Rumbelow Arrival

The family arrived at Port Adelaide on October 9th 1854.  They stayed at Port Adelaide for a short period before they trekked by bullock dray along the coast to the whaling settlement of Encounter Bay. The trip took a fortnight in the heat of summer and was not without danger and hardship from the local aborigines and the rough bush track. It must have been very arduous for Malen's wife Alice who was heavily pregnant at the time. Very soon after arriving, their eldest girl Alice married Cain Jelliff, a seaman from the Pestonjee Bomanjee, at the Tabernacle Chapel at Encounter Bay on 24th January 1855.

The first few years were marked with sadness, due to the deaths of three of the children, an infant girl, the baby boy and eldest son in his early 20s.

Carrie Rumbelow, who was considered to be the daintiest of the Rumbelow girls, the one who could sew a fine seam, is believed to have been the model for Petrel, the heroine in the Paving the Way, a novel about the early days of the colony by the Reverend Ridgway Newsland’s son, Simpson Newland.

Whilst Malen 2nd found initial work at the whaling station, it was Cain Jellif who taught him boating and fishing skills. The two started up a fishing partnership in about 1863, when Malen was 16.

The fishing was often glut or famine, with every boat making a good catch at the same time. Prices would then plummet and still there would be more fish than could be sold or smoked and so, with no ice or other means of keeping the fish fresh, the surplus would be buried. Fish were thought to be good compost for the soil.

The Rumbelows would smoke fish that couldn't be sold or used immediately. They took it to Adelaide by horse and trolley, changing horses at Willunga. Alice, who had no children, played an important part in the fishing enterprise, hawking the fish, and later some rock lobsters, around Port Victor and the houses around the shores of Encounter Bay.

Both Cain and Malen (2nd) appeared as fishermen of Encounter Bay in the South Australia Directory of 1875-77. Malen Rumbelow senior does not appear to have been involved with the fishing, his occupation in 1875-82 being listed as a farmer.

For some years, Malen (2nd) and his wife Mary lived in a cottage near the Fountain Inn at Yilki and raised their family there. Malen and Cain Jelliff continued fishing around Encounter Bay to the Murray Mouth and as far away as Kangaroo Island, in the Ferret and the Rambler.

Following the drowning of Cain near the Murray Mouth in 1878, Malen 2nd formed a business of Rumbelow and Sons. All eight of his children helped prepare and smoke the fish in the family fish shed on the shore. The girls Alice, Jane, Ada and Grace would scale the fish and the brothers would gut and fillet the mullet in preparation for smoking.

Godfrey, who was also always badly seasick, got the task of taking the smoked fish to market in Adelaide by horse and trolley, changing horses at Willunga. He also hawked the fish locally in place of his Aunt Alice.

A substantial house, Yeltanna, was built in the 1880s next door to Crystal Palace, as the cottage where the grandfather and grandmother Rumbelow lived was known. 

Across the way from the fish shed was Batchelors Hall, where the crews of the cutters lived. 

By 1883 a house is recorded as existing with Malen Rumbelow as the owner/occupier at a rateable value of £7. The family were involved in the whaling and fishing industry for over forty years. As the family expanded and lived close to each other, their group of homes became known locally as 'Rumbelow Town'. In 1918 Rumbelow Town consisted of six or seven homes.

The Fisheries Act was introduced in 1878, which regulated the size of nets and other means of catching marine scale and freshwater fish. This began the gradual introduction of controls and management. The Act exempted Aboriginal peoples from taking fish for their own use.

In the early 1880s George Watson, a fisherman at Victor Harbor, introduced the use of cane rock lobster pots to the area. He set his pots from the Ferret, which was later owned by Walter Rumbelow.

Malen 2nd and his sons, Henry, Cain and Malen 3rd, owned four or five big cutters at a time, including the Rambler, Stranger, Ferret, Brigand, and the Ivy, along with the 28 ft Spray. When the cutters went out they would be away for 7-10 days, looking for whitting and snapper. The family also netted mullet, salmon and snook in Encounter Bay and used flat bottomed dinghies to catch mullet in in the Coorong.

After the Adelaide to Victor railway service was inaugurated in 1884, they sent fresh fish and some rock lobster by rail to the various auctioneers and shops. Once the Edwin Daws Adelaide Fish Market commenced operations this brought an assured market and regularly sent their catch there by rail. 

