Upon their arrival in Port Phillip in 1846, it is likely that both James Senior and Junior worked for a time as laborers under the employment conditions governed by the Masters and Servants Acts. These Acts were devised in England and then modified for conditions in Australia. Workers hired from Van Diemen’s Land to work for the squatters were obligated to sign contracts under the provisions of the Act.
By scrutinizing the squatters and proprietors from below, we gain a different perspective on our history. The lives of servants reveals a lot about the masters. How employers treated servants and laborers at that time provides an insight into the attitudes and values of those in charge.
The Masters and Servants Act of 1823 demanded total obedience and loyalty from servants to their employers, with any infractions punishable by law, often resulting in jail sentences with hard labour. Even a brief absence without permission could lead to punishment. From 1830, Australian servants who left their employment without consent could also be pursued under the Bushrangers Act. The broad outline of these regulations would have been familiar to working people from Van Diemen’s Land whether they were convicts under sentence or “free” indentured servants bonded to an employer.
The employment regulations governing masters and servants were broadly speaking the same laws used to regulate convicts serving time in Tasmania and were heavily biased towards employers. Workers were required to comply with an employer’s commands and the Act of 1823 was used by employers to repress the collective bargaining ability of employees.
James Lowndes Junior and David Wilson were never convicts but they were workers. The British Government’s Masters and Servants Act of 1823 applied to any working person employed as a servant by a master, and because Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales were destinations for the transportation of convicts, the Act was used to control convicts. The children of convicts were subject to the same legislation, including in districts such as Geelong where actual convict labor was not a conspicuous feature of rural workplaces.
Disputes between workers and employers could be brought before a magistrate in a process which rarely benefitted workers. Often, the largest squatter in a district also served as the local magistrate, and so workers had little chance of successfully pleading their cases.
The Sydney Morning Chronicle of 27 September 1845 reported that “It is by no means singular to find the master of the servant sitting in his magisterial capacity and trying his own case. What chance then can the unfortunate servant have? Alas, none! Alas for justice! none. His accuser is at once both judge and jury, and we regret to be obliged to say, but seldom decides against himself.” In the Port Phillip District between 1835 and 1845, over one-fifth of the inmates in prisons had been convicted under the Masters and Servants Act for offences such as leaving ones place of work without permission.
Generally, workers were obliged to agree to be in service to a master for a fixed period of twelve months, during which time they were not permitted to “abscond,” although many did. Sometimes the absconders successfully made their way to a new district where they were not known.
The rates of pay in Australia generally compared favorably with those of Britain at the time. In 1849, shepherds and hutkeepers received payments of between £16 and £20 per annum. Married couples without children, or with older children, earned £30, while those with babies or infants received £5 less. Bullock drivers and skilled bushmen could earn up to £20 annually. The wages for housemaids, nursery maids, cooks, and laundresses varied from £14 to £20 per year. In Britain wages had stagnated for decades due to high population growth and the tendency to replace labor with capital at a time of industrialization.
At times in the 1840s, employers in the Port Phillip District faced acute labor shortages, which drove up the price of labor. Cash was not the sole form of payment. Wages in rural Australia frequently included rations of meat, flour, sugar, and tea, which meant a higher portion of the monetary wage was disposable. By contrast, in Britain workers had to pay for their food from already low wages. When economic conditions in Britain where even more severe than usual, assisted migration to Australia and other colonies was sometimes seen as an attractive option for those in a position to move.
Despite the possibility of achieving a better standard of living in Australia, labor laws remained harsh in this country for many years. Even after numerous amendments were made to the Masters and Servants Acts, transgressions such leaving a workplace without permission, for example, could result in up to three months imprisonment with hard labor.
These stringent laws provided a strong incentive for workers to either comply with a boss’s demands, which were often unreasonable or demeaning, or to seek to change the terms of employment if one could. By becoming an independent contractor, a worker could ameliorate some of the more oppressive provisions of the Act, although this path was not without risks.
Establishing an independent business as a hauler required some amount of capital and involved significant health and safety risks. Serious injury in hard manual work was common. The cyclical fluctuations of the economy and the changing seasons could also impact business. Nevertheless, economic independence was an aspiration that James Lowndes Junior greatly valued, if we are to judge his character based on the trajectory of his life.
For many workers who had arrived at Port Phillip in the 1840s, the gold rushes of the 1850s heralded a prolonged economic boom, which allowed some workers to set themselves up as contractors given the increased demand for services. Nevertheless, life in the mid-1800s was harsh and uncertain in many ways.
The Wilson and Lowndes households maintained regular contact with each other for many years. The families lived relatively close to each other during the 1850s and 1860s. The Lowndes family at Fyansford could readily maintain contact with Harriet and David Wilson at nearby Geelong. Tragically, Harriet Lowndes died of cholera at Gheringhap Street, Geelong, in August 1866 at the age of thirty-eight. Communicable disease was prevalent and difficult to avoid, especially if one was living in crowded and substandard accommodation.
Harriet was buried at the Western Cemetery in the plot where her mother, Ann Lowndes, had been laid to rest two years earlier. Eventually, both James Lowndes Senior and David Wilson would be buried in the same plot, indicating that the families were closely tied. Unfortunately, no headstones exist. At the time of Harriet’s death, her youngest child was still an infant.
