The Lowndes family is an example of a family from Tasmania which moved to Victoria to work for the likes of Charles Swanston and Charles McLachlan. Prominent gentlemen were dependent upon working people. Workers from Van Dieman’s Land were educated in the ways of the colony and frequently disaffected in their views of men with wealth and power.
During the 1840s, in some rural areas of Port Phillip, more than a third to half of the European population had convict origins, either as emancipated convicts or children of convict parents. This was particularly true for those involved in rural trades like carting. It has been noted that nearly all the carriers operating horse or bullock teams in the Port Phillip District during these years were of convict background.
The farmers of the Barrabool Hills faced a number of difficulties throughout the 1850s. Transport was a major problem. For years, roads around Geelong were in very poor condition, especially in winter. Also, the Barrabool Hills were badly burned in the bushfires of February 1851, which killed more than sixteen people. The Lowndes family would have had to face these difficulties as best they could.
Road conditions were as important as distance to those travelling by bullock dray or wagon. If a dray became bogged in swampy ground, days could be added to a journey. Significant physical exertion was required to unload and reload a wagon and the work was hazardous.
There are many descriptions of travel to the goldfields, as well as numerous accounts of life on the fields. For example, Eugene Von Guerard, the famous landscape painter, spent much of 1853 in Ballarat camping on the goldfields there. His diary and sketches of Ballarat and his journey from Geelong in that year show a European artist’s perspective on the diggings. The economic boom would have been especially consequential for those involved in carting drays and wagons. Men with these skills were in great demand and they could bargain rates of exchange to some extent.
A procession of carts and wagons crossed rough tracks to supply the miners. Bullock teams went from one watering point to the next. There were several tracks from Geelong to Ballarat and initially much of the traffic went through Fyansford. The Lowndes farm at Ceres Bridge was located close to several routes. Tracks heading north led to the goldfields and tracks heading west went further into the squatter country of the Western District.
In the pre-goldrush days of the Western District, the class and social divisions evident in British society during the Regency Period of the early nineteenth century were largely replanted in this new world. In Britain, the Victorian Era formally commenced in 1837 with the ascension of the new queen. The social values that later became associated with the Victorian Era emerged to the fore during the 1850s, which was the era of the gold rushes in Victoria which saw a great influx of population into the colony. In Britain, a respectable, code-bound urban middle class expanded alongside the traditional aristocracy and landed gentry. These “progressive” middle class attitudes and values quickly came to color urban centers in Australia, such as Melbourne in particular.
In the 1840s, by contrast, the men at the center of power in Port Phillip exhibited attitudes and values forged in the Regency Era. Institutions such as slavery and indenture, and the practice of coercive military rule over distant colonies, were embedded in their minds. These attitudes and values carried over into subsequent decades in areas of the Western District that were remote from the mainstream, reinforced by the fact that many of the assisted immigrants who arrived in rural Victoria in the 1850s were from peripheral areas of Britain and Ireland and were pre-modern in their outlook.
In remote rural areas of the Port Phillip District earlier modes persisted for longer. In a largely pre-industrial society, the dominant upper class existed above a rural working class of impoverished men and women. Many laborers found themselves in the Western District through circumstances well beyond their control. Despite occasional stories of success, most remained on the lower rungs of colonial society. Family life was impossible for many men and very difficult for many others.
Change accelerated in the 1850s with the gold rushes and mass immigration, but in some rural areas the older order was entrenched and difficult to reform. Many of the assisted immigrants who arrived at Portland and Geelong lived lives largely removed from the changes which had occurred in more metropolitan settings. The most insulated from the new currents were the pre-literate people from rural Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. In many cases these cohorts were in the process of adapting to a new language as well as to a new country.
Information about the lives of the serving class is scarcer than for the folk who employed them. The prejudice of free settlers towards people they considered of a lower order is evident in the literature of the day. An example of this is the moral panic that spread among Melbourne’s middle classes regarding the perceived threat posed by emancipists from Tasmania. By the late 1840s, the influx of working people from Van Diemen’s Land into Port Phillip had turned into a political issue. At the end of the 1840s, a “reactionary campaign of prejudice” was unleashed against the former convicts and the families that had crossed from Van Diemen’s Land.
