Patricia’s paternal grandfather is Hugh Reilly, who was born in County Cavan, Ireland, around 1833. Hugh Reilly’s initial voyage to Australia in 1856 was aboard the “General Hewitt”.
The “General Hewitt” is an interesting vessel. By the time she reached Portland in 1856 she had seen better days. On this particular voyage, one of many voyages she made to Australia, she left Plymouth on 5 July 1856 and arrived at Portland on 9 October 1856. The ship carried three hundred and sixty-six assisted immigrants, including Hugh Reilly. One hundred and five of the male immigrants were classified as agricultural laborers and sixty of the women were described as domestic servants. This accounted for around half the immigrants on the ship. The passengers were also classified according to their national origin. One hundred and fifty-six of the immigrants came from the south of England and one hundred and fifty-two came from the northern parts of Ireland. Fifty-eight came from Scotland.
It is notable that there were few immigrants aboard the ship from the southern parts of Ireland. County Cavan, where Hugh Reilly was from, is in Ulster, the historic northern province of Ireland. Today Cavan is in the Republic. When Hugh left there was no political border between North and South. Hugh emigrated well before the Irish border came into being. Ulster has nine counties, including Cavan. In the 1920s six of Ulster’s counties were incorporated into Northern Ireland whereas three, including Cavan, became part of the Republic of Ireland.
Local politics in Melbourne may have played a role in skewing the makeup of the Irish emigrants coming to Victoria in 1856. The assisted immigration program of the preceding two years had been criticized by Victoria’s Immigration Agent for including a disproportionate number of unmarried Irish women from the southern counties. The Immigration Agent in his 1855 report recommended that more immigrants should be selected from England and Scotland, preferably Protestants, rather than Catholics from southern Ireland. Men and women from Ulster may have been considered more acceptable than those from the three southern provinces of Ireland, which had large Catholic majorities.
Since the Plantations of the 1600s, Ulster had been settled with predominantly Protestant English and Scottish migrants and they comprised a majority of the population in some areas. Ulster Protestants came to Victoria in large numbers and were quite influential in society and were considered loyal to Britain and its project of imperial settlement. For some of the colonial elite, their perception of impoverished Irish Catholics from the south of Ireland was quite negative.
Some influential colonial politicians and public figures in Victoria considered Irish Catholics to be deficient in several ways, not least due to their religious ignorance, moral laxity, and poor education. There was a push in Melbourne to lobby the British government so that its immigration agents in Britian and Ireland would favor certain categories of emigrants for Victoria and curtail those of other categories. The hope was that this would see a better cohort of people arrive here. It was proposed to achieve this selective outcome by systematically limiting the numbers of assisted immigrants coming from the south of Ireland. An examination of the “Report of the Immigration Agent into Colonial Emigration and Immigration for the Year 1854” reveals a clearly stated preference to source proportionally more workers from England and Scotland rather than from southern Ireland.
Upon arrival, most of the assisted immigrants on the “General Hewitt” entered into a period of service for local employers. The inventory of the government immigrants who arrived on the “General Hewitt” records that Hugh Reilly was an Irish laborer twenty-one years of age. He was of the Catholic religion, and could read but not write. He was assigned to work as a farm laborer for a Mr. Clark, of Portland, for a period of three months.
The “General Hewitt” was a three-decked sailing ship launched at Calcutta in 1811. She was thus already an old ship when she made the voyage to Portland in 1856. The British East India Company had commissioned her specifically to use in their trade with China. The British opium trade involved British merchants associated with the Company sending opium produced in India to Chinese ports. Chinese silver and tea were exchanged for the opium. This created a massive trade imbalance and led to severe social and economic disruptions in China.
The China trade was essentially an illegal drug trafficking operation and the outcome for Chines society was a national crisis due to the massive rates of addiction and the economic disruption. It is estimated that 10% of the Chinese population was dependent on opium. The British East India Company illegally sent opium from India to China and the Royal Navy used its powerful fleet to protect this trade by force of arms. Due to superior military might, the British Crown was able to insist that China should sign a succession of “unequal treaties” that ensured China’s subservience to Britian in key sectors of the economy.
On her first voyage from England in 1813, the “General Hewitt” transported hundreds of convicts to Australia. The voyage had a high mortality rate, with thirty-four convicts dying en route. Governor Macquarie criticized the ship’s commander, stating that “proper attention had not been paid” to the convicts. Thereafter, the “General Hewitt” performed many voyages to China and India in the service of the East India Company. The Company sold her in 1830 and she then became a general merchantman. As a merchantman, the “General Hewitt” made numerous voyages to Australia carrying assisted immigrants.
By 1856, the ship was pretty much rotten in many places. This is clear from the legal depositions of several disaffected crew members subsequently charged with mutiny. The deterioration of the ship seems to have been a factor in the mutiny aboard the vessel when she neared Portland. The Police Court in Portland heard several cases arising from this mutiny. Two crew members were tried for assaulting the ship’s master, and many others were tried for refusing to work.
Additionally, members of the crew absconded from the ship while she was anchored at Portland, even though the vessel was well guarded while in the harbor. Those crew members who were caught absconding had to serve four months hard labor on the road gangs. Merchant seamen on British vessels were legally obliged to serve binding contracts of up to three years’ service. The contracts were heavily weighted in favour of the British merchants who ran the vessels, and the severe sanctions provided for in the contracts were enforced by the authorities.
Failure to not fulfill the provisions in the contracts was a criminal offence punishable by flogging or hard labour. Quite a few of the absconding sailors from the “General Hewitt” were not caught. Several headed north into the interior and ended up working on squatter runs along the Wannon River, some hiding out on remote stations for the rest of their lives. Other successful absconders made it to the goldfields where they disappeared into the anonymous mass of newly arrived immigrants.
It was advertised in the Portland newspaper that single females from the “General Hewitt” were available to hire as domestic workers for twelve months service for between £15 to £26, in other words generally for less than two pounds per month. Married couples from the ship could be employed at a rate of £40 to £45 for a year of service. These rates compared favorably with those available in Britian for similar work, and Australian wage rates were one factor that pulled migrants to the colonies, particularly from the more economically depressed parts of Britain and Ireland.
It is unclear when High Reilly initially traveled from Portland to the Koroit district, although he likely made his way overland in a serious of stages. His obituary (written many years later) mentions that after his stint in Portland he worked for a while in the Hamilton district as a surveyor’s assistant. Following this employment, Hugh came to the Koroit district and initially worked for a Mr. Thomson of Koroit. This would have been George Thomson, a Scottish free settler from Aberdeenshire who arrived in Port Fairy in 1840. Given that George Thomson died in 1860, Hugh Reilly would have arrived in the Koroit district sometime prior to 1860.
George Thomson was an important early proprietor in Koroit. In the early 1850s, he purchased farmland which would later become part of the Koroit township following the government’s survey of 1857. Thomson’s farmland bordered the intersection of Commercial Road and High Street, the two main streets of Koroit. It was on this land that Thomson built his famous Dunfermline Inn, on the northeast side of the corner. The Dunfermline Inn was erected behind where the Courthouse Hotel now stands. The Dunfermline Inn was one of the first commercial buildings in the new township, built sometime before October 1857. Part of the old pub’s walls still survive and have been restored and incorporated into a café and tourist venue. George Thomson was also a member of the Belfast Roads Board and was prominent in efforts to build and manage the National School in Koroit, which opened in 1856.
Hugh Reilly’s obituary mentions that before arriving in Koroit, Hugh accompanied a party of government surveyors from Portland to Hamilton, a journey of some fifty miles into the interior of the Western District. It is possible that Hugh was working for Mr. Lindsay Clarke, the Government Surveyor based in Portland at the time. Hugh Reilly is listed in the on-arrival shipping records as having been initially assigned to work for a Mr. Clark. Working in the Australian bush so soon after his arrival would likely have made quite an impression on Hugh but unfortunately there is no record of his feelings and observations.
The Trove archive indicates that Lindsay Clarke, the Government Surveyor at Portland, was responsible for surveying Hamilton and its surrounding districts. He oversaw several surveying teams that worked there in the mid-1850s. Mr Clarke made a lot of money through eventually selling blocks of land he had strategically purchased in the wake of his surveys for the government. It was common for government surveyors to accrue wealth in this way, as a means of supplementing their official salaries.
Hugh Reilly was one of four brothers who left County Cavan to travel to Australia. One brother, Andrew Reilly spent most of his time in New Zealand at Palmerston North. This district had small gold rushes in the 1860s in places like Karori. It seems likely Hugh travelled to New Zealand with his brother Andrew Reilly. Hugh Reilly’s obituary states that after working for George Thomson in Koroit, Hugh “went to the gold diggings in New Zealand, but subsequently returned to the district, where he was employed for a number of years by the late Mr. W. R. Routledge.” When Hugh returned to Australia, Andrew remained in Palmerston North. There are letters from Andrew Reilly in New Zealand to Hugh Reilly at Southern Cross which survive. It is clear from this correspondence that Andrew remained in New Zealand for at least several decades.
Hugh Reilly’s sojourn in New Zealand was in the first half of the 1860s. Hugh married Bridget McNamara in Warrnambool in 1866 and so he was presumably at Farnham from at least 1865, back in the Southwest for good.
Charles Reilly, a second brother, may have arrived in Melbourne in August 1860. There is a record of a twenty-two years old Irishman with that name arriving at Melbourne on the “Great Tasmania”, as an unassisted passenger. It remains uncertain whether this was Hugh’s brother.
Charles Reilly was always known as Charlie by the Reilly family. Charlie is but one example of the many Irishmen who returned to Ireland after some time in Australia. After decades in Australia, Charlie Reilly eventually went back to Ireland to live permanently in County Cavan. He had lived for many years around Tower Hill and had married a local woman there. Upon his return to Ireland, Charlie purchased a productive small farm in Cavan and raised several children there with his wife. One of their daughters was the mother of Seamus Bourke. When Aunt Biddy visited Ireland in the 1990s, she met Seamus Bourke near Belturbet in Cavan and Biddy and Seamus became good friends for many years until Seamus passed away. Right until his death, Seamus was living and working on the farm Charlie Reilly had purchased upon his return to Cavan from Tower Hill.
