In the standard histories of the nineteenth century, Victoria was depicted as a community of pioneer settlers, portrayed as enterprising free immigrants from Britain untainted by the convict stain. Waves of British settlers forged a new nation based upon the hard work of this superior founding race. Stereotypically, a virgin wilderness was transformed into a civilised nation through the exceptional efforts of the pioneers. Needless to say, this depiction of our history was always more fiction than reality.
The subaltern classes were largely ignored or faintly denigrated in these accounts. Some commentators were determined to distinguish between the worthy working class and the irredeemably bad set of scoundrels who contaminated our shores.
William Westgarth was a prominent nineteenth century historian and politician. Based in Melbourne, Westgarth campaigned vigorously for the banning of convict transportation. He feared that once convicts had served their time in Tasmania and Sydney, Victoria would become vulnerable to “the contaminating vices of a large mass of criminal population.” Although convict transportation to New South Wales was halted in 1840, convicts were still being sent to Van Diemen’s Land until 1853.
Westgarth also campaigned to curtail the immigration of Irish Catholics, especially where this involved government programs which enabled the assisted immigration of such unsuitable people. Westgarth believed that the arrival of people of convict background to Victoria from Tasmania and the immigration of Irish Catholics should both be restricted. It was misguided to think the arrival of large numbers of such people would be of benefit to growing the type of society he thought should be planted and nurtured here.
The worst possible scenario would be if these tainted groups intermarried and produced a mongrel population of low quality individuals that would threaten his vision of a good society. He feared such people would contaminate the colony. A conservative politician and a public intellectual, Westgarth played on anxieties held by sections of the British middle-class in Australia, and his view were quite popular in some quarters of the community.
According to Westgarth, migration policies in Australia’s colonies should favour the plantation of British Protestant and German Lutheran yeoman farmers. He considered skilled Protestant “mechanics” to be the ideal immigrants to secure the colony for Britain. William Westgarth was one of Victoria’s earliest historians. His great desire was to see the colony become an agrarian, respectable free-settler community which had successfully assimilated his idealized view of British middle-class manners as the ethical and moral center of this imagined community.
For Westgarth, Victoria became a British possession through free settlement and not by conquest. Prior to the arrival of the British, the country had no prior civilization and its Indigenous inhabitants had no legal claims to the land and as such they could largely be ignored.
In the academic text “The Civilisation of Port Phillip,” historian Thomas Rogers argues that it was the mythology of progress guided by Protestant moral values that was central to Westgarth’s writing. When considering Westgarth’s succession of books, Thomas Rogers argues that “Each one in its turn proclaimed the progress of the Port Phillip District to prospective emigrants, especially prospective agriculturalists.” Rogers adds that “In order to make room, rhetorically, for these new settlers, Westgarth had to depopulate the District.”
By depopulate the district, Rogers means that any preexisting people who were not of the type favoured by William Westgarth had to be excluded from the story of Victoria’s progress. In the excluded category were Aboriginal people, impoverished Irish Papists, the destitute of Britian, and marginalised people generally. Poverty was a moral failing inherent in the undeserving poor and this indelible blemish was particularly a characteristic of those of convict background.
Thomas Rogers argues that the semi-official historiography of the ruling elite is at the root of why so much of our past is now so poorly understood. Rogers writes as follows: “Free settlers wrote themselves into the landscape. In order to understand the processes and patterns of settlement, we must investigate their rhetoric. Port Phillip is an excellent historical place for such an investigation because it was so dominated by free settlers and their ideologies.” He adds that “British free settlers created the Port Phillip District and peopled it with their rhetoric.”
When the story of the 1840s and 1850s was retrospectively told towards the end of the nineteenth century, by literary historians such as William Westgarth, Francis Peter Labilliere, Rolf Boldrewood and Alexander Sutherland, it was free settlers who were lauded. There was a tendency for the squatter class to be lauded above any of the other groups which might be considered worthy. They were the noble “Men of Yesterday”, as Margaret Kiddle would have it. These free settler men were extolled for their manly pioneering zeal, their civic virtue and their unparalleled spirit of free enterprise.
The lives of the underclass class were elided as something of an embarrassment. Subaltern stories detracted from the tale of glorious free settler progress and so either were not told or were glossed in such a way as to reflect glory on their masters. These tomes of the early historians tended to portray convict transportation as a great social evil not due to the considerable harm it did to the convicts, but rather for the degeneracy it brought to the colony. Campaigns to end transportation were in some ways reminiscent of earlier calls to abolish the slave trade. The historians and social commentators of the day feared that it was the institutions and structures of convict transportation which might do most to corrupt and contaminate the mother country’s sincere efforts to plant a good society in the antipodes.
