Samuel and Henry-Allan Jones took the journey from the Riverina to the Koroit district in the mid-1920s, very likely by rail as this was when the railways reached their fullest extent and their greatest popularity. The railways were an affordable and reliable mode of transport in an era well before people had private motor transport. Standard gauge lines ran from Hay to Narrandera and from Narrandera to Tocumwal on the Murray River. At Tocumwal passengers would change trains and travel on the broad gauge line to Melbourne via Shepperton. The Port Fairy line from Geelong ran through Koroit and there was even a siding at Kirkstall.
The Port Fairy line reached Winchelsea in 1876, Colac in 1877, Camperdown in 1883, and Terang in 1887, and was then finally extended to Warrnambool, Dennington, Koroit and Port Fairy in 1890.
Samuel and Henry-Allan Jones’s sojourn at Kirkstall likely lasted just a relatively short period. When Henry-Allan married Eily in 1929 both Samuel and Henry-Allan were in the district. Samuel and Henry-Allan are on the Electoral Roll for Kirkstall in 1931, with Henry-Allan listed as a mechanic.
Uncle Bill mentioned several times that Henry-Allan was working in Kirkstall at a local motor garage when he met Eily, and this was Patricia’s understanding as well.
It is impossible to know what connected Henry-Allan and Eily to each other, apart from the opportunity presented by their proximity to each other. Eily was young and single, one thing led to another, and Eily became pregnant. It was probably not much more complicated than that, although he was ten years older than her. Teenage pregnancy was not uncommon, but where it did occur there was strong pressure placed on the people concerned to marry if possible.
The couple did have some things in common. Eily and Henry-Allan were both relatively new to the Koroit district, probably considered outsiders to an extent. Both experienced trauma in their childhoods, with Eily traumatized by the murder of young McIntyre and the subsequent legal proceedings brought against her father. McIntyre had been publicly accused of molesting Eily, and Anastasia was likely persuaded that the family should move to a new location, far from the scene of the crime.
Ernst died in tragic circumstances around the time Eily and Henry-Allan met. Anastasia likely had a lot on her mind. For her part, Eily would have witnessed the distress and difficulties Anastasia had to endure.
Henry-Allan Jones also experienced childhood trauma and loss. As an infant he experienced the illness and death of his mother. This was followed by a somewhat chaotic homelife during his childhood. When a teenager, his stepmother, Lizzie, died in tragic circumstances in outback New South Wales. It is quite possible that Henry-Allan was in Booligal when Lizzie died, and if this were the case then he may have had some knowledge of the circumstances of Lizzie’s tragic death.
Samuel Jones moved to the Cobden district in the early 1930s. He married Lucy Pappin there in 1932. Henry-Allan and Eily also moved to the Cobden district around this time, with Lionel in tow. Evidence suggests that Henry-Allan and Eily were living near Cobden from the final months of 1931.
Both Samuel and Henry-Allan are listed as supplementary voters on the 1932 electoral roll for Cobden. Being listed as supplementary voters indicates that the two men were newcomers to the district and had recently completed their voter registrations.
Uncle Bill, the couple’s second child, was born in Cobden in late December 1931 and his birth was duly registered there in January 1932. In the family, Bill was always said to have been born in 1932, even though he was actually born at the very end of 1931. On Bill Jones’s birth certificate, Henry-Allan is described as a twenty-five year old laborer, born in Carrathool. He was actually thirty years old in 1931. Henry-Allan may have been trying to present as younger than he actually was, given the age of his wife. On Bill’s birth certificate, Eily is described as Mary Eileen Jones nee Schefferle, aged twenty-one and born in Melbourne, although she was actually born near Geelong.
Lying to the authorities was likely not considered lying at all, as no one was actually being lied to, just the government.
Eily returned to the Kirkstall farm after separating from Henry-Allan in late 1932, or perhaps early 1933. Bill was just a baby and Lionel said he never remembered his father. From 1934, Eily is listed on the Electoral Rolls as living at Kirkstall, in the Subdivision of Koroit, initially under the name of Eileen Jones, home duties, and subsequently as Eileen Schefferle, home duties.
