The Jones family purchased their town blocks at Woolsthorpe in 1873. A survey map shows that the blocks were along Kennedy Street where it intersects with Porter Street as it runs down to the Spring Creek. The largest block is labelled with the name of T. Jones, indicating Thomas Jones’s ownership. This block backs onto Spring Creek, the source of fresh water for Thomas’s bullocks. On the other side of the street are four smaller blocks, labelled M.A. Jones, J. Jones, S. Jones and K. Jones. These all clearly refer to blocks held in the name of Thomas and Sarah’s children, namely Mary-Ann, Janet, Samuel, and Katherine.
From the Last Will and Testament in the Estate of Thomas Jones, it can be seen that at his death in 1897, Thomas left three acres of land and a four-roomed wooden house at Woolsthorpe to Sarah Jones, his widow, plus an adjoining block, for a total of about six acres. This property corresponds to the allotments shown on the town survey map of Woolsthorpe. Thomas did not leave any personal property.
Further up Porter Street the survey map shows another two blocks labelled with the name “S. Jones”. This may be a reference to Samuel Jones, the only surviving son of Thomas and Sarah, or it may be a reference to Sarah Jones, likely a reference to Thomas’s wife, although the couple had a daughter called Sarah-Ann, their youngest child born in 1872. The dates on these blocks refer to the early 1900s and so the reference is likely to be to Thomas Jones’s widow. In 1924 when Sarah Jones died, the status of these blocks is unclear, but it may have had something to do with why Samuel returned to the district in the mid-1920s, after the death of his mother in New South Wales.
The survey map of Woolsthorpe also shows that adjacent to the blocks owned by the Jones family there were two additional blocks labelled F. Freckleton. This is a reference to Francis Freckleton, who was a Protestant from County Cavan who came to Australia as an assisted immigrant with his second wife. Freckleton Senior arrived in Sydney in October 1841 on the “Ayrshire”, together with three hundred and eighteen other “bounty” emigrants from the northern counties of Ireland.
The first child of Freckleton and his new wife was born close to Sydney in 1842, but the next three children were all born in Port Fairy. By the 1850s, the Freckleton’s had a dairy farm near the flour mill at Rosebrook. In the early 1860s they sold their assets on the coast and moved to Woolsthorpe, at a time when Belfast was entering its long period of decline. Editions of the Banner of Belfast from the late 1850s and early 1860s include several advertisements placed by Freckleton for the sale of dairy cattle and bullocks suitable for teams.
It is likely that Francis Freckleton and his family knew Thomas and Sarah and their children from the time when both families were neighbors at Belfast. Both families left the coast in the 1860s and they were neighbours again at Woolsthorpe by the end of that decade, although by that time Francis Freckleton Senior had died. He passed away at Woolsthorpe in 1866 but subsequently two of his sons married two of the daughters of Thomas and Sarah Jones.
Katherine Jones married Francis Freckleton’s son, also called Francis, at the Jones property at Woolsthorpe in 1879. In the 1880s, Francis Freckleton Junior owned two town blocks directly behind those owned by the Jones family. In 1891, Katherine’s younger sister, Sarah, married Francis’s younger brother, William. Both Katherine and Sarah had large families. The street in which their town blocks were located is called Porter Street. Janet Jones, the eldest surviving daughter of Thomas and Sarah Jones, had married Robert Porter at Woolsthorpe in 1874. Janet and Robert had at least five children, and many of their descendants would live in the wider Koroit and Kirkstall districts.
When the Jones family moved to Woolsthorpe in the late 1860s, they already had relatives and acquaintances in the town. Sarah’s brother, Archibald Campbell, married Emma Glendinning at Woolsthorpe in 1870. Archibald and Emma Campbell went on to have eight children. The survey map of Woolsthorpe shows the blocks on which the Jones, Porter, Campbell, Freckleton and Glendenning families raised their children, the blocks all in proximity to each other.
