27
Greenmount, 1933
IN AMONGST THE 140 acres the Throssells owned on the other side of York Road was another weatherboard cottage, built in the 1850s as a guardhouse. The warder had lived there while supervising the convicts who built the original York to Greenmount road.1 Hugo had been renting it out and trying to sell it for years. On 10 February 1933, three months before Katharine left on her trip, the cottage burned down in a bushfire that spread up the valley at four o’clock in the afternoon and threatened orchards and several other houses before being brought under control by firefighters that night.2 All that remained of the cottage were ‘charred timbers and two tall brick chimneys’.3 Somehow, before the cottage burned down Hugo managed to remove the furniture and haul it out of the bush to safety. He had insured the building for £150.
A question asked in an arson inquiry two months later suggests the insurance company had suspicions. Madame La Reine’s hairdressing salon, run by Victoria Ross, had burned down in the city; a police officer had caught a nightwatchman coming out of the building smelling of kerosene. The insurance company suspected that Victoria Ross’s husband, John, was involved. Their lawyer, Nathaniel Lappin, asked Ross, ‘Have you ever discussed a fire that took place at Hugo Throssell’s place at Greenmount?’.4 Ross said he did not remember doing so and no follow-up was recorded. In May, the Rosses and the nightwatchman were charged with arson; Mrs Ross was acquitted but the other two were jailed. Lappin would go on to work as a police prosecutor in years to come, hunting out communists and manifesting a particular dislike of Katharine, perhaps triggered by his suspicion about the fire.
WITH KATHARINE LEAVING for London on 22 May and no longer restraining Hugo’s impulses, he embarked on his grandest scheme to make money: he would turn their Greenmount property into a rodeo. The show would be a source of income and the stream of visitors, enchanted by life in the hills, would buy the vacant blocks he was trying to sell. He was in a hurry. His first description of the enterprise, in a letter dated 21 June 1933 to the local council, sounds innocuous—he was ‘establishing a depot to supply horses for mounted hiking’. If that was all he actually intended when he began, it soon snowballed. The next month, when he printed a flyer advertising the grand opening to occur on 30 July, he had added the ‘main attraction’—a buck jumping competition—as well as clay pigeon shooting, ‘the William Tell Act’, a motor vehicle climb up the Freak Hill, Aboriginal people throwing kylies, an RSL band performing and afternoon tea. Hugo had renamed the horses for hire after Katharine’s books and Ric remembers the names ‘professionally painted in meticulous signwriter’s capitals on each tethering post. “Windlestraws” was a long-retired steeplechaser, “Kiss on the Lips” a pretty piebald pony. “Working Bullocks” was a gentle mule that seemed unconcerned by the indignity of being a bullock. Even my silver-maned chestnut was to be called “The Wild Oats of Han”’.5
At the end of June, a horse crushed Hugo’s foot, breaking two of the bones in his instep.6 On crutches, he took sick leave from his job as a fertiliser inspector and carried on with preparations for the rodeo. After Hugo was absent from work for five weeks, the director wrote that ‘owing to the fact that the necessary money has not been provided on our estimates, it will not be possible to give you further employment’.7 Perhaps it was a funding problem, but it’s possible the director had lost patience with his war hero on sick leave whose rodeo had been in all the newspapers.
