An Australian Emigrant Family

Peter Blackwell, Ph.D. Brown University '88 (Rhode Island) and Mark Blackwell, B.Com. B.D. (Euroa, Victoria, Australia)

[email protected]

This is my father's country. Manager of the flour mill,
he belongs in a crowded picture. His friends
and busy, flour dusted ghosts
lumping wheat.....

--Joyce Lee, My Father's Country

George Francis Blackwell was twelve years old when he arrived in Liverpool from Leicester on a winter's day in 1855. On January 6, he was due to sail from England to Australia with his father, George, and his twenty-seven year old uncle John Ward Margetts. Young George was the oldest child and so he was off to work along with the other men.

What mixed feelings he must have had. It would be two years before he would see his mother and brothers and sisters again. His youngest brother, Edwin Orlando, was only two years old. Letters would take up to six moths to be answered. At the same time there was the anticipation of a trip to the other end of the world - to Australia. A small boy sailing with his thirty-eight year old father and his uncle to begin work in a new land. His father had a contract to manage the Newry Flour Mill at Longford in Tasmania.

That wasn't all. When he arrived at the docks in Liverpool he saw an amazing sight - a great clipper ship named the Lightning, and as her name promised, one of the fastest vessels in the world. It was the ship that would carry him to his new home.

What a sight! The simple full female figure below the huge twenty foot bowsprit stood in contrast to her stern which was ornamented with gilded carved work. Her bottom shone bronze as she had recently been copper covered in Liverpool, and the rest of the hull outside was painted black. Inside she was pearl color, relieved with white, and the waterways were lead color.

What he could see from the outside was but a foretaste of what George would yet experience. The dining saloon was wainscotted and painted pure white, like enamel, and was relieved with gilded mouldings and flower-work. It was 48 feet long, 13 feet wide aft, and 14 forward, and had a large mahogany table its whole length, with settees along its sides. At the forward partition there was a costly sideboard of marble, and rising from it a large mirror. Another mirror and sofa ornamented the after part, so that the saloon was reflected from both ends.

Although he was not to enjoy the spacious state-rooms and other apartments on each side of the dining saloon, the whole length, rich in furniture, light, and ventilation, nevertheless, even between decks, where George would live, there were 10 plate-glass air ports on each side, skylights and ventilators along the sides of the house above, so that they were well supplied with light and ventilation, and fitted up in superior style.

This was the period of great "Colonial" clipper ships and a fierce competitive rivalry had developed between two companies and their captains. The competition to this point had centered on the Atlantic run to and from New York. The White Star Line had at the head of its fleet, Red Jacket, under the command of Captain Eldridge, and the Black Ball Line now had the Lightning, captained by James Nichol Forbes.

In the Liverpool Courier of March 1854, there appeared an article indicating that Captain Eldridge had made the fastest Atlantic crossing ever in the Red Jacket in January of that year.

Captain Forbes was incensed. He wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Northern Daily Times dated March 8th, 1854, "...I think I can dispute that assertion, not only in so far as regards my own passage in the Lightning, but I can also name several other ships which have made faster passages than the Red Jacket." He went on to say,

From inquiries I have instituted I find that the Red Jacket left her dock at New York on January 9th, and proceeded some distance down the bay and that she finally sailed at 5 a.m. on the 10th and arrived in the Mersey at 6 p.m. on the 24th, which makes the passage after deducting difference of time, 14 days and 8 hours, and not 13 days and 1 hour as represented at the time of her arrival.

I find on reference to the Liverpool Courier that the passage of the Sovereign of the Seas [another Black Ball Line ship, sister to the Lightning] in July last year, one of the worst seasons for making a fast passage in a sailing ship, occupied only 14 days and 2 hours, and the old packet ship Independence made the passage from New York to Liverpool ten years ago in 14 days and 5 hours, and if I remember rightly the Yorkshire made the passage in about the same time upwards of ten years ago, which are all faster passages than the Red Jacket's and from the same port.