Philip Reilly, a third brother, died in Melbourne in 1892. According to Aunt Biddy, he is buried in the Royal Melbourne Cemetery in a pauper’s grave. Biddy said she did not know any further details of his life, although she picked out a card she had among her family history documents. The card was issued by the Catholic Church and asks the holder to pray for the soul of Philip Reilly who died in Melbourne on 19 May 1892.
The great hunger brought considerable suffering to County Cavan. The county’s population fell from 243,158 in 1841 to 174,064 by 1851. In the long aftermath of the famine many people with the Reilly surname left Cavan. It was the most common name in the county. Some of those destined to depart were living in what were known as workhouses. By 1846, around 128 workhouses existed, and by the end of the famine, there were 163 workhouses across Ireland. The provided basic sustenance to the indigent in exchange for strict obedience and labor. The workhouse was the very last option for the destitute in Ireland.
Across Ireland the workhouses were overrun with orphans during the famine. The Earl Grey Scheme was an attempt to alleviate workhouse overcrowding by exporting young orphan girls to Australia. The Australian Colonial Land and Emigration Commission helped pay the costs of the scheme using funds from land sales in Australia. The pastoral industry was attracted to the scheme as it was envisaged that the girls would provide a new labor force of domestic servants and might also redress the gender imbalance.
In the late 1840s the Earl Grey Scheme shipped thousands of young girls without families to the colonies. The scheme was devised by Lord Henry, the Earl Grey, who was Secretary of State for the Colonies between 1846 and 1852. More than 4000 Irish orphan girls from Irish workhouses were shipped to Australia.
A number of vessels were contracted to transport Irish orphan girls to Australia. Perhaps the most noteworthy of all was the “Panama”, which departed Plymouth in 1849 after being chartered by the Earl Grey Scheme to bring girls to Australia. In January 1850 she arrived in Sydney with one hundred and fifty-seven orphans from workhouses in Dublin, Carlow, Clare, Cork, Galway, Kilkenny, Mayo, Sligo, Waterford, and Wexford.
In 1849 more than sixty of the orphan girls were sent to Portland abord the “Raven”. From there some went to Port Fairy where they were employed as cheap domestic servants, and some went to remote runs in the far west, where most were soon married.
The young female shipboard arrivals who came through the Earl Grey Scheme caused a tide of opposition in Melbourne and Sydney and the Scheme was ended at least partly due to the hostility in Australia from influential people such as the Presbyterian preacher John Dunmore Lang. He railed against a scheme he saw as dumping unwanted Irish girls on the shores of “the most glorious daughter of the Empire”. He saw them as an inferior type of immigrant who might undermine the quality of the population in this Jewel of Empire.
The Irish orphan girls of the Earl Grey Scheme were not free settlers in any sense. Under the guise of famine relief, the scheme was a program to provide pastoralists in Australia with young female labor while at the same time it helped clear Ireland of unwanted people.
The “Panama” is an example of maritime infrastructure that enabled the transport of people across the globe as part of Britain’s systematic colonization of these shores. Masses of poor and displaced people came to Australia on vessels such as the “Panama” and the “General Hewitt”. They had little agency surrounding the decisions made on their behalf and were denied many of the critical things that make up a good life.
When the Reilly brothers left Cavan, manorialism was strong in the countryside where they lived. Great landowners, including the Maxwell family, the proprietors of the Farnham Estate, ruled the roost. Henry Maxwell, the seventh Baron Farnham, was a Member of Parliament for County Cavan. Although largely absent, he was the largest landowner in the county and he was an ardent Orangeman. In the British Parliament, Maxwell voted against Catholic relief, against parliamentary reform, and against the provision of rations for the poor through any proposed tax on absentee landowners. During the famine he evicted many tenants and offered welfare relief only on condition that the impoverished person converted to Protestantism.
William Rutledge lived at “Emoh”, his house in Port Fairy, until 1865 when he moved permanently to Farnham Park. He moved into his new homestead on the Merri River, opposite the hamlet of Dennington. The homestead had been completed two years earlier but the grounds were being laid out. Rutledge had managed to restructure his business affairs in the years after William Rutledge & Co collapsed and he was still a man of substantial property. He increasingly concentrated on developing his Lincoln sheep stud on the Farnham Park estate.
When William Rutledge died in 1876 the remaining Farnham land was divided between his two sons. One son, William R. Rutledge, took over Farnham Park, whereas another son, Thomas F. Rutledge, took over the part known as Werronggurt, where a homestead had been built around 1867. Initially, Robert Woodward lived in the house before Thomas took up residence. Woodward had gone into partnership with the Rutledges for a time.
At the time Hugh and Bridget married in June 1866, the Farnham Park homestead of William Rutledge stood alongside the Merri River at Dennington. Hugh was working as a laborer for William Rutledge on the Farnham Survey. Bridget likely worked either on the estate or relatively close by as a domestic servant. She became pregnant to Hugh prior to their marriage so they must have known each other before their marriage. It is likely they met in 1865. Nothing now remains of the Werronggurt homestead and only the ruins of the old stone gatehouse still stand on the grounds of Farnham Park.
Hugh and Bridet were part of the large Irish Catholic community living between Port Fairy and Warrnambool in the 1860s. An Irish Catholic church hall had been constructed in central Warrnambool in the previous decade for the bourgeoning community and this was where the couple married. The officiating priest at the service was Father Thomas Slattery, the first parish priest at Warrnambool. On the marriage certificate, Hugh Reilly is noted as having been born in County Cavan and Bridget is noted as being born in County Clare.
The marriage certificate for Bridget and Hugh shows that they were married in the building generally now known as the Church Hall. It lies withing the grounds of Saint Joseph’s Catholic Church, Warrnambool. The old church was consecrated in 1856 on what is now Raglan Parade. The more imposing new church was completed nearby in the 1880s.
According to the marriage certificate, Hugh was a laborer, thirty-three years of age, and living on the Farnham Survey. According to this evidence, Hugh was born around 1833. His parents are noted as Phillip Reilly and Mary Prunty. When Hugh eventually died, his obituary mentions that he was working at Dennington for William Rutledge at the time of his marriage, and this is consistent with what his son Charles told Aunt Biddy.
Bridget McNamara was described as a twenty-four-year-old housekeeper living at Warrnambool. Although it is unclear who Bridget MacNamara was working for, she may have been employed at Farnham when she became pregnant and subsequently moved to Warrnambool when her pregnancy became apparent.
Both Bridget and Hugh signed the marriage certificate with their X marks, as did one of the witnesses, Mary Kenneally. This would indicate that these people could not write. Perhaps half of the population of the district were illiterate at that time, including many of the Irish immigrants. To what extent Hugh could read English is unclear. Hugh Reilly travelled quite a bit prior to his marriage and could negotiate business deals and travel schedules. It seems likely that Hugh had some capacity to read English.
Hugh and Bridget’s first child, Phillip, was born on 9 August 1866 just two months after the marriage. The birth certificate for Phillip Reilly shows that his birth occurred in Framlingham, to the northeast of Warrnambool along the Hopkins River. The mid-wife at the birth was a Mrs McNamara, a woman possibly related to Bridget. It is possible that Bridget went to live with relatives in Framlingham after her marriage and while heavily pregnant with Phillip. The birth of Phillip at Framlingham may have been kept within the family. Interestingly, when he died, Phillip’s death certificate says he was born at Dennington, with no mention of Framlingham.
The Reilly family lived at Dennington for several years in the late 1860s, prior to relocating to the eastern slopes of Tower Hill in the early 1870s. Aunt Biddy recalled being told by her father that the first children of Hugh and Bridget were born at Dennington in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Lookout Hill, where Bridget had lived as a child immediately after her arrival, was a few kilometers to the west of Dennington, just southeast of Tower Hill.
In the years following Hugh Reilly’s marriage to Bridget McNamara in 1866 the family lived on the river at Dennington and Hugh worked for William Rutledge on Farnham. During his time at Farnham Park, did Hugh Reilly speak regularly with William Rutledge? Did Cavan ever come up in their conversation? Like Hugh Reilly, William Rutledge originally hailed from County Cavan. Their social circumstances were not the same and Rutledge was aging. On electoral roles, William Rutledge listed his occupation simply as “gentleman”, whereas Hugh on his marriage certificate was noted as a “labourer” on the “Farnham Survey”.
Charles Reilly, Patricia’s father, and the second child of Bridget and Hugh Reilly, is said to have been born in 1868 although a birth certificate for Charles is not available. Perhaps the record was lost or the birth was not properly registered with the civil authorities. Some couples may have placed greater store on a baptism rather than civil registration. There was a high rate of infant mortality in poor rural communities. It may have been considered prudent to wait until the child was considered likely to survive. When Charles married Grandma Margaret in 1922 the marriage certificate notes Dennington as Charles’s birthplace.
Aunt Biddy said her father reminisced about his early childhood living close to the Merri River at Dennington. From her recollections of what Charles said, the shack the family lived in was just a rough hut, something akin to a timber shanty. This was in the early years of the 1870s. Many immigrant families still lived in very basic houses at that time, as early photos and drawings attest. Charles Reilly also mentioned the Aboriginal people who camped along the river close to where his family lived. The nearby bridge across the Merri River had been completed more than a decade earlier in 1857.
On Farnham Park, William Routledge and his children were akin to the lords of the manor and Hugh Reilly was a laborer in their service. Many working people died in impoverished circumstances and never got ahead in life at all.
As they strived to get ahead, there was a great deal of tragedy in the Reilly family. Many of Hugh and Bridget’s children died of tuberculosis and due to accidents and childbirth. There was an incredibly high mortality rate in the Reilly family, even by the standards of the day. After the arrival of Phillip in 1866 and Charles in 1868, Hugh and Bridget had a further children. The family likely lived in substandard housing, in simple wooden houses, first at Dennington and then on the slopes of Tower Hill. The coast has cold and damp winters, especially severe on the southern banks of Tower Hill. The crude dwellings were cold, draughty and damp over the winter months especially. Children’s bedrooms were crowded and respiratory disease could be passed easily from person to person.
