Sunday, August 19, 2007
Found HOLLIS grave, Melbourne General Cemetery
LOG OF THE DISCOVERY
For many decades, descendants of the Yarra-Valley-pioneering Hollis family have been searching in vain to find out what happened to the first father of the emigrant family in Australia, John Frederick Hollis. The family has a letter dated 1854 to young Hubert Hollis from Cousin Gus (Augustus Pearman) in England, which spoke of "the melancholy circumstances of your father's death." But for we did not know where or when in 1854 John F Hollis's short life came to an end.
One hundred and fifty years went by and old stories fell off from family knowledge.
There was no death record for him in Victoria. And none were found in any other state of Australia. And no one knew where he was buried, nor where his bones, connected as they are to our bones, might lie. This has been a lack of peace for some of us descendants, as if their was no place for us to rest in peace about our early father, even if there was for John F Hollis.
There is still no death record for him, though his burial details were recently discovered, and the site of his mortal remains indentified.
This is something of the record of how he was found.
EMAIL LETTER TO BARBARA HOLLIS, in Casino, NSW
4th JULY 2007 Brunswick, Victoria
Barbara,
I am in Melbourne on a break.
Today, I went to the Melbourne General Cemetery to try and find, among others, the grave of Fanny Hollis , aka Elizabeth Frances Simmonds who died, I believe in 4th June 1860 at Crown St, Yarra Berg, Richmond, VIC Alas I failed to find her there. Barbara, do you have her death certificate handy. My copy is somewhere deep in storage and very hard to get at the moment. Does it give her burial place as the Melbourne Cemetery?. I thought it did, but I need to check.
Anyway, The woman at the desk was very helpful, and I explained that Fanny's name was formerly Hollis and she may have been buried under that name. No Luck. In explaining the situation I told her that
'We now knew the date of her husband's death through the date of her widowhood being recorded on her re-marriage to Thomas Simmonds.'
' And what date was that', she asked.
I had my laptop with me so I looked it up. 11 Jan 1854 I told her.
'Hang on a minute', she said.
She went out the back and came back with what I believe was the original burials entry book for that time.
She soon found a Rebecca Hollis recorded as being buried on the 10 Jan 1854.
'I wonder if it is a mistake. And incorrect entry.' she said.
'But it is a day before he is meant to have died', I said. 'And then, I don't think you were allowed to bury people before they died, even back then."
She laughed.
'Anyway, there is no Rebecca recorded in the family'.
[ I see after the event that Rebecca Hollis burial is recorded on the computer date print outs.}
'Sure there is no other entry on that page'.
She looked down the handwritten entries on the list.
'Oh here', she said. 'John Hollis, died Brunswick, Vic age 45 . Buried 12 Jan 1854 ! '
'That's him, I said. 'Buried in the heat of January the day after he died'.
'Yes!' she said, 'But in a Public Grave'. -'You''ll never find exactly where.'
'Why not?"
It says Grave no 216 but no listing of denomination. Those were paupers graves It could be anywhere, and that is reclaimed Land. Burial have been made across those places.'
I believe we have him. In the Melbourne General Cemetery. After all. The entry had been overlooked, and was not made on the computer data base lists
Tomorrow I will go back to try and get a photocopy of that 12 Jan 1854 page.
Happy Hunting
Wayne
EMAIL Letter from Barbara HOLLIS,
4th July 2007 Casino, NSW
Great find Wayne,
I wrote to the cemetery years ago and ask them to search their records and not here was the answer. It pays to visit and ask more questions doesn't it. I am so excited that a mystery has been solved. Now for Fanny her death cert says buried Melbourne Cemetery 13 June 1860 the 5's & 6's look very similar could it be 1850? I'd say it is 1860 though.
she was born 1813 and 45 at death adds to 1858. Good hunting for Fanny. It must be great being a detective maybe we could open an investigation company!!!
Regards Barb
EMAIL Letter from Barbara HOLLIS
19th July 2007 , Casino, NSW
Hi Wayne are you still on your break in Melbourne? Did you have any luck with Fanny Hollis? Barb Hollis
EMAIL LETTER to Barbara HOLLIS, Casino, NSW
20th JULY 2007, State Library of South Australia, Adelaide
Hullo Barbara
I am in Adelaide on transit back to Alice.