Melbourne was an urban center even prior to the Gold Rush, at least in comparison to other settlements at Port Phillip. The number of British immigrants arriving at Melbourne was expanding well before the goldrushes. From 1848, free settlers were coming in ever increasing numbers directly from Britain and other parts of Europe, and there was increasing competition for jobs.
The demographer John Caldwell, writing in 1987, calculated that the Port Phillip District in 1846 had 32,879 inhabitants. The majority of these lived in Melbourne and its immediate environs. In 1851, prior to the goldrush boom, the figure for Victoria was 77, 345, with the great majority again being in Melbourne. Geelong was also a substantial town that had grown quickly in the 1840s. All other settlements were much smaller and later goldfields towns such as Bendigo and Ballarat did not exist prior to 1850.
The population of Melbourne just prior to the goldrush more than doubled in five years. This substantial increase in population was dwarfed by what occurred in the following three years. In 1854 the population of Victoria reached 236,776 people, although by then a much greater proportion was living outside of Melbourne, primarily at the new goldfields towns of Central Victoria. The population of Geelong township at the 1854 census was 20,115 people, comprising 11,065 males and 9,010 females. Fyansford, where James Lowndes and family lived, recorded a population of 289 people, 176 of whom were male and 113 female.
Previous labor shortages experienced in 1845 and 1846 were addressed by attracting workers from Van Diemen’s Land. By the end of the 1840s these inflows had significantly reduced. As the population of Melbourne increased further, some of the new settlers viewed the ex-convict population in Melbourne with evident alarm and distaste.
As detailed in Janet McCalman’s book “Vandemonians,” this clash of class and culture led to a moral panic in the minds of some of the newly arrived British immigrants, especially in that section most concerned with public amenity and decency. The new settlers were alarmed by the coarse conduct and the language of the people from Van Diemen’s Land.
The press and some public figures conveniently blamed the Vandemonians for various social ills, portraying them as a generally criminal group that comprised a threat to the moral order and to public safety. They highlighted the Vandemonians’ peculiar style of dress and uncouth manner of speaking, and contrasted it with their own respectability.
Between 1848 and 1852, the moral panic fueled by some church leaders and parts of the media of Melbourne led to a strong public campaign against the immigration of this class of people from Tasmania. Transportation to Van Diemen’s Land had continued through the 1840s, and former convicts from the island were arriving in Melbourne in numbers sufficient to cause grave concern among the good people of the city. They insisted that such immigration should be stopped and they called for the deportation of these Vandemonians back to wherever it is that they came from.
Some strongly opiniated people went on to suggest that the boats carrying the Vandemonians should be preventing from landing. It was argued that stopping the boats was necessary to protect the safety of respectable people. The behavior of some of these ruffians was an outrage to public decency and a threat to the womenfolk of the city.
The good people riding the wave of moral righteousness need not have worried so much. By the first years of the gold rush, the surge in immigration meant that by 1852 the number of new immigrants arriving at Melbourne rapidly overshadowed the relatively few who were still crossing from Tasmania. The issue of Tasmanian migration faded from view amid the streams of people arriving at Port Melbourne.
In colonial Victoria, Tasmanian immigrants of the laboring class had every incentive to hide their convict connections. In Van Diemen’s Land, convicts and their children were considered second-class citizens. This prejudice was difficult to overcome, even for those who were successful. Moving to Victoria offered a chance to escape this stigma, provided one could blend into the growing population and avoid being typecast as an emancipist from the island. It was easier to obscure one’s origins once the gold rushes got underway and a more diverse population grew.
In a rapidly expanding European population, people from Tasmania could start anew so long as they stayed out of trouble and adopted appropriate styles that might help them blend in with the new arrivals.
A joke told at school in Koroit in the 1960s started by asking: “How do you know if someone is from Tasmania?” The answer: “Count the number of fingers on their hands.” The prejudice against the islanders persisted for a long time. The irony was that many at the school had forebears who had arrived from Tasmania, unbeknownst to their schoolyard descendants.