Aunt Biddy said that according to her father, Hugh and Bridget first lived in a shack on the Merri River on the edge of Farnham Park and then moved a few miles west to Tower Hill. Aunt Biddy did not know the exact location of where the Reilly family lived at Tower Hill prior to moving into the Rehill farmhouse. Where exactly Hugh and Bridget lived in the mid-1870s and into the 1880s is something of a mystery. In all likelihood the family lived not far from the Rehill farm of Patrick Conrick, perhaps on the slopes southwest of Rehill. Such a location is not far from Dairytown. Grandma Margaret mentioned that some of her forebears lived for a time at Dairytown on the southeast side of Tower Hill.
If a family did not own land they tended not to sink much money into improving their housing. The widespread aspiration was to build a decent house on land of one’s own. It was likely only after moving into the relatively comfortable stone house on the Rehill farm that the Reilly family came to enjoy proper accommodation.
This is perhaps why Aunt Biddy revered this rather modest house to the extent that she did. To her, the Rehill farmhouse was like a palace, the symbol of her family’s perseverance and success, an icon of the family’s upward social mobility. Biddy greatly valued social respectability and economic security. By modern standards, the farmhouse was by no means grand at all, but compared to the simple wooden cottages where many of her neighbours and relatives still lived, it must have seemed quite substantial. It even had running water plumbed inside.
Freehold ownership of land was something to which Hugh and Bridget greatly aspired. By the standards of their community, Hugh and Bridget Reilly eventually became quite successful farmers. After years of leasing farmland around Tower Hill, banking the financial returns of good seasons, Hugh Reilly was able to take out a considerable mortgage to buy part of Rehill, one of the better farms in the district. Hugh Reilly had leased sections of Rehill for many years, and he eventually purchased a good portion of it in 1903. The Rehill property of the Conrick family had come up for sale at an opportune moment for Hugh. The property and farmhouse was on land he already leased at various times, and he may have been the on-site manager of the property. Hugh would have known the land’s potential to generate good profits in good seasons.
Freehold ownership of quality farmland at Southern Cross, and a solid house in which to live, came after years of leasing small plots and living in small wooden houses. As well as the greater material comfort, Rehill gave them a sense of social respectability. Around Koroit, especially in the Irish farming community, land ownership was at the centre of social status. To this extent, the Irish farmers were not so different from the squatters.
The birth and death certificates of family members note that from the early 1870s the Reilly family were at Tower Hill, rather than at Farnham or Dennington. These documents provide some clues as to where the family lived. The family may have lived on the slopes above Dairytown, although this is mostly conjecture rather than anything else. From 1871, all of Hugh and Bridget’s children have Tower Hill listed as their place of birth.
Phillip Reilly, the first child of Hugh and Bridget, was born in 1866 at Framlingham and then lived at Dennington when Hugh was working at Farnham Park. Phillip Reilly would die in 1901, aged thirty-five. His death certificate notes that he died at “Rehill”, Koroit, of cardiac failure, after an illness of some eighteen months. Phillip never married and he died two years before Hugh’s purchase of Rehill. Given that Phillip Reilly died at Rehill farm, the death certificate seems to show that the Reilly family were already living at Rehill by 1901. It is not clear whether they were living in the main house or in a separate dwelling on the property.
Patrick Conrick and his family moved from the farm well before 1901 but the main house must have been lived in after the Conrick’s left. It is likely that Hugh managed at least parts of the Rehill property for Patrick Conrick during the 1890s. The Borough of Koroit rate books indicate that Hugh leased portions of the Rehill land from Conrick during this time.
Hugh and Bridget’s second child, Charles Reilly, Patricia’s father, was born in 1868. The Reilly family was living at Dennington and would continue to do so for a few more years. Charles mentioned to Biddy in later years that he could recall living close to the river at Dennington when he was a young child. Hugh probably continued working on Farnham for several years after Charles was born.
The third child, Mary Reilly, was said to have been born in 1870, although no birth certificate has been found for her, just as is the case for Charles. It is likely she was born when the family was living at Dennington. Mary married Tom Johnston in 1890. Mary and Tom had one child, a daughter called Margaret, born at Tower Hill in 1892. Tragically, Mary Reilly would die in childbirth in 1894, aged twenty-four.
Tom Johnston was left to care for his only child, Margaret, just two years old when her mother died. Tom Johnston and Margaret lived with Hugh and Bridget Reilly as part of the extended Reilly family. Tom never remarried and remained with the Reillys until his death in 1915.
Margaret Johnston was raised more or less as a sister to Hugh and Bridget’s own children. Margaret would eventually marry Joe Haberfield in 1925. From then on she was generally known as Margaret Haberfield. According to Aunt Biddy, the Haberfield family lived in a modest house where Davidson’s quarry is now located, just to the west of Rehill farm.
Patricia and Aunt Biddy usually referred to Margaret as “Sis”, which is what their father Charles Reilly called Margaret, even though Charles was actually Margaret’s uncle. After Hugh Reilly purchased Rehill, the Haberfields likely worked on part of the farm in a share cropping arrangement with Hugh and Charles Reilly at various stages.
Tom Johnstone was a follower of the Church of England. The fact that he married into the Reilly family, who were Irish Catholics, was somewhat unusual for the time, although not particularly so. Mixed marriages, as such unions were called, were frowned upon in some quarters, although evidently not by Hugh or Bridget. Tom Johnstone died in 1915, aged sixty-one, but church or cemetery rules meant he could not be buried alongside Mary, his wife, who had died many years earlier in childbirth. Mary had been buried in the Reilly family plot in the Catholic section of Tower Hill Cemetery. As a follower of the Church of England, the cemetery regulations stipulated that Tom needed to buried separately, in the Anglican section of the cemetery. The sectarian divisions in graveyard burials are a reminder of the social divides of the past.
Andrew Reilly, the fourth child, was born at Tower Hill in 1871. There is a birth certificate for Andrew. Andrew is the first of the Reilly children noted as born at Tower Hill. He would die of tuberculosis in 1894, aged just twenty-three, and he is buried in the Tower Hill Cemetery along with the rest of the Reillys.
There is a birth certificate for a further son, John, who was born in 1874 and died in 1894. John also died of tuberculosis, according to Aunt Biddy. She had no additional information about his life, other than that he never married.
An early death from tuberculosis was also the fate of Bridget Reilly, born in 1875. According to her death certificate, Bridget died of tuberculosis at Tower Hill in 1892 when she was just seventeen.
Hugh Reilly Junior was born in 1877. Hugh Junior died of tuberculosis in 1918. His father, Hugh Reilly Senior, had died just months earlier. Hugh Junior never married and was forty-one years old when he died. He had been sick with tuberculosis for quite some time, according to Aunt Biddy.
Further tragedy struck the Reilly family when the youngest son, Edward Patrick, died at Tower Hill in 1906 after falling from a horse. Born in 1880, he was twenty-six when he died.
In the nineteenth century, tuberculosis killed about a quarter of the adult population of Europe. Diphtheria, another bacterial respiratory disease, killed many people as well, and tuberculosis and diphtheria worked in conjunction to destroy people’s lungs. But even though tuberculosis and diphtheria were common in Koroit and other places at that time, it is interesting that so many of the Reilly children should contract these bacterial lung diseases with such fatal consequences. Perhaps there was some genetic pre-disposition to the disease. Some recent research shows that human genetics play a significant role in how a person responds to and fights off tuberculosis. Notwithstanding the fact that Bridget and Hugh Reilly had a large number of children, only Charles Reilly lived long enough to inherit the Rehill farm.
The Reilly grave at Tower Hill Cemetery lists all the children of Hugh and Bridget on the headstone. Four of the children died within two and a half years of each other. Two of these children, Andrew and Bridget, died in 1892. Two other children, John and Mary, died in 1894. These would have been tragic times for the family. Three of these children reportedly died of tuberculosis, whereas Mary died in childbirth. Several of the Reilly children died of tuberculosis as young adults, ranging from sixteen for Bridget, twenty for John, and twenty-one for Andrew. None of these children married, and they were likely in poor health for some time prior to their deaths. There was something of an epidemic of tuberculosis in the community and it hit the Reillys hard.
It is very likely that the Reilly children became infected with the tuberculosis bacteria from other members of their family. In 1882, Robert Koch discovered that the tubercule baccilum bacteria which caused tuberculosis was a highly contagious airborne pathogen. The medical profession became aware that tuberculosis was somewhat preventable through maintaining good personal hygiene and hygienic living conditions. This was difficult to achieve in conditions of material poverty and substandard housing exacerbated by a lack of knowledge of how germs spread disease within a community.
Tuberculosis spreads from person to person by coughing and spitting and is often associated with over-crowding. The germs are expelled into the air when a person with tuberculosis coughs, sneezes or speaks and the germs can stay in the air for several hours. It is now considered a disease of poverty, poor sanitation, and the lack of modern health care.
Tuberculosis usually affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body, such as the brain, the kidneys, or the spine. A person with tuberculosis will likely eventually die of the disease if they do not get treatment, and until the 1940s there was no reliable treatment. The symptoms include coughing, chest pain, and the coughing up of blood from the lungs. Other symptoms include feelings of weakness, weight loss, fever, and night sweats. We can be grateful that the disease is mostly no longer with us.
In the 1940s, both Patricia and Aunt Biddy had tuberculosis as young women and spent long periods confined to their bedrooms. Biddy was more seriously affected and almost died. The introduction of antibiotics after the Second World War revolutionised medical treatment of bacterial infections and so both Biddy and Pat survived, albeit after long and nasty illness. Aunt Biddy sometimes mentioned that as a diseased young woman she prayed ardently to God. She resolved to dedicate herself to God and her faith if God answered her prayers and allowed her to live. Biddy was always a woman of strong religious faith. Patricia was more ambivalent.
Aunt Biddy and Aunt Mary were always aspirational in outlook. They wanted to project a respectable middle-class face to the world. As girls, their father Charles Reilly sent them to a Catholic boarding school in Warrnambool, where they learnt a more middle-class outlook than what generally prevailed in Southern Cross. Perhaps Charles Reilly thought there were too many young men on the farm and he may have wanted his daughters out of the way.
Biddy and Mary hoped that subsequent generations of the family would marry-up in the world although this aspiration never really came to fruition, at least not for a long time. Biddy became a schoolteacher and Mary worked as a nurse. These were the two professions open to young women at the time. As predominantly female occupations, both jobs were very poorly paid for the hard work and discipline that was required.
