Happy New Year!
Over the Christmas break I was talking with my father about some of the little or unknown pioneers of Victoria. So with that in mind I thought I’d cover off a few of the lesser known settlers / pioneers that I’ve come across of late.
George Dempster Mercer
George Dempster Mercer of Gorthy and Dryden was born 21 July 1772 in Perthshire, Scotland. He was the youngest son of William Mercer of Pitteuchar and Elizabeth Swan. George was a midshipman in the East India Company (EIC) then an agent and indigo planter in India.
He married Francis Charlotte Reid at Coel, also known as Allyghur, in India on 12 September 1810 in a joint ceremony with Dr John Macwhirter and Francis’ sister Harriett Anne Reid.
Upon his return to Scotland, in 1818, he became a J.P. for Perthshire and Midlothian and in the following year bought the estates of Gorthy and Dryden near Edinburgh where he lived until purchasing in Moray Place in Edinburgh, which became his family’s principal home.
As a major early investor in Van Diemen’s Land, he bought over 10,000 acres of land there, including a run that he named Gorthy, about 40 miles north of Hobart. George was also instrumental in the Geelong and Dutigalla Association (GDA) later to become the Port Phillip Association (PPA) and then the Derwent Company. This Association is known largely for its attempted purchase, known widely as the “Batman Treaty”, of 600,000 acres of land from the natives of Port Phillip.
George Mercer is unique in that he never set foot in Australia yet he played an active and important part in the GDA and its subsequent versions. In the beginning, George’s affairs in the Colony were managed by Charles Swanson and David Fisher (see later) but from 1839 onwards his two sons, firstly George Duncan and then John Henry, managed his affairs including numerous properties in and around Geelong. This included the Weatherboard run at Inverleigh, the Mount Mercer cattle station, a run at Warrambine, a station on the Indented Head as well as shares in runs at Geelong and Point Henry, Commeralghip, Deep Gully, Kuruck Kuruck, Murgeboluc, Mount Shadwell, Native Creek and Wardy Yallock. The Derwent Company and George Mercer had vast interests.
George died a very wealthy man on 7 December 1853 at his home at Moray Place and is buried in Warriston Cemetery in Edinburgh.
David Fisher
David Fisher was born on 6 June 1800 in Redgorton, Perthshire
David Fisher is now well remembered as one of the earliest pioneers of Port Phillip. Initially a gardener for George Mercer on his Dryden estate (where his wife-to-be Charlotte Ross also worked) near Edinburgh, he was sent out from Scotland by George to superintend and oversee his lands and property known as Gorthy in Van Diemen’s Land. As the push into Port Phillip accelerated and George’s son George Duncan arrived in Hobart, Fisher was sent across the straight to look after the Port Phillip lands for the PPA. Arriving in the Geelong area, he set about creating a permanent home. “Here I built the first house in Geelong worthy of the name, it is built of weatherboards of Van Diemen’s Land timber, which house yet still stands [in 1853, now long gone], and is still rather an ornament on what is now called Barwon Terrace.”[1]
It was in this house and at this location on the north bank of the Barwon River that Fisher “had the honour of receiving His Excellency Sir Richard Bourke, who had come hither to spy out the nakedness of the land, and with his suite encamped on the banks of the Barwon next to my house.”[2] It was not far from here where the city of Geelong would later be established.
The house was completed by Fisher in September 1837 and not long after he and his family permanently moved from Van Diemen’s Land to Port Phillip, settling there in March 1838. He spent much of the next two years interacting heavily with George Duncan as he superintended and managed George’s lands for the Derwent Company.
Following the dissolution of the Derwent Company and sale of his house in Geelong, and with George Duncan now well in control of his father’s investments, David Fisher was relieved to follow his own independent pastoral and agricultural pursuits. As part of his endeavours, he established a large property in the Barrabool Hills, a few kilometres southwest of Geelong. His property, known as Roslyn, after Roslin in Scotland located not far from his birthplace, was initially 1,280 acres. This land was well known to Fisher as he had superintended these for the Derwent Company before he purchased them for himself in 1840. He was a member of the South Barwon Council and was instrumental in the establishment of the first church in Geelong, St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, now St John’s Lutheran, in Yarra Street that bears a plaque from his children in his memory.
