Penguin Books Australia

CHAPTER ONE

'They must answer with their lives.'

Though his colleagues were unaware of it, as Kevin Rudd rose in his place in the Caucus Room on 4 December 2006 to nominate for the leadership of the Opposition, he offered the Party an electoral asset of the most extraordinary potential. He needed only to persuade his extended family to vote for him en masse in the next Federal election and Labor would romp home in a canter.

Not quite that simple, of course, but Rudd is descended from a convict girl, Mary Wade, who arrived on the Second Fleet and became perhaps the most prolific matriarch of our short colonial history. By the time she died near Wollongong in 1859 she had more than three hundred living relatives. Today they number in the tens of thousands.

Moreover, his first Rudd ancestor also arrived as a convict at the same time and the coincidence is a source of pride to the current generation. In his 2007 Australia Day speech, Kevin Rudd declared his pleasure at coming from convict stock 'on both sides'. Aside from the distinction this lends an Australian family now that the 'convict stain' has become a badge of pride, the extended Rudd family network in combination with the Wade descendants is truly immense.

It could so easily have been otherwise. On 5 October 1788, the eleven-year-old daughter of Mary English and George Wade was sweeping London's streets and begging from passers-by with an older girl, Jane Whiting, when they encountered eight-year-old Mary Phillips.

The smaller girl's clothes were a step up from the rags they wore' and after chatting briefly, they led her into an alley where they persuaded her to take off her frock, cap and little cape. Then they ran off to the local pawnbroker who gave them eighteen pence for the lot. However, another street urchin who'd apparently had a falling­out with Mary and Jane heard about the theft and – when they wouldn't part with some of the proceeds – dobbed them in. They came up for trial in January 1789 before a jury presided over by the Lord Chief Baron.

The proceedings were brief. When Mary Wade was called to the stand the judge seemed surprised that there was no one to speak for her but her mother. 'Have you no friends?' he asked.

'Yes,' she replied. 'Are they not here?'

'No, they live in Westminster; they was here today, only they could not come in to me.'

He turned to Mrs Wade. 'Are you the mother of that child?' he said.

'Yes, I am indeed. She was ten years old last December. I have a husband. He is a drover.'

'I can hardly ask you how your child has behaved; for I am afraid you are as much at fault as she is, by not taking proper care of her; letting her run about the streets was the sure way to lead to the place where she is now. What can you say for yourself?' the judge said.

The girl's mother replied, 'It is the other girl that induces her out when my back is turned to go a begging with her. I never brought her up to go a begging; all the butchers know me well. I have a great family of [children].'

The judge replied, 'I hope you will take better care of the rest, or else they will all come to the gallows.' He turned to the jury. 'Gentlemen, the very circumstance of such a child falling into the hands of two strangers, young as they are, standing over her and stripping her, does seem to me to be equivalent to holding a pistol to the breast of a grown person. Therefore, I cannot state it to be anything less than robbery. The consequence of that is that they must answer with their lives.'

The jury concurred. Their verdict was 'guilty', the sentence 'death'. Mary Wade was taken to Newgate Prison where she was given a tepid bath, prison clothes and a haircut. For the next ninety-three days she awaited the gallows.

However, on 17 April 1789, King George reprieved her from the hangman's noose and ordered her transported for the term of her natural life. And on 29 September she sailed from Plymouth on the Lady Juliana with two hundred and twenty-five fellow female convicts as part of the notorious Second Fleet.

Mary was one of the lucky travellers. On the Lady Juliana officers and crewmen fraternised openly (not to say flamboyantly) with the women in their charge and when they arrived at Sydney Cove on 6 June 1790 all but five of the travellers had made the long journey safely.

On the other four ships of what became known as the Death Fleet, conditions were hellish as the private contractors had cut rations to the bone and some two hundred and seventy-eight prisoners died on the journey. Thomas Rudd on the Scarborough travelled in chains and survived to serve seven years for stealing clothing.

Governor Phillip had established a small settlement on Norfolk Island under Lieutenant Philip Gidley King to fashion the local pine trees into masts, grow flax for sails and help supply the infant colony with much needed grain and vegetables. So about one hundred and fifty of the younger and healthier women – Mary included – were put aboard The Surprize and landed on Norfolk on 7 August.