The Special Surveys
The Koroit district is noted for the mass immigration of Irish people in the nineteenth century. This particular aspect of the history of Koroit has entered the realm of common knowledge. There is also a general awareness that there was a great famine in Ireland and that many people died or left. There is less understanding of the processes through which the immigrants were brought to Koroit, its semi-coerced nature, and the polemics which accompanied it.
A great impetus to the British plantation of Port Fairy and Tower Hill came in 1843 with the granting of James Atkinson’s Special Survey. Through the Special Survey regulations of the British government in London, Atkinson obtained eight square miles of land on the lower Moyne River at Port Fairy. He privately surveyed and leased town allotments on this land. He called the town Belfast after the city of his homeland. The town was later renamed back to Port Fairy. Atkinson was not a popular figure in the eyes of many people and perhaps choosing the name Belfast was polarizing and had sectarian connotations.
James Atkinson was a Sydney solicitor of Irish Protestant heritage. He had access to imperial finance and enjoyed useful political connections. Under the Special Survey regulations, Atkinson was able to obtain a strategic piece of land on a remote coastline yet to be developed. The location had significant potential for good returns on investment, especially when the discounted price of the land was considered and given the expectation that the security situation would improve rapidly once the Aboriginal people were persuaded of their place in the new order.
A Special Survey was a parcel of 5120 acres of Crown Land that was to be surveyed and developed for tenant-farming and closer settlement. The Special Survey provision of 1840 and 1841 was not a policy of the New South Wales government, but was instead an initiative of the British authorities in London. It was a short-lived initiative, probably because it was not viewed favorably by the colonial authorities in Sydney and Melbourne who felt it was imposed on them from afar. Preferably, the tenants working on the surveys were to be assisted emigrants from Britain.
Few Special Surveys actually eventuated, and as it happens two of them were developed in close proximity. These twin surveys were located between Port Fairy and Warrnambool. Lionel’s paternal forebears were associated with Atkinson’s Special Survey at Belfast and Patricia’s paternal forebears associated with the Farnham Special Survey of William Rutledge. There was considerable overlap in the business dealings of the two surveys.
Atkinson’s Belfast Survey at Port Fairy was centred on the warehouses and stores alongside the wharves on the river. A maritime trading network connected the port with the outside world. Atkinson developed his private town as a profitable real estate investment. Leases in the town were long-term and rents accrued to Atkinson through his local agents. Atkinson hoped to eventually sell blocks at a considerable profit once significant economic development occurred in the town. He was an absentee landlord who relied heavily upon local agents to run the day-to-day affairs of the town.
If they have a choice, most businessmen don’t invest in conflict zones. When the Surveys were granted in 1843, news that the hinterland surrounding Port Fairy was now secure must have been viewed as welcome information. James Atkinson appears to have kept himself well informed of the situation along this coast and he was looking for a strategic place to develop a private town. Port Fairy was considered an option with great potential.
Bass Strait ship captains visited Sydney and talked of the opportunities available at Port Fairy. Atkinson oversaw the process required to take advantage of the Special Survey regulations from his base in Sydney and through contacts in Britain. Under the terms outlined in the policy, he paid one pound per acre to the British government in London but was expected to sink further money into the scheme. Infrastructure had to be developed on the site and some support to the tenants was to be extended. An influx of much needed capital and new immigrants meant better commercial and trading opportunities for those who had arrived earlier. The whaling industry was in decline by 1843 as whales were fast being eliminated.
Once Atkinson had secured his special survey and paid his money to the government, he sent his agents to Port Fairy. The survey was done privately, not by government surveyors. Land was subdivided into town blocks and then either leased for long periods or sold at a profit. The enterprise at Port Fairy was a development project of a private entrepreneur.
Atkinson envisaged a private town planed on a colonial model derived from Ireland. It was to be a settlement dedicated to commerce and entrepreneurship. Similar developments had become a feature of nineteenth century Ireland and Atkinson probably saw no reason why this style of private town could not succeed in Australian conditions.
Irish laborers left home to escape harsh conditions in their homeland in the wake of the famine. The Irish came to Tower Hill because the journey was made possible by the British Empire. Imperial shipping networks and port infrastructure was in place to facilitate their travel. To travel so far, emigrants needed to qualify for an assisted passage. Family networks facilitated travel through a system of chain migration. People rolled the dice and came because they were not wanted at home or could not survive there.
Irish immigrants filled a demand for workers to toil in the fields around Tower Hill. Victoria’s population exploded following the start of the gold rushes. The demand for food increased proportionally. Produce grown at Tower Hill was exported from the port at Belfast which the firm of William Rutledge & Co controlled. There was a high degree of vertical integration in the economy given that a tight group of proprietors controlled the production, the marketing, and the transport of agricultural produce.
Upon arrival in the Southwest the assisted immigrants had to work for a period for a sponsoring employer. When their service was completed they often sub-leased strips of land close to where they had previously been employed.