Ann Lowndes died on New Year’s Eve, 31 December 1864 at Ceres Bridge, near Fyansford. Tragically and sadly Ann’s death was by suicide. Page twelve of The Melbourne Leader newspaper of Saturday 7 January 1865 has the following report: “Determined Suicide. — A coroner’s inquest was held yesterday at the house of the deceased, near Fyansford, before Dr. Forster Shaw, on view of the body of Ann Lownes, an old woman aged 62, and wife of a farmer named James Lownes. The deceased hanged herself on the previous night by the neck by a silk handkerchief thrown over a rope attached to a beam. From the evidence adduced it appears the deceased had been accustomed to hard drinking, and had lately been drinking very freely, which had produced delirium tremens and temporary insanity. The jury found that the deceased had committed suicide in a fit of temporary insanity.”
In many ways, Ann’s life was quite remarkable though replete with adversity. She did well to survive for sixty-two years. Born in Bristol to unknown parents, Ann very likely grew up in poverty. As a young woman she worked as a domestic servant or sex worker before being convicted of theft. Sentenced to transportation for life, she was shipped to Van Diemen’s Land where she got married and raised a family within a penalized community. She labored as a convict servant and had little control over her personal life, including when to marry and whether she could live with her husband. Her freedom was contingent upon her service to her masters, based on their judgement of her behavior and moral fitness. After twenty years in Van Diemen’s Land, Ann went with her family to Geelong, where she spent her remaining years on a leasehold farming property with her husband and son.
Ann had to endure pain without proper care. She had been transmigrated, trafficked and exploited. She was used as a colonial subject and as an agent of imperial expansion.
Six years before Ann’s death, on 21 May 1858 James Lowndes Junior married Anastasia Donnelly at Saint Francis Catholic Church in Melbourne. James was thirty-one years of age and had lived in Victoria for twelve years. He had finally tied the knot. Perhaps he had some financial security and felt the time was right. In the years following their marriage, James Junior and Anastasia mostly lived at Ceres Bridge, on the property near Fyansford they at first shared with James Senior and Ann.
Details about Anastasia Donnelly’s early life before her marriage to James Junior remain elusive. To outline her life in Victoria we have the sparse information from her marriage certificate and the details listed on the birth certificates of her children. It’s uncertain when she arrived in Victoria or her exact origins, although there is evidence that she came from Johns’ Well in Kilkenny. One of her children’s birth certificates provides this detail about her. There is no definitive passenger arrival record for her. According to the details on the marriage certificate, Anastasia Donnelly was an Irishwoman, part of the great wave of female emigration from Ireland in the mid-1850s.
Why James Lowndes chose to marry a woman who had relatively recently arrived in the colony, and who was not of his nationality or religion, remains unclear. As a working man with a livelihood and a home, he would have had some currency in the marriage market, despite his Van Diemen’s Land origins. He could have married someone from Tasmania of similar background to his, for example. It is possible that he simply took a liking to Anastasia and felt the time was right to start a family. Why the marriage was registered at the Church of Saint Francis in Melbourne rather than at a church in Geelong is also a mystery. Perhaps James Junior was working away from Geelong at the time he met Anastasia, and there is some evidence to support this conjecture.
Great numbers of young unmarried Irish women arrived in Australia in the 1850s. Multiple variations of the name Anastasia Donnelly can be found in the available immigration lists and some women traveled by names other than their own. The most likely possibility is that Anastasia arrived in Victoria in the mid-1850s from John’s Well, Kilkenny, Ireland, where she was born around 1836 or 1837.
Anastasia’s marriage certificate and the birth certificates of her many children consistently indicate that she was born in Kilkenny. The words, “Kilkenny, Ireland”, appear on multiple of her records. Donnelly is a common surname from that region of southern Ireland.
The birth certificate of Martin, her child born in 1874, is more specific. Although the clerk’s handwriting is poor, this record indicates that Anastasia was born in John’s Well, a rural district eight kilometers northwest of the town of Kilkenny. John’s Well is part of Rathcoole Parish and is known in Irish as Tobar Eoin Baisde, the Well of St. John the Baptist.