Hugo wrote of ‘considerable opposition’ to his enterprise ‘from the powers that be’.8 As much as Hugo felt persecuted, the opposition was largely due to him ignoring regulations. After constructing a corral, a thatched kiosk, and other temporary buildings, he retrospectively sought permission from the Greenmount Road Board; they told him he had seven days to take them down.9 Just before the opening, AO Neville, the infamous Protector of Aborigines, wrote to warn that it was a breach of the law to employ Aboriginal people without his permission.10 Hugo’s bigger problem was the law against charging admission for entertainment on a Sunday without special permission. It wasn’t an obscure regulation but one that was actively enforced; a dance hall operator, for example, was prosecuted in 1936 after a sting by undercover police officers.11 Just three days before the opening, Hugo wrote to the chief secretary of the state government asking for permission to charge. He still had some influence; the secretary granted Hugo permission. He would be allowed to cover his costs but any profits would have to go to charity.12 Later, Hugo was granted ongoing permission to take up a collection after 2.30 p.m. on Sundays.13 Local ‘opposition’ might have partly come from other residents objecting to the influx of people each weekend. The day before the opening the Greenmount Progress Association reneged on an agreement to loan him crockery.14 In August, a number of residents signed a petition objecting to the stench from Hugo’s horses.15
Two thousand people came up the hill for the opening day on 30 July. Hugo reported ‘we took over £70 at the gate for the [entry] charge and £10 odd for afternoon tea, whilst chocolates, oranges and ciggaros [cigarettes] sold readily’.16 The local newspaper, the Swan Express, declared it ‘Greenmount’s greatest day’ as ‘happy, laughing crowds wended their way from the station’, with a plane performing stunts overhead, the thrill of the dangerous bucking horses, and a ‘bounteous luncheon … dispensed in a large marquee’.17 The West Australian saw it differently, declaring ‘the programme was very disappointing’ with a crowd who ‘soon tired of the spasmodic attempts by motor cycles and cars to climb the hill’ and supposedly bucking horses who were far too placid.18
The rodeos continued through August and into September, still attracting a crowd, but not generating enough money to solve Hugo’s financial problems. On 14 September, he wrote to a colonel in the RSL about the possibility of a partnership, inviting the leaders of the RSL to visit and see the rodeo that coming Sunday. ‘I am prepared to fall in with any reasonable suggestion’, he wrote, ‘as my main object in attracting the crowd to Greenmount is to enable me to dispose of some of my building blocks in this locality, and this would be more effectively achieved with your organization in support’. If the RSL were to partner with him, he suggested they could add some military-themed attractions, creating a dugout to display war trophies and trenches from which the public could shoot ‘with a periscopic rifle disappearing targets across the creek—a la Gallipoli’.19 Hugo’s qualms about war had been momentarily forgotten. Nothing came of the suggested partnership and that week’s rodeo might have been the last, the advertisements having already stopped the week before.20 A few weeks later, the gossipy newspaper the Mirror ran a short satirical list of ‘Books That Were Never Written’; the first was ‘Rodeo—Hugo Throssell VC’.21
In Hugo’s letter to the RSL, he talked up his financial situation. ‘I have now sold my wheat farm for cash and also have every prospect of selling my Fermoy property at Northam. My foot is mended and the show is a going concern.’ The truth was that he was in a financial hole, with bills from the rodeo as well as rates arrears adding up to over £1200 and little income. He had twenty-two heavily mortgaged properties, most of them vacant land. Trying to raise money, he mortgaged the family home to a Harriet Roberts for £400.22 Years later, when the debt was called in, Katharine wrote, ‘This mortgage was one of the desperate things my husband did when I was away from home so long ago … and the last straw I think to his anguish of mind’.23
AROUND THE TIME of Hugo’s rodeo opening, a woman named Rose Ross and her daughter Enid took over the running of the Wandu guesthouse and, further up York Road at the top of the hill, the Log Cabin tearooms and dance hall. Hugo had enlisted Rose to cater for the rodeo and the two of them became close. Hugo couldn’t cook for himself; Ric remembers that after the opening day she stayed on and ‘dished up a … forbidden meal of bubble-and-squeak and fried scones soaked in Golden Syrup’.24 Imagining his father’s state of mind in his last weeks of life, Ric writes that Hugo and Rose began an affair. Hugo ‘couldn’t help playing up to women … But it never did go the whole way. Not till now’.25 Hugo arranged for Ric to stay with friends from school while he went to live with Rose.26 Ric doesn’t reveal how he knew about the affair—was it neighbourhood gossip or his own interpretation of what he remembered? He imagines Hugo’s guilt about it as a factor in his suicide. ‘A man should have stuck to [Katharine]. Couldn’t even wait a few months for her to come back. Sick with self-contempt, Jim went back to the house at Greenmount … [He] sat at the kitchen table with Katharine’s letter in his hand, afraid to be faced with his own disloyalty.’27
On 9 October, Hugo saw Dr Heriot. Heriot recorded, ‘History obtained with greatest of difficulty, does not wish to discuss his complaints … Not sleeping well—heart worse feels too big … Is financially worried … Unemployed—has only worked Agricultural Bank 10 weeks and run a few Rodeos during past year’.28
On 26 October, Hugo turned forty-nine. ‘He was born at about midnight’, Katharine wrote, ‘so they cd never decide the exact date’. The last known photograph of him is dated 27 October. He stands with his arm around his older sister, Eva Bartlett-Day. Next to them are Eva’s daughters wearing hats and gloves. Hugo’s hair is grey but he’s smiling and wearing a suit and tie. They are standing in a garden, probably celebrating Hugo’s birthday.
