‘Notorious strumpets & dangerous girls’: Convict women in Tasmania
Plaque at Cascades Female Factory historic site; photo by author, 2026 Recently my husband and I spent a week visiting some of our favourite spots in Tasmania (hello Freycinet, Bicheno, Ross, Richmond, and the beautiful Huon Valley!)
While in Hobart, I took the opportunity to go to the Cascades Female Factory historic site. Around 7,000 women walked through the entry gate during its nearly thirty years of operation in the first half of the 1800s.
The term ‘female factory’ puzzled me when I first heard of it. Essentially, the factories were prisons or barracks to house convicts; but they were also places of work where women laboured at various tasks, depending on which institution they were in and their status in the highly regimented convict system.
For example, they might be set to weaving, unravelling tangled, tarry ships’ ropes for re-use, laundering clothes and sheets from the nearby town, or sewing garments. Hence the term ‘factory’. The women made things or did jobs others didn’t want to do.
In addition, these sites operated as marriage market (free settlers or emancipated men could apply to marry one of the ‘better behaved’ women), maternity hospital, and nursery of sorts (although the infant mortality rate was often horrendous).
I was most familiar with the older Female Factory at Parramatta in NSW, so I was keen to visit the Cascades to compare and contrast the experiences of women there.
I joined an hour-long tour entitled Notorious Strumpets and Difficult Girls. That quote, by the way, comes from the surgeon superintendent’s report on a transport ship about a youngster, Julia Mullins, in 1826.
This is the kind of language that men in authority felt free to use about the women in their ‘care’ if they were unfortunate enough to end up in the British justice system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the guide on my tour remarked, the transportation system was ‘cruel, unfair and arbitrary.’ No one questioned why these women and girls ended up in a crowded, filthy gaol, in a court room, or on a transport ship. The thinking of the time held that there was a ‘convict class’, you were usually born into it, and nothing could change your life trajectory.
As it turned out, for some women, transportation did just that. If they survived the challenges of the system and served their sentence, some were able to make a real go of it in their new home. For most, the idea of returning home was laughable – who had the money for an expensive fare on a sailing ship? So they made the best of it, and some fortunate ones went on to have lives far superior to what they’d have endured had they remained in Britain. Among these were women I have researched and written about in the Travels with my Ancestors series on this blog.
The Notorious Strumpets tour told the story of seven women, all of whom had some experience of the Cascades Factory. Mostly their stories were pretty grim, with a couple who defied the odds and lived reasonable lives afterwards. Many factory women had left family behind when they boarded the transportation ships; lost babies or toddlers on the voyage or in the unhealthy ‘lying-in hospital’ or nursery; all of them experienced trauma of some sort from the time of their arrest and trial.
The strumpets were likely to be those women and girls who were not compliant, who did not keep their mouths shut and their eyes downcast. They spoke out, acted up, made trouble, got drunk, had sex with partners (male or female) not approved of by authorities. For these things they were punished, over and over again. The tour brought them to life in a respectful way, not overly dramatising things (because honestly, their lives were already pretty dramatic) and not glossing over their often troubling behaviours.
Among the saddest stories for me were the women who lived long lives of crime coupled with frequent homelessness. They lived surrounded by violence, both real and threatened. The odds were so stacked against them, yet they continued to defy, choose their own paths, exercise an agency of sorts. But they lived on the edge, among the most vulnerable in a harsh and unfair world. We were shown photos of some women, usually ‘mug shots’ taken when they entered other prisons after the Factory. The harshness of their world was etched in the lines on weathered faces, the rage or defeat in their eyes.
If you are in Hobart I highly recommend a visit to the Cascades Female Factory. While only a small proportion of the built environment of the factory still stands, the interpretive centre, displays and tours are excellent. It is a place to learn, to reflect, to pay respects to the women who lived, worked, suffered and survived.
Statue honouring convict women at Cascades historic site; photo by author, 2026
One husband and wife in my family tree arrived in Tasmania not as convicts, but as employees in the Launceston Female Factory in the north of the island. They were free settlers and got work at the factory – he as Gatekeeper and his wife as Assistant Matron. These were positions of some responsibility; they were gained (as was so often the case in this era) not through previous work experience or particular skills, but rather by presenting as ‘respectable’ people who would be willing to operate in a regimented and punishing system.
An engrossing book, prepared by the excellent Female Convicts Research Centre and published by Convict Women’s Press in Hobart in 2013, tells the history of this establishment, through the stories of the many women who entered its grounds as prisoners. Edited by Lucy Frost & Alice Meredith Hodgson, Convict Lives: The Launceston Female Factory is divided into a number of themes such as ‘Out of Ireland’, ‘The mixed blessings of motherhood’, ‘Resisting reform’, ‘Family sagas’, ‘Difficult ends’.
Once again, the determination of some women to defy, subvert or game the system is a thread that runs through many of the stories. There is tragedy too – how could there not be? – and a sense of the toughness of these people that British society preferred not to think about.
It’s a slim volume but a terrific read. I felt the coldness within the Factory walls, the longing for home of those inside, the quest for companionship and love, the squalor and overcrowding, the hungry bellies and the aching bones of the prisoners. I celebrated those who survived, who went on to marry, have healthy children, run businesses, find comfort and security in their lives after the Factory.
This book is a valuable little resource for my family history research and writing. It’s also a testament to the lives of the women who came here most unwillingly to take part in the absurd, harsh and quixotic experiment that was the convict transportation system.
Travels with my Ancestors #29: The Rags to Riches Tale of the Roberts Family Part Five
‘King St looking East’ by Andrew Garling c 1843.
Source: https://dictionaryofsydney.org/media/3068, accessed 11 April 2026This is Part Five of the epic story of my 4 x great-grandparents, William Roberts and Jane Longhurst.
In Part Four we saw Jane coping with the death of William in 1819, and his care for the family via generous legacies in his will. Jane continued to forge her way through colonial business and society as a widow, independently wealthy and answering to no one.
Was this about to change?
Part Five: Introducing William (2)
Another William was about to enter Jane’s life. William Hutchinson, like Jane and the first William, had been a convict. He had broken into a London home and stolen goods worth over £168; at his trial at the Old Bailey in 1796 he was sentenced to death, which was later commuted to transportation for life. He either had some influence wielded on his behalf, or he was lucky, because the sentence was then reduced to seven years.[i] He arrived on the Hillsborough in 1799.[ii]
Once in New South Wales he had a rather chequered career. In Sydney, he was convicted of theft from the Government Stores—a serious crime at a time when the settlement faced food insecurity, verging on starvation levels in its first decade. A few years earlier and William would have been hung for the crime; instead, he was sent to Norfolk Island, a penal settlement which also served as a place of secondary punishment.[iii]
There he met and married Mary Chapman (or Cooper), herself a transported convict, and they had eight children.[iv] Two of their daughters, Hannah and Martha, would feature in the Roberts family story in years to come.
William was industrious and well behaved on Norfolk; he was soon appointed overseer of government stock, acting superintendent of convicts in 1803 and then superintendent in 1809.[v] He may have smothered a smile at these appointments—overseer of the government stores, after having stolen from them so recently in Sydney!
When the government gave orders that the Norfolk Island settlement was to close, he oversaw the evacuation of the last inhabitants in 1814—a complex operation—winning himself a recommendation to Governor Macquarie.[vi]
Back in Sydney, he was made the Principal Superintendent of Convicts and Public Works—a prestigious and powerful position for a twice-offending convict. He was now responsible for the assignment of convicts, and he had gained the ear of the Governor.[vii] He had control over newly arriving convicts’ possessions and any money they brought with them—which, some suspected, he sometimes invested to his own benefit.[viii]
Was William just very good at any task he set his mind to? Or a smooth-talking opportunist? Perhaps he was a blend of both. It’s easy to imagine his grey eyes twinkling as he charmed people with tales of his adventures and successes. However it happened, he certainly won favour with the Governor. His next appointment was the highly sought after Principal Wharfinger (supervisor of the wharf) which gave him influence over the movements of ships in and out of the harbour—and their cargo.[ix]
In 1819 his wife Mary sailed back to England on the Shipley, along with returning regiment officers and naval surgeons.[x] This may have been an amicable separation; perhaps she was in bad health— or was Mary escaping from her husband or from life in the colony? She did not take the children with her: in 1822 they were living with their father.[xi] It’s possible that William held the children back from their mother if the separation was contested. As their father, he had complete custody and control over them. It’s likely Mary died within a few years of her return— that is, if her husband did not commit bigamy a few years later.
Some of his conduct came to the attention of Commissioner John Thomas Bigge, sent by the authorities in England to investigate matters concerning transportation to the colony. It would not have helped William’s case that he was an ally of Governor Macquarie who was at odds with Bigge and his commission. Despite this Bigge did not find any evidence to support a claim of wrongdoing on William’s part.[xii]
By the 1820s, William was an important and influential person. He owned pastoral properties south of Sydney, real estate in the main towns of the colony, business concerns such as the Waterloo Flour Mill, and was a founding director of the Bank of New South Wales.[xiii] He built a handsome sandstone house in Sydney on the corner of Pitt and Campbell Streets.[xiv]
He was active in various campaigns to increase civil rights in the colony.[xv] William’s trajectory was very much in line with Governor Macquarie’s belief that once they had served their sentence, convicts should be given every opportunity to become productive citizens on an equal basis with free settlers.
A happy second marriage?
William Hutchinson and Jane almost certainly met in Sydney. It could have been his role at the Bank that brought him into contact with the widowed Jane after her first husband’s death. Jane recognised a dynamic, forward-thinking man when she saw one. Hutchinson had been one of the three witnesses to her first husband’s will a few years earlier; settler society was small and networks brought people together in the commercial world of Sydney.
William Hutchinson’s signature as witness to the will of Jane’s first William.
Photograph by author of original document at NSW State Archives in 2026They married in 1825, blending their large families in the process. [xvi]
A certain amount of blending had already taken place. Jane’s son Thomas, one of her twin boys, had developed a relationship with his new stepfather’s daughter Hannah. They married in 1828 when Thomas was twenty-one and his bride seventeen.[xvii]
Ann (‘young Jane’) had died so tragically the year before, and Jane’s older children were mostly independent by then. Four of Hutchinson’s children were living with him in 1828, though none of Jane’s appeared on the household list in the Census of that year.[xviii]
~
Was Jane happy with her second William? Perhaps not. In the year following their marriage, there is a record of ‘Jane Hutchinson’ being sent to the Female Factory, the women’s prison at Parramatta, for one month. Her crime? Living in a state of prostitution. [xix]
According to a newspaper report, Jane had deserted her husband and children and was staying with a Ticket-of-Leave man, William Menzies. This is what led to the charge of ‘prostitution’; a term flung at any woman found living with a man other than her husband. Menzies was convicted of having harboured and concealed the said Jane. He had his Ticket cancelled and was returned to convict labour.[xx]
The Gaol Entry record showing Jane’s admission in January 1826.
Source: Ancestry.com, accessed 11 April 2026There were at least several other women called Jane Hutchinson who committed various crimes in this period, resulting in time in the Female Factory, Sydney Gaol, and even the ‘lunatic asylum.’ Was this newspaper reporting the arrest of the wrong Jane? If not, what could have made Jane seek shelter with Menzies, so soon after her marriage to Hutchinson? She was, after all, a wealthy woman in her own right and capable of supporting herself, should she have regretted her choice of second husband.
Source: Sydney Gazette & NSW Advertiser 12 Jan 1826 p3 Police Reports. Via Trove, accessed 11 April 2026
A clue might be found in a court case held ten years later, at the Sydney Quarter Sessions of July 1836. Jane’s son Charles was before the court on a charge of assaulting his stepfather, William Hutchinson.
Witnesses testified that at tea-time on 5th of May, Charles and his brother Joseph burst into the Hutchinson house in Pitt Street. Jane appeared beside them, described by Joseph as having the appearance of much ill usage. Charles confronted William in the hallway, calling him a damned infernal scoundrel for having hit his mother and hurled a glass at her.
He threw William to the floor and knelt on his chest, until blood gushed from his mouth. William grabbed a knife and the Roberts men ran off, with Charles crying out My mother has been the making of you! It appeared that when William had hit her, Jane had sent a maid to tell her sons what had happened and the brothers rushed to the house to get her out of harm’s way.
When giving his own testimony, Hutchinson freely admitted that:
he had hit her {Jane} and would do so again under similar circumstances; I struck her six times with my hand whip; I did not strike her with a tumbler; I threw one at her…she may or may not have been bleeding.
The brothers would have been enraged at hearing his, but their stepfather’s lawyer remarked that this behaviour towards his wife was not ill treatment. The lawyer for Charles’ defence, though, objected:
…if an assault under any circumstances could be justified, it was this…{Charles}had acted because of the natural feelings of a son who conceived that his mother had been grossly injured…
The jury found Charles guilty of assault, but given the mitigating circumstances, he was not sentenced to gaol, but to pay a fine of 40 shillings.[xxi]
William Hutchinson faced no penalty whatsoever for his behaviour.
Was this instance of abuse of Jane by her second husband one of many; behaviour that had begun early in their life together? Perhaps that report of Jane leaving her husband a decade before had been her attempt to escape his mistreatment. Menzies, the man she’d briefly stayed with then, had given her shelter and had paid a steep price for doing so.
If Jane was sent to the Female Factory for a month in 1826, she was back living with Hutchinson and his children two years later.[xxii] Judging by the ferocious response by Charles to his stepfather’s behaviour in 1836, the violence she experienced at Hutchinson’s hands had continued.
