Denis Blight
Elizabeth Hope Doddrell was born at sea in June 1849 near Port Elizabeth, South Africa. James Rogers Blight was three years old when he arrived in South Australia in the same year.
Life in gold-rushed Castlemaine, to which both families moved, was more turbulent than the seas on which they had sailed and rich in stories of gold, crime and wide-eyed discovery. One was about the time when Elizabeth’s father, who would leave his wife and children at home, alone, sometimes for days on end. Once, Elizabeth saw her mother slam a sash window down onto the hands of a man attempting to break into the cottage, seize an axe and bring it down as hard as she could to sever his bloodied fingers. Another was about brave Robert O’Hara Burke – a policeman from Castlemaine – who took a lock of her hair on his last doomed exploration.
Elizabeth married James in February 1871. Tough times and travels from one side of the continent to the other lay ahead: in the 1880’s by coach staying awhile in Hay and then settling with ten children in Burke in New South Wales; and in the 1890’s when depression hit the east coast of Australia and gold was discovered Western Australia, the family – amongst hundreds of thousands of others – moved to Geraldton.
A carefully posed photograph of James, Elizabeth and their ten children, shows two older boys with white handkerchiefs folded in their top left jacket pockets; Elizabeth, her hair plaited in a bun, tired with melancholy eyes but a strength of character that influenced the lives of three generations of her descendants; James, formally dressed, a big man with a large black beard and dark eyes.
James, restless, would go hunting and prospecting with kangaroo dogs or spend hours in his workshop. He drank too much, womanised and nearly killed a town health inspector. On 20 December 1897, a court ruled that Elizabeth was no longer bound to cohabit with him; granted her custody of their children under 16; and ordered James to pay two pounds weekly for their upbringing and costs of two pounds and four pence.
In 1904 James was allowed back into the family home, a Coffee Palace, managed with iron commerce by Elizabeth, provided he kept his distance, did not seek any conjugal rights, and paid board. An uneasy reconciliation dragged on as Elizabeth pursued her husband for monies owed until March 1908 when the Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by her confirming that resumption of cohabitation meant that the original ruling was unenforceable.
As the first two decades of the 20th century drifted by, and drought, federation, coronations, and war came and went. Elizabeth, now a grandmother to 30 children watched from her upstairs window onto the main street where the children passed by on their way to school. Once, she saw one of the boys walking by without shoes,
“Come in here and put these shoes on,” she called out. He did as asked. They were too tight but he daren’t disobey his Grandmother. She insisted that all should be baptised and attend Sunday School at the local Church of England. She influenced their education and apprenticeships and employed some of them part-time. As well as making sure they wore their shoes to school, she told them,
“Be neatly dressed, behave properly, and work hard.”
Elizabeth died on 22 December 1930. Her epitaph reads:
A wonderful woman in every way, well known throughout Geraldton and district and highly respected.
Denis Blight AO would ideally like to live in both Australia and the UK. He was able to do the latter for nearly seven years when he was CEO of CAB International and lived in Wallingford. He returns whenever he can. Currently he is chief executive of the Crawford Fund but finds time for his increasing interest in historical research. At the moment, family history is his focus. Elizabeth Hope Dodderell is his great grandmother. He has just sent his editor the manuscript of a book about one of her grandsons who was Chief of the Criminal Investigation Branch of the WA Police.