By then the land was proving much more productive than that around Port Jackson. But the promising agricultural start soon turned sour. The flax withered in the fields; the pine trees proved unsuitable for masts; and the vegetables were consumed on the island. Then as the relatively enlightened King was replaced by more authoritarian figures, production fell further. Soon the spectre of starvation hovered over Norfolk.

The settlement was abandoned in 1814 but by then Mary Wade's fortunes had changed dramatically. During the good times on Norfolk she had taken up with two men – first Teague Harrigan from County Cork, who was serving seven years for stealing two coats; and then Jonathan Brooker from Kent, convicted of stealing eight pounds' worth of glue.

She would have children by both of them and a very long marriage to Jonathan Brooker. By 1800 all three were back on the mainland and several years later she and Brooker – a skilled carpenter – had settled in the Hawkesbury district. There they provided the world. Having served his sentence he moved to the Campbelltown area, married and began producing the first of a very large family As the Mary Wade line grew, multiplied and spread across New South Wales, so too did Rudd's and on two occasions they coalesced.

Mary Wade 's grand-daughter Sophia Ray married Thomas Rudd's son Tom Junior at St Peter's Anglican Church, Campbelltown, on 2 March 1830. Then a decade later another Wade grand-daughter, Sarah Brooker, married Edward Rudd, the youngest of Thomas Rudd's four sons, on 3 November 1840, also at Campbelltown. It was this family that moved to the Wagga Wagga district. And it was there, at nearby Uranquinty, that two generations later Albert 'George' Rudd, a railway fettler, and his wife Maud (nee Harrison) raised a happy, boisterous family of nine children. The fourth, Albert 'Bert' Rudd, was born on 18 November 1918 and in time he would father the man who would aspire to be Australia's Prime Minister.

Kevin Rudd's maternal ancestors, the DeVeres, were not, so far as can be determined, of convict stock. Thomas Montreal Webster DeVere arrived in Sydney between 1846 and 1848 from Ballingarry, in Ireland's County Tipperary, possibly via the United States. His last-born son, Edwin Joseph 'Joe' DeVere, married Hannah Cashin (also of County Tipperary stock) in the Tweed River district.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Joe DeVere left the Tweed where he grew sugarcane and moved north to Queensland. His sister had married the licensee of the Commercial Hotel in Nambour and Joe took over the running of it. It was there that their daughter Margaret – Kevin's mother – was born.

Joe DeVere, it seems, was not well suited to the publican's life. Margaret later said he was fine at running the hotel, but that he 'drank the profits'. Other family members said that Joe was forever 'running up the slate' and 'shouting the bar.' Indeed, in 1923 Joe DeVere was declared bankrupt for failing to pay suppliers to the hotel.

But then (praise the Lord) the hotel burned down and Joe DeVere returned to a yeoman's sobriety. An inheritance from Hannah's father allowed her to buy a farm in the area now known as Nambour Heights, and then a much bigger property at Kureelpa near Mapleton, where they combined a cane farm with a dairy. There Joe's seven kids rose with the sun. According to Kevin's elder sister Loree, 'Mum often reflected on their busy lifestyle – 4 a.m. starts, milking cows by hand, then later when of school age catching the horse and riding to school. She was embarrassed when she got there because of her bare feet or those old crinkled stockings that fell down when she did have shoes.'

However, Margaret idolised her mother and the siblings also looked first to their mother for guidance. 'Mum loved all her brothers very much,' Loree says. 'The DeVeres were a very close family – never living in each other's pockets, but quietly helping each other out and never talking about it.'

For many Australian families, World War II was like a giant wooden spoon in the national mixing bowl, stirring the ingredients so that people from across the nation were thrown together unexpectedly. Bert Rudd from Uranquinty and Margaret DeVere from Nambour were among them.

When war broke out in 1939, Bert was a 20-year-old labourer at Spaull's Chaff Mill; a bright, lively character whose high marks on the Aussie Rules football field earned him the nickname 'Hinkler' after the famous Queensland flyer. He immediately enlisted in the militia and was posted to H.Q. Wing of the 20/54th Battalion at Parramatta.

He transferred to the AIF the following year and completed his enlistment papers in Wagga Wagga on 26 August, recording his religion as Church of England, his height as 5 foot 9 inches (1.75 metres), his eyes grey, his hair and complexion fair. After three months in the 8th Battalion at Wagga he transferred to the 13th Infantry Training Battalion before finding his niche for the rest of the war in the 2/15th Australian Field Company of Royal Australian Engineers.

