Samuel Jones left Woolsthorpe around 1880 when he was nineteen. He evidently had had enough of the Southwest and who could blame him. By 1883 he had reached Narrandera. The first train to arrive in Narrandera came in 1881 so he may have travelled part of the way by rail. The Riverina was a focus of the railway boom of the 1870s and 1880s. With the railways came a dramatic increase in Narrandera’s population with up to a thousand people moving to the area. Of those arriving many were from northern Victoria, including Samuel Jones and Bertha Weppner. Bertha married Samuel in Narrandera in 1883.
Narrandera is on Wiradjuri country on the Murrumbidgee River. The Narrungderah clan of the Wiradjuri was effectively destroyed by violent clashes with squatter pastoralists in the 1840s and early 1850s. The effects of disease and the impacts of dispossession also played a part. The Wiradjuri people now in Narrandera predominantly have forebears who come from regions south and west of the town. The traditional clans of these regions were dislocated by squatter expansion onto their country and some of the survivors subsequently came to live in Narrandera. For those interested in a good local history of the Narrandera Shire, Bill Gamage published an excellent book on the subject in 1987. Gamage grew up in Wagga Wagga and went to Wagga High School, then to the Australian National University. He has written widely on Australian history.
After Mary-Ann Jones married George Seton in Melbourne in 1878 they gradually moved further north of the Murray into New South Wales. Mary-Ann and George’s children were born at various places heading north. There was a child born in Albury in 1881, then a child born in 1883 in Wagga Wagga, and then a child born in Narrandera in 1885. It was at Grong Grong in the Narrandera district that all of Mary-Ann’s subsequent nine children were born.
Mary-Ann and George Seton lived as farmers at Grong Grong for the rest of their lives. This small town is situated on the trainline twenty-tree kilometres east of Narrandera. George Seton was a committeeman of the Grong Grong Australian Rules Football Club and frequently played in the Southwestern Football League for the club. The most popular sport in Grong Grong has been Australian rules football, perhaps evidence that many families in this area came from Victoria in the late nineteenth century.
Samuel Jones married Bertha Weppner on 30 June 1883 at Saint Thomas’s Church of England in Narrandera. She was twenty years old, two years younger than her husband. Although both were recent arrivals, Samuel and Bertha were evidently living in the town when they married. One of the witnesses to the marriage was Julius Weppner, Bertha’s younger brother. Bertha and Julius were no strangers to life in rural districts. The Weppner children were born and raised on a pioneer farm in the Colbinabbin district to the east of Bendigo, in the direction of Rushworth.
Bertha’s mother, Margaretha Weppner, died two years earlier in 1881, but her father, Johannes Weppner, was still alive and living on their farming property in northern Victoria. It is unclear what led Bertha to Narrandera. She was the oldest child of the family and perhaps did not want to be confined at home on the farm with her recently widowed father. As the oldest child in the family she may have felt condemned to an unfulfilled life looking after the house and the younger children. As it turned out, her father Johannes Weppner remarried in 1886. His new wife was several years younger than Bertha, which must have been disconcerting.
The 1880s was a period that saw significant numbers of people of German heritage move to the Riverina, looking for land and housing. People from northern Victoria in general were being attracted to the towns north of the Murray River. A young woman may have thought moving to the Riverina was a good idea, and Bertha no doubt hoped for the best.
Bertha’s parents were immigrants from what is now Germany, although they came to Australia separately. Johannes Simon Weppner was born in Hanover in 1831. At this time the Kingdom of Hanover was in a personal union with the British Crown. In the eighteenth century, the rulers of Hanover become the Hanoverian Kings of Great Britain. This arrangement ended in 1837 when Victoria became the Queen of Great Britain because Hanoverian law prevented females from inheriting the Hanoverian throne. Following the Austro-Prussian War, the Kingdom of Hanover became the Prussian Province of Hanover in 1866, and then became part of the German Empire in 1871. When Johannes Weppner left Hanover the ruler of the kingdom was George V, a first cousin of Queen Victoria, both being grandchildren of King George III of Great Britain.
In this family history, Johannes Weppner comes closest to fitting the designation of “pioneer free settler.” His Victorian naturalization certificate of 1860 lists Hanover as his “place of origin” and Johannes states that his current occupation as that of “miner”. Paperwork associated with the naturalization certificate lists Johannes Weppner’s father as Joseph Weppner and his mother as Clara Bock and also states that Johannes came to Australia aboard the “Saldanha” in 1854. Joannes may have felt it was important to gain his Victorian naturalisation because this status entitled him to own land in the colony.
The “Saldanha” was a fast clipper ship that sailed the Liverpool to Australia passage in the 1850s. On each voyage she would take up to seven hundred emigrants to Victoria and would also bring mail and the latest newspapers. On the return voyage to England she would transport flour and other produce, as well as gold bullion from the Victorian goldfields. The Argus newspaper of 17 June 1854 reports that the “Saldanha” arrived at Port Melbourne on 16 June with six hundred and sixty passengers in steerage. The hundreds of steerage passengers were in addition to the few dozen privileged cabin passengers who paid substantially more.
In the 1850s, only the wealthiest ten percent could afford a cabin, which cost at least three times as much as steerage. Cabins were located on the upper decks and these passengers enjoyed prepared meals and room cleaning as well as exclusive access to the best parts of the ship. In contrast, steerage passengers were housed below decks in dark and crowded spaces. They were required to cook their own food in groups and were responsible for their own cleaning and were allowed on deck only at certain times. Steerage passengers were segregated into single men, married couples and children, and single women, this last group strictly separated from all other passengers.
The “Saldanha” left Liverpool on 18 March 1854 and the voyage to Melbourne took just four months. The Argus newspaper reported that the “Saldanha” departed Melbourne on 7 July 1854 on her return voyage to Liverpool with 32,672 ounces of gold and two thousand barrels of sour flour. In the 1850s, 32,672 ounces of gold was valued at approximately £138,530 British pounds, which was a substantial amount of bullion in just this one shipment.
Victoria’s gold helped propel Britain to preeminence as a global trading nation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Gold from the fields in Australia significantly increasing the world’s gold supplies, especially significant at a time when the value of the major trading currencies was pegged to gold.
The wealth from Victorian gold was certainly a boon for Britian, but it also allowed for the rapid expansion of local public infrastructure to meet the demands of a rapidly increasing population. The British Mint opened branches in Australia from 1854 to produce gold sovereign coins. These were legal tender in the colonies and many were sent to India and to Britain.
