GIRL OF 18

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 18924, 28 January 1936, Page 3

GIRL OF 18

DISCOVERS CIVILISATION LIFE IN NEVER NEVER PERTH, Jan. 13. Ellen Margaret Hobley, 18, from the Never Never country in North Australia, is in Perth seeing cfvilisation for the first time. The girl has lived for the past. 11 years on a mixed farm 60 miles, from the mouth of the Roper River, with her father and mother. Until a few months ago the only other living creatures she knew were blacks, animals, birds, and crocodiles. Now she is bewildered by ships, trains, electric light, glass windows, huge buildings, crowds of people, and many other commonplaces l of modern civilisation, which she knew existed, but had never iseen. ' When only two years of age the gii'J arrived in Queensland from England with her father and mother, Mr. and Mis. John S. Hobley. After a journey of three years jn a buggy from Richmond, Queensland, the family reached their future home on the Roper River. Her only contipanions as she grew up. were' occasional visiting natives, the pigs, fowls, horses, goats, aud cattle on the run, and a tame cockatoo, which was her main friend. She knew also the enormous, man-eating crocodiles of the Roper River. She cjme to Perth with her mother on the vessel Koolinda. She travelled the first- 30 miles from the Roper River homestead in a dinghy rowed by blacks- to the Roper River'bar; the next 51 by motor car (the first she had seen) to the Roper Valley cattle station, and. thence 75 miles lo Elsev Station (the station of the book, "We of the Never Never"). The oexf stop was the Mataranka, railway siding, where her mother decided to remain for a week "for the girl to get used to civilisation." The pair went to Darwin by train (the first MisssHobley had seen). The girl received her education through a Sydney correspondence school. Site speaks with a slight American intonation and a distinct Lancashire accent, acquired from her father, a Lancashire man. Mother and daughter are on holiday in Perth, and hope to get work picking fruit. To-day ihey wandered round Peril), wearing broad-brimmed bats platted from grass growing on their farm, and in long, plain, flowing one-piece dresses that made them conspicuous as folk from some far isolated place.