Katie MillerKatie and Callie
Katie Miller, my great-aunt and sister to Emily Augusta Begbie and Charys Begbie, my aunt, were characters who could have been invented by Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams. Both were one-time missionaries in an Africa that has disappeared forever.
Katie's whitewashed mud house in Berega
Katie's diaries are now in the Mitchell Library, SydneyKatie, born in Sydney in 1879, sailed for East Africa under the auspices of the English Church Missionary Society in 1905. She worked in Tanganyika, then a part of German East Africa, until the advent of World War I, when she and her fellow missionaries were interned. During the time in confinement (in Tabora) she and the others surreptitiously collected bits of coloured fabric, to make a flag.
"Rev David Deekes found a piece of white calico in the bottom of his trunk. Mrs Doulton... contributed a small red turkey-twill table cover, while Miss Elizabeth Forsyth discovered an African child's blue overall. While others kept guard, the Archdeacon measured out with careful precision the lines of the flag, after which, still in guarded secrecy, the ladies of the party sewed together, with tiny stitches, the thirty two small pieces of material. The Union Jack was ready! Carefully it was hidden away from their German captors until on 19th September 1916, the Belgian army marched into the district and the prisoners were free. The missionaries' first act that morning, when they awakened to find their captors had fled during the night, was to fly their flag..."
Katie and fellow missionaries display their Union Jack, now preserved in SydneyKatie was to remain in Tanganyika, mostly at Berega (which I visited years later, to peek inside her whitewashed mud hut) until the 1940s, when she reluctantly returned to retirement. She was a memorable character - tiny, chirpy and bossy, recalling incidents (the cobra curled up in her slippers beside her bed), writing to her "boys" in Swahili, dreaming of her beloved Africa, until death took her gently away.
Charys Begbie, Nairobi, June 7th, 1929Charys, or Callie as she was called, was born in Sydney in 1898. I remember her as reed slim, with large dark eyes and a strong nose, a quiet, somewhat hesitant manner and a passion for working out the exact date of the Second Coming. She went to Africa, too, but in the 1920s, and not to the hinterland like Katie but to a children's hospital in Nairobi. This slender, fragile spinster rode around Nairobi's dusty streets on a powerful Harley Davidson and her efforts, though this was the last thing she wanted, were rewarded in true Colonial style - with an MBE, presented to her by the visiting Prince of Wales, just a year or two before he met Wallis Simpson.
Poor health brought Charys back to Australia, but not before an incident which she was to speak of with awe for the rest of her life. One evening, in Nairobi, after her hospital rounds, she'd retired for the night. She lived alone. Halfway through the night, she awoke to find an intruder in the house, an aggressive native armed with a panga. Friends, passing by, heard a commotion, and the intruder was held fast. But he didn't resist, in fact was quite quiet. When asked later why he hadn't attempted to harm Callie, which had been his intention, he said, "I didn't because of the man standing beside her..."
