Patricia’s grandmother on her paternal side is Bridget McNamara. Born in County Clare around 1842, Bridget was twelve years of age when she arrived at Portland Bay in 1854 as an assisted emigrant. Bridget and her family came aboard the “Almora”. Bridget was the fourth child of Edward and Mary McNamara, her parents. The eldest child of Edward and Mary was John McNamara, a young man of eighteen in 1854.
In the 1990s, Aunt Biddy obtained a genealogical family tree outlining McNamara descendants since the family’s arrival in Australia. The genealogy was compiled by Sister Irene, a Catholic nun who was the great-granddaughter of the aforementioned John McNamara, the eldest of the children who arrived with Edward and Mary McNamara. John McNamara was the older brother of Bridget McNamara, who was Patricia’s grandmother, and so Sister Irene was a cousin of Patricia and Biddy. The document is essentially just a list of births, deaths, and marriages. It traces family members from the 1850s until the 1980s.
The ledger of immigrants transported on the “Almora” is now available through the Victorian Government’s website. The ledger shows details of the immigrant families, their places of origin, religious affiliations, employment sector, age, and where some of them went upon arrival.
Immigrant processing depots were located near the wharves in both Portland and Port Fairy. These depots were where the migrants were initially housed and processed and where many of them were connected with their initial employers. At Port Fairy, the immigrant processing depot was in East Belfast, “the government town” on the east bank of the Moyne River located just outside the boundary of Atkinson’s privately owned Belfast township.
On the ship’s ledger, Edward McNamara is listed as having been assigned to a Mr. Edward Kelly, of Belfast, for a period of six months from 27 May 1854. It is possible that this Mr. Kelly was the man after whom Kelly’s Swamp is named, because the McNamara family lived for a period at Lookout Hill, overlooking the swamp that now bears Kelly’s name.
A large part of the Farnham Survey was leased to primary tenants who then employed newly arrived Irish immigrants to work in the fields. The immigrants cleared the scrub and grew crops. William Rutledge lived mainly in Belfast during the 1850s, where he ran his thriving trading business and he involved himself fully in the civic affairs of the town. A complex array of leasehold and rental arrangements was in place on the Farnham Survey. Tenants sub-leased sections to other tenants who contracted laborers to work the fields.
Lookout Hill, where the McNamara family initially lived, is a couple of kilometers due south of the Tower Hill Cemetery. Kelly’s Swamp lies beside the coastal dunes southeast of Lookout Hill. Most land to the north, east, and west of the swamp was part of the Farnham Survey. The agricultural laborers who worked on the Survey were not permitted to erect a dwelling on the Survey itself, and so they tended to live on its margins alongside lanes at places such as Lookout Hill, Dairy Town, and Killarney.
Many of the immigrants lived in crude turf and stone huts or in timber, bark, and canvas shanties. It is likely that the McNamaras lived in a basic shack along a track on the south side of the Rutledge estate. This is a wild and windswept place, very beautiful but at times very exposed to the elements.
The Survey was in the process of being cleared of its native vegetation. Drains and ditches were being dug when the McNamara family was brought to live at Lookout Hill. Cropping had commenced some years earlier. Tenants were brought across the world to this new “Garden of Eden” to clear, dig, plant, and harvest.
The ledger of immigrants aboard the “Almora” provides several insights into the McNamara family. Edward and Mary McNamara are recorded as thirty-eight and thirty-seven years of age respectively. Edward is listed as an agricultural laborer. Listed under Edward and Mary are their younger children: Bridget, who was twelve, Norry (Honorah), who was ten, and Denis, who was six. Neither Edward nor Mary could read or write. They were of the Catholic faith. They likely at least understood the Irish language. The older people of East Clare still spoke Irish but many children were encouraged by their parents to speak English as that is where the future seemed to lie.
The 1841 census for Ireland reported that the country had 8,175,124 inhabitants and four million spoke Irish. The census numbers are perhaps misleading with regard to the degree which Irish was spoken in the Ireland. If the head of a household could not speak English, then it was recorded as an Irish household. Probably a much higher percentage of the younger population was bilingual and used both languages to varying degree.
After the turmoil of the seventeenth century in Ireland the upper class practically ceased speaking Irish. The language remained strong in the west of the country, especially among the rural poor, and this profile fits the McNamara family very well. Irish was mostly forbidden in National Schools. In communities where Irish was spoken at home, it was strongly discouraged and shamed in civic discourse. Irish was portrayed as an ignorant peasant language, whereas English was the language of wealth and upward mobility. Poor tenant farmers spoke Irish, while rich and successful businessmen spoke English.
The leadership of the Catholic Church favored English, which was an international language based on imperial power. The Church as a global institution preferred the use of a global language. Local parish priests did not necessarily share this preference for English and many priests in rural communities spoke Irish with their parishioners. The mass itself was said in Latin, but sermons were very often delivered in English. For the Church hierarchy and for many Irish nationalists, being a Catholic was seen as the essence of being Irish, rather than being an Irish speaker. By the Famine era, Irish was generally absent from formal church services, even in Irish-speaking areas.
Out of eight million people in Ireland in 1841, one million people died as a consequence of the famine and its aftermath. The sections of Irish society most hard hit by the famine were those with high proportions of Irish speaking adults and their bi-lingual children. Irish speakers emigrated in great numbers. In the United States, it is estimated that almost one-third of post-famine immigrants spoke fluent Irish, and another quarter were children of Irish speakers. It is difficult to know what the figures would have been for Irish immigrants to Tower Hill, however the great majority of the Irish who came to the Southwest would have been at least bi-lingual with varying degrees of fluency in English.
The great famine of the late 1840s resulted in one million people leaving Ireland. For those who emigrated to Australia, being able to speak English was almost essential. Immigrants who could not speak any English on departure from Ireland needed to acquire some proficiency in the language, and indeed some proficiency in English was important in the process of gaining assisted passage. The bureaucratic underpinnings supporting the mass transfer of populations operated through the medium of English.
Irish was not the only language carried to the Southwest by those on the immigrant ships. There were speakers of Scottish Gaelic as well. James Bonwick in his book about the region mentions that when he was travelling in the hinterland of Portland he met a shepherd from Skye who could not speak any useful English.
The passenger ledger shows that there were two other families of McNamaras listed underneath the names of Edward and Mary and their children. Underneath the entries for Edward and Mary McNamara and their children are entries for two other families of McNamaras, also from Clare. It is possible that these families were relatives of Edward and Mary and that the three McNamara families were travelling as a group aboard the “Almora”. John and Mary McNamara, aged thirty-five and thirty-six respectively, are listed with their four children. Beneath these names are listed Patrick and Ellen McNamara, aged twenty-eight and twenty-six, respectively. This younger couple had one child with them.
Upon arrival, John and Mary McNamara and their family went to the farm of Donald Liset on the Merri River. Patrick and Ellen McNamara went to the farm of a Mr Newman on the Hopkins River. Edward and Mary and their family went to Tower Hill. While these locations are all in the Southwest, they were far enough apart so as to make regular contact difficult for those who had to walk.
When filling out the shipping ledgers of assisted immigrants, children under the age of fifteen were listed below their parents. Children fifteen and over, such as John, Mary, and Ellen McNamara, were listed separately from their parents, which is why these three older children are not listed with the others of their family. On the ships, immigrants were evidently considered adults from the age of fifteen and it is perhaps understandable why teenagers were segregated away from the berths of family groups. Older boys were quartered with single men and older girls were quartered with single women.
