The Life and Times of Six Australian Pioneers

James Arthur Loftus

Description

This true life adventure story is the saga of four ordinary Englishmen—a pair of banished, first-time petty thieves and a couple chosen to be settlers—who charted a course that led them to help build and mould an infant country on the remotest continent in the known world. Two of their offspring united to continue the adventure.
Vivid first-hand accounts have been pried from the daily, hand-written journals and writings of first-class passengers, crew, and one of the convicts aboard the small wooden sailing ships, as they battled winter storms on the treacherous North Atlantic and Southern Oceans and endured scorching doldrums in the equatorial region. Mutinies, inventions, discoveries, and wars have been chronicled to provide a backdrop of the prevailing international, societal, and interpersonal relationships of the period.
Characters from history’s stage weave their way through these pages—figures including James Cook, Horatio Nelson, Robert Emmet, Jonathan Swift, William Bligh, Lachlan Macquarie, Samuel Marsden, Walter Lawry, Alfred Howitt, and some long-forgotten souls like the tragic Margaret Sullivan. Artwork of the period is included to help stimulate the imagination and help place the reader beside the characters as they toiled to eke out an existence.
The primary objective of this biography is a quest to achieve a broader, deeper understanding and appreciation of the typical person—including their struggles, challenges, and contributions—in early colonial New South Wales, Victoria, and New Zealand. The goal is to further the development of a robust comprehension of the Life and Times that these Six Australian Pioneers experienced, as well, the millions of other pioneers just like them. This book will also appeal to those with an interest in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Australian, European, and New Zealand history; late eighteenth-century ocean voyages; and those with an interest in artwork of the period.

Sujets

• Social History
• Histoire
• History
• Australia

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris AU
• Date de parution: 21 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781664101562
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 35 Mo

Extrait

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SIX AUSTRALIAN PIONEERS

(1760–1880)







JIM ARTHUR LOFTUS



Copyright © 2020 by James Arthur Loftus. 811922

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.


Xlibris
AU TFN: 1 800 844 927 (Toll Free inside Australia)
AU Local: 0283 108 187 ([phone] from outside Australia)
www.xlibris.com.au


ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6641-0155-5
Hardcover
978-1-6641-0157-9
EBook
978-1-6641-0156-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020920188



Rev. date: 11/16/2022



SPECIAL CARE NOTICE
Members of Aboriginal communities are respectfully advised that this tome contains names and images of people who have passed away.
The records herein may contain terms or annotations that might be culturally sensitive and not normally used in certain public or community contexts. Certain terms or annotations may reflect the period in which they were written and considered inappropriate today.



To my Aussie Grandfather
who jokingly quipped his family’s Coat of Arms consisted of a
Ball and Chain.
Captain Arthur George Lilly (1894-1978)




Captain Arthur George Lilly



AUTOGRAPHS

1807

1807

1803

1815

1826

1826



SIX PIONEERS
1761 – 1883
Elizabeth Lilly
(c.1773–aft.1830)
arrived 1800
George Boyden
(1773–aft.1810)
arrived 1799
William Osburne
&
Mary MLeod
(c.1761–1834)
(c.1787–aft.1835)
arrived 1808

& their children
George Lilly
(1803–1867)
born NSW
Mary Grace Osburne
(1809–1883)
born Sydney, NSW




Grace and George Lilly i


i Grandparents of Capt. Arthur George Lilly – c. 1860



CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
England (1760–1808)
Ireland (1600–1803)
The Marquis Cornwallis (1795–1796)
The Hillsborough (1798–1799)
The Speedy (1799–1800)
The Speke (1808)
New South Wales (1788–1835)
Van Diemen’s Land (1803–1837)
Port Phillip District (1835–1842)
New Zealand (1842–1852)
Victoria (1852–1883)
Epilogue
Afterword
Ancestors Of Captain Arthur George Lilly
Ancestors Of Francis Thomas Van Hemert, M.D.
Ancestors Of William Wood (1792–1867)
Notes To The Family Trees
References
Illustration Credits



