The Story of The Farrell Family and Bridge Street

An Address With A Story

For the Farrell family, Bridge Street in Charters Towers, Queensland, was not simply an address recorded on certificates and electoral rolls. It was home — the family place that gathered Michael Farrell, his wife Susan Farrell née Muldowney, and their children together across the years, and then, little by little, watched that family circle grow smaller.

Bridge Street in Context

In the late 1890s, Bridge Street was more than just a line on a town map. Running beside Lissner Park, one of Charters Towers’ earliest and most important public reserves, it placed the Farrell family close to concerts, public meetings, commemorations, and the everyday rhythm of town life.

By the early twentieth century, this part of Charters Towers had already been shaped by substantial municipal works — kerbing, drains, and footbridges — while the park itself gave the street a distinctive civic character. 

“Bandstand in Lissner Park, Charters Towers, ca. 1905.”
Source: John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland,
via Wikimedia Commons (public domain in Australia).

With its band rotunda, fountain, memorials, and public gatherings, Lissner Park made the Bridge Street neighbourhood feel like far more than a merely residential pocket of town. It was part of the social heart of Charters Towers.

For a family living there, home stood beside a place of music, ceremony, community, and the ordinary bustle of a settled mining town.

The Farrell Family Home 

Michael Farrell and Susan Farrell nee Muldowney,
Photo taken c.1900

My maternal 2x great-grandparents, Irish-born Michael Farrell and Susan Muldowney, made the establishment of a permanent family home a priority after emigrating from England with their English-born children in 1887. Back in England, family life had been marked by constant movement around County Durham, in and out of overcrowded, unhygienic, bleak colliery housing.  To create a settled home of their own in Queensland must have meant something profound.

Sometime in the late 1890s, within ten years of emigration, they settled into their own house on Bridge Street, and from that point on it became the centre of Farrell family life in Charters Towers. Sadly, I believe there are no surviving records that show exactly where on Bridge Street the house stood, and it is highly unlikely that the home still exists. Even so, the address remains deeply woven into the family story.

It was where the younger siblings grew up and came of age, where working lives began, where departures were marked, and where family ties continued to hold, even as the household itself changed.

The two older daughters, who had emigrated to Australia before their parents, had already begun lives of their own by the time Michael and Susan established the Bridge Street family home. The second-eldest daughter, Helen Ann, had married in mid-1890. Margaret, the eldest daughter — my great-grandmother — married in 1892. Yet marriage did not entirely sever their connection to the family home.

One of the details I find especially touching is that when Margaret was heavily pregnant with her second child, my grandmother Sarah, she chose to travel to her parents’ house on Bridge Street. There she gave birth with her mother Susan acting as midwife. It is such a small detail in one sense, but it says so much. The family home became a place of care and refuge — somewhere to return to when life called for closeness.

A House That Slowly Grew Quieter

Once Michael and Susan had settled into the Bridge Street home, changes came early. Elizabeth, the third-eldest daughter, moved out upon her marriage in 1897. Son Patrick left home around that same time, when he began working as a miner. James seems to have gone not long after, around 1900, as his own working life took him to various places across Queensland. Michael left upon his marriage in 1901.

In the way of so many large families, the house that had once held parents and children together under one roof slowly began to empty as adulthood carried each one outward.

By the early years of the twentieth century, the electoral rolls offer a small but revealing glimpse of how the household had changed.

The records for 1903, 1905, 1908, 1909 and 1913 list only father Michael, mother Susan, along with their eldest son Thomas, as living at the Bridge Street family home.  The once-busy household of parents and children had grown considerably quieter.  

Then, in the rolls for 1915 and 1916, another familiar name appears again - the youngest son Matthew, who had returned after time away looking for work to live once more in the old family home.  In mid-1916 Matthew then headed off to war, leaving Australia until he was repatriated and medically discharged in 1918.  After his return, he moved back into the family home.