His clincher was to scornfully note that the White Star owners refused to bet on the Red Jacket against the Lightning the sum of 100 to 500 guineas (the money to be given to charity) as both ships were scheduled to leave for Melbourne on the Australian run around the same time. No wonder his nickname was "Bully".

The race now focused on the trip to and from Australia.

The Lightning had been built in Boston by Donald Mackay for James Baines's Black Ball Line in the winter of 1853-54 as a three masted, ship rigged vessel. Her tonnage was registered at 1600 tons, length 244ft, beam 44ft, height of mainmast 164ft and she spread over 13,000 yards of sail.

In 1855, John Willis Griffiths observed in the Monthly Nautical Magazine, "No timid hand or hesitating brain gave form and dimensions to the Lightning. Very great stability; acute extremities; full, short midship body; comparatively small deadrise, and the longest end forward, are points in the excellence of this ship."

The hand and brain that had made her, Donald Mackay, wrote a Letter to the Editor to the Scientific American in November 26, 1859, saying:

Although I designed and built the Clipper Ship Lightning and therefore ought to be the last to praise her, yet such has been her performance since Englishmen learned to sail her that I must confess I feel proud of her. You are aware that she was so sharp and concave forward that one of her stupid captains who did not comprehend the principle upon which she was built, persuaded the owners to fill in the hollows of her bows. They did so, and according to their British bluff notions, she was not only better for the addition, but would sail faster, and wrote me to the effect. Well, the next passage to Melbourne, Australia, she washed the encumbrance away on one side, and when she returned to Liverpool, the other side was also cleared away. Since then she has been running as I modeled her. As a specimen of her speed, I may say that I saw recorded in her log (of 24 hours) 436 nautical miles, a trifle over 18 knots an hour.

It was a great day when this remarkable ship ship left Constitution Dock in Boston for her maiden voyage. Duncan McLean in the Boston Daily Atlas of 1854, said of her, "Not a ripple curled before her cutwater, nor did the water break at a single place along her sides. She left a wake straight as an arrow, and this was the only mark of her progress. There was a slight swell, and as she rose, one could see the arc of her forefoot rise gently over the sea as she increased her speed."

On March 1, 1854, the Lightning sailed 436 miles, which is the longest day's run recorded by a sailing ship. The ships's log reported,

March 1. Wind S., strong gales; bore away for the North Channel, carried away the foretopsail and lost jib; hove the log several times, and found the ship going through the water at the rate of 18 to 19 knots per hour; lee rail under water, and the rigging slack; saw the Irish land at 9:30 p.m. Distance run in the twenty-four hours, 436 miles.

She was ready for the big race!

The Lightning left Liverpool on her maiden voyage on May 15, 1854 with Capt."Bully" Forbes in command. She reached Port Phillip Heads on 31st July, a passage of 77 days. She returned leaving Melbourne on August 20 and reaching Liverpool in 64 days 3 hours around Cape Horn.

George and his father were on the next voyage. They were not the only ones who were aware of the excitement of the race. Captain Forbes had taken command of the Schomberg and a new commander, Captain Anthony Enright, had the responsibility of maintaining the reputation of the ship and the Black Ball Line. The Lightning had 47 saloon, 53 second cabin, and could handle 20 intermediate and 253 steerage passengers. On the trip that George was on there were 228 passengers. The average age was 23 years.

Gold had been discovered in Australia in 1851. In the following years, the economy had expanded and the passengers on the trip were largely skilled workers under contract going to meet the needs of the growing Australian industry and agriculture. Two were farmers and four were millers, one of them George's father. Three were carpenters and joiners and there were two painters, four laborers, and two seamen. There was a coachman, a shoemaker, a boiler maker, a baker, and a shepherd. Apart from wives and children, there were six matrons and at least three spinsters and a gent or two. Two hundred and eighteen were English and ten were Irish.

As the anchor was raised, George would have heard the sea shanty that belonged to the Black Line Line.