The Woolsthorpe community was close knit. Poorer sections of the community tended to marry each other, just as upper sections of the community also tended to marry each other. Presbyterian families, mainly of Scottish heritage, comprised a clear majority of the population at Woolsthorpe. Mary Bennett in her book implies a clear hierarchy of wealth and status in the community, with the Lindsays and other large landowners at the top, then the more literate families involved in church, business and civic affairs, and lastly the general population of servants, laborers and small-holder farmers. She reports that while there were a few Catholics in Woolsthorpe, they went to church in nearby Winslow or in Koroit. The only church in Woolsthorpe was that of the Presbyterian majority. Sectarianism was a feature of society but mostly just as background to people’s primary concerns, which centered on how to make ends meet.
Differing local responses to the First World War was one occasion when sectarian divisions were clearly on display. In contrast to Koroit, just a short distance away, the youthful male population of Woolsthorpe answered the call to enlist in the Australian Imperial Forces when war in Europe broke out. It seems the young men of the town had a strong sense of loyalty to Britain and to the Empire at that time. Bennett notes that all the young men of Woolsthorpe who were eligible for service with the Australian Imperial Forces volunteered to enlist, without exception. By contrast, the nearby town of Koroit was quite divided in its loyalties, with many people quite neutral in their feelings regarding the war, bordering on hostile in some quarters.
This indifference or outright hostility to the Imperial war was largely restricted to Koroit’s Irish Catholic population, who were the majority in the town. This reluctance to enlist was also a noted feature of the predominantly Irish hamlets around Tower Hill, and especially evident at Crossley and Killarney, where it seems no young men from these almost entirely Catholic communities enlisted at all.
When Samuel Jones was growing up at Woolsthorpe in the 1870s, most people lived traditional lives, characterized by the dictates of a pre-industrial economy and a pre-modern society. Most married women had a large number of children, some of whom survived to adulthood. It was rare for all of a women’s children to survive. Sometimes the majority of a family’s children died before they reached full adulthood.
Tuberculosis and diphtheria were major killers of the young. Children in rural communities were mostly viewed as an asset and as a gift from God. Children were expected to work for the family. Most children did not go to school beyond primary level and many people had a poor level of literacy even after they finished their formal schooling. Low literacy may not have been seen as a major impediment to making a living, and some may have considered education an unfortunate affectation.
It is interesting to speculate on what education Samuel Jones may have received. A denominational school of the Presbyterian Church commenced at Woolsthorpe in 1862. This school was transferred from the Presbyterian Church to the State Government shortly after the Victorian Education Act came into effect in 1873. The Act legislated for free, secular, and compulsory primary school education and shifted educational control from religious denominations to a centralized state system run by the government.
Given that the denominational school was the only one in town, Samuel, born in 1861, would likely have attended this school in the late 1860s and early 1870s. This was in the years prior to the denominational school’s transfer to state control. In 1874 when the state government finally took over the running of the school, Samuel would have been around thirteen years of age and getting beyond the reach of compulsory schooling. The family had likely been living at Woolsthorpe from 1869 and it may have been the case that Samuel attended some classes at Woodford during the period when the family were there.
Mary Bennett’s book on Woolsthorpe provides some insight on education at the time when Samuel Jones likely attended the local school. In the early 1870s the school was still run by its Presbyterian administration and the transition to the new government arrangements proved somewhat problematic. Bennett notes that prior to 1875 it was very difficult to attract teachers of any degree of qualification to this small rural hamlet. Functional illiteracy among the parents may have been significant and this would have compounded the difficulty in teaching the students of such families. Samuel Jones’s parents were illiterate and so would have been of little help to Samuel in his formal education.
It is likely that Samuel’s schooling was disrupted for a variety of reasons and he may have received just a basic education. Whether he considered this to be an impediment is difficult to say. In 1875 Samuel would have been fourteen and already part of the rural workforce, likely no longer interested in school. The Education Act of 1872 required all children aged from six to fifteen years to attend school unless they had a reasonable excuse, but in remote country districts this requirement was difficult to enforce, and there were often not enough qualified teachers in any case.
The Presbyterian congregation ran the Woolsthorpe school at the time when the Jones family moved to the town. Samuel may have received religious instruction organised through the structures of the Church, which typically provided some religious instruction to the youth of local congregations. Whatever provision there was in place for education in this community, Samuel would have been expected to work from an early age, both on the farm and in supporting his father’s trade. Practical learning was likely more highly valued than formal schooling.