The “Saldanha” was only one of many ships bringing immigrants to Victoria in the mid-1850s. During the gold rushes, in the years between 1851 and 1860, Victoria’s population increased seven-fold from 76,000 to 540,000. By 1861 there were 10,418 German-born people in Victoria. The “Saldanha” was a vessel of the Black Ball Line, and during the 1850s and 1860s this shipping company carried more passengers to Australia than any other line. Clipper ships such as the “Saldanha” were introduced from the 1850s and were much faster than the ships previously used. Not all immigrant ships were as fast or as new as the “Saldanha”. Many slow and poorly maintained older vessels were still in service.
The prospect of making a fortune on the Victorian goldfields was undoubtedly one factor leading Johannes Wepner to make the risky voyage to Australia. He was only twenty-three when he arrived in Melbourne and seems to have quickly headed for the diggings around Bendigo. He would meet other young Germans on the goldfields there. Germans were the fourth largest ethnic group on the fields, after the English, the Irish, and the Scots.
Chinese men were also present on the goldfields in significant numbers at Bendigo. There were few Chinese women. On the Bendigo goldfields in 1861 it was reported that there were 5,367 Chinese men and only one Chinese woman. Chinese clan based brokers sent groups of indebted men to Victoria. The men were expected to repay in gold the debts they had incurred as a result of their passage. For the brokers, perhaps it was felt there was little financial gain to be had in sending Chinese women.
There was quite a deal of anti-Asian sentiment on the gold fields, and some violence was directed specifically at Chinese miners. Restrictive immigration policies based on race were put in place to satisfy the concerns of white miners and the great majority of the Chinese miners were repatriated in subsequent decades.
Johannes Weppner was on the Bendigo goldfields at a volatile moment. By 1854, the alluvial fields where miners could pan for gold in the gravel bedded creeks were declining in importance. Deeper mining operations were now being used and modern industrial mining equipment was being introduced. The Eureka Stockade rebellion of November 1854 occurred on the Ballarat fields, but similar political agitation was also evident at Bendigo.
On the goldfields one of the main political issues was that of the gold licence. An Anti-Gold License Association was formed at Bendigo in 1853, and this focused attention on the thirty shillings monthly licence fee that every miner was required to pay. The fee was widely considered to be excessive and disproportionate, and the use of poorly disciplined police constables to collect the money from the miners was a cause of great friction. The miners drew up petitions outlining their grievances. The petitions called for a reduced licence fee, for a less corrupt and a more disciplined police force, and for the right to vote in elections regardless of wealth. Petitions were circulated and signed at Bendigo, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Heathcote, Mount Alexander and other goldfields.
The Victorian Government faced significant financial difficulties in providing services on the goldfields given that the colonial budget was already in deficit. While one aim of the mining license was to generate revenue, it was also a mechanism to discourage an overwhelming influx of people to the diggings. Many men left their employers in the rush to the diggings, causing employers to lobby the government to do something that might keep men in their service. As the easily accessible gold on the surface became depleted, dissatisfaction with the licence fee amongst the miners intensified. It was increasingly an unrealistic imposition for most men on the fields.
Beginning in 1853, miners organized large gatherings, or “monster” meetings, to express their grievances. Despite mounting unrest, Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe remained stubbornly unresponsive to the miners’ concerns.
Many of the immigrant diggers from the European Continent were men who had experienced political agitation and national struggle in their homelands. Various anti-authoritarian revolutions had spread across Europe in 1848. As a teenager, Johannes Weppner may well have witnessed these revolts around Hanover, where they were a common occurrence and rather brutally suppressed. Some British miners had participated in movements of popular political reform there during the 1840s.
The situation on the goldfields was tense by late 1854. The police regularly employed licence hunts to track down diggers who had not paid their fees. The miners claimed the police were extorting money, accepting bribes and imprisoning people without due process. The tension culminated at Ballarat in the rebellion of the Eureka Stockade of November 1854. Almost three hundred troopers and police attacked a stockade groups of miners had erected in Ballarat to resist the authorities. The assault was over in fifteen minutes, with at least twenty-two diggers and six soldiers losing their lives. The Eureka Flag flown by the miners was torn down. The police arrested and detained one hundred and thirteen of the miners. Thirteen of these were eventually taken to Melbourne to stand trial and a Goldfields Commission of Enquiry was launched.
Although the battle of Eureka was of short duration and there was only a relatively small number of casualties, the ramifications were significant. The administration of the goldfields was overhauled. The Goldfields Commission recommended a general amnesty for all those associated with the rebellion at Eureka and the abolition of the gold license from early 1855, to be replaced by an export duty on gold. Public sympathy was very much with the miners, and the Victorian Government quickly adopted these measures. One by one the thirteen leaders of the rebellion were tried by jury and then freed. After the licence fee was removed, half the police on the goldfields were sacked. The judicial and political victory for the miners was one of the key steps leading to Victoria instituting male suffrage in 1857, and the events surrounding Eureka are generally now seen as foundational to the emergence of a liberal social democracy in Australia.
Regardless of the Victorian politics of the day, it is likely that Johannes Weppner was looking for ways of making a living outside of mining. As the surface gold ran out, industrial deep lead mining was developed using capital raised by corporations. These dangerous mining operations deep underground were not appealing to many immigrants. Some immigrant miners sought a future in agriculture and this was what Johannes Weppner did, starting perhaps from the late 1850s.
It is not known how successful Johannes was in mining. Nevertheless, he accumulated sufficient capital to enable him to join a group of German immigrants in establishing a farming community at Colbinabbin. The rich volcanic soil at Colbinabbin was strategically located to the east of Bendigo. Once Johannes Weppner obtained his naturalization certificate in 1860 he was permitted to buy land in the colony.
Colbinabbin is in northern Victoria between Rushworth and Elmore. “Colbinabbin Station” was one of four pastoral runs taken up in 1844 by the Van Diemen’s Land squatter Edward Curr and his son, Edward Micklethwaite Curr. This country is within the catchment of the Cornella Creek which flows into Lake Cooper. In 1858 the Colbinabbin run passed from the Curr family. Part of it was surveyed into smaller farming blocks for public sale. The group of German settlers that included Johannes Weppner purchased some of the freehold farming blocks which had recently been put on the market and they established a small German community in the district.