Through the second half of the 1930s, Eily settled back into the routine of farming life at Kirkstall. She now had her two boys to care for and she worked on the small mixed farm alongside the other members of her family. She milked cows and reared calves, raised and sold poultry, and cooked meals on the cast iron stove. This stove continued in operation right through the 1960s. Eily was highly adept in cooking with it and was an excellent cook. On market days she sold the family’s surplus produce in Koroit and she loved the banter and competition of the saleyards, located in the center of town on the main street.
From the time of his marriage to Lucy Pappin in 1932, Samuel Jones lived to the east of Cobden in the district known as Kennedy’s Creek. The electoral rolls for Kennedy’s Creek of 1934, 1936 and 1937 include the names of Samuel Jones and Lucy Jones, indicating that the couple lived in that hamlet throughout the second half of the 1930s. At that time Kennedy’s Creek was in the Subdivision of Port Campbell in the Electorate of Corangamite. On the electoral roll of 1937, Samuel is listed as a farmer and Lucy is described as engaged in home duties.
Kennedy’s Creek is an isolated bush district east of Cobden, inland from Port Campbell. Today it is still an entirely rural area in the foothills of the western Otways. To some observers, it might have seemed a remote and risky place for an elderly couple to live. However, Samuel and Lucy were both accustomed to bush blocks in out of the way places.
On the electoral rolls for Kennedy’s Creek at this time is John Joseph Pappin and his wife Francis Pappin. John was one of Lucy’s son by her deceased first husband, making him technically Samuel’s stepson. John Pappin was also Samuel’s cousin, given that his grandmother, Jane, and Samuel’s mother, Sarah, were sisters. Samuel was well into his mid-seventies when he lived at Kennedy’s Creek.
Samuel Jones died on 21 August 1939 at the Austin Hospital in Heidelberg and was buried in the Heidelberg cemetery the next day. According to Samuel’s death certificate he had lymphosarcoma for two years and had also more recently developed carcinoma of the rectum. He was seventy-eight years old when he died and was described as a retired farmer from Kennedy’s Creek, married to Lucy Jones. She too was in her late seventies at that time.
Lucy’s death in 1948, when she was well into her eighties, was registered at Cobden. She was survived by four of her children and was buried in the Presbyterian section of the Cobden cemetery. Tragically, two of Lucy’s sons, Duncan and Hugh, died at sea in 1928 when the boat in which they were fishing capsized at Port Campbell. At the time of the tragedy, Lucy had been living in the Port Campbell district for many years, where at least three of her sons lived.
The Geelong Advertiser of 2 March 1928 has a report of the events that led to the deaths of Duncan and Hugh Pappin. This was four years prior to Lucy’s marriage to Samuel Jones. Although Lucy is not mentioned by name, the Advertiser’s report states that the mother of Duncan and Hugh Pappin was a widow living at Port Campbell. Lucy’s husband, John Thomas Pappin, died in 1922 and is buried at Camperdown.
Hugh Pappin served in the AIF in the First World War, and was wounded in action in 1917, and his military record states that his father, John Thomas Pappin, was living at Kennedy’s Creek during the war. The youngest of the Pappin children, Harriet, was born at Woodford in 1895. It would seem that at least some of the Pappin family left Woodford after 1895 and some of them then moved to the Port Campbell district prior to the First World War. This was many years before Samuel Jones went to Kennedy’s Creek in the early 1930s following his marriage to Lucy Pappin. Some of Lucy’s descendants remain in the Southwest.
Henry-Allan Jones is a difficult man to trace from the mid-1930s. He does not seem to have bothered with maintaining electoral roll registrations from that point, likely indicating that he was moving around. In fact, it is difficult to trace his whereabouts between 1933 and the early 1940s.
In the 1990s, Bill and Lionel tried to find out what Henry-Allan was doing in the run up to his apparent death in 1943. There seems not much to add to Henry-Allan’s story, apart from a cryptic reference from Lionel indicating that he believed Henry-Allan had fathered another child in the 1930s.
