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In 1901, Isabelle, whose health had been seriously affected by a poisonous spider bite, was advised to go
south. Fred, unable to secure a transfer, agreed that his wife and children should go to Adelaide without him.
On his return to Adelaide in 1903, he resumed work in the General Post Office and purchased a family home.
He served for a time in Maree, South Australia, prior to his appointment to Alice Springs in March 1916 as Post
and Telegraph Station Master. Isabelle and the four youngest children, Mollie, Pearl, Alf and Ron, joined him
early in the following year, but Hilda, the eldest girl still living, then working as a milliner, remained in Adelaide.
The three-day train journey from Adelaide to Oodnadatta was followed by a 12-day five in hand buggy ride with
Gerhardt Johannsen as driver. Mother and children slept in a tent with spinifex and gum tips for a mattress.
Pearl afterwards remembered their first experience of waking to the sound of dingoes howling—a strange contrast
for Isabelle with memories of her English childhood.
They arrived in Alice Springs during a six-year drought to find that the government cattle, maintained to provide
meat for the Overland Telegraph Line staff, were either dead or dying. Like the rest of the minute population of
the township of Stuart, as Alice Springs was officially known until 1933, goats’ milk, goats’ meat and home made
cheese were essential parts of the diet until the drought broke. During the 1919 post war influenza epidemic, the
Prices’ daughter, Hilda, was one of Adelaide’s fatal victims. The isolation of Alice Springs did not prevent an
outbreak, but it was the Aborigines who suffered most. Mesdames Price, Stott and Standley gave compassionate
help with soup and food for the sick Aborigines. There were only two white women at the Telegraph Station,
Isabelle Price and a Miss Fitzpatrick, who cooked for the Telegraph staff, and three in the township, Mrs Stott at
the Police Station, Ida Standley, the school teacher, and Mrs Browne, wife of the hotel licensee.
One night an Aboriginal stockman from Bond Springs Station galloped into the Telegraph Station with news
that the Manager’s baby boy was very ill. Isabelle Price, riding sidesaddle, found her way along a dark bush track
through the ranges but arrived too late to give more than comfort.
As the Price children had a four kilometres walk down the Todd River to school, they attended only during the
cooler months. The schoolroom was at the back of the Stuart Town Gaol. In 1923 the South Australian Governor,
Sir Tom Bridges, and his party visited Stuart. The jail cell was cleaned out and decorated with gum leaves for the
reception. The Price family piano was shifted down by wagon for a musical evening with Fred Price as pianist.
The Price and Stott girls sang several duets. Fred was not only a good pianist but also an outstanding photographer
who recorded much of the town’s visual history between 1916 and 1924.
By 1924, Fred Price had been in charge of the Telegraph Station for eight years without a holiday. In April 1924,
the Price family set out by horse and buggy for Oodnadatta to connect with the fortnightly train to Adelaide.
Long hours of work and years without a break had affected Fred Price’s health. Their Adelaide holiday included
a return sea trip to Sydney, which none of them enjoyed much. Nor did it benefit, as the family doctor hoped,
Fred’s ill health. He died of peritonitis on 24 August 1924 at the age of 57.
Before leaving Alice Springs, the Prices’ growing love for the district led them to purchase two unimproved
pastoral leases about 200 kilometres north east of the town. One of these, Harper’s Springs, is now part of the
Mount Skinner Station. Following her husband’s death, Isabelle Price made the momentous decision to make their
joint dream a reality. In achieving this, on two unimproved leases without buildings or stockyards, she became the
first lone woman to establish a Centralian station. Having purchased 200 sheep from McBride Station near Burra
in South Australia, she arranged for them to be trucked by the same train on which she and her children travelled
to Oodnadatta. There she collected her buggy and horses, purchased three camels and a horse and dray, and set out
for a new homeland without a home!
The camels were loaded with the wire netting used for yarding the sheep each night. Syd, an Aborigine who
worked for the Price family, handled the dray and camels. Usually the two teenage girls, Mollie and Pearl, set off
after first light with the sheep, while their mother packed up camp and followed driving the buggy with her two
young boys. After the midday meal together, their mother went ahead to organise the sheep enclosure and set up
camp. After passing New Crown Station a thunderstorm gave the girls such problems moving the sheep that it
was nightfall when they reached a fast running creek where they finished carrying and urging the animals across
in darkness illuminated by lightning flashes. When they finally reached their mother, it was to learn that she had
experienced a near fatal disaster. Frightened by lightning, the horses bolted along a fence surrounding a water bore,
ripping out fence posts and enmeshing the buggy with a smashed pole in the wrecked fence.
It was a wet bedding night but there was the comfort that no one was seriously hurt. The family remained there
several days while the children cut and fitted a new buggy pole from bush timber. The incredible journey on the
old bush track to Alice Springs and Harper’s Springs to fulfil her husband’s dream provides evidence of Isabelle’s
courage and fortitude. She recognised the discipline that the hazardous terrain imposed on travellers and proved
her strength by coping with near disaster without panic.
When they left Adelaide, the children’s ages ranged between nine and 16 years. Pearl had her 14th birthday
while she was walking the sheep from camp to camp. They left Adelaide in mid October and arrived back in
Alice Springs in time for Christmas 1924!
After a rest with friends in Alice Springs, the Prices collected their household effects, domestic animals and
pets and set off on the final 200 kilometres’ sheep drive to Harper’s Springs. With the help of a neighbour to
be, Bob Purvis, this journey took three weeks. They arrived to find that the only ‘improvements’ consisted of a
well, a ‘whip’ for drawing water and a hollowed out log water trough. There was not even a rough bough shed.
Purvis helped with the unloading but had to get back to his own station, leaving Isabelle Price with four children
and two Aborigines 65 kilometres from the nearest neighbour.
With the help of the two Aborigines, the sheep and goats were shepherded every day and yarded each night,
while the children, with some Aboriginal help, set about building a bush house. This was constructed with log walls,