A delightful controversy ignited in the pages of The Gippsland Times in February and March 1921 over the question as to who founded Prospect (Seaspray) on the Ninety Mile Beach, where for many years Uncle David Borthwick had his farm. Satisfactorily, the answer appears to be great-great-grandfather William Pearson of Kilmany Park, among several other gentlemen including his crony and brother-in-law Lemuel Bolden of Strathfieldsaye. In a letter to the editor (“Who Founded Seaspray?” Thursday, March 3, 1921, p. 3) an anonymous correspondent set the record straight: “Sir,—Fifty years ago [c. 1871] Mr. W. F. Foster, our then Police Magistrate, the original Mr. Wm. Pearson, of Kilmany, Mr. L[emuel]. Bolden [his brother-in-law], of the Aurora Flour Mills, with their wives and children, and their nurses, and numerous other people, were in the habit of camping for weeks in the summer in tilted wagons, tents, &c., on the beach at Prospect, which has recently been called Seaspray. It was realized from the first that the place would always be a valuable seaside resort in summer, not only for Sale, but for all the surrounding districts; the one great drawback was the difficulty in getting there in the absence of anything like a passable road leading to it. And Mr. [James] McLachlan is fully entitled to the gratitude of the whole community for his unselfishness and untiring exertions for many years in providing a road for the benefit of the public; and if he were presented with a comfortable residence at Seaspray he would not be overpaid for the trouble he has taken for a long time past to provide that place with its first and most essential need. Many old residents were flabbergasted on reading Cr. A. G. Futcher’s letter in Monday’s ‘Times,’ [February 28] to find that gentleman claiming to be the founder of Seaspray! He says: ‘Twenty years ago, when I founded Seaspray—’ Really his modesty is delightful! Cr. A. G. Futcher has always been known to look after No. 1, and he has done very well. But honour to whom honour is due; and old residents know that Seaspray would be what it is today if Cr. A. G. Futcher had never existed. But Seaspray would have been many years behind what it is today if Mr. McLachlan had not given his services without any remuneration. And while some are striving to have a part of Seaspray cut up and sold, which would offer a safe speculation in which to invest their capital, let us at least be fair to Mr. McLachlan, and give him, and not Cr. Futcher, the credit for making Seaspray what it is.— Yours, &c., A 50 YEARS AGO CAMPAIGNER.”
The following brief article was published after Uncle David was rescued from the North African desert, but presumably before the military censors authorized the publication of his name. Granny clipped and kept it, evidently with much pride and enormous relief. David was shot down by a Messerschmidt Me109 on November 9, 1942, and the family was immediately notified in Geelong that David was missing in action, presumed dead.
Sergeant X, an Australian
Among the episodes of bravery cited is that of a 21-year-old fighter pilot baldly referred to as “Sergeant X, an Australian.” Wounded by cannon shell in both legs, entangled in the oxygen tube when he started to bale out, and having scarcely time to pull the rip cord of his parachute before reaching the ground, he landed in the desert without water bottle or emergency rations, which had been torn from his equipment. After dressing his wounds with pieces of parachute, he found he could not stand up, and started to crawl across the desert. By using his left foot and both arms he was able to propel himself slowly. In this way he crawled for four days and nights. He sucked early morning dew from desert flowers to assuage thirst; sometimes, while he lay motionless, he caught large beetles, cutting off their heads and eating their bodies. When found in the shade of an old Arab tomb by a patrol he was still conscious, and able to thank his rescuers for his first drink for four days. He had lost four stone, and the palms of his hands had been worn to sores. One wonders why the identity of such heroes is cloaked under an algebraic symbol.
Some photographs capture far more than a group of people, a place, an event or happening. Such is the case with this marvelous snapshot which my grandfather, William Borthwick, took at his eldest son’s first birthday party in 1922 at the family property, Raeshaw, which is at Fulham, a few miles west of Sale, on the northern side of the Princes’ Highway in East Gippsland.
The dramatis personae are friends, relations, and neighbors, evidently engaging in a friendly tug-of-war between two teams of women and children apparently of roughly equal strength—the kind of happy social exercise in which by all accounts my grandfather specialized.