The Cornella Creek flats and the adjoining country provided good opportunities for dryland agriculture. Among the German men involved in the original German farming community at Colbinabbin were Henning Rathjen, Carl Wendel, Heinreich Buckholt, Freidrich Toedteberg, Henning Staben and Johannes Weppner. By the late 1860s they had established mixed farms involving cropping, dairying, pigs and vines. Initial wheat harvests were good and more settlers from a range of backgrounds joined these German farmers at Colbinabbin.
The German farming men at Colbinabbin chose wives from their own Lutheran background who they met on the Bendigo goldfields. Several of the young women were members of the Fick family. The Fick sisters had left conditions of considerable hardship and instability at home and were looking for security and the means to start a family of their own. Upon arrival in Melbourne, the Fick sisters immediately went to the goldfields to join relatives already there.
Like many immigrant women who came to Bendigo, the Fick sisters had a male relative on the diggings. Their brother Hans Nicklaus Fick arrived in Bendigo in 1853. In following years, several sisters came to Australia through a process of chain migration to join Nick Fick, as he was known. One of the Fick sisters was Margaretha Anna Fick, generally known as Anna, who migrated to Bendigo in 1858. She is Bertha Weppner’s mother, Henry-Allan Jones’s grandmother, and Lionel’s great-grandmother.
Anna Fick was of German heritage but with a peculiar twist. Her family lived on Fehmarn Island, which is in the Baltic Sea just off the coast of northern Germany. It is a low, flat, farming island between Germany and Denmark. From the Middle Ages until 1864 Fehmarn Island formed part of the Danish Duchy of Schleswig, although most people on the island spoke a dialect of German. In 1848 the Germans living on the Danish borderlands rebelled against the Danish Crown, but the rebels lost the war. Perhaps this played a part in the mass emigration that occurred soon after. Also, the area was badly affected by the famine that was widespread across Europe at that time. The great Irish famine of this period is well known in Australia, but famine was experienced in Scotland and other parts of Europe as well.
Anna’s parents, Peter and Katharina Fick, raised eight children on Fehmarn Island, all of whom would ultimately settle in Australia through a process of chain migration. Peter Fick, the father of these children, was reported to be a bootmaker, but it would seem he was increasingly unable to support his children. Anna Fick was the oldest child, born in 1835. However, the first of the Fick children to arrive in Australia was the second child, Hans Nicklaus Fick, born in 1836. He was no more than eighteen years old when he arrived in Victoria in August 1853 aboard the “Daniel Ross” and came to be known here as Nick Fick. Nick went to the Bendigo goldfields in 1853 and Johannes Weppner arrived at Bendigo the following year.
The “Daniel Ross” made several voyages from Hamburg to Australia with mostly German immigrants, the great majority of whom were described as shepherds or laborers. The “Daniel Ross” was a barque of just four hundred and eighty-six tonnes. The Shipping News section of the Geelong Advertiser of 22 August 1853 notes the arrival from Hamburg of this ship at Port Phillip. Passage on this small sailing vessel was likely less expensive than most other options.
The fast clipper-ship “Saldanha” on which Johannes Weppner voyaged was a larger, faster and more comfortable vessel. Perhaps Johannes Weppner could afford a better grade of passage than Nick Fick, although he too travelled steerage, albeit on a better vessel.
Nick Fick’s father, Peter Fick, died on Fehmarn in 1855 and this likely added to the economic struggles of the family remaining on the island. Nick Fick may well have encouraged by his family to come to Australia given the dearth of opportunity on the island, especially given the real likelihood of another war. The situation on Fehmarn was dire.
Anna Fick and her younger sister, Louise, arrived in Melbourne on the “Magdalena” in January 1858. The “Magdalena” made several voyages from Hamburg to Melbourne in the late 1850s. Nick Fick had already been in the colony for five years but he was still just twenty-two years of age when the first of his sisters arrived.
Anna was twenty-three and Louise just twenty when they left Fehmarn. Men with good prospects might be found on the goldfields and the sisters were likely considered eligible young women. On Fehmarn, Anna’s occupation was described as that of maidservant. She likely brought very little money to the colony. The sisters joined the substantial German community already on the Bendigo fields.
Both Anna and Louise married German goldminers who became farmers at Colbinabbin. Anna Fick married Johannes Weppner in October 1862 at the German School in Bendigo. Louise Fick married Carl Wendel in January 1861 at the Lutheran Schoolroom in Bendigo. This was probably an alternative name for the same German school house. Perhaps the sisters worked in the schoolroom and they likely worshipped with the German congregation that centered around the school. They did not rush into marriage, waiting several years before tying the knot. They did not marry until their husbands obtained Victorian Naturalisation Certificates and had the legal right to own farmland.
The remaining members of the Fick family migrated from Fehmarn to Victoria in 1868 aboard the “White Star”. This party included Anna’s mother, Katharina, and Anna’s younger siblings Doris, Hans, and George. Doris would marry another of the Colbinabbin German farmers, Henning Staben, in 1870. Staben had previously been married to an Amelia Fick, who died in Colbinabbin in 1869. Amelia Fick was also born on Fehmarn Island and is likely to have been related. She was perhaps yet another sister or a cousin, although this is unclear. The younger boys settled in rural Victoria, where they married and had families of their own. Their mother, Katherina, died in 1888, seemingly at the property of Doris Fick and Henning Staben.
Johannes and Anna Weppner farmed at Colbinabbin following their marriage in 1862. In all they had eight children. Their first child, Bertha, was born in August 1863. She is Lionel’s grandmother on his paternal side. The last child, Nicholaus, was born in 1874.
In 1871, the German farmers at Colbinabbin built a small Lutheran school in the hamlet. The Victorian government took control of the Lutheran school in 1873 as Victorian State School No. 1218, which still operates today. Weppner descendants remain in the Colbinabbin district and go to this school. It is most likely that Bertha Weppner attended the Colbinabbin school. Colbinabbin has always been a small place with just a pub, a store, a hall and two churches servicing a sprawling farming district.
It does seem somewhat surprising that Bertha Weppner and Samuel Jones should end up marrying in 1883. Samuel grew up at Woolsthorpe and Bertha at Colbinabbin. Apart from being from rural districts, they were from culturally different places. Nevertheless, they had certain things in common. Their religious heritage was Protestant. Bertha was possibly bi-lingual to some extent. German would have been used at home by her parents and among the older members of the German community. She likely could understand German even though she may not have habitually spoken the language. By the end of her schooling, Bertha could likely read and write in English, perhaps better than Samuel.