Harriet Lowndes and David Wilson had nine children in all, mostly while living near Geelong. During the gold rushes of the 1850s, the family lived nearer to Ballarat for a time. David Wilson’s skills as a blacksmith, farrier, and wheelwright were in high demand. David’s blacksmith trade, particularly shoeing horses and repairing harnesses and wheels, would have been of great benefit to James Junior in his roles as carrier, ploughman and farmer.
From at least 1849, the Lowndes family lived on a small leasehold property at Ceres Bridge on the edge of the Barrabool Hills, near Fyansford. This property was where they farmed and took care of their animals. Two decades later they moved to Russell’s Bridge, near Bannockburn. These hamlets are both northwest of Geelong, with Russell’s Bridge being further up the Moorabool River from Fyansford.
James Senior and Junior were leasehold farmers at Fyansford for many years. They also worked as carriers along the tracks of the district. It was very common for leasehold farmers to also work as bullock drivers at certain times of the year. Horse carts and bullock drays were essential to the functioning of the economy that underpinned the pastoral stations and business generally.
As early as 1837, Fyansford was a crucial crossing point on the Moorabool River for travelers moving to and from Geelong. Crossing the river at the ford, and later over the bridge once it was built, provided access to the track heading west from Geelong. The track to the west went as far as Hamilton, first passing through Inverleigh, an important hamlet servicing several large squatter stations on the Leigh River.
Navigating the steeper sections of the track from Fyansford up to Geelong required considerable skill on the part of the haulers, especially during the treacherous winter months. Sometimes the crossing at the ford was damaged by flood. A Geelong Advertiser article from early 1842 underlined the importance of the ford. The paper reported that “Unless something be speedily done towards the repair of this, the principal crossing place on the Great Western Road, a serious difficulty will be found to exist in bringing down the present clip of wool to market”. The ford was repaired later that year once the weather improved.
Bullock dray drivers used the ford as a watering place as they travelled back and forth. Buildings grew around the ford, and the inn on the river became a popular stopping point. Men could have a drink while the animals rested by the stream. The ford on the river continued to be heavily used until the construction of the first timber bridge in 1854. It is likely that James Lowndes and son negotiated the steep track into Geelong many times in the late 1840s and early 1850s.
James Lowndes did not entirely avoid legal troubles during his early days in the Geelong district. According to a Court Report in the Geelong Advertiser dated 8 May 1849, a certain John Collins filed a case against James Lowndes for compensation regarding a missing bullock that was later found in Lowndes’ bullock team. The report stated, “the plaintiff lost a bullock in April, 1848, last, and found it 2nd March, 1849, in the team of the defendant. Plaintiff made a demand for his beast, which was immediately given up, now he has sued for its services to the amount of claim.”
The court ruled in favor of Collins, awarding him five pounds in compensation to be paid by James Lowndes. It remains unclear whether the defendant was James Lowndes Senior or Junior, though it is likely both were aware of the misappropriated beast. Additionally, a police case from the previous year mentioned a fine of eight pounds made against James Lowndes, but the specific charges were not disclosed. Once again, it is uncertain whether James Senior or Junior was involved in this matter.
The misappropriation of stock could cut both ways, it seems. James Lowndes placed an advertisement in the Geelong Advertiser of 10 December 1850 offering a reward of three pounds for any information regarding a bay mare which had been stolen from the Lowndes’ farm at “Roadknight’s Marsh”, near Fyansford, early Monday morning 9 December 1850.
This is the earliest definite reference to the Lowndes family from the time they lived at Ceres Bridge. At the time, prior to the building of the bridge to Ceres, this general location was known as Roadknight’s Marsh. It was here, a decade earlier in 1836, that William Roadknight and his son established their initial home station along the banks of the Barwon River. In 1836, guided by William Buckley, the famous escaped convict who had lived for over thirty years with the Wadawurrung people, several squatters including Roadknight had established small sheep runs along the Barwon River. The Roadknight family soon held several runs around Geelong.
By the time the Lowndes family settled at Ceres Bridge, a succession of squatter stations dotted the countryside to the west of Geelong. These were strung out along the watercourses, from the Moorabool and Barwon Rivers at Fyansford to the junction of the Barwon and Leigh Rivers at Inverleigh.
In 1837, when William Roadknight first set up his homestation on the Barwon at the marsh which was soon to bear his name, a group of Wadawurrung people regularly camped nearby. An aspiring squatter called John Muston, who at the time was an associate of Roadknight, wrote a description of an encounter with “blacks” in this location in a letter Muston wrote to his sister in England in July 1837. Muston had just shipped his sheep from Van Diemen’s Land to Port Phillip, in conjunction with a consignment of sheep owned by Roadknight. The sheep were then driven from Point Henry to the headstation on the Barwon River at Roadknight’s Marsh. Muston stayed there with his sheep for some time before moving along the river to claim his own run.
John Muston wrote, “Here we landed our fine cargo, … and started up the country and arrived at night on the Burwan River, Mr Roadknight’s station, where we are still stopping. We have a friendly tribe of Blacks, they are decent looking fellows and well disposed”. His letter mentions that the “blacks” were fast disappearing from this district, and that many had died as a result of “affrays” with the squatters and their men. In his letters to his family in England, John Muston includes many less than flattering comments about Aboriginal people. It is quite evident he looks forward to the day when they would be gone.