When a trim Black Ball liner's preparing for sea
To me, way hey, blow the man down
On a trim Black Ball liner I wasted me prime
O, give me some time to blow the man down

When a trim Black Ball liner preparing for sea
To me, way hey, blow the man down
You'll split your sides laughing such sights you would see
O, give me some time to blow the man down

There's tinkers and tailors, shoemakers and all
To me, way hey, blow the man down
They're all shipped for sailors aboard the Black Ball
O, give me some time to blow the man down

When a big Black Ball liner's a-leaving her dock
To me, way hey, blow the man down
The boys and the girls on the pier-head do flock
O, give me some time to blow the man down

Now, when the big liner, she's clear of land
To me, way hey, blow the man down
Our bosun he roars out the word of command
O, give me some time to blow the man down

Come quickly, lay aft to the break of the poop
To me, way hey, blow the man down
Or I'll help you along with the toe of me boot
O, give me some time to blow the man down

Pay attention to orders, now, you one and all
To me, way hey, blow the man down
For see high above there flies the Black Ball
O, give me some time to blow the man down

'Tis larboard and starboard, on deck you will sprawl
To me, way hey, blow the man down
For kicking Jack Rogers commands the Black Ball
O, give me some time to blow the man down

From the Mersey River to the Equator took over three weeks. Then down the coast of Africa to the Cape of Good Hope. As she turned the Cape she caught the "Forties" which carried her for a month across to Port Philip Bay where she would have been taken through the heads by the steamer Washington and anchored at Sandridge in Hobson's Bay about three miles from Melbourne.

George was to make the trip from Liverpool in 73 days, a new record. The return trip was 79 days. Captain Enright gained a reputation as the best-run emigrant ship as could be found. But the glory was not to be for long for the Lightning. The Red Jacket, now under the command of Captain Reed, made the journey from Liverpool in 69 days and back in 73 days. An extraordinary trip! The reputation of the ship and Line was at stake. Bully Forbes was brought back to the Lightning. The following is from a Liverpool paper, Oct. 23, 1855.

The Lightning, on her recent passage to Melbourne, was delayed by light and head winds, and consequently, made a comparatively long run of nearly 78 days; but, on the passage home, Captain Forbes has shown what the Lightning is capable of doing under moderately favorable circumstances, by making the run in the unparalleled short space of 63 days -- thus regaining the supremacy which had been snatched from him by Captain Reed....

The reputation of the Lightning and the Black Ball Line was restored once more!

The Lightning continued carrying passengers, wool and gold between Great Britain and Australia and did so until she burned while loading wool in Geelong on November 1, 1869.

Meanwhile, George, with his father and uncle, boarded the tiny 145 ton ship Black Swan with 9 male and 1 female steerage passengers to sail from Melbourne to Tasmania. Also on board were 13 English "Gents" and one 19 year old girl.

This inauspicious collection of 24 travellers did not speak highly of their ultimate goal. Robert Hughes observes in The Fatal Shore, "....consider Tasmania, which stagnated. Its population had crept from 69,000 in 1851 to 102,000 in 1871, not even doubling in twenty years. Visitors at the end of the 1860s saw apathy and depression everywhere: silent streets, building at a standstill, farmers sinking into rural solipsism, empty docks, a static populace heavy with old people and children but deserted by the young and energetic, who had gone across Bass Strait. The flood of immigrants to Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales passed Tasmania by. The island was decaying...." (p. 589)

The Blackwells came to Longford on the banks of the South Esk and Macquarie Rivers which was one of the oldest towns in Tasmania having been settled in 1813 by European settlers from Norfolk Island giving the district the name Norfolk Plains. It was the general belief that opportunities were better in the north-west. The original name of the town was Latour, but it was renamed, Longford, after the Longford Hotel built around 1827 by the Launceston Postmaster, Newman Williatt. Longford was in the prosperous wheatlands along with the towns of Cressy and Wesbury. There on the bank of the Esk the Newry Flour Mill gathered its power from the waters that flowed down from the Tasmanian High Table and added its produce to that of the flour mills in Launceston and the Oatlands.