Mary recalls that when she left Southern Cross at seventeen to go nursing at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne she was immediately put on a male ward. She had virtually no training and was expected to learn on the job. Her pay was minimal, but she gained the experience of working in a big hospital in the city with other girls. She formed a close friendship with a city girl whose family lived in a pleasant part of Kew. She learnt a lot about life that could not have been obtained had she stayed in Koroit.
Patricia lived most of her life in Koroit, where she raised her family. In the 1970s Patricia got a job at the Koroit Hospital washing dishes and delivering cups of tea and biscuits to the patients, some related to her and many who were people she knew. She enjoyed her work and valued the small income.
Hugh Reilly and his family at Southern Cross stayed connected by letter with Charlie Reilly after Charlie returned to Ireland. Several letters sent from Southern Cross to Ireland were given to Aunt Biddy by Seamus Burke. These letters date from 1890 till the early 1920s and were kept by Seamus Burke’s family down the generations. Hugh also corresponded with Andrew in New Zealand over the course of many years.
Seamus Burke was an Irish cousin who Biddy discovered on one of her trips to Ireland in the 1990s. The letters to Charlie in Ireland are rather boring, dealing just with mundane matters without revealing any personal feelings. Given that Hugh seems to have had limited capacity to write himself, he may have dictated the letters to someone else in the family who could write. The scribe was possibly Tom Johnston, Hugh’s son-in-law, or perhaps Margaret Johnston, Tom’s daughter. Margaret was raised in the Reilly household and Tom Johnston was considered part of the family.
According to Aunt Biddy, Charlie Reilly had lived in the Koroit district for a good number of years before returning to Ireland. Charlie married a girl from the Koroit district and she went to Ireland with him.
Charlie must have been successful in his farming at Tower Hill because when he returned to Ireland he had sufficient funds to purchase one hundred acres of good agricultural land close to the same village from where the Reilly boys had departed so many years previously. One of Charlie’s children, Rose Reilly, married a local man named Burke and one of their children was Seamus Burke, whom Biddy met when she visited Ireland. Seamus was Biddy’s second cousin given that Seamus and Biddy’s grandfathers were brothers. Aunt Biddy and Seamus Burke became great friends over the years.
Seamus and Biddy were in regular communication until Seamus died in 2007. The Burkes had a small farm outside Belturbet, close to Folias where the original Reilly farm was located.
When Biddy visited the ruins of the Reilly farmhouse at Folias, in a field close to the Erne River, it was mostly rubble, but she took some photos. This was where Hugh, Andy, Charlie and Phillip Reilly grew up prior to departing for Australia. Charlie Reilly was the only brother to return to Ireland. By comparing notes, Seamus and Biddy were able to piece together quite a few details regarding their respective grandparents.
It is from this contact Biddy made with her cousin Seamus in Ireland that we know exactly where Hugh Reilly and his brothers came from when they left Ireland in the 1850s. The family hailed from Folias in the vicinity of Belturbet, which is a small town in County Cavan on the border with County Fermanagh. These days County Cavan is in the Republic of Ireland whereas Fermanagh was incorporated into Northern Ireland. During the 1800s there was no partition.
The Plantations of Ulster greatly influenced society in this part of the country. The British undoubtedly learned many important lessons regarding the systematic colonisation of foreign lands through its experience here. The influence of “Manorialism” was strong in Cavan, where the major landowners included the Maxwells of Farnham and the Saundersons of Castle Saunderson. Edward Saunderson was the father of modern Ulster Unionism and was for a time the head of the Orange Order in Belfast.
Manorialism was an economic and social system common where the economy was organized around the ownership and management of land. Landed proprietors lived in fine country houses while the workers lived as tenants on the estates or in nearby hamlets, in basic accommodation. European manorialism has its parallels in parts of the Western District. The squatters on their runs and landed proprietors such as Rutledge lived in grand homesteads while the workers lived in simple wooden dwellings, either on the stations or in nearby hamlets. Many of the great manor houses of the Western District are well preserved and some of the descendants of the original families remain socially prominent.
There is a remarkably clear photo of Rehill taken in 1866 by Joseph Soden, a well-known professional photographer of the period. Soden took a number of photos of scenes in the Southwest at this time, including photos of Koroit and Woolsthorpe. The photo of Rehill is titled “Farm and Residence of P. Conrick, Esq.” and is available for online viewing.
The year the photo was taken was the year Bridget and Hugh married. It was several decades before they moved into the Rehill farmhouse. Interestingly, the photo shows at least one other dwelling on the property beside the main house. Cleared timber is pushed into rows along the paddock lines. A herd of cattle is in the foreground in front of the house. No other houses can be seen on the slopes rising to the top of the lakebank. Several of the paddocks have substantial numbers of standing eucalypt trees yet to be cleared. The farmhouse and outbuildings seem well maintained and everything appears neat, tidy and well managed.
In the 1960s, when the Jones family were driving along the tourist road through Tower Hill Lake, as we often did, Patricia would sometimes point out the line of fence posts in the marshy bed of Tower Hill Lake. She would say that Hugh Reilly, her grandfather, built that fence to contain his cattle at a time when the lake was mostly dry, probably sometime in the late nineteenth century. This was a tale her father and mother told her and was a story she had always known.
Hugh Reilly would have leased portions of land in the lake from the Koroit Council to run his cattle. The Council was responsible for managing the lake. Parts of Tower Hill were available to lease. A few Irish families from Dairytown were farming on the inner slopes of the lake. Some of them had been doing this from the 1860s. There are old photos showing potato crops being cultivated on the inside slopes of the lake by these Irish farmers. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the interior part of Tower Hill was officially a public conservation and recreation reserve, but local farmers considered it to be more or less common land for their use.
The management of the Tower Hill Reserve was a task the Koroit Council and the local farmers performed very poorly. By the end of the century, the lake and the land inside the rim had become quite degraded. It was something of a dumping ground for waste and rubbish. The water table was greatly altered by indiscriminate pumping of the aquifer for drinking water and for irrigation. The bed of the lake almost completely dried out.
Drought played a part in the drying of the lake. In dry years, the level of the water in the lake always fell, and sometimes the lake bed almost dried out entirely. Additionally, quarries were opened right around the rim of the lake, and feral animals such as rabbits and goats were allowed to run out of control, doing a great deal of damage to soil and vegetation. Conservation was not a priority.
Peek Whurrong people, prior to colonisation, likely considered the lake to have great sacred and ceremonial value. While Europeans may have admired the lake at times, they saw it through very different eyes. That the lake should be seen as something worth preserving in a way that approximated its pre-contact condition seems to have been a view not widely held in the Koroit community. By contrast, nineteenth century metropolitan visitors such as James Bonwick greatly admired Tower Hill and hoped it could be protected.
Hugh Reilly is mentioned just once in “A Green and Pleasant Land – A History of Koroit”. This book is a widely available history of the Koroit district. The second edition, and in particular the contribution by Peter Yule, is well worth reading. The book notes that in 1881 Hugh Reilly sunk a well on High Street for the Koroit Council. This well was near the National School and was thirty feet deep and six feet wide. Hugh got six pounds for his work.
Initially, people in the town got their water from wells dug down to the aquifer. Buckets attached to ropes were used to raise water from the wells. Hand pumps were adopted at a later stage. After the Koroit Borough Council was formed in 1870, the council took over most wells and put down more wells at strategic locations. The wells were periodically cleaned and kept in reasonable repair from the time the Council took them over. From 1890, reticulated water was piped to houses in the Koroit township. The water came from springs located near the bottom of the lake bank. This reticulated water supply was managed by the Koroit Waterworks Trust and its introduction led to a marked improvement in public health. Water was pumped into a holding tank above the town.
Education and Faith
In 1857 James Bonwick made several observations of the education available to people at Belfast and Tower Hill when he passed through the district. Bonwick was appointed an inspector for the Denominational Schools Board in June 1856 and in the next three years he undertook two extensive horseback tours of western Victoria conducting inspections of schools. On his tour through the Southwest, Bonwick noted that there were several denominational schools at Tower Hill. He reported that some local children were attending them and that the children in the vicinity generally appeared to be healthy and well fed.
In terms of the Southwest overall he made the following observation regarding the level of literacy. “In the whole district, only about one half the people can read and write.” James Bonwick, an educated middle-class gentleman, was inclined to blame the working-class for their ignorance and lack of morals, and for their supposed propensity for alcoholism, and for their lack of financial prudence. His comments regarding the Irish are generally disparaging. Bonwick is even more disparaging of the Aboriginal population, blaming surviving Aboriginal people themselves for their dire situation.
The Catholic schoolhouse and chapel on Rocks Road on the edge of the Farnham Survey was one of the schools of the district when Bonwick passed through. It was close to the southern edge of the lake midway between Killarney and Dairy Town. The schoolhouse and chapel was a timber building constructed around 1850 and two years later it was formally incorporated into the Belfast Catholic Mission, the precursor of the Port Fairy Catholic Parish. The schoolhouse and chapel was on land leased from William Rutledge.
Many assisted Irish immigrants were married, baptised and schooled in this modest building through the 1850s and 1860s. One of the first marriages was that of Ellen Molan and Patrick Conrick in 1850.
Margaret Bowman’s mother, Granny Eliza Binstead, was baptised there in 1857, the year James Bonwick passed through the district. Eliza is the author’s great-grandmother.
The younger McNamara children of Edward and Mary’s family may have attended school at the Rocks Road schoolhouse when the McNamara family was living nearby at Lookout Hill. They could have walked to the schoolhouse through the fields south of the lake. There is no evidence for this and it remains uncertain whether the McNamara children attended school at all. For Irish Catholics, the school on Rocks Road was the only Catholic option.
By the end of the 1860s, the Victorian government had established several “secular” National Schools in the district, including the National Schools at Koroit and Yangary. National Schools received funding from the state. In theory, National Schools were non-denominational, and through the 1860s many children of Irish assisted immigrants were enrolled in these schools although attendance was frequently poor. Often there was no Catholic alternative close by.
During the 1860s, denominational schools were still eligible for some degree of government support. After 1873, with the passing of the Education Act, school attendance became increasingly segregated by religion and national identification. Denominational schools no longer received state funding, which was a contentious policy shift. The Catholic Church had strenuously opposed the passage of the Education Act. The Church persistently lobbied for government support for Catholic schools to continue. These efforts were not successful. Despite the withdrawal of state support, the Church and the Catholic community was determined that a Catholic education system should continue.