Jane knew that gossip was rife in Sydney Town. Both she and her second husband were well-known in its business and property circles. She would have faced scandal and likely condemnation if she had permanently severed her ties with him, given his prominence in the settler community. She would be punished for desertion, while he would escape any penalty for his abuse. She may have felt she had no option but to endure his behaviour.
It’s also possible that despite the provisions in her first husband’s will, which left her a legacy for her sole and exclusive use and benefit …for the term of her natural life, Free from the Control of any person, the laws of coverture might still have applied unless she and the second William had a property agreement (a sort of colonial-era ‘pre-nup’) between them when they wed. Otherwise, her new husband would have control over all the wealth she brought to the marriage.
Real choices for women, even independently wealthy ones like Jane, were limited, given the legal and social constraints they faced.
~
Jane died later that year, after a decade with the second William. [xxiii]
She had done so much in her fifty-four years of life: convict girl, wife and mother, emancipist, businesswoman, a second marriage and many stepchildren.
William Hutchinson followed her into the grave ten years later.[xxiv] At his death, the value of his estate was estimated to be £220,000—equivalent to something like $1.77 billion in today’s money. His name appears at position 147 of the 200 ‘richest Australians of all time.’ [xxv]
They were both buried in Sydney’s Devonshire Street Burial Ground, near Jane’s first husband, her daughter Ann, and sons Richard and Thomas.[xxvi] Her surviving children may have felt some bitterness at burying their stepfather next to Jane, given his apparent unkindness towards her. Still, other links had been forged between the two families, with Thomas and his brother Joseph both marrying Hutchinson daughters: Thomas and Hannah in 1828, Joseph and Martha in 1835.
~
Legacies
William Roberts and Jane Longhurst demonstrated that despite the privations and cruelties of their world, people could—and did— overcome these obstacles to survive, and then to thrive. Theirs was certainly a ‘rags to riches’ tale.
Jane dealt with the wealthy and famous of colonial Sydney in her business life, despite the label of ‘whores and prostitutes’ routinely applied to convict women. She defied the convict stain and the scorn of her social betters, becoming a wealthy and influential woman after William’s death. If her second marriage had been an unhappy one, perhaps the loyalty and support of her children somewhat compensated for that.
Their children and grandchildren could thank William and Jane for their legacy: the monetary wealth and, importantly, the personal pride bequeathed by their parents.
This brings us to the end of the amazing story of William and Jane. Thank you for following along!
Soon I’ll be posting about the next generation of the Roberts in my family tree: the equally intruiging tale of Thomas Roberts and Elizabeth Greenwood, my 3 x great-grandparents.
This one has it all: convict voyages, orphanages, a teen marriage, theft and gaol in the colony, illicit romance and children.
Do join me for this next chapter.
[i] England & Wales, Criminal Registers, 1791-1892, Class: HO 26; Piece: 6; Page: 43.
Via Ancestry.com, accessed 17 Dec 2025[ii] Australian Convict Transportation Registers – Other Fleets & Ships, 1791-1868, Class: HO 11; Piece: 1.
Via Ancestry.com, accessed 17 Dec 2025[iii] Biography – William Hutchinson – Australian Dictionary of Biography (anu.edu.au), accessed 19 Jan 2026
[iv] State Archives NSW; Ships musters; Series: 1289; Items: 4/4771; Reel: 561; Page: 147. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 18 Jan 2026; William Hutchinson 1776–1846 – Australian Royalty: Genealogy of the colony of New South Wales, accessed 18 Jan 2026
[v] William Hutchinson 1776–1846 – Australian Royalty: Genealogy of the colony of New South Wales
Accessed 17 Dec 2025[vi] Colonial Secretary Index 1788-1825, Reel 6004; 4/3493 p.147. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 16 Dec 2025
[vii] Biography – William Hutchinson – Australian Dictionary of Biography (anu.edu.au) accessed 16 Dec 2025
[viii] Biography – William Hutchinson – Australian Dictionary of Biography (anu.edu.au) accessed 16 Dec 2025
[ix] Sydney Gazette and NSW Advertiser 8 November 1817 p1 Via Trove, accessed 16 Dec 2025
[x] State Archives NSW; Ships musters; Series: 1289; Items: 4/4771; Reel: 561; Page: 147.
Via Ancestry.com, accessed 19 Jan 2026[xi] State Records Authority of New South Wales; Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia; Population musters, Dependent settlements; Series: NRS 1261; Reel: 1254. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 17 Dec 2025
[xii] Biography – William Hutchinson – Australian Dictionary of Biography (anu.edu.au) Accessed 16 Dec 2025
[xiii] State Records Authority of New South Wales; Copies of Deeds to Land Grants and Leases; Series: NRS 13836; Item: 7/484; Reel: 2704. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 18 Dec 2025
[xiv] Casey & Lowe Pty Ltd Archaeology & Heritage, Report on Archaeological Investigation for Meriton of 420-426 Pitt St & 36-38 Campbell St, Sydney, p4
[xv] Biography – William Hutchinson – Australian Dictionary of Biography (anu.edu.au)
[xvi] New South Wales, Australia, Butts of Marriage Licenses, 1813–1835, 1894, Series Title: Licenses for Marriages, 1813-1827; NRS Number: NRS 1037; Reel Number: 2281; Volume Number: 4/1710
Via Ancestry.com, accessed 18 Dec 2025[xvii] Series Title: Licenses for Marriages, 1828-1831; NRS Number: NRS 1037; Reel Number: 2281; Volume Number: 4/6030. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 24 Jan 2026
[xviii] State Records Authority of New South Wales; Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia; 1828 Census: Alphabetical Return; Series Number: NRS 1272; Reel: 2554. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 17 Dec 2025
[xix] State Records Authority of NSW online, NSW Musters of Convicts in the Colony 1808-1849, Jane Hutchinson, HO10, Piece 19 NRS-2514-3-[4/6430] Page 137 Reel 851. https://search.records.nsw.gov.au/
accessed 18 Jan 2026
[xx] 1826 ‘The Police’, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (NSW: 1803 – 1842), 12 January, p. 3. Via Trove http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2185036, accessed 18 Jan 2026
[xxi] 1836 ‘Quarter Sessions’ The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (NSW: 1803 – 1842),14 July, p3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2205436, accessed 19 Jan 2026
[xxii] State Records Authority of New South Wales; Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia; 1828 Census: Alphabetical Return; Series Number: NRS 1272; Reel: 2554. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 19 Jan 2026
[xxiii] Australia Death Index, 1787-1985, Jane Hutchinson, V1836267 20. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 17 Dec 2025
[xxiv] Sydney Morning Herald 26 July 1846, p3. Via Trove, accessed 17 Dec 2025
[xxv] Rubinstein, William (2004). The All-Time Australian 200 Rich List, quoted at https://findingmerriman.com.au/merriman/william-hutchinson-1776-1846-william-bowmans-father-in-law/, accessed 7 March 2026
[xxvi] Sydney Devonshire Street Cemetery headstone inscriptions photographed and transcribed by Arthur and Josephine Ethel Foster, 1900. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 17 Dec 2025
Travels with my Ancestors #27: The rags to riches tale of the Roberts family story, Part Three
Source: City of Parramatta Local Studies Photograph Collection,
“The old toll bar at Dog Trap Road,
c. 1840s,” Reference Number: LSP00369.This is Part Three of the epic story of my ancestors, William Roberts and Jane Longhurst.
You can find Part One here and Part Two here.
So far we have followed William and Jane as they survived their voyage to NSW on convict transports, earned their freedom and began to make new lives in Sydney. William had been granted land in Sydney Town and at Bondi. Their colonial stars were on the rise.
Part Three: Thriving
William’s first recorded job under the new Governor, Lachlan Macquarie, was in 1810, working on stone bridges in Sydney, for which he was paid £100.[i]
That same year, he and Jane were married at St Philip’s church in Sydney.[ii] Jane had already given birth to a daughter and three sons (including twins Charles and Thomas, my 3 x great-grandfather) and she was heavily pregnant with their fourth son, Richard, on the wedding day.[iii] There were few among their fellow emancipists who’d cast judgement on a family born out of wedlock, although the clergy and authorities continually urged the colonial population to formalise their unions.
William’s work was favoured by the Governor. Macquarie was appalled by the state of the roads and dwellings in the ramshackle areas of Sydney Town that had sprung up in those earlier years, and ordered householders to take responsibility for the cleanliness and repair of the streets outside their homes. He threatened to impose an annual tax on anyone not doing so, and recommended someone who could help with any repairs that were needed:
William Roberts having rendered much satisfaction to His Excellency by his substantial repair of George Street, he is recommended to the consideration of the inhabitants as well qualified to make good the repairs now required.
By Command of His Excellency The Governor.[iv]Three years later came William’s most lucrative contract yet. He was appointed by the Governor to work under superintendent Thomas Moore, of Liverpool, to build a new road and bridges joining the existing Parramatta Road (at present-day Ashfield) to the new settlement of Liverpool, the first planned township settled by free arrivals.[v] Settlers needed better access to and from farms; securing food resources was always a preoccupation of colonial authorities and safe and reliable routes for grain and crops were essential.
Convict road gangs did the hard work of shovelling dirt, breaking stones, cutting trees; William was supervisor and responsible for the work being completed on time and to a budget. The new road was known then as ‘Dog Trap Road’ (because of the many dingo traps set nearby to protect settler livestock). It was renamed decades later as ‘Woodville Road’.
What an extraordinary turnaround: from labourer, to convict, to engineer, project manager and supervisor of convicts. When he’d galloped away on that gelding from Wootton Hall, he could not have imagined that he would end up as a respected road builder in NSW, twenty-seven years later. There must have been huge satisfaction, too, in knowing that, while on the population and convict muster records, his trial at Warwick and arrival on the Neptune were always listed, by the 1810 record he was described as a ‘landholder.’ [vi] By 1816 he had added ‘trader’ to his occupations.[vii]
William began work on the Liverpool road in 1813. The project included constructing bridges as well as creating a proper road from the bush tracks that had been used to that point.
It’s likely that at least some of those tracks had been established by the Cabrogal/Cahbrugal people of the Dharug nation, or those of neighbouring Tharawal or Gundungurra/Gandangana groups, as they travelled through the region on tribal business. It’s very unlikely that the men labouring on the new road would have given that possibility any thought, unless they glimpsed or met Aboriginal people while at their work.
When the road was completed, the Governor travelled along its length by carriage and reportedly expressed much satisfaction with the general line and performance of that important work.[viii]The new road was 24 km in length and included 27 new bridges.[ix]
With the success of this first major project, William was given many more contracts by Macquarie. He oversaw the extension of the Parramatta Road to Windsor, as well as roads and bridges at Airds, Minto, Bringelly, and the Cowpastures.[x]
Between 1813 to 1819 he was paid £8,000 in cash and £1,000 in spirits for the work he’d completed for the Governor.[xi]
In addition to all this activity he was busy with his farm and hotel businesses.
The Land and Stock Books of 1818 recorded him farming 50 cleared acres of land, on which he produced wheat, maize, barley and oats. He also raised 30 hogs, 30 horned cattle and owned a horse.[xii] Did he smile to himself when he took ownership of that last animal? Such a purchase would have once been nothing but a pie-in-the-sky dream. He had once stolen a horse; now he could buy one outright.
He opened the King’s Arms Hotel in Hunter Street, Sydney; Jane assisting with the many tasks involved in providing accommodation, food and drink to patrons. She would do so while tending to the care of their growing family. Benjamin (known as James) was born in 1816, the youngest of eight; his elder siblings Ann (known as Jane), William, twins Charles and Thomas, Richard, Elizabeth, and Joseph.[xiii]
A Direct North View of Sydney Cove…1794. Source: Dixon Galleries, State Library NSW The King’s Arms was a two-storey weatherboard building on a large corner block. The Roberts established an orchard and a kitchen garden to supply produce for the hotel’s meals.[xiv] They ran a tight ship at the pub, again winning the Governor’s favour. When Governor Macquarie was attempting to grapple with the fact that the settlement was awash with liquor, he had made the following proclamation:
Government House, Sydney, 16th February 1810
The very great and unnecessary Number of Licenced Houses for Retailing Wines and Spirituous Liquors that have hitherto been allowed to exist in the town of Sydney and adjacent districts, cannot fail of being productive of the most mischievous and baneful Effects on the Morals and Industry of the lower part of the Community, and must inevitably lead to a Profligacy of Manners, Dissipation, and Idleness. In view, therefore, to check these Evils, as well as in the Hope of awakening Sentiments of Morality, and a Spirit of Industry amongst the lower Orders of the People, His Excellency the Governor had deemed it his indispensable Duty to make a Reduction of the Number of Licenced Houses for Retailing Spirits…[xv]He restricted the number of licensed public houses to twenty, closing fifty-five in the process and imposing a hefty fine of £20 for anyone found selling liquor outside these restrictions.
William and Jane’s establishment was on the list of favoured publicans in Sydney Town—along with the likes of Mary Reiby, a fellow emancipist who became one of the wealthiest women in the colony.
They also opened an inn or halfway house on the Liverpool Road, catering to travellers needing to stop for a meal, to rest horses, or an overnight stay.[xvi] If Jane worked here, in the kitchen or at the bar, she would have had convicts—a scullery maid and cook—to assist her.
Sometimes she too, must have marvelled at how fate had changed her lot from her time on a transport ship, to a woman with money and resources. Their stars had well and truly risen.