PREFACE
WHERE DO I COME FROM ? This is a question that presents itself to many of us at some point in our lives. In the case of my Canadian children, the most straightforward answer might be: mostly from Ireland as well as England, Wales, Scotland, Holland, and probably France. Their Irish ancestry has been traced back to the early 1800s and a few into the late 1700s where the trail turns quite cold. ii On the other hand, several English families have been followed back to the early 1600s, to the days of Queen Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare, with at least one root penetrating back to the mid-1500s, during the reign of Henry VIII—almost to the time of the Protestant Reformation and the end of the Middle Ages or medieval period. iii Their Dutch ancestry has also been traced back to the mid-1500s. Two well-travelled ancestors in that family line moved to opposite sides of the globe. Then they returned to England only to move back to the southern hemisphere; one lady repeated the moves yet again. A couple of my children’s ancestors reportedly lived in mid-sixteenth-century France. 1 iv
MOST OF MY CHILDREN’S IRISH CLANS emigrated to the British Crown Colonies of Lower and Upper Canada between about 1806 and 1842 (before the Great Famine), although several arrived a decade or two later. One branch left Ireland in the early to mid-1700s, probably fished for a time out of Jersey in the Channel Islands, and then followed the fishing and settled in the British Crown Colony of Newfoundland sometime around 1790. A few Irish folks emigrated to the United States of America in the mid-1800s before some of their children relocated to Canada more than a century ago. Of the many Irish families, there is one Irish lass whose husband may have been Welsh or of Welsh ancestry, and there is one other lass blessed with an Irish birth v whose father, husband, and descendants were strictly English—two and three centuries ago.
William Forbes Adams’ 1932 treatise, Ireland and Irish Emigration to the New World from 1815 to the Famine, 2 provides a brief initial insight into why so many of our Irish ancestors emigrated when they did—for the most part, well before the Great Famine (1845-1852):
First among motives leading Irishmen to emigrate we must put desire to escape from Ireland. The conviction that the country had no future existed as early as 1815 among some of the more prosperous farmers; after the Munster famine of 1822 it was much more widespread, and by the middle of the thirties had become fairly general among the lower classes except in Connaught. Steadily and inexorably the pressure of population, extended unemployment, reduced wages, and raised rentals to a ruinous figure. Famine and disease swept over the country periodically, further endangering lives already precariously insecure. Civil war, coupled with political and religious dissensions and agrarian friction, completed the forces of expulsion. vi
While this may be news to many today, it was rather well understood not too many generations ago. I remember a conversation with my father over half a century ago regarding why our ancestors left Ireland before the Great Famine. He simply said: “In Ireland, there was always a famine of some sort—just not as severe and widespread as the great one.”
ONE DUTCH ANCESTOR, a businessman, crossed the English Channel and became a naturalised Englishman in 1719. Joan Van Hemert vii emigrated only a generation after Dutch-born William of Orange invaded Britain in 1688, defeated King James II (the last Roman Catholic English monarch), and was crowned William III (King of England and King of Ireland) and William II (King of Scotland). The known ancestors of Joan Van Hemert (1694–1758) all resided in Amsterdam, where a strictly maternal path has been traced back to Pietergen Ariaens. Pietergen was born about 1550, about the time of the expansion of Calvinism to this remote corner of the Holy Roman Empire and approximately twenty years before the establishment of the Dutch Reformed Church.
One English and Scottish couple emigrated to Canada with their family sometime before 1840. This exclusively British ancestral line slowly melded through three successive generational marriages into Irish Canadian families.
Four English (the father of the English lass was a Scot), one Welsh, and one Irish ancestor—including the prime subjects of this tome—emigrated to Australia in the years 1798, 1799, 1808, and 1852. They and their descendants moved around a great deal before my children’s second most recently naturalised Canadian ancestor, a fourth-generation Australian (although his father, a third-generation Aussie, was born in New Zealand) chose Vancouver, Canada as his official residence. This seaman chose Vancouver as his future home soon after he arrived on the Empress of Russia on Christmas Eve 1921, five years before he met his bride one day in the Dominion of Newfoundland. That couple viii promptly sailed off to Antwerp on the Chris Moller where they enjoyed an extended honeymoon; he was captain of that tall ship, recently loaded with Newfoundland’s lumber. He had spent most of his early life sailing the seven seas in the tall ships.
THE FIRST OF MY CHILDREN’S ANCESTORS known to have been born in any of Britain’s crown colonies are two of the primary subjects of this tome: George Lilly and Mary Grace Osburne. George was born in 1803, probably in Parramatta, just a generation after James Cook discovered the land in 1770 and a mere fifteen years after the first Europeans had landed on the continent with the mission to establish and build a British colony. Grace was born six years later in Sydney. Although Charles Furey was born about 1790, either in the British Crown Colony of Newfoundland or on the Island of Jersey, a British Crown Dependency in the Channel Islands—there is convincing speculation he descends from a fishing community in County Galway, possibly Claddagh. Robert Haney was next; he was born in 1811 in Québec City, Lower Canada—the son of an Ulsterman and soldier in King George III’s army.
THE RICHNESS OF MY CHILDREN’S MOSTLY IRISH HERITAGE has endured almost two centuries after their ancestors emigrated. This demonstrates how, over preceding generations, many people were attracted to each other, perhaps by chance, but also in no small part by familiar cultural or community bonds.
While usually overlooked, religion can also provide some valuable insight into a person’s past. In stark contrast to the attitudes of today’s western society, one’s religion was an essential factor in choosing a life partner. Religious prejudice is often deeply ingrained. Not long ago, religious discrimination was practised op