When James Atkinson’s team of private surveyors laid out the boundaries of the Belfast Special Survey, Charles Mills farmland around the lagoon remained outside the Special Survey. The Mills farm on the Lough was originally known as Lagoon Farm and abutted the eastern border of the Survey. Charles Mills and his associates were at the lagoon perhaps from the late 1830s, well before the Belfast Survey was formalized.
It is possible that the farmland at the lagoon was occupied without formalizing arrangements. Charles Mills was a well-known local identity. By 1843 he had been in the district for some years and perhaps he was left alone to get on with his business. The survey of the Parish of Koroit by Surveyor Robert Hoddle in 1845 incorporated the land at the lagoon into the Parish of Koroit, as Crown Allotments 11 and 12. Prior to the government survey, this was formally Crown Land, although it is unclear whether Charles Mills ever took out a formal lease. Prior to the government survey, the land around the lagoon was not part of an active pastoral run, even though pastoral leases around Tower Hill had been issued.
Atkinson obtained his Belfast Survey in 1843 and the Farnham Special Survey of William Rutledge dates from the same year. The lagoon farm of Charles Mills was between the two Special Surveys. When the government surveyed the Parish of Koroit in 1846, pastoral leaseholds were cancelled and the land here was sold as freehold. James Atkinson saw the chance to expand his holdings by purchasing land adjoining his survey. He promptly purchased the land at the lagoon where the Mill’s farm had been established for years.
Following Atkinson’s purchase of the land at the lagoon, finalised in 1847, Charles Mills entered into a leasing arrangement with Atkinson. Mills leased a block of four hundred and sixteen acres from Atkinson, held on a lease of thirty-one years. Mills then leased half this block to his sister, Eliza, and her husband, James Glare. Eliza Mills and James Glare named their portion of the farm “Woodbine”.
The precise construction date for Charles Mills’s “Woodbine House” at the lagoon is not known, but it was most probably erected between 1846 and 1848, which corresponds to when Thomas Jones likely came to this location. Thomas would have watched the building of the house and may even have been involved in carrying materials for its construction. According to experts involved in the heritage study of the dwelling, “Woodbine House” is unmistakably Tasmanian in style and some materials were brought over from Tasmania.
Charles Mills’s house has long been known as “Woodbine House”. After the death of Charles Mills at lagoon farm in 1855, the now combined Lagoon and Woodbine farms continued to be leased from James Atkinson by James Glare and his wife Eliza Mills. Olivia Mills, Charles Mills’ widow, remained at “Woodbine House” and Eliza and James Glare lived there with her. Thomas Jones likely leased his farmland somewhere in the vicinity of “Woodbine House” from the late 1840s.
According to best estimates, Thomas Jones had his farmland just to the north of “Woodbine House”, close to where the Moyne River enters the Lough. Fresh water was available here. Given that this land was incorporated into the Parish of Koroit from 1846, Thomas Jones’s entry on the electoral rolls sometimes list Koroit as where Thomas lived. These early records indicate that Thomas was enrolled in the Villiers division, rather than Belfast, again pointing to his living in the Parish of Koroit rather than the actual township of Belfast.
There was said to have been a clear understanding between James Atkinson and Charles Mills that at the end of the thirty-one year lease at the lagoon, the Mills family would have first option to either purchase the land or to renew the lease, which had commenced in 1847.
Charles Mills died suddenly in 1855, but Olivia continued to live on the lagoon property in conjunction with James and Eliza Glare. Interestingly, Olivia Mills, like her husband, was Australian born, her family having arrived in New South Wales prior to 1800. The Glares and Olivia seem to have remained at Woodbine until the early 1870s, although James Glare had to deal with financial insolvency from the late 1860s. “Woodbine House” is still a local landmark, standing proudly in the paddocks opposite the golf course.
Lionel’s grandfather, Samuel Jones was born at Belfast in 1861. Katherine, born in 1863, is the last child born close to Belfast. It seems the family left their leasehold property in the vicinity of East Belfast in the years following Katherine’s birth. Of the earlier births, Janet was born at Belfast in 1857, Sarah was born at Tower Hill in 1859 and Mary Ann was born at Killarney in 1860. These place-names all likely refer to the same location just to the east of Port Fairy.
In the early 1870s James Glare and his family left Woodbine, as they were unable to purchase the property or to renew the lease on satisfactory terms. James Atkinson sold the Woodbine farmland to Andrew Halley Knight, the capitalist owner of the neighboring Korongah estate. Reports in Port Fairy newspapers of the day indicate that Mr. Knight did not wish for tenant farmers to remain on his newly acquired land around the Lough. Perhaps he did not like their Vandemonian associations. As far as he was concerned, the land was to be set aside for his livestock.
The local newspapers of Belfast reported that many small farmers who had held leaseholds around the lagoon left the area in the late 1860s and early 1870s, around the time the Glares also left. This loss of a skilled section of the local population was lamented in the press, and was seen as yet another sign of Port Fairy’s economic decline at a time when Warrnambool was rapidly taking over as the main town in the Southwest.
Rosebrook was a satellite of Belfast township and was included in James Atkinson’s Belfast Special Survey. The hamlet is one of the oldest rural settlements in Victoria. When Thomas Jones and Sarah Campbell married in 1854, Rosebrook was a place of considerable local importance. It was strategically located at the edge of the rich agricultural lands of Tower Hill. The Rosebrook Flour Mill was built between 1845 and 1848. Before the bridge on the Moyne River was built, there was a wharf on the river and flour from mill was carried to warehouses along the river at Belfast, from where it was taken to vessels anchored in Port Fairy Bay. Produce was shipped to Melbourne, Launceston, Sydney and other ports.