In Woolsthorpe, some residents worked in the pastoral industry, but people often had multiple streams to their livelihoods. Employment was tied to the seasons of the year, and people needed to have an aptitude for various forms of work. Samuel would have been expected to assist older males in his community with their various trades and occupations. All-male work teams have specific modes of communication and hierarchy, culturally mediated and passed on to the next generation.
Households exercised a significant level of self-sufficiency. Even small parcels of land could supply families with essential produce such as milk, eggs, butter, and vegetables. Without electricity or refrigeration, families relied on cast iron stoves for cooking. Wood needed to be chopped regularly. Men butchered livestock and women prepared poultry. Hunting was a customary part of life. Firearms and working dogs were commonplace.
When Thomas Jones died in 1897 the frontier period was a distant memory. Nevertheless, accounts of those times were transmitted across generations. It was known that some of the older people in the town, such as Thomas Jones, had been transported as convicts in their youth. Some older residents had come to Portland or Geelong on immigrant ships in bygone days. Often it was just the name of the ship which was remembered by descendants. The tale of the Campbell family arriving at Portland aboard the “New Zealander” was likely retold by aunts and uncles, describing how the ship burnt in the harbor just days after the family disembarked.
From the point of view of officials of the British government, the demographic transfer of poor people across the world was likely deemed a success. The transplanted lives of Sarah Campbell and Thomas Jones were of benefit to the Empire. This transfer of humanity from one place to another should be seen as a program of systematic plantation. It is usually argued that Australia is a “settler nation” but the story is more complicated and more interesting. Those who came here were not all the same and they arrived through many pathways. Many of our forebears did not choose to come here, or at the very least their freedom to choose was limited and highly contingent.
When she died in 1924, Sarah had forty-one grandchildren and one-hundred great grandchildren. Her sister Jane probably had about the same number, and brother Archibald Campbell also had a relatively large number of descendants. These people from the Scottish Islands largely supported themselves, living on the periphery of civil society. They served the interests of those in positions of power, their work girding the wealth of the few. In waging war in Europe, it was a great advantage to the British to be able to draw on an extensive pool of transmigrated families.
There are one hundred and ninety-two electors listed on the 1905 Electoral Roll for Woolsthorpe, a division of the Federal Electorate of Wannon. Compulsory enrollment was only introduced in 1911 so there would have been people living in the Woolsthorpe district who were not registered on the 1905 roll. This helps explain why there are more men on the list of voters compared to women. Nevertheless, of the electors who were enrolled, the largest occupational group was that of “home duties”. All the sixty-two people who identified as being engaged in home duties were women, and no man was identified this way. A handful of women were listed as having occupations other than “home duties”. For example, there were two dressmakers, two cooks, and one female teacher.
Of the men, the largest occupational group was “labourer” with forty-four electors. The next largest group was that of “farmer” with fourteen. The low number of farmers compared to laborers perhaps reflects that this was a pastoral district dominated by large land holders. Many working men described as labourers did have small holdings but these were not considered to be farms. Four electors identified as “graziers,” including the owners of Quamby and Union Stations. There were thirteen “station hands”, three “boundary riders,” and two “grooms,” all seemingly employed permanently on the stations. There were two coach drivers, two carpenters, three quarrymen, one blacksmith, one bootmaker, one gardener, one hawker and one brickmaker. All these were trades one might expect to find in a small rural community. There was also just one publican and one storekeeper. In addition, there was the manager of the local creamery, two other unspecified managers, and one male teacher. Interestingly, there was just one shearer and one pensioner. Electors had to be twenty-one years of age to be eligible to vote.
Certain people were disqualified from voting in the Australian elections of that time and so their names would not have appeared on the roll. This included any Aboriginal native of Australia, and any native of Asia, Africa, or the Islands of the Pacific except New Zealand. So white people only, in effect. In any case, Woolsthorpe was an overwhelmingly white community, with the surviving Aboriginal people by that time confined to Framlingham or other government missions run by the Board for the Protection of Aborigines.
Sarah Jones was included on the 1905 electoral roll for Woolsthorpe. She was then around seventy years of age. Thomas, her husband, had died some years earlier, and her surviving children were now adults with families of their own. Two of Sarah’s adult daughters still lived in Woolsthorpe with their families, although three of her children had moved away by then. Archibald Campbell, her brother, lived in the town as did some of his children. Archibald was getting on in years and would die in 1909.