That gardening background from Scotland shone through as he was well known for his gardens and plants and for that large and valuable farm he once held. He was remembered fondly in the diary of George F. Belcher: “Poor old David Fisher - King fisher he used to be called! I renewed an acquaintance with him after years when I settled down for good in Geelong. King David as also he was then sometimes addressed, was a household word with us for half a lifetime - who does not remember him? He was a great horticulturist and was judge and steward at all the shows. Frequently he was an exhibitor and never liked to lose the special prize for dahlias. He owned a valuable farm situated between Highton and Ceres, where he made and lost a mint of money.”[3]
Fisher subdivided and auctioned off his valuable Roslyn estate in February 1851. It was advertised as being “the choicest land in New Holland, and better known as the garden of Port Phillip.”[4]
He died on 20 March 1879 at Gorrinn, near Ararat, in Victoria while living with his daughter Fanny Mercer Richardson (presumably named after George Mercer’s wife) and is buried in the Barrabool Hills Cemetery in Highton, a suburb of Geelong, not far from both his Roslyn property and that first house he built in Geelong. He is buried alongside Charlotte who died on 18 August 1875.
Charles Swanston
Charles Swanston, banker and merchant, was born in 1789 at Berwick upon Tweed in Northumberland and was the son of Robert and Rebecca Swanston. At 16 he was commissioned a lieutenant in the East India Company’s Madras Army. In January 1819, he was promoted captain but a year later lost his command due great reductions in the size of the army. In 1821, he became the military paymaster in the provinces of Travancore and Tinnevelly, a position he held for six years. In September 1828, he was granted a year's furlough to Van Diemen's Land on account of ill health.
He arrived at Hobart Town on H.M.S. Success in January 1829 with his wife. Georgina, and their family. Although on leave, he evidently decided to settle in the country, for he soon bought Fenton Forest, an estate on the River Styx, and Newtown Park at New Town. He also acquired land at Kingborough and some 4,200 acres in the County of Westmorland. He returned briefly to India in 1830 at the expiration of his leave, resigned his army appointment, and left again for Van Diemen's Land in May 1831.
In 1831 Swanston became involved with the Derwent Bank. The Bank had been promoted in 1827 by a group of leading citizens in Hobart. It was, in reality, a partnership for 14 years with the usual liabilities attached to that relationship. Although the Bank at first had seven directors, a meeting of shareholders in March 1830 agreed to reduce the number to three, one of them to be a full-time salaried managing director.
The first managing director of the bank was William Hamilton, who soon returned to London as the Bank's representative. Charles Swanston was appointed to succeed him; on 26 November 1831 he signed a covenant with the other two directors, Hamilton and Stephen Adey, that each should hold 40 of the Bank's 200 shares, and should not acquire a greater number or sell shares without first offering them to the other two. When Adey went to England, Swanston bought more shares, thereby gaining a majority of votes and undivided control.
Under his management the Derwent Bank prospered attracting large amounts of overseas capital for investment in the Colony at high rates of interest. He was responsible for introducing the overdraft system into Australian banking in 1834, in which year he established the Derwent Savings Bank. His influence in the Colony increased when he was nominated to the Legislative Council.
In addition to the Bank. he conducted business as an import and export agent, investment agent, and wool broker. He imported rum, tea and other goods in quantity, acting as agent for Jardine, Matheson & Co. of Canton and for firms in Madras, Mauritius, Calcutta, Manila and the Netherlands Indies, whose goods he distributed not only in Hobart but in Sydney and Adelaide. On behalf of many officers and officials in India, he also invested money in Van Diemen's Land in mortgages and bank shares.
