Frank (Francis) Kent

b. 1865 – d. 1944

MORTLOCK COFFIN BAY STATION WORKER (1880s–1944)

Author Denise Noack

Frank Kent was a long-time employee of the Mortlocks working for all three generations of the dynasty from the early 1880s. Frank, the fourth child of Edward and Margaret Kent, was born on the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, on 19 December 1865.

Lines of history run deep. Frank’s father, Edward, had been an overseer on Price Maurice’s Bramfield property on the Eyre Peninsula in the early 1840s. In these early years, Edward was also in partnership with Thomas Horne on Kappawanta station, a sheep station near Elliston on Eyre Peninsula. After it was suspected that Aboriginal people had stolen stores from Kappawanta on 27 May 1849, Europeans pursued the Aboriginal people to the cliffs, and some were shot, some killed and some arrested. This event is known as the Elliston or Waterloo Bay massacre, although the extent of the Aboriginal deaths is contested, with reports of fatalities ranging from 2 to 250.1

three people and a stingray
A stingray considered newsworthy because of its large size (5’3″ x 7’3″) was caught at Coffin Bay by Frank Kent in March 1932. Port Lincoln Times, 11 March 1932, 3. Reproduced courtesy of State Library of South Australia, Adelaide.

Edward Kent dissolved his partnership with Horne in October 1862 and then became a registered publican for the Sir John Barleycorn Inn on Rundle Street, Adelaide city, from 1862 to 1863.2 Later, the family returned to Eyre Peninsula and Frank was born at Round Water Hole, northwest of Port Lincoln in 1865. Frank is reported to have planted the pine trees at Port Lincoln as a schoolboy.3 It is unclear when Edward died, but Margaret was ‘universally respected in the district’ and ran a fruit shop in Port Lincoln until 2 December 1894, when she tragically died in a fire.4

During much of his working life, Frank was based at the Mortlocks’ Coffin Bay station, where he was one of three permanent workers, eventually living in a cottage that Jack Mortlock built for him.5 As well as general station work, Frank is reported to have ridden W. T. Mortlock’s racehorses for fourteen years, having great success on ‘Opal’.6 In January 1928 Frank provided information about the Nauo to anthropologist Norman Tindale from the South Australian Museum, who was visiting relatives in Port Lincoln.7 Tindale considered this information ‘would be of use to them in their research work’. Frank remembers having seen ‘150 natives in one batch’.8 Aged seventy-six, Frank was still rowing his boss Jack Mortlock in a dinghy out to one of the Mortlock yachts in Coffin Bay.9

The Port Lincoln Times newspaper reported that Mr Kent had ‘worked for the Mortlock family for 60 years, which is probably a record for this part of Australia. Although the estate would pension him off, Mr Kent refuses to live a life of idleness, and he is in many ways still as active and as capable as a much younger man’.10

Later, Frank was given a ‘substantial present and a retiring allowance’ by Jack Mortlock shortly before he died in Adelaide on 12 June 1944.11

Footnotes

  1. Account of massacre of Wirangu people at Elliston. Allan Wilson, interview with Tim Burder, 14 June 2014, https://s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/kira-page/RTF_DD/OH/OH32/OH32_1.20.pdf; Robert Foster, Rick Hosking, and Amanda Nettelbeck, eds., Fatal Collisions: The South Australian Frontier and the Violence of Memory (Wakefield Press, 2001); William and Maureen Nosworthy, eds., Tjeringa: The Story of the Sheringa District (Sheringa History Committee, 1988). ↩︎
  2. Adelaide Observer, 29 November 1862, 8; South Australian Register, 22 October 1862, 1. ↩︎
  3. Advertiser, 20 June 1944, 6. ↩︎
  4. Evening Journal, 3 December 1894, 2. ↩︎
  5. Port Lincoln Times, 31 July 1985, 12. ↩︎
  6. Advertiser, 20 January 1936, 19. ↩︎
  7. Luise Hercus and Jane Simpson, ‘The Tragedy of Naou’, in Forty Years On: Ken Hale and Australian Languages, ed. Jane Simpson et al. (Pacific Linguistics, 2001), 263–90; Port Lincoln Times, 13 January 1928, 4. ↩︎
  8. Port Lincoln Times, 13 January 1928, 1. ↩︎
  9. Advertiser, 24 November 1942, 4. ↩︎
  10. Port Lincoln Times, 23 April 1942, 1. ↩︎
  11. Advertiser, 20 June 1944, 6. ↩︎