This is an account of the lives of the forebears of the author’s parents, Lionel Jones and Patricia Reilly. The focus is on the colonial period of the nineteenth century, prior to the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901. In this account, Lionel and Patricia’s family story is presented within the context of a much wider history. Genealogies of the Western District are interwoven to tell a larger story.
In the first half of the nineteenth century the main social division was between masters and their servants. There is a reluctance in family histories to address the social divisions of early Australia. Family history writing in general lacks a critical examination of social class. Although mention may be made of a forebear’s working-class background based on a particular individual’s occupation, there is little attention paid to broader class structures or to how stratification operated within society. Consequently, individuals are not adequately situated within the wider class-based structures that shaped experience and people’s lives are not fully presented in this important dimension.
Many Australians have assisted immigrants or transported convicts as forebears. However, when a family advanced socially, it was considered better to compose a narrative that aligned with the newly elevated status of the family. It was considered expedient to downplay a stigmatized past from the family record.
Emancipated convicts rarely documented their lives, which meant a background in the penal system gradually faded from view. Families chose to emphasize forebears of more reputable backgrounds. Family chroniclers made strategic decisions as to what parts of the past to highlight. They wanted to project a certain image of the family. Deciding what to downplay was as important as choosing what to emphasize.
For many poor people, emigration to Australia may have constituted a last hope when confronting a dire situation. The spiel of the emigration agent, or the blandishments of one’s relatives, or the pressure of one’s powerful landlord, may have led a person to conclude that it was better to board a sailing vessel bound for the colonies rather than reside in a country whose elites had no great desire for you to stay.
The message may well have been that the privileged men and women in charge of your community wanted people of your background to leave. Millions of poor and marginalised Europeans left their home countries for the new world. Volition varied enormously. When assessing the degree of agency in the decision to leave, there were always multiple factors at play. However, the decision was always made within some wider context beyond the individual.
The settlement of Australia was a deliberate process driven by specific government policies. The people in charge of administering the colonies drew on decades of experience in population transfer to achieve specific economic and social outcomes. Australia was by no means isolated from what had already happened in other places. In the settlement process of the Western District, there are analogies to plantation systems of the British empire that had happened elsewhere. The Crown operated through designated agents who pursued its policies.
While the hesitancy among family historians to engage with issues of class and patterns of migration is understandable, it often leads to family histories that oversimplify social backgrounds, labelling disparate and diverse individuals simply as “early settlers,” as if they all belonged to a common category. Furthermore, the history of the settlement period has become highly politicized and is subject to significant ideological debate, creating a contentious environment many writers prefer to avoid. As a result, family historians feel constrained when discussing issues of class or the actual migratory circumstances of their forebears. This results in narratives that can be somewhat disconnected from the historical realities that shaped the lives of our forebears.
The squatters and other proprietors succeeded in the Western District because the Crown backed them. They were agents of the Crown. Likewise, the Undertakers of the Ulster Plantation were agents of the Crown, just as British plantation owners in the Caribbean were also agents of the Crown. The Crown was involved in the Transatlantic slave trade for centuries and was heavily invested in slave ownership in the Americas. By 1807, the British Crown was the world’s largest buyer of slaves. Servants serve their masters.
There is a direct link between the genocide in Tasmania to what subsequently occurred in the Western District. The key to understanding events in the Western District lies in pastoralism. The distinctive features of squatter pastoralism in the Western District, much of it with a genesis in Tasmania, eventually spread across much of the continent, profoundly influencing Australia’s national history.
From the 1820s, the British government issued grants of pastoral land in Van Diemen’s Land to a select group of individuals. Within this group of free settlers there were many gentlemen who subsequent transferred some of their pastoral enterprise to mainland Australia. Some of the same squatter families across generations were involved in the pastoral business throughout Australia, spreading from one frontier to the next. The gradual takeover of the continent for pastoral pursuits was methodical, occurring step by step and from one place to another. Squatter pastoralism and the state were intrinsically linked throughout much of the nineteenth century.
The squatters are an important group in Western Victorian history. Their legacy endures to this day. In the nineteenth century they held substantial power and wielded political authority. They were a substantial component of the “free settlers” lauded in the history books of the twentieth century. The role they played was indeed formative to our society. Considering that our forebears lived in the shadows of the squatter class, it is important to understand who they were and how they operated as agents of settlement. They acted cohesively as a network of privileged individuals. The genealogies of various men and women of the squatter class are included in this document as a means of providing contrast to the genealogy of our family, which is largely a story of the rural working class.
A process of systematic state sponsored genocide occurred in the Western District, similar to what had previously occurred in Tasmania. The two locations are inextricably linked in this regard. In this family history, the pivotal role played by the Crown’s agents in both settings is emphasized. The British state was involved throughout the process. How and why the genocide unfolded and identifying those responsible is not particularly difficult to ascertain. The archive contains the names of the key figures. The key decisions taken by the state are known. The family and business networks involved as well as their relations with the state can be readily traced.