Ably assisted by my mother, whose memory is good, I have decyphered the highly abbreviated key on the reverse, which consists only of surnames. From left to right, therefore, beginning with the little boy, Cousin Norman “Torch” Gooch (so named for his glowing red hair), the son of Uncle Arch and Aunt Norn (Norma), the rest of the group may be identified as follows.
After Torch comes Airlie Harrison, a friend of Granny’s. The Harrisons were an old Gippsland family. Then comes one of the three little Bowman cousins, the grandchildren of my grandfather’s Aunt Gwladys Bowman (Bell), of The Ridge, a portion of the original Snake’s Ridge station. Note the rather fetching headbands à la mode, and matching outfits. Reenie Crooke (Irene), or perhaps another of the Crookes of Holey Plain, who shared a long boundary with KilmanyPark, comes next. Then another of the Bowman girls, then Miss James, who was apparently something to do with the Crookes, maybe a governess. The little boy giggling immoderately next to her is Dale Crooke, then comes Aunt Kit (Gooch), then another Bowman child, and an older Bowman girl, evidently in her teens, and finally, leading the team on the left, Iris Thompson of Clydebank, another friend and neighbor.
Leading the opposing side is Alison Reid, a friend from Sale, dangling sprightly toggles from the waist of her cardigan; then Edward Crooke of Holey Plain, Dale’s elder brother, holding on with some determination. Then comes their sister Marie Crooke (pronounced like starry); then Granny (Helen Borthwick); then Rose, whom Mum describes as “a funny old factotum who lived with Uncle Arch and Aunt Norn” (Gooch); then Granny’s loyal school friend from Hermitage days Eily Madden; then little Gwen Foster (who eventually married Dale Crooke); then Rosemary Thompson; then her grandmother, Mrs. Thompson, Iris Thompson’s mother-in-law; and, finally, bringing up the rear, Ruby, the wife of Ormond Foster, of Boisdale near Maffra.
The three infants in the foreground are (left to right) Master Macdonald, Miss Macdonald (of Armadale—the property, not the suburb of Melbourne), and Uncle David Borthwick, aged one, who sits cheerfully on the rug.
The Bowman girls’ party dresses, the hats and coats worn by most of the grown-ups—where on earth are all the men?—the neat lawn, those plucky shrubs newly planted by Granny, and the wide gravel drive in the foreground stand in surprising contrast with the flat bleakness of the distant paddocks that descend into the background and the numerous dead trees dotted over them, although these are actually remnants of the aggressive process of land clearing, and not really any indication of severe drought or blight. (The whole of East Gippsland was once densely forested.) The locality is not far from the site of the present Sale aerodrome.
The Fosters, the Crookes, the Thompsons, Harrisons, Gooches and Pearsons (Granny’s family) could justly lay claim to being the closest thing to a landed gentry that ever existed in East Gippsland, but the mood here is hardly formal. They were pretty tough farming people, who educated and kept their small children fully occupied at home with the aid of governesses, or middle-aged spinster relations whose marital prospects were completely wrecked by the industrialized slaughter of the Great War. All were yet to be cast into the abyss of the Great Depression, though most of them survived it more or less intact, not without years of self-sacrifice and the mind-bogglingly ascetic money management strategies of the dessicated clerks of the Trustees Executors Company in Melbourne. Most of their living descendants, including me, remain powerfully connected to the rough and not especially hospitable sheep country that their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents opened up in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Unfortunately we do not know which of the two teams won the tug-of-war, but I rather fancy that Alison Reid, who was formidable, made sure it was hers.
Uncle David, on the verandah at Balmadies, Metung, teaching me all about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
David William Pearson Borthwick (1921-2000) was Mum, Uncle John and Aunt Anne’s eldest brother. He was a yachtsman, pilot, farmer, and great friend to many. A fourth generation Gippslander, he was born and spent his early years at Raeshaw, his parents’ sheep property at Fulham, near Sale.
On May 9, 1927, with his parents, David witnessed the opening of the Provisional Parliament building in Canberra by the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth), an occasion upon which every aircraft in the fledgling R.A.A.F. was excitingly grounded, and all the pilots returned to Point Cook unhurt, but by train. Clearly, aged six, from that moment only the Air Force would do.
At nine, David went to GeelongCollege as a boarder. He was a prefect, and represented the school in rowing and athletics.