Although they started out as friends, William Roadknight and John Muston eventually had a severe falling out. Muston came to believe that Roadknight had recently had an affair with Muston’s wife. Financial disputes involving the men only worsened their poisonous personal relationship.
Unlike John Muston, who was a relatively recent arrival to Hobart and someone who had a modest background in retail trade, William Roadknight was a well-established free settler in Van Diemen’s Land. He had arrived in Tasmania many years before, and was one of the first to move some of his flock to the stations on the Barwon and Moorabool Rivers at Geelong. Roadknight’s leasehold extended from the Barwon River into the lower Barrabool Hills but he decided to not renew his lease after the nascent administration at Port Phillip decided to survey the Barrabool hills prior to the sale of freehold blocks. In 1840, the land along the Barwon River was surveyed as Barrabool Parish, and the freehold titles to over twenty-five blocks of farmland were sold. Roadknight moved his pastoral operations further to the southwest of Geelong.
By the end of the 1840s, the Lowndes family leased a small farm on the river. It is unclear who owned the land the family leased. Much of the land sold in 1840 at the public auction following the government survey soon found its way into the hands of men associated with the Derwent Company, the successor entity to the Port Phillip Association. In truth, these gentlemen of the Derwent Company had in any case effectively controlled this part of the countryside since 1836, from the time they took up their option to depasture stock on the Crown Land they claimed.
For the Lowndes family, this location on the Barwon River at Roadknight’s Marsh, later called Ceres Bridge, held many advantages. It was close to important tracks, and the fresh water from the Barwon River and the lowland pasture for horses and bullocks was crucial to their survival. The family remained on the small leasehold farm at Ceres Bridge for approximately twenty years, throughout the 1850s and 1860s. Although they left few traces in the archive, some records do exist. Equally significant is what does not exist. From 1850, there is no evidence that either James Lowndes Senior or James Junior experienced any further trouble with the law.
James Senior and Ann may have made a return visit to Van Diemen’s Land in 1848, two years after their move to Geelong. The Port Phillip Gazette and Settler’s Journal of 30 August 1848, in its Shipping News section, lists “Mr. J. Lowndes and Mrs. Lowndes” as steerage passengers arriving at Port Phillip on 27 August 1848 from Hobart aboard the Lillias. The Lillias was the same vessel that originally brought the Lowndes family to Geelong in 1846. This report suggests that James Senior and Ann had at some stage returned to Hobart earlier in 1848, possibly to wind up business or to bid farewell to friends. The duration of their stay in Tasmania is unknown.
Over time, James Junior became somewhat established in the Fyansford community and even participated in civic affairs. For example, in 1867, he wrote two letters to the Bannockburn Council. One letter, published in the Geelong Advertiser of 15 May 1867, called attention to the need for gates in the fencing at the Ceres Bridge where his farm was located. The Council surveyor was subsequently ordered to address the matter. In the other letter, James Junior signalled his agreement with the proposed line of road to run between Ceres Bridge and the Lower Western Road, now the Hamilton Highway. The Council had informed him the previous year that the roadway’s approaches to the bridge were to be formed.
James Junior was sufficiently literate and confident enough to write letters to the local authorities on his own behalf, something his father would not have been able to do. He was forty years of age, and the Bannockburn Shire had been in existence for just a few years. The Shire was first incorporated as a roads district on 31 October 1862, and became a municipality in June 1864. The shire was bounded on the south by the Barwon River and included both Fyansford and Batesford hamlets within its borders. The Moorabool River flowed north to south through the shire. James Junior and his children remained associated with this shire for many decades.
The letters James Junior wrote to the Bannockburn Council provide a good indication of the exact location of his farm at Fyansford. The Lower Western Road is now known as the Hamilton Highway, and the Ceres Bridge over the Barwon River is located on what is now Merrawarp Road. To the north of the Ceres Bridge and just south of the Hamilton Highway lies a section of low, marshy ground where the Lowndes farm was likely situated. Historical documents refer to James Lowndes living at Roadknight’s Marsh and Ceres Bridge, both names for this location.
The letters James wrote to the Council in 1867 also confirm that the family was still living at Fyansford and had yet to move to Russell’s Bridge. The farm at Ceres Bridge was well placed to benefit from the gold boom when it started in 1851. Apart from the main road from Inverleigh that went through Fyansford and then to Geelong, the property also provided easy access to the road that ran north to Batesford, and then onto Ballarat.
Going the other way, Merrawarp Road rose up into the hills of the Barrabool Range and wound its way eventually to the small town of Ceres. This agricultural district was the early breadbasket of the Geelong region, renowned for its crops of wheat and other cereals. David Fisher, the gentleman owner of the “Roslin” estate which he had established in the hills, subdivided some of his land for the village of Ceres in 1850. Fisher had been the local agent for the Derwent Company. Ceres township was an immediate success, with the Wheat Sheaf Inn opening in 1850 followed by several more trade and commercial businesses, and a post office in 1856.
In 1856 the Victorian Government compiled electoral rolls for the first full election of the Victorian Parliament. The election of that year returned members to both the Legislative Council and to the new Legislative Assembly of Victoria. The 1856 roll is considered the most comprehensive surviving roll of the nineteenth century in Victoria. By contrast, most other rolls from this period have not survived in full. Eligibility to vote was far from universal, as inclusion was strictly limited by gender, property ownership, and residency requirements. Only adult men were eligible for enrollment.