Lionel did mention that Henry-Allan was living for a time in Geelong, and this is supported by a copy of a handwritten note from Leslie Rigby in reply to a request for information from a lady called Kathryn. Leslie Rigby took in boarders at her North Geelong house. In 1998 Kathryn made a phone call to Leslie requesting information regarding Henry-Allan. It may be that Kathryn was employed by Bill or Lionel to do research, or perhaps she was enquiring on behalf of someone else.
Leslie wrote a note replying to Kathryn’s request, as follows: “Dear Kathryn, as promised during the phone call this morning. He was with us Christmas 38, but visited us about Easter 39, from Korumburra. We as a family really liked him, and I could tell you other little stories, but enough said. Nothing really nasty. With regard to you and yours, Leslie Rigby.” The letter also indicates that Leslie sent some photos of Henry-Allan along with the letter. When Lionel died and our family were packing up some of Lionel’s things, we came across a photo that appears to be of Henry-Allan from this period. If so, then Henry-Allan has a definite resemblance to Bill, in particular.
As far as Lionel was concerned, from the end of the 1990s he felt he had learnt as much as he needed to about his father, and was happy to leave things at that. Amongst the papers Lionel gave the author is a death certificate for a man called Henry Allen Jones. Lionel was told by his researchers that this was likely his father’s death certificate, and it probably is, even though some of the details don’t quite add up. It is clear that Henry-Allan Jones did not always tell the truth, and he was probably something of a fantasist by the time of his death, if not well before. It is possible that this death certificate is for someone else entirely, but this seems unlikely.
The death certificate refers to a man called Henry Allen Jones who died on 2 June 1943 at Heidelberg House, which is a wing of the Austin Hospital in Heidelberg. This institution was a place where people with incurable diseases such as tuberculosis and cancer were cared for when such patients were excluded from other public hospitals, perhaps due to their poverty and lack of family support. It is uncertain to what degree Heidelberg House checked information given to them by its overwhelmingly impoverished patients.
At the time of his death, this Henry Allen Jones had been diagnosed with a Carcinoma of the Pancreas for a period of four months. On the death certificate, the usual place of residence for Henry Allen Jones was listed as Traralgon, which seems quite plausible, but his occupation was listed as Engineer, and his age at death was declared to be thirty-one years. Neither of these claims can be correct in light of other details known about Lionel’s father.
Furthermore, the father of the deceased was listed as Allen Hartley Jones, Medical Practitioner, which is obviously inaccurate. The place of birth is listed as New South Wales. The deceased claimed to have lived there for a period of twenty-one years lived, with a further ten years spent in Victoria. These lengths of time cannot be accurate in light of other information available regarding Henry-Allan Jones. The burial of Henry Allen Jones took place at Preston Cemetery on 4 June 1943.
Interestingly, Heidelberg House at the Austin Hospital was founded with a £6000 donation from Elizabeth Austin, the widow of Thomas Austin of Barwon Park in Winchelsea. Thomas Austin, the man famously credited with introducing the rabbit to Australia, was the owner of one of the largest squatter estates in Victoria and one of the wealthiest of the squatters. Elizabeth Austin was very generous with her wealth following her husband’s death. The philanthropy of some of the squatters is worth noting as a balance to some of their more questionable contributions to our history.
Some years before Henry-Allan died at Heidelburg House, Samuel Jones also died from cancer while being cared for at the Austin Hospital. It seems oddly fitting that both Samuel and Henry-Allan Jones should be cared for in their last days by a hospital founded on squatter wealth.
There are a couple of other documents that do support the view that Henry-Allan Jones was living in Traralgon in the early 1940s prior to his death in 1943. One of these is a Certificate of Exemption from Military Service. The fact that Henry-Allan had a medical exemption from military service is consistent with his admission to Heidelberg House in 1943 with cancer. On 18 December 1942, at the height of the Second World War, a Henry Allan Jones, aged forty-one, of 43 Argyle Street, Traralgon, was declared medically unfit from service in the Citizen Forces. The age of forty-one would be correct. The height given for this Henry-Allan was five foot seven inches, which is consistent with the wedding photo which shows that Eily’s husband was a relatively short man.