~
The town around them was changing under Macquarie’s public improvement program. Convicts laboured on handsome buildings such as the Hyde Park Barracks, St James Church and a new general hospital; charity schools were established in Sydney and outlying districts. The Governor acted to stabilise the colony’s wavering currency and established the first bank, the Bank of New South Wales, which was financed by private subscription and opened in 1817.[xvii]
These measures were helpful to businesspeople like the Roberts. Wealthy traders built warehouses along the wharves of Sydney Cove; shopkeepers, publicans, and essential tradespeople like tanners or blacksmiths built up flourishing businesses. The straggling settlement that William had seen when he first arrived was being transformed.
Hyde Park Barracks (L) ; The Courthouse and St James’ Church Hyde Park Sydney (R)
Source: Mitchell Library, SL NSWTheir circumstances were in accord with Governor Macquarie’s desire to see emancipists become part of the fabric of the colony, working to establish wealth and a future for themselves and their families. They were doing exactly as the Governor wanted all settlers to do: clear and cultivate land, growing produce along with a new generation of colonial-born youngsters to occupy and make productive this offshoot of the British Empire. Their children were thriving; unlike Jane’s own mother, she did not have the all-too-common experience of seeing any of her babies die. They lived in comfortable surroundings and never had to worry about where the next meal would come from.
Despite their difficult start, their life together was on an upward trajectory. They must have reflected on the years since they had each stood in the docks and heard the words transportation across the seas. They could not have guessed what awaited them in far-away New South Wales. Now, they had achieved a level of independence and prosperity that would have been unimaginable in Warwickshire or Surrey. Neither were literate, but if they could have written to their families back in England, what stories they could have told!
Among the free settlers and military in New South Wales were those who called themselves ‘exclusives’ and who were in bitter opposition to these developments. To them, convicts could never rid themselves of the stain of their criminal past and should not be afforded the same rights and privileges as those who had come free to the colony.
The Roberts were living at the interface of these conflicting views.
William & Jane’s stories will be continued in my next post.
[i] NSW Colonial Secretary’s Papers 1788-1856 Series: NRS 898; Reel or Fiche Numbers: Reels 6020-6040, 6070; Fiche 3260-3312. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 3 Dec 2025
[ii] Australia Marriage Index, 1788-1950, William Roberts & Jane Longest, 3 April 1810. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 3 Dec 2025
[iii] Australia & New Zealand Find-a-grave Index, Ann Roberts Levey; https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/249401714/ann-levey?_ Accessed 7 Dec 2025
Fairfax Media; Pyrmont, New South Wales, Australia; Year Range: 1841 – 1842; Australia, Newspaper Vital Notices, 1841-2001, Death notice for William Henry Roberts 1841. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 7 Dec 2025.
Australia, Births and Baptisms, 1792-1981, Baptism of Thomas Grenville Roberts 1807, FHL Film No 993949.
Via Ancestry.com, accessed 7 Dec 2025; Global, Find a Grave Index for Burials at Sea and other Select Burial Locations, 1300s-Current, Charles Roberts 1865, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/263496717/charles-roberts?_ Accessed 7 Dec 2025; Australia Birth Index, 1788-1922, Richard Roberts b 1810. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 7 Dec 2025
43 New South Wales, Australia, Colonial Secretary’s Papers, 1788-1856, Series: NRS 898; Reel or Fiche Numbers: Reels 6020-6040, 6070; Fiche 3260-3312. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 6 Feb 2026[v] NSW Colonial Secretary’s Papers 1788-1856, Series: NRS 898; Reels 6020-6040, 6070; Fiche 3260-3312,
Via Ancestry.com, accessed 7 Dec 2025[vi] State Records Authority of New South Wales; Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia; Title: Muster of Prisoners in the Colony, 1810-1820; Volume: 4/1237. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 9 Dec 2025
[vii] New South Wales, Australia, Settler and Convict Lists, 1787-1834, Class: HO 10; Piece: 3. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 9 Dec 2025
[viii] 1904 ‘The Great South Road’, The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW: 1842 – 1954), 25 June, p. 7.
Via Trove, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article14661003. Accessed 9 Dec 2025,[ix] https://www.visitsydneyaustralia.com.au/major-roads.html. Accessed 9 Dec 2025
[x] Michael Flynn, The Second Fleet: Britain’s Grim Convict Armada of 1790, p503
[xi] Michael Flynn, The Second Fleet: Britain’s Grim Convict Armada of 1790, p503
[xii] State Records Authority of New South Wales; Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia; Population musters, Dependent settlements; Series: NRS 1264; Reel: 1256. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 9 Dec 2025
[xiii] Australia, Births and Baptisms, 1792-1981 For Elizabeth Roberts 1812 https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XTCX-4XX, accessed 10 Dec 2025; Australia, Births and Baptisms, 1792-1981 for Joseph Roberts 1814, FHL Film Number 993949; For Benjamin James Roberts 1816 FHL Film Number 993949. All via Ancestry.com, accessed 10 Dec 2025
[xiv] 1882 ‘Old And New Sydney.’, The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW: 1842 – 1954), 27 November, p. 11
Via Trove http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13524564, accessed 13 Dec 2025[xv] Historical Records of NSW vol 7 (1810, 1811, 1812), pp289-290, via Trove, accessed 10 Dec 2025
[xvi] State Records of NSW, Colonial Secretary Index 1788-1825, Reel 6038; SZ759 p.342.
Via Ancestry.com, accessed 10 Dec 2025[xvii] Commerce and trade | State Library of New South Wales (nsw.gov.au) Accessed 10 Dec 2025
Travels with my ancestors #25: The Rags to Riches Tale of the Roberts Family
How did an illiterate horse thief from Warwickshire survive the worst transport ship in the history of convict voyages to Australia, then go on to become the Governor’s ‘go-to man’ for road and infrastructure projects in early Sydney? How did he transform himself from a wretched convict into a wealthy land owner, hotelier, husband and father?
The answer surely includes some good luck. Also, a finely tuned instinct for preservation, dogged hard work, and an ability to grasp the opportunities that the transportation system offered – if you could first survive the cruelties of the British justice system at the time.
William Roberts was my 4 x great-grandfather and his epic story illustrates how someone with physical and mental strength, with a generous dollop of luck, could do that.
His wife, Jane Longhurst, had an equally intruiging tale. I have written an earlier post about Jane and how she and William connected after both were transported; you can read it here.
WILLIAM ROBERTS (Abt. 1754 – 1819)
and
JANE LONGHURST / LONGEST (1783 – 1836)
Part One: Surviving
26 March 1787, Warwickshire, England
When William Roberts reluctantly entered the courtroom of the Warwick Assizes in early spring 1787, it was likely the most modern building he’d ever been inside. The dark wood of the public benches, and the prisoner dock where he stood, shone from regular polishing. Completed eleven years earlier, the courtrooms in the Warwick Shire Hall commanded solemnity, silence and—for the accused—enormous stress.
All eyes were on the Judge’s bench with its red leather seat and curtains, which would be drawn around the bench when a death sentence was pronounced. On a hook next to the bench hung the black cap the Judge would don at that moment. Surely, William would not receive the worst possible penalty for his crime of horse theft?
Mr Justice Heath heard sixty cases before pronouncing all verdicts together, at the end.[i] They were dealt with quickly, on average no more than ten minutes per matter, the sharp sound of the gavel punctuating the conclusion of one and the beginning of the next. William was not the only one facing a charge of horse stealing; there were two others like him, and men and women variously accused of theft of sheep, burglary, house breaking and robbery. Twenty-four times the guilty verdict was pronounced, the curtains drawn and the black cap positioned on top of His Honour’s head. Twenty-four lives to be ended at the gallows.
Most had no money to employ someone to put their case before the Court, had that even been allowed. They now had to hope for mercy from His Majesty King George III.
Thankfully that mercy arrived quickly. Just five days later, William and the other condemned were told that their sentences had been commuted to Transportation to the Eastern Coast of New South Wales, or some one of the islands adjacent, for seven years.[ii]
But what, exactly, did that mean? And where in the world was New South Wales?
~
If he could have looked at a map, he’d have been amazed and horrified at the vast expanse of ocean that lay between his prison in the midlands of England and the new British colony of New South Wales. He’d been raised in the landlocked county of Warwickshire, where the River Leam ambled its way north of the village of Leamington Hastings, his likely birthplace in 1754.[iii] He’d had nothing to prepare him for a voyage across the seas.
Map of England & Warwickshire
Source: https://www.visitnorthwest.com/counties/warwickshire/There’d been Roberts in villages and towns to the south and east of the city of Birmingham for many years.[iv] Most probably worked as agricultural labourers on the farms spread around that part of the county. Life was basic at best, beggared at worst, precarious always. The grand manor house that centuries ago had been home to the local lords, the Hastang family, were not for the likes of the Roberts. They made do from whatever labour or trades they could, settling in places called Arrow, Alcester, Salford Priors, along with William’s own village where he’d been raised with his older sister Elizabeth and younger brother Thomas.[v]
William had been baptised privately, then brought into the church some days later to have the baptism confirmed in front of the congregation.[vi]This often happened when those present at a birth thought that the baby might not survive until a church baptism could be held. In the case of this baby, he proved to be a survivor—several times over.
When he was nine, he’d witnessed his parent’s grief as they buried their baby boy Job, dead within a month of birth. Not a survivor, sadly for the Roberts family. Thomas and Ann had tried again for another boy, born seven months later. He too was baptised Job. They buried that tiny body weeks later.[vii]
There were no more children.
~In his thirties William was working, possibly on an estate known as ‘Wootton Park,’ about twenty kilometres west of Leamington Hastings. Built a century earlier, it had a manor hall, workers’ accommodation and landscaped grounds set amidst fertile green farmland.[viii] Workers kept the manor house in good repair and tended the expansive landscaped gardens. Given the nature of the terrible mistake he was about to make, it’s very possible that he worked in the stables, feeding, watering, and grooming the horses of the estate owners.
His employment at ‘Wootton Hall’ may have provided him with lodgings as well as wages: a real boon as labouring or unskilled work barely brought in enough to cover weekly expenses like lodging and food.
Wootton Hall, Wooton Wawen, Warwickshire UK. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wootton_Wawen_Wootton_Hall_002.JPG
What he did next would turn all that upside down.
He stole a horse, a gelding, probably from the estate—a risky business, stealing from your employer, if that’s what he did. If he enjoyed whatever time he had with the horse, crouching over its mane as it galloped away from Wootton, he would soon regret it. Whether he took the valuable animal to sell, to keep, or to trade, his plan came to a crashing halt when he was arrested and sent to a gaol, probably in Warwick, to await his trial.
After the sentencing, he was transferred in October to the prison hulk Stanislaus on the Thames in London.[ix] Here he was in the company of several other fellows who, like him, had escaped the death penalty at the Warwick Courthouse: Thomas Hughes, James Anderson, Richard Frinchett, James Royal Loome. Their hearts sank as they were rowed out to the decommissioned naval ship moored at Woolwich and clambered the rope up its dripping, rotting side. The old ship looked like a dark, monstrous, crouching thing on the water.
Prison Hulk, National Library of Australia Below, each deck was divided lengthways by metal bars, behind which they were crammed in close together. The smells from disease, unwashed bodies and clothes, and stale air were overwhelming. The other prisoners were thin, despairing, sickly men, many in rags and without shoes. There were some hard-faced veterans of the hulks, but also lads of nine or ten.
Life on the hulks was barely a life. He needed every ounce of courage and strength to face each day.
Their rations were poor: mouldy bread, hard ship’s biscuit, some thin soup with a small portion of cheap meat to be divided among each mess of six or more men. They drank weak beer or water from the filthy Thames.[x]
Each morning they were taken off to labour in work teams: digging moats or building embankments, dredging the thick river mud, construction work on docks, breaking up rocks. Each evening they were returned to the hulk to eat and sleep. The next day, and the next, and all the following days repeated the same pattern. Along with the hard labour, they had to avoid fights between prisoners, obey orders barked at them by guards, stay out of trouble, and hope not to succumb to illness—the only thing that flourished on board.
The hulks were the authorities’ solution to the developing problem of overcrowding in prisons across the land. Monied people had pressured the Government to address an alarming increase in property crimes: theft, burglary, poaching, highway robbery. Soon such offences were on an ever-expanding list of crimes for which death, or a long prison term, were the usual sentences. For some time, miscreants had been sent away to the American colonies. Wealthy folks were happy with this ‘out of sight, out of mind’ solution.
In 1775 that all changed. The Revolutionary War in America stopped the easy transfer of Britain’s law breakers. Unsuitable old gaols were groaning under the strain of more men, women and children pushed through their gates. At the same time, there was growing distaste and unease about the number of offences for which people could be hanged, resulting in more death penalties commuted, more prisoners needing to be incarcerated long term. What was to be done?
The hulks provided a solution—of sorts.
After the First Fleet of ships set off for the new colony of New South Wales in 1787, it seemed that the problem of crowded gaols would be solved by resuming the system of transportation. In the meantime, those waiting to be sent away had to be put somewhere.
Six months after arriving on the Stanislaus, William and his fellow Warwickshire prisoner, Thomas Hughes, were sent south to the harbour at Portsmouth, where yet another prison ship awaited them.[xi] The conditions on the Lion proved no better. They were kept here for twenty long months.
Was William told the news that he would, finally, be transferred to a ship that would sail to New South Wales? Or simply bundled onto a rowboat and sent across to clamber up the side of the new vessel? Either way, he would have felt relief to have the hulk at his back at last. Whatever lay ahead in that mysterious place, New South Wales, at least on the voyage there’d be some rest from back-breaking work, and being at sea might even be a kind of reprieve: fresher air, new sights, perhaps even some sunshine.
He was to be horribly disappointed.
~
Along with nearly five hundred other convicts he boarded the Neptune in December 1789. They quickly realised that the hulks had been merely a prelude to further suffering.
