Australian Dictionary of Biography

Pearlie Watling with her accordion, c.1983

National Library of Australia

Pearl Amelia Irene Watling (1905–1996), shale miner and musician, was born on 18 October 1905 at Waterloo, Sydney, daughter of Goulburn-born parents William Edward Collins, labourer, and his wife Mary Jane, née Hartley. According to family folklore, the name Collins had been adopted by her great-grandfather, George James, whose former convict status had so shamed his relatives in England that they paid him to change it. Pearlie believed that George, who had arrived in Goulburn with the early surveyors, was innocent of any serious crime and described the James family as rather ‘hoity-toity’ (Watling 1984). Thus began a long connection between the Collins family and the Goulburn region, including Boxers Creek, where George settled.

When Collins was eight, her mother died after a four-year battle with cancer. She and her younger brother Fred were separated, with Pearlie sent to live with her paternal grandparents. Her Protestant grandmother believed she possessed a wickedness inherited from her Catholic mother and would flog her with a whip. She was encouraged to play the violin by her grandfather, though he soon recognised her talent for the piano accordion. ‘I went on from tune to tune,’ she later remembered. ‘I didn’t have to learn them; I could just pick up the accordion and play’ (Watling 1984).

Collins attended school for one day when she was twelve. With limited opportunities for formal education, she would face difficulties finding employment throughout her life. She and her brother eventually joined their father at the Penrose pine forests, near Goulburn, where he worked clearing timber and chopping it into railway sleepers. The family of three lived in a tent and were frequently hungry, but she remembered her father as gentle and kind. ‘All we had as kids was dad to sing us a song or play his old accordion’ (Watling 1983). Christmases often passed unobserved, but one of her most cherished toys was a doll her father made out of a broomstick handle.

On 15 March 1924 Collins married Frank Watling, a labourer from Boxers Creek, at St Nicholas’s Church, Goulburn. They were to have three children, Alvin (1923), Olive (1924), and William (1927), although their daughter tragically died when she was three days old. The family lived in a one-room house and worked at Lockyersleigh, a large property near Marulan, where Frank worked as a stockman and Pearlie undertook various domestic jobs at the estate. They subsequently bought a 40-acre (16 ha) sheep property nearby, on the corner of the Hume Highway and Boxers Creek Road, where they struggled to make ends meet.

In July 1941 Watling’s husband enlisted in the Citizen Military Forces. Their eighteen-year-old son, Alvin, followed in November. On 11 November 1942 her husband was killed in action at Kokoda, Papua, while serving in the 2/1st Battalion. Her son’s health had deteriorated after his enlistment and in February 1943 he was hospitalised with colitis. Determined to save him from the same fate as his father, she travelled to Sydney and demanded that a new medical examination be undertaken; he was declared medically unfit and discharged on 5 March 1943.

Returning to her farm, Watling worked tirelessly with her younger son, collecting firewood from surrounding properties for the brickworks in Goulburn. In 1948 she was granted a mining lease and they subsequently used gelignite to extract up to thirty tons of shale per week from their property, which they then sold to Fowler’s Pottery Works at Marrickville, Sydney. This was dangerous and physically demanding work. In 1951 she purchased a house on Nicholson Street, Goulburn, and the following year she unsuccessfully petitioned the lessees to let her use one room so as to avoid routinely walking the six miles (9.6 km) from Boxers Creek to Goulburn, which aggravated a heart condition. Later in life, after she had moved to Record Street, Goulburn, around 1960, she worked as a cleaner for Waltons department store.

Watling came from a long line of folk musicians without formal training. They learned to play by ear, with her grandfather having learned songs from pub musicians while he waited outside the local inn to help his drunken father home. Building on her early aptitude for the piano accordion, she later taught herself on a small button accordion that her father gifted her as a wedding present. Her younger brother and his wife were also musicians, and she would join them and other members of the family to play at dances at Wingello, a small village east of Goulburn. Her Old Time Band played for many years at the Goulburn Railway Bowling Club. They also often played at the Goulburn Soldiers’ Club.

Fun and forthright, with a warm and easy laugh, Watling was a battler who refused to look upon her life as an ordeal. She was resourceful, hardworking, and kind, and was well known in her community, not only as a musician but also as someone people could turn to for help. Among her many feats, she was responsible for delivering babies in farmhouses and rescuing a two-year-old boy from drowning. She also played cricket for twenty-six years and was a talented tennis player. In the 1980s, at a time when musicologists and historians were increasingly interested in Australian folk culture, she was interviewed by folklorists, including John Meredith. She would later suffer from dementia, and in the 1990s she had a stroke that left her partly paralysed. Predeceased by her sons, she died on 14 January 1996 at Mirambeena Nursing Home, Goulburn, and was buried in Goulburn general cemetery with her daughter.