her death in 1887 I wrote a quatrain for her memorial, and
which those who knew her considered appropriate--

HELEN BRODIE SPENCE
Born at Whittingham, Scotland, 1791.
Died at College Town, Adelaide, South Australia, 1887.

Half a long life 'mid Scotland's heaths and pines,
And half among our South Australian vines;
Though loving reverence bound her to the past,
Eager for truth and progress to the last.

Although my mother had the greatest love for Sir Walter Scott, and the
highest appreciation of his poems and novels, she never liked Melrose.
She liked Australia better after a while. Indeed, when we arrived in
November, 1839, to a country so hot, so dry, so new, we felt like the
good old founder of The Adelaide Register, Robert Thomas, when he came
to the land described in his own paper as "flowing with milk and
honey." Dropped anchor at Holdfast Bay. "When I saw the place at which
we were to land I felt inclined to go and cut my throat." When we sat
down on a log in Light square, waiting till my father brought the key
of the wooden house In Gilles street, in spite of the dignity of my 14
years just attained, I had a good cry. There had been such a drought
that they had a dearth, almost a famine. People like ourselves with 80
acre land orders were frightened to attempt cultivation in an unknown
climate, with seed wheat at 25/ a bushel or more, and stuck to the
town. We lived a month in Gilles street, then we bought a large
marquee, and pitched it on Brownhill Creek, above where Mitcham now
stands, bought 15 cows and a pony and cart, and sold the milk in town
at 1/ a quart. But how little milk the cows gave in those days! After
seven months' encamping, in which the family lived chiefly on rice--the
only cheap food, of which we bought a ton--we came with our herd to
West terrace, Adelaide. My father got the position of Town Clerk at 150
pounds a year twelve months after our arrival, and kept it till the
municipal corporation was ended, as the City of Adelaide was too poor
to maintain the machinery; but 75 pounds was the rent of the house and
yards. We sold the cows, and my brothers went farming, and we took
cheaper quarters in Halifax street.

The Town Clerkship, however, was the means of giving me a lesson in
electoral methods. Into the Municipal Bill, drawn up under the
superintendence of Rowland Hill (afterward the great post office
reformer, but then the Secretary of the Colonization