To vote for the Legislative Assembly, men needed to own freehold property valued at £50 or leasehold property valued at £10. James Lowndes and his son were able to meet these requirements. Shortly after these rolls were compiled, the Victorian Constitution was altered in 1857 to allow all men over twenty-one to vote for the Legislative Assembly.
On the 1856 rolls, both James Lowndes Senior and James Lowndes Junior are listed as leasehold farmers on the Barwon River, in the Batesford Division. This suggests that in 1856, father and son were residing on their rural property at Ceres Bridge near Fyansford, close to the Barwon River, on edge of the Barrabool Hills. Despite approaching sixty years of age, James Senior likely continued to assist his son with the farmwork and in the carting business. Ann is not included on the rolls, as women did not have voting rights at that time.
According to a report in the Geelong Advertiser dated 21 May 1855, James Lowndes participated in a ploughing match organized by the Geelong and Western District Agricultural and Horticultural Society. The event took place in the Barrabool Hills, attended by the local dignitaries of the Geelong district. James Junior competed in the Bullock Team event but did not win any of the top financial prizes, which were only awarded to the first and second place winners. The article mentions James as being from Roadknight’s Marsh. This suggests that James Junior likely offered his ploughing services to local farmers and landowners, in addition to conducting his carting business. At that time of the ploughing match, James Junior would have been twenty-eight years old and in the prime of his working life.
This interesting entry in the Geelong Advertiser from May 1855 illustrates the social hierarchy of the colonial period in the middle of the nineteenth century. The large landowners are respectfully mentioned by name and title, whereas many of the ploughmen are referred to as servants of their masters. A few working men, including James Lowndes, are not listed as servants of anyone, possibly indicating that they were leasehold farmers managing their own farming and contracting operations. Most of the servants mentioned here were likely to have been emancipated convicts or assisted immigrants from Britain, but James Junior did not fall into either category, as he was born in Tasmania and was by 1855 living as an independent working man in Victoria.
The article, published under the heading “The Geelong and Western District Agricultural and Horticultural Society,” reads as follows: “The first annual ploughing match in connection with this newly formed society, took place on a Friday last, at Aitkenside, the farm of Messrs. Young, situated on the Barrabool Hills, on which occasion upwards of 200 persons were present, amongst whom were several ladies [and] H.S Wills, Esq., M.L.C. president of the society, J. C. Langdon, Esq., and W. Scout, Esq.; besides these gentlemen, we observed on the ground Mr D. Fisher, Vice President of the society, Mr A. C. Macdonald, Mr Curlewis, Mr James Piper, Mr Middlemas, the secretary, and many other gentlemen connected with the agricultural interests of the colony. The weather during the greater part of the day, was very fine, although there were two or three heavy showers, which although they wetted the spectators of the match, did not in any way dampen the ardour of the competitors, who ploughed away as vigorously as ever. The only point in which the regulations, which had been drawn up by the committee for the occasion, was that the match for bullock teams did not commence until 10 o’clock a.m., instead of half past 9 a.m., and that for the horse teams at 11 instead of 10 o’clock. …
In the match with bullock teams the first prize given was £8, and the second £4, and the following parties entered into competition for it, viz.–James Lownds, Road Knight Marsh; Thomas Peach, Barrabool Hills; and John Braid, servant to Messrs Young.
For the match with horse teams, the prizes being £10, £8, and £4. There were eleven entries. The entries were as follows: -Thomas Tremilian, Point Henry; James Inch, servant to Mr Thomas, of Ceres, Barrabool Hills ; Thomas Clark, also servant to Mr Thomas: John Heard, Barrabool Hills (this party, we believe, did not plough himself); William West, servant to Mr Helmes, Barrabool Hills; John Fame, servant to Mr C. Wyatt, Fyans’ Ford; Andrew Grey, servant to Messrs Young, of Aitkenside; Robert Paton, also servant to Messrs Young; Joseph Selston, servant to Mr Bankin, of the Barrabool Hills; Dugald Cameron, Barrabool Hills; and David Bonney, servant to Mr James English, Newtown.
From the manner in which the ploughing was executed, notwithstanding that the soil was rather stiff, there has been considerable improvement made since the last ploughing match which took place in this district, and we have much pleasure in remarking that the teams, the horse teams in particular, reflect the greatest credit on their owners, the beasts being not only of good quality, but in first-rate working condition.
During the progress of the matches the members of the committee of the society partook of refreshments in a tent which had been erected, and which, when the rain came on, formed a very acceptable shelter. About 4 o’clock the matches closed; and the judges having viewed the ground, the prizes were at once declared and awarded. For the bullock teams the first prize of £8 was given to John Braid, servant to Messrs Young; and the second of £4 to Thomas Peach. For the horse teams, the first prize of £10 was awarded to Robert Paton, servant to Messrs Young the second of £8 to Joseph Selston, servant to Mr Bankin; and the third, of £4, to Andrew Grey, servant to Messrs Young. The prize of £5 for the best pair of horses engaged in the match was awarded to Mr Thomas, the landlord of the Wheatsheaf Inn, one of whose teams was drawn by a pair of strong and beautifully made black mares, which were the object of much admiration.”