James Atkinson and his agents are said to have recruited laborers from Sydney to work on several construction projects in the district in the 1840s. Many of these workers were assisted bounty immigrants. The Bounty System was a form of assisted immigration where the government offered financial incentives to encourage people to migrate to Australia. Bounty agents in Britian would recruit potential immigrants from Britain and arrange their passage. Upon arrival, the government would reimburse the recruiter or the employer for all or part of the cost of the passage, and the worker would be required to work for a designated period governed by contract. The bounty system was regulated by the New South Wales colonial administration, which set criteria for immigrants and managed reimbursements.
Although the bounty program ended in 1842, it brought many laborers to New South Wales prior to this date. Some of these bounty immigrants are known to have arrived in the Southwest in the early 1840s, likely at the instigation of James Atkinson or his agents. Francis Freckleton, a friend of Thomas and Sarah Jones, seems to have arrived at Port Fairy in this way. Francis first arrived in Sydney in 1841 from the north of Ireland and subsequently came to Port Fairy. Two of his sons eventually married two daughters of Thomas and Sarah at a time when the Jones family lived at Woolsthorpe. The Freckletons and the Jones family were neighbours at Woolsthorpe just as they had been earlier at Rosebrook.
Following Victoria’s separation from New South Wales in 1851, a new wave of assisted immigrants arrived in the Southwest through a program administered by the newly formed Government of Victoria. Many of these people landed at Portland directly from Britain and Ireland. There was ongoing competition amongst the colonies for a share of the assisted immigrants coming from Britain.
Local squatters and other proprietors campaigned specifically for greater assisted migration to Victoria. Lauchlan Mackinnon, a prominent Western District squatter, purchased a controlling shareholding in the Argus newspaper and lobbied the government in Victoria to expand the policy of sending impoverished British immigrants to the colony to support his own business and to raise a daughter colony on these shores.
Lauchlan Mackinnon represented the Belfast and Warrnambool district in the squatter-dominated transitional unicameral Victorian Legislative Council. He was born on the Isle of Skye, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and trained in the legal office of his uncle in Glasgow before coming to Australia in 1838. He held several pastoral runs in the Western District. His vast run at Dundonnell, north of Mortlake, which he took up in 1841, was named Mount Fyans Station, named in commemoration of Foster Fyans. Mackinnon sold his interest in the station around 1853 to focus on his role as a proprietor of the Argus. He died in England in 1888 leaving a vast estate and considerable personal fortune derived from his Australian pastoral interests and his other commercial businesses. He was a great believer in the plantation project.
The years of the late 1840s and the 1850s were the heydays of Rosebrook. It declined from the 1860s onwards. The flour mill closed at the end of this period, due to the downturn in local production of wheat. The rise and fall of Rosebrook seems to mirror that of Thomas Jones in the Belfast district. Sarah and her father Duncan were living at Rosebrook when she married Thomas Jones in late 1854 and they likely lived in rather modest circumstances. Because leases might not be renewed, there was little incentive to build substantial houses on land that tenants did not own.
Eventually, some tenants were able to buy small freehold farming blocks in their own right, although many small farms were less than ten acres in extent. For whatever reason, Thomas and Sarah Jones left Belfast by the end of the 1860s, although the family’s relocation from Belfast does correspond to the general downturn of the Belfast area during that decade. They eventually purchased six acres at Woolsthorpe, spread across several adjacent freehold blocks. It was at Woolsthorpe that the Jones family built a modest wooden house, where they lived for many years, and it was at Woolsthorpe that Thomas eventually died.
To Woolsthorpe
Thomas lived at Woolsthorpe from the early 1870s until his death in the late 1890s, a period of twenty-five years. He was plagued by infirmities in his final years, likely occasioned by a lifetime of hard labor. Sarah lived even longer in Woolsthorpe. When she was in her eighties, in 1918, she finally left to live at the home of her daughter, Mary-Ann Seton, in Grong Grong, New South Wales. She was by then elderly and had experienced a bout of ill health, although she maintained her mental acuity until the end. She was survived by five of her children. At the time of death her four surviving daughters were Janet, Mary-Ann, Katherine, and Sarah-Ann. Of her sons, just Samuel survived, Lionel’s grandfather.
Three daughters married at Woolsthorpe and commenced families there. The other daughter, Mary-Ann, left home relatively early to move to the city for work. She married in Melbourne and soon headed into the Riverina with her husband to commence a farming life at Grong Grong. Samual Jones followed his sister into the Riverina and he married Bertha Weppner in Narrandera. Samuel seems to have returned to Woolsthorpe with his young wife for a period, before the couple moved back up to northern Victoria and the Riverina again.
It is likely that Thomas Jones was acquainted with Woolsthorpe before the family moved there permanently. Pam Marriot in her book, “A Shamrock Beneath the Southern Cross” reports that a man from Belfast named Jones worked for James Glare to construct a sapling bridge over the Spring Creek in 1854. The bridge was a public works project of the newly formed Belfast Roads Board. James Glare was the contractor and his son John likely worked with Thomas Jones to build the bridge.