With the passing of the Education Act in 1873, many Protestant denominational schools closed and the new state school system took over the existing school infrastructure. In Protestant families, most parents transferred their children to the state system. In Woolsthorpe, the former Presbyterian school transitioned to becoming a National School after 1873 and a similar process occurred at Woodford around this time.
Following the passing of the Education Act, the Irish Catholic community around Tower Hill became even more committed to establishing a school system of their own, despite the Victorian Government’s withdrawal of state funding for denominational schools. A more cohesive Catholic school system was developed in the last decades of the 1800s, funded from within the community.
To some extent the educational environment of Koroit and district in the last decades of the nineteenth century reflected the situation in Ireland at that time. The children of Catholic families increasingly attended an expanding system of Catholic schools, whereas the children of Protestant families continued attending the government’s state schools. Around Koroit, this segregation of education by religious affiliation was virtually total until the 1980s. In Koroit, the Catholics went to Saint Patrick’s, and the Protestants went to the Koroit State School. This was why Saint Patrick’s Koroit had many more students in attendance than the state school throughout most of the twentieth century.
The Education Act of 1873 precipitated an expansion of clerical influence in the Koroit Irish community. More and more young people in the district were drawn into the religious orders. In particular, many young women entered the convent, where they served as teachers at Catholic schools or as staff at Catholic hospitals. The teaching clergy was poorly trained in secular pedagogy but deeply committed to the Catechism. The teachers in the Catholic schools were drawn mostly from the local Irish community of the Southwest. Some clergy came from Ireland and further afield.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church was a feature of religious instruction in local schools and was taught at Saint Patrick’s Koroit through to the early 1960s. Rote transmission of Catholic doctrine was drilled into the students. The Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s saw some reforms introduced. Irish national identification was part and parcel of the local education system, but it was inculcated in conjunction with a distinctively Australian affiliation.
We were Australians with an Irish heritage. Britishness was not emphasised at all. There was no reciting of God Save the Queen and no pictures of Her Majesty, in contrast to the state schools. There were crucifixes and AMDG, a Latin acronym which can be translated as “For the greater glory of God,” used as a rallying cry for Catholics throughout history.
What seems common to all of the early schools of the mid-nineteenth century is that the numbers of children in attendance would fluctuate markedly from week to week depending on certain factors at play in the community. For example, if there was thought to be an outbreak of infectious disease in the district, parents would often not send their children to school until it was thought to be safer. This indicates that people did understand that disease could be spread from person to person, even though they did not know the mechanism.
Additionally, at times of harvest, or planting, or other seasonal agricultural tasks, children would stay home to help the family earn its livelihood. Farm and house work had priority over schooling, regardless of the regulations introduced by the Victorian Government that made attendance compulsory. The decision of parents to limit school attendance did not indicate a deficiency of moral worth or a lack of intelligence, as is sometimes supposed. It was a calculated decision to minimize risk and enhance economic survival.
In her book, “Still Stands the Schoolhouse by the Road”, published in 1987, Jean Uhl examines the diary of George Gilbert McKay, the head teacher of the Yangery National School during the 1860s and 1870s. McKay mentions the many tragic deaths of young children from respiratory and other disease, including his own offspring. The Tower Hill Cemetery Trust holds the records of hundreds of young people who died around Tower Hill in the 1860s and 1870s, many of whom lie in unmarked graves. In his diary, George McKay records the frequent absences of students caused by the need to work at home and on farms.
George McKay began teaching in the National School at Yangery in December 1858 shortly after the school opened. The school was established in 1858 on the Southern Cross Road on land donated by Roderick Urquart. Patrick Conrick was one of the patrons, representing the Catholic community. The school was a small primary school and George McKay was the only teacher. He remained at the school until 1890, when he moved to Melbourne. He kept a diary throughout this period.
McKay was a diligent educator and a devout Calvinist Protestant who had the misfortune to have a run in with several prominent members of the local Catholic community. Patrick Conrick served on the Tower Hill School committee of management for Catholic education and was generally active in community affairs.
McKay mentions the emergence of stressful sectarian tensions surrounding education in the Koroit district. Some disputes in the area could be characterised as sectarian in nature, revolving around religious doctrine and nationalist ideology. There were disputes regarding what aspects of this should be taught to local children. Protestants and Catholics increasingly did not see eye to eye on education.
Social currents emanating from Ireland feed into the discourse on education. Additionally, there were divergent views on the topic of “State Aid for Catholic Schools”. Given the role of the Catholic Church around Tower Hill, and the size of the Koroit Irish population, it should not be surprising that events in Ireland shaped matters regarding education in the district. Events in Ireland continued to shape the policies of the Catholic Church in the Southwest for many decades.
Interestingly, one of George McKay’s children survived. She was Hadassah McKay, born in 1871. One of her children was Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, the eminent Australian scientist who in 1961 won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work in immunology. Sir Frank died of cancer in 1985 in Port Fairy, and is buried in the Tower Hill Cemetery next to his grandparents. In recent times his legacy has been subject to revisionist criticism due to his alleged racialist views and his embrace of eugenics. The Burnet Institute, named in commemoration of his contribution to Australian science, acknowledges that some of his views are controversial and discriminatory, particularly those relating to eugenics, the theory or practice of improving the genetic characteristics of a population by favoring certain “races”.
Unfortunately, the curriculum and pedagogical issues at Tower Hill seem to have become personalised over time. The Catholic population was expanding in relation to the Protestant population in the district. The Yangery National School was the closest school for the Reilly, Bowman and Kelly children to attend, but the teacher, though dedicated to the task, was a man of firm Calvinist belief. This became an issue. Demographics favored the Catholics. Charles Reilly attended the Yangery National School for a time in the 1870s but he sent his own children to the Illowa Catholic school which came to occupy the site of the former Yangery National School.
Saint Columba’s Illowa Catholic School was established adjacent to the National School. Charles Reilly’s children, Biddy, Mary, Chas, and Patricia, all attended Saint Columba’s Catholic School, which was built right next to the state school. This new Catholic School was built at Illowa in 1918 and around one hundred out of the one hundred and forty students at the government school transferred to Saint Columba’s.
There is one memento of Charles Reilly’s attendance at the state school in Yangary. The Victorian National Schools during the colonial era used textbooks issued for the National School system of Ireland. Aunt Biddy passed on a textbook that Charles used during his school days at the Yangary National School. The book was printed in Ireland for use in the National School system of Ireland at a time when that country was ruled by Britain. The textbook is an interesting document, replete with Protestant Christian moralizing and British nationalist propaganda.
Such texts laden with British nationalist ideology may partly explain why many Irish Catholics wanted their own schools. The school textbook promoted Reformed Christian moral values and the British Empire. Many of the Irish Catholics of Koroit would have considered this inculcation of British Imperial values and Protestant religion as problematic. Once a choice became available, Catholic parents supported the emerging Catholic education system, which better reflected their values and aspirations.
There is a school record from the nineteenth century which shows that Hugh and Bridget Reilly were warned regarding Charles’s non-attendance at the Yangary National School. It may be that Hugh and Bridget were concerned about an outbreak of disease in the district or perhaps they needed Charles to assist on the farm.
The push for a separate system of education is also illustrated in the history of Saint Brigid’s Crossley. This school was essentially the successor to the Catholic schoolhouse on Rocks Road, south of Tower Hill. Following the passing of the Education Act in 1873, the Tower Hill Catholic schoolhouse on Rocks Road was earmarked for closure. By 1877 it was no longer in operation. A Catholic school near Kirkstall was also closed at this time leaving a gap in the schooling that was available to all students on the south and west sides of Tower Hill. Many small Catholic schools in Victoria closed in the 1870s when public funds were withdrawn from all non-government schools in Victoria.
In response to the lack of schools on the western side of Tower Hill, the Victorian Government decided to build a new government school on the hill at Crossley. The Crossley State School was duly completed in 1878. School attendance had been made compulsory and so the Catholic children in Crossley, Killarney and Tower Hill had little choice but to attend the new state school, even though their parents for the most part clearly preferred to have their children attend a Catholic school. The Catholic Parish of Port Fairy, with the support of the Koroit Irish community, responded by building its own school at Crossley, right next to the state school.
When the Catholic school opened late in 1878, the Catholic children virtually all transferred to the new Catholic school, which was called Saint Bridgid’s. From that point on only a handful of students remained at the state school. In 1883 the state school had a total enrollment of fifteen students, whereas the adjacent Catholic school had two hundred and twenty students. The Crossley State School was eventually closed in 1892 due to the declining numbers attending. The school buildings were then purchased by the Catholic Church and were put to use as the classrooms of Saint Bridgid’s School. The author attended lessons in these classrooms in the early 1960s.
Like other the Catholic Schools in the district, Saint Bridgid’s Crossley relied greatly upon the labor of local women who had gone into religious orders. The local congregation contributed what money they could spare. From the authors recollection, the education on offer was nothing like anything in Victoria today and feels as if it belongs to a vanished world. It is doubtful that anything can resurrect the largely pre-modern worldview of that community at that time.
The author and his siblings were taught for two years by the Good Samaritan Sisters in the classrooms of the former government school, by then part of Saint Bridgid’s Catholic School. The Jones family was living at Crossley while our new house in Koroit was being built. Once our new house was completed, the Jones children went back to attending class at Saint Patrick’s Koroit.
The old classroom buildings at the Crossley school were demolished in the 1980s following the closure of Saint Bridgid’s. The church hall and the church at Crossley still stand. The red brick church was erected in 1913 next to the hall. The author can recall having his First Communion in the church in 1964 followed by ice-cream and lollies in the hall. There are some interesting photos of that day. In 1965, Richard, the author’s brother, had his funeral service in the Church at Crossley. He had died in a farm accident nearby, aged six. The Crossley hall is also where the author’s sister had her funeral services following her death in 2013. The church and hall are now owned by the Crossley community, many of whom are the descendants of the forebears who built these now historic buildings.