Some commentators maintain that William Rutledge did the Irish workers a favor by having them employed on his land. In the wake of the famine and its subsequent deprivations hundreds of thousands of people needed alternative livelihoods. However, was the sending loads of impoverished Irish tenants to Australia a good outcome for these poor and unwanted people. From a moral standpoint, it seems wrong to transplant the surplus population of Ireland, a country the British Crown forcibly colonized, to another country cleared of its indigenous inhabitants by the very same agents of the Crown.
It is important to bear in mind the power dynamics between servant and master, tenant and landlord at the time. The long and unfortunate story of the Crown’s control over Ireland should also be considered. Resistance was crushed. People were moved around the globe like pieces on a chess board, the objects of imperial might.
Morality plays little part in geo-politics, it is often said, and this is true as far as it goes. While it is all very well for academic commentators to argue that empires have always behaved in this way, the unbridled exercise of imperial power by a colonizer does not make all that happens right from a moral standpoint. Academic historians exhort the public to avoid “presentism” when evaluating historic events. This is the uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes when evaluating the past, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts. Family history should perhaps not be bound so tightly by this precept, while remaining mindful of the pitfalls.
Most of us interested in genealogy feel we are entitled to feel aggrieved on behalf of our forebears. A genealogical account is as much a literary narrative as it an academic exercise. While every effort should be exercised to maintain historical accuracy, it seems pointless to entirely disavow a personal point of view regarding right and wrong.
The “Almora” arrived in Portland with hundreds of assisted immigrants aboard. She was a regular voyager on the run from Liverpool to southeast Australia during the 1850s, bringing hundreds of immigrants on every voyage. However, the voyage she made in 1854 was the only one where she anchored at Portland Bay with her consignment of immigrants. The local newspapers of the day reported extensively on the arrival of the “Almora”, not least because of the mail and news she brought from England.
The Argus newspaper of 6 May 1854 has the following report, written by their Portland correspondent: “The arrival of the emigrant ship “Almora” has a particular interest from the fact that she has brought us later home news than, at the time of her arrival, had reached any other Australian Port, and we were able to publish the latest European intelligence of all the Australian journals. The “Almora” sailed from Liverpool on the 31st January; crossed the equator on the 25th February; had very light winds, and far south had to tack off the Brazil coast of Pt. Segiuo, and lay becalmed with the land in sight for 36 hours; and having experienced the winds from the south and east after leaving the Brazil coast, had nothing but head winds from the southeast up to the 31st March. She anchored in Portland Bay on the 27th of April. The “Almora” is a first rate clipper-built ship diagonally iron trussed on the frame in the building, the same as ships of war. As soon as the immigrants are all disembarked and her cargo for this place landed, she returns direct to Liverpool; and Capt. Turner confidently expects to make the journey home under 80 days.”
The Launceston based Cornwell Chronicle of 13 May 1854 has a report from Portland Bay of the arrival of the “Almora”, as follows: “This fine ship, with 430 Government immigrants, anchored in our bay on Tuesday, after a beautiful voyage of 84 days. The immigrants are chiefly from Ireland, and are reported as respectable and well conducted on the passage. We believe nearly all who wished to engage have found opportunities of so doing at very good wages.”
The “Almora” also brought illness with her to Portland, as reported in the Cornwell Chronicle of 12 August 1854, as follows: “The Scarlet Fever is producing serious ravages in Portland. It is confidently stated that the fever was on board the “Almora” immigrant ship when she came into port and that there was a case of death from this disease in the depot soon after the immigrants were put on shore. An official enquiry is about to be made into the matter.”
One item of news brought by the “Almora” told of a tragic story which highlighted the risks involved when making these long voyages. The Portland Guardian of 27 April 1854 reports that the “Almora” brought news of the shipwreck of the “Tayleur”, another immigrant vessel. The “Tayleur” ran aground off Lambay Island in the Irish Sea and sank on her maiden voyage. Of perhaps more than 600 aboard, only 280 survived. Estimates of the number of lives lost vary. Out of over 200 women on board, only three survived, possibly because of the difficulty with the clothing of that era and the fact that most women could not swim. Of the more than fifty children on board, only two survived.
Thankfully the “Almora” made the voyage to Portland safely. It is said that conditions on the immigrant ships to Australia were generally much better than conditions on many of the “coffin” ships that took Irish emigrants to the United States at the height of the famine. The long experience of transporting convicts to Australia taught the British bureaucracy many valuable lessons in how to transfer masses of people by sailing ship in relative safety and good health. Convict transportation to Van Dieman’s Land ended the year before the “Almora” arrived at Portland. However, the need for a subaltern workforce in the colonies remained.
William Rutledge and his colleague Roderick Urquhart controlled the farmland in the vicinity of Lookout Hill, where Edward, Mary, and their children lived and worked. There is a low sandstone ridge here running parallel to the coast. The ocean views from the ridge are magnificent. Towards Tower Hill, the land is highly arable, thanks to the volcanic activity of former times.
Not far from Lookout Hill, closer to Tower Hill, was Dairytown, another location where Irish tenant farmers erected simple dwellings on the margins of the Farnham Survey. Still further west, at Killarney, between the Farnham and Belfast Surveys, Irish families built rudimentary shacks along the tracks which bordered the Surveys. By the end of the 1850s there were hundreds of Irish around Tower Hill.
The Tower Hill cemetery was established in 1856 on the northern border of the Farnham Survey and it is here that Patricia’s forebears are buried. When the cemetery welcomed its first burial, Dairytown (Derrytown) was already established next to where the cemetery was reserved. It was predominantly a village of poor Irish tenants and laborers. In due course Dairytown was surveyed and subdivided into small freehold blocks. Grandma Margaret said that some of her forebears lived here in the early days. She also said that some of the Irish families who lived in this very exposed location subsequently moved to Koroit and others went to Kirkstall and to Southern Cross.
The Farnham Survey extended from Killarney to the Merri River at Dennington, skirting Tower Hill. Most parts of Yangery and Illowa were included as part of the Survey. Several years after obtaining his survey, William Rutledge purchased considerable additional farmland northeast of Yangary towards Woodford. Farnham Survey extended to Mahoney’s Road on the westside. South of Crossley, on the edge of the Survey, Marcus Macartney, brother-in-law of James Atkinson, owned farmland at the spot where the outlet of the lake ran into the Tower Hill Marsh.
Robert Woodward, another relative of Atkinson, became a large landowner in the district and was a business agent for both Atkinson and Rutledge. He was one of a small elite that dominated the affairs of the district. Woodward was Atkinson’s nephew, and like James Atkinson himself, he had family connections with former British military gentlemen active in the commercial life of Sydney.
James Atkinson arrived in Sydney in 1830 from Ireland and became a prominent and well connected member of Sydney society, at least partly due to his family connections to Colonel Charles Wall of the 3rd Buff regiment who was married to his sister. James Atkinson was thus the brother-in-law of Colonel Wall, given that Atkinson’s sister, Anne, was married to Colonel Wall. When James Atkinson and his wife first arrived in Sydney they lived with Colonel Wall and his wife, James’s sister. Robert Woodward married the daughter of Colonel Charles Wall and Anne Atkinson. Woodward’s father was Captain Charles Woodward of the Royal Meath Militia, an Irish regiment of the British Army.