Photographs at the time show him as round-faced and serious, the resemblance to his future youngest son quite marked. But Bert Rudd was no scholar and certainly no diplomat. On the contrary, his war record and the memories of his comrades at arms provide a picture of the quintessential country digger. He followed orders, did his bit and on two occasions returned a day late from leave, for which he was 'reprimanded' and 'fined 20 shillings'. By the end of the war he had climbed up the non-commissioned ranks to the unusual designation of Lance-Sergeant.

The field engineers were concerned mainly with communications and the 2/1 5th, as part of 1 Australia Corps, was sent to Palestine in 1941 in company with the artillery and infantry units that confronted the Vichy French forces entrenched there. The most famous of these actions resulted in the Victoria Cross for the then Lieutenant Roden Cutler who was himself desperately wounded when trying to establish communications between his artillery and the front line.

Bert Rudd was hospitalised by a mild dose of malaria in October 1941 but returned to his unit five days later. They continued in action in the Middle East until April 1942, when they returned to Australia on the Dorset to meet the threat from Japan. Bert attended the School of Military Engineering at Casula, NSW, followed by a stint as a driver for Colonel John Buchan, a Victorian architect in civilian life. While the association was relatively brief, the Buchans remained in touch after the war. Indeed, in his Maiden Speech to the House of Representatives in 1998, Kevin Rudd would pay tribute to John Buchan as 'a family friend of more than fifty years who went to his maker only last month and who, despite our political differences, always encouraged me to pursue a career in public life following the death of my father.'

Meanwhile, Bert Rudd's war took him from the relative safety of communications fieldwork in both NSW and northern Queensland, to the recapture of Borneo from the Japanese. By now, he had become close mates with a Queenslander, Ron Morrison, who had joined the RAAE and trained at the Empire Air Training School just outside Uranquinty.

Like most other airmen, Ron visited the town for dances at the Uranquinty Hall and patronised the local London Cafe in the main street. There he met Bert and they had an instant rapport. However, he was really more interested in Val Taber – daughter of the owner and a relative of Bert's by marriage – and decided right away if he made it through the war he'd marry her.

Ron and Bert met up again in Cairns where Bert's outfit was training on amphibious landing craft, but their best times were on Labuan Island. Ron would fly down to Bert's encampment on the small island off Brunei whenever he could commandeer a plane. 'We had lots of good talks during the war and after,' he said. 'Bert was a really good bloke.'

Labuan had been occupied by the Japanese in 1941 but by 1944 they were a spent force. 'Basically we were starving the buggers out,' Ron said. 'They'd get crazy in the foxholes and become bomb happy and charge out with their rifles blazing.' The Australian Bren gunners would be waiting.

Bert's camp was near the waterfront where he and his mates had organised a still that made 'a beaut drop of whisky'. Ron remem­bers himself and Bert 'supping one or two' and yarning one quiet afternoon when suddenly the air raid siren went. They jumped into Bert's foxhole, which was half full of water from the nightly downpour. 'It was a mud hole really' he said, 'surrounded by metre­tall kunai grass.'

For a while all was quiet. However, out in the grass there was an American D8 tractor clearing the kunai from the strip. The driver had jumped off the tractor, which careered about the place. 'Suddenly there's this rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat coming at us through the kunai from about 200 metres away,' Ron said. It was like a Japanese charge to the death. The two mates were dumbstruck.

But then the all-clear siren sounded and the bloke climbed back on the D8. The bulldozer had picked up the telephone wire and dragged the telephone out of the guard house. It had gone rat-a-tat­tatting through the grass. 'We had another whisky quick smart.'

When they returned home in 1946 Ron proposed to Val, and Bert was his best man at the wedding in Wagga. Bert was undecided about his future, and when Ron said he could join him cutting cane on Ron father's farm near Nambour, he jumped at the chance.

Meanwhile, Margaret DeVere – Marge to her family – had grown into an attractive, gently spoken young woman with a true love of country life. As a child she took special delight in riding and had become an expert horsewoman. After attending the tiny Dulong State School, she went on to the Rural School at Nambour where she learned typing, shorthand and bookkeeping.

She worked at a milk bar in Maroochydore for a while, then got a job in the post office at Monto. 'After a couple of years in commercial work,' Loree says, 'Mum decided she wanted to do her nursing training at the Mater in Brisbane. It was while she was there that her mother died.'

