Special Achievements

• Worked the land with husband.  Bertha and her husband, with their four children, departed Port Lincoln, South Australia, in 1933 and travelled overland to Alice Springs.  The journey was by a heavy waggon pulled by about 28 donkeys with a lighter van pulled by eight donkeys, and took about ten months.  They arrived at Henbury cattle station in Central Australia in 1935 with some of their family. When they finished work at Henbury retimbering a well and the homestead, they moved to Temple Downs to build a dam in 1937. Once the dam was completed they shifted to a water soakage named Yowa. Here Bertha and Abraham obtained a small grazing license of 320 kilometres around the area situated between boundaries of Tempe and Angus Downs and the property was named Andaloo. They had gathered stock in payment for some of the work they had done for different pastoralists. Before setting themselves up at Yowa the Andrews had lived in a cave at Reedy Hole in the George Gill Range for a while. Their daughter died in 1938 leaving two children 10 and 12 years old at Yowa. The Andrews abandoned Yowa camp and moved to Olunga on Andaloo. The Andaloo property was too small to develop and was poor grazing country; the Andrews abandoned it and moved to Curtain Springs about 1944. The family found and opened up another native well and built their first homestead this is where the present Wayside Inn is situated. Bertha's husband died in 1951, she moved into the ‘Old Timers Home’ run by the Australian Inland Mission. Bertha was of pioneering spirit she had the ability to give the roughest camp a homely atmosphere and to present bush cooked meals with the barest ingredients.