Johannes Weppner seems to have been a successful pioneer farmer at Colbinabbin. The term “pioneer” seems appropriate in relation to Johannes. He came to Australia on his own volition and used his own hard won financial resources to establish himself on the land. He seems to have had sufficient talents and resources to choose between a range of available options.
Samuel Jones, the sole surviving son of Thomas and Sarah, seems to have had no particular trade or much formal education. His general rural skills meant that he could find work as a laborer or stockman on rural properties throughout his life. He likely could command a team of animals and haul loads through experience gained from working with his father. He probably never had much money but he did have some initiative and enough nous and judgement to get by in life. He comes across as a hardened and taciturn man.
Uncle Bill Jones made contact in the early 2000s with some of the descendants of Bertha Weppner. It is impossible to say to what degree second-hand recollections correspond to the actual situation of Samuel and Bertha’s lives in the late nineteenth century. Given the way things turned out for Bertha, she may have hoped for a better life than what she got.
Uncle Bill’s meeting with Weppner family descendants came about as a result of following a lead from Daphne Evans, a cousin who Bill tracked down while on a visit to the Riverina in the 1990s. Daphne was a grandchild of Samuel and Bertha, as was Bill and Lionel. Daphne’s father, William Jones, was a son of Samuel and Bertha. Likewise, Lionel’s father, Henry-Allan Jones was also a son of Samuel and Bertha. William Jones and Henry-Allan Jones were full bothers, with William being older by six years. Daphne Evans had a negative view of Samuel Jones from what she had heard from her father. Given that Daphne’s account of Samuel Jones is the only one to have been handed down, it does merit consideration, and it is largely not flattering.
For Daphne, the troubles in the family could be traced to Samuel’s decision to start a relationship with a young woman called Lizzie Power in the years before Bertha died. The story from Lionel and Bill’s account is that Samuel Jones, their grandfather, was employed in an assortment of rural jobs in several Riverina districts, generally working on extensive squatter stations. During one of Samuel Jones’ absences on a pastoral station, he formed an extra-marital relationship with Lizzie, who was living on an adjoining station.
Bertha died following a period of illness and grief, in the wake of the death of her infant twin children. After Bertha died, Samuel Jones and Lizzie Power married quickly, as Lizzie was again pregnant.
William Jones, Daphne’s father, told Daphne of his difficult childhood. According to this account, William’s family life with Samuel and Lizzie had been dysfunctional. At the time Samuel married Lizzie, soon after Bertha’s death, he had already been in a relationship with Lizzie for some time prior to the marriage, a liaison which had resulted in a child conceived out of wedlock. During William’s childhood, Lizzie was still young and overwhelmed by a succession of small children. Samuel was sometimes absent, working on remote properties.
Lizzie had already given birth to a daughter prior to her marriage with Samuel. This child, Catherine, was born two years before Bertha died, and Samuel may or may not have been the father. Lizzie was around nineteen at that time. Catherine was raised in Samuel and Lizzie’s household and adopted the Jones surname.
Lizzie gave birth to Catherine in 1901, the same year that Henry-Allan Jones was born. The births happened in different places to different women, but Samuel Jones may indeed have been the father of both children. There is evidence that Lizzie Power may have had a previous child when she was an even younger teenager, but no record exists of what became of this child. At the time of her marriage to Samuel, Lizzie’s residence was listed as Burrabogie Station, which was a large remote station east of Hay.
On Catherine’s birth certificate, Lizzie Power’s father was noted as a boundary rider and it may have been that Lizzie’s father was working on the same station where Samuel Jones worked. She was still a teenager when she met Samuel. They married just months after Bertha died, as Lizzie was expecting the birth her next child in a few months.
Lizzie Power became William Jones’s stepmother upon her marriage to Samuel and it seems not to have been a happy experience for young William. He was seven years old when Bertha died. The situation seems to have left a deep mark on him. William Jones, along with Samuel and Bertha’s other children, did not get on well with young Lizzie Power. The older children of the first marriage mostly left home as soon as they could, at young ages. In any case, Lizzie was battling to take care of the sequence of younger children that she was having with Samuel while living in Hay.
This description of a clearly dysfunctional family situation is the account provided by Daphne Evans to Lionel and Bill, which was then retold to the author. Given that Daphne never met either of her father’s parents, it is hard to say just how fair and accurate her characterisation of the situation was. Nevertheless, her recollections, albeit based on anecdotes from her father, should be added to the record.
There is little verifiable public information regarding Samuel Jones. The dates of his marriages, the births of his children, and some electoral roll data provide the only information in the archive that we have of him. It seems there are no photos and very little textual evidence. There is a lovely photo of Bertha taken at Hay when she was an unmarried young woman.
It does seem clear that Lionel’s father, Henry-Allan Jones, was born into a situation of some emotional turmoil and economic hardship, with much to be desired in the way of parental care and psychological support. Henry-Allan was born in 1901, the year before his mother died in November 1902. He would not have had any clear recollection of her, although the pain of separation must have persisted somewhere. Both Samuel Jones and Lizzie Power were likely themselves suffering intergenerational trauma of some form and this likely passed to Henry-Allan and then perhaps by some ill-defined mechanism to Lionel and Bill. The damage to these individuals is one legacy of our brutal colonisation. Bertha Weppner was collateral damage along the way.
Bertha found herself in a terrible situation in August 1898 when she gave birth to twins in Hay. One of these children, Ivy May, survived just three months. The other child, Arthur Stanley, died in February 1899, having survived less than six months. Bertha, who had several older children to care for, was probably sick with worry during this period. She became pregnant with Henry-Allan at the end of 1900, not two years after the death of her infant twin children. Samuel, her errant husband, was often away from home. In any case, he was in a relationship with Lizzie during his periods away. Henry-Allan was born in August 1901, and the following year in November 1902 Bertha died from a malignant endocarditis and general fatigue, according to the death certificate.