His largest investor was the abovementioned George Mercer, whom he had met while in India. In 1835 when John Batman sought support for his proposal to colonize Port Phillip, a syndicate called the Port Phillip Association was formed with Swanston as a leading member. Swanston's role was to obtain the necessary finance and to act in effect as its commercial manager. He included Mercer in the association.
The Port Phillip Association’s attempt to purchase some 600,000 acres of land in Port Phillip, including the future sites of Melbourne and Geelong, was a failure. But, the Association eventually bought just over 10,000 acres of land on the banks of the Moorabool River, near Geelong, for £7,919 7s. 7d. with a remission of £7,000 from the Government towards their expenses to date. By the time that this happened, in 1837, the majority of the members of the original association had by this time sold out and Swanston, Mercer, Montagu, and Learmonth were the shareholders. The PPA, now the Derwent Company, was dissolved and the lands were carved up amongst the shareholders.
In 1844 Swanston, in partnership with his son-in-law Edward Willis, began trading as a merchant in Geelong. The firm, which lasted until 1854, held the pastoral properties Murgheboluc, Paywit, Ocean Grove, Point Lonsdale, Gnawarre, and Native Creek No. 3 in the Geelong district, and in 1846, near Harrow, a station of 112,000 acres (45,325 ha), which was later subdivided into several smaller runs with Swanston & Willis retaining the Koolomurt section after the others were sold.
In October 1841, Swanston had converted the Derwent Bank into a mortgage bank. As the depression of the 1840s deepened, the flow of overseas investments to the Bank greatly diminished, the value of the land over which the Bank held mortgages dropped disastrously, the price of wool fell, and debtors to the Bank found difficulty in meeting interest payments. He managed to keep the Derwent Bank going for another five years, with the financial assistance of the Bank of Australasia and the Union Bank, but when these institutions withdrew their support in 1849, he resigned and the Derwent Bank went into liquidation. The Bank's affairs and Swanston's had not been kept separate, and his liabilities were £104,375 of which £58,504 was due to the bank. In the end, his creditors received 10s. in the pound. In 1850, tired and worried, he sailed for America but stayed there only briefly.
Enroute to Sydney from San Francisco, Swanston died at sea on the Raven captained by William Bell on 5 September 1850. Swanson was buried at sea at 8am the following morning.
Swanston’s eldest son, Charles Lambert, took over his father's interest in Swanston & Willis in 1850 and continued the management of the properties near Geelong. One of his three daughters, Caroline, married Edward Willis.
Curiously very little has been published on Charles Swanston and other than for the existence of Swanston streets in both Melbourne and Geelong, Charles Swanston has pretty much faded into the past.
Sources:
Charles Swanston, 'Swanston, Charles (1789–1850)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/swanston-charles-2713/text3815, published first in hardcopy 1967, accessed online 3 June 2016.
H. G. Turner, A History of the Colony of Victoria, vol 1 (Lond, 1904), Print.
W. H. Hudspeth, ‘Rise and fall Charles Swanston’, Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania, 1948.
Edward Willis
Edward Willis was born on 12 September 1816 at Hornsby in England and in December 1823 he arrived in Van Diemen's Land with his parents. Until he was 21 he worked on his father's property, Wanstead, near Campbell Town. In 1837 with his brother William, he headed to Port Phillip taking ewes and rams from his father's pure-bred merino stud. In April, the brothers took up a run at the junction of the Plenty and Yarra Rivers.
Edward married the daughter of Charles Swanston, Catherine, on 12 September 1840 at Hobart Town. Willis, just like his father-in-law and brother-in-law, was a pastoralist. Willis joined Swanston and, later, Swanston’s son Charles Lambert, in their Geelong firm, whilst living in a house on Barwon Terrace. He would later sell the house to Dr John Macwhirter. George Alexander Stephen joined the firm, which then traded for many years as Swanston, Willis and Stephen.