Guaranteed buyers and the means of getting the catch to market in wholesome condition, basic requirements for a viable industry, were aided by the coming of steamers and railways, plus the building of ice works and the advent of refrigeration. Through all these events twists the saga of the Adelaide Fish Market, a virtual monopoly from 1887 until 1954, when the fledgling South Australian Fishermen’s Co-operative Limited acquired the premises. After 1979 SAFCOL, as it was generally known, was gradually transformed from a fishers' cooperative, to an internationally owned company. 

Sources:

For They Were Fishers The History of the Fishing Industry in South Australia

Evelyn Wallace Carter

Amphitrite Publishing House, 1987

Victor Harbor School Band

Victor Harbor Primary School Band in the 1890s; a group of boys wearing military style uniform with slouch hats, some with fifes and drums. approx. 1896

The Rumbelows of Encounter Bay

Acknowledgement: Archives, State Library of South Australia.

One of Malen's grandchildren was Grace, later Mrs. G.E. Buck, and fresh in her mind, as she sat in her old-fashioned rocking chair, was the occasion of her eighty-third birthday on 7th January, 1958, when she unveiled a family memorial stone in the old Tabernacle cemetery at Encounter Bay.

The stone is in memory of Anne, Godfrey and David Rumbelow, three of the children who arrived with their parents on the 'Pestonjee Bomanjee.'

Of the other children one was Malen junior, who became Mrs. Buck's father. As each of his children came along it was known as ween (spelling uncertain), and whether this was to denote the 'wecfniest' child of the brood at the time or whether it meant another child to be weaned, Mrs. Buck did not know. Jt may even be an old Suffolk word, perhaps a shortened form of weanel or weanling.

Grace Buck (died in June 1973) was destined to be the last surviving member of the eight children in her family, four boys and four girls, who spent their early years in Rumbelow Town.

The Rumbelows, along with Nicolas Baudin, Matthew Flinders and the wild and woolly whalers, made the history of Encounter Bay; while her father's sister, Carrie became the heroine in Simpson Newland's book, Paving the Way.

In 1954 the family commemorated the centenary of its arrival by holding a service in front of the old home where Grace Rumbelow was born. Her father was a lad of eight when the family landed at Port Adelaide whence they began their trek around the coast by bullock dray. 

Yeltanna was built by Malen junior from stone obtained from West Island near the Bluff - an island which Simpson Newland describes as 'only a few acres in extent and principally composed of granite boulders.'

The men who supplied the stone would be rowed across to the island every Monday by the contractor, Mr. Oliver, who would collect the men on the following Saturday morning. In the meantime they lived in shacks and tents while cutting granite; the chips as they were called, became part of the Rumbelow home, while the superior, cut granite from this same island became part of Parliament House, Adelaide.

Alongside Yeltanna was Whaler's Haven, home of Grandfather and Grandmother Rumbelow, a place once described by a certain Captain Parkes as the Crystal Palace, a name that stuck. Whenever the Captain stayed at Encounter Bay, young Grace would gather his favourite delicacies, sea snails or warriners while he, when he returned to town, would send her his 'warriners' in the form of peaches. Delicacy indeed!

'However, there were other less delicate ex changes when Mrs. Buck's son 'Steven (who took up the story now and then) this was done by walking into the whale's interior through its propped-up mouth. Happily, Steven's grandfather did not suffer the fate of Jonah.

But it was fishing rather than whaling that occupied the lives of the Rumbelows. Each of Grace Buck's four brothers (Henry, Malen, Godfrey and Cain) had their appointed tasks. Godfrey was not really cut out for the fisherman's life for he was always sea-sick, oftentimes to the point of bringing up blood. So his job was to take the fish to market and send consignments to Ballarat.

Other less inviting jobs were carried out in the Fish Shop (known as Bachelors' Hall) and in the Fish Shed. Here young Grace used to help scale the mullet ('any of us could do that') while Henry would 'cut' and Malen would 'gut'. Since there was no ice or refrigeration in those days, the only way of keeping fish was to smoke it. That meant first of all filling kerosene tins with water and then putting in enough salt until a fresh egg would float in it. There was then enough brine to cure the fish.

