Through the Valleys

By Murray Poke

This book is the life story of the author, Murray Poke and includes the account of how he and his wife Grace handled a number of valley experiences. You will read how they have come through these traumas together. Read how they found inner spiritual peace to handle these difficult situations. Read how they faced the doctor's statement,The tumour has returned,your son has only a short time to live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Murray Poke
• Release date: Dec 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301919031

Murray Poke

Murray Poke is now retired. He lives with his wife Grace in Tasmania, Australia. They have four children [two in Heaven] and eight grandchildren.

Book preview

Preface

Your son Murray has a hare lip and requires extensive surgery!

Your son Charles has met with a fatal accident!

The tumour has returned, your son Matthew has only a short time to live. We can give him another operation and extend his life for a few months or you can let him die now! Upon hearing this diagnosis, how would Grace and I walk to the next room and face our young nine year old son?

How does a father explain to his five year old son and his three year old sister that their mother has just passed away in the adjoining bedroom while they slept?

Where does one receive the spiritual strength and inner courage to face such difficult trials and situations in life?

Charles Has Been Killed!"

It was Monday 8th February 1961.

Charles has been killed! My brother Russell called as I entered the homestead driveway. As I bought the tractor to a halt, he called again. Charles has been killed!

How? I returned.

On the bulldozer; at Montagu Swamp.

The sky was overcast. Summer had been quite dry and our farm was looking rather brown from lack of rain. I had spent the morning cultivating a sun hardened paddock at the back of the farm when the rain-drops began to fall. At about 2.30 that afternoon I stopped working the ground and drove up the road to return the tractor to my parent’s place.

After hearing the devastating news I steered the tractor around to the shed. As I realised the truth of Russell’s words the tears began to come. How will I be able to go inside my parent’s home and face my father and mother?

It was early that morning I stood at the door of the dairy and watched my brother Charles drive past in his little green Morris Minor and disappear into the distance. I did not think for one moment that I would never see him alive again.

Charles had left that morning to resume driving a bulldozer for the Tasmanian Department of Agriculture that was in the final stages of a large return soldier’s farm settlement program at Montagu Swamp, now called Togari, in the far North West of Tasmania. He had been away from work for a few days from a slight work accident he had the previous week.

Over a number of years farms were being carved out of the dense rain forest in this highly fertile valley. The forest had been cut down and the rubbish and smaller trees were pushed into windrows to let dry. After some months these rows were set ablaze. However some of the saplings were partly covered by earth and had not burnt.

It was at this stage of the land-clearing program that the bulldozers were being used to push the half burnt logs into new heaps.

Charles was just one of a number of drivers employed to assist with this clearing for the new dairy farms. When the lunch-time break arrived the men sat in a group for their usual cut lunch and cold drink. They had been eating for some minutes when one of them said, Where’s young Pokey? Charles had not turned up at the usual spot. His dozer motor could be heard throbbing in the distance and the men thought it unusual for him to be still working.

A couple of them climbed onto one of the log heaps from where they could see the motionless dozer with its motor still racing. They ran to the spot where to their horror they found Charles laying across the controls, he was dead. He had apparently been pushing a sapling that was firmly embedded in the ground at one end, when the other end apparently flipped over the dozer blade and struck Charles on the head. Since that fatality, laws relating to bulldozer safety were altered requiring machines to be fitted with a canopy to prevent similar accidents.

What a shock that was for all the family, especially my dear mother and father. Charles had been very special being the youngest child in the family and born six years after the last sibling. At his funeral, hundreds of people came to offer their sympathy and to show respect to the family.

A couple of days after his burial, a number of family and friends visited the spot where Charles had died without even a chance to say good-bye to them. My mother had wonderful memories of that Monday morning when Charles went into her room, sat on the bed and talked for a few minutes before going to work.

Early Days

I had loved my young brother. We had laughed and played together, roamed the paddocks of our family farm together. How I ached at this loss. As I look back, I have a greater understanding of how deeply my mother and father were heartbroken by his sudden death.

My parents had worked hard together to bring up their family and earn a living from the soil, as their ancestors had done for generations.

Charles was my youngest brother, the seventh child of Charles and Hannah Poke, descendants of some of the early Tasmanian settlers. My great, great grandfather, John Poke, with his spouse Ann and their three year old son John, had left the English district of Sussex on a treacherous sea voyage around the world to Tasmania, there to make a new start in a young and promising country.

They travelled aboard the ship Rapid that arrived in Launceston, Tasmania on 2nd November 1840 and soon set up home in the Avoca district.

It was here, sometime later, their second child Marthann was born. Apparently John Sr was a labourer in those early days of Tasmania’s European settlement and moved around different places for work, including Westbury where their third child, Luke, was born.

A couple of years later the family moved to the far north west of Tasmania and purchased eighty acres of land in the Forest district near the flourishing township of Stanley. The family grew to five boys and a girl. Their father John died at an early age of thirty six years.

At about this time, Thomas Ollington came to Tasmania from Cressingham, in Norfolk, England. He married Sarah Stearne, whom it would appear; he met on the voyage aboard the ship, The Emu that berthed in Stanley on 19th December 1841. It would seem that Sarah was only fourteen years old when she married Thomas on 22nd September 1842. Thomas and Sarah Ollington became the first European settlers at Duck River, later renamed Smithton. Their first daughter was born some time later, the oldest of a family of ten. Jane was the first white child born in Circular Head district and a commemorative plaque stands near an old tree which Jane herself planted.

Some years later Jane Ollington married William Poke, another son of John and Anne Poke. William Poke was my great grandfather. I still have memories of seeing his wife, my great grandmother Jane Poke, sitting in a rocking chair, dressed in a long black gown. I was very young at this time. Grandmother Jane died at the age of ninety nine years.

On my mother’s side of the family, my great grandfather was the same Thomas Ollington who married Sarah Stearne. My mother’s other forebears had sailed to Tasmania from Ireland.

I sometimes wonder what would have inspired or pressured these people to leave home, family and friends, for such a journey around the world, to begin a new life in an often harsh environment. As well as the hardships of life in the bush and different climatic conditions, these settlers also lived in fear of roaming bushrangers. They also endured the hardships of having their livestock attacked by the notorious Tasmanian Tiger, now believed to be extinct.

As I have listened to the stories of my parents about the trials of those early settlers, I wonder at times how I might have coped in similar conditions.

Life Begins

I was born towards the end of the ‘great depression’ (1937) that had world-wide effect