Independently Owned, Locally Grown, Community Loved
Swedish immigrant and small farmer’s wife Gussie Feldt recounted the day in 1892 that a well-known vagrant woman, Annie Bags, passing through Halifax knocked on August Anderssen’s door. On that fateful day Eva, August’s wife, had just set up a dainty afternoon tea in the parlour for Flora Shaw, renowned British journalist, author, and staunch imperialist who was in the district to see for herself the state of the sugar industry as it prepared to transition from indentured Melanesian labour to free white labour. Her findings were published in The Times in 1893.
Before Flora arrived, there was a knock on the door. It was Annie Bags. Eva, all a fluster at Annie arriving at such an unsuitable time, told her to “Come back tomorrow, I am expecting a great person here and she might come at any moment.”
When Flora arrived, she was welcomed into the Anderssen’s parlour. However, just as August began his prepared speech detailing the grievances of small farmers in the tropical north far away from the seat of Government in Brisbane Flora started shifting uneasily. He tried to get her attention again, but then she jumped up and flew out the door. August was incensed, taking her hasty departure as a personal affront.
However, as it turned out she was covered in ground fleas that she had picked up from her visit around the farm to see the living and working conditions of the indentured labourers. After she had bathed and got into clean clothes, August saw the funny side of the situation, but he and Eva were disappointed Flora never got to hear his speech.
When Annie turned up the next day hoping for half a crown for fortune telling or for her tins and bottles to be filled with milk for her cats, August told her to “Get away!” Annie replied, “Ah well, of course I am not Flora Shaw” and at that August burst into laughter.
Who was Annie Bags? As the story goes her actual surname was Ferdinand and that she was a well-educated Prussian aristocrat (she claimed to be a Hungarian countess) who travelled to Australia in the late 1880s in pursuit of a red-headed Englishman she had met in Europe whom she believed intended to marry her.
Understanding that he may have ventured to the goldfields she searched the fields from Victoria to Queensland, finally locating him in Ravenswood and married to another woman. Broken-hearted and who knows what her financial situation was, she became a vagrant. Travelling on foot, dressed in clothes made of calico grain bags and carrying her belongings in sugar bags, and accompanied by a menagerie of animals, she traversed north Queensland.
On 17 April 2019, 109 years after Annie Bags’ death and burial in Townsville’s Belgian Gardens Cemetery at the age of 59, a headstone was finally erected on her unmarked grave. This came about through the crowd funding efforts of Rod Jones of Raven Tours.
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