The marriage certificate from 1858 shows that Anastasia was Catholic and married James according to the rites of the Catholic Church. From that point onward, the Lowndes family had an affiliation with the Catholic religion. Previously, while living in Tasmania, the family had been associated with the Church of England. Anastasia likely wished her children to be raised Catholic and James Junior seemingly had no objection.
On the marriage certificate, Anastasia is described as a “Domestic” whereas James is described as a “Carrier”. One witness was Matilda Wison, likely a relative of David Wilson, brother-in-law of James Lowndes.
The most intriguing detail on the certificate is that both James and Anastasia list “Mordyalick” as where they were living. At first glance the author interpreted this as being Mordialloc, an eastern suburb of Melbourne, but it seems more likely to be a reference to a squatter run in the Western District. The property known as Marida Yallock (alternative spellings include Meridayalloc, Mordialloc, Marrady Yallock) is a more likely candidate.
The Marida Yallock run was just south of the Glenormiston run of Neil Black. It was first taken up by Stephen Ewan in 1840 and by 1858 it was in the hands of Daniel Mackinnon, Ewan’s friend. Mackinnon was a nephew of Dr Daniel Curdie, a prominent squatter of the Cobden area, and he was a friend and associate of Neil Black. It is quite possible that James travelled to this area for work and that he met Anastasia when she was working on a station on the lower Mount Emu Creek or the Hopkins River.
It could take a week to travel from Geelong to Marida Yallock by dray or wagon, but many such carts were making the journey in 1858. When Stephen Ewen took up the run in 1840 Marida Yallock was at the frontier.
In 1840 a chap named Charles Gray was a guest at Marida Yallock. He later wrote of his time in the Western Victoria. In that account he writes: “Whilst at our first squattage, I went out kangaroo shooting one day with Stephen Ewing who had just occupied a run near us and G. W. Craig. Riding over the one day, I came upon the scene of one of the numerous conflicts Fred Taylor was said to have had with the natives, who were numerous and daring in this district. The blacks seemed to have decamped suddenly, leaving their spears, waddies, etc., behind. These had been thrown on the fire and rendered useless”.
In 1842 Stephen Ewen wrote to his aunt in Scotland describing how “Our sable brethren are not encouraged about the station, as they become troublesome and apt to help themselves to a few sheep or anything they take fancy for”. He goes on to describe how the clanspeople, though numerous because of the nearby Protectorate Station of Charles Sievwright, kept their distance from his huts because of the many guns he had and his threats to kill any native who injured his stock. This letter to his aunt also indicates that he knew something of the inter-clan violence which had occurred at the Protectorate. Sievwright wrote a report of one incident which wound up in the records of the British authorities.
One possibility when trying to identify the arrival of the women named Anastasia Donnelly who married James Lownes can be found in the record of a young women who arrived in Melbourne in July 1855 aboard the “Tornado”. This girl, listed as Mary Donnelly, was an unmarried Catholic girl from Kilkenny described as a domestic servant who could not write and who was eighteen years of age when she arrived. These bare facts match what is known of Anastasia, apart from the discrepancy in the first name. This girl was sent to the Hopkins River in August 1855 on a long journey of more than a week’s travel. She may not have been the Anastasia Donnelly who married James Lowndes, but her story of transmigration is interesting in any case, and is representative of many poor women from rural Kilkenny who came to Victoria in the middle years of the 1850s.
The “Tornado” departed from Glasgow in April 1855 with three hundred and ninety-five Government immigrants. Of these, two-hundred and ninety were unmarried women and girls, the great majority Catholics from southern Ireland, many of whom could not write and many of whom were from Kilkenny. Regular steamship services connected Irish ports, such as Dublin, with Glasgow and Liverpool. As it was considered internal travel within the United Kingdom, passenger lists for these journeys in the 1850s across the Irish Sea do not exist, so it is impossible to say how this young woman left Ireland.
Once in Victoria, the assisted passenger records of the “Tornado” show that in August 1855 this eighteen year old young woman listed as Mary Donnelly was assigned to a property on the Hopkins River, in the middle of the Western District. Almost three years later, Anastasia Donnelly married James Lowndes in Melbourne and both of them indicate on the marriage certificate that they were then living at “Mordyalick”.