William Rutledge, the proprietor of the Farnham Special Survey, was the most prominent of the landowners on the coast. Rutledge worked in conjunction with his landowning and mercantile associates, some of whom were close relatives. In turn, James Atkinson had his own retinue of relatives.
Middle-sized farmers purchased freehold land from the late 1840s as it became available after parish surveys were completed. Not all the middle sized farmers were Protestant but the majority were. They too availed themselves of the Irish laborers who were shipped to the district in the 1850s. Irish emigrants were valued due to their skills and experience as agricultural workers and because they were available.
Irish emigrants forged a common solidarity at Tower Hill. Because the number of Irish laborers at Tower Hill was comparatively large and concentrated in a relatively small area they were in a position to form a distinct community, set apart from other immigrant groups. The proportion of Irish in relation to other groups increased steadily, from being a minority in the 1840s to becoming the majority by 1870. Irish identity and Irish nationalism played some part in forging this distinct community.
Solidarity grew out of events in Ireland, including social repercussions resulting from the famine, but colonial Australia was very different to colonial Ireland. Strict separation between the various groups around Tower Hill could never be unequivocal. There was substantial mixing of the population. There was at least as many women and girls as men and boys in the family groups which arrived after 1851 and this gender balance among the new arrivals was in contrast to the earlier wave of emancipist workers composed mainly of men.
The Koroit district saw an influx of assisted Irish laborers to an extent not typical of other places. Tower Hill was distant to the goldfields and a different kind of country. The landscape around the lake had aspects to it somewhat reminiscent of Ireland. The scale of Irish emigration to Tower Hill meant that by the late 1800s Koroit had become the most distinctively Irish influenced location in Australia.
Irish immigration was seen more positively around Tower Hill than in Melbourne where it was quite controversial in some quarters. William Rutledge and his colleagues from Ulster and Scotland clearly understood conditions in Ireland. From the perspective of his Anglo-Irish background, Rutledge knew the Irish labor force at Tower Hill. He may have even felt some sympathy for their plight. He knew Irish laborers could profitably be employed on his Farnham Survey clearing land and planting crops.
The assistant emigrants arriving at Portland and Geelong were viewed more favorably than the emancipated convicts from Tasmania and New South Wales who had been in the district from the start. There was greater prejudice against those of convict background than the prejudice directed against Catholic Irish.
The emancipists workforce had been on the mainland for a considerable time and were disdainful and distrustful of the elite. In turn, they were considered somewhat untrustworthy due to their convict associations. Class hostility may have colored perceptions on both sides of the economic and social divide. In any case, many men of emancipist background had gone to the diggings and most would not be coming back to work for their former employers.
Rutledge acted as agent for Atkinson, and together with his brother, Lloyd Rutledge, and his relatives William Foster and Horace Flower as business partners, the firm of William Rutledge & Co was established. Whereas the Farnham Survey at Tower Hill concentrated on agricultural production, on the Belfast Survey warehouses were built along the river where wharves and flour mills were put up. Produce was carted to the waterway and loaded onto lighters and then taken to the ships waiting in the bay.
Rutledge & Co operated as shipowners, importers and exporters, gold-buyers, stock and station agents, general merchants, warehouse and bulk-store operators, insurance and commission agents, wine and spirit merchants, wool and produce buyers, mail contractors and merchant bankers. The company quickly expanded to become one of the greatest commercial entities in the colony of Victoria and essentially held a monopoly over local and regional trade. The firm contributed significantly to the growth and development of the district.
In the 1840s and 1850s, William Rutledge was highly active in almost all Belfast’s affairs, variously serving as magistrate, mayor and alderman. His house in town was one of the principal centers of social life for the elite.
Belfast was one of the few private towns developed in Australia and its leading gentlemen were ideologically dedicated to mercantile capitalist entrepreneurship. Atkinson and Rutledge and their associates such as Roderick Urquhart controlled much of the agricultural production of the district and controlled the wharves. They enjoyed a near-monopoly at a time of rapid growth in demand. A constant stream of immigrant labor arriving on British ships sourced through assisted immigration programs worked greatly to their benefit.
By 1870 this dynamic phase of development had come to end. The glory days of Belfast were over. Rivalry with other commercial interests became heightened in a struggle to gain economic advantage. The firm of William Rutledge & Co lost out. In 1862 the company filed for voluntary insolvency. Even though by 1866 all creditors had been paid, the fall of the Rutledge company had a devastating effect on Port Fairy. There was a significant financial depression and much regional business and trade transferred to other townships, particularly nearby Warrnambool. Many people of diverse backgrounds left the Port Fairy district.