After a month of loading provisions for the voyage, as well as tools, animals and equipment for the colonial settlement, they sailed out of Portsmouth harbour in mid- January 1790.[xii] There was no opportunity for prisoners to watch the dwindling shores of England—from the outset they were bundled below decks, the seventy-eight women in a separate area, the men chained in twos or threes on a lower deck.
The prisoners could not have known it, but the ship and its captain, Donal Traill, had previously been in the business of transporting enslaved people from Africa to North America. The new cargo was treated in a similar way.
They were starved on low rations, because the Captain had orders from the Neptune’s owners, the private contractors Camden, Calvert & King, to sell excess provisions on the way if possible. The Government contract paid a flat rate per prisoner boarded each ship. It had nothing to say about how many should be disembarked once they reached Sydney Cove. It was a perfect opportunity for contractors out to make an easy profit.
The ship anchored at Cape Town in April, too late for the forty-eight men and one woman who had already died.[xiii] Many of those still alive, especially the men kept in irons for the whole voyage, were desperately ill: malnourished, their muscles atrophying from lack of movement, infections from lying in their own filth. The stench of rotting teeth and gums from scurvy, the dreaded blight of life at sea, filled the close air of the prisoners’ decks. Some lemon or lime juice would have fixed that, but not for these prisoners.
They were tormented by lice, suffered in the hot airlessness of the tropics, then shivered in the colder southern regions. The meagre food was often fought over by those who could still fight. Sometimes, no fighting was necessary: if a prisoner died, those closest would quickly take the rations and hope the death would not be discovered for a little while. When a corpse was found by guards, it would be taken above and tossed unceremoniously into the sea.
There was plenty of death. It was the one thing the hell-ship had in abundance.
The Neptune made good time on this voyage, sailing into Port Jackson on 28 June 1790, but one hundred and fifty men and eleven women had not survived the voyage. Once known, the total number of dead convicts on the Second Fleet appalled even authorities in far-off London: over a quarter of all prisoners on the four transport ships that made up the fleet, and a third of those wretches on the Neptune, died on the journey. Within eight months of arrival, forty percent were dead.[xiv]
For the ragged, starving convicts of the First Fleet and their equally hungry guards on shore that day, who were hoping the new ships had brought fresh supplies and strong bodies to help grow more food, the sight of the crippled, dying and very sick passengers disembarking from the Neptune was horrifying. More mouths to feed, more sick bodies to care for in the rudimentary hospital. The rations across the tiny, struggling settlement had already been drastically reduced by Governor Philip. How were they to survive without additional food and healthy people to do the work needed?
Even so, some of those watching were reduced to pity, even tears, at the plight of those crawling from the bowels of the Neptune. William was one of the survivors.
Work and freedom
His next challenge was simple: keep surviving. Firstly he had to get through his seven year sentence. In those early years, newly arrived convicts were set to work on the many projects needed by a fledgling settlement clinging to the edge of a huge, unknown continent. These included building, constructing rudimentary roads to make moving around the township easier, making bricks, fishing, growing grain or vegetables in the struggling government gardens. Prisoners were also assigned to military personnel and officers as servants and labourers.
Shelters were tents or simple wattle and daub huts with woven branches for shutters at their windows. Convicts built their own shelter, grew what food they could from a garden plot in their own time, lined up at the government store for dwindling rations.
During the months on board the hulks and the Neptune, William must have decided not to make the same mistake that had brought him to this wild British outpost. He worked hard in his assignment in Sydney and avoided coming to the attention of the guards or convict overseers for the wrong reasons. His industry was rewarded. Along with the punishments meted out for wrongdoing, there were some rewards for good behaviour.
By January 1794, just four years after his arrival in chains, he had been granted thirty acres of land in Sydney Town, near the Brickfields on the southern side of the settlement.[xv] This year was significant for another reason: he had served his sentence and was now a free man.[xvi] Never to return to his native England, he instead turned his mind to creating a new life in this place under the southern skies.
Brickfield Hill and village on the High Road to Parramatta.
Source: National Library of AustraliaThe land of New South Wales had been claimed for Britain by the first Governor, Arthur Phillip, in 1788. However, there was no negotiation, agreement, or treaty with the original people of that land. From then on, it was the Governor and his successors who decided who ‘owned’ or had the right to occupy, particular parcels of land. Land became one of the ways in which settlers’ and convicts’ behaviour could be rewarded, controlled or manipulated. Any convicts who wondered who really owned the land they were clearing, cultivating, or building on, generally kept those thoughts to themselves.
Did William or his fellow emancipists ever wonder about the Governor’s ability to hand out tracts of land to whomever he pleased? In their day-to-day work and movements around Sydney Town and outlying regions, convicts and freed men and women would encounter the people who had lived there before the English ships arrived. These meetings were sometimes friendly, sometimes not. The ‘natives’ had an uncanny ability to melt into the bushland when they needed to, but they were beginning to push back against the encroachments of the white strangers.
From the first months after January 1788, the Indigenous people around Sydney had been struck down in horrifying numbers by unfamiliar diseases. Those who’d arrived on the first fleet of convict ships, witnessed dead and dying people all around the harbour and its surrounds. The white settlers’ activities continued to destroy the waterways, food sources and hunting grounds that the Eora, Dharug and other groups relied on for their physical, spiritual, family, and cultural needs.
But the original people stayed, survived and resisted the theft of their Country.
Whether William and other transportees ever gave them much thought, is another question.
William and Jane’s story will be continued in my next post.
If you want to follow along on the journey and have not yet subscribed, you can do so here.
[i] Birmingham Gazette April 2, 1787,
via https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/ariss-birmingham-gazette, accessed 31 Jan 2026[ii] WR’s Warwick Assizes record: https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C8999560
Reference: HO 47/6/91 Fol. 307. Date: 1787 Mar 31 Held by: The National Archives, Kew.
Accessed 28 Nov 2025[iii] Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43 (for William Roberts) Accessed 29 Nov 2025
[iv] See Author’s Note re factors guiding assumptions made about locations and records for this Roberts family.
[v] Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43 (for Elizabeth Roberts); Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43 (for Thomas Roberts). Accessed 29 Nov 2025
[vi] England, Warwickshire, Parish Registers, 1535-1963, database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-DZCS-LVB?cc=1462403&wc=XDTP-BZ9%3A42645501%2C1583866127%2C1583866128 : 13 March 2019), Warwickshire > Leamington-Hastings > Baptisms, marriages, burials 1705-1812 > image 23 of 80; from parish registers of the Church of England. Database and images, Warwick County Record Office, England. Accessed 29 Nov 2025
[vii] England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538-1975 FHL Film Number 548390, 555353, Web address /search/collections/9841/records/121235106?tid=73626398&pid=202711239221&ssrc=pt
Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43 (for Job Roberts 1);
Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43;
Burial record for Job Roberts 1765 at FreeReg: https://www.freereg.org.uk/search_records/65b28ae2f493fd5ab33201eb/job-roberts-burial-warwickshire-leamington-hastings-1765-06-16?locale=en (for Job Roberts 2)
All accessed 29 Nov 2025[viii] https://www.ourwarwickshire.org.uk/content/catalogue_her/wootton-hall-park. Accessed 30 Nov 2025
[ix] Treasury records [T 1, 7, 39, 46, 62, 64, 172, 176, 229, 236, 247], 1783-1956 [microform]/Fonds T./Series T1/Subseries (Pieces 587-3031)/File 653. AJCP Reel No: 3551/Item 164/Lord Sydney with Mr Campbell’s return of convicts on board the Ceres and Stanislaus hulks
Via Trove at http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1271439159. Accessed 30 Nov 2025[x] https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/prison-hulks-britain-conditions-escapes-transportation-social-reform-charles-dickens/ Accessed 30 Nov 2025
[xi] Treasury records [T 1, 7, 39, 46, 62, 64, 172, 176, 229, 236, 247], 1783-1956 [microform]/Fonds T./Series T1/Subseries (Pieces 587-3031)/File 658. AJCP Reel No: 3551/Item. Lion’s report and accounts/
Via Trove at http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1271598671. Accessed 30 Nov 2025[xii] https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/neptune Accessed 30 Nov 2025
[xiii] Michael Flynn; The Second Fleet: Britain’s Grim Convict Armada of 1790 (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 2001) p1
[xiv] Michael Flynn; The Second Fleet: Britain’s Grim Convict Armada of 1790 p1
[xv] State Records Authority of New South Wales; Kingswood, NSW, Australia; Archive Reel: 1999; Series: NRS 1213; Description: Colonial Secretary: List of all Grants and Leases 1788-1809.
Via Ancestry.com, accessed 1 Dec 2025[xvi] State Records Authority of New South Wales; Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia; Title: Muster of Prisoners in the Colony, 1810-1820; Volume: 4/1237. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 2 Dec 2025
Author’s Note on historical records: the Roberts Family
Locating the correct records for a family with such a common name as ‘Roberts’ is challenging, to say the least. My aim is to only include information for which I have verified sources. In some situations, I have had to do some guesswork, choosing those records which make sense based on the person’s location, age, life circumstances. Then I’ll use phrases or words like ‘about,’ ‘possibly,’ ‘likely to have been.’
Footnotes will take you to verified sources where I’m confident I have the correct records; but I will always indicate if there is uncertainty about a particular fact or record.
In the case of the Roberts, I am sure that the family lived in the county of Warwickshire for at least several generations. The Roberts name pops up across the county; however I have pinpointed connections of family members across generations, around a cluster of small villages and hamlets in the region near Stratford-Upon-Avon (famous as Shakespeare’s birthplace) and east to Rugby. This area is south and southeast of the city of Birmingham.
Location is a factor that I use in my guesswork around which Roberts records belong in ‘my’ Roberts tree: is it reasonable, given the historical time in which the record was generated, for a person to have been baptised in one village but end up at the other side of the county? Certainly that could happen, but where there is a Roberts record closer to their place of origin that fits all the other available facts, I will tend to favour that one.
Family circumstance is another piece of the puzzle. These people were mostly poor, so unlikely to have estates worth making a will for. Marriages licences were expensive; most working class people obtained permission to marriage via having the ‘marriage banns’ (intention to wed) published three times in their local parish prior to the wedding day. My reasoning here is that marriage records involving a licence are less likely to be for my Roberts folk.
Age, marital status, children: all additional pieces to fit into the big jigsaw of constructing a family tree, when the family name is such a common one and records not as forthcoming or informative as they are today.
I hope this gives you some insight into my thinking and that it helps you in making your own decisions about all this as you read.
Travels with my Ancestors #24: The German Connection
This is one of a series of posts in which I explore stories of people from the past: individuals in my family tree. Up until recently I was researching and writing about my father’s side of the tree; now I am digging deep into the heritage of my mother’s ancestors. Mostly, these were people whose family beginnings were from England and Ireland, with one known exception.
You can read the first post about my mother’s German great-grandfather here.
Above: Scenes from Kirn, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, in September 2025.
My sister and I have just returned from a trip to Europe during which we spent a week in the Rhineland region of Germany. We travelled here hoping to learn something of our German ancestor’s homeland, before he emigrated to Australia in 1861. For me this kind of travel is less about family history research (think hours spent poring over old documents in archives) and more about stepping on the land on which my forebears had lived.
What did I know about Christian Übel* before travelling to his place of birth? Very little.
I knew he’d been baptised in 1838 in the Evangelische (Protestant) church in the small town of Kirn, west of Mainz in the Rhineland-Palatinate. Today, the town is medium-sized (about 8,500 residents). It lies in a valley between two rivers: the Nahe and the Hahnenbach, on the edge of the Hunsrück hills.
His father was a clothmaker in the town and the family lived in Haus 139 am Hahnenbach. His paternal grandfather had been a farmer. Christian was number four in a family of nine children; though two older brothers had died within six months of their birth, leaving Christian as the oldest surviving son.
I wondered what effect this loss of children, so common at the time, might have had on parents and siblings? Did Christian grow up in the shadow of his dead brothers? Or were they never discussed – did his parents believe it best to put those losses behind them and move on? There would be few families who had not endured the death of infants or children, in an era where accident or illness could suddenly and indiscriminately strike down a young life.
A Google map search showed that there is a neighbourhood, or municipal area called Hahnenbach, about 10 km to the northwest of Kirn itself. Was this where the family lived?
When he arrived in Sydney by steamer in 1861, Christian was a baker, but I don’t know when and where he obtained that trade and if he worked in a bakery or even had his own business, before leaving Germany.
I didn’t necessarily expect to find answers to these questions during the visit to Kirn, but I did hope to get a feeling for the town and its surroundings. This was certainly achieved during my brief time there.
To begin with, we paid a visit to the municipal History Library, to meet a man with whom I had previously exchanged emails about archival records that might be available. He had very kindly prepared a copy of Christian’s birth certificate and presented it to us. I was thrilled, as I had not seen a copy of this proof of Christian’s birth anywhere in the online databases I’d searched from Australia.
Another helpful person was an employee in the information booth in the main part of town, who provided a map and – crucially – the suggestion that the Übel family home was likely to have been located on one of the two streets that align the Hahnenbach river that runs through the centre of town. There is a ‘right’ and a ‘left’ Hahnenbachstraße, or Hahnenbach street, one of which would probably have been the location of ‘House 139’ where Christian was born, back in the 1830s.
What a gem of information! It provided my sister and I with a starting point, as we wandered up and down the two streets on either side of the narrow river. Nearly two hundred years ago, it was probably a quietly flowing stream; today it has been straightened and its sides built up with concrete, presumably to conrol the flow of water and as protection from flooding.
Above: The Hahnenbach river and its adjacent streets in Kirn.