I found Fanny Hollis yes, And a surprise. Cannot tell all right now. I will send you details.
The burial entry for her has this additional note - under the entry for grave. 11 Jany 1854.
The grave Section and number is an exact match for the so-called pauper grave of John Hollis
So it seems she is buried with John F. Hollis after all and the grave was retrospectively made a private one. Old Simmonds might not have been pleased.
I have located the exact plot, and it is a area of grass in the middle of scattered old Church of England graves.
will send further details and a plan later
Wayne
Email Letter from Barbara HOLLIS
20th July 2007 , Casino, NSW
Wow that's great news Wayne,
Isn't genealogy hunting fantastic!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have just had some photos from Sth Africa and oh the rellies are very dark in colour and seem a lovely lot. I was so excited to get the photos you would have thought they were my rellies. Look forward to the next exciting episode
Regards Barb
Paying Due Honour to our (first) Father and Mother
The deaths, the untimely ends seemed like the fragmentation of something precious, as if the warp and weft of the interwoven edierdown of our Hollis family had come undone, and the stray ends, the broken seems, the orphaned offsprings had been left too thin, to rip apart in the harsh Antipodean winds.
But now I find that the Hollis parents are in their shared grave, lying together as they did in life, resting in peace.
It can only have been through the Hollis children, in the time of grief at their mother's death in 1860, and then all under eighteen, who had the wit and strength to collect the fees and dues to pay for the bruial plot, and to insist on their parents being buried together, even if their step-father was against it, and so ensure that their father's grave also be restored as a plot of respect.
GOING TO THE ORIGINAL BOOKS - for the detail that matters.
NOTE: In respect to original documents in doing history. Melbourne General Cemetery has a computer database which purports to be a complete record of all recorded burials there.
John Hollis' burial was not on that list. Years, and searchings, asking of that resource got fat nothing. One researcher since told me that pauper's burials are not included on that database! Why? But then, Fanny Simmonds was not on the database either. The data base is only as good as the transcibers, and human error and distraction cause oversights, ommissions and flaws. It was only when I had the blessed service of a officer with goodwill and initiative who went to the original books that I got to find out what was really going on.
I asked to have Frances Simmonds death added to the computer database, and watched at the counter while she was entered in to that easy access, but then more enquirers came to the desk and the officer was busy, so we have yet to get John Hollis up there.
But, even then, the computer database would not have included the further record book columns which allowed me to discover the fine print and the backdated detail which led me to deduce that John and Fanny were buried in the same grave after all.
Email Letter from Barbara HOLLIS
19 August 2007, Casino, NSW
Hi Wayne,
Hope your trip was a great success and you are now settled back to the routine of life. You have me intrigued with your email sentence:
" I found Fanny Hollis yes, And a surprise. Cannot tell all right now. I will send you details."
Can you tell me now as I am impatient waiting? Raining here all day and don't we need it.
Regards Barb Hollis
Email Letter to Barbara HOLLIS
20th August 2007, Alice Springs, Northern Territory
Sorry Barbara, a life of intense work has overtaken me here.
The surprise was what I then went on to give away. That the grave was the same number as the one John Hollis was in, after being told it was a pauper burial and we would never know where it was exactly. The grave/graves are in the same section, same number, so the same plot. I believe they are buried together after all. When I asked the woman at the desk what the addition of the date (11-Jan 54) meant in the normally empty column (in the record-book), she said it probably meant the grave had changed from being a public one (Pauper's) to a private grave. She was going to confirm for me my reading of these documents, as she found my interpretations surprising, though convincing on the evidence. She was as excited as I was, as she did not usually get to see such breakthoughs. I did not arrange for anything to be sent on, addresses etc, so I need to contact her. She gave me exact photocopies of old grave maps and I have worked out the exact site of the grave plot. It is in an area filled with soursob and grass, with a few remnant graves scattered about between pepper trees. This lovely grassy treed area is framed by heavy crowds of block graves of old stone on every side.
