SYRIAN MARY Listen to the song Syrian Mary (sung by Jim Low) |
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Syrian Mary provided a valuable and welcome service to those living isolated lives away from the larger towns. She carried her goods in three baskets, one in each hand and balancing the third one on her head. Apparently she later used a pram. She walked the lonely roads and tracks of the district between the years 1890 and 1910. The bushman 'Duke' Tritton remembered meeting her in his early twenties, while travelling and working in the area. This would have been sometime during the latter part of the first decade of last century and he estimated her to be then in her sixties. She obviously made a significant impression on Tritton. Some fifty years later he described her “as the most remarkable woman I have ever met”. He also noted that she was “as straight as a ramrod, and walked like a queen”. To his knowledge, she never came to any harm during her travels, despite the fact that the bushranging Governor brothers roamed this area of the state. (“Once A Jolly Swagman”, by 'Duke' Tritton in 'Walkabout's Australia', Ure Smith Pty Ltd, 1968, pp 191) Mary Byers' childhood memories, as retold to Vicki Powys, in her book 'Growing up at Dark Corner'(1993), add some more light on the enigmatic Syrian Mary. Mary Byers was born in 1895 and recalled a lady who used to visit the family Dark Corner home during childhood days. It seems highly plausible to assume that this visitor was Syrian Mary. It also highlights again the great distances travelled by this woman to accommodate her grateful customers in isolated areas. “Another traveller that used to come around selling things was the Syrian lady. Or perhaps she was the Assyrian lady, I'm not sure. Anyway, she sold haberdashery items, and these she carried in a big wicker basket on her head. She always wore a long black dress, and we'd see her, about every three months, walking along the road from the Palmer's Oakey direction. She spoke just enough English to get by. With the help of some sign language too. I suppose she didn't have a husband or children to look after; if she did we never saw any sign of them. Mum always asked her in, and the Syrian lady would spread out a tablecloth on the floor of the front verandah, and then proceed to set out all the items she had for sale, cottons, elastic, hairpins and hatpins, needles and pins, ribbons, buttons and lace, all those sorts of things. Mum used to save up so that she could buy from the Syrian lady, since she was cheaper than the shops. I never knew where she had come from or where she was going to, but she passed by our door on a regular basis.” (pp 27-28) | |||