It’s left and right streets appeared peaceful; a mix of old and newer housing. Not an especially affluent neighbourhood, but close to the old town, the town square, the Catholic and Protestant churches and Jewish synagogue. In the 1800s it may have played host to an array of tradespeople such as Christian’s father, the clothmaker.
From here, we found the Protestant church where Christian had been baptised in 1838. A solid, cream and red brick building with a tower that dates to the eleventh or twelfth century, it was cool and peaceful inside. We photographed the font where Christian’s small head had been wet with baptismal water; the high pulpit where the minister would have delivered his sermons each Sunday, and the decorative arched ceiling.
Above: the historic Protestant church in Kirn, where Christian Übel was baptised in 1838.
I love nothing more than ambling through a street and buildings where, many years in the past, people from my own past had walked. In that respect, my trip to Kirn was very satisfying. I came away with some sense of the place, and a feeling that I could now write a little more confidently about my great-great-great grandfather Christian and his place of origin.
Oh, and before we left Kirn, we went to an excellent local bakery and, in honour of our ancestor, purchased a very beautiful loaf of fresh, crusty German bread.
*In Australian records, Christian’s family name is spelled Uebel.
All photos by the author, September 2025.
Christian’s story will be continued in future Travels with My Ancestors posts.
If you are connected to the Australian Uebel family, I would love to hear from you!
Please subscribe if you’d like to receive updates. I usually post weekly, with a mix of book reviews and posts about all things history.Travels with my Ancestors #23: ‘Dear Christian’
After several years of Travels with my Ancestors posts and a book, all about my father’s side of the family tree, at last I come to my mother’s side. Mum was, if anything, even keener than Dad about all things family history, so if she were still with us she might very well be saying About time, too!
My sister and I are looking forward to a trip later this year to explore the place where our mother’s great-great grandfather originated. He’s the outlier in the family tree: the only person I know of whose roots did not lie in England or Ireland (with the exception of one other as yet unconfirmed possibility who may have been born in France.)
Our 3 x great-grandfather arrived in Australia in the mid-19th century but I know so little about his life before then. When I sat down to write about him, I felt a bit stumped. How do you tell a story when you don’t know its beginning?
Rather than make things up, I decided to write a letter, of sorts, expressing my dilemma. Here it is.
Dear Christian,
(or perhaps I should call you great-great-great-Grandfather,
but that’s a little wordy)There is so much about you that I don’t know. I’m doing my best now to rectify that, but it is difficult to dig about in records from another country when I am so far away, here in Australia. I know plenty about you since you arrived in Sydney in 1861 – where you lived, what you did for a living, who you married, your children, when you died and where you were buried. But before that? Not so much.
For example, there is the business of you being Prussian—or not. On your New South Wales Naturalisation document of 1880 your original citizenship was described as Prussian. When I found Kirn, the town where you were born, on Google maps and saw that it’s located in the Rhineland-Palatinate region (on the other side of the country from Prussia)—well, that was confusing.
I revisited my history books and learned that several of the many little states and kingdoms that later became Germany were controlled by Prussia at various periods, including the Rhineland at the time you lived there. One mystery solved.
Source: By Adam Carr at English Wikipedia – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34552576 Other questions have not been so easily answered.
Such as, why did you leave your homeland?
Your father had been born and lived near Kirn, and was a skilled tradesman: a tuchmacher or clothmaker. You likely grew up within a comfortable home, along with your six siblings. Your family was of the Protestant faith and you were baptised at the Kirn Evangelisch church in September 1838.
You did not take up your father’s trade in the cloth industry. Instead, you became a baker. Another skilled trade, but one involving flour, yeast, salt and sugar rather than wool or linen.
Your working day would begin early, well before dawn, as you loaded the ovens with wood and filled the heavy mixing bowls with flour. There must have been satisfaction as you brought out the dark rye loaves or sweet apfelkuchen, arranging them on the wooden shelves each morning, ready for customers. Your bakery would be redolent with the savoury scent of caraway seeds and the warming aromas of nutmeg and cinnamon. As you wiped your floury hands on your apron, did you give a nod of approval at another day’s good baking?
Source: https://germanculture.com.ua/german-bread/german-bread-the-heart-of-germanys-baking-culture/ Or were you wanting something different? Was Kirn, its small-town sights and familiar faces, too confining or commonplace? Did you dream of bigger horizons, new people and customs, adventures across the seas?
Or—and here historical events may have played a part—there were very different motivations for you to leave. Your homeland was experiencing seemingly never-ending turmoil, political and economic. In your father’s time it was the devastation of the wars wreaked by Napoleon Bonaparte. Then confusion as the Rhineland came under French control for a time.
You were just ten when the first of several uprisings began across Europe, led by people demanding more freedoms in how they were governed, and—amongst the German-speaking states—national unity. This was long before a German nation was planned and at a time when most Europeans were governed by autocratic, conservative rulers and officials.
Barricades at Alexander Platz, Berlin,
Source: By JoJan – Own work; photo made at an exhibition at the Brandenburger Tor, Berlin, Germany, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17630682I wonder how your parents felt about this push for more freedoms for ordinary people, or if they even knew about the demonstrators and the movements’ leaders and their demands? Did they agree or did they just want to get on with their lives and be left in peace?
The revolutions largely failed but the effects lingered as new political ideas took root and grew. Economically, life was difficult for many. The spectre of famine hung over villages and towns with crop failures in the countryside.
Was Kirn affected? Perhaps you struggled to get flour for your bakery. Customers may have fallen away as money for a daily loaf of bread became harder to find. You could no longer see a prosperous future there.
The pickelhaube, symbol of Prusso-German militarism from the mid- nineteenth century.
Source: By G.Garitan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25768801Even worse, you may have dreaded the call of conscription into the Prussian military—then a requirement for all able-bodied young men. Given the number and ferocity of wars and internal conflicts in your lifetime, it would be understandable if you’d longed to be somewhere where these were not constant threats.
Maybe your family were among those who harboured a dislike of the militaristic nature of Prussian rule. If you had inherited such feelings, you may have decided that leaving was preferable to submitting to such authoritarianism.
Whatever your reasons, you embarked on a ship to New South Wales. As far as I know, you had no contacts or family already in the colony. You might have come as part of a government-sponsored immigration scheme, though so far, I have found no record of that. I don’t even know the ship you arrived on!
Recently, at lunch with a Uebel cousin, another of your descendants, my sister and I were stunned when our cousin mentioned a version of your arrival story which had you jumping ship here during the gold rush days. We looked at each other, amazed. How had we never heard this family legend? And my mind immediately went to the question: how can I find out whether that story is true? If so, you would have been amongst many hundreds of others, literally gambling on finding a fortune on the messy chaos of the goldfields.
I still hope to find those details, and to learn more about your travels here. However you came, what must you, born and raised near the river Rhine but otherwise nowhere near a body of water like the vast oceans you voyaged across, have made of that long journey to this southern continent?
I think you came alone—a young man of twenty-three. Within five years, you’d married an English girl from Plymouth, and with Sarah you had eleven children. You continued your trade, opening a bakery and shop in Sydney’s St Peters.
You had some tragedies in your life here—losing two children before they’d had a chance to fully grow—and you never saw your native Kirn again.
But I am grateful that you took that ship from Germany and gambled on a better life here, because otherwise I would not have existed. I hope you did not regret your decision to come.
I will continue my search about your life before you left Germany. I want you to be more than just a name on my family tree. Yours is a good name—Christian Uebel—and both names have been handed down through subsequent generations. Still, I want to be able to see your name and feel a connection, to feel that I know something of you, not simply your name.
With thanks, from your great-great-great-granddaughter,
Denise
Sources:
NSW Certificate of Naturalization No 866 1880 for Christian Uebel
Death Registration 10554/1906 for Christian Uebel
Einwohnerbuch Stadt Kirn 1544-1900 Teil 4 Familiennamen Schr – ZTravels with my Ancestors #22: Troubled Waters
This is the continuing story of my Newton family history. The first instalment can be found here.
Travels with my Ancestors is an ongoing series of posts in which I explore my family heritage, sometimes involving travels to their places of origin, sometimes travel through archives, online sources and history books.
All photos are by author unless otherwise indicated. Names in bold indicate those people from whom I am directly descended.
Troubled Waters
BEADON NEWTON (1836 – 1919) and
ELIZABETH TOPPS ROBINSON (1849/1850 – 1902)Locked up
Greta, Hunter Valley NSW, 1876
Things began to go badly for Elizabeth Newton (née Robinson) when Constable Powell entered the Newton’s cottage, one step behind her husband Beadon. They were followed by Mr Leaver, one of Beadon’s employers from the Greta store where he worked. What was going on? Why were they here?
When the constable began looking through the rooms of the house, under beds and in cupboards, it was apparent that something was very wrong. Powell drew out assorted objects from various hiding places around the cottage: a man’s new shirt, sweets and tobacco, a bucket and garden spade, canned goods, crockery, calico…They were hidden under their bed, beneath the old couch in the living room, and in the lean-to shed outside.
Mr Leaver looked on with dismay. At one point, he exclaimed: ‘Beadon, what made you rob us in this way? Have we not given you everything you required?’The goods recovered by Constable Powell and identified by Mr Leaver by his store’s mark, amounted to £20 in value, the equivalent of six month’s wages.2
Why had Beadon stolen? His employment at Chapman and Leaver’s store in Greta paid him a wage of 15 shillings a week, and the family had lodgings in a cottage provided by his employers. His duties weren’t overly demanding—he delivered goods to customers, helped keep the stock tidy and swept out the store at the end of each day. He was sometimes alone then, and now he admitted to taking things he found on the floor, protesting that he thought there was no harm in that.
Had he became trapped in a cycle of petty theft, neither being able to own up and return the items, sell them, or use them? Elizabeth must have noticed the things appearing in their cottage. Perhaps he lied and told her he’d bought them. Or, if she suspected them to be stolen, she was bound to silence as mother of two small children, dependent on him and unwilling to force an issue which could see him go to gaol.
Constable Powell told her that he had spotted several items partially hidden under a tree in nearby bushland. Suspicious, he’d replaced them under the leaf litter, and returned at dusk, climbed a nearby tree, and waited. A man on horseback approached, stopped at the tree, and began stowing the goods in his saddlebag. The constable nabbed him in the act. It was Beadon, who claimed to have paid for them at the store and left them there to retrieve later.3
Constable Powell was having none of that story. He returned to the Leaver and Campbell store in town, and asked Mr Leaver to accompany them both to Beadon’s home, where the other stolen goods were then found.
NSW Police Gazette 9 February 1876, from Trove Beadon was taken to Branxton police lock-up, about fifteen kilometres away, there to await trial.4 As he left the cottage with the constable, Elizabeth probably looked with despair at their sons: three-year-old Albert and baby William. What was she to do now that Beadon was arrested and she would no longer have a house to live in? She would have to take up domestic service work again, as she’d been doing before the boys were born. But who would care for them while she worked? The future looked bleak.
Above: Branxton police station in 2021 
Above: The tiny window in the police lock up at Branxton. What went through Beadon’s mind as he peered out from the cell? To date, she’d not had much luck in marriage. She’d wed her first husband, James Pendall Morley, in 1870 when she was twenty. They married at her father William Robinson’s home at Down Park, the estate where he worked near Hinton, on Wonnarua land near the Hunter and Paterson rivers. The young couple didn’t have much between them: she was a servant and he a labourer. The ceremony was conducted by a minister from the Primitive Methodist/ Wesleyan church, the faith that her family had brought with them from Lincolnshire.5
They had a child, named after the baby’s father and his maternal grandfather: James Hardy Morley, born around the year of their marriage. If Elizabeth had been pregnant with this child before the marriage, it was likely a rushed wedding. It’s possible that he was several years younger than her. These circumstances could have made for a difficult start to married life for both.
Within two years, James was gone. He may have deserted her or died. Either way, he’d disappeared from her life. A ‘James Morley’ was in and out of Sydney’s Darlinghurst Gaol around this time, usually on charges of drunkenness.6 Was this the man who had so briefly been her husband?What happened to the baby after Elizabeth and James parted ways? He lived to adulthood, married, and eventually died in his fifties at Lithgow, NSW.7 It’s unclear whether he stayed with his mother during his childhood years.
In 1872 she tried marriage for a second time. This ceremony was held in the Trinity Church of England in Lochinvar. Her new husband was Beadon Newton, twenty-six, a labourer.8
Lochinvar Trinity Church, 2021 On the marriage record, Elizabeth declared herself a widow – was this a convenient lie to erase the mistake of her first marriage?
On the day, she juggled baby Albert Harvey (Bertie) in her arms. He’d been born almost eight months earlier, in February.9 It’s possible that the delay in the marriage of his parents was due to the need for authorities to confirm that Elizabeth was, as she claimed, a widow.
They settled into life at Greta, just up the Old North Road from Lochinvar. Beadon worked in Chapman & Leaver’s store; in his free time, he probably enjoyed a drink at one of the four pubs in town. He also served as church verger for the Reverend Walsh.
The railway had arrived along with exploratory mines to dig for coal; Greta was an up and coming place, though still quiet enough for a young family. The village was surrounded by expansive paddocks of pasture with scrubby patches of eucalypts and pockets of more densely forested woodlands.
Their next baby, William, arrived in 1875; Elizabeth’s days were busy.Something the couple shared were their experiences as young immigrants from England: Beadon from Somerset when he was thirteen; Elizabeth from Lincolnshire at three years of age. Both transplanted, but young enough to make New South Wales their home.
Perhaps he told her the story of attempted mutiny by some of the crew on the immigrant ship Una. She may have spoken sadly of her mother whom she barely remembered, because Mary had perished on board the Irene before reaching Australia. Elizabeth’s baby sister Hannah had died too, not long after their arrival.