In August 1854 the contractors declared they had completed the bridgeworks. However, when the Secretary of the Belfast Roads Board, Dilmond Howes, inspected the bridge it was found that there was insufficient spacing for the wheels of the bullock drays to safely cross. The bridge was eventually finished after remediation works. Creek crossings in remote districts were often of this type of sapling construction. These rough and ready sapling bridges were prone to wash away in floods but served their purpose until more substantial solutions could be provided.
An additional reference to Glare’s involvement in the construction of the sapling bridge over the Spring Creek at Woolsthorpe is found in Rachel Mary Bennett’s “Glimpses into the Past – A History of Woolsthorpe”. Bennett’s excellent local history book states that it was John Glare who was involved in the construction of the sapling bridge. Thomas Jones knew both James Glare and his son, John, and Thomas lived close to the Glare’s at Belfast. It seems likely that Thomas worked with John in 1854 to build the bridge in the months prior to his marriage to Sarah Campbell. It is known that James Glare was the contractor for several construction projects for the Belfast Roads Board in this period and a local farmer and carrier such as Thomas Jones was just the kind of working man who might assist the Glare’s in this contracting work.
It was common for tenant farmers to work as contractors and laborers during certain times of the year. Haulage skills involving heavy labor were in demand in the district, and it is clear from several sources that Thomas was a carrier by occupation. He is also described variously as a laborer and as a leasehold farmer. He was probably all of these things, working seasonally as a carrier, laborer and farmer. Men with such diverse skills were a key part of the economy.
Bridges and roadworks were important to the squatters in transporting supplies and commodities between their stations and the coastal ports. It was strategic for proprietors and landowners to be involved in the running of Roads Boards and municipal bodies to ensure that civil infrastructure was provided for themselves and the community generally. Even though the squatters set themselves apart, they did consider themselves to be leading members of a wider British community carving out a homeland in the Southwest.
The sapling bridge built in 1854 over the creek at Woolsthorpe was not located where the current main bridge crosses Spring Creek just before the southern entrance to the town. Instead, the 1854 bridge was on the minor road that goes past the cemetery to Hawkesdale. The sapling bridge can be seen in a photo taken by Joseph Soden in 1866. The simple sapling construction had done well to last so long, and was thus a testament to its builders.
The Soden photo, and others taken by Soden in the town at the time, show the vegetation and housing in Woolsthorpe three years before the Jones family moved there permanently. Thomas and Sarah would have been very familiar with the scene. The houses are timber slab huts with bark or shingle roofs. Sarah, Thomas and their children would have lived in this type of vernacular dwelling as depicted in the Soden photos. The huts were simple but well-made, constructed from materials sourced from the nearby bush. In 1869, Thomas and Sarah Jones’s son John was born at Woolsthorpe, indicating that they were likely living at Woolsthorpe at that stage. Tragically, John died in infancy, aged just two weeks.
The lives of Thomas and Sarah’s children provide some context to the family’s community life at Woolsthorpe. The first of their children, Sarah, born in Belfast, died there in 1858 aged just two years.
The second child, Janet Jones, born in Belfast in 1857, survived to lead a long and productive life, lived almost entirely in the Koroit and Woolsthorpe districts. In 1874, when Janet was seventeen, after the family had settled at Woolsthorpe, she married Robert Porter, and they had five children together, all of whom were born at Woolsthorpe. Robert Porter died at Koroit in 1920 aged seventy-six. He was born around 1844 and was about thirteen years older than Janet. In 1935 Janet Porter died at Kirkstall, aged seventy-seven.
According to Lionel, the Porter families living around Koroit in the 1970s were related to him through this historic connection. Even though Lionel never really knew his father and did not have much to do with the Porter side of his family, he understood he was related to local people from these families. In a rural community, a person is often aware that he or she is related to others nearby, even though they may not know the full details of all the historic connections. There may be good reasons to avoid rummaging into recesses.
Janet Porter’s latter day connection with Kirkstall is significant. In 1929, when Lionel’s father, Henry-Allan Jones, married Lionel’s mother, Eily Schefferle, there was a wedding photo taken of the bridal party. The youngest girl in the wedding photo is Sarah Porter, who was the “flower girl” at the wedding. A flower girl is typically the youngest female in the wedding party and she precedes the bride down the aisle. When commenting on this wedding photo, Lionel said that Janet, his great aunt, was Sarah Porter’s grandmother. Thus, young Sarah in the photo was Lionel’s second cousin, as they shared common great-grandparents, namely Thomas Jones and Sarah Campbell.
Janet lived with her son Thomas Porter at the time of Eily and Henry-Allan’s wedding in 1929. Thomas Porter had relocated to Kirkstall from Woolsthorpe some years previously. Thomas Porter, the father of the young Sarah in the photo, was a first cousin of Henry-Allan Jones, sharing common grandparents.
The names Janet, Thomas and Sarah were passed down through the generations. The practice of passing down names from generation to generation is very common among families in the Southwest, as indeed it is in many other places. In a pre-modern world, recurring names were especially important in connecting people through generations. Young Sarah in the photo was evidently named after her great grandmother, Sarah Campbell, who married Thomas Jones in 1854. There was a succession of Sarahs in the extended Jones family.
Electoral rolls verify that Janet Porter moved from Woolsthorpe to Kirkstall in her old age. The rolls also show that some of her sons were living around Koroit during the 1920s and 1930s, and the rolls include Thomas Porter at Kirkstall.
