Mary Ellen Bruffell born in 1907 was the eldest of eight children born to Thomas Bruffell and Catherine Bolger. The family lived in the Kirkdale area of Liverpool where Thomas Bruffell was a boilermaker. Late in 1927 at the age of twenty Mary immigrated to Western Australia to meet up once again with and to marry Walter L Martin junior on the 22 October 1928. Mary had met Walter in Liverpool while working for Walter’s father. Walter had completed an apprenticeship in the electrical trade but seeking better prospects two years earlier in 1925, had himself immigrated to Western Australia. First requirements for a young man seeking to establish himself in a new country is to make money. To this end Walter equipped himself with a axe, tent and provisions and moved east of Perth some hundreds of miles into the hinterland where he set up as a clearing contractor. At this time the area was being opened up to what later were to become the wheat districts of Western Australia. There was good money to be made cutting and clearing the timber and scrub. Were it for no other reason than there sense of enterprise that one may be excused for thinking fortune would smile upon the two new arrivals, but it was not to be. Within four years of her setting foot on the harsh and sandy soil of Western Australia Mary died.

Walter had been unable to arrive at is wife’s bedside in time. It was March 1932 the great depression of the thirty’s was at its worst. Walter had been working “susso” on the road at Gillies Camp some hundreds of miles down south. The first he heard of the call for him was by bush telegraph. An announcement, which had been made by the hospital authorities over the radio, just happened to have been heard by the local butchers boy who passed it on. Walter dropped the shovel he had been working with and ran to the highway. Hitching a ride most of the way and completing the distance by train the fare given to him by the driver of the lorry, he eventually arrived at the hospital but he was too late. Too late and too numbed he was to know the full measure of his anguish when subsequently he was handed a letter, his own letter written to Mary and posted from Gillies Camp the day after she had died. As it happened she had left behind a two year old son, who for whatever reason was in the same hospital at the time of his mother’s death. The father gathered the infant into his arms and went out into the night. Weeks later the men at Gillies Camp “passed around the hat” to help pay for Mary’s burial.

Name	Surname	Status	Born	Died
John	Bruffell	Head	1799	1872
Elizabeth	Bruffell	Wife	1800	1885
Thomas	Bruffell	Son	1830	1879
John	Bruffell	Son	1834	1841
Amelia	Bruffell	Daughter	1838	1857
Elizabeth	Bruffell	Daughter	1815	Unknown
Mary.C	Bruffell	Daughter	Unknown	Unknown

John & Elizabeth Bruffell arrived in Australia about 1839 with their five children. John Bruffell was a publican and originally was the publican of The Heart In Hand in Brisbane. In 1854 the family moved to Sydney where John became publican of The Ship Inn in The Rocks area. Elizabeth there daughter married John Readharmore in 1840. There other daughter Mary married George M Colling in 1841. Thomas there eldest son never married.