And now, for the second time in a few short years, she faced life alone without a husband by her side.Back to Hinton
Fortunately she had family still in Hinton. Her father Hardy lived there with his third wife Anne and their children, so Elizabeth took the two little boys and moved back to await Beadon’s trial.
In March, Beadon came before the Maitland Sessions court. He was found guilty after a ten minute deliberation by the jury, although they recommended mercy on account of the nine testimonials in his favour, including one from the Reverend Walsh, which stated that Beadon had assisted him at the church for the previous four years.
The magistrate was less impressed. He said sternly that he’d liked to have passed a severe penalty, but given the character references, he sentenced Beadon to imprisonment with hard labour in Maitland gaol. Elizabeth’s husband would be gone for eighteen months and she would need to get on with her life for the duration.10Two months after the heavy door slammed shut on Beadon’s cell, little William took ill with a cold or infection. A fever set in and he began crying irritably and shivering, even though his little body was hot to touch. The crying stopped—but Elizabeth’s relief must have turned to alarm when he became listless and refused to take any fluid. Soon after he began convulsing and he died in her arms.11
She had to deal with the grief of burying their baby without her husband. Her father and stepmother were doubtless some comfort. She occupied herself with Bertie, now three, and may also have needed to find work until Beadon returned.Troubled Waters
Once Beadon was released in 1877, it seemed their life together had at last settled. He found work in carpentry and they moved into Plaistowe Street, West Maitland. All their remaining six children were born in Maitland: Robert (born 1878), Mary (1880), Frances (1882), John (1885), Ernest Beden (1888) and George (1891).12
Their street ran straight to the banks of the Hunter, so they had to cope with numerous river floods over the years, including a devastating one in 1893.
After sudden torrential rains, warnings came from upstream about rapidly rising levels and a bell rang through Maitland sounding the alarm. The fast current and a huge load of debris in the river swept houses and farm structures away, inundating shops and homes in the central areas of town. People had to be rescued off roofs and out of trees; despite heroic efforts, at least fifteen people died.13
Maitland Flood Scenes by Elijah Hart, Photographer, West Maitland. Dated as 1857, but according to researcher Peter F. Smith probably circa 1867 or 1870.
Courtesy of State Library of Victoria.
Retrieved from
https://hunterlivinghistories.com/2019/02/26/maitland-floods-elijah-hart-1857/
24 April 2025Added to the heartache, the terrible economic effect compounded the pain of the 1890’s depression.
Elizabeth endured the death of another child in 1879; this time it was Robert, still a baby.14 There was more sadness when Beadon’s father died in 1881 and Elizabeth’s father in 1900.
However, their surviving children were growing, some were marrying and establishing families. Like the rest of their community they had to try to move on.Elizabeth was only fifty-four when she died in August 1902.15 She’d developed septicaemia, or blood poisoning. This meant high temperature, headache, chills, nausea, and pain. She was admitted to hospital but there was nothing more that could be done for her; all they could do was hope and pray.
They buried her at Campbell’s Hill cemetery in West Maitland on a wintery day six weeks after she became ill.16
Elizabeth’s gravesite in West Maitland, 2021 Beadon was left alone; now in his sixties, he was doing general labouring work where he could find it. He’d moved from Plaistow Street to a house he built at 16 Cross Street.
The house at Cross Street Maitland, where Beadon Newton lived after Elizabeth’s death.
Image taken during 1930 flood of Hunter River. Photo courtesy of Kerry Newton.In 1912 he suffered the shock of hearing the news that his youngest son, George, had been arrested and imprisoned for indecent assault.17 At twenty-one years of age, George was getting off to a very bad start. He spent three months in gaol and was released on a hefty bond. Beadon’s own time in front of court and in gaol must have come rushing back to him. George appeared to have learnt from this experience and did not come before a court again.
Beadon died a few years later in August 1915, when the nation was in the throes of the Great War.18 Perhaps he was glad to close his eyes on a world convulsing in violence and suffering. He was laid to rest alongside his wife at Campbell’s Hill.19
Photo from 2021 Beadon and Elizabeth merged the Newtons and the Robinsons, people from either side of England: the west country of Somerset and the Lincolnshire fens in the east. As children, they didn’t choose to come, but by making the journey with their families they planted successive generations here, in Australian soil.
Travels with my Ancestors will be continued in future posts…
- Maitland Mercury & Hunter River Advertiser, 16 March 1876 p3, Maitland Quarter Sessions. Via Trove, accessed 11 June 2024
- NSW Police Gazette & Weekly Record of Crime, 9 Feb 1876 p209. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 19 March 2024
- Maitland Mercury & Hunter River Advertiser 29 January 1876 p10 Via Trove, accessed 11 June 2024\
- New South Wales, Australia, Police Gazettes, 1854-1930, 9 Feb 1876 p42. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 20 March 2024
- Marriage of James Pendall Morley & Elizabeth Robinson, Transcript of reg no 2703/1870.
State Archives NSW; Kingswood, New South Wales; - Gaol Description and Entrance Books, 1818-1930; Series: 2134; Item: 1921; Roll: 276. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 22 June 2024
- Death of James Hardey Morley https://centralcoastfhs.org.au/Unrelated%20Death%20Certificates_Mar%202014.pdf p11; State Records Authority of New South Wales; Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia; Indexes to deceased estate files; Archive Series: NRS 13341; Series: “Pre A” Series (1923-1939); Reel Number: 3231 Accessed 22 June 2024
- Marriage of Elizabeth Morley & Beadon Newton reg no 2864/1872 NSW Births Deaths & Marriages, Marriage. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 20 March 2024
- Birth of Albert Harvey Newton reg no 12927/1873, Via Ancestry.com, accessed 22 June 2024
- State Records Authority of New South Wales; Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia; Clerk of the Peace: NRS850 Returns of Criminal cases heard at Country Quarter Sessions, 1875-1877; Series Number: 850; Reel: 3638. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 20 March 2024; Maitland Daily Mercury 16 March 1876 p3, accessed 22 June 2024
- Australia Death Index, 1787-1985, William R Newton, Reg no 7761/1876. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 20 March 2024.
- NSW Birth Reg no’s 15531/1878; 17562/1880, 20854/1882, 24921/1885, 27288/1888, 20815/1891. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 20 March 2024.
- Chas Kays, ‘The Great Flood of 1893’ 2022, in Maitland Stories at: The great flood of 1893 — Maitland: Our Place, Our Stories (maitlandstories.com.au)
- Death of Robert Newton 1879, reg no 6502/1879 Via Ancestry.com, accessed 22 June 2024
- Death reg for Elizabeth Tops Newton 1902, Cemetery, Military, and Church Record Transcripts, 1816-1982″, FamilySearch https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QVB6-B2BV: Sun Mar 10 14:35:15 UTC 2024 Accessed 13 June 2024
- Burial of Elizabeth Newton at https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/80623438/elizabeth-newton Section A1 Plot 3, accessed 22 June 2024
- State Archives NSW; Kingswood, New South Wales; Gaol Description and Entrance Books, 1818-1930; Series: 2232; Item: 3/5978; Roll: 5122 NB: the estimated birth year on this record is incorrectly given as 1893 Via Ancestry.com, accessed 22 June 2024
- NSW Death Reg no 9561/1915. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 20 March 2024
- Burial of Beadon Newton 4 Aug 1915 in Australia and New Zealand, Find A Grave Index, 1800s-Current, accessed 22 June 2024
Travels with my Ancestors #21: The Newton Story continued.
People from the West Country, Part Two
Portsmouth Harbour, 2023 In Part One of People from the West Country, we saw William and Ann Newton and their family embark in 1849 on the long voyage to New South Wales as bounty or assisted Emigrants. They knew they were in for a long journey with all its discomforts and dangers, but they faced an unexpected added threat of a mutiny at sea by some of the crew.
Those passengers not in the married and family section of steerage class, were separated into single male and female sections, with a dividing wall between them. This is what led to a dramatic stand-off between the Una’s Captain Causzer and several of the crew.
About a month into the journey, a group of around a dozen crewmen tried to destroy the dividing partition between the male and female passengers. They had armed themselves with knives and other weapons, demanding that the bar across the sections be removed and a chalk line drawn on the deck instead. They threatened the ship’s master, vowing they had a right to throw him overboard if their demands were not met.1 Will and Ann must have feared for Eliza, Martha, Mary Ann—all young women in their early twenties. Possibly even young Elizabeth was not safe at eleven years old.
The next day the threats to the Captain and First Officer continued, as rebels tried to convince some of the male passengers to join them. Then they refused to work the ship, which forced the captain to ask for help from any of the passengers who could assist. The mutineers continued their strike for several weeks. They passed the time singing loudly and behaving like boorish fools. Everyone’s safety was on a knife edge: mutinies at sea endangered all on board. What if there was a storm, or another crisis needing all hands?
For the Newtons and others in steerage, their proximity to the loud, defiant, cursing sailors must have been disturbing. The shouts and threats of the mutineers and the tight faces of the ship’s master and other officers made for a time of high tension. Many passengers must have longed for the return of the usual shipboard routines.The mutinous crew were finally restrained. A newspaper report in Sydney, a week after the Una’s arrival, recounted how the men were committed to trial for their actions.2 Mutiny at sea was a serious offence and could result in a sentence of death.
Extract from The Shipping Gazette & Sydney General Trade 24 Nov 1849, from Trove, accessed 29 March 2025
The rest of the voyage passed peacefully, and the ship arrived at Sydney in November 1849, four months after setting sail. The Newtons made their way to Newcastle in the Hunter valley; the traditional lands of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples. They were in New South Wales at last, ready to begin their new life.Life and death in the Hunter Valley
As Will and his family voyaged to Australia, he could not have known that back in Somerset, his sister Mary Ann was dying.3 His father had gone thirteen years earlier and the family had buried Martha, his mother, just a few months before they left England.4 Some of his strong ties to the west country there were already fraying.
They settled in Newcastle; he may have found work in an established butcher’s business there, or taken up work as a labourer. In the 1850’s his occupation was recorded as a fisherman.5 Perhaps he had decided that, living so close to the sea, harvesting the bounty of the ocean made for a better living than land animals.The young adult children all began to marry; grandchildren arrived. Eldest son Thomas moved to work in Sydney. They gradually grew accustomed to the different ways and landscapes here, starting to put down tentative roots. Young children are adaptable, so the sounds of Australian birds and the smell of the eucalypts would quickly begin to replace their memories of the west country of their birth.
After all the preparations, the long voyage, the excitement and anxiety about the move, Will only had Ann for eight years in their adopted country. She became ill with a heart and liver complaint, suffering for six months until she died in May 1858, aged fifty-seven.6 Eliza, the daughter born before Ann’s marriage to Will, had the sad duty of notifying the authorities of her mother’s death.
Soon after Ann’s grieving family had buried her in the grounds of the little Christ Church in Newcastle, Will got news that their son Thomas, who had moved to Sydney, was sick with scarlet fever. His neighbour had summoned a doctor, who diagnosed the infectious disease from Thomas’ high temperature, the raised scarlet rash over his body and his swollen, mottled ‘strawberry’ tongue. Within two weeks he was dead at twenty-five years of age.7
It was a double blow for his father. Will’s dreams of his family’s future in the colony had surely not included the deaths of two of them within the first decade. There was nothing to do but to carry on. At least all the children were now grown, no longer needing their mother’s care. That was a small mercy.Berry Park
Sometime after the tragedies of 1858, Will moved to the town of Morpeth, a bustling Hunter River port on the traditional land of the Wonnarua people. Produce from all over the valley went by steamer to Sydney, and via Morpeth to Maitland, and the coal industry was expanding in the valley. Water transport was growing in importance. Morpeth also had a mill which ground the wheat brought in by farmers across the district. The town had a promising future and some fine buildings lined the main street near the wharf.
Swan St Morpeth 1898 Courtesy University of Newcastle Library Special Collections
Will had a connection with Berry Park, an estate built on the edge of the river near Morpeth by John Eales, originally from Devon, who had become a prosperous grazier and pastoralist. In the 1840’s coal was discovered on Eales’ property and he established a private railway line to carry coal from his Duckenfield collieries at Minmi out of the district. His prosperity allowed him to build a mansion he called Duckenfield Park House, and he employed many workers like Will on the estate.
Source: Google maps
Two years after moving here, Will married for a second time.8 His new bride was Irish-born Bridget Chadwick, twenty-seven, who had arrived in Australia on the ship Matoaka five years before.9
Together they had four children: George, Sarah, Richard and Lucy, all born between 1860 and 1874 and all (except Sarah) at Berry Park.10
Berry Park was where the Newtons and the Robinsons first connected: Beadon Newton would meet Elizabeth Robinson there, as her family also lived on or near the Eales Estate.
But bad news kept arriving from Somerset. His siblings were dying: brother George in 1873, sister Charlotte in 1876, another sister Ann in early 1881.11 They were all getting on in years.
Will’s own time was up in 1881; he died at Berry Park and was buried at Hexham Cemetery.12 By then he had lived for more than thirty years in the colony.
The decision to bring his first family across the seas to settle here could not have been an easy one; at the end of his seventy-seven years, was he able to reflect on that choice and be satisfied it had been a good one, despite the setbacks they’d suffered?
He left behind his second wife and their children, then aged from twenty to eight.