The third child of Thomas and Sarah to survive childhood was Mary-Ann Jones, born in 1860. Her birthplace is listed as Killarney. She went on to have over a dozen children, most of whom were born at Grong Grong near Narrandera, in the Riverina. Mary-Ann survived until she was eighty-eight years of age. She married George Seton in 1878 in Melbourne when she was eighteen and she likely left Woolsthorpe to seek a life away from the village of her girlhood.
After their marriage, George and Mary-Ann Seton moved north into the Riverina and from the early 1880s they had a farming property at Grong Grong in New South Wales. It was to Mary-Ann and George’s property at Grong Grong that Sarah Jones eventually moved in 1918. By that stage Sarah was an old lady and Thomas, her husband, was long dead. Her journey from Woolsthorpe to Grong Grong was undertaken after a bout of illness.
Lionel’s grandfather, Samuel Jones, was born in 1861, at Belfast. Samuel Jones eventually had three marriages and quite a few children. As a young man he moved from Woolsthorpe to the Riverina, and then he moved back to the Southwest in the 1920s. He lived at Hay, Narrandera and several other places in the Riverina. Moving around the remote regions of the district he worked on several outback stations.
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, many people from Victoria moved to the Riverina. When Samuel first left Woolsthorpe as a young single man, he was part of this wave of migration from the south to the Riverina. He met Bertha Weppner there and they married in Narrandera in 1883. Bertha too was part of the wave of migration into the Riverina. Samuel’s sister Mary-Ann and her husband George Seton had already moved there. The squatters had come beforehand, and they had mostly destroyed the Wiradjuri clans around Narrandera, paving the way for the Victorians who were to follow.
Samuel probably never fulfilled Thomas Jones’s hopes for his son. Samuel was the only surviving son of Thomas and Sarah and may have been a disappointment. Two other sons, Thomas and John, had died as infants, most likely at the time when the family was moving from the coast. There is evidence that Samuel and Bertha lived at Woolsthorpe for a period in the 1880s, early on in their marriage, before they headed north again.
Bertha’s father lived on a farm at Colbinabbin in northcentral Victoria. According to the birth certificates of some of Samuel and Bertha’s children, the couple lived for a time in locations close to Bertha’s parental home.
Sometime after his mother’s death in 1924, Samuel returned to the Koroit district. For whatever reason, he was accompanied by his son, Henry-Allan Jones. While in the Riverina and northcentral Victoria, Samuel Jones had quite a few children from two marriages and it is unclear why this particular son should accompany him back to the Southwest. Upon returning, Samuel reestablished connections with his relatives, including with his sister, Janet, who was by then living at Kirkstall with one of her sons. Samuel also reestablished a connection with his first cousin, Lucy Papin, who he married in Cobden in the early 1930s. Samuel and Lucy settled in a bush hamlet east of Cobden and remained there for the rest of their lives.
In the brief interlude when Samuel and Henry-Allan were living at Kirkstall in the late 1920s, Henry-Allan Jones met Eily Schefferle. This resulted in Eily becoming pregnant with Lionel. Eily had been living at Kirkstall with her two younger brothers and her mother for several years by that stage, although she was still just nineteen years of age when she became pregnant. Months before Lionel was born, Eily and Henry-Allan married at Koroit in 1929. Shortly afterwards, Henry-Allan and Eily moved to Cobden where Lionel’s brother Bill Jones was born. For whatever reason, the marriage broke down abruptly and Eily returned to Kirkstall with her two young children around 1933.
Samuel Jones had two younger sisters who survived. The first of these siblings, Katherine, was born in Killarney in 1863. She is the last of the children of Thomas and Sarah to be born while the family still lived on their original leasehold at Belfast East, southwest of Tower Hill.
In 1879, when just sixteen, Katherine married Francis Freckleton at the Jones property in Woolsthorpe. Katherine and Francis Freckleton went on to have twelve children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. A town-survey map of Woolsthorpe from the nineteenth century shows that in 1889 Francis Freckleton purchased a town block adjacent to the plots owned by the Jones family. Most of Katherine and Francis’s children were raised there at Woolsthorpe. The couple subsequently moved to Garvoc, another small hamlet situated in the midst of squatter stations.
The youngest of Thomas and Sarah’s children was Sarah-Ann, born at Woolsthorpe in 1872. Thomas and Sarah were in the process of buying property there. Sarah-Ann lived to the great age of ninety-two. She had eleven children with William Freckleton, whom she married in 1891. William was the brother of Francis Freckleton, who had earlier married Katherine. In other words, two brothers married two sisters, an arrangement which was not particularly uncommon in nineteenth century rural communities. William Freckleton and Sarah-Ann lived at Woolsthorpe for two decades before moving to other parts of the Southwest. While living at Woolsthorpe, William and Sarah-Ann owned at least one town block there. She was a registered midwife and eventually died at Warrnambool in 1963.
Between the birth of Katherine in 1863 and Sarah-Ann in 1872, Thomas and Sarah suffered the loss of two infant sons. Thomas was born in 1867 at Woodford, a hamlet on the Merri River to the east of Tower Hill. He survived for just sixteen months, his death certificate stating that he died at Spring Creek in 1868. After flowing through Woolsthorpe, the Spring Creek joins the Merri River just north of Woodford. It is hard to be certain where the Jones family was living in 1868. They may have been at Woodford or in Woolsthorpe or perhaps camping in the bush nearby.
A family connection to Woodford may have been though Jane Campbell, the sister of Sarah Jones. After leaving Mull in 1853, Sarah and Jane Cambell arrived in Portland aboard the “New Zealander” together with their siblings and their father. The Campbells were then all forwarded to Belfast.
