Caldwell, Then Doust

Martha Jemima Robens

1855–1927

Widowed at thirty with two small children, she waited twenty-four years and then married a Clarence River pioneer nineteen years her senior, who outlived her by ten and reached a hundred.

Born: 8 October 1855 · Sydney
Died: 22 February 1927 · Chatswood
Married: John Caldwell (d. 1886); David Doust (1836–1937)
Lived: 71 years

Born on 8 October 1855 in Sydney.¹ For a long time her married surname stood as one of the open questions of this chapter: Sarah Ann Robens’s death registration of 1900 gives her daughter’s name as Caldwell, while the family’s compiled descendant record gives Doust. It looked like an error in one source or the other.

It was neither. She married twice. Martha married John Caldwell at Sydney in 1881 and was widowed in 1886; twenty-four years later, in 1910, she married David Doust.²³ Her mother died in 1900 — in the middle of those twenty-four years, when Martha was still Mrs Caldwell and had been for nineteen years. Both records were right, and the discrepancy was never a discrepancy at all.

The next generation

Children

Daisy S. Caldwell (1882–1904) — died at twenty-two
William Livingstone Caldwell (1884–1968) — auctioneer, of Lismore

1881–1886

Five Years, and Twenty-Four Alone

She and John Caldwell settled at Redfern, where both their children were born. He died there on 18 March 1886.³⁴ She was about thirty, with a girl of four and a boy of two, and she did not marry again for almost a quarter of a century.

Daisy died young — at Newtown on 20 April 1904, aged about twenty-two, and was buried at Rookwood beside her father.⁵ An earlier account gives her name as Daisy Sarah; every record found gives only the initial S.

William Livingstone went north. He married Emily Maude Graham at Lismore in 1909, farmed first at Eureka nearby, and then spent decades as an auctioneer at 12 Wyrallah Road, Lismore, where he died on 6 March 1968.⁶⁷ His three children stayed in the district: Daisy Elizabeth, a nurse, who lived at that same address for most of her life and died in 2002; Joyce Martha, registered at birth as Martha J. after her grandmother and known always by her middle name; and Livingstone John, who served with the 2nd AIF and became an auctioneer like his father.⁸⁹¹⁰

1858

The Man She Married Second

David Doust was born at Lamberhurst in Kent on 28 October 1836, the year before Victoria came to the throne. In 1858, judging his prospects at home poor, he married Mary Waters, sailed from Liverpool aboard the Admiral Lyons on 25 September, and reached Sydney Heads on 29 December.¹¹

His own reminiscences describe what he saw:

St. Andrew’s Cathedral was in course of construction; a burying-place where the Town Hall now rears its noble proportions. A two-railed fence ran from Bathurst street down Brickfield Hill. After landing we walked up George street, got through the fence & walked across a large paddock, taking a short cut to Surry Hills.

David Doust, recalling his arrival in Sydney, December 1858

1861–1893

The Clarence

In February 1861 he followed his uncle James Boorman to the Clarence River, into country he described as rich and heavily timbered, “where people were scarce, but the natives & mosquitoes were in great numbers”. He made his own furniture out of bush materials, crossed the river by raft for fifteen shillings a week, and walked the long way home every Saturday evening. It took the family six months to save £13.¹¹

He took a five-year lease on standing timber, cleared scrub, planted his first maize by hoe. At the end of it he selected 250 acres on the far bank and got his cattle and bullocks across the stream behind a boat, buoyed on an empty cask. A dry season nearly broke them — they were never in debt, he said, but they lived on cornmeal porridge three times a day.

Then sugar came to the Clarence and the returns with it. He bought a second farm, drained a swamp with a box drain at a cost of £500, bred cattle and horses, bought a third farm for £2,000. He named his farms “Bayham”, after the Lamberhurst farm his own father had held.¹¹

1893 gave him both ends of a farmer’s luck in a single year. The greatest flood the Clarence has known destroyed his entire maize crop — a thousand bags. That same year the New South Wales Government awarded him its £50 prize for the best-worked and best-managed farm on the North Coast, against forty other competitors.¹¹¹²

1854–1937

A Pulpit Made of Corn Bags

He was a Wesleyan and then Methodist lay preacher from about eighteen, and stayed at it into his nineties. In the pioneering years he gathered the settlers of the Ullmarra district into a congregation in a rough barn, and preached Brushgrove’s first service from a pulpit made of corn bags. In 1906 he was one of two men who converted a former shop at South Grafton into a Methodist church — building the platform, painting the walls, putting in the seats and the organ — for the first service on 21 January that year.¹¹

Mary died in 1909. David moved to Sydney, and in 1910 he married Martha at Chatswood, where the 1913 roll finds them in Anderson Street, he of independent means and she at domestic duties.¹³ There were no children of that marriage. They stayed at Chatswood until Martha died on 22 February 1927, aged seventy-one, and was buried at Rookwood, Section 2W, Row 1, Methodist ground, under a stone that names her simply “wife of David Doust”.¹⁴

He then went to Bellingen to live with his son. He turned a hundred on 28 October 1936 and died at the Masonic Hospital, Ashfield, on 19 January 1937 after a short illness — seventy-eight years after walking up George Street through a two-railed fence.¹²