A few years after his death, the family suffered an awful loss: their home and possessions were razed in a house fire in April, 1888. Volunteers from the local community came to their assistance, collecting funds to allow the family to rebuild. George, then twenty-eight, put a grateful notice in the Maitland Mercury and Hunter Valley General Advertiser, expressing their thanks.14
Bridget lived for another sixteen years, passing away at Newcastle in 1904.15
Meanwhile the children who had emigrated with their parents from Somerset had made lives of their own, mostly remaining in the Hunter district.
Eliza married twice; first to Thomas Dawson (1850) then after his death in 1859, she wed George Barry in 1861.15 She lived in the Newcastle area until her death in 1896.16
Martha married William Wilding, a druggist and chemist, in 1851, and they had one child, a son (also William) who was born and died in 1881, the same year his father died.17 What a traumatic time for Martha, losing both husband and baby in one year. Perhaps it because of this that she suffered for some time from a mental illness and spent years in what was then the Gladesville Lunatic Asylum, Parramatta, where she died in 1895.18
Elizabeth (known as ‘Biddy’) had nine children with David Avard who she married in 1860, but suffered the loss of three infants.19 She died in Berry Park in 1890.20
Youngest son John married in 1864 to Mary Lindores; they lived in Muswellbrook.21 He died in 1907 at Minmi, outside Newcastle.22
The Newtons had become firmly established in the Hunter Valley. Somerset and the West country of William and Ann’s youth were now places on the map to these younger immigrants.
SHipping at Morpeth 1860 Courtesy University of Newcastle Library Special Collections The Newton family story will be continued in the next chapter of Travels with my Ancestors
1.‘Revolt on Board the Emigrant Ship “Una”’, Shipping Gazette & Sydney General Trade, 24 Nov 1849 p 293 Via Trove, accessed 30 September 2023
2.Bells Life in Sydney & Sporting Reviewer Sat 24 Nov 1839 p3 Via Trove, accessed 30 September 2023
3. Burial of Mary Ann Dyer Oct 1839 in Somerset Heritage Services Taunton, Somerset England, Somerset Parish Records 1538-1914, Ref No D\P\ wal.sw/2/1/39 Via Ancestry.com, accessed 6 March 2024
4. Death of Martha Ann Newton March 1849 in Somerset Heritage Servicesd Ref No D\P\stogs/2/1/8 Via Ancestry.com, accessed 6 March 2024.
5. Death registration of Thomas Newton in Registry of Births Deaths & Marriages, Reg no 1858/736
6. Death registration of Ann Newton in NSW Registry of Births Deaths & Marriages, Reg no 1858/4629
7. Death of Thomas Newton in Registry of Births Deaths & Marriages, Reg no 1858/736
8. Marriage of William Newton & Bridget Chadwick Australia, Marriage Index, 1788-1950, , reg no 2524/1860. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 18 March 2024
9. Australia; Persons on bounty ships (Agent’s Immigrant Lists); Series: 5316; Reel: 2137; Item: [4/4792] Via Ancestry.com, accessed 18 March 2024
10. Australia Birth Index 1788-1950, George William Newton reg no 1860/9163; Sarah Jane Newton reg no 1863/10140; New South Wales Pioneers Index: Pioneers Series 1788-1888 Richard Henry Newton reg no 1871/13072; Catherine Lucy Newton reg no 1874/14112. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 18 March 2024
11. Death of George Newton March 1873 in England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1837-1915 Volume 5c Page 281; Death of Charlotte Perrett (nee Newton) March 1876 in England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, vol 5c p259 1837-1915 Somerset Heritage Service; Taunton, Somerset, England; Burial of Ann Geen (nee Newton) 30 March 1831 in Somerset Parish Records, 1538-1914; Reference Number: D\P\stogs/2/1/8; Somerset Heritage Service; Taunton, Somerset, England; Somerset Parish Records, 1538-1914; Reference Number: D\P\du/2/1/18. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 6 March 2024
12. Transcript of William Newton Death Certificate reg no 1881/8734
13.Maitland Mercury and Hunter Valley General Advertiser 9 June 1888, p2. Via Trove, accessed 19 March 2024.
14. Death of Bridget Newton 14 June 1904 in Australia Death Index 1787-1985 Death reg no 1904/10268. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 19 March 2024
15. Marriage Eliza Long & Thomas Dawson1850 Australia Marriage Index 1788-1850, vol VB; Marriage Eliza Dawson & george Barry Australia Reg No 2463/1861, Via Ancestry.com, accessed 19 March 2024 ;
16. Eliza Barry at ttps://www.findagrave.com/memorial/177510222/eliza-barry
17. Marriage of Martha Newton & William Wilding Australia, Marriage Index, 1788-1950, Marriage Reg 1851 vol V. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 13 June 2024; Death of William T Wilding NSW Death reg 1881/8445; Death of William Thomas Wilding (snr) reg 1881/8365; Via Ancestry.com, accessed 22 June 1
2024; 1882 ‘Family Notices’, The Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser (NSW:1843 – 1893), 25 February, p1 accessed 13 Jun 2024; http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article848178; accessed 13 June 2024
18. Death of Martha Wilding reg no 1895/2499, Death Index 1787-1985, Pioneer Index Federation Series 1889-1918 Via Ancestry.com, accessed 13 June 2024
19. Marriage of Elizabeth Newton & David Avard reg no 1860/2050, NSW Pioneer Index – Pioneer Series 1778 – 1888, Via Ancestry.com, accessed 8 March 2024; Australia and New Zealand, Find A Grave Index, 1800s-Current; Harriet Avard 1860; Alice May Avard 1880; Mary Avard 1877. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 19 March 2024
20.Burial of Elizabeth Avard https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/170978688/elizabeth-avard Via Ancestry.com, accessed 19 March 2024
21.Marriage of John Newton & Mary Lindores reg no 1865/2683, Marriage Index, 1788-1950, Via Ancestry.com, accessed 8 March 2024;
22. Death reg no 5627/1907 in Australia Death Index, 1787-1985 Via Ancestry.com, accessed 8 March 2024Travels with my Ancestors #20: Now for the Newtons!
So far in the Travels with my Ancestors series, I have dealt with successive generations of Eather family and descendants, and people from other families who joined the spreading branches of that growing family tree. The final post of the Eather story concluded with my grandmother, Florence, who was born Florence Creek, but whose mother was an Eather before her marriage.
Florence’s married name was Newton.
So now I want to go back in time a little and tell the story of the Newton family’s beginnings: where did they originate; when and why did they come to Australia?
This is the Newton family story.
All photos by author unless otherwise indicated.
People from the West Country – Part One:
WILLIAM BENJAMIN NEWTON (1804 – 1881) and
ANN LONG (1800 – 1858)
Ship’s rigging at historic Portsmouth harbour, England, 2023. A west country family
The Una was moored at busy Plymouth harbour when William and Ann boarded the ship. It was July 1849 and they were about to set off on a momentous journey that would forever change their lives and those of their children. Did they hear echoes of far-off lands in the cries of gulls wheeling above their heads? No doubt the rigging on the brigantine’s two tall masts was bewildering to them both, having never stepped aboard a ship until then. They had to hope that the crew knew the ropes, and the captain would keep them safe.If the weather and their luck held, in a few months the family would be disembarking on the shores of New South Wales, far away from Somerset in England’s west country, where they’d been born and raised.
William Benjamin Newton came from a family with deep roots in Somerset. His forebears had lived there for at least four generations. There were stories about links to Wales, of a Newton who’d ventured across the Bristol Channel in search of a new place to settle. One story told of a Newton family amongst the wealthy nobility. It was possible, but so long ago that it hardly mattered. The Somerset Newtons had little to show from any reputed affluence of earlier generations.
Above left: Map of UK showing location of Somerset in England’s west. Source: Google maps
Above right: Northern Somerset, showing villages around the Quantock Hills where Newton & related families lived: Stogursey, Nether Stowey, Crowcombe, Dunster, Bridgwater, among others. Wales lies across the Bristol ChannelA good number had lived in Crowcombe, one of several villages around the Quantock Hills in the north of the county. Newtons had been baptised, married and buried at Crowcombe’s Church of the Holy Ghost since at least the seventeenth century, possibly even earlier. 1
The church was like most in those parts: a tall, square tower topped with blunt pinnacles, fronting the rest of the building, all of dark stone. Always a little gloomy, even daunting, those churches. Inside it was a different story. Crowcombe’s church was known for its intricately carved bench ends on the pews. Hard to say how old they were, but they dated from the middle ages, at least.
Crowcombe Church of the Holy Ghost, 2023.
The carvings were lovely to look at, but what made them special were images from old Somerset tales, told to generations children by parents. Several depicted the legend of the Gurt Worm, a dragon, and the fearsome battle where two men cleaved the beast in half. This, so the story went, was how two local hills were formed, back at the beginning of time. Crowcombe children at least had interesting things to see, should a sermon be too dull.
The church’s carved pew ends depicting local legend of the
Gurt Worm
2023 Will had been born in 1804 in the village of Stogursey on the northern edge of the Quantocks, to parents Thomas Newton, a butcher, and Martha Buller. 2
Many Newtons had married into families from surrounding towns and villages: Bridgwater, Bicknoller, Combe Florey, Nether Stowey. His parents had lived at Nether Stowey when they married, then Crowcombe for a time, but moved to Stogursey before his birth.3 Stogursey had an old water mill, the ruins of a castle, and a cheerful brook that ran through pastures at the edge of the village. It was a pretty place, but not always easy to make a living for people of limited means.
Above: Scenes from Crowcombe, Stogursey & Nether Stowey in Somerset, in 2023
Will’s mother Martha came from a better-off family; her father and grandfather had both owned land, and were considered ‘gentlemen.’ Her father, George Buller, had left a will, in which Martha inherited an equal share of the property—with the provision that, should any one of his six children quarrel about the will or challenge it, they should be cut out without a shilling and their part divided among the rest.4 Perhaps after all, it was less troublesome to be a tenant farmer or employee with little to leave when you died, other than memories.Most folk around the Quantocks made their living as labourers on farms, harvesting apples for the tasty Somerset cider; here and there a saddler, carpenter, or cordwainer (shoemaker.) There was also work to be found in the all-important wool industry, from shepherding to wool washing.
West country folk were proud of their independent nature, the bounty of their land, their small communities that wrapped like comforting blankets around individuals and families.
The youngest of five children, William had learned to read and write—both he and Ann signed their own names on their marriage record.5 He had probably received a basic education in the local parish charity school.
He’d taken up his father’s trade of butchery, which should have brought in a reasonable living. But his family had grown, with seven children; downturns in the economy meant unemployment, rising food costs, and less money for people to buy his meat. New machines and factories replaced workers on farms and home-based producers of goods, like rope makers, weavers or straw plaiters.
Though far away from London, the seat of government and royalty, Somerset was affected by these changes as much as the rest of England.
In the public houses and the market, there was talk of opportunities for emigrants to the southern colonies. Should he apply for assisted passage under the generous terms offered by the colonial government? Skilled men such as himself were in demand; and colonists also wanted domestic staff. Ann had experience as a housekeeper, while their three older daughters were housemaid and needlewomen, and son Thomas had taken on the family trade of butchery. All the youngsters could read and write, except for John; the lad was only eight and still learning. He’d be able to to continue his schooling on the voyage, at daily lessons given to the children on board.
The passage for one person to Australia was beyond William’s reach; for a family of nine it was impossible. Under the Bounty Immigration scheme, the government would pay the passage of those it thought would be useful in the colony.
To leave behind family and home, likely forever—it was not something a man would consider asking his wife to do if the rewards weren’t likely to be considerable. There were many risks; things could so easily go wrong. Still, they had to think of their youngsters and hope that they’d all find better prospects in the colony.
Ann Long was from Dunster, on Somerset’s northern edge. From the nearby beach she could look across the Bristol Channel to Wales. It used to be a busy port for trade in wool, wine and grain. Since the sea had retreated several hundred years earlier, it had become a centre for cloth manufacture: Dunster woollen cloth was rightly famous throughout the whole country.
Walking through the village, under the gaze of Dunster Castle on its lofty hill, Ann would have passed the ancient octagonal Yarn Market, a reminder of the days when the town dominated trade in wool and cloth.
Above: Dunster Castle on the hill; and the medieval era yarn market in the village centre, 2023
Ann’s father was William Long, a saddler: a skilled occupation which easily supported his small family of wife Martha Headford and their three children.
While still a single woman, Ann had given birth to a daughter in 1825. She’d had to endure the sting of seeing baby Eliza described as a base-born child in the baptismal record.6 After Ann and Will married at the majestic Church of St George in Dunster in 1827, that no longer mattered: they were a family, though Eliza kept her mother’s maiden name of Long.
The family had settled at Tower Hill in Stogursey, just across the hills from Crowcombe. Ann’s father went to live with them after the wedding, since his wife had died the previous year.7 Other children arrived quickly: Martha in 1828; Mary Ann the year after; Thomas in 1833. Then came Beadon in 1836, Elizabeth in 1839 and lastly John in 1841. They were all baptised at Stogursey’s St Andrew’s church.8The voyage
Now the family was preparing for the Una’s departure. Most of their belongings were stowed below decks in trunks and boxes. They’d put clothes and items they’d need for the voyage in their allotted space in the emigrant quarters. Emigrants were told that there would be very little room on board, as the ship also carried cargo for stores and households in the colony, so they had to balance the needs of their family over a voyage of several months, and limited washing facilities, with the small area they would occupy.
They had to bring their own basic cooking equipment, plates and cutlery, as well as bedding and towels; and a ‘slop bucket’ or chamber pot for use as a privy, especially at night. Each family group would be issued with daily rations to prepare meals. The food would seem very monotonous after a while: salted meat or fish, dry biscuit, porridge of oatmeal or barley, peas and potatoes, and cheese. They’d have an allowance of tea, sugar, and dried fruits such as currants. The younger children would probably screw up their faces at the compulsory doses of lime juice, which they were told would prevent the dreaded shipboard disease of scurvy. Water would also be rationed. A plain diet: but at least they’d all be adequately fed during the voyage.