Lizzie Power had a toddler in tow when she married Samuel Jones in 1903, with another child on the way. Lizzie herself was then only twenty-one. She subsequently had several further children with Samuel, the last born in 1913. New South Wales electoral roll data indicates that Samuel and Lizzie were living together at Hay in 1913. The circumstances surrounding Henry-Allan Jones life during this period is a matter of speculation. However, his early home environment may go some way in explaining why he could never settle down in later life and never formed a long-term relationship with anyone. There is evidence that he was a fantasist who could not meet the expectations and responsibilities required of him.
Henry-Allan did maintain a relationship with his father Samuel for a significant part of his life. Father and son travelled together to the Southwest in the mid-1920s and were living in Kirkstall from the late 1920s to the early 1930s. Then they both moved to the Cobden district at around the same time. Nevertheless, by the middle years of the 1930s Henry-Allan had already left the Cobden district. He does not seem to have maintained further contact with his father, his wife, or his children from that point.
Bertha’s children
It is possible to trace Bertha and Samuel’s life together through tracking the births of their children and by outlining what little is known of their lives. Although Bertha and Samuel were married in Narrandera on 30 June 1883, they apparently soon moved back to Woolsthorpe. It is there that their first child, Sarah Campbell Jones, was born in 1884. Sarah Campbell Jones was evidently named after her grandmother’s maiden name, Sarah Campbell. Two of Samuel and Bertha’s children had “Campbell” as their middle name, which may say something about the role played by the Campbell side of the family at Woolsthorpe.
Following their marriage in the Riverina, Samuel and Bertha likely lived at Woolsthorpe for at least a year. This is supported by entries on the 1886 Victorian electoral roll for Minhamite in the electoral division of Belfast and District. Both Thomas Jones and Samuel Jones are listed on the 1886 electoral roll as farmers at Woolsthorpe. What Bertha made of the community at Woolsthorpe is difficult to even speculate upon, but the fact that the couple did not settle there is of some significance.
Sarah Campbell Jones died in 1917 at the age of thirty-three while living at Innisfail, Queensland. In 1903, when she was nineteen, Sarah was one of the witnesses at Samuel’s marriage to Lizzie Power, indicating that she was living in Hay at that time. She may have assisted with the care of her younger siblings during Bertha’s bouts of illness. Sarah eventually married Scottish born Robert McGregor in 1907 in the Presbyterian Church at Annandale, Sydney. He was a quarryman and carpenter and she was a domestic servant. They went on to have four children. The last of her children, named Bertha after her deceased grandmother, was born in Innisfail in 1913. Robert McGregor died in Innisfail in 1924.
Interestingly, when Johannes Wepner died in 1899, he left one hundred pounds to Sarah Campbell Jones. Johannes evidently knew Sarah when she was a child living in North Central Victoria. The inheritance money was to be paid to Sarah Campbell Jones when she turned twenty-one, which would have been in 1905. This was two years after Bertha died so Sarah may never have received this money.
The second child, Samuel J. T. Jones, was born in 1886 at Nagambie, Victoria. It seems Samuel and Bertha Jones had left Woolsthorpe and moved to North Central Victoria by then. The Nagambie district is adjacent to Colbinabbin where Bertha was originally from and it is likely that Bertha was in touch with her father and his new family there.
Not much is known about Samuel J. T. Jones, except that he lived in Hay as a youth. In 1903 when Samuel Jones married Lizzie Power at the courthouse in Hay, Samuel J. T. Jones was the other witness to the marriage, together with his sister, Sarah. He would have been seventeen at the time. At some stage he left Hay and went to work at the tin mine at Ardelthan, near Barellan in New South Wales. Tin was discovered there in 1912, leading to a major boom with numerous small mining operations. He also worked in Queensland as a sugar cane cutter, perhaps in the vicinity of Innisfail where his sister lived. The life of this working man would have involved much hard labor in rough conditions.
The third child, Duncan Campbell Jones, was born in Shepperton, Victoria in 1888. Shepperton is also in North Central Victoria, in the general vicinity of Colbinabbin. Much later, in 1923, Duncan married Agnes Wall, a widow at Hay. Duncan is described as a laborer and no children were born to the couple. However, Duncan became a devoted stepfather to Agnes’s son Frederick. The family lived at Hay, which is where Duncan died in 1963. He is buried in the Hay cemetery in an unmarked grave. Duncan Campbell Jones was evidently named after Duncan Campbell, his paternal great-grandfather, the emigrant shepherd from Mull who arrived in Belfast in 1853 with his large family.
There is a brief obituary for Duncan Campbell Jones in the Riverina Grazier of 18 July 1963, and this contains one of the few newspaper references to his father, the enigmatic Samuel Jones. The report is as follows: “The death is reported on Monday evening of an old resident of the district in the person of Duncan Jones, who was on the eve of his 75th birthday. He was the son of the late Sam Jones at one time well known in the town and spent the greater part of his life in and around the district engaged in station work. Mr. Duncan Jones had been in ill health for some time and never engaged in any public activities in the town. His wife Agnes, (formerly Mrs. Wall) predeceased him by some years and he is survived by his step-son, Mr. Fred Wall of West Hay to whom he has been ‘Dad’ since early childhood.” Such a short and bittersweet obituary, with so much left unsaid and unexplained.
Nagambie and Shepperton, where the second and third children of Samuel and Bertha were born, are both relatively close to Colbinabbin. Johannes Weppner, Bertha’s father, was still living at Colbinabbin at this time. Bertha’s mother, Anna, died in 1881 and Johannes remarried in 1886.
Johannes Weppner married his second wife the same year that Samuel J. T. was born at Nagambie. Her father’s new marital relationship may have been somewhat disconcerting for Bertha. Johannes Weppner’s second wife, Christina Bartram, was younger than Bertha by several years. Christina was nineteen when she married Johannes, who was then fifty-five years of age. Johannes and Christina Weppner had three children of their own, all born while the couple were living on the farm at Colbinabbin.
Samuel Jones and Bertha lived close to Colbinabbin for a number of years, although it is unclear how close they were to Bertha’s father. It is possible that Samuel went back to the Riverina for work while Bertha and the children stayed in North Central Victoria. The details are not known.
Whatever the case, the fourth child, Bertha J. Jones, was born in 1893 at Booligal, some seventy-five kilometres north of Hay. This child was born five years after the third child, a substantial gap between the births. Surrounded by vast treeless plains, there was just a pub and a few houses at Booligal on the edge of the arid country of western New South Wales. It is a lonely and isolated place, made famous by “Banjo” Paterson’s famous line “Hay, Hell and Booligal.” Samuel was likely working on stations in this inhospitable district, or perhaps he worked as an independent operator in transport or haulage occupations.