Patrick and John Conrick
The farm in Southern Cross that Hugh Reilly purchased in 1903 had been associated with the Conrick family since the mid-1850s. There is a record from the Belfast Roads Board from 1854 that shows Patrick Conrick paid rates on cultivated land at Tower Hill that year. When the Borough of Koroit was established in 1871, the first rate-book for the new municipality shows that Patrick Conrick paid rates on two hundred and forty-two acres. By 1880 the ratable land of Patrick Conrick was three hundred and sixteen acres, with a house. In 1888, the Borough rate-book shows Patrick Conrick paid rates on three hundred and four acres of land. This slight reduction was due to a slice of the Conrick owned land being acquired for the new railway line to Port Fairy.
Additionally, the Borough of Koroit rate-books are notable in that they reveal something of where Hugh Reilly was living and farming in this period. Aunt Biddy was a member of the Koroit Historical Society. She was also a volunteer worker at its museum in town located in the old National School building. Through the Historical Society she had access to the Koroit Rate Books from the late nineteenth century. Biddy’s sleuthing found that Hugh Reilly had leased a house and some land from Conrick in the late 1880s. The rate-books of 1887, 1888, and 1889 show that Hugh Reilly rented a house and twelve acres of land from Patrick Conrick in these three consecutive years. The house Hugh rented may have been the main farmhouse on the Rehill property, given that the Conricks had moved away from the property by then, or perhaps a secondary dwelling. The Joseph Soden photo from 1866 seems to show an additional house on the property.
These rate book records of the late 1880s were made just prior to the tragic years of the early 1890s when four of the children of Hugh and Bridget died as young adults. Biddy did not unearth additional records in the rate books. By the 1890s the Conricks were not actually living or farming at Rehill, even though the Conrick family still owned the property. The farmland was either leased to local farmers or placed under the care of a manager, possibly Hugh Reilly. Throughout the 1890s, Hugh and Bridget likely continued to farm parts of Rehill with the assistance of their remaining children and their son-in-law, Tom Johnstone.
Patrick and Ellen Conrick played a notable part in the history of Koroit. A street in the recent King Street subdivision of the town has been named in commemoration of the family. Patrick Conrick left his home in Ireland and arrived in the Port Phillip District in 1841 as an eighteen-year-old youth. He came to Tower Hill in 1848. Patrick’s father is said to have been a tenant farmer on the Rehill Estate in County Tipperary in Ireland.
Ellen Molan was the youngest child of John and Bridget Molan. The family was originally from Limerick, and arrived in Port Phillip in 1840 as bounty immigrants to New South Wales. Unlike many bounty immigrants of that period, the Molans brought a large family with them. They migrated with seven children: Daniel, Michael, Margaret, Maurice, Thomas, William, and Ellen. Ellen Molan thus had five older brothers in her family and many of these boys seem to have become farmers or business operators in the district. They mostly married locally and raised families in the area.
John Molan and his eldest son Daniel became sizable tenant farmers on the Farnham Survey and seem to have employed some of the new wave of Irish arrivals who came in the 1850s as sub-tenants on their leaseholds. It is likely that the Molans sponsored families to come to Tower Hill through their connections to parts of rural Ireland. Chain migration and sponsorship of relatives and friends was a feature of migration to the district for decades.
Various members of the Molan family became prominent in business, hotels, and church and civic affairs, a state of affairs which continued well into the twentieth century. Managing hotels was a field in which the Molans became prominent. The Commercial Hotel in Koroit is still sometimes referred to as “Molans” by some older people. Maurice Molan, one of the brothers who arrived as boys in 1840, built the Shamrock Hotel in Crossley in the early 1860s. By that stage he was the owner of substantial freehold property at Crossley and was a prominent and civic minded member of the community.
In 1850, Patrick Conrick and Ellen Molan married at the Catholic schoolhouse and chapel on Rocks Road at Tower Hill, one of the first couples to do so. They subsequently had six children. By 1854, after a stint on the goldfields where Patrick Conrick may have come into some money, the family purchased a sizable block of good farmland on the eastern side of Tower Hill. It is said that Patrick named the farm “Rehill” after the estate property near Clogheen in Tipperary on which his parents had been tenants. There is a still a small hamlet called Rehill Cross in this vicinity and a Rehill Road leading to it.
Patrick Conrick seems to have been a very aspirational young man. Rehill in Tipperary was formerly part of the extensive property of the Earl of Glengall, a title that was created in 1816 for the prominent aristocratic landowner Richard Butler. The Butler family had for centuries been part of the elite of southern Ireland. On his Rehill property at Tower Hill, Patrick Conrick employed other Irish immigrants, including Hugh Reilly.
In the early 1880s, Patrick and Ellen relocated to Warrnambool. The Conrick family’s move to Warrnambool was in the wake of a legal and financial scandal involving the family, an episode which may have been something of a catalyst for the move away from the Koroit district. In 1880, Richard Conrick, a son of Patrick and Ellen Conrick, was convicted of stealing two hundred and ten pounds from a friend while both had been staying at the Koroit Hotel. This conviction, together with the revelation at the trial of “fast” behaviour by ostensible community leaders, upset some people in the community, and this may have been a factor which led the Conricks to relocate.
Patrick Conrick had been a prominent community leader for many years, and so the controversy surrounding his son’s alleged theft of a friend’s money was a blow to the family’s local esteem. Conrick had been a Borough of Koroit councilor from 1872 till 1879 and had previously been a councilor of the Belfast Shire from 1863 to 1867. He served in many civic roles and on various committees. His business and political interests meant that he personally knew many of the district’s community leaders, from across the sectarian divides. Personal honor, temperance, and public reputation were important to the group of largely Presbyterian and Methodist gentlemen who at that time dominated the civic and social affairs of the district. Catholic community leaders had also emerged and Conrick and members of his wife’s family were prominent in this regard.
Community relations needed to be negotiated with care, both inside and outside of the sectarian divides. Sectarian and personality-based politics was a feature of life around Koroit. It was possible to become mired in controversy with one’s neighbours over some issue or another that had blown up. Whatever prompted the move, sometime after the public furor surrounding the alleged theft, the Conrick family relocated to Warrnambool, where the family purchased commercial property.
From the early 1880s, Patrick Conrick leased parts of Rehill to local Irish farmers, including to Hugh Reilly and William Crowe. A self-made man from County Clare, William Crowe was a from a village in East Clare close to where Bridget McNamara and her family lived prior to their departure in 1854. William Crowe left East Clare in 1855, one year after the McNamara family departed Ireland. Several of William Crowe’s descendants went into Catholic religious orders and Crowe family members were especially prominent in its supporting the growth of Saint Bridgid’s Church at Crossley.
William Crowe has his own entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. He was a Borough of Koroit councilor for forty years and a prominent backer of the Koroit Butter Factory, among other things. Crowe seems to have been quite an innovator in agricultural production and was a shrewd and successful businessman, with a thirst for the latest farming knowledge. After leasing parts of Rehill for a number of years, Crowe purchased farmland on the rim of Tower Hill.
When Hugh Reilly purchased his half of Rehill in 1903, William Crowe purchased the other half of Patrick Conrick’s land, in association with Peter McVicar, a well-respected Protestant farmer. Whilst remaining steadfast Catholics, Hugh Reilly and William Crowe maintained good relations with their fellow farmers across the sectarian divide.
Sons of Patrick and Ellen Conrick were locally well-known for a number of reasons. The most prominent was John Conrick, the eldest son of Patrick and Ellen. On several occasions in the 1870s, John Conrick overlanded large herds of cattle and horses from southwest Victoria to southwest Queensland.
In this endeavour, Conrick tread a path similar to the sons of Roderick Urquhart of nearby Yangery Park. The Urquhart boys, Angus and Roderick Junior, also went squatting in outback Queensland in the 1870s. Roderick Urquhart Junior returned to the Southwest and became the proprietor of Boonerah, a portion of the original Hexham Park run. Urquhart’s wife was the third daughter of William Armstrong, the owner of Hexham Park. Tragically, their eldest son was killed in Palestine during the First World War. Like the Urquhart brothers, John Conrick became a prominent pastoralist in the Coopers Creek area. This frontier region of Western Queensland was just “opening up” in the wake of the ill-fated Bourke and Wills exploration expedition.
In the early 1880s, John Conrick married Agnes Ware, the daughter of Joseph and Barbara Ware of Minjah Station located to the north of Woolsthorpe. The Ware family of Minjah Station were seriously wealthy squatters. They were socially prominent in Victorian society, both in metropolitan Melbourne and throughout the Western District. George Ware, Agnes’s brother, emerged as a business associate and financial backer of John Conrick and they worked in collaboration to establish several cattle runs in southwest Queensland. It was John who set up and worked the remote stations whereas it was George who provided much of the capital to purchase the stock and equipment. In some ways it might be said that John Conrick was an agent of the Ware family in the years immediately following the marriage of John and Agnes.
The ambitious John Conrick, son of Irish Catholic immigrants, wanted nothing more than to take up land on the frontier and become a squatter in emulation of the likes of the Wares. Like many previous squatters on the make, John Conrick was quite prepared to marry strategically, although it seems that the marriage of John and Agnes Ware did not meet with whole hearted approval from either family. There were conspicuous differences in the couple’s religious and national backgrounds, not to mention the considerable discrepancy in wealth and prestige.
Southwest Victoria was the jumping off point for quite a few ambitious young men who took cattle and horses to Queensland to establish runs on frontier country. The story of squatter pastoralism on the Coopers Creek mirrors that which occurred earlier in Western Victoria, not least in the devastating treatment of Aboriginal people. Some of the same families that led squatter pastoralism in Western Victoria also became involved in squatting in Queensland. For example, the Manifold, Bostock, Ware and Urquhart families all invested in Queensland runs. Younger members of these families, or their agents, travelled to Queensland to oversee operations there.
In western Queensland, the runs were even larger than in Victoria, distances to markets were much greater, and the climate was more challenging. Nevertheless, John Conrick persevered to eventually become a very successful pastoralist. His marriage to Agnes Ware did not survive. The partnership with George Ware was wound up after some years, in the wake of the marital split between John and Agnes.
A biography of John Conrick, titled “Conrick of Nappa Merrie,” was published by Helen Mary Forbes Tolcher in 1997. It seems John was spending too much time in the Aboriginal camp and his extra-curricular activities had come to the attention of Agnes, who was not well pleased, and so she departed the property with some of the children.