Irish assisted immigrants stayed around Tower Hill in proportionally greater numbers than those of other national groups and found employment in various roles but mostly in agriculture. While many left for other places, Irish people continued to arrive through the 1860s. They tended to marry each other and they generally had large families. They developed a community of the imagination as much as anything else.
Rutledge’s Farnham Survey was to the east of the Belfast Survey. It was south of Tower Hill and located on the best arable land, stretching from the lake to the Merri River at Dennington. Rutledge named his new estate after a plantation estate in County Cavan called Farnham. The grand mansion at Farnham in Ireland is located close to Bawnboy, the village from where the Rutledge family hailed.
The Irish town of Bawnboy takes its name from the “bawn”, or defensive wall built in 1613 surrounding Lieutenant Willaim Ruttledge’s fortified stone house. Lieutenant Ruttledge was the military agent of the Scottish/English planter Sir Richard Greames. During the reign of James XI and I, Richard Greames and his brother secured a sizable grant of Irish land in Cavan at a time when they were acting as military servitors during the Ulster Plantation.
The 1622 Survey of County Cavan states: “Sir Richard Greames, holdeth 1000 acres of this land, upon which there is built a Bawne of stone and lyme, sixty foot square and nine foot high, with a little stone house within, where in Lieutenant William Ruttledge dwelleth and hath a lease thereof and of 200 acres of land for 21 yeares and the rest of Sir Richard’s 1000 acres are sett to the Irish from yeare to yeare, who plowgh after ye Irish fashion.”
William Rutledge, the proprietor of the Farnham Survey at Tower Hill, lived in the Southwest for decades and was very active in local affairs. The firm Rutledge & Co, which William Rutledge founded in 1843 and which he directed in conjunction with several family associates, was the trading company based at the Belfast port. The firm soon dominated the local economy. Rutledge also served as an agent of James Atkinson and the two special surveys were linked by common commercial interests and personal ties.
From the start it was envisaged that tenants would work on the survey while living adjacent to it. Native vegetation was cleared in the initial years and crops of grain and potatoes were then successfully grown. It was hoped that newly arrived emigrants would be attracted to Belfast and an outpost of Britian would be planted in a hitherto unsettled part of Australia.
Planed settlement modeled on these lines was somewhat akin to schemes of systematic town planning implemented in Ireland. New towns had been established there during the Regency Period and were developed by Protestant landlords seeking to improve the value and utility of their estates. These new Irish towns became gateways for the growing trade with Britain.
Koroit and the mass immigration of Irish people
In the hamlets around Tower Hill, the Irish influence persisted for many decades, well into the mid twentieth century. Around Crossley, Killarney, Tower Hill, Illowa, Yangary, and Southern Cross, people of Irish heritage were the majority, and most of them remained devout Catholics. In Killarney and Crossley virtually the entire population was of Irish heritage.
Patricia took great pride in her heritage and appreciated her connection to Ireland. By the mid-twentieth century when Patrica and Lionel first met, many of the Koroit Irish families had been in the district for almost one hundred years. Although the origins of these families can be traced to various parts of Ireland, the Irish living on the slopes around Tower Hill forged a cohesive community tied together by marriage, religion, and education.
There was a prominent and influential Protestant minority in Koroit, although Irish Catholics had long comprised the majority of the population. It was generally assumed by civic leaders that people belonged to one religious community or another but perhaps the most unacknowledged section of the town were those who were largely secular and not aligned with any particular religious tradition.
Throughout the twentieth century, Aboriginal people were not prominent in the Koroit community and “they” were more or less discouraged from being in the town. This was consistent with most small towns in the Western District. The author recalls Koroit in the 1960s and 1970s as being almost entirely “white”.
It is fair to say that although the town was not monocultural it was largely monoracial. With regard to cultural differentiation and diversity, the sharp sectarian divides of the nineteenth century mellowed over time and a process of cultural homogenization occurred to some extent. “Whiteness” was a point of commonality around which social cohesion could manifest and unfold.
Like most other parts of rural Australia, Koroit’s demography was fundamentally shaped by the exclusionary aspects of the White Australia Policy. The exclusion of “non-whites” was pivotal in many ways, and it was not until the turn of the twenty-first century that racial demographics changed to any great extent. Even now, the population of the district is distinctly “whiter” than most metropolitan suburbs of Melbourne. Rather than being seen as a deficiency, it might remain the case that most residents of the area see this relative homogeneity as an important component of the Southwest’s heritage.
Historically, the sectarian situation in Koroit was somewhat idiosyncratic. A unique demographic situation, rooted in migration and history, created a complicated legacy that was distinctive and atypical.
The Protestant minority of Koroit for the most part had family connections to Ireland and Scotland rather than to England. The Protestant congregations were generally either mainstream Presbyterians or followers of Free Presbyterian splinter groups. These communities have had an ongoing influence in Koroit. Presbyterians tended not to define themselves as Irish even if the families were originally from Ulster. The term “Irish” implied Catholic and there was a separate “Scots” community. The Scots Presbyterian Church in Koroit has served this community for many years.