In 1940, David entered OrmondCollege to study engineering at the University of Melbourne. War had broken out in Europe, and he volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force as air crew. As a member of the Empire Air Training Scheme, he trained at Somers, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and in England. After six weeks’ operational training on Hurricanes, at Unsworth in Lancashire, he was posted to the Middle East.
Shortly after arriving in Cairo David contracted malaria, and went to the Sudan to recuperate. His host was Douglas Dodds-Parker, governor of the Blue Nile province, not far from the Ethiopian border, such as it was, who gave David a lasting interest in the region.
Dodds-Parker was a veteran of the Sudanese Political Service in the Anglo-Egyptian administration, and closely involved in the Special Operations Executive push to restore the Emperor Haile Selassie to his throne, a goal that was attained rather easily in 1941, to the lasting humiliation of the approximately 20,000 Italian personnel who were captured by an allied force not much larger than 1,700 men.
When travelling by camel with His Excellency on imperial business, David celebrated his twenty-first birthday (August 8, 1942) in a mud hut in Khartoum.
He then joined 450 Squadron flying Kittyhawks, and took part in ground strafing, escorting light bombers and dive bombing operations before, during, and after the Battle of El Alamein (July 1942).
On November 9, 1942, David was shot down by a Messerschmidt Me109. It was reported that his aircraft had crashed in flames, and that there was no chance of survival. However, he had parachuted clear of the plane, an instant before it crashed behind enemy lines.
He was severely wounded in both legs, and was unable to walk. Knowing that the British forces were advancing, he bandaged his legs with pieces of his parachute and set out, crawling backwards for four days in a sitting position, using his hands for propulsion. He survived by eating beetles, and drinking dew. On the fifth day he was found by two Bedouin who helped him reach and cross the British lines.
David was in hospital in Cairo for six months before returning to Australia in a hospital ship.
After more rehabilitation, he was posted to various bases in Australia before returning to operational flying in 1944 with 78 Squadron on NoemfoorIsland (in the Papua province of the Dutch East Indies’ western portion of New Guinea). He was mentioned in despatches for the second time after leading an attack on a heavily defended Japanese base.
In December, his legs were causing him difficulties, and he was sent down from the islands.
The R.A.A.F. offered him an intelligence job but, rejecting the idea of not flying, he resigned from the Air Force and joined Australian National Airways as a commercial pilot.
During the next four years, he flew DC2s, DC3s, and the very rare DC5 on the Sydney, Brisbane, Broken Hill, and Tasmanian routes. In 1949, he resigned from A.N.A., and bought a farm through the Soldier Settlement Scheme at Giffard, on the shore of Bass Strait, along a stretch of the NinetyMileBeach in East Gippsland.
He developed a productive farm, rearing sheep and Hereford cattle. He was an early and vigorous experimenter with techniques of cultivating salt-tolerant plants for his livestock.
David was also one of the original members of what would eventually become the Metung Yacht Club.
In 1986, he bought Chindrina, a 26-foot yacht which he and his two sons, my Borthwick cousins Ian and Keith, sailed from Hobart, Tasmania, across Bass Strait to Metung.
In 1970, he sailed down to Hobart again (with Dad and their old friend Kenneth Aitken as crew), but most of his sailing was around the GippslandLakes, either solo, or with a crew of family, and friends. The occasionally shambolic Marley Point Overnight race became an annual event from its inception, with his children and grandchildren all assisting.
David Borthwick died on September 1, 2000, after having suffered a stroke, and was survived by his wife Jeanie, two sons, and six grandchildren.
Acknowledgment: This obituary was written by David’s son, Keith Borthwick, with the help of family and friends, and appeared in The Age newspaper (Melbourne) on November 17, 2000. It is here slightly augmented.
David and Jeanie also had a daughter, Janet, who was my godmother.
As a little girl she had been a bridesmaid at Mum and Dad’s wedding in 1949, and Mum was especially attached to her.
She grew up, followed both her parents to the University of Melbourne (and her mother to Women’s College, as it was then known), and afterwards worked for a time in counter-intelligence circles. The authorities were somewhat taken aback when Uncle David robustly sought assurances (in person) that Janet’s undercover activities would not put her in harm’s way.
On one occasion she tailed a visiting Soviet agricultural delegation to Wangaratta, and it would be amusing to know exactly what information the K.G.B. gleaned en route—interesting ways with manure, perhaps?—and what information Janet noted in the relevant file; I do not know if she spoke any Russian.