James Atkinson was the head of a syndicate that included his brother-in-law Colonel Wall. Much of the financial backing behind the syndicate came from the Sydney merchant firm of Flower, Salting & Co. This was the same firm which financed William Rutledge in his endeavours. As merchants in Sydney, the Flower family were prominently involved in the wool trade between Australia and Britain.
The firm encountered its share of financial difficulties during the slump of the early 1840s. After restructuring, the business recovered, and a new firm, P W Flower and Company, was established in London in 1844. For a time, this firm became Britain’s largest importer of Australian wool. The company was involved in the shipping of wool and a wide variety of other merchandize to and from Australia and also traded coffee from India.
One of the Flower brothers, Horace Flower, married Amelia Kirk, the sister of William Rutledge’s wife. Horace Flower was also a partner in the firm of William Rutledge & Co. and they lived in Port Fairy for many years. Phillip Flower, his brother, managed the family’s commercial affairs in London. The financial and family connections within this extended commercial cartel of the extended Atkinson and Rutledge families were extensive and opaque. It is clear from the background the individuals involved that the consortium had strong links to the British Military and to the Australian and English wool industry.
Much of the land between Belfast and Warrnambool was thus owned either by William Rutledge or James Atkinson, or by several landowners and businessmen associated with them, some of whom were their relatives by birth or marriage.
One such landowning proprietor was Scotsman Roderick Urquhart. His Yangery Park Estate bordered the Farnham Survey at Illowa. Both Urquhart and Rutledge were associated with James Atkinson, and various members of the Urquhart and Rutledge families served as agents for Atkinson in the 1840s and 1850s. Roderick Urquhart’s uncle, George Urquhart, was Atkinson’s superintendent at Parramatta, outside Sydney. George reportedly overlanded from Sydney in 1840 and selected the land to be included in the Belfast Survey on behalf of Atkinson. Both George and Roderick Urquhart initially lived at Rosebrook and were involved in surveying the district. They also oversaw the initial clearing of bushland on the Belfast Survey, employing laborers to do the work.
Arriving in the district as a well-connected young man, Roderick Urquhart founded a family dynasty of his own. From the mid-1840s, Urquhart managed parts of the Farnham Survey and then in 1847 he purchased nearby Yangary Park at Illowa, adjoining the north boundary of the Survey. Urquhart, together with his wife and children, returned to Scotland in 1857, where his two sons and five daughters continued their education. Roderick Urquhart returned to Yangery Park in 1862. He was gratified to see that while he was on his sojourn to the mother country, the land at Tower Hill had been cleared and developed into highly arable farmland by Irish and Scottish tenant laborers. The assisted immigration programs sponsored by the government and by squatters and proprietors such as Urquhart, Atkinson and Rutledge had paid ample dividends to the men of capital.
The Urquharts re-invested the returns made by their operations at Belfast and Tower Hill. They diversified into squatter pastoralism on a large scale. The Urquhart family was among many squatter families who held pastoral estates in various locations in Australia, including in outback Queensland. Two sons of Roderick Urquhart, together with a cousin, Angus Fraser, took up pastoralism in Queensland in the late 1870s. After some initial trouble with the “blacks”, which they successfully resolved to their advantage, they developed Kaliduwarry Station in the vicinity of Cooper’s Creek.
In the Southwest, the Urquhart family were noted for their support of polo, especially on their “Hexham Park” run northeast of Woolsthorpe. The family dynasty suffered a substantial blow when Roderick Urquhart the Third was tragically killed in Palestine while serving with the Australian Imperial Force in the First World War as an officer in the Light Horse Brigade. Alongside the benefits of being in the inner circle, there was also an expectation that the young gentlemen of such landed families would lead efforts to defend the Empire. Young Roderick Urquhart performed his duty well in this regard.
Following their arrival from Clare, Mary and Edward McNamara and their children worked on the Survey at Tower Hill. It is likely the family remained southeast of the lake for several years. Bridget Reilly’s eventual obituary notes that her McNamara family spent their initial period in the Tower Hill district at Lookout Hill. Furthermore, the 1856 Electoral Roll for Victoria lists Edward McNamara as a laborer living on Farnham in the district of Koroit. Edward and his family had arrived at Tower Hill from East Clare two years earlier. However, by 1860 it appears that most of the McNamara family had moved to Kirkstall.
It is notable when viewing Sister Irene’s genealogical list of McNamara descendants just how many McNamara offspring have descended from this first generation. The various children of Mary and Edward McNamara mostly married other Irish born immigrants and raised families in the Koroit district. Some of their offspring did not survive and some did not marry. Nevertheless, this particular family was quite prolific in terms of the number of children born in the two decades following its arrival.
In 1856, John McNamara, the eldest child, married Anne Murphy. John was twenty years of age when he married Anne, who was also an Irish immigrant. John and Anne initially lived bordering the Survey at Tower Hill. The couple soon had three children. The first two were born while they were living south of the lake, at Tower Hill. Significantly, their third child was born in January 1860 at Kirkstall. John and Anne had evidently moved to Kirkstall on the other side of the lake and some ten kilometers away from Lookout Hill.
Tragically, John McNamara was killed at Kirkstall in March 1860 in a well-digging accident. He was just twenty-four and in the prime of life. The youngest of his children was less than two months old when this tragedy happened. For Edward and Mary, the loss of their eldest son must have been a great tragedy. They had nursed him through the famine and then to Australia, only to lose him down a hole at Kirkstall. Furthermore, the now middle-aged couple likely had to support John’s children. It seems Edward and Mary moved to Kirkstall after the tragedy. Anne, John’s wife, married her second husband, Jeremiah Gleeson, in 1870 and she had further children with him.
The second of John and Anne’s children, Edward McNamara, was born at Tower Hill in 1858. He is the grandfather of Sister Irene and thus the nephew of Bridgid McNamara, Patricia’s paternal grandmother.
Perhaps John and Anne McNamara had saved enough money to buy a small block of land at Kirkstall. The consolidation of leases that occurred on the Farnham Survey in the late 1850s prompted some tenant families to move to more affordable land at places such as Kirkstall. Land here was cheaper than many other places although the quality of the farmland was not as good. Most immigrants aspired to own their own land, no matter how small and indifferent.
Mary McNamara, the second child of Edward and Mary, married Patrick Kelly in 1855 when she was just seventeen. This was a year after the family’s arrival and before John married. Eventually, Patrick and Mary had ten children, all born at Kirkstall, bar the first child who was born at Tower Hill in the late 1850s when the McNamaras were still living southeast of the lake, adjacent the Survey.
The next child, Ellen McNamara, married William Scales in 1863 and they had eight children. Ellen and William also lived at Kirkstall after their marriage.
The fourth child is Patricia’s grandmother, Bridget McNamara. She married Patricia’s grandfather, Hugh Reilly, in 1866. When she married Hugh, Bridget McNamara was listed as living at Warrnambool, working as a housekeeper. Bridget and Hugh had at least eight children, most of whom did not survive far into adulthood. Several died of respiratory disease as young adults. Only two of Bridget and Hugh Reilly’s children had offspring of their own. One of these children, Charles Reilly, Patricia’s father, married Margaret Bowman in 1922. They had five children. Margaret also had five children with Joseph Kelly, her first husband.
Bridget McNamara was eighteen and unmarried when John, her eldest brother, died in 1860. Given that she was of working age when her parents moved to Kirkstall, she may have spent little time there, perhaps having already gone into domestic service. Eighteen years of age was old enough for a girl of her class to commence domestic service. Bridget may have remained east of the lake when the others moved to Kirkstall.