The ploughing match took place on the heights above the Barwon River, near Ceres. In the 1850s, this district was a most productive agricultural area. James Lowndes and his family lived on their farm at the bottom of the valley.
It is worth mentioning that this ploughing match occurred some twenty years after John Helder Wedge first came to this part of the Barwon Valley, guided by William Buckley. At that time, in late 1835, squatter stations were yet to be established and Europeans were not living there.
The Barrabool Hills and the Barwon River are depicted on Wedge’s 1835 map of Port Phillip. In 1839, just four years after John Helder Wedge drew his sketch map of the Port Phillip District, the Barrabool Hills were surveyed as part of Barrabool Parish. Following the parish survey, numerous freehold blocks were sold at the government land sales that year. In February 1840, Charles McLachlan, a wealthy Scottish businessman, and his partner Captain Charles Swanston, a banker and merchant, acquired much of this land.
Both of McLachlan and Swanston had substantial business interests in Tasmania and both were key figures in the Port Phillip Association and the subsequent Derwent Company. They purchased a large number of the blocks put up for sale. They then established the Strathlachlan estate, a sheep run which consisted of around half of the recently auctioned land of Barrabool Parish.
In this way, McLachlan and Swanston set a standard which became common practice for men who first arrived in Port Phillip as squatters and speculators. Land first taken up as leasehold was subsequently purchased as freehold. In the Barrabool Hills, on the outskirts of Geelong, a handful of years had passed for conditions to become sufficiently secured so as to enable government land sales to proceed after survey. It was as though these gentlemen knew in advance what was likely to happen, as if by design. The Lowndes family would have been familiar with men such as McLachlan and Swanston, and would have been aware of how the game was played.
In 1850, portions of the Strathlachlan Estate in Barrabool Parish were further divided into sixty-five small farms, collectively known as the Merrawarp Estate. By 1861, only ten resident owner-farmers remained working on their middle-sized blocks, with the majority of the land leased to tenant farmers by absentee landlords. During this period in the 1850s, at the height of the gold rush, the Barrabool Hills became a hub of productive cropping, contracting, and vineyards.
The Lowndes family likely lived just outside of Merrawarp Estate. The farm was near the bridge over the Barwon River on Merrawarp Road. On the northern side of the Barwon opposite Barrabool Parish was Gheringhap Parish. Gheringhap Parish was also surveyed and sold in 1839, with much of the land quickly coming into the hands of McLachlan, Mercer, Learmonth and Swanston, and so land there was thus also owned in large part by gentlemen associated with the Derwent Company. The legacy of the government land sales in Barrabool and Gheringhap Parish shaped land ownership profoundly over decades to come at a time when younger members of the Lowndes family were forging their lives in the district.
David Fisher is mentioned as being present at the ploughing match held by the Geelong Agricultural and Horticultural Society in 1855. Fisher was the manager for the Derwent Company at Geelong from 1836 and was an early paid associate of Swanston and McLachlan. Fisher acquired a section of Barrabool Parish shortly after it was first subdivided in 1839. The fertile hills behind Geelong were very familiar to David Fisher as he had been the manager overseeing Derwent Company operations in the Barrabool Hills even in the years before he purchased a block for himself in 1840. He called his property “Roslin” after the town in Scotland close to his birthplace.
Roslin is a village in Midlothian, on the North Esk River, eleven kilometres to the south of Edinburgh. David Fisher’s estate of two square miles in extent, comprising prime farming land adjacent to a major town in the new colony, would likely have impressed the folks back home. Over time, Fisher subdivided his estate into smaller farms, leasing them to tenants and thereby becoming a collector of rents. The more he acquired, the higher he rose in society.
The Derwent Company, in which Swanston was the leading local figure, had bought out many of the other members of the Port Phillip Association by 1837. Charles McLachlan, Charles Swanston, and David Fisher were all closely associated with the Derwent Company. McLachlan was a business partner of Swanston in Tasmania for some years and both men subsequently invested in Port Phillip when it was being “taken up”.
David Fisher and Dr Alexander Thomson were the first squatters at Geelong itself, both having arrived in 1836. The worthy Dr Thomson was initially the catechist for the Port Phillip Association. He was tasked with preaching Christianity to the Aboriginal people, but soon found squatting more appealing and more profitable. Some years prior to coming to Port Phillip, Thomson had been granted four thousand acres of land in Van Diemen’s Land, having brought considerable capital to the colony, mostly inherited from his Scottish mother.
While Fisher is credited with building the first house where the city of Geelong is today, Thomson staked out his pastoral run on both sides of the Barwon River, naming his property “Kardinia”. The famous footy ground is located within the confines of Thomson’s Kardinia Park run, although his homestation was on the south bank of the river in what is now Belmont. Other squatters and free settlers arrived just after these men, but Fisher and Thomson together with Foster Fyans are generally regarded as the “pioneering figures” of the Geelong township, and were celebrated as heroes for over one hundred years.
In the first two years following his arrival at Port Phillip, David Fisher was a keen scout for the Derwent Company. He made several expeditions with other squatters associated with the Company when they were all looking for suitable territory to take over. Together with his associates, in 1837 he pushed west into unsecured “virgin” country as far as present day Mortlake. The gentlemen of the party were all busy laying out runs as the group trekked over the vast plains. It must have seemed to them like the Promised Land.