* * * * * * *

Edwin Orlando, the youngest child in the Blackwell family, was at the docks in Liverpool on the 22nd. of May, 1857, where his father and older brother had been two years earlier. The ship he was to board, Sir W.F. Williams, was a far less pretentious vessel than the Lightning. She was merely an 870 ton wooden barque which the Liverpool company of Shaw and Co. used to trade between Liverpool and Hobart-Town. The journey would take them 91 days.

Edwin had plenty of company. He sailed with his mother, Ann Francis (36), his sisters, Caroline (12) and Ann (7), and his brother, Thomas (9). His widowed grandmother Margetts, now 69 years old, joined the voyagers with her companion, Miss Emma Woods. There was also his uncle, William Margetts (39) and his wife, Mary (27), and his cousins Thomas Butlin (2) and William Peck (2 months). Aunt Anne Margetts (33) with her three year old son, Stephen Peck, was on her way to join her husband, John, who had sailed with George and George Blackwell Junior two years earlier.

The families were finally reunited in the beautiful but still developing north-west region of Tasmania in the shadow of Cradle Mountain.

The Margetts family initially settled on a farming and grazing property in the New Norfolk district, later at Hagley and Black Sugar Loaf at Westbury, eventually moving to the small settlement of Wynyard, which was one of small communities struggling for identity and permanence along the coast.

Stanley was the first settlement of any substance. In 1842 it had been surveyed and opened to purchase and it grew at a remarkable pace and by 1849 it was a thriving town with a population of several hundreds.

In contrast, the settlements to the east made slow progress. John King was the first settler to come to Table Cape. By 1850 most of the land on the west of the Inglis River had been leased as far as Jacob's Boat Harbour. Three brothers, John, Joseph and Matthias Alexander named the little community Alexandria and by the middle 1850s there was a small town reserve, a general store, a draper's shop, a shoemaker's shop, a blacksmith as well as the Wynyard Arms Hotel owned by Joseph Alexander. Matthias took over management of the hotel until his death in 1865. The small settlement stagnated and eventually disappeared in the 1860s.

On the eastern bank of the Inglis River, the Government initiated a project to survey Crown lands and laid out the town reserve of Wynyard, named after the commanding officer of British troops in Australasia who visited Tasmania in 1851, General Edward Buckley Wynyard.

In May 1853, two young Manxmen, William Moore and Robert Quiggin, formed a partnerships and arrived at Wynyard with a complete sawmill plant which they installed together with stores and jetties. Moore and Quiggin built an intercolonial timber trade which at one point was the largest in the colony. They established a small fleet of ships and developed a brisk trade with New Zealand where the demand for Tasmanian hardwood greatly exceeded the supply.

Wynyard itself grew but slowly. The Advocate newspaper in the 1850s reported it as "a poor miserable;e place, nearly the whole covered in scrub and good sized trees here and there. There were no roads - only tracks made by paling cutters - dust in the summer and slushy potholes in the winter" and "six or seven houses all told".

Further to the east the town of Burnie was emerging at Emu Bay, although by 1863 there were only seven houses, three hotels, two churches and several stores with a town population of fifty people. Adding the sixty four settlers and their families in the surrounding area, the total was some four hundred people. In 1850, William Garner built the Emu Inn, later to be renamed the Welcome Hotel next to the Burnie Inn built by Thomas Wiseman a few months earlier. Thomas Wiseman was a shipbuilder on the Tamar River who was persuaded to come to Burnie to help refloat the barquentine Waterwitch which went aground in 1850 near Whalebone Creek. With a large group of helpers and much digging, the job was successful, and Wiseman so liked the area that he settled in Burnie, building the inn. For many years, a large red pane of glass in front of the swinging night light of the Burnie Inn was the official beacon guiding ships to anchor at night. Opposite the Burnie Inn he built a shipyard shipyard and the next year, Wiseman erected St. George's Church of England on what was later to became known as Church Hill. It was a wooden building with a small gallery and diamond-paned windows. Two years later, the first resident minister was established. There was a three-roomed cottage which had been opened as a Government school in 1862 with Widow Mary Morris as the teacher.