The fifth child, Honorah, married Robert Hayes in 1866 and they had ten children, all born at Kirkstall. Robert Hayes was an assisted Irish immigrant born in County Tipperary.
Dennis, the sixth child, married Mary Toohey in 1890 and they had six children, all born at Kirkstall. Mary was Australian born. She was raised at Mepunga to the east of Warrnambool. Her Irish born parents had been among the first Europeans to live in the district. Dennis and Mary and their family later lived at Yarpturk for some years. Mary died there in 1916 aged forty-nine years.
Sister Irene’s genealogical information shows that most of the grandchildren of Edward and Mary McNamara were born close to Koroit, particularly at Kirkstall. Subsequent generations have been born in various places all over Victoria. Edward and Mary’s direct descendants in Victoria would now number several hundreds, if not thousands. The family arrived in Portland with very little, likely forced from their East Clare homeland by circumstances beyond their control. As can be seen from this example, the younger members of the Irish community at Tower Hill tended to marry each other. For decades, Catholics mainly married Catholics and Protestants mainly married Protestants.
People now living in the Southwest tend not to consider themselves migrants in any way. They feel thoroughly Australian. They might even imagine that they are the original people of the district. Most people do not know much of distant forebears, or they only know the lists of names written down in the notes of a deceased maiden aunt. Being a migrant has a pejorative connotation for many people. Most people have little understanding of why their nineteenth century forebears came here in the first place.
The categories of Irish, Scottish, English, Catholic, Presbyterian and Anglican once had real meaning in people’s minds. In contrast with today, distinctions of national origin and religion were important in the mid-nineteenth century. The people who came here were not all of the same in terms of class and nationality. James Bonwick, for example, is quite explicit about these differences when he describes the population of the Western District. For him, the categories of class, ethnicity, religion were of paramount importance. He saw Western District society as diverse and very far from mono-cultural. He describes in detail the large under-class of subaltern workers, and outlines in great detail the generally condescending attitudes of the gentlemen who comprised the small ruling class. His assessments are replete with moral judgements, revealing his inherent class, religious and national prejudices.
While the society was not mono-cultural, it was mono-racial. For the most part, the surviving Aboriginal population was actually not considered part of this society at all.
It is likely that the family of Edward and Mary McNamara was quite representative of many of the Irish who arrived at that time. The aftermath of the famine was marked by conflict and social upheaval. In some places, a whole class of people was removed from the landscape. The Irish children on the ships sent to Portland were children who survived the great hunger and its aftermath. This trauma must have stalked many lives. Land and language was lost. The pain of dislocation likely persisted down the generations in some sublimated form.
There are two archival reference that probably relate to the McNamara family when Edward and Mary lived at Kirkstall. There is a paragraph in “A Green and Pleasant Land – A History of Koroit” that reads as follows: “The first church in Kirkstall was a Primitive Methodist church opened in the early 1860s. The church had not been in use for long when a dispute arose over the ownership of the building. For about two years a man named McNamara used the church as a piggery, until the Methodists regained control with the aid of a Supreme Court Bailiff and several policemen.”
This same incident is mentioned in “A Shamrock Beneath the Southern Cross – An History of the Shire of Belfast”, as follows: “In August 1867, G.C. Fricker, the Supreme Court Bailiff accompanied by Mr. Mills, the Crown Lands Agent, Senior Constable Tatlock and other members of the Belfast police court went out to Kirkstall to take possession of the church. For two years past the church had been in the procession of a person named McNamara, who had bought the land upon which the church stood. However, he was not entitled to the building. McNamara was not at home when Tatlock knocked at the door and his wife did not know where the key was located. Back to the church went the party and the constables broke the lock from the door. Procession was taken by Mr. Fricker who handed the church over to the trustees.” Edward and Mary lived at Kirkstall for many years, from the early 1860s till their deaths in the late 1800s.
Both Edward and Mary McNamara are buried in Tower Hill Cemetery, not far from where William Rutledge was laid to rest. A simple memorial headstone marks the spot where Edward and Mary were buried, close to the Reilly family plot. It is likely that this was erected long after John McNamara and his parents died, perhaps at the instigation of Sister Irene, who was clearly interested in the genealogy of her family. This headstone serves as a memorial to Edward and Mary and also to their eldest son, John, Sister Irene’s direct forebear.
A report on the death of Edward McNamara was published in the Koroit Sentinel and Tower Hill Advocate of 10 August 1889. This confirms that Edward and Mary McNamara lived at Kirkstall for the greater part of their lives since coming to Victoria. This report is one of the few documents in the archive mentioning Edward and Mary by name. As far as the public record is concerned they were people who lived more or less anonymously.
The newspaper report is as follows: “A very old resident of the district has passed away in the person of Mr. Edward McNamara, who was found dead in his bed yesterday morning. Deceased, who was a native of County Clare, Ireland, has resided in this colony for 35 years, living at Kirkstall a greater portion of the time. He had been in good health up till the time of his death, and it was therefore necessary to have a magisterial enquiry as to the cause of death. This was held yesterday afternoon before Mr. William Midgely, Justice of the Peace. Mary McNamara deposed that the deceased was her husband and 78 years of age. He had been complaining some time of rheumatics. He went to bed on Thursday night at 8 o’clock and appeared in good health. They spoke a few words then went to sleep. At 2 a.m. she awoke and found him dead. She believed he died from old age and natural causes. He was never attended by any medical man. Denis McNamara, son of the deceased, gave similar evidence. The magistrate gave a verdict that death resulted from old age and natural causes. The funeral, which is in the hands of Rundell Bros., will take place tomorrow at one o’clock.”
Mary McNamara died on 24 August 1898 at the age of eighty-eight, remarkable given the conditions of the time and the material poverty of her life. Apart from the official records of birth, marriage and death, and her children’s birth and marriage certificates, there is very little known of Mary as an individual. There is no reason to believe that Mary ever learned to read or write.
What is known is that she was baptised as Mary Molony, initially lived in a rural village in East Clare, and then married a local Irishman from her district. While living in Ireland, she gave birth to at least six children at a time of great economic hardship and social turmoil. She saw and survived the famine and managed to keep her children alive. She came to Victoria in 1854 as an assisted emigrant aboard the “Almora”, disembarking at Portland. She lived the remaining forty-four years of her life in the Koroit district, alongside many of her fellow countrymen. Although she was not a free settler, her descendants can be found throughout Australia. One of her daughters, Bridget McNamara, is Patricia’s grandmother. Bridget married Hugh Reilly in 1866, and one of their sons was Charles Reilly, Patricia’s father.
There is some information available as to where the McNamara family came from in Ireland. According to Irish records, Bridget McNamara, the fourth child of Edward and Mary, was baptized in January 1843 in the Parish of O’Callaghan’s Mills. The parish was part of the Diocese of Killaloe, in County Clare. The sponsors of the baptism were Thomas McNamara and Margaret Moloney of nearby Knockatinty. Mary McNamara’s maiden surname was Malony. The sponsors at Bridget’s baptism would have been close relatives of the immediate family, as is the custom at Catholic baptisms till now. Fortunately, the historic church records of Bridget McNamara’s baptism have been digitised and made available to the public.
The village of O’Callaghan’s Mills is in the east of County Clare, about halfway between Ennis and Lough Derg. It is about twenty-six kilometres north of Limerick City. The Parish of Callaghan’s Mills included the hamlet of Sixmilebridge. On 22 July 1852, less than two years before the McNamara family emigrated, a magistrate and eight soldiers of the British 31st Regiment escorted eighteen tenants of the Marquess of Conyngham to Sixmilebridge to vote for Colonel Vandeleur at the general election.