After completing her training she worked for a time at Brisbane's Greenslopes Military Hospital. It was during this time that she met and fell in love with a young private from the Darling Downs, George Parkinson, either at the hospital or when on leave at her parents' farm at Mapleton, which was visited by both American and Australian soldiers who bivouacked in the area. They would become 'virtually engaged' and they would correspond for three years before George – by then an officer commissioned in the field – was killed in action by the Japanese at Bona on the New Guinea coast. She would keep the letters throughout her married life.

When she returned to Nambour the war was over and she found a congenial position at the newly opened Selangor Private Hospital. The converted 'Queenslander' had been founded in 1947 by two army nursing sisters, Dorothy Ralston, who had been evacuated from Singapore just before its fall, and Christine Oxley, who had been a Japanese POW in Malaya's Selangor province.

Margaret had known Sister Oxley at the Mater after she was repatriated, and the work at the small hospital was constant and demanding. She lived on the premises but also enjoyed an active social life. According to daughter Loree, 'Mum and Dad met at a dance at the Valdora Hall. Mum's brother, John, introduced them.'

They were soon engaged and the livewire Bert was readily accepted into the clan. John DeVere would be best man at their wedding, which took place at Nambour's St Joseph's Catholic Church on 18 September 1948.

Margaret had moved out of the hospital a couple of weeks before and stayed with her best friend and bridesmaid, Isobel Corvesor, in William Street. On the Saturday a week before the wedding, they had a call from the wife of the publican of the Club Hotel. 'She wanted to know when we'd be delivering the wedding cake,' Isobel recalled. 'We said, "Sometime during the week." There was a sudden silence on the phone. "Oh dear." She had the whole wedding breakfast prepared and it was the wrong week! For the next few days the regulars at the Club were the best fed people in Nambour.'

Bert had been living with the Morrisons but now it was time to buy a place of his own. However, money was very tight and the best he could find was the old deserted Yandina Creek school house that had been closed down by the department when the wartime supply of pupils dried up. Fortunately, he had a country­man's familiarity with bush carpentry and he set to on his own to make it habitable.

After a great deal of hard work – and some reports say a visit from his father from Uranquinry – he succeeded ... just. The result was reminiscent of the Shingle Hut of the fictional Rudd family from On Our Selection. Loree says:

'There was no electricity, and no running water. There was a hose we'd bring in from a tank outside and put it in the bathtub. 'The kitchen had a dirt floor. I remember as a three-year-old, Mum chasing chickens off the kitchen table when she was bak­ing, because they just had this doorframe with the dirt floor and potato bags hanging down. The stove was outdoors. We didn't have a proper car but Dad had some kind of jeep. He taught Mum to drive at Yandina Creek. I don't think it was an entirely peaceful exercise.'

Their first child, Malcolm, was born in 1949 followed by Loree in 1950. The block was only about two hectares – and included the old rundown school tennis court where the kids played – but Bert went into partnership with a neighbour, John Zgajewski, to develop a banana plantation nearby. Bert continued to cut cane during the season and they kept a couple of house cows for milk. They got by.

Malcolm and Loree walked the three kilometres to the new Yandina Creek School. By then -1956 – there had been another addition to the family, with Gregory born two years previously. However, just as Loree was starting Grade One (after 'kindy') in the little one-teacher school, the Rudds' fortunes took a turn for the better. Bert did a deal with the wealthiest man in nearby Eumundi, Aubrey Low, to manage and sharefarm his 160-hectare property just outside the town.

Low had made his money from timber and according to Malcolm Rudd he still worked a team of horses at that time. 'He was always good to me,' Malcolm said. 'He drove a huge American car replete with an alcohol supply in the boot. I knew he owned the farm and we worked it. However, I have no sense of him being anything other than a gentle and kindly man in his dealings with myself and my siblings.'

The new farmhouse was 'luxury'. Loree said, 'The real highlight to us was just going like that and the light came on!' It was not in the best condition, perhaps, but that would change. At last Bert and Margaret Rudd had a decent place to bring up their kids and they would spend a lot of time making it a pleasant, attractive home. Loree recalls that Bert did all the carpentry and inside painting.

It would be home for the Rudds for the next twelve years. The country was rich and fertile; the milking shed was in good shape, as was the small dairy herd. Bert would soon build that up, add some beef cattle and they'd start planting their own fruit and vegetables right away. The future looked bright, and for Margaret the best of it was that there was a new baby on the way.