No Gold in Melbourne: A Scottish Family in Australia

No Gold in Melbourne: A Scottish Family in Australia

Title page

Copyright

No Gold in Melbourne: A Scottish Family in Australia

By Glenn Martin

Published 2021 by G.P. Martin Publishing

Website:      www.glennmartin.com.au

Contact:            info@glennmartin.com.au

Copyright © Glenn Martin 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any process without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations for a review.

Glenn Martin asserts his moral rights as the author of this book.

Book layout and cover design by the author

Typeset in Sitka 11 pt

Printed by Lulu.com

Main front cover image: Hoddle Street, East Collingwood, 1855. See Acknowledgments for more details.

ISBN:      978 0 6488433 3 7 (ebook)

About the book

A prominent stream of Glenn’s ancestors is Scottish, particularly the Mackie family. Scottish people began emigrating as far back as the early 1600s. Many of them went to America, but in 1852 Alexander and Rachel Mackie emigrated to Melbourne, taking with them their five children. Alexander was a skilled tradesman, both a weaver and a stonemason, and Melbourne was about to stir as the hub of the Victorian colony’s gold rush.

It would have been a cheerful story of increasing prosperity that flowed down through the generations, except for the fact that Alexander’s son, Robert, was killed in a goldmine in Collingwood.

What do you think the effect of that was on the family who remained? Robert left a widow and five children behind him. Glenn charts the silent but powerful effect of this event on the family over generations. Glenn is the great great grandson of the man who was killed.

About the author

Glenn Martin has written over fifteen books, as well as having five collections of poetry. He has books that offer new perspectives on ethics and the bigger picture of how to live, and several books that he calls reflections on experience. He has also been exploring his family history for many years, discovering amazing people and events and writing the stories.

His writing comes from a lifetime working in different occupations, including school teaching, university tutoring, and managing community sector organisations. He has also been the editor of professional and academic publications and a writer on management, employment law, and training, prior to which he lived in the bush north of Kyogle, northern New South Wales. He currently lives in Sydney and has five children and four grandchildren.

Note

There are several illustrations in this book that will help the reader to track the many people and places herein:

Glenn’s ancestors (Chapter 2)

Glenn’s direct Mackie ancestors and their siblings (Chapter 5)

Map of Fife in Scotland (Chapter 6)

The voyages from England to Melbourne (Chapter 6)

Children of George and Frances Mackie, and their spouses (Chapter 23)

No Gold in Melbourne

1    Introduction

Lead me to the slaughterhouse,

I will wait there with the lamb.

As they say, you never know what you will find when you go looking for your ancestors. I have found many surprising things, but nothing as brutal as this: my great great grandfather Robert Mackie was killed in a goldmine in Collingwood. And nothing as preposterous. A goldmine in Collingwood?

Yet, if you scratch the surface, the history books reveal it. A website called ToMelbourne.com.au has a history of Collingwood, and the article includes this statement, Collingwood even had a Goldmine. The Collingwood Gold Mining Company was formed in the 1860’s and a shaft was sunk through bluestone to a depth of more than 100 feet not far from the present Town Hall. But the Company collapsed soon.

It is just a statement; apparently there is nothing more to be said. The Collingwood Historical Society offers a little more. In its publication, In Those Days: Collingwood Remembered (3rd edn, 1994), it refers to a paper read to the Victorian Historical Society in 1909 by Edward A. Petherick. He was recalling Collingwood of the 1850s and 1860s, and he mentions the gold-mining company. He gives the above facts, and goes on to say the shaft was at the south east corner of Gipps Street and Hoddle Street, opposite the 'Royal George', not far from the present Town Hall, which is on a basaltic bed.

Again, Petherick simply notes the demise of the company: The company did not prosper and finally lapsed. The only additional piece of information is a quote from a newspaper of the time, the Argus. In its issue of August 13, 1865, it described the scene when a pennyweight of gold was gleaned from the first half bucket of wash dirt brought through the shaft:

Directly gold was found the workmen knocked off and no slight amount of dissipation followed. Crowds collected and the street was during the afternoon crowded with buggies full of anxious visitors eager to gather hints for a little speculation. It is worth telling that while the secretary of the company was exhibiting the gold to the Honourable Colonial Secretary the precious morsels got spilt on the carpet and were not recovered.

This is amusing for its wry observations of human nature, but it reinforces the reasons for the brevity with which historians have treated the local gold venture: The company did not prosper and finally lapsed. Which is to say, they did not find gold. But my great great grandfather was killed by that shaft, and I think it changed the course of my family’s history.

2  My family: the context

I have gathered a mass of information about my family, going back five generations and more. I can recite to you that I have one set of parents, two sets of grandparents, four sets of great grandparents, and eight sets of great great grandparents. And I know all their names, when they were born and when they died, when they married and where all of these events occurred. And who all their respective children were.

This story is not about all of that. It is about one of those eight sets of great great grandparents. It follows my mother back to her mother, to her father, and to his father. But it also needs to go back to his parents too, the great great great grandparents. I still get confused, so I have charts to help anchor me. We are going to follow the Mackie strand back in time. It is shown in Item 1.