As keen pastoralists the Swanstons and Willis held a number of stations including Native Creek No. 3 station, which originally as part of the PPA.. They held this station from October 1842 to January 1851. It was at the junction of the Leigh and Barwon Rivers at Inverleigh adjoining the Mercers’ Weatherboard station. They also held Kout Narin station near Harrow from October 1846, subdividing it in 1848 and retaining the Kout Narin station, which they then later subdivided a number of times.
Just like a number of others in this period, Willis was active in Geelong's development. In the 1840s he was a member of the Geelong Literary Association, a trustee for the Savings Bank, a committee-man of the Geelong and Portland Bay Immigration Society and of the Botanical Gardens, a supporter of local government for Geelong, and an opponent of transportation. In 1845, he became a trustee of the Port Phillip Savings Bank. He was a trustee of St Paul's Church. He was a member of the provisional committee of the Geelong and Melbourne Railway Co., chairman of directors of the Geelong and Western District Fire and Marine Insurance Co., a trustee in 1856-57 of the Geelong Grammar School, and a promoter of the Board of Commissioners of Waterworks.
Willis was an early member of the Melbourne Club and its president in 1881. In 1894 he returned to England and lived on his property, Seven Oaks, in Kent. He died at Goring near Reading on 9 August 1895.
George Alexander Stephen
George Alexander Stephen was born on 7 June 1815 in England where he was baptised at the Swallow Street Scotch Church in Westminster. He married Emily Johnstone in England on 29 July 1848.
Not long after this, George and Emily made the journey to Port Phillip and settled in Geelong in late 1849 in the village of Little Scotland (now part of Geelong West.) George forged for himself a successful career in mercantile pursuits joining Charles Swanston and Edward Willis to form the firm of Swanston Willis and Stephen who operated as shipping merchants in Geelong.
As most of the early pioneers were, George was also civic minded playing a founding role as a trustee in the establishment of All Saints Church in Newtown as well as St Paul’s in Geelong. He was the secretary of Geelong Benefit Building and Savings Investment Society, was involved in the cutting of the Bar across Geelong Harbour, and with the Geelong Protestant Orphanage. He was also key in the establishment of the Corio Club and was its inaugural honorary treasurer.
George Alexander Stephen died at his home on the street named after him, Stephen Street, in Newtown on 13 May 1908. His funeral party departed his Newtown home on 14 May for Geelong Eastern Cemetery where he was buried. As a show of the respect for him, there was a “large and representative gathering.”[5]
In a service conducted at All Saints Church later in the week, George Alexander Stephen was paid tribute. “But all who have known George Alexander Stephen well unite in the opinion that he was a man of unswerving Christian character, whose word was his bond, whose strength of will could not be over-estimated, and whose practical benevolence extended itself through church, parish, and diocese, benefiting tho community and giving men an example of real goodness which should not be soon forgotten.”[6]
The following year, 1909, a tablet was unveiled in memory of George Alexander Stephen at All Saints Church, Newtown where it still remains today.
Foster Fyans
Captain Foster Fyans was born in 1790 in Dublin, Ireland. In 1811 he made ensign in the 67th Regiment of Foot where as part of the 2nd Battalion he saw service in the Peninsular War before returning to England in May 1817. On 3 February 1818 Fyans left for the 1st Battalion in India where he stayed until 1820 when he then returned to England having purchased captain. In 1827, he returned to India and transferred to the 20th Regiment.
In 1833 Fyans joined the 4th Regiment at Sydney from Mauritius and was posted to Norfolk Island as captain of the guard. During his two years there, he took charge in a crisis and handled a murderous mutiny, which he had cause to believe was led by John Knatchbull. He thus became commandant at Moreton Bay.
Fyans resigned and, in September 1837, sailed for Port Phillip as first police magistrate of Geelong, accompanied by his former batman as district constable, two subordinate constables, a clerk, and twelve convict retainers. After tramping from Melbourne, he established himself on the Moorabool River, at what became known as Fyansford, not far from the lands of the PPA. Fyans tackled the problem of siting a town, persuading both Robert Hoddle and Governor Sir George Gipps against Sir Richard Bourke's choice of Point Henry, and obtained machinery and convict labour from Sydney to make the present site of Geelong possible through the establishment of the Barwon River breakwater.
