There’s a rumour in my mother’s family that we have a touch of the sight: an ability to communicate with spirits and predict the future.

Ann, my great-grandmother and Bridget’s sister, would tell her granddaughters that she had a dream the night before her wedding: she was carrying a cross, up a hill.  And that, she’d say, was exactly what it was like being married to her husband.   

My mother tells a story of when she and her sister shared their grandmother’s bed when they stayed at Ann’s farm in Hendon. Mary and her sister would giggle and talk in bed, as little girls are wont to do. 

Ann would tell them about how she used to share a bed with her younger sister. Ann, too, used to giggle and talk with her sister when she should have been sleeping.  Then, one day, Ann woke up to find her sister lying next to her: ice-cold and stone-dead.  

A bit of dark soul, my grandmother Ann.

I’m not going to lie; my great-grandmother scared the bejesus out of me.

Our relative age differences didn’t help.  Ann lived until she was 105.  I only clearly remember meeting her when I was about 6 and Ann was in her second century.

She was deaf and blind by then, missing fingers and teeth.  She barely recognised my mother when Mum tried to speak to her.

I felt bad for Mum.  Here I was with a lively, joke-cracking, cake-baking grandmother and all Mum had was this poor creature.  Longevity is not always a gift.

“A black-natured woman, twisted by a hard life,” is how my grandfather, Ann’s son-in-law, would describe her.

Fair cop.  The tale about waking up in bed next to her dead sister is likely true. Her younger sister, Mary, died at home from rheumatic fever in 1905 at age 15.[3]

As for her husband and my great-grandfather, all reports have him down as man of great charm, as entertaining as he was fiscally irresponsible.  In the end, he and Ann lived in separate homes. Doubtless, that was the best outcome one could hope for in an age before no-fault divorce.

They would know their own tragedy as a couple.  Veronica, their eldest daughter, was thrown from a horse while rounding up cattle on the same farm where my mother would stay as a girl.  She suffered a head injury and died a few hours after her fall. [5] She was 10.

When Ann died, she did the one thing which I really admired her for.  She asked to be buried next to Veronica so she could lie eternally next to the daughter she lost. [6]  

It bespeaks a softness, and a vulnerability, I don’t associate with Ann.  And it seems very much at odds with a woman who never spoke a word about her baby sister’s murder.

#WildBridgie

[1] "Ann Duggan Celebrates Her 103rd Birthday." The Toowoomba Chronicle, 1987 (exact date and page unknown). B Moulder, owner of the copyright.

[2] "Ann's Bed in a State of Abandonment." Hendon Photos, late 2000s, B Moulder, owner of the copyright.

[3] Death Certificate of Mary Margaret O’Callaghan, 28 October 1905, Queensland Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, Brisbane, Queensland. Death Certificate.

[4] "Grave of Mary O'Callaghan." Allora Photos, 25 March 2022, B Moulder, owner of the copyright.

[5] "CHILD FATALLY INJURED." The Brisbane Courier (Qld. : 1864 - 1933) 8 June 1926: 16. Web. 30 May 2024, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article21031394.

[6] There was one other thing that tugs at my heart about Ann.  I realised it while trying to improve this the only picture I have of her, an image of Ann from a news clipping celebrating her 103rd birthday.  I think she’s wearing a headband with a bow on it in this picture.  There’s something inordinately touching about a centenarian determined to appear her best for the local newspaper by accessorising appropriately.

[7] "The Graves of Ann and Veronica." Allora Photos, 25 March 2022, B Moulder, owner of the copyright.