It was at Wynyard that on January 26, 1860 young George Blackwell, now 18 years old, was drowned in the Inglis River. As procedure required at that time, George Shekleton, a local farmer serving as coroner, assembled a jury of citizens at the Wynyard Arms Hotel who all swore the required oath that they had indeed seen the body "then and there lying dead" and were duly charged with inquiring how George died. They determined that he was "accidentally drowned while endeavouring to swim his horse across the Inglis river" and placed their seals next to their signatures, or in the case of James King, his mark which was witnessed by the coroner.

The rest of the Blackwell family stayed on in the Longford area. Caroline and Annie received some tuition at a girl's school but Edwin learned the trades of flour milling and blacksmithing at which he was adept at age twelve.

On July 4, 1865, Caroline was married to Mr. John Ridge from Table Cape at the Anglican Church at Longford by the Rev. A. Stackhouse and moved to John's farm just near the River Inglis. Two years later the rest of the family moved to the Wynyard area as the economic stagnation of the south spread to the wheatlands of Cressy, Longford and Westbury causing the Newry Mill to close. George Sr. bought 269 acres of land from the Crown for 278 pounds, 3 shillings and 10 pence in August of 1867 near the Flowerdale River.

They found a growing sense of community as more and more settlers purchased holdings from the Crown. The property to the west was owned by Samuel Deans who had come to Geelong from Londonderry in 1850 as a carpenter and wheelwright. He had just recently settled in the Jacob's Boat Harbour-Wynyard area. The farm beyond him was owned by his son, James Dean, and to the north and east the property belonged to William Moore, who would become the Chief (Colonial) Secretary in the 1880s. To the east there was some Moore-Quiggin property. The Margetts were not far away.

Some of the families began to hold monthly church meetings at "Springfield" and sometimes they would go by boat around the coast aways to Tollymore on Table Cape where George Shekleton had a prefabricated interdenominational church building he had brought from Ireland and erected in the corner of his farm looking out over Bass Strait. He named the little church, "Grove Chapel".

The fabric of the community was severely tested when on the 29th. of September, 1868, Edwin's other brother, Thomas William, drowned in the same river that had claimed George eight years before. Tom was 22 years old. This time the coroner was neighbor William Moore who assembled the inquest at the home of John Ridge, Tom's brother-in-law. Having viewed the body lying dead, the jury determined that Tom had been "engaged in driving a calf across the "Ford" at the Inglis River...and the said Tom William Blackwell accidentally and casually and by misfortune fell into the aforesaid River Inglis and in the waters thereof was there suffocated and drowned..." Among the inquisitors were John Alexander, Thompson Brown, Thomas Wiseman and Tom's uncle, William Margetts.

A week later, on the 7th. of October 1868, George Blackwell died of a heart attack. The two bodies were added to the tiny cemetery at Grove Chapel where young George already lay.

Seventeen-year-old Edwin was now responsible for the farm, his 48 year old mother, and his sister Anne.

When he was eighteen, on May 4, 1870, in his mother's house, Edwin married Mary Dean, who was the same age and had lived on the farm next door . The Primitive Methodist minister, Mr. Palfreyman, conducted the ceremony which was witnessed by Edwin's sister, Annie, and Mary's brother, James. In September of the same year, James and Annie were married.

Edwin assumed his new responsibilities with diligence. He taught himself to read from the Bible. He introduced a plough for tilling the soil in place of the hand tools of the past and designed a pea harvesting machine. He also developed plans for a treadle-driven sewing machine which he tried unsuccessfully to patent in the United States, the plans mysteriously disappearing there. But with the disastrously low prices for most agricultural products, the farm could not provide sufficiently for the family and Edwin needed to supplement with other sources of income.