Studio photograph of five people: two elderly men seated with a small boy in a white shirt between them, and a young woman and a man standing behind. — Five generations of Clarence River Dousts at the Bellingen Show, 1933 — David Doust seated at right, his son Reuben seated at left, Reuben’s son Hedley standing at right, Hedley’s daughter Lilian May standing at left, and her son Ray on his great-grandfather’s knee

The Record

Sources & References

1
Birth

Summary record for Martha Jemima Doust née Robens — born 8 October 1855, Sydney; parents Stephen Robens and Sarah Robens.
2
First marriage, 1881

NSW BDM marriage index — Martha J. Robens to Jno. Caldwell, 1881, Sydney, reg. no. 665.
3
John Caldwell’s death

NSW BDM death index — John Caldwell, 1886, Redfern, reg. no. 5287, parents William D. and Margaret Caldwell; died 18 March 1886, buried Rookwood. A separate index card for him carries a registration number 2185 that matches neither the marriage nor the death entry; its source has not been identified.
4
The surname question, resolved

Sarah Ann Robens’s 1900 death registration names this daughter as Caldwell; the family’s compiled descendant record names her Doust. Both are correct. She was Mrs Caldwell from 1881 and Mrs Doust from 1910, and her mother died in the interval.
5
Daisy S. Caldwell

NSW BDM death index — Daisy S. Caldwell, 1904, Newtown, reg. no. 6378, parents John and Martha J.; died 20 April 1904, buried Rookwood with her father. An earlier compiled account gives her name as Daisy Sarah; the primary records give only the initial.
6
William Livingstone Caldwell

Married Emily M. Graham, Lismore, 1909, reg. no. 5065. 1913 State Electoral Roll, District of Lismore, Eureka polling place — William Livingston Caldwell, farmer, and Maude Emily Caldwell. Died 6 March 1968, buried East Lismore General Cemetery; Emily Maude died 24 March 1960.
7
His obituary

Sydney Morning Herald, 23 March 1968 — William Caldwell of 12 Wyrallah Road, Lismore, survived by his wife and by “Daisy Caldwell” and “Joyce”. Research has since identified three children in all.
8
Daisy Elizabeth Caldwell

NSW BDM birth index 1910, Lismore, reg. no. 16192. Born 12 May 1910; on the electoral roll at 12 Wyrallah Road as a nurse in 1937 and at home duties in 1934 and 1943. Died 16 February 2002, buried Lismore Memorial Gardens.
9
Joyce Martha Caldwell, later Gamble

Registered at birth as Martha J. Caldwell, 1913, Lismore, reg. no. 18336, and known by her middle name. Married Frederick Eugene Gamble, Lismore, 1934, reg. no. 9719 — the index gives “Frederick K.”, treated as a transcription slip since every later record gives Eugene. The 1937 roll still lists her as “Caldwell, Joyce”, living with her brother rather than her husband, which is not explained. Died 23 June 1995, aged eighty-two.
10
Livingstone John Caldwell

Born 1 March 1922, Lismore; 2nd AIF service no. NX114779, next of kin William Caldwell. Married Joyce Savill, Lismore, 1945, reg. no. 3295. Died 1991, buried Pinegrove Memorial Park, Minchinbury; the family plaques name their children as Wendy, Sandra, John and Trish. A “Wendy Anne Caldwell” recorded with Joyce and Livingstone John on the 1937 roll cannot be his wife or his later daughter, and remains unidentified.
11
David Doust — biography

Compiled biography of David Doust (28 October 1836 – 19 January 1937) by a one-name study of the Doust surname, incorporating his own reminiscences: birth at Lamberhurst, Kent; marriage to Mary Waters 27 July 1858; the voyage of the Admiral Lyons from Liverpool, 25 September to 29 December 1858; Bolwarra and then the Clarence River from February 1861; the leases, selections and farms named “Bayham” at Lower Ullmarra and Southgate; the 1893 flood and the £50 government prize; his lay preaching from about eighteen, the barn congregation at Ullmarra, the corn-bag pulpit at Brushgrove, and the fitting-out of the South Grafton church for its first service on 21 January 1906.
12
“Death of a Centenarian”

Newspaper obituary, January 1937 — a pioneer of the Clarence River district who came out in 1858 and settled on the river in 1861 with neither horse nor bullocks, carrying his own cut shrubs and shingles to the homestead site; the 1893 government prize; survived by three sons, Reuben of Bellingen, William Colin of Southgate and Albert of Grafton, and one daughter, Mrs W. J. L. Kyle of Hurlstone Park. An earlier compiled account gives four sons and one daughter; the contemporary obituary is preferred.
13
Chatswood, 1913

State Electoral Roll, District of Gordon, Chatswood polling place — David Doust, independent means, and Martha Jemima Doust, domestic duties, Anderson Street; Arthur Leslie Doust, florist, and Florence Maud Doust at Hercules Street nearby, presumed to be David’s children by his first marriage but not confirmed, and named neither in his obituary nor in the compiled biography.
14
Martha’s death and burial

NSW BDM death index — Martha J. Doust, 1927, Chatswood, reg. no. 3704, parents Stephen and Sarah. Headstone, Rookwood General Cemetery, Section 2W, Row 1, Methodist: age 71, “wife of David Doust”.