A second documented reference comes from the 1943 Electoral Roll for Traralgon, which includes a Henry Allan Jones living at 43 Argyle Street, Traralgon. This is the same address as that on the medical exemption certificate. This Henry Allan Jones is listed as an engineer, which is consistent with the entry on the death certificate, but rather an exaggeration of the skills of a talented motor mechanic. Perhaps when he was living in Traralgon in the early 1940s, Henry-Allan was already in some form of institutionalised health care due to his illness and this is why he suddenly appears back on the electoral rolls. His apparent disregard for the truth seems entirely consistent with what can be gleaned from the archive.
Life at the Kirkstall Farm
In the late 1930s, Lionel and Bill were children on the farm at Kirkstall living with their mother Eily, their granny Anastasia, and their uncles, Orry and Gerry. The boys walked to the Catholic primary school in Kirkstall, a couple of kilometers from the house. Their school days were in the wake of the great depression. Money was scarce for most people. There were many unemployed men shuffling through the countryside going from town to town, constantly moved on by local police. Unemployed men were often tolerated to stay a night or two at the local showgrounds before being told to move on again to the next town.
In the fertile farming districts around Koroit, basic staples could be produced even if a family had just a farm block of only a few acres. People had access to vegetables, eggs and milk, and rabbits and other game could be hunted to provide supplementary nourishment when needed. People exchanged goods with others in the community.
Anastasia ran the farm at Kirkstall. Her early life at Bannockburn had equipped her with the skills necessary to run a small mixed farm. Her adult children and her two grandchildren living on the farm contributed to the farmwork. Patricia, who got to know them quite well, sometimes mentioned that the relationships between family members could be quite volatile at times and emotions were not always well regulated.
It must have been hard for Anastasia to run the farm, not because she lacked the skills, but partly because she was the woman in charge. This was a period of greater sexism than is now generally the case. At that time, the person in charge was usually presumed to be a man. Some men felt threatened and demeaned if a woman was perceived to be the one giving directions. This emerged as an issue for Uncle Orry and Uncle Gerry as they grew up on the farm. It seems they developed the view that they should have control of the place, as the men of the family. According to Lionel’s account, Anastasia had to struggle to keep hold of the farm in the face of her sons’ apparent preference to sell up and take the money for their own purposes.
While the evident misogyny in the Schefferle family at Kirkstall was in line with much of the culture of that time and place, it was also an unfortunate trait that both Lionel and Bill adopted in turn. There was a general lack of respect towards women in a homosocial culture. In conversation, women tended to be disparaged whenever men gathered, perhaps as a defence mechanism to obscure some deficiency in male personal esteem and agency. At any rate, even a cursory examination of Western District history will reveal a deeply entrenched misogyny, hopefully now much reduced.
In the family, there was a lack of positive male role models. Orry and Gerry Schefferle went through their adolescence without a father figure and this was replicated in the experience of Lionel and Bill. However, Uncle Orry did offer his nephews some degree of support, particularly in their sporting endeavours. Orry was Lionel’s cycling trainer and coach. Uncle Gerry had good trade skills which he passed on to his nephews. Both Lionel and Bill developed talents in carpentry, concreting and hunting, for example. They were also excellent cooks, something they picked up from Anastasia and Eily.
There was an evident suspicion of authority among those at the Kirkstall farm. Both Uncle Orry and Uncle Gerry had little time for the cops, an attitude which was fairly common in the district. In later life both Lionel and Bill moved to the city and became financially well off. However, they remained wedded to many of their formative views inculcated in them from their early days in an impoverished rural community. They were always country people, even while living in the city.
In terms of the misogyny of the day, it wasn’t just in the home, or in the footy club, or in the pub, or in the workplace that sexist traits were manifest, to the great detriment of women. The government and the religious institutions of the district underwrote policies of institutionalised sexism and misogyny. The government’s “welfare” services were on the lookout to remove children from families where the father was absent. This fear was quite justified. Many children of poor families were removed from a mother’s care when a father died or otherwise went missing. While living at Kirkstall, both Anastasia and Eily had a fear of government officials, concerned that the children might be taken away.
