Ivy Mary Robens

A Bulldog, and a Fire in the Night

In the mid-1920s, while the family was living in a cottage on Sydenham Road, Marrickville, fire broke out in the house at night. A neighbour raised the alarm and woke William, Ivy and their three-year-old daughter in time for them to escape the burning building. The family bulldog, shut in the room where the fire started, could not be saved.⁴ A companion report describes a watchman’s warning, and furniture damaged in the rescue.⁵

Coming so soon after the death of their infant son, the fire is remembered in the family as the point at which the marriage began to fail.

Desertion

In early 1927 William Cairns Gage left. A warrant for his arrest, issued by the Mudgee Bench and published in the New South Wales Police Gazette on 2 February, describes him with the flat precision of the genre — and gives, incidentally, the fullest physical description of him that survives.⁶

He had left Mudgee some days earlier driving a grey one-ton Ford lorry, registration L.29-967. The complainant is named as Ivy Mary Gage, of Lawson Street, Mudgee.⁶ He was never brought back. He surfaces two decades later in the London electoral registers, at 26 Fitzalan Street in Lambeth, and died there in the last quarter of 1947, aged fifty-six; he was buried at Lambeth on 7 November.⁷⁸ By the time of Ivy’s own death, the press described her as his widow.

Four Thousand Miles to Cooktown

Left to raise Patricia alone at the dawn of the Depression, Ivy went looking for work on the road. By 1930 she was at Cross Street, Baulkham Hills — the same house in which her father had died two years earlier.⁹

In the middle of 1931 she and Patricia, known in the family as Patsy, made a journey that the newspapers carried nationally: some four thousand miles from Melbourne to Cooktown in far north Queensland. They had been travelling five months and a week. In all that time the only paid work Ivy found was a single week at Bega.¹⁰

From Cairns they were given free passage by steamer to Cooktown. Finding no work there, the same ship carried them back again. Patsy was eight years old.¹⁰

The Walk to Adelaide, and the Night Flit

The following year brought a harder journey. In 1932 Ivy and nine-year-old Patricia set out to walk from Bathurst to Adelaide, intending to press on to relatives in Perth — among them, almost certainly, Ivy’s own brother Aubrey, who had settled in Western Australia after the Boer War.¹¹

They were stopped by police at Port Augusta. When Ivy announced that she would simply walk all the way back to Bathurst instead, the Women Police intervened: a bed was arranged at the Salvation Army Home on Gilbert Street, Adelaide, and a school place for Patricia. The arrangement lasted one night.

Mother and daughter had set out on foot, back toward New South Wales.¹¹ She surfaces at Bowenfels near Lithgow in 1934, at Orange Road, Bathurst in 1936, and by 1943 at 196 Keppel Street, Bathurst — her mother’s old house, though her mother had died the year before and only her sister Stella was still there.¹²¹³¹⁴

The Fire at Bathurst Common

In 1943 Patricia married George Frederick Hill at Bathurst.¹⁵ The following year Ivy was charged with maliciously setting fire to the dwelling of her son-in-law’s father, George Thomas Hill, on Bathurst Common, on 1 July. She was remanded on bail of £40 self, and committed for trial from the Bathurst Coroner’s Court on 12 August 1944.¹⁶¹⁷

The newspaper accounts of the committal are the most painful documents in this chapter. Detective-Sergeant Wilson told the court that the house — in which Patricia, George and their child were asleep — was set alight in the early hours, the occupants waking only just in time to escape in their nightclothes. Ivy had told him her son-in-law was “a waster and was ill-treating her daughter.” She had raised the fire alarm herself, and called the police, in the hope that in the confusion she might get Patricia and the baby away from him.¹⁸

Other witnesses testified that the couple “lived happily together.” Constable McKechnie put it plainly.

After a psychiatric review she was placed on a good-behaviour bond rather than imprisoned. It is hard to read the sequence — the cottage fire of the 1920s, the years of highway vagrancy with a child, and then a fire lit at her own daughter’s door to rescue her from a danger nobody else could see — as anything other than one long injury working itself out.

The Last Lift

Family memory holds that in her last years Ivy finally made the journey to Western Australia that had defeated her in 1932, to see the brother she had not laid eyes on since he sailed for the Boer War. It has not been independently verified, but it matches exactly the destination she had been trying to reach twenty years before.¹⁹

On the night of Friday 18 February 1955, hitch-hiking back from South Australia toward Queensland to visit Patricia — and her sister Stella, who was living at the same Coolangatta address — Ivy was killed when a semi-trailer, a truck and a car collided at Spring Flats, eighteen miles north of Gundagai on the Hume Highway. Two men in the other vehicles were seriously injured. The press reported her simply as “Mrs Ivy Mary Gage (59), a widow.”²⁰

The woman who had once walked four thousand miles to keep her daughter died on the road going to see her.

The Ducks at Christmas

None of the above is how the family remembers her. What survives in family memory is Christmas, and the sound of her arriving.

They would kill the ducks for Christmas dinner. This is oral history rather than record, and its source is still to be properly cited — but it is the only account of Ivy in which she is not in trouble, and it is the one the family kept.²¹

Patricia later divorced George Hill and raised two children, Evelyn and George. She died on 5 May 2006, aged eighty-three, and was buried at Southport Lawn Cemetery on the Gold Coast — a few miles from the flats where her mother had so often been heading.²²