Bertha J. Jones married William Davies at Narrandera in 1914 when she was twenty-one. At the time, they were both working in the Riverina town of Leeton. William was an electrician and linesman but he suffered an electric shock and fell from a pole at the Leeton canary, incapacitating him for the rest of his life. Bertha and William had one son, William Junior, who was born in 1915. When Bertha died in 1928 after a long illness, William Junior was placed in “Salvation Army Care”, presumably because his father was unable to provide for him. William Junior enlisted in the Australian Army in 1940 and served in the Second World War in Syria and Palestine, before being discharged at the end of the war in 1945 with the rank of sergeant.
The fifth child, William Henry Jones, was born in Hay in 1894. As the most “successful” of the children, William had a remarkable career given his background. Bill and Lionel met Wiliam’s daughter, Daphne Evans, at her home in Leeton later in life, where she recounted her father’s views regarding Samuel Jones. Daphne was hardly a disinterested narrator of these distant events. Based on what her father told her, it seems clear that Daphne believed her father left home to escape a dysfunctional family situation. He seems not to have gotten on with his stepmother and was not happy to stay in the house with Samuel and Lizzie’s growing clutch of children.
William Henry Jones left home as a teenager and first worked at the Ardlethan tin mine, probably following his older brother to the mine. He then moved to Leeton and worked on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Scheme in the construction of irrigation canals.
William married Amelia Gorey in 1915 when he was twenty-one and working at Ardlethon. Interestingly, he did not sign on for the war, even though many young men from rural New South Wales did volunteer at this time. Amelia Gorey was nineteen when she married William. She was born at Wanganella, a tiny place on the Billabong Creek north of Deniliquin. At the time of her marriage, she was a domestic servant working at Leeton. William and Amelia eventually had four children, the second of whom was Daphne Evans, who Lionel and Bill got to know in the 1990s.
William Jones became a very well-known and respected construction contractor in the Leeton district. From his obituary we learn that he had a talent for building and for leading teams of working men. He labored on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Scheme from its earliest days and worked with horse drawn scoops and drays excavating the irrigation channels. William was associated with the development of Leeton where he became a building contractor and had his own team of horses and wagons. He carted wheat and rural merchandise throughout the district. Eventually he operated his own construction company, which erected many buildings in Leeton, including houses, garages, motels and churches. William established a reputation as a meticulous builder. His most well-known project was the construction of the famous Roxy Theatre in 1930.
William eventually took up farming in the Leeton district. In 1950, he and Amelia retired to the coast at Wollongong, where he built his own home. Later in life he became active in community affairs through his Methodist church and his bowling club, of which he became a life member. He died at Leeton in 1975, a respected scion of the Riverina community. An extensive obituary was published in the local paper, noting his various achievements.
It was through Amelia and William’s children, and their grandchildren, that contact with Bill and Lionel was established in the 1990s. Bill and Lionel maintained communication with their relatives at Leeton for many years. The author and his brothers have met some of these cousins. They are successful country people, with children of their own.
In August 1898 Bertha gave birth to twins at Hay, four years after the birth of William, the previous child. One of the twins, Ivy May, died in November and was buried the same day. The other twin, Arthur Stanley died in February 1899, just six months old.
This must have been a very difficult time for Bertha. Johannes Weppner died at distant Colbinabbin in September 1899. There is no indication that Bertha was able to attend her father’s funeral. An obituary for Johannes Weppner was published in the local “Elmore Standard” on 29 September 1899, as follows: “Very general regret was expressed here on Monday when it became known that Mr. Johannes Weppner had passed away. It will be remembered that the deceased met with an accident while loading wool about 12 months ago, from which he did not properly recover. Mr Weppner was a native of Hanover, Germany, and with a number of compatriots settled at Colbinabbin over 40 years ago. He was an extensive sheep farmer and large landholder. The remains were interred in the Colbinabbin cemetery on Tuesday, the funeral cortege was of about 50 vehicles and a number of horsemen.”
Lionel’s father, Henry-Allan Jones, the last of Samuel and Bertha’s children, was born on 11 August 1901. The birth certificate records his name as Herbert Allan Jones. His marriage and death certificates record his name as Henry Allan Jones. He was born in Carrathool, New South Wales, a tiny settlement on the north bank of the Murrumbidgee River, sixty-one kilometers east of Hay. It is likely that Samuel Jones was there for employment, likely working on one of the large stations in the district. Bertha must have been living there as well, as this was where she gave birth to Henry-Allan. Carrathool is in the general vicinity of Burrabogie Station where Lizzie Power was living at the time when Samuel Jones evidently started an extra-marital relationship with her.
Bertha died in Hay aged thirty-nine years of age on 11 November 1902, a little over one year after the birth of Henry-Allan. She was buried the next day in the Wesleyan section of the Hay cemetery. Samuel Jones is recorded as the informant on the death certificate. Just where the infant Henry-Allan Jones was living in the last weeks of Berth’s illness is difficult to say, but presumably he was in Hay, perhaps in the care of his older sister, Sarah Campbell Jones, who was by then eighteen years old and living in Hay. There seems to be no notice of Bertha’s death in the local newspapers.
Two and a half months after Bertha’s death, Samuel Jones married Elizabeth Power in a civil ceremony at the Hay Court House on 31 January 1903. Witnesses to the marriage were Samuel and Bertha’s two eldest children, Sarah Campbell Jones and Samuel J. T. Jones. Lizzie Power was aged twenty-two and was listed as living at Burrabogie Station, near Carrathool. She was the daughter of James Power, a boundary rider, and was born at Redbank in Victoria in 1881. Her mother was Elizabeth Griffiths. Lizzie gave birth to Violet Jones at Hay a few months after the marriage. On his marriage certificate, Samuel is noted as being a coach proprietor.
It is clear that Lizzie Power already had a child with her when she married Samuel Jones. The historical indexes show that a Catherine E. Power was born at Hay in 1901 to Elizabeth Power. Catherine was born in 1901, the same year as Henry-Allan Jones, and she is listed on Lizzie’s subsequent death certificate. Catherine was raised in the Jones household in Hay along with Henry-Allen and the five subsequent children born to Lizie and Samuel. She was known by the Jones surname prior to her marriage. Henry-Allan Jones was born within months of his half-sister.