Those of English Non-conformist heritage were a minority within a Protestant minority. Some such families, such as the Skilbeck and Midgley families, who were Methodists, were locally prominent. The former Wesleyan Methodist Church is now the Scout Hall.
Mainstream Anglicans were relatively few in number when compared to other towns of Koroit’s size. The Church of England, as it was universally called, had fewer adherents and was less imposing than was usually the case. The congregation worshipped at the small bluestone Church of Saint Paul, built in the 1870s.
Those of Irish heritage were the majority population of the Koroit and Tower Hill district and this community strongly adhered to Catholicism. Over the decades, the Catholic Church and the local parish became ever more closely integrated into the social life of the Catholic community and the line between Church and civil aspects of community life was blurred in many ways. Networks centered on the Catholic Church and affiliated organizations ensured that this community was cohesively organised both in and of itself and also in relation to other communities.
Many of the local Catholic clergy derived from the Koroit Irish community. It was common for families to have members working locally as part of various religious orders. The community kept abreast of political developments in Ireland and this colored responses to social and political issues for many years.
A good source for information on the role of the Catholic Church in the Koroit and Tower Hill district can be found in “The Church on the Hill” by Dr. Helen Doyle, a noted and respected historian of the district. The subtitle to this text is “A centenary history of St Brigid’s, Crossley, and its Irish-Australian community.” Her book on Saint Brigid’s focusses on the Killarney and Crossley areas but there is much that is pertinent to the wider Tower Hill district. There is much that is relevant to Koroit, the ecclesiastical center of the Parish.
As a professional historian, Helen Doyle specializes in writing local histories and has written studies of several Victorian municipalities, including for the Shire of Moyne.
Helen Doyle describes how the role of Catholicism became pivotal in local education. She highlights the great desire of Catholics to have their own school system. From 1874, Victorian government support for denominational schools ceased, which forced the Catholic community to source teachers at low cost from within the community. The primary way in which this was achieved was by encouraging young people to enter various religious orders whose chief function was to deliver Catholic schooling to the Irish-Australian students of the district. In particular, many local young women were drafted into religious orders such as the Sisters of the Good Samaritan, the Sisters of Mercy, and the Sisters of Saint John of God.
At the start of the twentieth century, the Sisters of the Good Samaritan Order were assigned the task of staffing the schools of the Koroit Parish. The first nuns of the Order moved into newly constructed Convent at Koroit in 1906. They immediately commenced teaching at the preexisting schools of Saint Patrick’s Koroit and Saint Bridgid’s Crossley, and later established new schools in Illowa and Kirkstall. There were up to twenty nuns living at the Koroit Convent at any one time during this period. Catholic women from the Koroit district could be found in convents across Australia. In 1973, the Whitlam government reinstated financial support for Catholic schools. The Koroit Convent was subsequently sold and lay teachers took over most of the teaching duties at Saint Patrick’s School.
The author and his siblings attended both Saint Patrick’s Koroit and Saint Bridgid’s Crossley in the 1960s. The local community knew which nuns were connected to which local families. Membership of religious orders conferred a certain cachet to the entire family. The nuns who taught us were generally pre-modern in their social and religious outlook, similar to the people of the community to which they were a part. The inculcation of Catholic doctrine with a distinctively Irish hue was a feature of their pedagogy. The nuns concentrated on teaching the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. Saint Patrick’s School had a little library of books.
Koroit was never just an Irish Catholic town and in the nineteenth century the Protestants of the district were more dominant socially and politically than was the case in later years. The trend over the twentieth century was for the Catholic section of the community to grow, both in terms of numbers and in relative economic strength.
One feature of the Koroit countryside was that it was relatively closely settled. Hamlets blended seamlessly with the surrounding countryside. Plots of a few acres housed a family. The distance from one house to the next was not great and people could see their neighbours. Townspeople had family and friends living in the countryside nearby.
The story of Patricia’s forebears illustrates various ways in which Koroit was distinctive, existing somewhat outside the mainstream. It seems appropriate to begin with Patricia’s mother, Margaret Bowman. Grandma Margaret lived on the Reilly farm at Southern Cross prior to moving to Warrnambool in the mid-1960s. She died there in 1973. The author has memories of her from the early 1960s and into the early 1970s.
The farm at Southern Cross where Grandma Margaret lived was not far from Koroit, just a few kilometers to the east of the town. Patricia, Aunt Biddy, Aunt Mary and Uncle Chas were raised on the Reilly farm. All the girls spent time at boarding school in Warrnambool for some years where they learned some of the affectations of the middle-class. Their father Charles Reilly died in the mid-1950s not long after Patricia and Lionel married. Charles inherited the farm from his father, Hugh Reilly, who died in 1918. Hugh was an Irish immigrant from County Cavan who bought his farm in 1903, after years of lease holding in the locality.