Marida Yallock was a station on the Mount Emu Creek close to where it joins the Hopkins River. It is the kind of place to which young assisted immigrant Irish women were sent upon their arrival. After the required period of service on the run, such women were free to enter into new contracts with the same or different employers. Mordyalick was also where James Lowndes Junior said he was living in 1858 at the time he wed Anastasia, and so James may have met Anastasia there. Given that James’s occupation involved considerable travel, perhaps the couple travelled to Melbourne together prior to being married at Saint Francis Church in the city. This is conjecture but given the paucity of hard evidence some degree of speculation is required to make sense of the little information that is available.
A great number of laboring people worked on Marida Yallock in the mid-1850s, employed by Daniel Mackinnon, the prominent squatter who took over Marida Yallock in 1854. Mackinnon was the nephew of Dr Daniel Curdie who was also a prominent squatter in this area.
The noted scholars of the pastoral industry, Ralph Malcolm Billis and Alfred Stephen Kenyon, in an article published in the Australasian of September 1934, write as follows: “When taken over by Daniel Mackinnon from Stephen Ewen, Marida Yallock was a jungle of lightwood, gums and scrub, the land was sour and the grasses limited to a few tufts here and there. By working to set plans in the space of a few years Daniel Mackinnon, this pioneer, converted the jungles and swamps into an estate of great value. The scrub was cleared, grasses were sown and the land was sweetened by the construction of almost 200 miles of drains.”
It was assisted immigrants such as the Kilkenny girl named Mary Donnelly and Vandemonian men such as James Lowndes who did much of the work at Marida Yallock. They were not “pioneers”, a term best left to gentlemen such as Daniel Mackinnon. People such as this young woman and James Lowndes were the hired help, the servants who ended up in the Western District as a result of decisions taken elsewhere.
For information concerning Daniel Mackinnon and Marida Yallock, the author is indebted to Florence Charles and her excellent book “Mackinnon’s Bridge”, published by the Mortlake and District Historical Society in 2020.
The Kilkenny region was profoundly impacted by the Famine and those who came to Victoria on the “Tornado” were survivors of the great hunger. The national disaster portended the general collapse of pre-famine rural society. Many people emigrated to escape terrible conditions there in the wake of social collapse. The worst of the famine occurred between 1846 and 1849, but the effects of the hunger were felt for years, and hastened the precipitous decline in the use of the Irish language. In the early nineteenth century, Irish was still frequently used, particularly in rural areas. By the 1851 census, the percentage of Irish speakers had already fallen significantly, with the famine acting as a major catalyst for the language’s decline as the hunger hit Irish-speaking rural communities the hardest.
The most likely scenario is that Anastasia came directly from Kilkenny to Victoria, perhaps travelling under a slightly different name. It is possible she might have been transported to Tasmania in the last phase of transportation but there is absolutely no evidence for that. Convict records from Van Diemen’s Land do not list an Anastasia Donnelly within the appropriate age range.
Some Irish women who arrived in Victoria as assisted immigrants, when applying through an agent in Ireland, had altered their names and their ages in order to qualify for an assisted passage. A women might claim to be single when she was actually a widow, for instance. It should be borne in mind that many of the Irish women who arrived on the “Tornado” could not write and so their applications for passage and the subsequent arrival records were all written by others. For people being encouraged to leave wherever it was they were, the main thing was to qualify for an assisted passage by whatever ruse could be found. Sometimes simple clerical error based on misinformation or lack of understanding might muddy the details of a person’s identity.
On the marriage certificate, James Junior lists Van Diemen’s Land as his place of birth and names his parents as James Lowndes and Ann Higgins. James Senior’s occupation is noted as “carrier”. Anastasia records her father’s name as James Donnelly, farmer. The name of her mother is unclear on the record, but the first name is clearly Ellen, and the surname may perhaps be Cummins.
