Cappawhite to Meekatharra Is it a loaf of bread you be wanting, my lad? … Be you alone or have you a mate? Shure ‘tis hard times my boy, but take this and good luck. - Quoted from “Brodie”: Memoirs of Sir Laurence Brodie-Hall, Access Press, Northbridge, Western Australia, 1994, p39
P
ake had seen it all before. Twenty years ago he had been there himself, walking for days, camping in any available shelter, chopping wood in exchange for a decent piece of fresh meat and the luxury of milk and sugar for his billy tea. He understood that glint in the eye – the prospect of the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, his very own mining ‘show’. The 1901 census of Ireland had shown Pake Timoney as an electrical engineer’s indentured apprentice in Cork City, nineteen years old and sixty miles from his home village of Cappawhite, Tipperary. For twenty years electricity companies in Ireland had generated fragmented networks, some of them harnessing alternating current (AC) and others direct current (DC), according to location and the size and purpose of each grid. Pake’s training in Cork was DC-based, and of little value in the emerging AC networks in Australia.
86 | THE IRISH SCENE
Pake had other skills acquired through his family’s central position as shopkeepers in Cappawhite since 1877. Their shop at the heart of the village, today occupied by the Centra grocery and convenience store, consisted then of a general store, bakery on the side, tavern at the rear and the family’s residence upstairs. The parched and dusty goldfields town of Meekatharra takes its name from an Aboriginal word meaning place of little water, and it was here that Pake called up the skills of his youth to bake the bread that filled the bellies of local gold prospectors and the travellers passing through. Many had no money to pay for what they ate, but Pake fed them anyway. He had learnt that some skills were universal, and bread was as much a staple in this semi-desert country as among the lush, green hills of County Tipperary. ~ Christine Timoney