In 1963 Uncle Chas committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree in the backyard of the farmhouse. He was the only son of Charles Reilly. Lionel helped to cut him down. The author learnt this much later from Lionel. At the time, we children were told Chas had died in a tractor accident. It seems suicides were often covered up and explained away as much as possible. For example, rather than say someone shot themselves, children would be told that a person died when their gun discharged while they were crossing a fence, or some other such story.
Uncle Chas’s death was a great family tragedy. For one thing, it meant the farm at Southern Cross was eventually sold by Grandma Margaret. At that time farms were generally passed from father to son or else sold if there were no sons. After the farm was sold, Grandma Margaret purchased a home in a nice part of Warrnambool and lived there until her death. The author has memories of family gatherings at the Reilly farm and can recall the frequent visits made to her home in Warrnambool.
Family is at the heart of Irish Catholic religious and ceremonial expression and predates modernity by many centuries. The concept of family encompassed a wide kinship network of interrelated families and connected individuals. A clannish social and cultural life existed at Koroit. The population may have derived from many parts of Ireland but its cohesion was strengthened by the migration of kin though various chains of migration. Links between the countries were maintained.
Lionel Jones worked as a baker at Lynch’s Bakery in the town. Patricia was a housewife in the terms of the day. They worked hard to provide for the family. Everybody was expected to work from an early age and the division of labor was quite gendered. In the 1960s, the term housewife was more or less applied to any married woman who stayed at home caring for children and doing housework. Patricia looked after the children and did the housework while Lionel went to work.
The American dream was an ideal to which people aspired. American TV sitcoms and music took over. Television was a revelation to its denizens when Koroit got it in 1963.
Aunt Biddy and Uncle Tony were important in our lives in the 1960s. Aunt Biddy was Patricia’s older sister and she lived with her husband Tony O’Loughlin on a soldier-settler farm at Minjah. We saw a lot of them, in Koroit and on the farm. After Richard, one of the author’s siblings, was killed in a farm accident at the age of five, Aunt Biddy and Uncle Tony made sure their home was available for the children to go to. Patricia was no doubt desperately in need of respite in order to grieve her son. Richard was killed when he was run over by a tractor at harvest time in tragic circumstances. Fault did not rest with anyone, although it might have been better to have kept children well away from working farm vehicles.
For us children, Uncle Tony was a great favorite. He was full of interesting stories and magic tricks. Tony would take us around the farm on the tractor and even to the local pub at Caramut where he would buy us a sarsaparilla while he drank a beer and chatted about farming with the other men in the bar. Many of these men had been soldiers too and to a child’s mind this gave them an added mystique. Aunt Biddy was frequently exasperated by Tony’s propensity to take us into pubs and by his grand schemes to make a fortune.
Aunt Mary, Patricia’s other sister, moved from the district after her marriage to Merve Neild and so we did not see so much of her. However, Mary and her two children, Pat and Danny, visited Koroit regularly during school holidays. Aunt Mary had trained as a nurse. When she was seventeen she left home and worked at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, initially in a male ward where she was expected to learn on the job. Trainee nurses from the country worked extremely hard and were tightly controlled, and were paid a pittance.
For a time, Mary and her family lived on an old squatter property near Streatham, where Mary’s husband Merve worked as a farm laborer. Danny, their son, was good friends with a son of the Weatherly family, owners of the property. Their homestead was called Blythvale, located down a long gravel drive through the sheep paddocks. It was made clear to us children this friendship could not last, due to the social gulf between the Nield and the Weatherly families. They were squatters for generations and we were just workers for generations. It was clear to everyone that once the son went off to attend boarding school at Geelong Grammer all social connections with Danny would cease. In the end, Merve was caught drinking on the property which was not tolerated.
Several of Patricia’s half-siblings from Grandma Margaret’s first marriage lived in the district. Margaret Bowman had married Joseph Kelly prior to marrying Charles Reilly. One of Patricia half-sisters, Maggie Keane, lived in Koroit with her ten children. One of these children, Francis Keane, married Catherine Lynch, his neighbour from across the road. Catherine was the daughter of Frank Lynch who owned the bakery where Lionel worked. Francis also worked at Lynch’s bakery. Catherine and Patricia became good friends.
Jack Kelly was Patricia’s half-brother. He lived in Koroit with his wife Muriel and their two children, John and Brian. John Kelly worked at the Nestles factory at Dennington for many years and we got to know him well. Brian had a developmental disability.
