December 2015 – Edition 129

The article continued to draw on an item “Not Grim at all” written by James Lerk and published in the Bendigo Weekly of 21-Feb-2014.

Grim’s birth and siblings. Grim was born at McDougall Road, Golden Gully, which was one of the first gullies to be opened up on the Bendigo goldfield after gold had been discovered in 1851.

This article continues to draw on an article “Not Grim at all” written by James Lerk and published in the Bendigo Weekly of 21-Feb-2014. It also takes into account my recent discovery that Grim’s brother in law George Hardy was also a mine manager.

George Hardy: George married Grim’s sister Alice Ann Heyes (b1856-1942). In the Electoral Rolls he described himself as a “Manager”, which left it open to doubt what he managed. Did he manage a mine, or a store, or a workshop?

As often happens, the answer came to me recently by indirect means. When I was searching George and Alice’s family I came across a sad little entry for Rhoda Jane Hardy, who died at the age of one in 1883 in Ringarooma, a mining village in a remote area in Tasmania.

This was the same place that Grim had started his mine managing career in the same period, making it obvious that both families had gone to the village at the same time so that Grim and George could gain experience in mine management.

(Bendigo mall pictured)

This article continues the theme of the Heyes family, who were the ancestors of my wife Diane. In previous articles I have talked about Grimshaw (“Grim”) Heyes and his career in the gold mining town of Bendigo.

Although I have one more article about the life of “Grim” I am now going to tell you about his nephew Donald George Fraser.

The reason for this is that in April Australia will be celebrating the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign, where Donald served. This would make it timely to tell you about Donald. I will return to Grim’s life in a later article.

As far as I am aware Donald is the only member of the Heyes family to serve in that War.

Donald, born in 1893 in Ballarat, was a son of Grim’s sister Sarah Hannah Heyes, born in 1870 in Bendigo. Sarah married John Angus Fraser (1865-1940) in 1890.

This article gives us some of the highlights of the timbergetting history in Australia. This history is almost unknown to modern Australians despite the fact that it almost rivals the goldmining era in Australia in significance.

This area was on the top of a range of hills in the north of the Sydney region where there were stands of towering eucalypt trees exceeding 100 feet (30 metres) in height. Sawmills dotted the area in the late 1800s, the last one closing in the 1960s.

My interest in timbergetting goes back to the days when I grew up in a former timbergetting area in Sydney.

Adding to this, other Jerrems families have lived in the Gippsland Ranges in Victoria, famous for some of the tallest trees in the world.

Pictured: Giant Stump with family

In this article we look at the “squirreling” activities of William George Jerrems ll. The reference to “squirrel” originated from the hoarding instincts of the squirrel.

To the left is a photo of William George Jerrems ll, who was undoubtedly the greatest “squirrel” in Jerrems history. He collected coins (for which he was best known), postage stamps, fossils, Indian artifacts and books. He started collecting ancient Greek and Roman coins at the precocious age of 13 when most schoolboys were collecting tadpoles and marbles, and he continued collecting in some form or other until the 1920s.

This assisted significantly in the opening up of the huge pastoral industries in those areas, in a similar manner to the role of paddle steamers (beginning a short time earlier) in opening up the vast Mississippi catchment in the United States.

For over 40 years a fleet of paddle steamers plied their trade on the inland rivers, their captains fought the floods and droughts, and sometimes the crews fought each other. Fortunes were made and lost. It was a tough but rewarding life.

Pictured: Delta Queen stern wheeler USA

The specific relevance to readers (including the descendants of Big Bill and Nicoll the Tailor) is that their forbears came from Melbourne and Bendigo, which had a direct rail link to Echuca, the main river port on the Murray River. It is quite likely that some of the forbears visited Echuca and traveled on a paddle steamer.

Pictured: Tree from Enchanted Forest

The three Dusting brothers, John Matthews Dusting (1812-85), Joseph Matthews Dusting (1818-83) and Martin Dusting (1822-1908) migrated to Australia in 1854 in the sailing ship “Panama”.

The three brothers and their families settled in Portland, where they are listed in the 1856 Census, so they had obviously not succumbed to the lure of gold.
Portland developed to become an important fishing port providing for the town and later, with the connection of the railway in 1877, to the region as far afield as Ballarat and eventually Melbourne.

The Portland lifeboat. The boat was specifically built for rescue work, following a British design, involving the use of very strong diagonal planks. It also had watertight bulkheads at each end for flotation purposes.

Pictured below: Admella painting. See October’s edition for the full story tying in the lifeboat with rescue attempts of the Admella.

The banner photo at top is of a later crew of the Portland Lifeboat, probably taken in the late 1800s. One of the men would have been Arthur Dusting, the son of John Dusting who took part in the famous rescue.

John’s occupation at Portland was “lighter man”. A lighter is commonly a flat-bottomed unpowered barge or punt used in loading or unloading ships, or in transporting goods for short distances. This would have provided John with the fitness and skills necessary for his berth on the lifeboat.

The ship where the Portland lifeboat played a famous role was the Admella, a single screw iron steamship of 395 tons and a length of nearly 60 metres (200 feet) which plied between South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria (its name was in fact made up from the first letters of the names of the ports of Adelaide, Melbourne and Launceston).

The Admella was on a trip between Adelaide and Melbourne when it ran aground on a reef off Cape Banks in South Australia, 150 km to the west of Portland. Over the next few days, several rescue attempts were made by the Corio and Ladybird rescue boats.

The Portland lifeboat, which had been towed a distance of 150 km (100 miles) to the scene from Portland by the steamship Ladybird had made an earlier attempt to reach the wreck but was driven back by the raging seas and damage to its oars and rudder.

Now it was finally successful in coming alongside the wreck. There, in the words of one newspaper report, the remaining 19 survivors “threw themselves into the lifeboat and were caught as they fell by the boatmen”. They were then rowed to the Ladybird which returned to Portland.

I embarked on describing the lives of William and Elizabeth’s children in the order of their birth (Elizabeth Jnr, Thomas and Jabez).

Her second marriage in the following year was to George Wills Priston, a pharmacist with a shop in the city. Elizabeth had a baby daughter in 1865 but died within a little over three weeks, indicating that she may have died as a result of the birth.

By coincidence, George Priston became a business partner with Elizabeth’s Uncle Jabez, in a business which was carried on by the Small family until the 1940s.

Thomas Stephen Small. Thomas, born in 1834, married Zilpha Burchett (1840-1903) and they settled initially in Richmond. Thomas described himself as a surveyor, but he also had a strong interest in the Richmond Voluntary Rifles.

For me Old Ray, the Family Ghost, has been quiet. The have been no embarrassing intrusions. Thank goodness.

As always, I try to assist by keeping you happy, healthy and prosperous.