Years later, David Fisher was one of the “pioneers” of whom Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe requested a letter of memoir prior to La Trobe’s retirement in 1853. Fisher’s recollections are an interesting account of what he thought worthy of recording. This was well after these initial incursions into the Western District. His attitude toward the Indigenous people and towards the servants in his employ speaks for itself. Dr Alexander Thomson was another contributor to the collection of letters La Trobe requested, now known collectively as the Letters from Victorian Pioneers collection. La Trobe had specifically requested information on the Aboriginal inhabitants of the districts where the gentlemen now lived.
Thomson writes to La Trobe on this subject as follows: “On my first journeys into the country I was very much surprised to find so few natives, and thought they were keeping out of the way. During our first visit to Buninyong we did not see one, and on our first journey to the west, when we discovered Colac and Korangamite, we saw about twenty at Pirron Yalloak, who fled on seeing us. On better acquaintance I found their number really very small. All within 100 miles had visited us.
In December 1836 I was at great pains to muster all that were in the Geelong district, and gave each a blanket; they were Buckley’s tribe, and he assured me I had mustered the whole of them, amounting to only 279. They were always friendly; I was well known amongst them, and wherever I went they received me kindly. But, alas! the decrease has been fearful, chiefly from drinking, and exposure to all weathers bringing on pulmonary complaints. Since their connexion with the whites there has been little increase. When I first numbered them they had several children amongst them, but they decreased every year, and now in this tribe we have only 34 adults and only two children under five years. The men now living were all children when I arrived, and are beginning to look old, so that in ten years more there will not be one alive.
Every attempt to civilize them has signally failed. I have had several in my family for years, and taught them to read and go to church with the family; but after a time the other youths would threaten them and carry them off, when they again got fond of a savage life. I am convinced that no plan, except one based on entire isolation, will succeed with these poor degraded people.”
Aspects of Dr. Thomson’s self-serving account were contested by La Trobe at the time it was written and Thomson’s appraisal of the Aboriginal population numbers of the district is questionable to say the least. Nevertheless, the spin put on events by Thomson and others among the early settler elite regarding the first few years of Port Phillip’s history was one that persisted over the coming decades. There was a contest over who would shape the public narrative of Victoria’s beginnings. The politics of selective memory in terms of the squatters’ relationship with the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Western District played into the justifications that framed the standard narrative that became entrenched by the end of the nineteenth century.
Charles McLachlan represents a fascinating example of the type of Scottish gentlemen who migrated to Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s. He was part of a wave of middle-class emigration from the Scottish Lowlands during that period. Following his childhood in Scotland, McLachlan spent his early career in the West Indies, where he was employed as a manager on a slave plantation for the Glasgow firm Ewing & Reid. The Ewing family, prominent plantation owners and slaveholders, benefited significantly from the Slave Compensation Act in the mid-1830s.
After returning to Scotland from the West Indies, Charles McLachlan obtained a position in the head office at Leith of the Australian Company, a newly founded corporation led by a group of merchants and shipowners in Edinburgh to operate the first regular shipping service between Britain and the Australian colonies. The Australian Company was also established to encourage middle-class Scottish families from the Lowlands to emigrate to Australia.
Charles McLachlan arrived in Hobart Town in 1824 after being hired to manage local operations for the Australian Company. In 1825 and 1826 McLachlan oversaw the construction of the company’s headquarters on the Hobart docks, which were the largest commercial buildings in Hobart at the time. Utilizing a great amount of assigned convict labor, he ran a profitable business until 1832. The company imported rum, gin, wine, ale, pork, herrings, hams, tea, coffee, mustard, stationery, saddlery, paint, tar, chalk, nails, implements, iron, and cedar. In short, McLachlan’s enterprise traded a great variety of goods and made good returns for its shareholders.
As part of the incentives for gentlemen to invest private capital in the colony, McLachlan was awarded substantial grants of land in the Midlands, totaling 3450 acres. He also acquired a whaling station at Southport and several town allotments in Hobart, and he became a prominent businessman, banker and politician in the colony, and he was a member of the Legislative Council. In short, he might in other colonial contexts have been seen was a planter tasked with establishing commercial enterprise in the colony. His commercial enterprise and political work was a catalyst for new settlements and the expansion of the settler population, all executed in the service of the British ruling class.
Under Charles McLachlan’s leadership, the Australian Company facilitated the migration of many hundreds of Presbyterian Scottish free settlers to Tasmania. These settlers, who generally had sufficient capital and connections to qualify for land grants, often brought to the colony some of their retinue of servants and livestock. The most successful of the Scottish free settlers established sizable estates in the Midlands. Quite a few of these settlers, or their children, would go on to take up squatting runs in the Western District.
Following in the wake of the Port Phillip Association, Charles McLachlan sent consignments of sheep to the Port Phillip District. As outlined, in 1840, he and Charles Swanston purchased a sizable portion of newly available freehold land in the Barrabool Hills which became the Strathlachlan Estate, near where the Lowndes family eventually settled. These men had previously set the conditions which allowed such purchases to be made.