Years later, in 1867, while at Woodford, Sarah gave birth to a son, Thomas, who did not survive. Jane, her sister, also gave birth to a son in Woodford that year. This child, named Peter, also died as an infant. Jane’s husband died the same year. It is likely that Sarah and Jane and their respective families lived close to each other at Woodford at this time and would have had much grief to share.
Jane Campbell married Peter Harris at Belfast in 1856, a year after her sister Sarah married Thomas Jones, also at Belfast. By 1860 Jane and Peter Harris were living at Woodford, where Peter worked as a timber splitter, although he also worked at times as a carter. Peter Harris was born in 1810 and so he was quite a lot older than Jane Campbell, who was born in 1835. Jane and Peter had several children in the Woodford district before his death in 1867. One of their children was Lucy Harris. Lucy’s birth certificate states that she was born in 1860 at Grassmere, a rural location near Woodford. Peter Harris signed Lucy’s birth certificate with his X mark, indicating that he too could not write. Lucy became known as Lucy Pappin after she married John Pappin in 1877, when she was seventeen.
John Pappin’s family background was not dissimilar to that of Lucy Harris, his wife. He too was from a family of assisted immigrants who had been in the Southwest for over twenty years. He had arrived in Victoria with his parents in 1855 when he was seven years old.
John Pappin was around twenty-nine when he married Lucy Harris. Between 1879 and 1895 John Pappin and Lucy had several children, all born at Woodford. Lucy lived at Woodford for the first forty years of her life. Samuel Jones was born at Belfast in 1861, the year after his first cousin Lucy Harris was born near Woodford in 1860. After the Jones family moved to Woodford and then to Woolsthorpe, Samuel and Lucy lived close to each other, as children. They were not to marry until much later in their lives.
John Pappin died at Camperdown in 1922 and Lucy remained a widow until she married Samuel at Cobden in 1932. Lucy and Samuel had much in common. Their mothers were sisters, and their fathers were laboring men who had been in the Southwest for years. When growing up in the 1860s and 1870s their families had lived close to each other. Lucy’s death certificate from 1948 states that she was born in Mailors Flat, which is very close to Woodford.
Lucy Pappin’s mother, Jane Cambell, had many children across three marriages. In all, Jane had around fourteen children, not all of whom survived childhood. Jane died in Warrnambool in 1920. Her widowed father, Duncan Campbell, was from Mull, where she was born. She came to the Southwest with her father and her siblings after being transported from her island home via an assisted emigration scheme.
One of Sarah and Jane Campbell’s bothers was Archibald Campbell. He married Emma Glendinning and they too lived at Woolsthorpe. The siblings, Sarah, Jane and Archibald, thus all lived in the vicinity of Woolsthorpe and Woodford from the 1870s, where they raised their families as best they could.
In the 1860s, Woodford was a more important place than it was later. It was a strategic crossing and watering point for bullock drays in the days before bridges were built lower down the river. Bullock teams were dependent on regularly spaced water points where animals could drink and rest. A team could travel about fourteen kilometers per day and water for the animals was needed at the start and finish points. A team heading north from Woodford would travel to Woolsthorpe on the Spring Creek, and then to Caramut on Muston’s Creek. The hamlets of the working people developed close to the homesteads of the squatters. Workers and the proprietors were located within easy reach of each other, usually beside the same streams.
Records indicate that Thomas and Sarah purchased property in Woolsthorpe in 1873, but the birth certificates of some of their children indicate that they were living there several years prior to that. The years of the late 1860s were a transition period for the Jones family. Samuel was likely scarred by the family trauma occasioned by the death of his siblings and the dislocations of moving from the coast. At the very least, his education, such as it was, would have suffered as a result of the disruption.
From the early 1870s, the Jones family settled down on six-acres of land at Woolsthorpe, living in a modest four-roomed timber house. Woolsthorpe declined markedly as a village in the twentieth century. If one visits Woolsthorpe today, some remaining examples of simple vernacular houses can still be seen, now in varying states of disrepair and dilapidation. Such houses have largely disappeared from more vibrant places, although they were still reasonably common in Koroit in the 1960s.
The Jones family connection to Woolsthorpe continued well into the twentieth century. The connection started much earlier, from the mid-nineteenth century. William Lindsay acquired Quamby Station in 1854 to add to the family’s adjoining Union Station. Lindsay family members were regular travelers between the coastal towns of Port Fairy and Warrnambool and the family’s stations at Woolsthorpe.
The Lindsay’s rapidly expanded their pastoral enterprise through the 1860s and into the 1870s. Thomas would have been very familiar with Union Station in these decades. Expansion coincided with the conversion of the land’s status to freehold. As the Pastoralists’ Review of 15 July 1909 makes clear: “Union was one of the first estates in Western Victoria to be made freehold. The greater part of the 15,000 acres of which it consisted was purchased at auction from the Government in 1856. The owners were consequently not troubled at a later date, like so many other pastoralists in the sixties, with the inconvenience of selection going on in the midst of the run. When neighbouring holdings were being split into fragments by speculative selectors, Union was held intact in fee simple”.
From 1856 Union Station was “improved” through private investment, once the owners had security to invest without fear that their pastoral leaseholds might be cancelled by government programs of “selection.” The private investment ensured that large numbers of workers and servants were employed on drainage, fencing and land clearing. Local and state government supported the squatters by providing infrastructure such as better roads and bridges, spurred into action by the effective political lobbying of the squatter class.