In 1840 he was appointed as commissioner of crown lands for the Portland Bay district. Supported by sixteen troopers, originally all transported for desertion in America, and later by the native police, Fyans oversaw a great range of duty as rival settlers spread everywhere. He made the required returns of licensed runs and their occupants and completed the printed official Itinerary showing his daily employment, 3,000 miles (4,828 km) normally covered each half year, and from 36 to 260 squatting schedules handled in his office.
But just as number of others were doing at the time, Fyans played both sides. He ran his own cattle west of Lake Colac at Colet Colet obtaining the licence to do so more or less from himself in 1838. He eventually sold his lands and cattle with their “FF” brand. In 1845 he bought 158 acres (64 ha) at Geelong, beside the Barwon, he built a stone homestead, Bell-Bird Balyang, the site of which is marked today with a sun dial and plaque.
In 1849 he was reappointed police magistrate and nominated mayor for the inauguration of the Geelong Town Council. In 1853, he retired and the following January offered his estate for sale 'being about to return to Europe'. However, he did not sell nor did he return to Europe.
His wife Elizabeth died in March 1858. Fyans died at Balyang on 23 May 1870 and was buried in East Geelong Cemetery. His distinctive memorial remains there today.
Sources:
P. L. Brown, 'Fyans, Foster (1790–1870)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/fyans-foster-2075/text2595, published first in hardcopy 1966, accessed online 3 June 2016.
Fyans, Foster. Memoirs recorded at Geelong, Victoria Australia by Captain Foster Fyans. Edited by P.L. Brown. The Geelong Advertiser Pty. Ltd. 1986. Print.
Brownhill, W.R. The History of Geelong and Corio Bay. The Geelong Advertiser Pty. Ltd. 1990. Print.
Shaw, A.G.L.. A history of the Port Phillip District. Melbourne University Press. 1996. Print.
Robert Tennent
Robert Tennent was born in Edinburgh in 1813 and educated at Edinburgh Academy. He was the eldest son of Patrick Tennent, writer to the signet, and Margaret Rodger Lyon. He arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in June 1839 from Leith and crossed to Port Phillip in October 1839. Along with Charles Hugh Lyon (1825-1905), he held a squatting run of nearly 30,000 acres at Gnarkeet, 100 miles west of Melbourne, from 1844 to 1853 even though he had left Port Phillip by late 1851. Earlier, Tennent also held over 75,000 acres at Carranballac / Fiery Creek, 20 miles from Gnarkeet, with a number of others from 1841 to 1848. He is remembered in Cressy, Victoria where Tennant Street (misspelled with an “a”) is named in his honour.
As a member of the Edinburgh Calotype Club he is famous for his photograph “Kitchen Hut Gnarkeet Station, Port Phillip” apparently taken in April 1848 with a camera made out of a cigar box and the lens from a telescope.
Tennent, Robert. Kitchen hut, Gnarkeet Station, Port Phillip, Australia. c. 1848. Source: National Library of Scotland.
Have fun out there!
CG
References
[1] Sayers, C.E. Letters from Victorian Pioneers. South Yarra: Lloyd O'Neil for Currey O'Neil. 1983. Print. 42.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Brownhill, WR. The history of Geelong and Corio Bay: With Postscript. Geelong: The Geelong Advertiser Pty Ltd. 1990. Print. 70.
[4] "Advertising" Geelong Advertiser (Vic. : 1847 - 1851) 4 February 1851: 3 (DAILY and MORNING). Web. 19 Aug 2016 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article91915265>.
[5] “OBITUARY." Geelong Advertiser (Vic. : 1859 - 1926) 15 May 1908: 4. Web. 6 Jun 2016 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article148919972>.
[6] THE LATE MR G. A' STEPHEN" Geelong Advertiser (Vic. : 1859 - 1926) 18 May 1908: 3. Web. 3 Jun 2016 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article148920371>.