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Patricia and Lionel
Lionel Jones, eighteen, and Patricia Reilly, sixteen, at the Koroit Showgrounds in 1948 Continue reading
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Family Tree
The forebears of Lionel Jones and Patricia Reilly. Family Tree from first generation to arrive in Australia 1. Lionel Jones – Maternal Side A: James Lowndes Senior (Lionel’s great-great-grandfather) – Ann Higgins (Lionel’s great-great-grandmother, also known as Ann Lowndes upon her marriage to James in Hobart in 1827). James Senior was born England 1795, arrived… Continue reading
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Introduction
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… Continue reading
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Lionel’s forebears on his maternal side – the Lowndes family in Tasmania –
Colonial Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s and 1830s is a precursor society to that planted in Southern Victoria in the 1830s and 1840s. People of varied social backgrounds began crossing Bass Strait to settle permanently on the southern mainland from 1834. Melbourne was founded in 1835. Until 1850, when it was renamed in honour… Continue reading
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Ann Higgins Arrives in the Colony
Two years after James Lowndes arrived in Van Diemen’s Land, Ann Higgins was tried at Warwick Assizes, charged with stealing money and watches. Warwick is in the West Midlands of England, close to Birmingham. More than two hundred years after the trial of this young woman, the court records for Ann’s trial still exist. On… Continue reading
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Lowndes family in Geelong prior to Victoria’s Separation from NSW
Georgetown is the port in northern Tasmania at the entrance of the Tamar Estuary. James Lowndes Junior left there on 24 August 1846 aboard the “Shamrock”, bound for Port Phillip Bay. The “Shamrock” was one of the first steamships in the country and for a time had an incredibly busy schedule transporting sheep, immigrants and… Continue reading
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Life at Ceres Bridge and Fyansford
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… Continue reading
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Lowndes family at Russell’s Bridge, Bannockburn
Russell’s Bridge is just a few kilometers east of Bannockburn, a town founded in the early 1850s as a stop on one of the early routes to the goldfields. After the decline of alluvial goldmining, this route became the main road from Geelong to Ballarat. When the railway between Geelong and Ballarat was built in… Continue reading
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Men of the Company – The gentlemen and their servants at Geelong
Colonial historians, writing in the late nineteenth century, established a standard ideological narrative. For them, Australia was a British society, part of the British Empire, ruled by wise men who understood the world better than the poorly educated masses. Free settlers of respectable middle-class backgrounds were the primary agents of progress and civilization. Aboriginal people… Continue reading
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Foster Fyans and the strong arm of the law: Wedge, Dana and La Trobe
In late 1837 Captain Foster Fyans established a police camp in a paddock where the Moorabool River merges with the Barwon. The police camp was where the Moorabool River could be forded at its lowest reach, hence the name Fyans’ Ford. Crossing here gave the Europeans access to the country immediately west of Geelong on… Continue reading
The Shadows of the Gentlemen 