The Publican and the Pastoralist

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An odyssey of a mother and daughter who fought the outback and won… but at a terrible cost.

Susana Honan, from Ireland, aged 18, arrived in Brisbane on the Gauntlet in 1878 and in 1886 married the owner/builder of the Royal Hotel in Birdsville, Qld. She had three children and her husband died during the third pregnancy. She managed that hotel or Tattersalls Hotel, also in Birdsville intermittently until 1912. In 1913 her third child, Alberta, married John James Scott, manager and part owner of Mount Leonard Station, a large and successful cattle property in the outback of western Queensland, 100 miles east of Birdsville. Alberta had five children between 1914 and 1920 and almost immediately after the birth of her fifth child her husband was drowned trying to recover cattle that a drover had abandoned at a time of unprecedented flooding of the Diamantina River system. Soon after this, she returned with her children to a life in Adelaide. To add to this her brother was killed by a sniper in WWI and later in WWII her son was executed by the Japanese in Ambon. Despite these hardships she gave her children a happy home and a good education. These two women lived a total of 71 years after their marriages, but only shared 11 of those with their husbands.