He became a dentist of some sorts and teeth were extracted in the barn. Once a person had committed themselves to having their teeth pulled, Edwin would not allow anybody to back out.

A fine horseman, Edwin would be called on in the town to round up wild cattle. Legend has it that he once brought a bull under captivity by winding his whip round its tongue. He would ride until the horse was exhausted then on foot chase the cattle down. It is claimed that Edwin could charge double rates for farm laboring as he worked at double the speed. When he scythed, he could double the amount of others.

Three years after they were married, Edwin and Mary's first born son, Herbert, was born on May 14, 1873, and Arthur Byron was born two years after that. On Herbert's fourth birthday, May 14, 1877, both children became violently ill and died the next day. It was commonly believed that they had eaten poisonous mushrooms, although the inquest could only report that the children "did labor and languish under a grievous disease of the body to wit acute inflammation of the stomach and....did die but how such acute inflammation was caused there is no evidence to show".

Edwin and Mary had six more children over the years but Mary never really recovered from the loss of her babies. Edwin's loss was all the sadder when his sister, Caroline, died in September of 1877, reportedly from lung inflammation from becoming soaked through when driving cattle through wet grass. His mother, Anne Francis, who was to live until she was eighty-five, had already seen the death of her husband, two sons, her daughter and two grandchildren in the twenty years that she had been in the new land.

* * * * * * *

The inquest for the two children was held at the home Jonathan House and the jury included, in addition to House, William Margetts, Edwin's cousin. There was also a Robert Wigmore with four others and the coroner. People still recounted the amazing incident that had occurred in the House family over twenty years earlier and which also involved Robert Wigmore.

Jonathan House was the son of John Stagg House, J.P. of Stag Farm. In 1850, Justice House sentenced a man named Bradley to three months imprisonment for petty theft. Bradley was an ex-inmate of the Port Arthur Penal Establishment and had been an assigned servant of the Van Dieman's Land Company and upon release had vowed to get even with all who had wronged him. Upon his release from prison he struck up an acquaintance with a convict cook in military barracks, named O'Connor, who desperately wanted to get to the mainland and join the gold rush.

With the help of Bradley, O'Connor escaped and got a change of clothes. O'Connor agreed to join Bradley in going to Stagg Farm to settle accounts with John House and get some money to go to Victoria. Along the way they came to the hut of a ticket-of-leave convict , One-Eyed Smith, who agreed to show them the way to Stagg Farm, after being threatened at gun point.

Jonathan House was lighting the kitchen fire at dawn when he saw the two men approaching trying to conceal their muskets behind the unfortunate Smith. He recognized Bradley as a man he had overheard threatening to shoot his father. He woke his father but before they could find a gun and some clothes, Bradley and O'Connor entered the house. House Sr., clad in a night gown and cap, escaped through a window and ran towards some nearby scrub. O'Connor saw him running and fired his musket superficially wounding him in the thigh. House made it to his nearest neighbor, where he borrowed some clothes and a horse and rode to Stanley to seek assistance.

The villains, meanwhile, had assembled the family and hired hands in the kitchen, threatening them on the belief that substantial amounts of money were hidden in the house. Among them were House's eldest daughter, Ellen, and her fiance, a young carriage painter named Phillips (a Thomas Phillips was also at the inquest but evidence has not been found to identify him as the same Phillips in this incident). When Bradley refused to shoot them, O'Connor pointed his gun towards Phillip's head. As he was pulling the trigger, Ellen dashed forward and took the full charge in her body and fell to floor gravely wounded. She eventually recovered but was in poor health for the rest of her life.

The outlaws quickly withdrew taking Smith with them.