Images from on board HMS Victory at Porstmouth Historic Dockyards, 2023
The assisted emigrants’ quarters in steerage was a large space divided by a long wooden table down the centre, with berths arranged in rows on the sides. Passengers constructed partitions of sorts between family groups to give some privacy; a bedsheet or blanket if they could be spared. There were over three hundred emigrants just like the Newtons: married couples, single men and women, and about eighty children and babies.
‘Immigrants at Dinner, 1844‘, engraving.
With kind permission of Australian National LibraryThe odours in the stuffy space were terrible: so many bodies together along with the smell of mutton boiling or fish frying. It was a relief to go above and breathe in the tang of the sea breeze. The unfamiliar sensations as the ship lifted and sank with the swell made moving around difficult until people found their sea legs.
The youngsters were likely brimming with excitement at being on board, running along the deck, examining the rigging and all the other unfamiliar sights and sounds. Perhaps Ann and the older children had mixed feelings. As the Una drew anchor and sailed out of the shelter of Plymouth harbour, did they look on the shores of England for the last time with some sadness, wondering what lay ahead?
As it happened, the voyage was to prove more dangerous than they could have anticipated.
They’d been warned of the usual difficulties and perils of a long sea voyage: seasickness, shipboard fever or accidents, storms, hot weather through the tropical regions around the Equator. Boredom which would set in after the first week or so: shipboard routines were important for cleanliness and health, but repetitive; and after a while the experience of being surrounded by nothing but sea became tiresome.
What they had not expected was a mutiny.
William and Ann’s story will be continued next week…
- Marriage of Thomas Newton & Edith Bossley 23 Dec; Burial of Thomas Newton 8 Feb 1690; Somerset Parish Records, 1538-1914; Reference Number: D\P\crow/2/1/1; Somerset, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials 1531-1812 From Ancestry.com, accessed 6 October 2023; Baptism of Abraham Newton 13 Jan 1663; Marriage of Abraham Newton & Sarah Sulley 31 Oct 1701 in Phillimore’s Transcript File line number 171, Somerset Crowcombe Parish Registers; Burial of Abraham Newton 27 July 1729; Baptism of Wm Newton 24 March 1703; Baptism of John Newton 24 Aug 1748; Burial of John Newton 1 May 1789; 1653: in Somerset Heritage Service; Taunton, Somerset, England; Somerset Parish Records, 1538-1914; Reference Number: D\P\crow/2/1/1 Via Ancestry.com, accessed 22 June 2024
- Baptism of WIlliam Nurton (sic) 21 May 1804 in Somerset Heritage Service, Taunton, Somerset, England; Somerset Parish Records 1538-1914; Ref No D\Pstogs/2/1/4Via Ancestry.com, accessed 10 Oct 2023
- Marriage Martha Buller & Thomas Newton at Nether Stowey 1798, in England, Pallot’s marriage Index, 1780-1837 Via Ancestry.com, accessed 22 June 2024; Baptism Charlotte Newton 6 Oct 1800 in Somerset Heritage Service, Taunton, Somerset, Somerset Parish Records 1538-1914 Ref No D\P\crow/2/1/2 via Ancestry.com.accessed 22 June 2024
- Will of George Buller of Nether Stowey 1 Oct 1799,in National Archives, Kew Surrey, England, Records of Perogative Court of Canterbury Series PROB 11, class: PROB 11, Piece 1331 Will Registers 1799-1801 Howe Quire numbers 693-745 (1799) via Ancestry.com, accessed 5 Oct 2023
- Marriage of William Newton & Ann Long 15 Nov 1827 in England Select Marriages 1538-1973 Via Ancestry.com, accessed 29 Sept 2023
- Baptism of Eliza Long 13Nov 1825 in Somerset Heritage Services, Taunton, Somerset, Ref no D\P\du/2/1/6,Somerset, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1914 via Ancestry.com accessed 7 March 2024
- Burial of Martha Long 18 Oct 1826 in England, Select Deaths & Burials, 1538-1991, Dunster, St George Parish Reg no 195 Somerset Heritage Services Ref no D\P\stogs/2/1/7
- Baptism of Thomas Newton 11/12/1831; Somerset, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1914 Beadon Newton bapt. 13/10/1836; Somerset Heritage Service; Taunton, Somerset, England; Reference Number: D\P\stogs/2/1/7 Elizabeth Newton bapt 21/10/1839
Travels with my Ancestors #19: In the Shadows of War (Part Two)
This is the continuing story of the family and descendants of convicts Thomas Eather and Elizabeth Lee in Australia. You can find the very first post in this series here. That one deals with my journey to discover Elizabeth’s beginnings in Lancaster; following posts explore the Eather roots in Kent, then the journeys of both on convict ships to NSW, where they met and created a family and life together.
This chapter in the Eather family story is about my grandparents: Florence May Creek (1896 – 1973) and Ernest Beden Newton (1888 – 1955). You can find part one of their story (Travels with my Ancestors #18) here.
In Part One of In the Shadows of War we saw Florence struggling with the devastation of the loss of her beloved eldest son ‘Snow’ during the 1942 fall of Singapore to the Japanese. At home, she had to deal with a volatile and violent husband. In this part of the story we learn a little more about that man: where his people came from and the life he made with Florence.
Son of English Immigrants
Ernest’s parents (Beadon Newton and Elizabeth Robinson) had both emigrated from England with their parents as children. Their families had settled in the Hunter district and that’s where Ernie was born, the second youngest of eight children, in 1888.1
As a youngster he was involved in a scrape which brought him before West Maitland Police Court in early 1905. He was seventeen and with his brother George (aged fourteen) and two other boys, had stolen 40 pounds of lead from the roof of a local school. The little gang had crept out in the dark of night to purloin the material which they then sold to a second-hand dealer. Lead was a popular roofing material because of its flexibility, malleability, resistance to corrosion and wear, and it could be endlessly recycled—very alluring for a dealer.While they initially succeeded in their plan, they were found, arrested, and charged with theft. They were fined £2 10s which was paid on their behalf by unnamed ‘friends.’ 2 The boys could have fallen foul of an unscrupulous dealer offering money for stolen lead; otherwise it was youthful foolishness and hoping for a quick quid that led them astray.
Ernie learnt from this experience because he never came before a court again—despite his later behaviour at home. As Florence knew, a man’s violence towards his family was rarely punished, no matter how much damage he inflicted.
His father had been a carpenter but Ernie worked as a fettler for one of the private railway lines that operated around the Hunter then. With the expansion of coal mining in the district, rail transport was in demand to move coal and mine workers, and private lines ran to and from places like South Maitland, Kurri Kurri and Cessnock.3
He had a shed in the yard where he did work on saddles, bridles, fences and anything else that needed doing. Like most working men of his time, he could turn his hands to many practical tasks. The cows and chickens they kept provided milk, butter and eggs. He shot rabbits for the dinner table. He brought home coal for the fire, from mines near his work on the rail lines. They were poor, but his many flaws did not include a failure to provide for his family as best he could.To the Mountains
After the war ended, Florence and Ernie made the move to Bilpin, to live on the property Snow had taken up there before his enlistment. Snow had named her as administrator of his will and his interest in the Bilpin land formed part of his estate.29
Despite the official Army notification of Snow’s death, she continued to hope that he would return to her. Living in Bilpin meant that if he did come home, she would be there to meet him. She could feel close to him, in the mountain village he’d chosen as his future home.
Ernie agreed with the move; Snow had been the apple of his father’s eye, too.
The journey from Maitland to the Blue Mountains took over two weeks, travelling by horse-drawn wagon. Ernie had converted an old cart for the purpose; it was piled with their modest household items and possessions. Ernie took the reins and the horse plodded its slow way south.
It nearly ended in tragedy. When the horse reared up, startled by something on the road, Florence was tumbled from the cart which then ran over her prone body. A stint in hospital was needed for her injuries to heal before she could settle in Bilpin.
It was a difficult start for the family, especially for youngest daughter Isabel, who at thirteen had to cook and clean house for her father while her mother was in hospital. Making matters worse was the discomfort of the old house they rented from a local man, Mr Heyde; it was a dark and cold place where winter winds sent cold fingers into the many cracks in the floor and walls.5
From 1950 Florence leased Snow’s land while a cottage was built for them by Oswald Johnson, whose son Bill was later to marry Isabel. In 1953 Florence successfully applied to the Lands Department to convert her lease to a Conditional Purchase.6 Son Bob built his house on the other half of the property.
The Bilpin cottage c 1951 She had returned to settle in the mountains that edged the Hawkesbury valley, where she’d been born and where her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents had lived. It was the valley where her convict ancestors had farmed alongside the Hawkesbury river, the ancient winding waterway that ran from the mountains to the sea. New generations of Eather and Lee descendants would now regard the valley and its surrounding mountains as home.
Moving from Maitland to the tiny hamlet of Bilpin took some adjustment. First sparsely settled by Europeans in the early years of the colony, Bilpin was still small, with few services. There was a weatherboard School of Arts hall, a tiny school, post office and telephone exchange, a petrol bowser with hardware and produce store. Electricity was not available until 1953; before that everyone lit their homes with kerosine or pressure lamps, or had their own generators.7
Transport was often a problem, as the road from Richmond to Bilpin and out the other side to Lithgow always needed maintenance and upgrading. Many locals used horse and buggy or cart into the 1950s. Groceries, meat, bread and milk deliveries were made by stores at Kurrajong or Richmond; there were no doctors or other medical services in Bilpin.
Her new home was surrounded by hills thickly forested with eucalypts, tree-ferns and climbing vines, punctuated on the lower slopes by neat orchards.
The cool climate and productive soil suited fruit growing. Bilpin was known as the ‘Land of the mountain apple,’ with many flourishing orchards producing a variety of apples along with pears, plums, peaches and nectarines. From early times, the beautiful stands of tall native trees attracted timber getters; there were still sawmills near the village.
Their cottage in Bilpin was a simple one, with a vegetable garden and chicken coop in the back near the outhouse. Life was as busy as ever with many chores that needed doing.
She had left behind the ever-present risk of river floods, and exchanged that for a new worry—bushfires which could take hold on the thickly forested hills and threaten homes and lives.
Still, many of her children and grandchildren lived nearby, visiting often. Christmas afternoons were for the grandkids, who came to show their Christmas gifts to Nanna.8 She loved those times with the young ones all around her. And she was at home on the land chosen by Snow.
The Newton home at Bilpin c1960s She cared for her aunt Isabella until Isabella’s death in 1955, and Aquilla, Florence’s eldest brother, during his illness a few years later. 9 Florence was known and loved for her generosity and kindness.
She lived there with Ernie until his death after a stroke in 1955.10
On the January day he was buried, as Florence stood at the graveside at St Peters, Richmond, she was finally free.11
She had eighteen years without him, peaceful years to enjoy her family. But she never forgot her first born child, keeping his memory alive, especially at Christmas.A Quiet Courage
Florence died from pancreatic cancer in 1973 at Kurrajong hospital, at the age of seventy-seven.12 She was buried alongside Ernie at St Peters, Richmond. She could rest at last, even lying so close to the man who had bullied and abused her for so many years. He could no longer hurt her.
The gravestone of Ernest and Florence at St Peters churchyard in Richmond, NSW. A plaque commemorating their son, Doug, sits beneath. Nearby are graves of other Eather family members and descendants. She was a gentle and generous woman, a simple wife and mother who did not draw attention to herself, preferring to keep in the background. Her life with Ernie blunted much of her sense of self-worth. She did her very best for her family with the meagre resources she had, coped with a volatile and bullying husband, and raised her children in trying circumstances.
A photo of her as a young woman, taken before her marriage and all that came with it, shows a pretty girl with dark hair and a full mouth. She is not smiling: her thoughtful gaze is to the side of the camera. Was she dreaming of what her future might hold?
She deserved a better life than the one she went on to have. The undying affection of her children and grandchildren may have been some compensation for that. She made sure that her family knew they were loved; not by demonstrative hugs or declarations but by her hard work and kindness. All who knew her loved her; she was affectionately called ‘Aunty May’ (her middle name) by many.
Footnotes:
1 Birth registration of Ernest Beden Newton 1888/27288 Certified copy 31 Oct 1988
2 Newcastle Morning Herald & Miner’s Advocate 28 January 1905 Via Trove, accessed 12 Jan 2023
3 Stephen Miller Smith, The History of Rail Services in the Hunter Valley, University of Newcastle, at https://hunterlivinghistories.com/ Accessed 15 Jan 2023
4 Ernest Harvey Newton in Indexes to deceased estate files; Archive Series: NRS 13341; Series: A Series (1939-1948); Reel Number: 3277State Records Authority of New South Wales, Australia; Via Ancestry.com, accessed 26 Jan 2024
5 Isabel Johnson to Denise Newton, telephone discussion, 2024
6 Certificate of Granting an Application for Conversion of a Special Lease Tenure 54/5900, in family collection of Doug Newton
7 Meredyth Hungerford, Bilpin, The Apple Country: A Local History, p307
8 Kris Newton to Denise Newton, conversations 2023
9 Isabelle Johnson to Denise Newton, telephone discussion 2024
10 NSW Births, Deaths & Marriages, Death Reg 1955/427
11 Windsor & Richmond Gazette 25 Jan 1955 p12 Via Trove, accessed 21 January 2023
12 NSW Death Registration Florence May Newton No 1973/64407