The Place They Returned To

Throughout the 1900s, however, Bridge Street remained the entire family’s anchor point. It was still the place the family returned to for weddings, celebrations, funerals, and those important moments that gathered scattered relatives back together again. 

The small social notices in the local paper make that visible in such a human way. 

In 1912, married daughter Elizabeth — Mrs Frank Shaw — was noted as having spent a few days as the guest of her mother at Bridge Street before leaving for Sydney. 

In 1913, Matthew Farrell, then of Torrens Creek, was mentioned as staying with his mother there. These are only brief newspaper items, but they say something very real: even after sons and daughters had moved into lives of their own, Bridge Street was still the place that meant home.

A House of Grief as Well as Gathering

The funeral notices connected with the house on Bridge Street are especially moving.

In February 1905, the funeral of little Edward McCane — the eight-year-old grandson of Michael and Susan Farrell, and son of Owen McCane and Margaret Farrell — was announced as leaving from “Mr. M. Farrell, senr., residence, Bridge-street” to proceed to the Charters Towers Cemetery. That one notice alone makes clear that the family home was not only a private domestic space, but also the place from which grief was gathered and shared among the wider family circle.

Over the years, other funerals also left from the Bridge Street home to proceed to the local cemetery. 

When the patriarch of the family, Michael Farrell, died in 1917 aged 83, the newspaper noted that the funeral cortege left his wife’s residence in Bridge Street. His obituary adds still more texture to the family story, describing him as an old resident of the field, born in Ireland, aged eighty-one, and a man who had spent many years employed at the Waterworks (also known as the Charters Towers Pumping Station). It also captures the sadness of wartime in the Farrell family, recording that one son, Patrick Joseph Farrell, had been killed in action, while another, Matthew James Farrell, was then serving at the front.  (James, the other son who had also seen active service in France, was actually still overseas at the time - recovering in a hospital in England).

The matriarch, Susan Farrell, née Muldowney, was farewelled from her late residence in Bridge Street in 1919.  She had passed away at the age of 77.

Son Matthew Farrell’s funeral left from his late residence there in 1922 after his death at the youthful age of 35. 

Then, in 1923, the funeral of Hannah Margaret Farrell, née Hynes — wife of son Michael Farrell junior — departed from the residence of her brother-in-law Thomas Farrell in Bridge Street.  Hannah (sometimes known as Margaret) passed away at the age of just 42.

Taken together, these notices give the address a deep emotional weight. This was not only the house where children were raised, where married daughters returned, and where sons came and went between work and war. It was also the house from which the family carried their dead out into the town for the last time.

War, Loss, and the End of the Household

That wartime thread runs quietly but powerfully through the story of the Farrell children. Patrick left for war in 1916 and never came home again. James also served overseas during the First World War, as did Matthew, the youngest son, who otherwise remained most closely tied to the family home until his death in 1922.

Thomas, the eldest son, stayed at Bridge Street longer than any of the others, remaining there until about 1925, when serious illness led him to move to the home of his sister Margaret. By then, the old household that Michael and Susan had once presided over must have felt vastly different from the busy family home of earlier years.

That is the part of this story that lingers with me most. Bridge Street was not only a place where the Farrell family lived. It was the place that held them across a generation — through migration, marriages, childbirth, working life, war, grief, homecomings, and gradual parting. Over time, as family members died, married, moved away, the number living there dwindled until only one remained.

That slow thinning of a once-full household feels like such a familiar pattern in family history. A house that once knew the noise and movement of many lives becomes quieter, room by room, until it stands as a witness to all that has passed through it.

For me, that is what makes Bridge Street so meaningful in the Farrell story. It was more than a location in Charters Towers. It was one of those rare family places that held people together for a time, and then quietly let them go.

An imagined view of the kind of timber Queensland house the Farrell family may have known on Bridge Street, Charters Towers, in the 1890s to early 1900s.  Sadly no photo of the original family home survives, and no surviving records show exactly where on Bridge Street it once stood.