Samuel and Lizzie had five children between 1903 and 1913, all born in Hay. Following the birth of Violet in 1903, government birth records show that Richard George Jones was born in 1905, Janet Jones was born in 1908, Isabel Jones was born in 1910, and Robert Jones was born in 1913.
The New South Wales Electoral Roll for Hay in 1913 shows that Samuel and Lizzie Jones were living in Church Street around that year. Samuel was described as a laborer and Lizzie worked in home duties. The Jones family likely lived in Church Street at Hay for over a decade. This was where Henry-Allan spent his childhood years. His older brothers and sisters progressively left home to work in other towns. Lizzie’s younger children probably took most of his step-mother’s attention.
Lizzie died 4 February 1918 at Booligal, situated on the Lachlan River in the northern Riverina. She was thirty-eight years of age when her life ended in somewhat mysterious circumstances. Booligal is the afore mentioned much-maligned tiny town in the midst of semi-arid country still known as the One-Tree Plain. A lonely pub was famously situated at One Tree, halfway between Hay and Booligal on the Cobb Highway.
Samuel Jones had worked at Booligal previously and Bertha had given birth to one of their children there. The poem, “Hay and Hell and Booligal”, by Banjo Paterson, was first published in The Bulletin in 1896. Paterson compares Booligal unfavorably with the nearby town of Hay, and even hell itself, humorously listing a litany of problems with the place. Heat, sand, dust, flies, rabbits, mosquitos, snakes and drought bedeviled life there. The poem ends with the following line: “Oh, send us to our just reward In Hay or Hell, but, gracious Lord, Deliver us from Booligal!”
Lizzie is buried in the Booligal cemetery, in an unmarked grave. Henry-Allan would have been seventeen when Lizzie died but it is unclear if he was in Booligal at the time of her death. Samuel Jones would have been in his late fifties. It is unclear from the death certificate whether Samuel was living with Lizzie when she died, but someone gave a detailed account of her particulars to the registrar. The names and ages of Lizzie’s six surviving children are all listed in order. The names of Lizzie’s father and mother are correctly noted, as is her place of birth. Samuel Jones is listed as Lizzie’s husband, and it is noted that she was aged twenty-one when she married. These details could only have been provided by a close adult relative, and so Samuel was likely the person who supplied this information.
The cause of Lizzie’s death is listed as “Cerebral softening and hemorrhage resulting in cerebral tumor”. Cerebral softening is associated with abusive head trauma, and with blunt force cerebral injury as well as stroke. Did she have a stroke, a fall, or suffer some form of physical abuse? It is impossible to say for certain. The cause of death was ascertained two days after her death from an inquiry conducted by a justice of the peace based at Hay. This man, the delightfully named Montford Longfield, had evidently travelled the seventy-five kilometers to Booligal in the height of summer to conduct the inquiry into Lizzie’s death. While the cause of death was noted, there is no record that anyone was considered responsible for her passing. Lizzie was buried immediately after the inquiry, on 6 February 1918.
It is unclear what became of Lizzie and Samuel’s younger children after 1918, five of whom were under fifteen years of age at the time of Lizzie’s death. The youngest, Robert, was only five years old. What role Samuel played in raising these children after Lizzie’s death is unclear. It may have been deemed by the authorities that Samuel was not in a position to provide the necessary parental care, and so the state government may have intervened, but this is just speculation. The two older children, Catherine and Henry-Allan, were seventeen and were probably judged old enough to support themselves.
When Samuel’s mother, Sarah Jones, died at her daughter Mary Ann’s farm at Grong Grong in 1924, Samuel was said in her obituary to be living at Barellan, another little place in the Riverina, situated between Ardlethan and Griffith.
It is possible that Henry-Allan was living at Barellan as well, because Samuel and Henry-Allan evidently left the Riverina together to travel down to Koroit. Henry-Allan Jones was twenty-three years old in 1924, and while he had never been to the Southwest, this was where his father had grown up and where he had relatives.
Social class and the responsibility for genocide
This genealogy has a focus on social stratification in Australia. Lizzie Power was near the bottom of the social hierarchy in the Riverina region and it was only Aboriginal people who were of lower status in colonial society. But who was at the top of the social pile?
The squatter ownership of Burrabogie Station can be traced back to the same cohort of people who took up the squatter runs of Victoria. Burrabogie was associated with the Loughnan family from an early stage. There is a link to the British military in India and to colonial Van Diemen’s Land. There is a link to our family history as well. Lizzie was living at Burrabogie Station when she entered into a relationship with Samuel Jones and Bertha was living nearby at Carrathool when Henry-Allan was born in 1901.
John Michael Loughnan was a British army officer and pastoralist who was born in England in 1806. As a captain in the 10th Bengal Cavalry, he served with the British East India Company and was adjutant and aide-de-camp to Governor-General Lord Auckland. At Calcutta in 1836 he married a gentlewomen of his own class and eventually they had seven sons and two daughters.
After retiring from the army, Captain Loughnan was granted property in Van Diemen’s Land in 1837. Loughnan was awarded a land grant based on his military service record and the amount of capital he brought with him. By 1842 he had taken up Lindenow Station, a run of some 40,000 acres on the Mitchell River in Gippsland in the Port Phillip District. Loughnan was thus a squatter in Gippsland as well as a large landowner in Van Diemen’s Land. He was in business with his brother, Henry Nicholas Loughnan.
Frederick Taylor, the man who in 1839 led the Murdering Gully Massacre of thirty-five people of an Aboriginal clan living along the Mount Emu Creek at Terang, in the Southwest, was a partner of John and Henry Loughnan. Taylor was a joint licence holder of Lindenow Station with the Loughnan brothers from 1845. John Loughnan and Frederick Tayler likely first knew each other from when they were both living in Van Diemen’s Land.
Frederick Taylor is linked with several episodes of frontier violence in both Gippsland and the Western District, as outlined in “The Fortunes of Frederick Taylor,” written by Tony Edney and published in the Victorian Historical Journal in 2013. The article details Taylor’s involvement in the murder of an Aboriginal man at Geelong in 1836 and the massacre of clanspeople at Murdering Gully in 1839. While at Geelong, Taylor was a station overseer for financiers and Port Phillip Association members Charles Swanston and George Mercer on their claims on the Bellarine Peninsula.