Sarah’s youngest daughter, Sarah-Ann, was living in Woolsthorpe with her husband, William Freckleton. Both were registered as voters on the 1905 roll. One of their sons, also called William, was just nine years old in that year. A decade later, in 1916, he would enlist in the army when he was nineteen years of age and go to France to fight in the Great War. He was wounded in action in 1917 and died of his wounds several days later, aged just 20 years.
William Freckleton was shipped to the Western Front to fight for the British Empire, quite ironic given the history of his grandparents’ arrival to Australia. William’s maternal grandfather had likely been transported as a felon and his grandmother had sent out from her island home on Mull. His paternal grandfather was a bounty immigrant from Ulster, the site of an earlier English plantation.
Remarkably, some Aboriginal men of the Western District fought for Britain on the Western Front. During the frontier conflict, on which side of the line did their forebears fight?
Janet Jones, the eldest of daughter of the Jones family, was also on the 1905 Electoral Roll for Woolsthorpe. Janet was listed as Janet Porter, alongside her husband Robert Porter. Most of Janet and Robert’s children were grown up by 1905, and some had moved away from the town. Robert Porter died in Koroit in 1920. One of Robert and Janet Porter’s sons, Thomas Porter, was on the Woolsthorpe roll in 1905. Thomas was twenty-two years old in 1905 and lived on nearby Minjah Station where he worked as a rabbiter. Thomas eventually married and moved to Kirkstall. His mother, Janet Porter, came to live with him there in the 1920s. Janet was living in Kirkstall when her brother Samuel Jones and his son Henry-Allan came to live there for a while. Henry-Allan met Eily Schefferle there which in turn resulted in the birth of Lionel Jones in 1930.
According to the Electoral Roll, Thomas Porter worked on Minjah Station as a rabbiter in 1905. Minjah was broken up for Soldier Settlement after the Second World War. Aunt Biddy, Patricia’s sister, lived on Minjah in the 1950s and 1960s with her husband Tony O’Loughlin. Tony had qualified for one of the Soldier Settler blocks carved from Minjah station. He was bombed in Greece by the Germans, escaped to Palestine, and was then sent to the highlands of New Guinea to fight the Japanese. The Australians killed all the Japanese soldiers after they were pushed down from the mountains into the sea.
Tony O’Loughlin’s parents lost their farm during the depression when he was fourteen. He followed the wallaby track from town to town looking for work, alongside many other displaced rural men. He enlisted in 1939 because it was a job that paid reasonably well. He would not talk about the war, or at least just with his mates in the pub at Caramut. When we stayed at the farm on Minjah, Tony would sometimes wake us up at night yelling “the Japs are coming.”
Minjah Station was taken up by the Ware family. In 1838, Joseph and George Ware came to Port Phillip from Van Diemen’s Land. Their settler parents arrived at Hobart in 1823. The Ware brothers landed stock at Williamstown and took over one of the Native Creek runs west of Geelong.
George Ware left the Native Creek run and headed west looking for fresh country. He took up Woowyrite on the Mount Emu Creek. Joseph Ware took up Koort-Koort-Nong, to the north of Terang. The Ware brothers took over the lease on the station known as Hamilton’s Run in 1846. They renamed it Minjah. They soon after acquired the Muston’s Creek runs, which they renamed Barwidgee.
By the time of his death in 1894 Joseph Ware had amassed an estate worth £31,332. In 1905 when Thomas Porter worked on Minjah the run consisted of many thousands of acres with many thousands of head of livestock.
Caramut, previously known as Muston’s Creek, developed as the service town for Joseph Ware’s Minjah and Barwidgee stations. Tony O’Loughlin is buried in the Caramut cemetery with a beautiful view over the Lubra Creek, now renamed. The creek is the site of an infamous massacre of several Aboriginal women and children, an attack in 1842 which was led by the local squatter, Robert Whitehead, helped by some of his workmen. Whitehead is buried in the Tower Hill Cemetery, not far from our Reilly forebears.