Woolsthorpe was filled with children connected to Sarah and Thomas through kinship and marriage and the Jones family likely knew almost everyone in the town. Two of Thomas and Sarah’s children were born at Woolsthorpe, in 1869 and 1872. Janet, the eldest daughter, married Robert Porter in Woolsthorpe in 1874 when she was seventeen, and two other of Thomas and Sarah’s daughters married local men in the town. In addition, Archibald Campbell, Sarah’s bother, also lived in Woolsthorpe with his wife and children. The were not prominent in the social hierarchy of the hamlet, but they were part of the community.
Woolsthorpe is typical of small settlements that developed on the margins of squatter properties. Many historic hamlets in the Western District first emerged at the fringes of the early squatter runs. These once vibrant hamlets now house declining rural communities with aging populations with deep ties to their districts. Some small towns have now virtually disappeared, but a few have survived as local service centers.
Rachel Mary Bennett’s local history of Woolsthorpe, called “Glimpses into the Past – A History of Woolsthorpe”, was published in 2002. Bennett describes Woolsthorpe as a place where three large squatter stations converged. The earliest European settlement here was called Spring Creek. The township of Woolsthorpe was initially surveyed in 1852, with an additional survey in 1854. In these early years of the town, goods were carted along rough tracks to and from the coastal ports of Belfast and Warrnambool. Heading north from Woolsthorpe the tracks went to Caramut and then to Hamilton or Ararat, passing many remote squatter homesteads and associated hamlets along the way.
Thomas Jones worked in the carting trade as a bullocky. In her book, Mary Bennett includes Thomas Jones on her list of carriers living at Woolsthorpe in the 1870s, and this occupation is ascribed to him in his eventual brief obituary published in the “Koroit and Tower Hill Advocate”. Woolsthorpe was on the main road from the coast to Ararat and Stawell and additional tracks went to Ballarat, Geelong and Hamilton. Bullock teams could take weeks to get to a destination and to return home.
From at least 1873, Thomas, Sarah and the children owned a number of adjoining blocks in the town, with a total area of around six acres. The family’s property was beside the Spring Creek at the southern edge of the hamlet. During the times of her husband’s absence, Sarah would have run the household and supervised the children. It was not uncommon for laboring men to be away for days at a time and it was common for women to run family farms in the absence of menfolk. Like others of their class and background, the Jones family likely had a garden, poultry of various kinds, a milk cow or two, and pens for their animals.
As European settlement became more entrenched in the Southwest, frontier society transitioned into something a bit more modern. As time passed, old lags such as Thomas Jones were likely viewed as something of an anachronism. When he married Sarah Campbell in 1854, Thomas was relatively young, likely full of hope about the family he would start with Sarah. At that time, Belfast was expanding rapidly. By the 1870s and 1880s, Thomas Jones was ageing. His livelihood involved a lot of heavy lifting, which must have been hard on his body. He battled from day to day to make ends meet, without the government services, social safety nets, and public amenities available today. When in need, people relied upon their relatives, their church and their lodge for support.
From the mid-1870s, Samuel Jones likely helped his father in the carting trade, whether he liked it or not. Samuel was the only boy of the family. Bullock driving seems to have been almost entirely a male profession, although the archive has records of a couple of noted female bullockies, including the redoubtable Agnes Buntine of Gippsland.
Bullock teams and drays were a familiar sight in Western Victoria in the nineteenth century and skilled bullockies were the backbone of the rural workforce, transporting heavy goods such as wool, wheat, timber, and farm supplies. Horses needed specialized fodder, but bullocks could get by browsing on the roadside and along the streams. A bullocky was often accompanied by a dog and a younger helper, who walked on the off side of the team, and hence was known as an “off-sider.”
Samuel’s sisters were mostly busy with the chores of farming: caring for the animals, growing food, and the general housework. Woolsthorpe was highly gendered in its social values and its division of labor. There was men’s work and there was women’s work. Three of Samuel’s sisters married local men in Woolsthorpe and started their families in the town. Of the girls, it was only Mary-Ann who left Woolsthorpe as an unmarried young women to go to Melbourne to work. She met her husband in the city and moved with him to a farm in New South Wales.
The initial survey of Woolsthorpe was undertaken in 1852, and there is a notice published in the Melbourne Argus of that year which mentions that “Woolsthorpe, on the Spring Creek on the road from Hexham has been listed as the site for a new township”. The earliest blocks sold were purchased by William Lindsay and George Bostock. These two men were among the most prominent squatters and proprietors of the Southwest. George Bostock was related by marriage to the Manifolds. Two of George’s brothers married sisters of the Manifold family. Georges father, Robert Bostock, first worked on the African coast as a Trans-Atlantic slave trader. He subsequently settled on an estate in Van Diemen’s Land.
A copy of the original Woolsthorpe Town Survey Map is available from the State Library of Victoria. It shows the various town blocks plus the names of the original purchaser of each property and the date of purchase. The map shows the blocks purchased by Thomas and Sarah in 1873, and also those purchased by the Freckleton family, who were friends of the Jones family. Two of the Freckleton boys married two of the Jones girls. Woolsthorpe developed slowly through the 1860s and 1870s. It remained a hamlet throughout the colonial period, and then declined through the twentieth century. The investments of Colin McKenna and his Midfield Meats company in the twenty-first century has revived the town to a degree, helped by its proximity to Warrnambool.