In response to the alarm that House raised, a small military attachment and some special constables were mustered and began to trail the two gunmen. O'Connor was still hopeful of stealing sufficient money to make a fresh start in Victoria when he remembered that the mailman, Paddy, the Tinker, would be carrying �2,000 in his bag to Stanley for the VDL Company to pay for purchases. The mail was carried on foot as the track was too poor even for pack horses. They made camp and waited and soon after 10 p.m. the diminutive mail carrier came into sight. He saw the men by the campfire beckoning him to join them for a cup of tea and cautiously approached to within a few yards when he saw the muskets in the firelight. He ran with O�Connor following shouting threats of murder. He fired hitting Paddy in the left arm. Faint from loss of blood, Paddy scrambled onto the foreshore, throwing the mailbag into a crevice in the rocks. O�Connor gave up the chase and did not see that the bag had been tossed aside.

Early the next morning, Paddy staggered into the military camp with the news of the assault and information that the bandits were heading to Table Cape.

At 11 a.m. the outlaws arrived at Alexandria, hid their belongings in a stable, and calmly walked into Matthias Alexander's Wynyard Arms and had a few drinks with Robert Wigmore. who did not know that they were outlaws or Smith was a hostage. Inquiring about passage to Victoria they were told to go down to the landing stage where Captain Jones was loading his schooner Dove heading to Port Albert on the Gippsland coast of Victoria. Not realizing the danger, Jones agreed to give them passage and they wandered back to the inn where they had their first good meal in two days. Suddenly one of the local residents came to the door and shouted to Alexander that the police were coming. Bradley and O�Connor scrambled to their feet and rushed out the back door to the stable to get their guns. In the process, O�Connor knocked Robert Wigmore's small daughter off her chair spilling her cup of tea. He apologized and gave her 2s.

Exchanging gunfire with the pursuers, the outlaws made their way through the scrub to the small jetty, while One-Eyed Smith finished his meal in the company of Wigmore, glad to be rid of his captors. Jumping on board the villains ordered Jones to set sail, Bradley aiming his musket at the captain and O'Connor, crouching under the taffrail covering the crew.

About three miles out into Bass Strait, Captain Jones unsuccessfully tried to catch Bradley off guard, only to have his finger blown off as punishment and a warning. Twenty four hours later they arrived on the South Gippsland coast and the outlaws put ashore and headed for Melbourne. Along the way the murdered a young ploughman and were caught by a detachment of troopers at Caulfield after a fierce gun battle. They were tried for murder and armed robbery in Melbourne and hanged at Pentridge Stockade.

Captain Jones returned top a hero's welcome by the settlers and continued to sail the Dove until his retirement in the mid 1860s.

* * * * * * *

One of the interesting characters at the time was a man known as Philosopher Smith, born James Smith, in 1827 in George Town. He was a flour miller's assistant for a while, and then a farmer in 1853 gradually acquiring property until he was one of the largest landholders in the district.

But the lure of mineral wealth had been a long time interest of his and he was content to roam the bush with his dog, sometimes disappearing into uninhabited regions of the colony for months at a time. In 1851 he joined the gold rush to Victoria and gained invaluable experience mining at Castlemaine.

In 1859, he found traces of gold at the Wilmot River, copper at the Leven River, and iron ore at Penguin Creek, but not enough for any of it to be profitable.

During the next ten years he prospected in the rugged central highlands. In 1871, while prospecting in the Waratah Rivulet area below Mt. Bischoff, due south of Emu Bay, he noticed traces of casserite (tin oxide) in the stream. The traces disappeared as he waded upstream, but when he climbed the mountain he discovered casserite in considerable quantities.

In 1872, with a party of workers, he cleared a track and the scrub over the lode and began mining. During the summer of 1873 several tons of ore were carted by bullock teams to Burnie to be smelted in Melbourne, where the quantity extracted proved rich. By the 1880s the dividends from the mine were fabulous, eclipsing every mine in Victoria, and Waratah grew from a camp to a town of 874 people by 1881. It became, in fact, the richest tin mine in the world.

As the economy improved, spurred on by mining and the supporting industries, Edwin returned to that skill which perhaps he knew the best - flour milling, and a mill was set up on the banks of Deep Creek at West Wynyard using water as the motive power as had been to the mill in Longford.