Agnes was not the only squatter’s wife who was upset upon learning of such behaviour on the part of her husband. Annie Baxter was another. Her journal indicates that she refused to sleep with her husband, the squatter Lieutenant Andrew Baxter, after it became apparent that he had been intimate with the “lubra” wife of an Aboriginal man, as she put it. By some accounts, such behavior on the part of gentleman proprietors was a feature of remote pastoral districts that remained mostly unacknowledged for decades.
The “Rockhampton Capricornian” newspaper published an obituary of John Conrick on 30 January 1926, as follows: “The many friends of Mr. John Conrick will regret to learn of his death, which occurred at the Ku Rua private hospital, Adelaide, on January 10, after a long illness, says the Melbourne “Argus”. … His father, Mr. Patrick Conrick of Rehill Estate, Koroit, gave him his beginning in Queensland, when aged 19 years, on Nappamarie Station, Cooper’s Creek, one of the first stations to be opened up in Queensland. At that time the blacks were very troublesome, and the reports of their hostile activities had frightened many squatters. … As a member of the Royal Geographical Society, Mr. Conrick’s contributions were looked to with interest, and in recognition of his excellent work he was made a fellow of the society.”
By the early 1890s, back in Koroit, the Conrick family had left their Rehill property at Southern Cross. Eventually they left the Southwest altogether. By the end of the century, Patrick and Ellen Conrick retired to Melbourne. Patrick and Ellen’s move to the city, and the death of Patrick Conrick in 1903, prompted the Conrick family to finally sell Rehill farm. This opened the way for Hugh Reilly to purchase almost half of Rehill in 1903, including the house. When Hugh Reilly purchased his part of Rehill in 1903, it seems he had been renting the farmhouse and leasing land on the property for some time, perhaps while working as a manager or overseer for the Conricks.
The Ballarat Star of 12 March 1903 has the following report of Hugh Reilly’s purchase of Rehill, as follows: “About 240 acres of land on the late Mr Conrick’s Rehill farm, Southern Cross, near Koroit, have been disposed of at excellent prices. Mr H. Reilly, of Southern Cross, purchased 140 acres at £4O per acre, and Messrs W. Crowe and P. Mc Vicar, of Koroit, purchased 100 acres at the same price. The estate, which contained 300 acres, realised between £12,000 and £13,000.”
Aunt Biddy kept the original document for the “Conditions of Sale” of Rehill. The contract of sale indicates that in April 1903 Hugh Reilly purchased one hundred and thirty-nine acres from Patrick Conrick at a price of 5561 pounds. This amounts to a price of forty pounds per acre. Of this amount, 1400 pounds was paid upfront and 4161 pounds was secured by mortgage, payable in one and two years at four percent interest. Thus, the bulk of the purchase price was borrowed money, to be paid back over a relatively short time.
Hugh Reilly must have trusted his own farming abilities and had faith in the capacity of the land to deliver high returns. The debt was evidently paid on time. Given that he had farmed the land for some years, he knew what it was capable of producing. For Hugh Reilly, as for Patrick and John Conrick, the ownership and management of land was something deeply felt as an indication of personal worth. It was pivotal to social status and individual validation. On the part of men from humble circumstances or unfashionable backgrounds, they may have felt that despite disadvantage and discrimination they had managed to succeed in spite of everything.
Into the Twentieth Century
Bridget passed away in 1914 at the age of seventy-one. A brief funeral notice in the Koroit Sentinel and Tower Hill Advocate of 20 June 1914 acknowledged the death of Bridget, as follows: “Reilly – On the 19th June, at “Ray Hill,” Yangery, Bridget, dearly beloved wife of Hugh Reilly, aged 71 years. R.I.P.
(The funeral will leave her late residence on Sunday (tomorrow) at 2:30 p.m. for the Tower Hill Cemetery.) T. Rundell and Son, Undertakers.”
The details of Bridget’s personal life are quite sparse. Her early childhood in County Clare coincided with the years of the great famine. Her teenage years were spent as part of a family of tenant farmers at Tower Hill, where she worked as a laborer. She then likely worked as a maidservant somewhere on or close to Farnham and Dennington. She married Hugh Reilly and after several years at Dennington the family moved closer to Tower Hill and Southern Cross. Hugh’s gamble on the land and his decision to buy part of Rehill paid off, at least if the details of Hugh’s last Will and Testament are a guide.
It must have been traumatic for Bridet to have buried so many children. Most of her children died as young adults while she was living on the slopes of Tower Hill. Towards the end of her life she lived in relative comfort and security in the farmhouse at Rehill, with her aging husband and remaining children.
There is an obituary from the “Koroit Sentinel and Tower Hill Advocate” of 27 June 1914 marking Bridget’s passing. The obituary makes no mention of Bridget McNamara by name, referring to her as Mrs. Hugh Reilly. The obituary does not name her parents, Edward and Mary McNamara, although it mentions that Bridget came to Australia with her parents. It glosses over the hardship and trauma of her life. The fact that she was a McNamara and that her parents and siblings mostly lived at Kirkstall in straitened circumstances is entirely glossed over, as was her time as a housemaid. Her obituary is drafted from the perspective of her Reilly family name, from information provided by her Reilly relatives at Rehill. There is a desire to place positive spin on the past to ensure that the Reilly family is presented in the best possible light. This is usual for an obituary in a local newspaper and obituaries then tended to follow a set formular.
It is likely that Bridget did not spend much time with her parents after Edward and Mary moved from the Farnham Survey to Kirkstall. Bridget was eighteen when her eldest brother John was killed at Kirkstall in 1860. Bridget, as an unmarried eighteen-year-old women of the working class may have had to make her own way in such a situation. She was old enough to go into domestic service on her own account and so may have picked up work at Farnham, Dennington or Warrnambool.
There were two other families of McNamaras who came out on the “Almora” alongside Bridget and her own McNamara family. The three families are listed together, as though they may well have been all related. One of these other McNamara families went to a farm on the Merri River and the other went to a farm on the Hopkins River. It is quite possible they stayed in the district and Bridget may have known some of them.
Bridget’s obituary published in the “Koroit Sentinel and Tower Hill Advocate” is as follows: “Mrs. Hugh Reilly, one of the best known and respected residents of Southern Cross, died on Friday evening after an illness extending over four months, the cause of death being heart failure (writes our Illowa correspondent). She was a colonist of 60 years, having arrived in the State with her parents in the year 1854, from County Clare, Ireland, landing at Port Fairy. The family settled at Lookout Hill, near Farnham, and subsequently removed to Dennington. Deceased was married in Warrnambool in the year 1866 by the Rev. Father Slattery. Mr. and Mrs. Reilly have resided at Southern Cross for many years. About 30 years ago, Mr. Reilly rented Ray Hill farm from the late Patrick Conrick, and carried on farming operations on an extensive scale, with a considerable measure of success. He subsequently purchased the farm, where the family still reside. The deceased had many sterling qualities, and was a kind and charitable nature; she was beloved of her neighbours, and respected by the community. She was of a strong, robust nature, characteristic of the pioneers who endured the hardships and privations inseparable from the lot of the settlers of over half a century ago. The deceased survived all the members of her family, with the exception of two sons, for whom widespread sympathy is felt, and for the bereaved husband, in their loss. There are two sisters and one brother living in the district, Mrs. Kelly (Kirkstall), Mrs. Hayes (Port Fairy), and Mr. D. McNamara (Yarpturk). The funeral took place on Sunday, and the cortege was one of the longest seen in the district for some years. The Rev. Father Manning officiated at the grave, and the mortuary arrangements were carried out by T. Rundell and Son.
The obituary is notable for the agency it accords Bridget, using active words such as “arrived” and “settled.” This degree of agency is misleading, as is the word “pioneer.” The truth of the matter is that it was more the case that Bridget was taken to and planted in the Southwest. Passive voice sentences would be much more appropriate to describe the circumstances of her arrival than the active voice used in the obituary. The influence of the free-settler ideological narrative is quite evident here, which serves to obscure the truth. Bridget was brought to Australia as part of a family of displaced colonial subjects. It is entirely inappropriate to refer to Bridget as a pioneer, as this ascribes greater agency to her than was the case.
The obituary is of interest in several further ways. Bridget did not have a funeral service at the church. It was common for a funeral service to be held in the home and then the cortege left directly for the cemetery. Also, Bridget’s obituary mentions that Hugh Reilly commenced renting Rehill farm “thirty years ago” which indicates they were there well before they purchased the property in 1903. It is likely that Hugh and Bridget were farming at Rehill from the mid-1880s.
Hugh Reilly died in 1918. His wife and most of his children had predeceased him. His sons Charles and Hugh Junior were living on the farm and he had one surviving granddaughter. Hugh Junior was then in poor health and was not expected to live for long, and indeed Hugh Junior died of tuberculosis a few months after his father. This left just Charles as the sole son to take over the farm. Tom Johnstone, Margaret’s father, had died three years earlier. Margaret Johnstone was still living with the Reilly family at that time and would not marry Joe Haberfield for some years.
The will demonstrates the sound financial foundation that Hugh left for his descendants. As well as being a good farmer, Hugh Reilly was evidently a capable businessman. The Last Will and Testament of Hugh Reilly reads as follows:
“This is the last Will and Testament of me, Hugh Reilly of Southern Cross, farmer, County Villiers, State of Victoria.
“I give devise and bequeath unto my son Charles Reilly, the whole of my farm land at Southern Cross containing 139 acres more or less, also my bush land at Warrong containing 200 acres more or less, I likewise fourteen hundred pounds now in the National Bank Koroit on the balance remaining, after paying the legacy hereafter specified to Margaret Mary Johnston.
“To my granddaughter Margaret Mary Johnston I bequeath four hundred pounds sterling together with the whole of my household furniture effects that may be in her house at the time of my death. I direct my son, Charles Reilly, to pay my son Hugh Reilly one pound sterling per week and to provide him with full board and lodging so long as the said Hugh Reilly shall live. I also direct that my son, Charles Reilly, erect and pay for suitable railings at the family burial ground at Tower Hill; and I hereby appoint my said son, Charles Reilly, and my said granddaughter, Margaret Mary Johnston executer and executrix of this my Will, made by me on 18 May 1918.”
