Martha Hustwick

Martha (known as Mattie, was born in 1860 was the eldest of five girls. She finished school at the age of thirteen and trained to be a teacher. In February 1886, at the age of twenty-six, she gave up her teaching post in England to travel to Australia with her ailing sister, Emily. Mattie and Emily arrived in Brisbane, Australia on the 7th May1886 on the Duke of Sutherland as Second Class passengers, and by November of that year they were living in Ipswich.

Mattie and Emily lived in Martin Street, Ipswich with Mattie being responsible for earning a wage, taking care of the house and caring for her younger sister. She was a teacher in Ipswich and in 1887, and at the age of twenty-seven she was appointed Head of the West Ipswich Girls School. Martha wrote to her cousin, Jane, in Gamsworth, a farm at Barden, near Bolton Abbey and Skipton in England). On one of these letters written in 1888, Martha gave her address as Burnett Street, which was a short walk to the West Ipswich Girls School.

In 1889, Mattie was transferred to Charters Towers where she met Rev. Matthew Henry Brassington (known as Harry), a Methodist Minister who transferred from Gympie to this town in 1891. She married Harry who was ten years younger than her in Townsville on Saturday, 13 May 1893.

Two months later, Mattie and Harry left Australia to return to England by which time she was pregnant, and Harry was suffering from TB, the same disease that took the life of Martha’s sister. The couple moved to Rushton to live with Harry’s sister Elizabeth, at Fir Tree Farm. Their only child, a daughter named Hilda May was born in February 1894 and sadly on the 10 March 1894 Matthew died at the age of twenty-five. Martha returned to Durham to be with her family.