November 17, 2022
One of Nanango’s best-known senior citizens died recently at the age of 85.
Lorna Graham, affectionately known as the “Matriarch Of Glenmore”, died peacefully on September 17.
But as guests were told at Lorna’s Requiem Mass on September 26, her story really began 140 years ago when stagecoach driver Robert Sexton set up a passenger and mail service between Kilkivan and Nanango.
Robert regularly stopped at a picturesque spot known as Glenmore not far from Broadwater Lagoon to change his horses, and in 1878 he purchased this property.
It remains in the family today, six generations later.
Lorna was born at the Glenmore homestead in 1936 to parents William (Bill) and Mary (Minnie) Lee, and lived there for most of her life.
As a little girl she observed the changing seasons and the blessings and heartbreaks of life on the land, learning to ride horses, faithfully completing her farm chores and developing a lifelong affinity for cattle.
Robert Sexton had registered Glenmore as a stud property with the brand XXO (in use until recently).
Seventy years later, the young Lorna helped her parents Bill and Minnie manage the station’s pedigree Herefords.
Lorna left Glenmore briefly as an 11-year-old to complete her schooling, moving to Nanango to live with her paternal grandmother so she could attend St Patrick’s school.
After this, she went to boarding school at Stuartholme College in Brisbane where she made many life-long friends.
But as soon as her schooling was completed, Lorna settled back into life at Glenmore with her parents, happily resuming the yearly cattle routine of breeding, calving and bull sales.
She kept meticulous records and also led prize cattle in parades at local shows, at the Brisbane Exhibition and as far afield as Roma (where Glenmore won champion or reserve bull for nine years in a row).
During these years Lorna also established connections with other stud livestock breeders – such as the Schafferius and Bishop families – and forged more friendships that lasted all her life.
In the 1950s, Lorna’s social outings were limited to show circuit social gatherings and country dances.
But at a bush dance in Booubyjan towards the end of that decade, Lorna met her future husband Len, a lucerne farmer from Goomeri.
The couple was married in 1960 and Len quickly adapted to life on a stud beef cattle property, guided by Bill and Minnie and assisted by faithful helpers Harry and Eileen Lawton.
In turn, many beautiful lucerne crops were grown on the Barker Creek Flats to feed the stud cattle.
Four children arrived over the next eight years, with Lorna’s youngest son Ian following nine years later.
Lorna was remembered by a family friend as “a stylish, regal lady who loved looking well-dressed at every function. Every task she took on was carried out with precision and terrific organisational skills”.
In 2018, Lorna was invited to speak to reporters about what Lady Bjelke-Petersen meant to her at Lady Flo’s State funeral in Kingaroy, and her comments were beamed all over Eastern Australia on the evening news.
Her son Peter also recalled that apart from Glenmore, Ringsfield House was another special place for Lorna.
“Four of her five children were born there when it was a maternity hospital, and she appreciated its beauty and its importance in Nanango’s heritage,” he said.
“She came along, dressed with impeccable elegance as she always did, sometimes with a hat, sometimes without.
“After all, she was the caretaker of the hat which her great grandmother Johanna Sexton wore on her wedding day in 1872, which as been preserved at Glenmore for 150 years.”
Lorna has been interred at Nanango Cemetery.
[Footnote: This is an edited version of a eulogy prepared by Nanango historian Elizabeth Caffery at the request of Lorna’s family]
