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Parliamentary Record, vol XXI; O’Loughlin College, annual magazines, 1987–1993; personal information Br Cusack, Br Pye, M Sutherland;
A Welke & H J Wilson, ‘Darwin Central Area Heritage Study’, Report to the National Trust of Australia (Northern Territory), 1993.
J EASTERBY-WOOD and HELEN J WILSON, Vol 3.
O’SHEA, TIMOTHY (TIM) (1878–1958) and O’SHEA, CATHERINE (1880–1930), pioneers. Timothy (Tim)
O’Shea was born in Tonavarn, Tralee, County Kerry, Ireland, on 29 April 1878. He was one of four sons and five
daughters born to Patrick and Johannah O’Shea, nee Barrett. Patrick O’Shea, a farmer, was a retired professional
soldier, having enlisted in the British Army to serve with the Dublin Fusiliers in 1848, which was the year of his
wife Johannah’s birth. During the Indian Mutiny in 1857, Captain Patrick O’Shea’s regiment took part in the Relief
of Lucknow. Seeing his commander disarmed and menaced by a sepoy, Patrick killed the Indian with his sabre.
For this deed, Patrick O’Shea received the Star of India medal.
After working at his trade as a bricklayer, O’Shea left Ireland to seek a better life in Australia. He promised
to keep in touch with a pretty girl named Catherine O’Keeffe whom he met at his send-off party. When his ship
berthed in Brisbane in 1900, O’Shea went ashore with seven Shillings and six Pence in his pocket—his first
purchase was a pineapple! Finding a scarcity of work in Brisbane, he made his way north to Townsville where he
practised his trade, brick making for the construction of the court house, post office and the well-known Queen’s
Hotel.
While in north Queensland, he accepted a job with a plate-laying gang in the Northern Division of the
Queensland Railways. Wages were low and the cost of living high, so O’Shea, with a strong young back, broad
shoulders and enormous capacity for hard work, took a job cutting cane, becoming one of the first of the white
gangs to work in the cane-fields. Until this time, sceptics believed that cane cutting was the monopoly of the
imported Kanaka labourers, and that white men did not have the endurance or stamina for work of that kind in
those climatic conditions.
Hearing of fortunes being made and lost in mining, O’Shea made his way to Herberton where, at a mine which
he named ‘The Maid of Erin’, he made a substantial tin strike—enough, in fact, to travel back to Ireland and marry
the girl who had kept in contact with him for nearly seven years.
On 12 February 1907, at Friars Church in Gerah, Eire, Timothy O’Shea married Catherine O’Keeffe.
Dark-haired, brown-eyed and bonny, Catherine (‘Kate’ or ‘Kitty’) was born on 2 February 1880, and worked as a
postal clerk in the small township of Farranfore until her marriage. She was one of a family of three daughters and
five sons of John and Mary, nee Donlevy, O’Keeffe.
After their marriage, Timothy and Catherine sailed for Australia, which was to be their adopted homeland
forever. An indication of some measure of O’Shea’s prior success in Australia is that he paid passage for many
other members of his family: his widowed mother, two brothers, five sisters, one of his brothers’ wives and their
three children—a total of 12 besides himself and his new bride. On arrival in Queensland O’Shea saw them all
suitably settled—a great effort for a young man who had arrived virtually penniless in Australia only seven years
before.
The young O’Sheas settled in Irvinebank where O’Shea continued mining and the first two of six daughters
were born: Kathleen in 1908 and Johannah in 1909. News of new mining fields and a rich tin strike at Pine
Creek in the Northern Territory lured the family and they travelled by boat to Darwin in 1909. Accompanied by
O’Shea’s mother, who lived with the family until her death in 1925, they travelled by train from Darwin to Pine
Creek where they settled until 1918. O’Shea joined the ‘tin rush’ to Umbrawarra, west of Pine Creek, and soon
had a very productive and profitable little lease of his own to work. In 1910, he and a man named Paddy Kelly
went to Bulman in Arnhem Land to inspect the silver-lead reported to be there. Travel by packhorse was slow
and arduous and they were away for three months. Travelling to Bulman, they passed over an area with obviously
great mining potential. O’Shea identified tin as the predominant ore and became the discoverer of the Maranboy
mining fields. At this time he still intended returning to Queensland so did not bother to establish any claims in
the area. Instead, when he returned to Pine Creek, he gave what information he had to an acquaintance named Jim
Schaber who became the man to put Maranboy ‘on the map’. On their return journey, Tim and Paddy travelled
back to Pine Creek via Katherine Gorge. In 1911, the Commonwealth took over control of Northern Territory
administration and the northern railway was extended farther south to stop at the wide and deep Katherine River
in 1917. After the 1914–18 war, the nation’s economy was in a depressed state, so the river was not bridged until
1925 and the terminus moved from Emungalen to Katherine on the southern bank of the river in 1926.
The O’Shea family lived in Pine Creek until 1918 and during this period five more girls were born, though
one died soon after birth. During the First World War, O’Shea and his brother-in-law, Bill Lucy, worked a
tin-mining lease nine kilometres from Pine Creek. The ore was carted to Mount Wells and crushed in the old
Commonwealth battery. They also mined molybdenum, though deposits were not significant. As his family
increased, O’Shea mined less and stayed in town, working for a time in Schunke’s blacksmith shop. When work
commenced on the extension of the railway line from Pine Creek to Emungalen, he worked for a while on this,
for he was one of a very few experienced construction workers in the Northern Territory. He took a contract for
sculling bolts, which entailed taking the nuts off large bolts that had to go through the railway sleepers. Deciding
that a better future lay in the destination of the railway, O’Shea in 1918 moved his family to Emungalen, which
was to be a temporary settlement until the Katherine River was bridged.
Emungalen township consisted of a boarding-house and general store owned by Mr Dick Gillard, Ron Brumby’s
saddler’s shop, a combined bakery and store with a Chinese proprietor named Ah Fong and a blacksmith’s shop
belonging to Irish Tom McCarthy. There were several family homes and the O’Sheas reconstructed their Pine Creek