When the mine at Waratah was started, Edwin made a four day trip delivering 20 pound flour bags, an amazing feat when one considers that the first arduous 18 miles of the 48 mile trip were a constant climb through thick forest and the unformed track was a morass for nine months of the year.

It was during this time that Edwin became quite wealthy although he also lost considerable invested sums when the new Florence Mine at Zeehan closed as a result of flooding from an underground river.

The flour mill was initially run by Edwin and his sons, Fred and Arnie but by 1897 he had sold it to the boys as indicated in a newspaper advertisement in the Emu Bay Times of that year.

Roller Mills, Wynyard Blackwell Brothers

(Late E.O. Blackwell and Sons)

Beg to notify that they have recently added to their

Extensive Plant, improved Machinery, and have

now on hand a very superior line of flour,

SNOWFLAKE

Also first-class Stone Flour, Pollard Bran, Barley

Meal, and Crushed Oats. Fowl's Wheat always on hand,

GRISTING DONE, 6d. PER BUSHEL

The brothers, in turn, sold the flour mill to their great uncle Stephen Ward Margetts, as they were interested in joining their father who was running a saw-mill he had started. The flour mill was deliberately and maliciously burned down by a Herman David Thompson in 1925.

* * * * * * *

One of Edwin's closest friends was his brother-in-law and long time neighbor, James Dean. Somewhere in the 1870s, Grove Chapel and the people connected with it became identified with the Plymouth Brethren, a dissenting group from the Church of England having its origins around 1827. The first identified Plymouth Brethren evangelist to Australia was Harrison Ord, an engineer who had been converted under Charles Spurgeon and who became a notable evangelist during the revival in England. In 1876 he moved to Australia and evangelized throughout Victoria and Tasmania.

On the day of the first Bible conference at Tollymore (Grove Chapel) in January, 1873, James went to the races with his wife, Annie. He became dissatisfied and ended up attending the conference meeting where he was converted. Together, the two friends rode their bicycles up and down the coast, from Wynyard to Circular point, evangelizing. Edwin drove in a horse and cart on alternate Sundays to Sisters Creek to preach and at lunch hours sometimes preached in the streets of Wynyard. His grandson was to wonder if his efforts of going down the coast involved trying to covert the rabbits. It may well have been that his commitment to evangelism militated against success in business. But those roots lay deep in the dissenting traditions of Leicester passed down from his ancestors.

His grandchildren remember him as a dignified man, white haired with a fresh clear complexion and a neat, square-cut beard. His build was stocky and compact, his manner sedate and his speech measured. Inventive, independent, strong-willed, perhaps even hard, and physically strong, he was both respected and loved.

Edwin lived a full life until his death in 1932 at the age of eighty years. A fortnight before he died, it is rumoured, he rode his bicycle to Stanley to check on some land.

* * * * * * *

Mark Twain wrote in Following the Equator, "Australian history is almost always picturesque and indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is in itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer, and so it pushes other novelties into second and third places. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies. And all of a fresh, new sort, no moldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities, but they are all true; they all happened."

Bibliography

Boston Daily Atlas, Vol. XXII, No. 181, Tuesday, January 31, 1854.

Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore. NY: Vintage Press. (1986)

Lee, Joyce. My Father's Country. Les Murray (ed.) "The Oxford Book of Australian Verse", Oxford:Oxford University Press. 1986

Liverpool Courier, March 1854

Liverpool Courier, Oct. 23, 1855

Mercer, Peter. Gateway to Progress: Centenary History of the Marine Board of Burnie. Burnie: Marine Board of Burnie. 1969

Northern Daily Times, March 8th, 1854

"Personal reminiscences of Bettine Reeves, Neville and Betty Blackwell and Meg Wade" -- Grandchildren of Edwin Orlando Blackwell, Tasmanian Archives.

Twain, Mark. Following the Equator. In T. Inglis Moore (Ed.)"A Book of Australia". London:Collins. 1961.

Victorian Archives


Postcolonial Web Australia Victorian Web