Item 1: Glenn’s ancestors

Robert Mackie is the one that got killed. Alexander and Rachel Mackie, his parents, brought their whole family out to Australia from Scotland, including Robert, who was already grown up; he was the eldest and he was nineteen. He had his twentieth birthday in Melbourne on 21st October 1852; the passengers had alighted from the ship on 4th October. There were five children. The youngest of the children was three.

Alexander Mackie, the father, and his wife Rachel (Bridges), were both forty-five. I thought this was rather late in life to be completely uprooting their family to go the far side of the world. Both the Mackie and the Bridges families had been in Fife for generations. Young people tended to marry locally and stay put.

Where did all my other great great grandparents come from? They all came from somewhere in the British Isles and Ireland. It goes like this – you can see the connections in the chart above:

Thomas Martin and Mary Ann Williams – both from Cornwall, England

William Dower and Elizabeth Pascoe – both from Cornwall, England

Charles Eaglestone and Hannah Palmer – both from Oxfordshire, England

Edward Lloyd Lewis and Sarah Crosby – Essex, England and Waterford, Ireland respectively

William Archer and Ellen Welch – Hertfordshire, England and Fife, Scotland respectively

John Neil and Alice Wetherell – Armagh, Ireland and Offaly, Ireland respectively

Robert Mackie and Catherine Hood – both from Fife, Scotland

Thomas Bulling and Frances Maria Jones – Surrey and Hertfordshire, England respectively.

These people are interesting because in each line of ancestors, they were the generation that came to Australia. Thomas Martin and Mary Ann Williams were a young married couple; they had one son, Thomas, who was only one year old when they left Cornwall (my great grandfather). William Dower and Elizabeth Pascoe, who were also from Cornwall, were married, but they came to Australia with Elizabeth’s parents, who brought all of Elizabeth’s siblings with them – eight of them.

Charles Eaglestone and Hannah Palmer left Oxfordshire with four children, one of whom was a great grandfather of mine (he was two years old at the time). Edward Lloyd Lewis and Sarah Crosby were a special case: they were both convicts, transported separately – they met in Hobart and married. William Archer was another special case: he was also a convict. Ellen Welch came to the colony separately, alone, on an assisted passage, to be a servant; remarkably, she came from the same area of Scotland as the Mackie family – Fife. She met and married William Archer while he was serving his sentence in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales.

John Neil and Alice Wetherell came from neighbouring counties in Ireland. They were married before they left for Australia, and they had one child, a daughter who unfortunately died at sea on the way to Australia. As noted, Robert Mackie came out to Australia with his parents and siblings, unmarried. How did Catherine Hood, his future wife, get to Australia?

Catherine Hood came to Australia the year after the Mackie family. She came out with her parents, James McDonald Hood and Margaret Bell. They also brought eight other children, ranging from 27 to 13 years. Strangely, or not, they also came from Fife. Did the Mackie and Hood families know each other in Fife?

I don’t know. It depends on how you see it. Robert Mackie was born at Earlesferry and Catherine Hood was born at Largo. Five miles apart along the coastal plains of Fife. Either that is a prohibitive distance for rural folk and they never met in Scotland, or it is just a short horse-ride and the two families, and Robert and Catherine, knew each other, or at least knew of each other. (See Item 3.)

Thomas Bulling and Frances Maria Jones, the last of the couples, were married in London before they came to Australia. They are the only couple I have not been able to find in the shipping lists. However, Frances gave birth to a baby girl on 25th April 1855 in Melbourne. Their marriage had taken place in London on 3rd September 1854.

At that time the voyage to Australia took about two and a half months, so the window of possibility for them leaving London is small. I favour the Essex as the ship, because it arrived about a week before the birth, and the birth took place only about half a mile away from the docks (yes, I am using old measurements). The baby, unfortunately, died after a few days, a result of jaundice. They had eight more children over the coming years.

This book is not about all of these people. It is just about the Mackie family, a Scottish family in Australia. But this little account shows what they were part of, a great upheaval of people from the old country, a spilling out into the colonies of the British Empire. And while governments, the elite and the powerful had their ambitions on the world stage for the colonies, the Mackie family were being squeezed by the effects of industrialisation in Scotland, and they just wanted a new place where they could start again, for themselves and, more importantly, for their children.

3  Knowing the past

It might be asked how I know what I know about the Mackie family. Did my mother know the story about how her great grandfather died? She did not. There were things that she knew about her family, and she was willing to talk about them. I remember things she told us children when we were growing up.

Later on, when I became interested in family history, she told me more things, but the truth of it was that there was much that she didn’t know. She knew more about her father’s family, the Archers, than anyone else. Well, there were stories that she had been told, some of which I discovered to be false. There were no convicts in our family. I found that statement to be false, a not inconsequential fact. William Archer, the initial emigrant in the Archer family, had been an involuntary emigrant, transported for the theft of twenty-eight pairs of ‘high shoes’ (I guess, a finer class of shoes, perhaps made by a cordwainer).

I asked her about the Mackie family. She had one photo of her grandparents, George Briggs Mackie and Frances Emily Mackie in later life, seated on the verandah of their house in