THE MINER'S COTTAGE - Also known as O'Kanes cottage.

The date of erection of the cottage is unknown, but the block on which it stands was excised from the original holdings in 1923, and conveyed to the daughter-in-law of Thadeus O'Kane. This gives the cottage a unique distinction, that of being the last physical link between Charters Towers and its greatest journalist.

Jeanie Elizabeth O'Kane was the widow of Thadeus O'Kanes only son John Gregory O'Kane, and thus the only survivor in Charters Towers of a family that was famous in the newspaper world of North Queensland.

In 1876 John Gregory O'Kane and his two sisters emigrated from Ireland to join their father in Charters Towers. John became a reporter on The Northern Miner. On 21st April 1881, John Gregory O'Kane, aged 24, married Jeanie Elizabeth O'Kane, a 21 year old school mistress born in Ballymoney Co. Antrim, the daughter of Dionysius O'Kane merchant and Rosetta nee Magee.

Apart from a short period when John Gregory became involved with Daisy Bates and a reporter from the Miner in a confused matter that ended with the suicide of the reporter and the exile of Daisy to Fanning Downs, the marriage appears to have been a happy one. Certainly, it lasted longer than Daisy's subsequent marriage to "Breaker" Morant. There were three children, Francis Morris (1882), John Gregory (1884) and Rosa.

When Thadeus died in 1890, the Miner passed to other hands. John became the editor of the Towers Herald, in 1898 he died, and after a short struggle to fill his editorial role, Jeanie gave it her best and returned to her original trade of teaching. Although the freehold of the building became hers in 1923, she had already inhabited it for some time. Certainly, she was there in 1918, for a witness recalls hearing the news of the death of her daughter Rosa O'Kane there. Sister Rosa O'Kane of the Australian Army Nursing Service died at Woodman's Point Quarantine Station, Freemantle W.A. on December 31 1918, an early victim of the great influenza epidemic that followed the end of World War 1. Rosa's brother Frank had been a corporal in the A.I.F., serving in France. Jeanie died in 1936, and the house passed to other hands.

DESCRIPTION OF THE BUILDING

Although we do not know when the house was built, it probably is about the turn of the century (1890-1900). Originally, the standard worker's cottage consisted of two rooms, roofed by a transverse corrugated iron gable, with a verandah front and rear. Kitchen, bathroom and lavatory were in seperate detached buildings, almost always at ground level, with earthern floors. The four-roomed house began to replace the two-roomed cottage in Charters Towers after the arrival of the railway in 1882. The building was raised several feet of the ground on round timber stumps, generally of local bush timber, with an iron plate on top of the stump to prevent termite penetration of the house structure. A pyramid roof topped the four-room core, and verndahs were added front and rear. The kitchen was usually attached to the rear verandah.

Materials used in the construction of the house were cheap, light and portable. Roofing was universally galvanised corrugated iron. Walls were made of light studs, 2"X4" (50X100mm) morticed into top and bottomplates and covered with chamferboard on the inside. The building technique was in fact a form of mass production, using masses of cheaply produced nails. North Queensland stud frame walls had several local peculiarities. They were lighter than in other places and were normally trussed by two braces let into the inner face of the studs against the chamferboards. The other local variation was the practice of having the frame as the outside wall, with the smooth chamferboard face serving as the  inner walls.

"The Miner's Cottage" exhibits all of these characteristics. The floor plan is completely standard, as are the the stud frame walls. The pressed metal ceilings are an additional luxury, for ceiling was not universally adopted. The ballustrades on the verandah are also standard, vertical  1" (25mm) dowelling set in rails. Even the small decorative trimmings (acroteria), sheet metal trimmed into ornamental fringes on window hoods and the roof ventilator, and the fretwork brackets on the verndah posts, are standard to this type of dwelling. The method of construction had one further advantage, it made the building comparitively demountable, when the goldfield failed, many Charters Towers houses were dismantled and exported to Ingham, Ayr and South Townsville.

The preceding short history was researched by the late Mr. D.Johnson after being commissioned by the current owners of the building. ( more detail of the  O'Kane family is available).