Enforced family breakup was the experience of Patricia’s mother, Margaret Bowman. When her first husband Joseph Kelly died, her five children were taken from her care and were placed in Catholic orphanages in Ballarat. Somehow the authorities judged that Margaret could not support her children. Her husband had died with debts to repay and so Margaret went to work in Melbourne to earn money and to escape the public shame of impoverished widowhood and mental breakdown. Her children were removed from her.
As is well known, removal of children happened a great deal with respect to Aboriginal families, but it also happened to many other poor families. The great difference was that the removal of Aboriginal children was done within a subtext of government-sponsored efforts to erase Aboriginality, in effect a continuation of genocidal practices.
In the Southwest there was an entrenched sexism and paternalism evident in the overall policy of removing poor children no matter what the children’s “race”. If a father was absent or judged unworthy in some way then the children were at risk of removal. In terms of the feelings of the respective mothers watching on as children were taken away, the emotions would have been similar no matter what color the poor mother was deemed to be. The women concerned would have taken the removal of their children quite personally, one suspects.
Lionel spoke several times of the network in place at Kirkstall to provide the community with advance warning of the presence of child welfare officials in the district. Kirkstall had the reputation of being a poor neighborhood. Even though there were poor families throughout the Koroit district, it seems that the proportion of such families was somewhat greater at Kirkstall. Lionel recalled that although his own family was not well off, they were relatively better off than many other families. He said they always had proper shoes to wear to school, for example, while some of the poorest children of the district did not.
Uncle Bill sometimes referred to the lane where he and Lionel grew up as “goose shit alley”. In the 1930s and 1940s there were rows of simple wooden houses running along both sides of Hamilton’s Lane, and farm animals and poultry freely wandered up and down the road. When Lionel visited the author when he was working in rural Sumatra in the late 1980s, and we rode a motorbike around the rural backroads, Lionel said he recognized many things from his childhood in the way people lived there.
Poorer families in the 1930s still lived in a pre-industrial way to some extent. Lionel and Bill grew up on a mixed farm that was self-sufficient in many things and people would exchange produce with neighbours.
At Kirkstall people socialised at the local community hall. Such halls were a feature of many districts, including remote places such as Kennedy’s Creek. At the halls in Crossley and Kirkstall there were card nights for the older people and dances for the younger ones. Community halls were spaces where women could gather, more so than the local pubs, which were more oriented towards men.
Until the mid-1960s, market days in Koroit were important occasions to buy and sell. Livestock was taken to the saleyards in the main street and farmers met each other on the footpaths and in the pubs. Various stalls lined the street where the people of the town could buy produce from those with farms. The footpaths housed a real farmer’s market rather than some ideological initiative of an activist group.
Sporting contests brought people together at the local reserve and most people went to church of one kind or another. Accents were distinctively rural and some people spoke with a little of the old Irish lilt. Others had voices reminiscent of those of the old colonial days.
A few aspects of modernity gradually arrived on the scene. Trains, motor cars and electricity gradually became entrenched, which made a big difference. Lionel recalled that it was a huge event whenever planes landed in local fields and people would flock to see the machines and their pilots.
After attending the Catholic school at Kirkstall, Lionel went to the convent school in Koroit to complete his intermediate certificate. He was proud to have remained at school until he was sixteen and that he completed his leaving certificate. Most of his acquaintances left school at thirteen or fourteen, and some effectively never went beyond primary school.
The Second World War dominated the first half of the 1940s and there was a great demand for teenage farm labor due to the absence of so many adult men. From mid-1942, at the height of the Second World War, all men of military age were required to sign on with the Citizen Military Forces, unless they could obtain a certificate of exemption. Also, the price of rabbit skins was high due to demand from the military and teenagers could make a good living from hunting and skinning rabbits. A good income from picking potatoes and other agricultural tasks such as hay carting was available to older boys. The wartime boom changed a depressed rural economy into a much more buoyant market for goods and services.