I want to call for family contributions of money to get a memorial stone and plaque placed in the grave. I imagine this would be on the horizontal as in a lawn cemetery, though I have not made full inquiries about whether a vertical/ upright headstone is permissible,
I wrote a screed proforma for how I imagine it might go,
Wayne
[ The PLAN ]
Draft Screed Proforma for A MEMORIAL STONE
Here, waiting the promise of God, lay the mortal remains of
John Frederick HOLLIS -yeoman farmer, (very briefly) of Melbourne
born: - c.1808 Cane End, near Caversham on Thames, Oxfordshire (nr Reading)
died, a pauper, 11th January 1854 Brunswick, Victoria, - 3rd child &
2nd Son of William Hollis, Esquire & his wife Elizabeth nee Pottinger
of “Lashbrook Farm” Gentlefolk, Yeoman Farmers on 450 acres at Cane End
and also his wife
Frances Elizabeth (late Simmons) HOLLIS nee CLOSE
[ married 8th July 1840 at Old Church, St Pancras, London ]
Born c.1813, Shiplake-on-Thames, Oxfordshire (near Reading)
Daughter of Francis James CLOSE, auctioneer & Mary Ann nee Bullock
Died 4th June 1860 Crown St, Yarraberg, Richmond, Vic. (by then the wife
of a second husband, Pennsylvania-born Thomas Simmons, brickmaker)
The Hollis’s emigrated on 1st August 1852 on the ship “Chalmers” from London arriving in Hobsons Bay on the 22nd November 1852 with their six children:
1. Hubert John HOLLIS: (1841-1888) – pioneer farmer of Wandin Sth (Burleigh)
2. Arthur HOLLIS: (1842-1909) fencer and carter, of Mooroolbark
3. Frances Elizth HOLLIS (1843-1928) m. John Thomas SMITH, brassfounder
4. Edward HOLLIS (1845-1892) of Richmond - died Beechworth Asylum
5. Edith HOLLIS (1846-1892) – m. William Henry GRASS - of Richmond
6. Lucy HOLLIS (1848-1891) – m. John CURTIS - of Richmond
Early parishioners of St Stephens Anglican Church, Richmond
Erected by descendants in humble thanks for their
brief lives, for the sacrifice they made to be Australian.
“The seed must go down to the ground and die if it is to bear much fruit.”
written by Wayne David Knoll 10 July 2007, Brunswick, Victoria
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Bush Graves of Wandin South
Bush Graves of South Wandin South
Unmarked Graves of Silvan, Silvan South and Burleigh
Most of the pioneers of the parish of Wandin Yallock and South Wandin are buried in the old Lillydale Cemetery. However, there are a number of infant children who died in the first weeks of life who were buried in the bush and their graves have now been left unmarked and unrecorded. I know of four such graves. There may likely be other bush graves of which I do not know.
1. The HOLLIS twins – 1875- 1875 [ Hollis – Suckling ]
The first in time that I know of is the graves of the Hollis twins in 1875.
These children were born to Hubert Hollis and his wife Eliza nee Suckling. These children were born in a timber and bark hut above the banks of the Middle Creek, to the north of Ferndale road. Feryndale House later stood nearby, and one of the early trees planted there is still standing and must be the biggest oak tree in Australia. The first cild was unnamed, and either died at birth or was stillborn and not recorded as a birth. The child was wrapped by the father in a swaddling piece of cloth and buried on a little hillock up behind the hut. The twin named WILLIAM HOLLIS, lived only eight days and then was buried beside his sibling in the same manner. b. 1875 Wandin vic (Birth Certificate Index 1875/26445); died 1875, (Death Certificate Index 1875/15381).
The death certificate records the burial place, and the oral history of the Hollis family story was handed down from Eliza (who lived to 1924) to her grandchildren, especially to her daughter Ada (Mrs Knoll) - who lived to 1948, as well as from Eliza Hollis's sister Elizabeth Suckling, who lived to 1933, that Hubert and Eliza Hollis's twins were wrapped in a piece of cloth and buried on the hill behind the bush hut the Hollis's occupied - on the site where Fernydale House was built in the 1880s by Albert Wiseman. This is recorded by Ada Knoll ( nee Hollis's)eldest granchild, Joy Olive Jackson, nee Whittingham, in her book "Against All Odds" (privately published on CD and as a book) which tells much of the story of the Hubert Hollis family.