On 7 November, he returned to see Dr Heriot. His insomnia was getting him down. ‘He used to dread going to bed’, said Hugo’s brother-in-law, ‘as he had most horrible thoughts as soon as he would lie down’.29
Ric hadn’t seen his father for weeks when they met in the city to watch a film at the Ambassador Theatre. ‘It was good to be with him. I looked around to him happily. He seemed miles away, staring. He didn’t know I was there.’30 On Friday 17 November there was a Greenmount school concert in the evening. Ric recited Tennyson’s war poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’.31 It’s unknown whether Hugo was there to hear it.
Hugo’s much older brother-in-law, George Withers, had known him since he was a boy. On Saturday 18 November, he came out to Greenmount to help Hugo burn off grass around the property with three other men. Hugo confided in George as they worked:
[He] drew my attention to his madness in starting his Rodeo Stand which he called Throssell’s Folly. He said that the expenses were very heavy and ran him further into debt. He said if he had any pluck he would blow his brains out.
He said his wife left everything in perfect order when she left and he seemed very worried as to what she would think when she came back from England where she was at the time.
He said she would find everything in a muddle and he was far better out of it.
They’d stopped burning off by the time it was dark at half-past seven; George decided to stay the night with Hugo. They walked up the road to the Log Cabin and stayed till midnight, eating and talking with Rose Ross and her daughter. ‘After tea he seemed brighter and was telling fairy tales to Mrs Ross’s child.’32
Returning home, George remembered that Hugo ‘had a shower and rub down and said how fresh it made him feel. He then told me how good it was for me to come up and stay with him, and said good night and stated that he was going to sleep in his wife’s room. Those were the last words I heard him speak’. Did he mean Katharine’s workroom? There’s no record it had a bed in it, but it was a strange thing to say if he meant the bedroom he and Katharine shared.33
When George woke in the morning, he lay in bed for an hour before he got up. He was expecting for Hugo to call out at any moment for them to get started on the burning off. At ten past eight, he went looking for Hugo. His bed had been slept in, but he wasn’t there or in the yard. Eventually, George found him on the back verandah, ‘lying in a deck chair in his pyjamas with his feet upon the lattice work and a big wound in the side of his right temple. A revolver in his right hand resting on his right shoulder. A large pool of blood was on the verandah and he was still bleeding and breathing heavily’.34
Hugo had been lying there, fatally wounded, for at least an hour. Inexplicably, George hadn’t heard the shot, although he thought it might have been what had woken him. George called a doctor and waited with Hugo for the half-hour it took him to arrive. It’s unrecorded whether Hugo was conscious. ‘When the doctor arrived he was still alive and we placed him on a couch. He expired about 15 minutes after the doctor’s arrival.’35
The doctor found a suicide note on the shelf. Newspapers reported that it read, ‘I can’t sleep and feel my old war head. It’s going phut, and that’s no good for anyone concerned’.36 He had also made a new will dated the day before his death, leaving everything to Katharine. On the back, he had written, ‘I have never recovered from my 1914–18 experiences, and, with this in view, I appeal to the State to see that my wife and child get the usual war pension. No man could have a truer mate’.37
An autopsy was carried out on his body the next day and then that afternoon, an hour or two before Katharine heard the news of his death in London, he was buried at Karrakatta Cemetery with a military funeral. When his coffin was lifted onto the gun carriage, ‘the pathetic souvenirs of the late Captain Throssell’s active service—his Victoria Cross and other war service medals, his weather-beaten plumed Light Horse hat and sword were placed on top of it’. Members of his 10th Light Horse followed the pallbearers, the now middle-aged veterans still showing ‘the scars of war’, a number of them missing limbs. ‘Light rain fell as the cortege drew up at the graveside. Someone offered the chaplain the protection of an umbrella, but he brushed it aside, and the rain streamed down his surplice. Water dripped, too, from the shrubs on to the flag-covered coffin.’38