Uncle Tony disliked the Returned Servicemen’s League and the Anzac Day commemorations. He thought the RSL commemorations represented the view of the officer class rather than that of average diggers. Tony thought that war was a terrible thing and he thought that what happened to the Aboriginal woman at Lubra Creek was a crime done to benefit squatters.
Prior to the First World War, it is estimated that over one hundred thousand of our countrymen wandered rural districts in Australia carrying their swags, seeking casual work and sleeping rough. The Jones family at Woolsthorpe likely considered themselves lucky at times to have a roof over their heads on a small block of land. They were fortunate in comparison to others who had no home but the roads.
Federation was achieved in 1901 following its approval via referenda. An early bill passed by the new Federal Parliament of Australia was the act which set up the White Australia Policy at national level. In the first four decades of the twentieth century, the Labor Party was very competitive in Wannon, in contrast to the situation today. In terms of parliamentary representation, at the Federal election of 1910 the Labor Party won a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate to form majority labor government for the first time. Nationally, the Labor Party attracted 49 percent of the vote, with the Liberals on 44 percent. In the division of Wannon, Labor held the seat with 55 percent of the popular vote against 45 percent for the Liberals.
Thomas Jones died at Woolsthorpe in 1897. What Thomas stipulated in his will may have had some bearing on why his son Samuel Jones eventually returned to the Koroit district from the Riverina in the mid-1920s. In the will, Thomas stipulated that the house and outbuildings on the three acre home block should go to his wife Sarah, and then upon Sarah’s death this property should go to Sarah-Ann Freckleton and her family. Sarah-Ann was still living at Woolsthorpe when Thomas died, although she moved away in coming years. Thomas had an additional three acres next to the house block. According to his will, this property was to go to his wife Sarah and then be split amongst the other children upon Sarah’s death.
Sarah Jones lived until 1924, by which time only Janet was living at Woolsthorpe, although she was shortly to move to Kirkstall. Whether or not there was any issues regarding the inheritance upon Sarah’s death cannot now be determined. Nevertheless, Samuel reappears in the district soon after his mother’s death. By the late 1920s Samuel was living at Kirkstall, reconnecting with family members he was familiar with from previous decades.
When Sarah died in New South Wales in 1824, Woolsthorpe was already declining in population and importance, although it had never been very large. Thomas and Sarah’s children had all left the hamlet by the end of that decade. Many small places were losing population due to changing circumstances. Some larger towns such as Koroit tended to hold their population, and provincial centres such as Warrnambool increased in size. It was the small outlying hamlets which struggled to survive as human labor was replaced by mechanization.
The patterns of landownership were changing in the Tower Hill district. Many tiny farms were amalgamated into larger ones. Although family size remained large on average, the population of some hamlets declined markedly as people drifted away to larger towns and to the cities. In the squatter country inland from Tower Hill, some large properties were broken up for closer settlement, but this did not compensate sufficiently to redress the general trend toward declining populations in outlying rural districts.
Sarah Jones died in 1924 at the property of her daughter, Mary-Ann Seton. George and Mary-Ann Seton cared for Sarah at their farm outside of Grong Grong for six years. Sarah had experienced a bout of illness while still living at Woolsthorpe, but why she went to the Riverina rather than to one of her daughters who lived in the Southwest is unclear.
Sarah’s only surviving son Samuel Jones was living in the Riverina at the time of her death. It is unclear how much contact Samuel had with his family members at Grong Grong in the years leading up to Sarah’s death. Quite possibly he did not see a lot of his mother and sister. In the Riverina, Samuel spent most of his time in the Hay district, well to the west of Narrandera. Samuel was living at Barellan in the northern Riverina when Sarah died, which is a tiny town well to the north of Grong Grong.
Details from Sarah Jones’s death certificate add just a little to what is known about her life. She died in the Coolamon Shire of New South Wales on 14 October 1924, aged ninety years. The certificate notes that she was born around 1834 in Mull, Scotland, and lived in Victoria for sixty-three years prior to her final years in New South Wales, where she spent her last six years. She was a daughter of Duncan Campbell, a shepherd. In 1854 Sarah married Thomas Jones in Belfast, Victoria.