The giant oak stands is a kind of historical memorial to the Fernydale era that the Hollis’s began, but I do not believe the children are buried by the oak tree. Up the back of the present property and business owned by James Dean, is a small hillock beside a road reserve where a grassed track is used by bikes and horse riders The owner has a water tank on top of the hill. I believe the children are beside this tank. The approximate site, where there is a little flat or shelf in the slope which forms the hillock, can be accessed up the side road, known as Randolph Road, off Ferndale Road.
James Dean is the pioneer of the enterprising Technical Solutions Australia, and manager of his help-for-disability electronic and equipment business on site. Technical Solutions Australiahttp://www.tecsol.com.au/index.html> make assistive technology, and automated divices and equipment that is used to improve the functional capabilities of individual with disabilities. This is appropriate in one way, as the Hollis family who pioneered that site for the Wiseman’s had a son Alfred, the youngest, who was crippled for most of his life, and used to use a trolley bed to get around the house for many years.
The siblings of these Hollis twins were: Annie 1867-1868; Charlie 1869-1905; Florrie (Mrs Albert Stewart) 1871-1908; Ada Jane (Mrs K Wilhelm Knoll) 1873-1948; George Hubert 1877-1955, Edward 1878-1945; and Alfred Hollis 1881-1952.
2. NOTE: I was wrong. I APOLOGIZE TO ANYONE I MAY HAVE LED ASTRAY> I am Sorry. I previously had the infant William Chapman – 1894/5 listed here, as follows:
William Chapman [ Chapman – Hunter ]
This infant was the William Chapman family’s first child: - son of William Chapman, then nearly 40, and his mother Estella nee Hunter, age 21. The child either died soon after birth or was stillborn. The Chapman story tells that the child’s mother Stella (Estella Jane Chapman – nee Hunter) was kicked in the navel area by a cow while milking, and she feared for the health of the child from that time on. I believe the child was buried in the garden of the old Chapman home, on the property that is now at the end of Progress Road, Silvan, near the headwaters of the Wandin Yallock Creek. THIS IS WRONG.
I WAS IN ERROR. In checking Hunter Family burials, I have recently discovered his burial among graves of the Hunter family in the Lilydale Cemetery Records which records William Chapman's Burial Therein - At Burial Number 2752 In Wesleyan Section 2, Grave 204, Lillydale Cemetery. The siblings of this first Chapman child were: Frank, Ernest, Mary (Knoll), Ralph, Dora, John, Charlie, Jessie (Hayne), Walter, Amy (Moon) & Ada Chapman (Taylor).
BUT as a REPLACEMENT for Number Two I have found: ATTWOOD (mistakenly transcribed as Hatwood) HUNTER: - I found William Chapman's details by the way when investigating the record for the detail for the burial of his mother Stella Hunter's younger siblings, seven of whom died in infancy. The latter six, but not the first of the seven, are listed in the Lilydale Cemetery Burial Record, all buried in the same grave. The first of the Infants who died young was Attwood Hunter, named for his mother Roseanna Dale Hampton's father, Attwood Hampton. Attwood was an old family name. Even Attwood Hampton had it from his maternal grandfather, Attwood Searanke. Unless Attwood Hunter was buried in Heidelberg or elsewhere, then he is likely to have been buried on the old Hunter property. This is now an open question.
Attwood (sic) Hatwood HUNTER was born and died in Wandin Yallock in 1877. He lived two days. He was the family's fifth child, but the first to die as a baby.
3. Unnamed infant BROWN about 1939 [ Brown – Knoll ]
A stillborn/miscarried child of Olive Ada Brown, nee Whittingham, nee KNOLL, & her second husband Horace Richard Laurence Brown. The child was born on the western slopes of Knolls Hill in Wiseman Road, Burleigh, and taken by the child’s grandfather Karl Wilhelm Knoll who then lived to the east on the hilltop, next door, and buried it in the bush, back of the ten acres, on top of the old Knolls Hill, behind the (present lemon) orchard.