Mary Bennett’s book on Woolsthorpe includes some information on Thomas and Sarah and their children. The Jones family was evidently not a prominent local family but they were acknowledged as part of the community. The longest reference to Thomas and Sarah is as follows, “Tom Jones and his wife Sarah Campbell had children born in Woolsthorpe from 1869, but his earliest purchase of land was block 56 in April 1873 in Tom’s name followed by blocks 52, 3, 4, 5, 6 bought on 12 August 1873. Mrs Jones could not read or write but she was recognised as a very gifted knitter who did the most wonderful pattern knitting. At the century history display, Mrs Hazel Devlin (nee Surman) displayed a knitted lace, double bed cotton quilt that her mother had been given by Mrs Jones. Sarah Jones was also a midwife in the early days. “Granny Porter” was Mrs Jones’ daughter, Janet Jones, and she too was very gifted with her crotchet. She crotched the cloths for the Koroit Roman Catholic Church alter as well as petticoats and linen”.
Sarah, as a midwife in the town, would have been on call to assist with births at short notice, a traditional service which would have provided her with a little supplementary income. In the book, Sarah is described as illiterate. In the late nineteenth century, illiteracy amongst the elderly was still relatively common in the Southwest.
It is notable that when Thomas died in 1897, Sarah, as the informant, did not seem to know the names of her husband’s parents or where he was born in England. On his marriage certificate, Thomas had provided these basic personal details on his own account. By 1897 his birth was a long time ago, in a place far away. Sarah would have had no firsthand knowledge of England at all, having been born on the remote island of Mull and whisked to Australia when she was eighteen years old. Thomas’s death certificate merely notes that his occupation was that of laborer and notes that he had spent “some time in Tasmania” and had been in Victoria about fifty years. Sarah signs her husband’s death certificate with her X mark.
Religion and the Lodge
The archive shows that Thomas and Sarah were adherents of the Presbyterian Church. The officiating minister at the wedding of Thomas and Sarah was the Reverend Craig, a Presbyterian clergyman in Belfast at the time. The Lindsay family were Presbyterians and were leaders of the Presbyterian community. It is unclear which church Thomes or Sarah attended while living near Belfast. They may have attended the non-conformist Protestant chapel at Rosebrook, which was aligned with a generally Calvinist religious outlook.
When Sarah and Thomas’s married in 1854, Christian revivalist movements were strong in working class communities in Britain, America and Australia. These Great Awakenings, as they were known, swept Britain and America in the nineteenth century and were also influential in Australia. Such religious revivalism was fostered mainly by Methodists and Wesleyans. Breakaway Presbyterian churches were also locally prominent in the nineteenth century.
It would appear that Thomas Jones remained a Presbyterian all his life in Victoria. When he was buried in Woolsthorpe cemetery on 20 August 1897, the officiating clergyman at the funeral was the Presbyterian minister, the Reverend T.J. Riddle. Sarah Campbell and her emigrant Highland family identified with the extensive Presbyterian community of the Southwest, which was mainly of Scottish heritage.
Thomas Jones joined a fraternal and masonic lodge well before his marriage to Sarah Campbell. The Loyal Prince Alfred Lodge was officially founded in Port Fairy in 1848 and Thomas was an early member. Thomas seems to have remained a member of this lodge for the rest of his life, although he may have transferred to the Koroit branch later in life, especially after the old lodge hall in Port Fairy burnt down in 1875. Woolsthorpe was not too far away but Koroit was much closer. Thomas had already left Belfast well before the fire.
There were overlapping social links between some of the masonic lodges and some Presbyterian congregations. There were connections between some fraternal lodges and the Orange Order. The Orange Order is a conservative, British unionist and loyalist organization with deep roots in the Protestant communities of Northern Ireland and Scotland. It traditionally opposed Irish nationalism and was wary of Catholicism in general. The Orange Order was influential in Belfast, as one might expect. The hall of the Loyal Prince Alfred Lodge at Belfast was widely used for social functions in the 1850s and 1860s, especially those events with the object of boosting the Empire and the Royal Family.
Squatters and proprietors were often elders in their Presbyterian communities and were generous benefactors to the congregations. They funded churches and denominational schools in many towns. Various of the squatter class were members of lodges of one kind or another. A form of civic generosity was a tenant of their belief and they selectively supported numerous charitable organisations.
The leading gentlemen of fraternal lodges were active in local business and in municipal government, maintaining active networks of influence. The military volunteer corps and the police forces were institutions where lodges had influence and extended patronage. A good example of this civic engagement at Belfast is represented by John Mason. He was an early prominent member of the Loyal Prince Albert Lodge, and in 1863 he helped found the smaller Loyal Belfast Lodge, an exclusively Orange society. He was also a member of the Horticultural Society, an important local institution for networking.
John Mason arrived at Port Fairy in 1844 from Stirling in Scotland, just one year after James Atkinson obtained his Belfast Special Survey. He became known as Captain Mason following the formation of the Belfast Volunteers, a Rifle Corps formed in 1859, which functioned as an advocate of the Empire, rallying the populace in support of the Queen and the British nation generally. In business John Mason was variously an innkeeper, carpenter, stonemason, architect, estate agent, advisor to the council and the treasurer of the shire. He was also the secretary of the Savings Bank. He was elected to the first council of the Belfast Roads Board in 1853 and to the first Municipal Council in 1856. He served many terms as a councilor from 1856 to 1873 and was the first mayor of the Borough of Belfast in 1863. He was the esteemed brother of many of the leading gentlemen of the town.