Another brother was Joe Kelly who lived in a fine stone house just past Woolsthorpe. The house was from his wife’s Davidson family, a well-connected family at Woolsthorpe. The couple had two children, Paul and David, who were a little older than the boys in our family. Joe worked in Koroit at the Agricultural Cooperative and was thus known universally as “Joe from the Co.”
Through the Kelly, Keane and Bowman families, the author understood he was related to other people in Koroit, even though he did not pay much attention to the details. Older people, especially the older ladies, would often talk about genealogical connections, but this held little interest for a child. Such knowledge was very detailed and complicated and it seemed impossible to keep track of all the connections.
The Reilly farm at Southern Cross was called “Rehill”. It was sometimes spelt “Rahil” but Aunt Biddy preferred “Rehill”. The story of how Grandma Margaret came to marry Charles Reilly and live at the Reilly farm was retold many time through the years. Margaret’s Bowman family lived across the road from the Reilly farm. There were many children in the extended Bowman household and they did not have much, although Biddy stressed they were not poorer than many others.
In 1908 when just nineteen, Margaret Bowman married Joseph Kelly. He was a local Southern Cross man and a neighbour of hers. The Kelly farm was to the north and nearly adjacent the Reilly farm, which in turn was across the road from the Bowman farm. The Keane family lived next to the Reilly farm. Life at Southern Cross was local as it was a tiny place.
After their marriage, Margaret and Joseph Kelly had five children in relatively quick succession. The family continued to live in Southern Cross, up the road from the Bowman house where Margaret had grown up as a child. One of Joseph Kelly’s brothers lived on an adjacent farm if crossing the paddocks. The Kellys, Reillys, Bowmans and Keanes were all close neighbours and there were a number of marriages between them. It was common in those days for neighbours to marry and sometimes two siblings of one family would marry two siblings from another family.
Unfortunately, tragedy struck Margaret and Joseph Kelly. After a few years at Southern Cross, the family moved to Yambuk to work on the farm of James O’Brien. Yambuck, on the other side of Port Fairy, was another hamlet with a high concentration of Irish people. The O’Briens were noted stock auctioneers and they purchased part of the former Yambuk Estate, originally a squatter run taken up by Lieutenant Baxter and his famous wife Annie.
The Kelly family were living in an old farmhouse on the Yambuk property. In 1916 the house caught fire and burned down. The couple and the children escaped with their lives but with little else.
By late 1917, Margaret, Joseph and the five Kelly children had returned to the Koroit district. Tragedy struck again. According to Aunt Biddy, Joseph Kelly caught a fever in 1918 following his playing in a rainy early spring footy match. He died after a short illness. At the time this was thought to be pneumonia. It may have been an early case of the so called Spanish flu that spread rapidly after the First World War.
Upon the death of her husband, with five young children in her care, Grandma Margaret apparently had no means of supporting her family. She was devastated at losing her husband and found it difficult to cope. She may have had some form of breakdown. Either at the behest of the church or the state, her children were taken away from her and she had to move to Melbourne to work as a maid to pay off her debts. It seems the authorities had a low tolerance for a poor woman heading a family of young children without the presence of a husband and without evident means of support.
Who knows what a woman might do to provide for her children? Margaret’s extended family evidently had insufficient means to forestall the authorities from removing them. Family solidarity and support could only be made to stretch so far, it would seem. In any case, there was no shortage of children to support. The Kelly children went to two Catholic orphanage in Ballarat, the boys to one and the girls to the other.
Grandma Margaret’s children lived in Catholic orphanages in Ballarat for a couple of years. According to Patricia and Aunt Biddy, after the children were removed, Grandma Margaret worked in Melbourne as a maid at a hotel. Biddy suggested that Grandma Margaret may have been in debt and was at her wits end, not having the proper means to provide for her children.
The archive shows that in March 1919, just before she moved to Melbourne, Grandma Margaret sold all the furniture of the house she and Joseph leased at Southern Cross. The owner of the property then sold it soon after she vacated. Margaret then lived in lodgings at Koroit for a short time and then she left for Melbourne.
Whenever this story was told, it struck the author as odd that the authorities should resort to such harsh measures in the name of protecting children. It seemed odd that the Kelly and Bowman families should acquiesce to such an intervention, and could not negotiate a better solution. The details of what actually happened remain unclear. Poverty and lack of resources made the situation difficult.
While some argue that the Irish are more egalitarian than other communities, the author is not sure if this is actually the case. There was a hierarchy of perceived Catholic virtue with various levels of good people from good families. The public face of virtue was perhaps more important than the actual commodity.
As the story goes, Margaret was lucky. Before long a white knight appeared on the scene. Charles Reilly, the close neighbour of the Bowmans and Kellys, was no doubt aware of Margaret’s plight. After all, the Reilly farm was just across the road from the Bowman house. Margaret had been raised there. Charles had never married and so he offered to marry Margaret. He was considered an older man by that stage. It seems that Margaret was happy to accept this proposal and the couple married in July 1922. She was thirty-two whereas he was twenty-two years older than her.