After that part of the process the fish would be spread out on benches to drain for a certain time, then sliced down the back right through from the tail to the head and lastly threaded on wire through the eyes. Once this grisly procedure was over the fish were hung up in the three smokerooms in which the smell of burnt sawdust filled the air.
Most important, of course, were the fishing boats, the Rambler, the Spray and the Ferret; the old original Ferret went down on the day of the relief of Mafeking. Two historic moments to be sure! And such a day it was, said Mrs. Buck. She remembered looking from the front door which was half glass and directly in line with Wright Island; there she saw for the first and only time a great fan of spray flung up behind it. By contrast, the night before had been so calm that the men had had to row the sailing boat into her moorings, little thinking that on the next day they would carry her bow and stern ashore to the old fish shed, there to rebuild her. Such is the fisherman's life. 

Mrs. Buck looked back on the days when her father used to take the fishing cutter, the Rambler, to Kingscote on Kangaroo Island with the ballot boxes for the elections (political fishermen, then as now, always angling for a catch.)
It was also the beginning of some romantic fishing too, as it turned out, with Grace as the unwitting (though not unwilling) bait. It was through her father's association with the Buck family during his visits to the Island, that Grace met her future husband, Dave Buck. The Bucks were a pioneering family who had arrived on the Island in 1837 on the Duke of York and settled at North Cape.

On the day that Grace and Dave were married, floodwaters washed around the church as the bride pulled up in a little hooded trap. So it was not on the arm of her father, but in his arms, that the bride entered the church, later to be carried out in the arms of her husband.

Close to the Rumbelow home was the Fountain Inn, built in 1837. It still stands along the sea- front, although its solid outside staircase that led to the attic has long since rotted away. The first proprietor was a man named Robinson, host to the 'rude, bold, often lawless men who hunted the monster of the deep', as Simpson Newland describes the whalers. It is now called Yelki or Yilki (meaning farm by the sea) , a name derived from the portion of land there that was surveyed even earlier than Adelaide. The little post office on the sea-front, also Yilki, was demolished in 1976.

One of the many visitors to the Fountain Inn, was the Rev'd Dr. Jefferis, of the Brougham Congregational church, North Adelaide, who used to conduct services in the dining room. Here also, after a match on the Cricket Paddock, the losing side would 'shout' tea to the winners.

After Dr. Jefferis died, his widow promised to donate the land if residents could build a church within twelve months. And so they did with the help of Mrs. Buck's mother who provided the stone.

Some of you have probably seen the little limestone church off the main road at the back of Yilki. You may also have wandered in the cemetery of the old Tabernacle church, a stone's throw further back, to linger over the names recorded there. Perhaps among the mauve scabious and dry grass of summer, you have seen the names of two children engraved on a copper tablet: Samuel Grosvenor Hargreaves 6 years and John Herbert Barratt 2 years, grandsons of Edward Grosvenor.
'Poor dears', you may say, turning to look at another name of an old pioneering family - Jagger. One of the Jaegers tombstones, according to Mrs. Buck, was broken off by a passing motorist one stormy night during a flood to help carry him to safety.
The old Jagger farm house still stands on a rise above Encounter Bay, near the Bluff: it was built by Matthew Jagger who came out on the Lord Hobart in 1839. One of his fellow passengers was Ridgway Newland, the first Congregational pastor of the South Coast, whose Tabernacle church was erected in 1846.

Around this little church grew up a community in which family associations have lasted for more than a century. 'Everyone knew everyone else', said Mrs. Buck 'even in Victor Harbour, right up to the 1940s.' To those who shared some of those years, the day of the memorial unveiling in 1968 must have been alive with the spirit of the past, especially to Mrs. Buck and the then ninety seven-year-old Mrs. Godfrey Rumbelow.

Even the birthday posy given to Mrs. Buck was a link with the past as the flowers came from the garden of Whaler's Haven. This old home of her grandparents is now a museum which was established by Mr. and Mrs. R.P. Tilbrook. The home was moved piece by piece from its original site to one nearer the Bluff and although white ants had eaten part of it, some of the layered or laced weatherboard was sent to Adelaide to be replaned. Likewise new shingles from Tasmania were cut by an old-time shingle splitter. Today one may see inside the museum some of the original Rumbelow furniture, relics of the whaling days and of the local Aboriginal tribe.

Many tales of the sea could the Rumbelow family tell, though none, I suppose, of more far reaching consequence than the tale of 112 days recorded day by day in the diary of Malen Rumbelow, pioneer.