In his middle teenage years Lionel acquired his first bicycle and he quickly developed a love of riding. He several times told of a man called Billy Sheehan who was living for a while in the hayshed on the farm. Billy was apparently resisting military service because he didn’t believe he should be expected to serve. His family had already lost enough people to conflict, apparently. Lionel later came to realize that Eily and Billy Sheehan were probably engaged in some kind of affair.
As a teenager, Lionel was useful to the adults on the farm because he would go about the district on his bike, running errands and collecting information. He even mentioned that at one time he was employed as a runner for a local SP bookmaker. Uncle Orry was somehow involved in this shady business. Illegal gambling on the horses was very popular at that time, and bookies employed local youths to assist in organising bets with punters and as lookouts. Lionel continued to help with the farm work at Kirkstall throughout the 1950s. He also worked seasonally on other local farms picking potatoes and the like.
Eventually Lionel took up cycling as a competitive sport. He would compete at local road racing events and track cycling carnivals. Sporting carnivals were very popular in outlying rural towns at that time. Marching bands would parade along the street as public entertainment. Bagpipes, drums, and kilts were on display at these events through to the 1960s. Irish and Highland dancing were popular as well.
Uncle Gerry Schefferle married Linda Grundy in 1941 and they lived at Kirkstall before moving to Spring Street Koroit with their young children. According to electoral rolls for Koroit they were living in Spring Street from around 1949 into the 1950s. Gerry and Linda eventually moved to Warrnambool and we would visit them there. They had a son, young Gerry, who Lionel knew all his life. Young Gerry married Lorraine from Winslow and they in turn raised a family on their Winslow farm, just southeast of Woolsthorpe.
Uncle Orry Schefferle married Rose Ward in 1944 and they also lived at Kirkstall during the late 1940s and into the early 1950s. Orry and Rose then moved to Warrnambool at some stage and the author can recall visiting their upstairs flat many times during the 1960s. Rose worked as a cook at a Warrnambool pub but Orry insisted she quit when he stopped work as it was not acceptable to him that she should work when he did not. Such attitudes were fairly common, although this was beginning to be thought of as somewhat anachronistic. Patricia thought it a great shame that Rose should have to stop working even though she enjoyed her job greatly and the money was very useful to both her and her husband. Orry and Rose lived on hardly any money for the rest of their lives but they seemed to get by well enough on the little they had.
After Lionel completed school at Saint Patrick’s in Koroit he started work as an apprentice baker at the local Koroit bakery. Frank Lynch was the proprietor. Interestingly, one of Patricia’s nephews, Francis Keane, married Frank Lynch’s daughter, Catherine. As children, Francis and Catherine lived across the road from each other. Patrica Jones and Catherine were good friends in later years.
Patricia knew the Keane family in Koroit very well, given that they were her close relatives. Francis Keane’s mother, Maggie Keane, was Patricia’s half-sister, even though there was a great difference in their ages. Francis worked with Lionel at Lynch’s bakery for many years.
Around 1948 while in his late teens Lionel Jones met Patricia Reilly. She lived at Southern Cross on the Reilly family farm. After a relatively long courtship, they married in 1953. The photo at the start of this document shows Lionel and Patricia shortly after they first met in 1948. She was sixteen and he was eighteen. They were attending the Koroit Agricultural Show held at Victoria Park.
Lionel’s grandmother, Anastasia, died in 1963. Granny Anastasia was generally known as Annastasia Lowndes, having reverted to her maiden name. Lionel held his grandmother in the highest regard. Towards the end of his life he stipulated that after he died his funerary urn should be placed in Anastasia’s grave at Tower Hill Cemetery. This was done in 2021.
