A Curlew Cried

Today we spotlight a novel lovingly published by the author’s children as a tribute to their mother. “A Curlew Cried” was written by Winifred Millicent Hardie {deceased} over forty years ago and recently published by her daughters Helen Elizabeth Payne and Janet Anne Goldman. It is 1911 when Bill and Isobel Elgin scramble down from […]

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Today we spotlight a novel lovingly published by the author’s children as a tribute to their mother. “A Curlew Cried” was written by Winifred Millicent Hardie {deceased} over forty years ago and recently published by her daughters Helen Elizabeth Payne and Janet Anne Goldman. It is 1911 when Bill and Isobel Elgin scramble down from the Kalgoorlie Express with their family of six in tow to begin a new life in the wheatlands of Western Australia.

Welcome to this edition of Newsgram!

Today we are going to go back in time. It was just over forty years ago when Winifred Millicent Hardie sat down to write the story of Isobel and Bill Elgin and their children emigrating from England for a new life on a farm in the remote Wheatbelt of Western Australia.

In Bill and Isobel’s world it’s 1911. A tough time for Australian farmers who were pushed to their limits by the dry, dusty, vermin-infested landscape. Bill and Isobel are stepping off the Kalgoorlie Express, Perth station, with their family of six and dreams of a new life in an unforeseen future.

Helen Payne – None of them knew anything about farming basically, and they came out from England and got this farm in the middle of nowhere and they were the pioneers of that time. They struggled through droughts and floods and the first world war. 

That is Helen Payne who along with her sister Janet Goldman recently published the manuscript of this part-true/part-fictional story —     titled “A Curlew Cried ”. It was a story they found among the items in their mothers estate. 

Helen Payne – It was wonderful. From the minute I sort of looked at and started to read it I was fascinated and of course all the pages had sort of been mixed up so I had to go through all the pages and put them back together again and I couldn’t put it down. I was absolutely fascinated.

Doesn’t that put a smile on your face? It is one of my favorite types of finds stumbling across something long forgotten. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the movie “Field of Dreams” “…The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces…” it’s wonderfully dizzying.

Helen Payne – When she had time she’d open it up and write this, write whatever she was writing,  and as a fourteen your old I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in what she was doing  and when she was finished she asked my sister to type it. My sister was a typist and I can remember Janet sitting there with this old fashioned typewriter typing this manuscript and I don’t know what happened. It got finished and then nothing happened with it and they shoved it in a bag and when mom got ill she came to live with us and of course everything came with her and I just must have put it in the filing cabinet and forgot about it. It was only through sheer luck that I found it and we got it published. 

So the lives of the Elgin family have been dusted off and sent out into the world for us to enjoy. It was a tough life for these pioneers, farming rugged terrain in a turbulent time. Still, they persevered as the determined family they were, willing to do whatever it took no matter what the personal sacrifices may have been.

Helen Payne – They came to Perth, which is our capital and from there got on a train and got to this farm and they had it for a long, long time and made the best out of a bad situation but at least they could own that property and the girls in the family supported the men and worked as hard as the men. 

The will to go the distance was so powerful back then. The faith, the commitment and the sense of family unity was so powerful. If you like this kind of story I think you’ll enjoy “A Curlew Cried ” by Winifred Millicent Hardie and unless you’re an Ornithologist you  have to be curious about what in the world a Curlew is…

Helen Payne – A Curlew is a bird that used to be in the wheat fields.

Yes, there are a couple of different types of Curley. The Bush Stone-curlews are now listed as threatened but you can still find them if you’re a determined birder — check out the Koala Conservation Reserve — I’m told they have some. The Eastern curlew, looks kind of like a skinny version of the Kiwi and it is listed as critically endangered in Australia. 

One more thing…in Australian folklore the Curlew is said to represent a “bad omen” or “death” because its call sounds like a screaming woman or a baby.  

O.k. I’ll stop talking about birds but I wanted to share that because I think it adds a great amount of romance to this tale. A family struggling to make a new life in an unforgiving world and finding a way to not only do just that but to find some laughs as well. 

It’s also the story of Winifred Millicent Hardie, her lost manuscript and her hidden past now resurrected in a magnificent way. Here Helen recounts how she felt when she first read the manuscript and found out something about her mom that she never knew. 

Helen Payne – Everything sort of came together for me that this is what mom was trying to tell us but she couldn’t because she would have been sworn to secrecy that she was illegitimate and she couldn’t even tell her own daughters and I think that’s the saddest part. I mean there’s obviously a lot of fiction in it as well but most of the characters I suppose when mom wrote it were still alive so she couldn’t put them down. but all the boys that went to war, that was true. I think people will love it actually and I really hope they do because everyone I know who has read it has loved it and said “where’s the sequel, we need a sequel”. 

Leave them wanting more. Perfect. 

Somewhere Winifred Millicent Hardie has to be smiling. Her book A Curlew Cried is now available wherever you like to buy books. We have links to Barkesandnoble.com and amazon.com in the shows description and that will do it for this edition of news gram from webtalkradio.com. 

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