Mary Alice Maud Poole

Mary Alice Maud Poole was born in 1879, the third daughter of William and Frances Poole, very likely at Dalmorton itself — her birth was registered in the Wellingrove district, the same New England-side registration area that later recorded two of her younger brothers' births at Glen Innes, though the family never left the Clarence goldfields township that raised them all.¹

On a date not yet found, but registered at Grafton in 1901, she married Jeremiah Joseph Donohoe, a young farmer born in 1878 at Alumny Creek, close by South Grafton, to a local Donohoe farming family — one of a great many Donohoes and Donoghues, it turns out, settled in small farms all around South Grafton and Kangaroo Creek in this period, so that the surname alone marks no particular connection.² The couple settled at or near South Grafton and raised at least four sons there: Valmond Rupert, born 1902; Michael Joseph, born 1907; Frederick, born 1910; and Vivian, born 1917 — all four registered at Grafton, the district that had brought the Pooles and the Donohoes together and that Mary Alice Maud never left again.³

She died at Grafton on or shortly before 24 May 1929, aged about fifty; her funeral notice — headed simply "the late wife" of Jeremiah Donohue — shows it left St Patrick's Catholic Church, South Grafton, for the South Grafton cemetery, with Jeremiah's own membership of the parish's A.H.C. Guild noted alongside it. It is the first sign anywhere in the record that this branch of the family was Catholic. The death index entry names her parents correctly as William F. and Frances, settling the identification beyond doubt.⁴

The clearest trace of the household she left behind comes from the following year's Commonwealth electoral roll, which finds her widower, Jeremiah — described simply as a labourer, though Grafton Lands Office records show him also holding small annual leases of Crown land at South Grafton, parish Southampton, from at least 1918 — sharing a home with their eldest son Valmond, a teamster, at "5 Mile Peg," on the Woolgoolga road out of South Grafton.⁵ Jeremiah Joseph Donohoe outlived her by eleven years, dying in the Grafton District Hospital on 4 August 1940, aged 62 by one obituary and 63 by another, and was buried, again from St Patrick's, in the South Grafton cemetery. His obituaries give the fullest picture yet of the family he left: his four sons were then living at Corindi (Valmond), South Grafton (Michael), Calliope (Frederick) and — remarkably — Dalmorton itself (Vivian), the old goldfields township his Poole in-laws had left two generations before; and he was survived by three brothers, Jack of Waterview, Daniel of Broadwater and James of Sydney, and a sister, Mrs A. Shepherd of Swan Creek. His own death registration names his parents as Jeremiah and Mary Donoghue — very possibly the same Jeremiah Donohue who farmed near Swan Creek, at Ulmarra, through the 1890s, and whose failing eyesight forced him to sell up a lifetime's stock and equipment in 1897.⁶

It is her eldest son's wedding, in 1935, that gives the fullest surviving glimpse of the family Mary Alice Maud left behind. Valmond Donohoe married Eva M. Best, of Coffs Harbour, on 18 May that year at St Teresa's Catholic Church, Coramba — the first Nuptial Mass ever celebrated in the town, beginning at 7.30 in the morning and drawing a large crowd despite the hour. The bride, given away by her eldest brother and attended by a guard of honour of the parish's Children of Mary, wore white georgette and carried Cecil Brunner roses; Valmond's own brother, Michael Joseph, stood beside him as best man. The wedding notice describes the groom simply as "son of Mr. and the late Mrs. Donohoe, of South Grafton": external, independent confirmation both that Mary Alice Maud was already dead by 1935 and that Jeremiah was still living, exactly as the civil records show.⁷ See the wedding notice ›

Valmond and his bride — recorded thereafter, a little more fully, as Mary Eva Kathleen Donohoe — settled at Coramba, where electoral rolls place them continuously from 1937 through the mid-1940s, Valmond labouring and Mary Eva Kathleen keeping house (his own father's 1940 obituary places him instead at nearby Corindi, a discrepancy not yet resolved). In later years the couple moved on to Baryulgil, further up the Clarence, where by the 1950s Mary Eva Kathleen was running her own store. Valmond Rupert Donohoe died on 8 November 1980, aged seventy-eight; Mary Eva Kathleen lived on until 6 August 1999, aged ninety-three, and the two are buried together under a single plaque.⁸ See their headstone ›

Michael Joseph, the second son, was born in 1906 — his birth not registered at Grafton until the following year — and the same 1935 electoral roll that catches him standing as his brother's best man also finds him established in his own right as a wood merchant on Ryan Street, South Grafton, a step up from the labouring work recorded against him on Glenugie Road five years before; by 1939 he had moved again, to Bent Street, working as a carrier. By then he was already at the centre of a long-running scandal, aired in full in the Grafton District Court in November 1943. Stanley Clarence Dwyer, a Rappville farmer turned AIF soldier, won an undefended divorce from his wife, Maisie Isabel Dwyer, on the ground of her adultery with Michael Joseph Donohoe — pleaded, formally, as having run from March 1937 to March 1943, though Dwyer's own evidence reached back further still. He told the court that in January 1936 he had found a letter in Michael's hand, and that when he confronted his wife she told him, "You might as well know the truth. I love him, and he loves me, and we are going to be together sooner or later," and handed back her wedding ring. Dwyer described tracking his wife to the South Grafton house she was sharing with Michael, watching a bedroom light through the night, and returning the next morning to take two of their three young children; Michael, confronted in turn, denied neither the affair nor that he was living with Dwyer's wife. Judge Storkey granted the decree nisi. Michael Joseph Donohoe married Maisie Isabel Dwyer, née Cowling — whose own first marriage, to Dwyer at Ulmarra in 1932, had produced three children, among them Neville Stanley Dwyer — at Grafton the following year, 1944. Michael died in 1973 and Maisie in 1977; both are buried at Clarence Lawn Cemetery, South Grafton.⁹

Frederick, the third son, married younger still: Ivy Rita Cowling — quite possibly a sister of Michael's own Maisie, though the connection has not been confirmed — at Grafton in 1929, when Frederick was only about nineteen. Their first son, James William, was born that same year; two more followed, Leslie John in 1930 and Brian O'Neill in 1932. By 1940 he was recorded at Calliope, a small settlement near Grafton. Frederick James Donohoe died in 1995 and Ivy in 2003, both buried, like Michael and Maisie, at Clarence Lawn Cemetery, South Grafton — by then very nearly a family plot in all but name.¹⁰

Vivian, the youngest of the four, carried his own father's name as a middle name — Vivian Jeremiah Donohoe. His father's 1940 obituary still placed him at Dalmorton itself, of all places — the old goldfields township his own Poole grandparents had left almost half a century before — yet electoral rolls already show him settled by 1939 at Warrell Creek, near Macksville on the Nambucca River, working as a contractor; the discrepancy between the two is unexplained. He was, in any case, the only one of the four brothers to leave the Clarence district for good. He married Aileen Mary Hoffman, born 1925 and so some seven years his junior; no date for the marriage has yet been found. Vivian Jeremiah Donohoe died on 18 January 1975, and Aileen lived on until 19 December 2004; both are buried at Macksville Cemetery.¹¹