Eily married Norm Fraser in the 1950s and the couple lived at the farm at Kirkstall for many years. Norm was a very capable handyman and people generally like him. He kept the property well-maintained during his time there. Eventually, in the early 1970s Eily and Norm decided to sell the farm. It is likely they decided to sell the farm and move from the district as the farm work was becoming too hard for them as they got older. Before they left Kirkstall they had a great send off in the Kirkstall Hall. They moved to an old but comfortable weatherboard house in Kilmore. In Kilmore they would have better access to shops and services.
Norm Fraser predeceased Eily by some years. Eily died at Kilmore in 1984. Nevertheless she too is buried in the Tower Hill Cemetery. Bill Jones had his funerary urn interned in Eily’s plot when he died. Even in death the two bothers maintained a competitive relationship.
Pat Reilly was from a family that was part of a local community best described as Koroit Irish. Lionel sometimes found this Koroit Irish community difficult to navigate because his family was not really part of it. Kirkstall was more of a mixed community, more diverse in composition, and the Schefferles were relatively recent arrivals by local standards and not did not consider themselves culturally Irish even though Anastasia’s mother was from County Kilkenny.
In Koroit and nearby places such as Southern Cross, Illowa, Yangery and Crossley people of Irish heritage were the majority in the population. An Irish constituency was dominant on the slopes and banks around Tower Hill. This was due to specific historical circumstances involving patterns of migration in colonial times. Catholicism was integral to this heritage.
There were many Protestant families in and around Koroit, belonging mostly to the Presbyterian or the Scots congregations. Some Protestant families had historic connections to Ulster and had a Scots heritage. In addition, the Methodist and other non-conformist churches had adherents in the district. There were a few Church of England families in the town. They had their own small bluestone church, dwarfed by the much larger Church of the Infant Jesus. Koroit was set apart due to the absence of a large Anglican congregation.
By the time Lionel and Patricia started going out together in 1948 many of the Koroit Irish were already third generation Australian. Patrica’s paternal grandparents were Irish born. Her maternal grandfather was Irish born as well. Her maternal grandmother was born in Australia but raised in a household of Irish born parents. Irish cultural roots were still very evident when she was growing up at Southern Cross.
Most of Patricia’s Irish forebears came here in the 1850s as assisted emigrants to Portland and Port Fairy in the wake of the great famine. Many of them initially worked as agricultural laborers on land leased from estates owned by a network of Protestant landowners. William Rutledge was the largest of these proprietors. There were smaller farming properties in the district, mostly owned by Protestant free-settlers and they employed the recently arrived Irish farm laborers as well. The descendants of Irish emigrants have lived all around Tower Hill, organised in their own community. The Church was a pivot for the community for many decades.
As might be expected, there was a tendency for Irish assisted immigrants to marry each other. The Tower Hill district was closely settled and so there were eligible partners of similar background in the vicinity. In the twentieth century, the Koroit Irish tended to see their town as their own, a place set apart from others. In many ways it was unique.
From 1843, in the decade prior to when Patricia’s forebears were brought to Port Fairy, a small group of landed proprietors began to assert their control over economic life on the coast. These well-connected gentlemen had entrenched their preponderant economic leverage by the early 1850s, just in time to take advantage of the boom ushered in by the discovery of gold in central Victoria. Underpinning their economic power was ownership and control of the land and the labor services of subaltern workers.
Thirty-eight ships carrying assisted migrants arrived directly at Portland between 1851 and 1857. Our Macnamara, Bowman, and Reilly forebears arrived in the district between 1854 and 1856 on several of these ships.
Permanent colonial presence on the coast between Port Fairy and Warrnambool preceded the arrival of this wave of assisted immigration by around twenty years.
Europeans originally came to these shores in the whaling era of the 1830s. Initially, most Europeans on the coast came over from Van Diemen’s Land. Vandemonian workers were seasonally engaged in whaling and during the off season some of these men were set to work running livestock and collecting the wattle bark used in tannin production. A small network of traders, merchants and whaling station captains controlled the whaling, livestock and bark collecting operations on the coast.
For some years, the number of Indigenous clanspeople on the coast was greater than the number of Europeans. By the end of the 1830s, squatters were spreading through the interior parts of the Southwest and confronting clanspeople on their country.
Shadows of the Western District 