Interestingly, when she died in 1911, Anastasia’s death certificate records that her mother’s first name was Mary, the same first name as the young women who was sent to the Hopkins River. On the death certificate, Anastasia’s mother’s maiden name is listed as Cummins. “Mary Ellen” was an incredibly popular combination in nineteenth century Ireland and so this may well have been the name of Anastasia’s mother. A woman baptized as Mary Ellen might appear as “Mary” in one record and “Ellen” in another depending on the whim of the clerk or her personal preference. The name Mary was ubiquitous and accounted for roughly a quarter of all Irish women at one point. Families frequently gave multiple daughters “Mary” as a first name to honor the Virgin Mary. To tell them apart, the children were called exclusively by their middle names or family nicknames, for example Mary Ellen went by Ellen, and Mary Anastasia went by Anastasia.
James Junior signed the marriage certificate with a neat and legible signature, while Anastasia signs with her X mark, indicating she was unable to write. She signed the birth certificates for all of her children with her X mark. An obvious discrepancy on the marriage certificate is that James is listed as being twenty-eight, when in actual fact he would have been thirty-one, given that he was born in 1827.
When Anastasia died in 1911, her death certificate lists her age as eighty-two, which would make her year of birth around 1829 by that reckoning. This does not seem correct and is contradicted by other evidence. She would by that account have been around thirty years old at the time of her marriage in 1858, which is likely incorrect. If Anastasia had been thirty when she married, then her child-bearing history would have been quite remarkable.
Anastasia raised ten children, born between 13 March 1859 and 15 August 1883. If Anastasia had been born in 1829, she would have been fifty-four when her last child was born. It is more likely that Anastasia was born several years after 1829. Upon her gravestone it is inscribed that she was seventy-five years old when she died in 1911, indicating a birth year of 1836 or 1837. This is consistent with her marriage certificate and the ages recorded on most of the birth certificates of her children.
Interestingly, the death certificate lists the length of time Anastasia spent living in the colony of Victoria as fifty-four years, indicating an approximate arrival date of 1856, two years prior to her marriage in 1858. The usual caveat regarding inconsistencies when examining official records from the nineteenth century apply here.
Anastasia’s age on her marriage certificate appears to be twenty-one, though the entry is somewhat smudged. On this reckoning, Anastasia would have been born around 1837. If approximately correct, she would have been a child during the famine. She quite possibly spent her childhood in conditions where hunger and destitution were rife. During the summer of 1847, when Anastasia would have been around ten years old in northern Kilkenny, about one-third of the population depended on daily rations of Indian meal, essentially livestock food.
People such as Anastasia Donnelly very likely had close relatives who did not survive the great hunger. People were dying in their houses, and from 1848 no relief at all was given to the poor except for gruel dished out twice a day in the workhouses, where disease was widespread. People were forced to leave the land they had leased for many years and go into these workhouses, where many died from disease.
On her children’s birth certificates, Anastasia states that she was twenty-two when James was born in 1859, twenty three in 1860 when John was born, and twenty seven when William was born in 1864, all consistent with her being twenty one when she married. This indicates a birth year of around 1836 or 1837.
On her 1855 voyage to Australia, the “Tornado”, after some delay, finally departed for Australia in April and arrived at Hobsons Bay in July 1855. The Melbourne Argus of 16 July carried a brief note of her arrival in its “Shipping Intelligence” report, as follows: “July 14.—Tornado, ship, 1229 tons, Robert Crighton, from Glasgow 14th April, with three hundred and ninety-five Government immigrants. Montefiore, Graham, and Co., agents.” An additional note in the same newspaper is as follows: “The vessel brings nearly four hundred Government female immigrants, who appeared to be in excellent health and spirits. One poor girl, just as the ship entered port, fell into a fainting fit and died. The vessel is remarkably clean, and fitted with great care to convenience and accommodation, and Dr. Macosh, under whose immediate care the immigrants have come out, speaks very highly of the general conduct of the whole of them.”
The shipping agent, Montefiore, Graham, and Co., was a nineteenth century merchant and shipping firm associated with the Montefiore family. The various business enterprises of the Montefiore family played a significant role in the early colonisation of Australia. The family had links to the slave plantation economy of the Caribbean, and two of the Montefiore brothers, Jacob and Joseph, made large fortunes in pastoral real estate in Australia and other commercial activity including migration services. The extended Montefiore family played a significant role in sending people to this country.