In 1842, Charles McLachlan moved to London, residing in comfort in upmarket Eaton Place, in Belgravia, just behind Eaton Square. This was a very posh address. There, he served as an unofficial agent for Van Diemen’s Land, and he made several further visits to Australia. He died in Melbourne in 1855. In his later years, he was considered a notable public benefactor in the colonies, generously supporting the Scots Presbyterian Church in both Tasmania and the Geelong district.
Nowadays, the early arrivals to Australia are too often generalized as an amorphous mass of “British Settlers”. During the colonial era, however, Charles McLachlan and James Lowndes were not considered to be people cut from the same cloth. The social divide between them was vast. Gentlemen such as Charles McLachlan were considered to be of another rank entirely in comparison to laboring men such as James Lowndes. Equality between men was not a core tenant of civic life in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Supporting prominent settlers like Charles Swanston and Charles McLachlan was a cohort of workers, often with convict backgrounds, generally with limited education, and often disaffected in their views of those with wealth and power. The Lowndes family is a good example of a Tasmanian family of convict background which moved to Victoria to work for free settlers, for men such as Charles Swanston or Charles McLachlan.
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 had a convict background.
The farmers and carriers 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. 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.
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. While in Britain the Victorian Era formally commenced in 1837 with the ascension of the new queen, there was a lag in the transmission of changing attitudes and new social values that later became associated with the Victorian Era. Geelong was at the periphery of empire not at its center.
In remote rural areas of the Port Phillip District earlier modes persisted. In a largely pre-industrial society, the dominant upper class of society 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 poorer men.
Change accelerated in the 1850s with the gold rushes and mass immigration, but prior to that an older order became entrenched. Even in the 1850s, many of the assisted immigrants who arrived at Portland and Geelong as agricultural laborers were from pre-modern backgrounds, and were living lives largely removed from the changes which had occurred in more metropolitan settings. Many of these newcomers were from rural Ireland and from the Scottish Highlands and the Western Isles.
Information about the lives of the serving class is scarcer than for the gentlefolk 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 emancipist Tasmanians. By the late 1840s, the influx of working people from Van Diemen’s Land into Port Phillip had turned into a political issue. By the end of the decade, 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 on the southern coast of the mainland. 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 Gold Rush boom, the figure for Victoria was 77, 345, with the great majority again being in Melbourne.
The population of Melbourne just prior to the goldrush had more than doubled in five years and it is likely that at least half this increase were free settlers with some private means. While this represents a substantial increase in population size, it is 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 these were male and 113 were female.
The previous labor shortages of 1845 and 1846, initially addressed by attracting workers from Van Diemen’s Land, was significantly reduced by the end of the 1840s. As the years progressed and the population increased further, some of the incoming free settlers from Britain viewed the ex-convict population from Van Diemen’s Land now ensconced 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 immigrants, especially in that section of the respectable middle-class 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, which contrasted with the modes of respectable Victorian society, which placed a huge emphasis on sober personal conduct, thrift, and on traditional Protestant family values.
Between 1848 and 1852, the moral panic fueled by some church leaders and the whiggish media of Melbourne, led to a strong public campaign against the immigration of emancipists from Tasmania. Transportation to Van Diemen’s Land had continued throughout this period and former convicts from the island were arriving in Melbourne in numbers sufficient to cause grave concern among the self-righteous of the city and among its self-appointed moral guardians. They insisted that such immigration should be stopped, and they called for the deportation of these Vandemonians back to Tasmania where they had come from.
Furthermore, some went on to suggest that the boats carrying these people should be preventing from landing. It was argued that stopping or turning back the boats was necessary to protect the safety and virtue of respectable people. The behavior of some of these uncouth ruffians was an outrage to public decency and a threat to the respectable womenfolk of the city.
Maria Wilson, Harriet Lowndes’ daughter, born in Melbourne in 1847 to Vandemonian parents, and a child with transported grandparents, began her life just as this great moral panic was about to burst into view. Negative scrutiny in the city could be avoided by living in rural districts and disappearing from view.
The good people riding the wave of moral righteousness and indignation need not have worried so much. By the first years of the Gold Rush, the surge in immigration caused by gold fever 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 deluge of people arriving at Port Melbourne from Britian and Europe.
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.
In a rapidly expanding European population, a person from Tasmania could start anew, so long as he or she stayed out of trouble and adopted appropriate styles of dress and speech that might enable them to better blend in with the multitudes of new arrivals. Nevertheless, for those attuned to such things, there were certain tell-tale signs that indicated a person’s origins, not least to those who had themselves spent time on the island.
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.
Gold provided many economic opportunities for those that had been in the colony prior to its discovery. The economic boom would have been especially significant for those involved in carting and hauling. 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.
Supplying the miners with what they required saw a procession of carts and wagons crossing rough tracks guided by old hands from Tasmania driving bullock teams from one watering point to the next. Although there were several tracks from Geelong to Ballarat, much of the traffic went from Geelong west towards Fyansford. After crossing the Moorabool River at Fyansford, traffic could proceed along the Geelong-Buninyong Track through Gheringhap, or it could head further west to the Leigh River and then head north on the western side of that river. Either way, the Lowndes farm at Ceres Bridge was strategically located close to these routes.
In deciding which route to take to the diggings, seasonal factors were important. Whilst the shortest route might be best for those on foot, road conditions were more important than distance to those travelling by bullock dray. If a dray became bogged in swampy ground, days could be added to the journey. Significant physical exertion was required to unload and reload a dray full of supplies in order to lighten the load and escape the bog, not to mention the added risk to men, bullocks and equipment.