Thomas Jones no doubt knew John Mason through mutual membership of the Loyal Prince Albert Lodge, and he may have benefited from being part of networks led by men such as John Mason. Working men might benefit from the patronage of better educated and well-connected members of the community. Charles Mills was a prominent member of Loyal Prince Alfred Lodge. Mills was commended by his fellows for his role in saving people who were in a floundering boat while out in Port Fairy Bay. This feat of leadership and seamanship was a heroic act on the part of the entire rescue crew.
The Catholic community had its own societies and fraternities, such as the Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society. For the most part, relations between the sectarian elements of Southwest remained civil, if not exactly harmonious. On special occasions there were joint charitable campaigns attracting support across the denominations. Nevertheless, sectarian identification was important in Belfast. How could it not be, given the demographic composition of the area and its links to its distant namesake.
Thomas Jones was likely more interested in the financial protections that lodge membership conferred rather than any ideological or sectarian aspects. Roland Wettenhall has written about the benefits of the fraternal societies in his paper “The Influence of the Friendly Society Movement in Victoria”. He describes the situation as follows: “The growth in membership of fraternal lodges in the mid-1800s was spurred by the social dislocations caused by the gathering pace of economic change, the lack of trade union protection, and the lack of universal public insurance schemes”. The welfare protections of the government were poorly developed in the 1850s and so people relied on mutual benefit societies for support in old age.
For many working people such as Thomas Jones, it was only by joining mutual friendly societies like the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows (M.U.I.O.O.F.) that they could protect themselves and their families against the afflictions of illness, unemployment, injury or sudden death. Financial benefits in old age were obtained through the paying of joining fees and ongoing subscriptions made when men were young and healthy. Membership fees and subscriptions were thus a form of health and old age insurance.
According to Roland Wettenhall, upon joining a lodge, prospective members had to sign a form stating that they were of sound health, and pass income, religious and moral tests. Each local lodge member then voted on the suitability of the prospective member by placing a black or white ball in the ballot box. If more than three black balls were returned the prospective member was rejected. It seems that Thomas Jones met such tests of character and social standing when he was inducted into the Loyal Prince Alfred Lodge in the late 1840s.
Membership of a lodge provided some form of vetted social standing for individuals within the newly planted communities of the Southwest. Lodges were significant institutions in colonial life generally, important for male bonding and social interaction in post-frontier communities. In an immigrant setting, the bonafides of people were often hard to determine. As such, lodges were useful for personal vetting, social networking, and in maintaining solidarity among ideologically aligned men.
Catholics generally did not join masonic lodges. However, some Catholics did join, despite the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Freemasonry. Some Catholics had been masons in Ireland before coming to Australia. Nevertheless, lodge membership was often seen as a marker of sectarian identity, particularly with regard to those lodges known for their distinctive Loyalist symbols and colors. A bar on the membership of women generally excluded them from of one of the most influential social and economic forums of the town.
Thomas Jones’s membership of the Belfast branch of the Loyal Prince Alfred Lodge would indicate that he had some standing and social currency in his community. He was more or less illiterate so it is hard to imagine he progressed far in the hierarchy. Lodge membership may simply have assisted Thomas in the mundane but important personal aspects of his life, such as marriage, tenancy and employment.
It is likely due to Thomas Jones’s membership in this lodge that a short obituary was published in the local paper. This obituary, published on 21 August 1897 in the “Koroit and Tower Hill Advocate”, states that Thomas was one of the earliest members of the Loyal Prince Alfred Lodge, Independent Order of Odd Fellows. The full article, under the heading “Death of an Old Resident” reads as follows: “Another very old resident of the district, in the person of Mr. Thomas Jones, has joined the great majority, having died at Woolsthorpe on Thursday morning, at an old age, long past the allotted span of man’s existence. Mr. Jones was for many years a familiar figure on the roads with his team, and was well known to those living along the routes over which he had to travel, but of late years he had been a great sufferer, and for sometime past abandoned his occupation. He was one of the earliest members of the Loyal Prince Alfred Lodge, M.U.I.O.O.F, and for many years had drawn relief from the Lodge. He died from a general breakup of the system, and his remains will be interred in the Tower Hill Cemetery on Saturday afternoon. Brothers of the Order who can manage to do so are desired to join the cortege.”
The Loyal Prince Alfred Lodge, to which Thomas Jones belonged as “one of the earliest members”, was established in the mid-1840s and its hall opened in 1848. Thomas, described as a “very old resident of the district”, was likely living in the vicinity of Belfast by the end of the 1840s.
From this brief obituary, Thomas Jones was remembered as a carter in the district. He may have been considered an “old hand” by some with long memories. In his later years he was crippled with infirmity, brought about by a life of hard labor. Just where Thomas is buried is a little unclear. His death certificate states Woolsthorpe yet the newspaper report mentions Tower Hill. There is no record of his burial at Tower Hill, so most likely he is buried at Woolsthorpe, which is where he lived when he died. Thomas’s house was not far from the cemetery at Woolsthorpe and so he was likely laid to rest there.
Most graves in the Woolsthorpe cemetery are now unmarked. Mary Bennett reports that a bushfire in the mid-1930s destroyed most of the simple wooden crosses which had been used as grave markers. These were not replaced, as apparently those remaining in the declining rural community were not entirely sure who was buried where, especially in terms of the older graves.
Shadows of the Western District 