Anne, Trish and Jane Bootes on their horse Peggy at Gudgenby in 1956. After learning to ride and as they grew older, the three sisters became indispensable on their mountain property, mustering mobs of up to 60 cattle for sorting, and to have the calves branded. Photo: Bootes family collection.
Daughters of a third-generation mountain cattleman, these three sisters mustered cattle in the Australian alps, smashed the ice across the Gudgenby River in winter so the cattle could drink and sprinted to their beds on freezing nights with a hot-water bottle.
Bill and Joan Bootes leased the land for decades while raising the girls and grazing cattle. As schoolgirls on horseback, they became so proficient at mustering cattle, branding and weaning were timed to coincide with their holidays from boarding school.
Now they are ready to let go of one of the remnants of their childhood spent on Gudgenby Station in the foothills of Yankee Hut range where the family built Gudgenby Homestead in 1964. The Bootes family had to leave in the early 1980s when the property became part of Namadgi National Park.
One of the sisters, Trish Bootes, said when they left they could not bear to go without the homestead’s Australian cedar staircase.
“When my family left there, we thought all signs of European occupation would be removed because it was in a national park,” she said. “There was an attachment to the staircase because as a family we worked on restoring it before it was installed.”
In the 1960s, when her parents were planning the homestead, Bill had remembered seeing an advertisement from someone’s scrapyard, for an old cedar staircase from the Queanbeyan Post Office.
“I guess he called them up to see whether they still had it,” Trish said. “We went around to have a look in this man’s yard and the staircase was covered with a whole lot of tin.”
The Australian cedar staircase the Bootes family installed in Gudgenby Homestead. Photo: Trish Bootes.
They bought it from him, took it home and went to work cleaning it up.
“I remember having to use a blowtorch on it because it had some old paint and all sorts of nail holes and goodness only knows what in it. So it was a mess,” Trish said.
“My father was very interested in Australian red cedar, they loved collecting antiques and their antiques were predominantly cedar, which he then restored.
“He was keen on French polishing, that was his hobby. He French-polished the staircase.”
More recently, researching the origins of the staircase, Trish found the building in Monaro Street, Queanbeyan, from which it had come had been demolished before the Bootes salvaged the staircase from the scrapyard.
A woman from Queanbeyan History Museum said the building that housed the post and telegraph office on Monaro Street was now the site of the (closed) ANZ Bank.
“The post office building that was replaced by the new post office I think was built in the late 1800s and for some reason I thought that the staircase was earlier than that,” she said.
Trish and Jane Bootes riding one of their cattle, ‘’Etty’’, at Gudgenby in 1963. Photo: Bootes family collection.
The family is giving away the staircase, which is dismantled into two pieces.
“If anybody wanted to offer me something for it, that also would be good because it did cost me money to remove it and have stairs to replace it at Gudgenby,” Trish said.
You can contact Trish via email: [email protected].
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