Janet got married at St. George’s Church of England, Malvern, to which ceremony I was allowed to go, wearing an extremely fetching pair of bottle-green velvet shorts, smocked white shirt, and a pair of red patent-leather buckled shoes. I vividly recall Uncle David’s tail coat, and spectacular collapsible silk top hat.
Janet and her husband moved to a farm near Albany in Western Australia, but in 1969 was killed in a tragic car accident.
No parent recovers easily, or ever, from the death of a child, but I am sure David and Jeanie were long comforted by the knowledge that Janet’s infant son, Robert Campbell, who survived the crash, grew up, spent regular holidays with his grandparents, his uncles and cousins, then studied engineering, and prospered.
Robert now lives with his own family in New Zealand.
Helen Pearson, my grandmother, in London, c. 1913.
Helen (Granny) was the daughter of the Hon. William Pearson, M.L.C. (1864–1919), and his wife Sophie Emily (née Gooch).
Granny was born on November 27, 1893, at Bonegilla Park, Wodonga, and grew up with her brother Roy, her sister Emily (Aunt Mim), and their younger cousin Mollie (Mungie) at Kilmany Park, near Sale in East Gippsland.
She was the head girl at The Hermitage in Geelong in about 1911–12.
Bafflingly, the family spent the years of the First World War living in Europe. At first they were stranded. When war broke out the family was touring Wales in a motor, and had great difficulty finding anyone who could speak English. Uncle Roy immediately joined the British Army, and served in the 13th Hussars in France and Mesopotamia. Although the Pearsons sailed back to Australia at the end of 1914, after a few months they turned around and came straight back again, presumably at some risk of enemy attack, to be nearer Roy, and possibly to resume a style of life in England that clearly suited their daughters. They settled in a large house called The Orchard on Chorleywood Common near Rickmansworth, on the northeast edge of London.
At the Hermitage, Granny recalled seeing her first aeroplane, a black speck that appeared over the You Yangs, but in early 1914, on a visit to Menton in the south of France, she actually flew in one.
William Pearson died prematurely in 1919, and Kilmany Park was sold not long afterwards. The station was subdivided, and the house was turned into a glum Presbyterian Boys’ Home.
In 1918, Aunt Mim, who was by then the widow of a British army officer, Pat Jackson, contracted Spanish influenza. Granny caught it too. They were both lucky to survive, as were their parents. The family returned to Australia at the end of 1918.
Soon after the end of the war, Helen married my grandfather, William Arthur Borthwick, a grazier, at Sale on October 27, 1920. Before the war she had known his older brothers, Lex and Keith, who was killed in the first wave at the Battle of the Nek at Gallipoli.
The Borthwicks were neighbors. Their property, which was creatively named Bald Hills, shared a boundary with part of Kilmany, and the Pearson and Borthwick children grew up together. Reading between the very discreet lines of Granny’s handwritten memoir – the name of Keith Borthwick crops up from time to time in connection with dances in Sale and Melbourne, golfing tournaments at Kilmany and Traralgon – one wonders whether there was more than a hint of affection between Granny and him. Keith Borthwick survives in one of the most haunting footnotes to Bean’s official history, but fell in perhaps the most disgracefully futile action at Gallipoli.
Helen and William Borthwick settled on a farm called Raeshaw, at Fulham, quite close to Bald Hills and Kilmany Park. My mother Helen (b. July 20, 1926), her brother David (1921–2000), their sister Anne (1923–1986) and brother John (1929–2006) were all born at Raeshaw. Anne and Helen followed their mother to The Hermitage.
The family moved to Geelong in 1936, and eventually settled first in a large house called Raith in Newtown, then at 188, Noble Street, where they remained throughout the final years of World War II.
As a child my grandfather had contracted rheumatic fever, which permanently weakened his heart, so although he volunteered for active service in World War I, unlike his two brothers, he was not allowed to go. In the late 1940s, Granny and Grandad moved from Geelong to Berwick, where he died far too young of a heart attack in 1953 – obviously I never knew him.
Granny retired to a big, rambling Edwardian house with a pretty garden at 5, Myamyn Street in Armadale. She died at Lynn Private Hospital in Melbourne on February 12, 1975, after a brief diabetic illness.