The difficulty for family history lies in the controlling power of an elite which exercised control over the standard narrative. This is challenging for those wishing to express a counter-narrative, not least because it is unclear to authors as to the extent of their own family’s involvement in historic crimes or the involvement of friends and neighbors. There is an unavoidable moral dimension to these questions, involving what is right and what is wrong. Genocide is obviously “wrong”, but how meaningful is it to apportion blame from the perspective of our own era?
The British gentry who migrated to Australia formed an elite class at the center of power here. Some individuals were born gentlemen, but many others aspired to be considered part of this elite. In Britian in the Regency Period, rising to the status of gentleman normally involved participating in pastoralism or in certain dignified commercial pursuits. Mercantile trade within commercial companies and professions such as the law and medicine played significant roles, as did service in the military and the clergy.
At the peak of the gentry pyramid were those who inherited or could purchase extensive landed estates. At this point the gentry class intersected with the aristocracy. British class structures were transferred to Australia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in somewhat modified form. The class system and the social arrangements governing upward mobility in both Britain and its colonies were closely tied to the expansion of the Empire, to imperial trade, and to the armed forces.
The standard histories of Victoria have often glossed over the contributions of the families of servants and laborers, downplaying the significance and impact of the subordinate classes. Discussion of social class in terms of one’s own family inevitably involves revealing a history of struggle and disadvantage. Stressing the subordinate and exploitative nature of a forebear’s relationship with the power holders of the day can be divisive within a family. People have differing views and often prefer to imagine that their forebears were more notable citizens and more respectable in society than they actually were. Consequently, there is a reluctance to recognize one’s family as representative of an underclass, or as servants to an elite.
Without doubt many of the forebears in this family history were servants and laborers working for the gentry in one way or another. Some descendants may consider it unedifying to portray antecedents as members of an underclass. An illiterate emancipist bullock driver or a prostitute does not have the same cache as a “grazier” or “pioneer settler from a respected family of local farmers”. People like to be descended from the big house or at least from the ranks of the respectable middle class.
When examining Australian histories authored in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, the free settlers are typically portrayed as those who arrived in this country through their own volition and resourcefulness. Squatters are often depicted as quintessential free settlers. Many of them were leaders of civil society and laid claim to set the moral tone for the community. Additionally, free settlers were depicted as upholding the tenants of British civilisation, in conjunction with the security and police forces of the colonial state.
Invariably, squatters were the loyal servants and agents of the Crown, often serving as honorary magistrates, for example, or as civic leaders of the community. Many of the prominent squatter families in the Western District, for example, dominated the early local municipal bodies, as well as colonial legislatures and the district’s financial and commercial institutions. The distinction between government office and private enterprise was often quite blurred. Many of the early government officials were also squatters.
The lives of our forebears illustrate the story of migration to Australia. Migration was a large-scale organized endeavor guided by policy made at the highest levels. The government’s bureaucracy set and adjudicated this policy. The assisted migration system was managed by agents who were regulated by the colonial administrations. Migration was implemented by agents contracted to deliver services, motivated by profit.
In the narratives of the colonial period, a distinction is made between those who arrived as free settlers and those who came as convicts or assisted immigrants. It is notable just how many of the forebears described in this family history arrived at Portland as assisted immigrants, and who then stayed in the Western District. Thousands of impoverished immigrants arrived in Portland in the mid-1850s. They were colonial subjects of the British Crown whether they liked it or not. Others among our forebears arrived in the colonies as transported convicts or as emigrants from Continental Europe. There are no British gentlemen among them.
A nation is not synonymous with a state. Nations exist long before states emerge. Although the term “First Nations” is aptly used to refer to Aboriginal societies, the state, as we understand it today, arrived with the British in 1788. A logical series of steps was taken by the colonizing state to establish a new branch of British society in the so-called wilderness. The new offshoot was planted and nurtured with care and foresight. Although not often depicted as such, it is fitting to portray the settlement of Australia as a plantation project of the British state. The history and genealogy of our family, mostly situated in the Western District, is a case which illustrates this point, and provides an example of how this plantation unfolded.
It is misleading to think that all those who arrived in colonial Australia, apart from the transported convicts, were free settlers. There were distinct differences between free settlers and the various categories of non-convict arrivals. Convicts were obviously not free, at least during their initial years in the colony, but many others were not free either. Many laboring people lived lives working for those more highly placed in the social order, in service to masters of one kind or another. The degree of volition people could exercise in deciding to travel to this country varied enormously. Many of the assisted emigrants who came here were hoping for a better life in Australia, but this does not necessarily make them “free”. Serving the better off was often the only option available.