At the time, Colonel Vandeleur was a prominent Conservative Tory gentleman opposed to tenants-rights. The Vandeleur family first came to Ireland in the seventeenth century, and settled in County Clare, where they became one of the principal landowners. On the day of the election, a crowd of protesters, including two Catholic priests, gathered near the ballot office. Before long, some form of altercation broke out between protestors and the group of pro-Vandeleur voters. Some of the soldiers then suddenly opened fire, without the Riot Act having been read.
Six people were killed at the scene and eight were wounded, one of whom later died. At the coroner’s inquest, the jury returned a verdict of murder on the part of the British led soldiers. However, the jury’s verdict was then overturned on appeal by the Attorney-General for Ireland. In response, an article published in the “Anglo-Celt” accused the soldiers of the regiment of “willful and deliberate murder”. In response to the article, the editor of the “Anglo-Celt” was arrested and jailed for libeling the authorities. This affair gained some notoriety, a manifestation of the culture wars of the day, and was even discussed in the British Parliament. Conservative members demanded that the two priests at the affray should be prosecuted for the alleged incitement of the tenancy.
Brutality involving British landlords and Irish tenants generated lingering bitterness and tension. The Marquess of Conyngham was an absentee landlord in control of large territories in Ireland. He reportedly showed little interest in the estates he claimed there. According to Thomas Campbell Foster in an 1845 report for “The Times of London” newspaper, entitled “Commissioner to report on the condition of the people of Ireland”, Conyngham visited his estates in the west of Ireland very infrequently and for a few days only. His agents collected rent from tenants every six months. Foster’s report described these estates as follows: “from one end of his large estate here to the other, nothing is to be found but poverty, misery, wretched cultivation, and infinite subdivision of land.” The general poverty of the tenancy was for years particularly severe on Conyngham’s estates, and the great famine of 1845–52 was particularly dire for these tenants. As the famine commenced, many tenants had been just surviving on a diet of potatoes and water. As the famine took hold, partly due to the constantly rising rents, many tenants were then evicted for nonpayment of rent.
Sometimes, agents acting for the landlords organised the semi-coerced emigration of tenants as assisted emigrants to Australia. This was done to ensure that the most marginal or the most troublesome of the surviving tenancy left the countryside. After 1847, the amount of money that Irish landlords were required to pay in Poor Law taxes increased. The more tenants on a landlord’s estate, the higher the tax. This tax was a strong motive for many landlords to clear their land of their smallest tenancies. This was especially the case in more remote and poorer regions such as East Clare, where the practice of subdividing land into smaller and smaller holdings had been among the highest.
It is not possible to know exactly what led to the McNamara family leaving Clare in 1854, but conditions for tenants in the immediate vicinity of the McNamara home village were quite dire if we are to believe the accounts of the times. What is clear is the children of the McNamara family were not free settlers to Australia. They were impoverished people transmigrated from one British colony to another.
Not surprisingly, the famine evictions left a legacy of bitterness. Tower Hill was home to many transplanted Irish tenant farmers and bitter memories likely came here with the immigrants. It is estimated that over half a million people were evicted throughout Ireland during the Famine years. Some people were forced into workhouses, some families emigrated, but many other people died. Some people simply abandoned their homes to seek relief elsewhere. In other cases, entire families were wiped out by death.
Edward and Mary McNamara and their children must have lived through this hellish period, as East Clare was one of the areas hardest hit by the hunger. The fact that they survived at all likely indicates that they had at least some resources to fall back upon and were perhaps not the poorest of the poor. They may have been among the poorest who survived.
For the Irish immigrants around Tower Hill, the psychological scars of dislocation and deprivation were not addressed. A shared perception of being part of a group that had suffered an injustice persisted over several generations. There was often a nostalgia for an imagined golden past in a place far away. Solidarity among the Irish community was the prime way of ensuring survival in the face of adversity and discrimination.
There was a determination to make amends in the new country, to regain what was lost. The need to assimilate was generally seen as important, and this approach was promoted by the Catholic Church as the only realistic option. A separate identity as a marginalised group can only be sustained for a limited time without it causing harm and distress. While many people admired Ned Kelly for being “game”, his outlaw path was not followed by most of the Irish who came to live in the Southwest. There were opportunities in the new land and the Irish encouraged each other to show that they were as worthy as any other people in the colony.
Land Ownership, Systematic Colonisation, and Leasehold Arrangements
The Belfast Survey and the Farnham Survey were not far apart. Both surveys came into existence more or less at the same time, around 1843. Planning for their formal establishment predates that year. Both Surveys were 5120 acres in area although the outlines of the surveys were quite different, with Farnham being an irregular elongated rectangle and the Belfast Survey being more block shaped. Killarney is located between the historic Farnham and Belfast Surveys.
The land enclosed by the Belfast Survey was not the most arable in the district. The most strategic feature was the river frontage close to the mouth of the Moyne River. From the start, it was envisaged that a private township would be established on the west bank of the Moyne River not far from the coast. John Cox’s trading store was already in operation at the time the Belfast Special Survey was awarded to James Atkinson. A mooring had been established alongside the store and lighters were taken there from the small trading and whaling vessels anchored in the bay.
In the years prior to the awarding of the Survey, the sea captains John Mills and Alexander Campbell had established houses on the west bank of the river close to Cox’s store, and the Launceston entrepreneur Michael Connolly had a house close by. In addition, there were a huts housing a number of workers. Outside the borders of the Belfast Survey several farms were in operation in rudimentary form. One was Captain Charles Mills’ farm close to the Belfast Lough, then called the Lagoon. Another was Archibald McNeil’s new farm at Killarney. McNeil was an associate of Campbell and John Griffiths and had been involved in their whaling operations in previous years. In 1843 he opened the first pub at Port Fairy.
In 1843 it was reported that there were already fourteen pre-existing dwellings on the land that had been granted for the Belfast Survey, mostly along the river and towards the lagoon. According to the British Government’s regulations, Crown Land allocated to a Special Survey was meant to be “unoccupied” prior to its private survey. Nevertheless, it is clear that a small community from Tasmania was already at Port Fairy.
After being granted the Special Survey at Port Fairy in 1843, Atkinson sent a party of agents to privately survey the township. From that year, Atkinson had a legal right to develop this land whereas the other parties did not. The pre-existing population of Europeans seems not to have been noted as impediments to the granting of the survey. A lawyer such as Atkinson may have argued that the occupiers did not have any claim to the land as it was unalienated Crown Land prior to the awarding of the Special Survey.
The sea captains seem not to have taken out pastoral leases even though they were using the coast to run livestock and grow produce. The gentleman who had established the store on the river, Mr. John Cox, had moved north to take up a licensed pastoral run, first at Mount Rouse and then near Mount Napier. There was no consideration given to any form of Aboriginal land rights.
When the work of the surveyors was completed, Regent, College and Campbell Streets were laid down as the boundaries of the new Belfast township. Atkinson named the settlement after his hometown, although the port was still known as Port Fairy. The Merrijig and Caledonian hotels were in operation from 1844. Wesleyan and Presbyterian churches were established by 1847 on land reserved for that purpose and the Loyal Prince Albert Lodge was in construction. Nevertheless, Belfast remained very much a rough frontier town for much of the 1840s.