Hugh Reilly signed his will in a shaky hand. The witnesses were J. Bowman and Henry Brun. The J. Bowman mentioned as witness was likely the older brother of Grandma Margaret, who would marry Charles Reilly three years later. Hugh died on 27 May 2018, ten days after he signed the will. Charles was one executer and Margaret Johnstone, Charles’s niece, was the other. The Victorian Government office for probate stamped the will on 10 August 1918. These official legal records survive in the Victorian government’s archives.
There is an obituary for Hugh Reilly published on 8 June 1918 in the Koroit Sentinel and Tower Hill Advocate. The obituary reads as follows: “By the death of Mr. Hugh Reilly, senior, which took place at his residence, Southern Cross, on Monday 27th May, one of the best-known figures in the farming life of this district has been removed, writes our Illowa correspondent. Born in County Cavan, Ireland, he left for Australia on the ship “General Hewitt” at the age of 24 years. He landed at Portland in 1854, and worked for a short period in the vicinity as a farm-hand. He subsequently accompanied a party of Government surveyors and pegged out the present town of Hamilton. A few years later he arrived in this district, and was employed by the late Mr. Thompson, of Koroit. Later he went to the gold diggings in New Zealand, but subsequently returned to this district, where he was employed for a number of years by the late Mr. W. R. Routledge. He was married at St. Joseph’s Church, Warrnambool, by the late Dean Slattery in 1866. The late Mr. Reilly has resided in this district ever since. He was a very successful farmer and dairyman, and took a keen interest in everything associated with the rural industries. He purchased the late Mr. P. Conrick’s farm, “Rehill” about 15 years ago, and he was generally regarded as one of the most enterprising farmers in the district. He was a kindly employer, a good neighbour and scrupulously honest in all his business dealings. Advancing age necessitated his giving up all active interests in business during the past few years. The deceased was 88 years of age, and was predeceased by his wife about four years ago. Two members of his family survive him. Requiem Mass was celebrated at the R.C. Church, and the remains were interred in the Tower hill cemetery, a large number of district residents paying their last tribute of respect by joining the funeral cortege. The mortuary arrangements were carried out by Messers. T. Rundell and Son.
There are several errors in the above obituary. Firstly, the year of arrival of the “General Hewitt” is wrong. The correct year should be 1856 rather than 1854. Secondly, Hugh’s age on arrival was probably a few years younger than the stated twenty-four. Thirdly, although Hugh might have accompanied a team of government surveyors to the Hamilton area, the town of Hamilton itself was initially surveyed in 1850, several years prior to Hugh’s arrival in Australia. Nevertheless, an extension to the town was surveyed around 1856 or 1857, which may have been the surveying activity the obituary was referring to. Interestingly, Hugh had a requiem mass at the Catholic church, and the cortege left from there.
Charles Reilly inherited the Rehill property when he was still a bachelor, but in 1922 he married Grandma Margaret, then a widow with five young children. Aunt Biddy told the author that Charles and Margaret started living on the Rehill farm around 1926, several years after Charles married Grandma Margaret. In the interim period, prior to returning to Southern Cross, Charles and Margaret had lived in Spring Street, Koroit, which was where Aunt Biddy was born in 1923.
Charles leased the Rehill farmland to others for several years in the early 1920s. A neighbor, Joe Haberfield, married Margaret Johnstone in 1925, and the Haberfields were working some of the farmland in a share-farming arrangement with Charles. Margaret Johnstone’s father, Tom Johnstone, had previously worked with Hugh Reilly on the Reilly farm, so the connection with that side of the family was maintained. Rehill was farmed by an extended family network, with work carried out by various members of the Reilly, Johnstone, Haberfield and Kelly families.
There is remarkably little archival information concerning farming activities at Rehill over the decades of the 1930s and 1940s. The three daughters of Charles and Margaret were sent to board at Saint Ann’s in Warrnambool, perhaps with an eye to their security at the farm and so that they might devote themselves to getting some form of education away from the confines of Southern Cross.
Charles Reilly died on 31 October 1954. In early November of 1954, the “Koroit Sentinel” published a lengthy and glowing obituary, which reads as follows:
“Mr. Charles Reilly died at his home at Southern Cross on Sunday last. He had been ill for about ten days.
Mr. Reilly was 86 years of age and had been in good health until the time of his last illness.
He was one of the most highly esteemed residents of the district and his death will be deeply regretted by his many friends.
A member of a well-known family, Mr. Reilly had spent all his life in this district. He took an active interest in many organizations in his younger days, and at all times was a very generous supporter of local efforts.
The farm operated by Mr. Reilly at Southern Cross was one of the famous properties of the district. It was purchased from the Conrick family by Mr. Reilly’s father almost a century ago, after the late Mr. Conrick decided to leave Victoria for Queensland. The long hill on the adjoining road is still known as Conrick’s Hill.
Live stock was always of particular interest on the property, and both Mr. Reilly and his father were successful exhibitors at district shows, and Mr. Reilly himself was a most consistent prize winner as a rider of his own ponies and hacks.
Racing enthusiasts will remember what were known as the Reilly ponies which raced throughout the district.
The outstanding performer was Alice Grey, a beautiful grey pony, winner of many races, and one of Mr. Reilly’s proudest possessions.
So outstanding were the ponies bred on the Reilly property that several of them were sold to Melbourne owners and raced most successfully at Ascot and other Metropolitan tracks.
The breeding of high class draught horses was another interest of Mr. Reilly’s and he also had great success in this field.
His farm was often selected for the staging of the old-time ploughing matches, and there were many stirring contests, at which all the district experts were seen in action.
A keen enthusiast for improving the standard of dairy cattle, he developed one of the best herds in the district, and was regarded as a particularly good judge of all kinds of dairy cows.
His years weighed very lightly upon him, and he was keenly interested in everything around him, right up to the time of his death.
A pleasant, genial personality, the late Mr. Reilly brought something of his own quiet happiness wherever he went.
In his family circle, and amongst his many friends, he had earned a respect and an affection seldom met with, and he leaves many grateful and happy memories of a wise and kindly father and a good friend.
Sincere sympathy will be extended to Mrs. Reilly and family in their bereavement.
The funeral took place on Monday afternoon to the Tower Hill Cemetery after Rosary and Final Absolution at the Church of the Infant Jesus, Koroit, the celebrant being Rev. Fr. O’Farrell.
The very large and representative gathering was a fine tribute to a grand citizen.
Coffin bearers were Messrs. Joseph, James and John Kelly, L. Jones, C. Reilly and J. Haberfield.
The pall bearers were Messrs. D. Bowman, J. Keane, Jos Haberfield, B. Haberfield, F. Haberfield, P. Bowman, J. Ryan and S. Worland.
The burial service was read by Rev. Fr. Kiniry.
Messrs. Guyett and Sons were in charge of the mortuary arrangements.
Several comments and corrections should be made regarding this obituary. Firstly, Hugh Reilly bought Rehill from Patrick Conrick in 1903, which was only fifty years from the purchase date rather than the hundred years indicated in the obituary. Secondly, it was John Conrick, Patrick Conrick’s eldest son who famously traveled to Queensland. John Conrick seems to have had little to do with the eventual sale of Rehill to Hugh Reilly. Thirdly, the list of pall bearers and coffin bearers records the names of men who had a long association with Southern Cross. The Kelly, Keane, Bowman and Haberfield families are all represented.
Notably, Lionel Jones is also on the list of pallbearers. Lionel married Patricia Reilly the year before this funeral. Joe, Jim and Jack Kelly, the three sons from Grandma Margaret’s first marriage to Joseph Kelly, are also named as pallbearers. They worked on Rehill as well as other local farms and lived at Southern Cross until they were adults. By the time of this funeral, all the Kelly boys had moved from Southern Cross and had started their own families in the district.
Patricia’s only full brother, Chas Reilly, is also listed as a coffin bearer. Tragically, Uncle Chas would commit suicide less than a decade after his father’s funeral. Chas’s death would ultimately lead to the sale of Rehill. It is the author’s understanding that there was initially some dispute between the female members of the respective Kelly and Reilly sides of the family regarding the will Uncle Chas left. Legal representation became involved in the matter. Relations between the disputing parties were subsequently repaired over the years, although perhaps not entirely.
Patricia mentioned several times that Charles Reilly had a traditional Irish wake in the farmhouse prior to his formal funeral service. The body was placed on the main table in the house, and friends and neighbors arrived to mark his passing. Such affairs could drag on for some considerable time and involved prayers, eating, and drinking. Patricia expressed her disapproval of this practice and mentioned that it was one of the last proper Irish wakes in the district. Patricia seemed quite happy that such old traditions had mostly died out. She felt it was disturbing to see her beloved father put on open display in the midst of toasting, lamentation and reminiscing.
Charles Reilly’s death in 1954 occurred one year prior to the birth of Paul Jones, the eldest child of Lionel and Patricia. Paul was born in 1955, Mark in 1956, Leon in 1957, Richard in 1958, Adrian in 1960 and Maree in 1966.
The author has vague recollections of the Reilly farm. It was sold in the mid-1960s and Grandma Margaret moved to Warrnambool. In the 1960s, Aunt Biddy lived with Uncle Tony O’Loughlin on his soldier settler block at Minjah. As children, we often stayed there. Aunt Mary and her children, Pat and Danny, lived for a time on a property near Streatham called Blythvale. Mary’s husband, Merve Neild, was working as a general hand on this property. Aunt Mary, and Pat and Danny, visited Koroit during school holidays especially after the breakup of Aunt Mary’s marriage.
The Jones family lived in Koroit throughout the 1960s, first in a little weatherboard house in North Street, then in a rented farmhouse at Crossley, and lastly in the brick veneer house in Wright Street. Patricia and Lionel had purchased the block earlier. The house was based on a suburban A.V. Jennings design that Lionel appropriated from a free brochure and was a reflection of their aspirations for American style modernity. American cultural influences were increasingly evident in rural areas and American style television and music became pervasive in the 1960s and 1970s.
Lionel worked as a baker at Lynch’s Bakery in these decades. Patricia eventually started a job as a domestic worker at the Koroit Hospital, washing dishes and making cups of tea. The children attended Saint Patrick’s School in Koroit, apart from the two year period where we attended Saint Brigid’s Primary School at Crossley. We served as altar boys at the church, played sports a lot, and generally ran around in a very free-range sort of way. We had bikes and we would hold races in the street. Sometimes we hunted rabbits. We were expected to work at whatever tasks were going on.