Upon her death in 1924, her surviving children were Janet 67, Mary-Ann 64, Samuel 62, Katherine 60, and Sarah 55. Three males and two females were already deceased, having died in infancy. Sarah was buried on 15 October 1924 in the Presbyterian section of the cemetery at Grong Grong. William Moulton, the local Presbyterian Minister, officiated at the service. Sarah’s son-in-law, George Seton of Grong Grong, was the informant.
Two local Riverina newspapers published a notice on the passing of Sarah Jones. From the Narrandera Argus of 17 October 1924 there is the following report: “The death occurred at the residence of her son-in-law, Mr. G.M. Seton, Grong Grong, of a very old resident in the person of Mrs. Sarah Jones, of Woolsthorpe, near Warrnambool, Victoria, at the ripe age of 90 years. The deceased landed at Portland, Victoria in 1853, from the ship “New Zealander”, which was destroyed by fire a week after landing. Mrs. Jones, who has been residing in the district lately, had been ailing for some time, and her demise was not unexpected. She has a son Sam Jones of Barellan, N.S.W. and a daughter Mrs. G.M. Seton of Grong Grong. Her living descendants comprise four daughters and one son, 41 grandchildren, and over 100 great grandchildren. Her husband predeceased her about 27 years ago.” This notice was also printed in the Coolamon Farmers Review of 24 October 1924.
The author has a photocopy of a cutting from an unnamed newspaper, presumably from the Southwest, as it talks about “this district”, which has the following notice: “The death of Mrs. Sarah Jones which took place at her son-in-law’s (Mr. G.M. Seton) residence, Grong Grong, NSW, on the 14th October removes a very old colonist and yet another of the early pioneers of this district. The deceased lady, who was the widow of Mr. Thomas Jones of Woolsthorpe, was born at Mull, Scotland in the year 1834, and had, therefore, reached the advanced age of 90 years. With her father, the late Duncan Campbell, whose calling was that of shepherd, she arrived at Portland in 1853 on the ship “New Zealander”, which was burnt in Portland Bay a week after her arrival. The homemakers in this new land considered they had made a very lucky escape. In 1854 the deceased lady was a maid in the home of the late Mrs. Lindsay, mother of Messers. Wm. Lindsay and the late Jas. Lindsay of “Quamby”, Woolsthorpe. In that year, at Belfast, she married Mr. Thos. Jones, who predeceased her by 27 years. Some six years ago, the old lady was the victim of a painful illness, and although she never fully recovered from its effects, she retained all her faculties until within three days of her death. Four daughters and one son are left to mourn the loss of a kind mother. There are also about 40 grandchildren. The surviving members of the family are Mrs. R. Porter (Woolsthorpe), Mrs. W Freckleton (Panmure), Mrs. F Freckleton (Hamilton), Mrs. G.M. Seton (Grong Grong NSW) and Mr. S. Jones (NSW).”
The “painful illness” Sarah suffered from six years prior to her death may have been associated with the influenza epidemic of 1918, although this is just speculation merely based on coincidence. It is widely accepted that this global epidemic from early 1918 to 1920 infected roughly five hundred million people, one-third of the world’s population, and killed an estimated seventeen million to fifty million people.
Woolsthorpe is typical of many hamlets in the Western District. From the 1870s, the Southwest experienced limited population inflows, maintaining demographic stability for over a century. Rural Australia was not inherently egalitarian, nor should it be assumed that people shared a single sense of identity. Society was divided along lines of class and religion. Even so, most people defined themselves as being “white”. While there was a general acceptance of “White Australia,” debates persisted regarding national identity, immigration, and the economic direction of the country.
Cultural and religious heritage, and a focus on ancestry, is valued because people feel most connected to this aspect of identity. People in small communities are interconnected across generations. They recognize from their history that immigration and conflict possess the capacity to profoundly alter established patterns of human settlement.
By contrast, a more abstracted notion of civic identity places stress on a national identity grounded on the shared citizenship of diverse groups of people from many backgrounds who come together in an artificial political project. This more abstracted notion of a diverse and multicultural Australia struggles to find traction among ordinary people whose forebears have lived in a particular place for generations.
It is somewhat ironic that many descendants of the original servants and laborers comprise the group who now feel most firmly entrenched in the Southwest. By contrast, the descendants of squatters have largely moved on.