The impact of Atkinson’s Belfast Survey can be traced through the growth in population that accompanied the establishment of the Survey. In March 1843 the township had little more than fifty inhabitants. By October, the population was estimated at two hundred and fifty people. By the end of that year the number of residents had grown to over three hundred. By late 1844, the number of houses had grown to about sixty, most of which were timber and bark or wattle and daub shacks although there was a growing number of more substantial dwellings. The 1846 census listed the population at six hundred people.
A mill, a tannery, and a brewery were established on the Survey through the 1840s. The Belfast hinterland had a diverse population with an active farming community along the Moyne River flats and around Tower Hill with its volcanic soils. People varied according to class, nationality, and religion. The wharves and warehouses on the river saw an increasing volume of goods shipped in and out. Many of the early residents of the town came from Tasmania but there also many from the Sydney area where Atkinson was based. The female population was substantially less than the male until the arrival of the immigrant ships.
Once the immigrant ships started to arrive in earnest the population expanded further, although the goldrushes took some earlier arrivals away from the district. The 1854 census for Port Fairy showed a population of one thousand and four hundred residents. By 1857 Port Fairy was one of Victoria’s busiest and most important ports.
In the mid-1840s the coastal strip between Port Fairy and Warrnambool was officially designated a “Settled District”. Land was surveyed by the government in ways which were designed to encourage smaller farms and closer settlement in a district favorable to agriculture. The landers and the merchants of the district were part of the upper class, alongside the squatters of the interior. While there was a distinction made between gentlemen engaged in agriculture and trade in relation to those gentlemen engaged in pastoralism, there was considerable overlap in investments and in their general attitudes to those lower in the social hierarchy.
The Farnham Survey was an elongated rectangle of land stretching from the eastern edge of Killarney to the banks of the Merri River at Dennington. The Survey skirted the lake on its southern side and included much of what is now known as the Tower Hill, Yangery and Illowa. This was the most arable part of the district, although in 1843 much of it was still heavily vegetated. The farm of John Griffiths and Michael Connolly at Illowa, and Alexander Campbell’s cattle run, had been established prior to the Farnham Survey, and from 1843 both were incorporated into the Survey. The earlier entrepreneurs, such as Griffiths, Connolly and Campbell, had lost money in the financial crash of 1842, and were forced to relinquish much of their local assets.
From the start, an elaborate system of tenancy arrangements were instigated on the Farnham Survey, whereas the Belfast Survey concentrated efforts on developing a private town. The two surveys were actually in something of a symbiotic relationship in the 1840s and the 1850s. The management of both surveys overlapped and there was a degree of overlap in the economic and financial arrangements underpinning both schemes. The Belfast Survey and the Farnham Survey were complementary to each other at this time.
The Special Surveys were examples of systematic colonisation, whereby wealthy “emigrant capitalists” were attracted to invest in agricultural enterprises and to support closer settlement through the leasing of small tenancies. It was envisaged that revenues could be boosted through the sale of unalienated Crown land and that the money raised through land sales might be put to good use in financing assisted immigration. After all, the Crown had paid nothing for the land and any money generated from its sale could be reinvested in ways conducive to the expansion of settlement.
The Rutledge and Atkinson consortiums upon paid the relatively modest fee of one pound per acre for their land, which was significantly below the value of comparable agricultural land elsewhere at that time. The Crown could justify such generous terms by pointing to its policy of encouraging systematic colonisation, although from another perspective such policy was quite akin to schemes of colonial plantation.
The Special Surveys were pivotal to the economic and social development of the Southwest. William Rutledge was involved with both surveys. He was an agent for James Atkinson and he headed the trading company which largely controlled the maritime trade through the port. He was assisted by his brother Lloyd Rutledge and by Horace Flower, his eventual brother-in-law. In many ways it seems fair to say that the district was run by a business cartel, or rather by a series of closely networked family-based cartels.
Agriculture boomed during the gold rush years of the mid-1850s. Production struggled to meet demand and prices for produce were high. The boom was followed by a downturn which was followed by a recovery and then another downturn. A cycle of boom and bust was typical of the times.
During the boom periods, the proprietors of the Southwest pressured the governments to provide them with additional labor. The Rutledge cartel was at the forefront of efforts to divert assisted immigrants to the Southwest. Rutledge lobbied the government for assisted immigration programs to ensure the arrival of a stream of suitable workers to the Southwest.
The economy of Belfast and Tower Hill was quite vertically integrated during the 1850s. While some produce was transferred overland by bullock carts along rough tracks, most of it had to be transported to the port at Belfast and then shipped to Melbourne or Geelong. Being in command of shipping and trade through the harbour was a strategic advantage to the Rutledge firm and the men who controlled the port were heavily involved in primary production and secondary processing. The profits attracted competitors and soon a rivalry emerged with backers of the alternative port at Warrnambool and this emergent operation challenged Belfast’s domination of local trade.
The Farnham Survey was worked through a complex systems of lease-holding. The Farnham Survey was worked almost entirely by tenants from its earliest days. There was a complex system of leases and sub-leases. Rents flowed to those at the top.
Although assisted immigration to the Southwest had commenced in the early 1840s, a new wave arrived in the 1850s. In time, chain migration tended to replace the assisted immigration schemes in bringing new people to the district. An older brother might help pay for a younger brother to come to Tower Hill. Daniel Bowman was joined after a decade by his younger brother James Bowman, whose migration was likely sponsored by Daniel. Irish agricultural laborers continued to arrive in the Southwest until conditions at home somewhat improved, although poverty in rural Ireland persisted for decades.
At the start of the 1860s, a serious economic depression hit the Port Fairy district. In 1862, William Rutledge & Co went bankrupt, forcing Rutledge to reorganize his business and farming enterprises. A substantial number of working people left Belfast for better opportunities elsewhere. There was considerable local dissatisfaction with the way Atkinson and Rutledge were managing local affairs. The landowners were constantly criticized in the “Banner of Belfast” for having too much power vested in their hands at the expense of those on leaseholds who were struggling to make ends meet.
Leaseholds were increasingly difficult to afford, especially upon the expiration of the initial fourteen-year leases on the Farnham Survey. Alongside those who left Belfast, there were many tenants who left Farnham, some moving to Koroit and Kirkstall, while others left the district entirely.
One feature peculiar to farming practices around Tower Hill was a leasehold system common to Irish farming called conacre. Large blocks of estate land were first let to intermediate leaseholders. The leaseholders, then sub-leased much of their leased land to agricultural laborers under the conacre system. This short-term sub-leasing arrangement was of sufficient length to sow and harvest a single crop and was for less than a full year. Under this system, land was divided into strips that were let to renters for less than a calendar year, and for one crop only.
Under the conacre system, the renters took on the risk and the landlords and the primary leaseholders collected the rents. Under the conacre system the farmers who worked the land did not have long-term security. Rents could be paid in a number of ways, whether by cash or through the provision of labor, a share of the crop, or a combination of these. In practice, the system was heavily weighted in favour of the landowner, who took the rents. Conacre tenants improved a landowner’s property and most of the risks of agricultural production were defrayed to the tenant.
In good years, many tenant farmers made regular profits from the system of conacre tenancy. In bad years, due to poor weather or poor market conditions, a tenant could face financial ruin or increased indebtedness. Conditions at Tower Hill compared favorably with the often harsher conditions faced by tenant farmers in Ireland and Scotland. Given that economic and social conditions in Ireland and Scotland were dire immediately after the famine, many marginalized people had little choice but to leave their homelands for somewhere else, and it may well be that Tower Hill was better than some of the other possible destinations.