Jacob Montefiore was one of the eleven “Colonisation Commissioners” appointed in 1835 to oversee the settlement of South Australia. Along with Colonel George Palmer, he organised the first emigrant ships to South Australia in 1836. His position as Colonization Commissioner enabled the appropriation of land at Adelaide from its First Nations owners. Montefiore companies also sent large quantities of Australian wool to London and financed infrastructure projects in Australia.
The Montefiore brothers were related to the wealthy Rothschild family and helped to found the Bank of Australasia. In 1852 Jacob Montefiore travelled to Victoria as the agent for the Rothschilds. During his time in Victoria, Jacob formed the company Jacob Montefiore and Co. He described himself as banker, dealer in gold, wool and tallow, and as the agent for Ν. M. Rothschild & Co.
It was not just Scottish and English derived money that was invested in Australia at the time. The movement of capital was highly globalized and that invested in Australia came from multiple sources. The wealthy businessman and philanthropist Moses Montefiore was a cousin of Jacob and Joseph. Moses Montefiore made his money largely from his role as the stockbroker for Nathan Rothschild, his brother-in-law. Like Rothchild, Moses Montefiore was a committed Zionist and a freemason. He stated in an interview in the 1860s that “Palestine must belong to the Jews”. Palestine was shortly to become yet another arena of “systematic colonization”, crucially funded by Rothchild money. In short, it was common enough for wealthy individuals and family companies to be involved in the business of moving people around the globe.
When slavery was abolished, Moses Montefiore and Nathan Rothschild loaned the British Government £15 million, with interest payable, a huge amount of money at the time. The money was used to compensate British slave owners after slavery was ended. This loan to the British government was subsequently paid off over many years by the British taxpayers. According to the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership at the University College London, Rothschild himself was a successful claimant under the scheme, being a beneficiary as mortgage holder to a plantation in the colony of Antigua.
Jacob and Joseph Montefiore’s father, Eliezer Montefiore, had also owned sugar plantations in Barbados and he partnered with others to transport enslaved people from Barbados to Guyana. Several of Eliezer’s sons were involved with compensation claims when enslaved people were freed. Both Jacob and Joseph Montefiore acted as agents for the Rothschilds in Australia, where the family’s finances were actively deployed to develop the new nation, an ideological project they supported.
Regardless of how Anastasia Donnelly came to Victoria, James Junior and Anastasia welcomed their first child in March 1859 while living at Ceres Bridge. The son was christened James after his father and grandfather. The Lowndes family continued living at Ceres Bridge for most of the 1860s, during which time several further children were born. John was born in 1860 at Fyansford and Mary Ann was born in 1862 at Gheringhap, followed by William in 1864 and Andrew in 1866.
The last of the children born at Ceres Bridge was Harriet in 1869. On Harriet’s birth certificate, it is noted that her parents lived in the Parish of Gheringhap, near Fyansford, consistent with the location of the farm at Ceres Bridge. Anastasia was thirty-two at the time, with James listed as being ten years older than she was.
In the early 1870s, the family moved from Ceres Bridge. They likely initially shifted to Moorabool, a location along the Moorabool River opposite Batesford. The birth certificate for Thomas, born in 1873, is somewhat of an anomaly in the sequence of births. His certificate notes that his parents were living at Moorabool, in the Shire of Corio. The shire’s western boundary was the Moorabool River, opposite Batesford, and there was a hamlet called Moorabool that had developed as a work town during the construction of the railway line to Ballarat. On Thomas’s birth certificate, his father James Lowndes is noted as being a farmer at Moorabool.
The birth certificates for the children born from 1874 onward all indicate that they were born further up the Moorabool River, closer to Russell’s Bridge, at a place known locally as Sherman’s Ford. For example, the birth certificate for Martin Lowndes, born in 1874, indicates that the family were now living in Darriwil Parish, Bannockburn Shire. Martin’s birth registration was issued at Leigh Road, the former name of Bannockburn, whereas all previous birth registrations had been processed at Geelong.
The details on Anastasia Junior’s certificate, from 1878, are substantially similar to those for Martin. Interestingly, all of the certificates for the children born at Ceres Bridge have James Junior’s occupation listed as laborer, while all those after 1873 have his occupation listed as farmer, which may indicate his new status as an owner of freehold property.
