>> Go Back - page - >> List of Entriess
home, settling in for some of their happiest years together. O’Shea’s daughters said of their father: ‘Dad always
kept a roof over our heads and plenty of food in the pantry.’
Catherine O’Shea set up a boarding house as there was a demand for accommodation for train passengers
and people coming in from the outlying properties. She often gave compassionate lodging free of charge to the
needy and many times had up to eight fever-ridden patients to nurse back to health. These were usually sick men
from outlying areas who had come to town to get the once-a-fortnight train to Darwin where the only doctor in
the Northern Territory was located. The next nearest medico was in Indonesia, this being nearer than Adelaide.
In 1919–20, soldiers returning from the Middle East after the First World War brought back many sicknesses,
one of which was a sleeping sickness, pansomiaris, which was very severe. Though many people in the north died
of fever, Kate O’Shea never lost a patient in her care.
O’Shea and Bill Lucy built a blacksmith shop, mainly to cater for their own several wagons which plied
freight from the railhead. Vesteys meatworks opened in Darwin in 1917 and there were herds of cattle brought
to Emungalen to be railed to Darwin. Consequently, there were always accompanying wagons and buckboards
needing attention of some sort. O’Shea’s expertise was always much in demand as he was able to do all repairs—
even complicated wheelwright duties which involved making spokes and wooden wheels and shrinking red-hot
rims around them. Some station folk came from as far as Helen Springs in the south 580 kilometres away to collect
their supplies which arrived only once a year, by boat to Darwin then by rail to Emungalen. Pressure and demand
on northern facilities eased somewhat with the arrival of the railway in Alice Springs in 1929.
There was no school in Emungalen and O’Shea persevered with requests to the Education Department until
a teacher was sent in 1919. She was a Northern Territory girl named Marie Elliott who had graduated from the
University of Adelaide. Unfortunately, facilities provided by the department were far from adequate, and when she
arrived with her elderly mother, their home consisted of two rooms in the three-roomed railway waiting rooms.
The middle room was used as the school during the day and a rest room for Miss Elliott and her mother after school
hours. There was no kitchen, so Mrs Elliott cooked out in the open on a ground fire with a camp-oven. In 1920
a school was built but with only a male toilet. O’Shea prefabricated a toilet and one moonlit night he quietly set it
up for the ladies.
In 1922, work commenced on the railway from Emungalen to Birdum. O’Shea with a horse and scoop helped
form some of the high railway embankments, and he also turned at his forge some of the iron needed for the
Katherine railway bridge, which was commenced in 1924 and completed in 1926 without any fatalities.
During the 1930s Depression years O’Shea and his family were virtually the only people in Emungalen with
sufficient means of support and never claimed the ‘dole’. He was always an excellent provider for his large family,
quick to risk new ventures and to pit his strong back against hard physical work. Catherine had a keen Irish wit
and sense of humour, and though she suffered severely from rheumatism, her happy laughter was often heard as
she went about her busy boarding house routine. Clothing was all hand-washed with starched white pinafores for
her daughters. O’Shea’s clothes, though clean and darned, never had patches on the seat, for it was said that only
a lazy many wore patches on the seat of his trousers.
The family moved to Katherine after the completion of the bridge construction and opened a fully licensed
hotel named ‘O’Shea’s Railway Hotel’ which was operated by family members for nearly 50 years. O’Shea and his
family went on a world trip back to Ireland in 1928. Two years later, on 26 June 1930, Catherine died of rheumatic
fever. O’Shea, a devoted and loving father, sheltered and protected his daughters until one by one they left to marry.
He delighted that they all settled in the north, as he had enormous faith in the future of the Northern Territory.
After establishing a hotel in Katherine, O’Shea also established one in Borroloola in 1927 and installed his
brother John as licensee. When the railway reached its final terminus at Birdum, some 200 kilometres south of
Katherine, he built another hotel, which thrived until 1952, when he moved the licence to Larrimah six kilometres
away, on the Stuart Highway. His second-youngest daughter, Noreen, and her husband Bartholomew (‘Bat’) Kirby
ran this hotel for him until 1957 when his eldest daughter Kathleen and her husband, a retired mounted constable,
John (‘Jack’) Mahony took over the licence. O’Shea and the Kirbys then went to Katherine, to the hotel where
O’Shea ended his days. Timothy O’Shea died on 30 March 1958.
In Katherine, O’Shea Terrace has been named for Timothy and Catherine and in 1960; a drinking fountain was
unveiled in their memory.
Tim O’Shea in his life never transgressed the law and never depended on charity. He never debated Irish
problems, maintaining a loyalty and gratitude for his adopted land. Many were the people he assisted with charitable
acts that he never spoke of. He paid his way in full.
At the time of his death, his six daughters and eleven grandchildren survived him.
Family information.
MIRIAM A HAGAN, Vol 1.O’SHEA, MARY: see ULYATT, MARYOLD TIM: see MAMITPAONE POUND JIMMY: see TJUNGURRAYI, GWOJAONGOO: see WONGGUORKNADINJA: see ERLIKILYIKA