William Rutledge originally hailed from Bawnboy in County Cavan. Rutledge family members had first settled in Ireland even prior to the Cromwellian conquest of the 1650s. They were Anglican by religion and had a background of service in the British military. By 1670, around ninety percent of County Cavan’s land was in the hands of British settlers.
In terms of Irish society in the nineteenth century, William Rutledge’s family was part of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency. Britain colonized Cavan through the dispossession of Irish Catholics. Scottish and English Protestants were “planted” on land formerly owned by people of a very different national and religious background.
In the 1840s and 1850s, the British planted some of its subject people in the Southwest on recently cleared Aboriginal land. They implemented government sponsored programs of assisted immigration and other colonial policies to further this scheme of systematic colonisation. Despite the many differences, the historic resonances between the settlement of the Southwest and the Irish Plantations of the seventeenth century are clear enough.
William Rutledge arrived in Sydney in 1829, the year before James Atkinson arrived there. The two men would have been acquainted with each other from the early 1830s. After his arrival in Sydney, Rutledge became involved in banking, contracting and farming activities there. In 1838 Rutledge took sheep overland to Melbourne and the Port Phillip District. In 1843, Rutledge somehow managed to negotiate the complex steps involved in being permitted to purchase a Special Survey, in conjunction with several associates.
The Special Surveys were seen by some in the colonial administration as barely disguised vehicles for land speculation, favoring privileged individuals. The process leading to the granting of Special Surveys was opaque, which was one reason it was opposed by some officials. Select individuals were allowed to purchase unsurveyed tracts of land for a low price. There had been no government survey undertaken and no subsequent public auction of freehold land. This was unusual and was considered unfair by some in the colonial government and in the elite generally. Personal connections at “home” seemed to have been involved in obtaining these Surveys.
Indicating where his loyalties lay, Rutledge named his new property “Farnham” after a large Ascendency estate in County Cavan close to where he hailed from. The founder of the Farnham Estate in Ireland was Robert Maxwell, whose father was an English planter who came to Ulster in the reign of King James IV & I. This is the period when the founder of the Rutledge family in County Cavan, Lieutenant William Ruttledge, first appears in Bawnboy. Robert Maxwell became the Anglican Bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh in 1643. Following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, Maxwell established the Farnham Estate. Large areas of Cavan previously owned by Irish Catholics were granted to the Maxwell family in the seventeenth century.
In the eighteenth century the descendants of Robert Maxwell become the Earls of Farnham. The Ascendancy refers to the political and economic domination of Ireland by loyalist Anglican landowners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Maxwell and Rutledge families were of this elite. During much of this time, Catholics were a second class community in their own country. William Rutledge brought his Ascendency outlook to his new home in the Southwest. William Rutledge and his family were active in supporting the Church of England in the Southwest. Rutledge was a major financial contributor to Saint John’s Church in Port Fairy and also supported the building of the Church of England in Warrnambool.
Rutledge, or “King Billy” as he was sometimes referred to, made his own distinct and peculiar contribution to the Belfast district. His eccentric worldview differed somewhat from other proprietors in the Southwest, many of whom were dour and upright Scots Presbyterians.
In 1840 in Sydney, William married Eliza Kirk, the daughter of Rupert Kirk, a former British military officer with experience in British India and the USA. The Kirk family in England had a long history of involvement in the English wool and cotton trade. Rupert Kirk purchased over three hundred acres of prime land in Sydney in 1831. He established a soap making business and became quite wealthy through the 1830s and into the early 1840s. The family lost money following the economic downturn of the early 1840s.
William Rutledge’s marriage into the Kirk family helped with setting up his own enterprise, although Rutledge had other sources of financial backing in Sydney through his connections to his uncle, Dr Thomas Forster, a former British military surgeon. William Rutledge’s mother was the sister of Thomas Forster. The Forster family were Anglo-Irish proprietors from County Longford.
After arriving in Australia, Dr Thomas Forster married Elizabeth Blaxland, who was Gregory Blaxland’s daughter. Elizabeth arrived in Sydney with her famous father in 1807. The well-known Blaxland family were prominently involved in colonial Sydney’s elite business and political life.
Thomas and Elizabeth Forster had lived in India for the first few years of their marriage. Thomas worked for the British military there. One of Thomas and Elizabeth Forster’s daughters married Thomas Rutledge, her first cousin and a brother of William Rutledge. Another Forster son, Francis Forster, was a partner in the firm of William Rutledge and Co.
Two sisters of William Rutledge’s wife married business associates of William Rutledge in the Southwest. Agnes married the Warrnambool squatter Henry Foster in 1847 and Amelia married Horace Flower in 1850. Yet another sister, Ann, married Richard Bennett who worked in the Rutledge firm throughout the 1850s. Their son, Richard Bennett Junior, wrote many letters to the local Warrnambool newspapers regarding the early history of the district. In 1984 these letters were published under the title “Richard Bennett’s Early Days of Port Fairy”, edited by Jan Crichett. A sister of Richard Bennett Junior married Lloyd Rutledge, the younger brother of William Rutledge. In the 1870s Richard Bennett Junior established a wool processing business at Dennington with family finance.
Over many decades in the Southwest, the prominent Rutledge, Bennett, Flower, Ritchie and Kirk families were all intertwined through marriage and business associations.
Lloyd Rutledge, William’s brother, was of particular assistance to William Rutledge in 1852. William sent Lloyd to Portland to meet the incoming immigrant ship “Runnymede.” Proprietors and squatters at that time were desperately in need of labor. Carrying blank forms of agreement from William Rutledge, Lloyd boarded the ship and immediately signed up more than seventy of the passengers for work in the Rutledge family enterprises at Port Fairy.
The immigrants on the “Runnymede” had yet to be properly processed and this breach of protocol attracted police interest, which Rutledge fobbed off. Additionally, Rutledge was going over the heads of other prospective employers, who were annoyed with this act of non-compliance given that they too wanted access to the immigrants. Accompanying Lloyd on his journey to Portland was Thomas Browne, better known by his pen name Rolf Boldrewood, the author of “Old Melbourne Memories.”
On 2 July 1852, the Colonial Times of Hobart reported something of what transpired, as follows: “Immigrants per Runnymede – This noble vessel with her human freight, 212 immigrants in number, anchored in our bay on the 3rd, and with the exception of a few females in the depot, all have found engagements in the brief period of less than eight days. Some of them have obtained very high wages, for which they have to thank Mr. Lloyd Rutledge, who has taken considerably upwards of one hundred with him for various parties in Belfast and the Port Fairy district. The rapidity with which these parties have been hired is an additional encouragement to the Emigration Commissioners, to send immediately and without interruption more labour, our cry is still for more. Several thousands could now be engaged, and even then the market would not be glutted. – Portland Guardian -”
The “Runnymede” was among the first of the many immigrant ships to arrive at Portland, a trade greatly encouraged by proprietors such as William and Lloyd Rutledge.
At Port Fairy, the Rutledge firm shipped wool, tallow and, later, gold to England and imported a wide variety of goods, using its own ships and its own wharf. The London firm of P W Flower and Company, established in 1844, traded extensively with William Rutledge & Co. The London firm also had many commercial ties to James Atkinson’s business interests in Sydney. Wool grown on the squatter stations of the Western District was sent to England through this trading network. The tightly controlled trading consortium that linked Port Fairy to Sydney and London ensured that William Rutledge & Co had a virtual monopoly on trade through the port.