When Patricia, Biddy or Mary talked about their father, they always said that Charles Reilly was the kindest and gentlest of men. Charles would have known Margaret from the time she was a child. On Margaret’s part, it would not have hurt that the Reilly farm was one of the best medium sized farms in the district. Charles Reilly was considered a relatively wealthy man by the standards of his community, at least in comparison to the Bowmans and Kellys.
Charles Reilly owned a second house on the Southern Cross Road, at the gateway to the Rehill farm. This house was originally purchased by Charles’s father, Hugh Reilly, as his place of retirement when he got too old to farm the land. This second house was next to the Bowman home where Margaret was raised.
According to Aunt Biddy, after Hugh died in 1918, Charles moved into this retirement house and leased the main farmhouse. When Charles and Margaret married in 1922, Charles was living in the retirement house. The Rehill land was leased to others and it is likely that Charles’s relatives, Magaret Haberfield and her husband Joe, were in a share cropping arrangement with Charles at that time.
Upon his marriage in 1922, Charles Reilly sold the retirement house. Charles then purchased the best house in Spring Street, Koroit. This relatively short and narrow street is in the centre of town, running off the main road. It was lined with modest timber dwellings inhabited by large families of mostly Irish descent. Reportedly, in the 1920s the street was often full of children, playing games and generally running about.
Following Margaret’s marriage to Charles Reilly, the authorities saw fit to allow her five children from her first marriage to be reunited with her. The Kelly children came down from Ballarat to live in Spring Street with Charles and Margaret in their new home. It is not clear what emotional baggage they brought with them, but they seem to have survived the Catholic orphanages mostly intact.
Margaret and Charles Reilly commenced a family of their own and were living in Spring Street when Aunt Biddy was born in April 1923, the first child of the new marriage. Aunt Mary was born some eighteen months later, in November 1924. Biddy and Mary eventually both lived to be over one hundred years of age.
The Reilly family lived in Spring Street for several years. Then in 1926, Charles and Margaret and all the children moved back to the Rehill farmhouse on the property at Southern Cross. Charles recommenced farming the land, with some assistance from the Kelly children. Joseph Kelly had a surviving brother on a small farm just to the north of Rehill and the Kelly children reportedly spent time working there as well.
It was fortunate for Charles Reilly that he had some assistance with the farm work, as he himself was getting on in years. Charles Reilly’s own siblings were all deceased by that stage and he was the sole male descendant of his father. He did have a niece who was raised in the Reilly household, almost as a sister. Her name was Mary Johnston. She married Joe Haberfield, yet another neighbour. Mary and Joe Haberfield share-cropped parts of the Rehill farmland at various times.
According to Aunt Biddy, one reason why Charles Reilly purchased the house in Spring Street was so that Grandma Margaret would have a place of her own upon his death. He was considerably older than her and so was thinking ahead. He may well have hoped to produce a son of his own who might take over the farm eventually.
Chas’s suicide a decade or so after Charles Reilly’s own death meant that this succession plan was not fulfilled. At that time and place, farms generally passed to sons and not to daughters. The expectation was that the head of a family was a man, although there were exceptions.
Patricia was born in 1932, and was the youngest child of Charles and Margaret Reilly. She was almost always called Pat. At the time of his youngest child’s birth, Charles Reilly was already considered an elderly parent. Grandma Margaret was forty-two years of age and Charles was sixty-four.
Patricia’s arrival was the twelfth occasion that Margaret had given birth. Two of her children did not survive early childhood, one from each marriage. Sheila Reilly was Patricia’s full sister. She died at around two years of age. The author was told that Sheila may have had Downs Syndrome. Chas committed suicide in his thirties, Patricia survived to reach eighty-five and both Biddy and Mary hit their centuries.
Over the years the author has made many visits to Tower Hill Cemetery. Virtually all of Patricia’s forbears are buried there, as are Lionel’s forebears. Elders in the family such as Aunt Biddy would explain who was buried where and what the connections were. The details could be hard to remember but over time it became clearer. Close to the Reilly graves is a plot of McNamara graves holding the remains of McNamara relatives. Not far away in the Reilly family plot Bridgit McNamara lies next to her husband Hugh Reilly. Margaret Bowman’s parents and grandparents lie in two separate plots about fifty metres away. The Bowman, McNamara and Reilly families are the cornerstones of Patricia’s Irish genealogy.
These families came to the Southwest at a time of trial and tribulation. What volition did they exercise in coming here and how did colonial immigration policy shape their lives? What experience of famine did they have and did they speak Irish? The answer to these questions varied depending on individual and family circumstance specific to each case.
Shadows of the Western District 