Elizabeth (Lizzie) Byron

b. 1879 – d. 1972

Domestic Servant (1902–1908)

Author: Margaret Allen

In 1902 Elizabeth (Lizzie) Byron, aged twenty-three, came to work at Martindale Hall. She had already worked as a housemaid at Kulnine station near Mildura and on a property near Naracoorte. From 1904 she was a cook at Martindale Hall.

According to her family, ‘She stoked the huge open fireplace on the ground-floor kitchen … and scrubbed the back pots and pans which hung from chains over the coals. When guests arrived she set the long polished wood table in the dining room with fine china and silver cutlery.’1

While at Martindale Hall, Lizzie fell in love with Ted Scarfe, a local Mintaro man, who worked in the Martindale stables, grooming and feeding the horses. By 1907 the two became a couple and started a family and then, in 1908, left the district for some years.

Elizabeth Byron, (later Scarfe) aged twenty-six, c. 1905. Kirstin Blatchford and Karil Lowke, In Clover: Life in Mid North South Australia 1850–2019. Mary Garrett: Her Ancestors, Life and Descendants (pub. by author, 2020), 12. Reproduced by kind permission of Karil Lowke.
image of a kitchen and table
The large wood stove in the kitchen at Martindale Hall. Photo by Denise Noack, 2020.
stable with people at front
The stables at Martindale Hall, c. 1890. Reproduced courtesy of State Library of South Australia, Adelaide.

Footnotes

  1. Kirstin Blatchford and Karil Lowke, In Clover: Life in Mid North South Australia 1850-2019. Mary Garrett: Her Ancestors, Life and Descendants (pub. by author, 2020), 30. ↩︎