Taylor was a partner with his good friends the Loughnan bothers in their checkered squatting endeavours in Gippsland, and later in the Riverina. He was appointed a magistrate for the colony of Victoria in 1855 while holding Strathloddon, a station close to Guildford on the Loddon River. In 1858, Taylor subdivided the title to his old pre-emptive right at Strathloddon into hundreds of individual titles and sold them off at very high prices to land-hungry former goldminers. It is said he received £40,000 from the sales. In 1859, Taylor was elected to the Melbourne Club, which, according to Tony Edney, “demonstrated that he was a gentleman in good standing.”
Taylor never married and he died a rich man at Bonally House in Elsternwick in January 1872. Bonally House was a bayside mansion in Melbourne which he purchased in 1868. Frederick Taylor was buried in style at the St Kilda cemetery. An imposing headstone was erected in his memory and his obituary states that he was “an old and respected colonist”. Interestingly, Taylor left Bonally House to his close friend Henry Loughnan who moved into the mansion and lived there until 1877.
As Tony Edney writes concerning Taylor, “his ultimate triumph speaks clearly about the values that were considered important by society’s leaders in the foundation years of our state … In the eyes of the pastoral elite, mistreatment and murder of Aborigines cast no serious reflection on the character of the white perpetrators, a view they managed to hold while professing Christian principles”.
The dispossession and decimation of the clans of the Gunai Kurnai nation of Gippsland was a consequence of the considerable frontier violence that followed in the wake of the squatters. The details of the violent events in East Gippsland are poorly attested and are disputed. The exact roles played by free settlers, emancipist servants, the Native Police, and the rival clansmen of the Boonwurrung nation have been debated by various sides in the Australian history wars.
Regardless of the intricacies of the debate, it is incontrovertible that the ultimate responsibility for the genocide in Gippsland lies with the British Crown. The government at Westminster, British military officers, and civil servants working in the colonial administrations were the leaders and organizers of the program of colonial plantation in Australia. The squatters and proprietors on the ground in Tasmania, Gippsland, the Western District and southern Australia generally were important agents in this imperial expansion.
At Lindenow, his Gippsland station, John Loughnan grazed flocks of sheep and herds of cattle and it was there that he established his fine Arabian horse stud. With his brother Henry, he purchased additional grazing property in the Gippsland district as it became available.
In the 1850s John Loughnan took up property in the Riverina in partnership with Frederick Taylor, including Burrabogie Station. Loughnan was mostly an absentee landlord at Burrabogie, with the station largely managed by his overseers. His son, George Cumberlege Loughnan, was educated first in Hobart and then at Stonyhurst College, an elite English private school that proudly claims to be the oldest continuously active Jesuit Catholic school in the world. George returned to Australia and started his squatting career on Burrabogie from 1862. The Loughnans were of the English elite, part of the minority Catholic component of the upper class, although this religious affiliation was not particularly highlighted by the family in Australia.
It was reported that in the 1870s the total area of Burrabogie was five hundred square miles. It had a frontage to the Murrumbidgee of twenty miles, and it had upwards of two hundred and fifty miles of fencing which cost from £50 to £80 per mile. The station carried upwards of 130,000 sheep and its homestead complex was one of the largest in the Riverina, really a small private town owned by the Loughnans.
In 1880 George Loughnan was elected to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly for Murrumbidgee, serving until his retirement in 1885. In Parliament he continued the fine tradition that large landowners should pay no tax and get large government subsidies. Loughnan died at Bourke in Western New South Wales in 1896, widely lauded for his achievements.
The genocide in large parts of southeast Australia was due to the actions and policies of the British state. The federated successor to the various British colonies in Australia is now the Commonwealth of Australia. It seems logical that given the state-sponsored nature of the dispossession of First Nations peoples in Australia, upon which British settlement was founded, the fact of historic genocide should be acknowledged in the Australian Constitution alongside any Statement of Indigenous Recognition.
Merely stating the obvious that Australia was inhabited prior to 1788 is not enough. There needs to be a statement that what happened to many First Nations groups in this country was unwarranted and the usurpation of their land was forced on them entirely without their consent. Retrospective recognition of First Nations peoples in the Constitution should acknowledge that genocide was a consequence of the actions of the British Crown.
The Constitution of the State of Victoria, as amended in 2004, goes some way to recognising this situation. The amended Constitution has a new section which states that in “Recognition of Aboriginal people (1) The Parliament acknowledges that the events described in the preamble to this Act occurred without proper consultation, recognition or involvement of the Aboriginal people of Victoria. (2) The Parliament recognises that Victoria’s Aboriginal people, as the original custodians of the land on which the Colony of Victoria was established— (a) have a unique status as the descendants of Australia’s first people; and (b) have a spiritual, social, cultural and economic relationship with their traditional lands and waters within Victoria; and (c) have made a unique and irreplaceable contribution to the identity and well-being of Victoria.”
In July 2025 the Victorian Government tabled the Yoorrook Justice Commission’s final reports, described as a “historic moment on our path to truth-telling and Treaty”. It notes that the reports conclude the work of the Commission, established by the Government in partnership with the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria to investigate injustices experienced by First Peoples in Victoria since colonisation, including the impact of past and current government policies and actions. The Victorian Government has formally undertaken “to carefully consider the Commission’s final findings and recommendations”.
Throughout the Yoorrook Commission’s hearings the State acknowledged that First Peoples’ “sovereignty was never ceded”. The report states that for “First Peoples, this statement means that First Peoples were the sovereigns of the lands now known as Victoria before the British invaded and the State’s sovereignty over these lands has not been lawfully acquired.” It calls for a treaty to be negotiated to redress this situation.
The Commission’s final report found that from 1834, mass killings, disease, sexual violence, the destruction of languages and cultures, and child removals from families and communities combined to “bring about the near-complete physical destruction of First Peoples in Victoria”. Indigenous peoples in Victoria were “decimated”, with the report stating: “This was genocide.”
Not only did the Crown’s regime devastate First Nations groups, but it also callously used its poorest and most vulnerable subjects to underpin its activities. Individuals of this European underclass had to frequently endure miserable conditions, and were deprived of most things important to a decent life. The Commonwealth of Australia, as the successor to the British Crown, should also acknowledge the violence foisted upon British Crown Subjects in the colonial period, alongside the doubtless much greater crimes perpetrated upon Indigenous clanspeople.
Shadows of the Western District 