Proprietors connected with William Rutledge & Co were partners in several squatter stations in the Western District. Wool produced on pastoral stations and destined for British textile mills was a key part of the business. Horace Flower had interests in several pastoral runs, including Argyle, a run of 32,000 acres near Casterton, Burrie Burrie near Dunkeld, and The Gums near Penshurst, for example.
Several of the siblings of William Rutledge were prominent squatters. Perhaps the most notable was Thomas Rutledge, who purchased the Carwoola estate near Queanbeyan from William Rutledge. Thomas Rutledge was born in Cavan and migrated to Australia in the 1830s when about twenty-three years of age at the behest of his older brother.
In addition to Carwoola, Thomas Rutledge acquired several other squatter stations in New South Wales. By the 1870s Thomas was said to control about 90,000 acres of pastoral country and he became a member of the New South Wales Lower House. Thomas married his cousin, Martha Forster. She was a daughter of Dr Thomas Forster, a former British military surgeon then living in Sydney. As mentioned, Thomas Forster was married to Elizabeth Blaxland, the daughter of Gregory Blaxland, and the niece of Captain John Blaxland.
John Blaxland famously first came to Australia in 1807 after agreeing to invest £6000 in the colony. He negotiated free passage for his extended family and their servants and free freight for his stores and equipment. He was also awarded a grant of eight thousand acres, and eighty convicts were assigned to run the operation. The government agreed to clothe and feed the convicts for eighteen months. Blaxland was conspicuous in the political shenanigans of early colonial Sydney.
As well as being collectors of rents, proprietors such as Atkinson and Rutledge were land speculators. They had significant family ties to the pastoral industry, to the military, to imperial trade, and to the law. They invested in the hope and expectation that they could eventually sell their land at a profit, following its transformation by the labor of others. The Rutledge and Atkinson families and their business associates were part of Australia’s colonial elite. In some ways, the Special Surveys were a form of land banking, granted to gentlemen who could leverage strategic connections.
Atkinson and Rutledge were products of a highly restrictive and stratified society preoccupied with public behavior and personal reputation. The social outlook of these men had been forged in the Regency Era of Britain and Ireland during the early decades of the nineteenth century, with its strict social structures and class divides. In the Regency Era, land ownership in Britain was dominated by a conservative landed gentry class. Their worldview was aligned with the policies and interests of the British government. British social hierarchies were transferred to colonial Australia substantially intact, where they formed the basis of political and economic power for generations.
James Atkinson was born in the north of Ireland around 1804 at the start of the Regency Period. James was educated at the Royal School, Armagh, a school founded to educate the sons of local Protestant merchants and land owners during the plantation of Ulster. In 1821 James was admitted to King’s Inns in Dublin, Ireland’s oldest school of law and a bastion of British colonial power in Ireland. Atkinson held a commission in the 5th Regiment of Foot, another loyalist bastion. This regiment was known by nicknames such as “The Fighting Fifth” and “Lord Wellington’s Bodyguard” for its earlier service during the Napoleonic Wars.
Atkinson emigrated to Australia with his wife Emily in 1830. She was likely his cousin and the couple wed the previous year in Newry, County Armagh. Emily Macartney’s sister Rosanna had emigrated to New South Wales in 1822 with her husband, Lieutenant James Reid, at a time when he was an officer on half-pay. The Macartney’s hailed from Rosebrook in County Armagh, which is likely why Atkinson assigned the hamlet of Rosebrook at Port Fairy with this name. The evident military, professional and fraternal networks of these Ulster families may have been of assistance when negotiating the granting of Atkinson’s Special Survey.
The Macartney family was undoubtedly well-connected. Some had served as Members of Parliament and as senior officials in Ireland. Hussey Burgh Macartney, the first Anglican Dean of Melbourne was an uncle of Emily and Rosanna Macartney. A cousin, John Arthur Macartney, the Dean of Melbourne’s son, was a notorious squatter in Queensland who worked with the Queensland Native Police to “disperse” Aboriginal clanspeople from his stations.
In contrast to Atkinson, Rutledge lived in the Southwest and become a very prominent local identity. He was a magistrate as well as a businessman, a merchant and an estate owner. He was the quintessential “big man” of the Belfast and Tower Hill district. Unlike James Atkinson at Belfast, William Rutledge never developed a private town on the Farnham Survey, although there seems to have been a plan at some stage to develop a private town in the vicinity of Woodford or Dennington, schemes which never eventuated.
After the crash of 1862 and the bankruptcy of his company, Rutledge subsequently moved to a homestead he had built on the eastern edge of the Farnham Survey, which became known as Farnham Park. Rutledge increasingly turned to sheep production after the collapse of his trading business in 1862. Another homestead on the Farnham Survey, called Werronggurt, was built on a hillside to the south of Yangary. This house was the home initially of Robert Woodward, James Atkinson’s nephew who had gone into partnership with Rutledge after the crash. The homestead was subsequently lived in by Thomas F. Rutledge, William’s son.
In 1876, Thomas F. Rutledge married Edith Ritchie, the daughter of well-known local squatter, John Ritchie, who was a Scottish gentleman who came to Van Dieman’s Land in 1833. Ritchie first took up land at Launceston in proximity to the Henty family. At the urging of the Henty brothers, Ritchie came to the Southwest from Tasmania in 1839. When he crossed Bass Strait on his journey to the Southwest he came with all of possessions, including his sheep and his servants. His Aringa Station, located immediately to the west of Port Fairy and bordering Yambuk, was a run of 26,000 acres of average sheep country between the Shaw and Moyne Rivers. For many decades, John Ritchie was a prominent and influential local politician and civic figure at Belfast.
James Atkinson rarely visited Port Fairy and did not stay long when he did. He was largely an absentee landlord based in Sydney and he left day-to-day management of his affairs to a small number of trusted agents, including William Rutledge. Atkinson made at least one return visit to Britain in these years. Robert Woodward, James Atkinson’s nephew, was appointed as an agent and attorney for Atkinson when Woodward was quite young and he became very prominent in district affairs. Marcus Macartney was also a close relative of Atkinson and he farmed land adjacent to the outlet of Tower Hill. Macartney’s farm was originally purchased by James Atkinson and was then transferred to Macartney. James Atkinson’s wife Emily was a Macartney, as was Atkinson’s mother.
One reason for the bankruptcy of William Rutledge & Co. was the actions of commercial rivals to break the company’s near monopoly of trade in the Southwest. Rival capitalists, based in other towns such as Warrnambool, emerged to contest the economic dominance of the Belfast cartel, and in the early 1860s some of these commercial interests worked together to bring the Rutledge Company down. When it went bankrupt in 1862 it had debts of some £117,000, which greatly exceeded its available assets. The bankruptcy caused a major economic depression in Port Fairy from which the town never really recovered. By 1866, all creditors were paid but the fall of the Company had a devastating effect on Belfast. The long term effect was that Port Fairy stagnated and people drifted away.
James Atkinson died in 1864 but his family retained his Belfast land holdings for a further two decades. In 1885 Atkinson’s children sold the remaining unsold land of the survey to a syndicate of local investors and the rest of the land was sold off, partly to the local council. In 1887 the residents of Belfast successfully petitioned the Government to rename the town Port Fairy. The early promise of Port Fairy was not realised but the downturn in its fortunes meant that many historic buildings from that era remain.