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 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 to Geelong with her family, where she spent her remaining years on a farming property with her husband, their son, and his wife.
Ann’s health was wrecked. She had to endure pain without proper care. She had been transmigrated, trafficked and exploited. She was used as a subject and as an agent of British imperial expansion.
Six years before her death, Ann’s only son, James Lowndes Junior, married Anastasia Donnelly at Saint Francis Catholic Church in Melbourne. On 21 May 1858, at thirty-one years of age, James Junior finally tied the knot. He had been living in Victoria for twelve years. Perhaps he had some financial security and felt the time was right. Regardless, James Junior and Anastasia began living at Ceres Bridge, on the rural property near Fyansford they would share 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. If we take the details on the marriage certificate at face value, 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 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 on a project in the city at the time he met Anastasia. Construction of the Geelong to Melbourne railway line between 1853 and 1857 required considerable labour.
Anastasia’s marriage certificate shows that she was Catholic, and she 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.
Anastasia’s marriage certificate and the birth certificates of her many children indicate that she was born in Kilkenny, and Donnelly is indeed a common surname from that region of southern Ireland. The words, “Kilkenny, Ireland”, appear on multiple records. The birth certificate of one of her children, Martin, 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 location eight kilometers northwest of Kilkenny town. The hamlet there is part of the Rathcoole Civil Parish, and is known in Irish as Tobar Eoin Baisde, the Well of St. John the Baptist.
Great numbers of Irish women arrived in Australia in the 1850s, and like many other women of her ilk, no definitive record of Anastasia’s arrival has been established. Multiple variations of the name Anastasia Donnelly can be found in the available immigration lists. 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.
The Kilkenny region was profoundly impacted by the Famine. Many people emigrated to escape terrible conditions in the wake of it. The worst of the famine occurred between 1846 and 1849, but the effects of the hunger were felt for years, and hastened the collapse in the use of the Irish language and saw the general collapse of pre-famine rural society. 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 it hit Irish-speaking rural communities the hardest.
It is possible that Anastasia came to Victoria from another Australian colony. It is unlikely that she was a convict transported to Tasmania. Convict records from Van Diemen’s Land do not list an Anastasia Donnelly within the appropriate age range, but it is possible that she might have been transported to the island in the last phase of transportation there. It is more likely that she travelled directly from Ireland to Victoria under a different name.
There are instances whereby Irish women who arrived as assisted immigrants sometimes altered their names and ages to qualify for a passage. A women might claim to be single when she was actually a widow, for instance. For some desperate people, the main thing was to get an assisted passage by whatever ruse they could find. Sometimes simple clerical error might disguise a person’s true 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. His occupation is noted as a “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 Ellen, and the surname is perhaps Connolly.
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 arrival date of 1857, a year prior to her marriage in 1858. This would seem to be approximately correct, although 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 ten years old in northern Kilkenny, about one-third of the population depended on daily rations of Indian meal, essentially livestock food. People were dying in their houses.
From 1848 no relief at all was given to the poor, except the gruel dished out twice a day in the Kilkenny workhouses, where disease was widespread. People were forced by government regulation to leave their leasehold farmland and go into the workhouses, where many more died from disease and lack of nutrition. It is entirely likely that Anastasia had relatives who did not survive.
On the first, second and fourth of her children’s birth certificates, Anastasia states respectively 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, and so supporting a birth year of 1836 or 1837.
While a thorough search of the colonial era passenger arrival records for the relevant years has produced nothing conclusive regarding Anastasia Donnelly’s arrival to Australia, one possibility that does seem worth mentioning is the record of a young women who arrived in July 1855 aboard the “Tornado”. This girl, listed as Mary Donnelly, was eighteen years of age, could not write, and was listed as an unmarried Catholic from Kilkenny, and described as a domestic servant. This young woman 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 rural women from 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 aboard. Of these, two-hundred and ninety were unmarried female emigrants, the great majority of them 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. Upon arrival in Victoria, this woman listed as Mary Donnelly was assigned to a property on the Hopkins River in the middle of the Western District.
The “Tornado” originally departed Glasgow on 28 February 1855, but was forced back to Rothesay Bay on 4 March after being disabled. It finally departed for Australia on 14 April 1855. The Melbourne Argus carried a brief report in its Shipping Intelligence section of 16 July, 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.”
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 was deeply involved in the infrastructure underpinning Australian immigration. It played a significant role in sending people to this country and was thereby responsible for planting a significant number of British and Irish peoples in Australia.
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 family 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.
The famously wealthy British 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” from Europe, crucially funded by Rothchild money. The links between slavery compensation payments and the plantation settlement of Australia are evident in this story. It was not just Scottish-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.
When slavery was abolished, Moses Montefiore and Nathan Rothschild loaned the British Government £15 million, with interest, a huge amount of money at the time. The money was used to compensate the slave owners in the British Empire after slavery was ended. This loan 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 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 deployed to develop the nation.
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 residing on at Ceres Bridge throughout the 1860s, during which time several further children were born. 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 workcamp during the construction of the railway line to Ballarat. On Thomas’s birth certificate, 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.
The Shadows of the Gentlemen 