Australia was just one migratory destination among many others in the nineteenth century, all operating within vast networks of global migration. It was not only Europeans who were being relocated. Many individuals from India, for instance, were moved to other British colonies throughout the nineteenth century. Millions of impoverished Chinese also left their homeland through coercion of one kind or another. Africans were forcibly transported in vast numbers to the Americas, while millions of penalized Russians were exiled to Siberia. The tentacles of organized global migration during this period led to the displacement and death of countless people worldwide.
An underlying theme highlighted in this genealogy is that Australia during the colonial period experienced dual aspects of colonization. Our forebears were both the colonized subjects of the Crown and the colonizing agents of that Crown. The colonization process was not random or unplanned, rather it was intentional, calculated, and systematic. It unfolded according to a specific logic and through decisions made by numerous powerful and privileged agents. The Crown, personified in the monarch, was at the apex of authority, a single figure to whom all others in the hierarchy owed their allegiance.
In the early part of the nineteenth century when New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were being populated with Europeans, the British monarch was George IV. In British history, this era is generally known as the Regency Period, so named because George was acting as the Regent from 1811, due to the madness of his father, King George III. The monarch who followed George IV was his younger brother, William IV, whose reign ended with his death in 1837. Queen Victoria then became the monarch and she remained on the throne for the rest of the century. Monarchs are important to our story only in so far as they were at the apex of the network of elite groups that ran Britain. All loyal subjects of the Crown were expected to show deference to the Monarch.
The stories of our forebears provide a perspective from the bottom up. These common lives tell us something of how working people lived in relation to those in society who were their masters, who were not without masters of their own. Individuals had to defer to those above them in the very hierarchical social structures of the period. In some ways the people at the bottom were not really part of civil society, given that they were beneath the level of being properly considered worthy. They were essentially disposable and interchangeable and were set outside the civil order. Some were considered criminals. Society was sharply divided in those days and there was no universal “us” that encompassed the entire population over which the monarch ruled.
In this document, the genealogy of our forebears is presented based upon the metaphor of a family tree. This metaphor illustrates the connections between various family members, allowing readers to better understand this family lineage. We all have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and sixteen great-great-grandparents, whether or not we know who they are. The family tree helps us visualize the links connecting various family members.
The narrative begins with Lionel’s lineage and then transitions to Patricia’s. This arrangement is intentional, as Lionel’s maternal ancestors were the first to arrive in Australia, dating back to the 1820s. In contrast, Patricia’s forebears predominantly arrived in the mid-1850s and mostly arrived within just a few years of each other. Her forebears typically came from Ireland, and they remained in the Koroit district. Lionel’s family history is more complex, with ancestors arriving earlier, originating from various countries and living in different places in Victoria.
The family tree at the start of this document ends with Lionel and Patricia at its base. Previous generations are labeled from A to D. The letter A corresponds to the great-great-grandparents of Lionel or Patricia, while B corresponds to great-grandparents, and C to grandparents. The narrative is focused solely on forebears who spent their lives in Australia or migrated here as children or adults.
It is quite remarkable that there is at least some information on just about every one of Lionel and Patricia’s forebears who came to the Western District. There is at least some basic information about each of them. Even apparent scant information is interesting and remarkable to have. Thomas Jones, Duncan Campbell, Sarah Campbell, Johannes Weppner, Anna Fick, Killian Schefferle, Catherine Lang, Xavier Muhlebach, James Lowndes, Ann Higgins, Anastasia Donnelly, Hugh Reilly, Edmund McNamara, Mary Moloney, Brigid McNamara, James Bowman, Charles Binstead and Bridget Dwyer are all people who were born overseas but who came to colonial Victoria. They are Lionel and Patricia’s direct ancestors, as far as can be told from the record. These forebears arrived over a period stretching from the early 1820s to the late 1860s. They were born in a variety of European countries.
The document concludes by contrasting the genealogical information of several gentry families with our more working-class family.
The stories told in this document are from the European side of the frontier. There is a history of violence in the shared heritage of the Western District. The Yoorrook Justice Commission’s final report, released in July 2025, found that from 1834 mass killings, disease, sexual violence, the destruction of languages and cultures, and child removals from families and communities combined to “bring about the near-complete physical destruction of First Peoples in Victoria”. Indigenous peoples in Victoria were “decimated”, with the report stating: “This was genocide.”
This family history does not seek to dispute the Commission’s findings, which are in line with what many in the Southwest community knew at the time and place of the author’s childhood. Our forebears’ stories intersect with the historic injustices highlighted in the final report, but this document does not attempt to ally with First Nations people, who have their own stories and their own pathways to truth, recognition and justice.
The Shadows of the Gentlemen 