The child’s full sibling was Linda Christabel Brown born 1937 Mount Evelyn., and half siblings were Joyce Olive Jackson (nee Whittingham), Donald Lorimer Whittingham, and Leslie Hugh Whittingham.
Readers, please send me any corrections, or additions, or tell me of other unrecorded or unmarked graves in the district.
Unmarked Graves of Silvan, Silvan South and Burleigh
Most of the pioneers of the parish of Wandin Yallock and South Wandin are buried in the old Lillydale Cemetery. However, there are a number of infant children who died in the first weeks of life who were buried in the bush and their graves have now been left unmarked and unrecorded. I know of four such graves. There may likely be other bush graves of which I do not know.
1. The HOLLIS twins – 1875- 1875 [ Hollis – Suckling ]
The first in time that I know of is the graves of the Hollis twins in 1875.
These children were born to Hubert Hollis and his wife Eliza nee Suckling. These children were born in a timber and bark hut above the banks of the Middle Creek, to the north of Ferndale road. Feryndale House later stood nearby, and one of the early trees planted there is still standing and must be the biggest oak tree in Australia. The first cild was unnamed, and either died at birth or was stillborn and not recorded as a birth. The child was wrapped by the father in a swaddling piece of cloth and buried on a little hillock up behind the hut. The twin named WILLIAM HOLLIS, lived only eight days and then was buried beside his sibling in the same manner. b. 1875 Wandin vic (Birth Certificate Index 1875/26445); died 1875, (Death Certificate Index 1875/15381).
The death certificate records the burial place, and the oral history of the Hollis family story was handed down from Eliza (who lived to 1924) to her grandchildren, especially to her daughter Ada (Mrs Knoll) - who lived to 1948, as well as from Eliza Hollis's sister Elizabeth Suckling, who lived to 1933, that Hubert and Eliza Hollis's twins were wrapped in a piece of cloth and buried on the hill behind the bush hut the Hollis's occupied - on the site where Fernydale House was built in the 1880s by Albert Wiseman. This is recorded by Ada Knoll ( nee Hollis's)eldest granchild, Joy Olive Jackson, nee Whittingham, in her book "Against All Odds" (privately published on CD and as a book) which tells much of the story of the Hubert Hollis family.
The giant oak stands is a kind of historical memorial to the Fernydale era that the Hollis’s began, but I do not believe the children are buried by the oak tree. Up the back of the present property and business owned by James Dean, is a small hillock beside a road reserve where a grassed track is used by bikes and horse riders The owner has a water tank on top of the hill. I believe the children are beside this tank. The approximate site, where there is a little flat or shelf in the slope which forms the hillock, can be accessed up the side road, known as Randolph Road, off Ferndale Road.
James Dean is the pioneer of the enterprising Technical Solutions Australia, and manager of his help-for-disability electronic and equipment business on site. Technical Solutions Australiahttp://www.tecsol.com.au/index.html> make assistive technology, and automated divices and equipment that is used to improve the functional capabilities of individual with disabilities. This is appropriate in one way, as the Hollis family who pioneered that site for the Wiseman’s had a son Alfred, the youngest, who was crippled for most of his life, and used to use a trolley bed to get around the house for many years.
The siblings of these Hollis twins were: Annie 1867-1868; Charlie 1869-1905; Florrie (Mrs Albert Stewart) 1871-1908; Ada Jane (Mrs K Wilhelm Knoll) 1873-1948; George Hubert 1877-1955, Edward 1878-1945; and Alfred Hollis 1881-1952.
2. NOTE: I was wrong. I APOLOGIZE TO ANYONE I MAY HAVE LED ASTRAY> I am Sorry. I previously had the infant William Chapman – 1894/5 listed here, as follows:
William Chapman [ Chapman – Hunter ]
This infant was the William Chapman family’s first child: - son of William Chapman, then nearly 40, and his mother Estella nee Hunter, age 21. The child either died soon after birth or was stillborn. The Chapman story tells that the child’s mother Stella (Estella Jane Chapman – nee Hunter) was kicked in the navel area by a cow while milking, and she feared for the health of the child from that time on. I believe the child was buried in the garden of the old Chapman home, on the property that is now at the end of Progress Road, Silvan, near the headwaters of the Wandin Yallock Creek. THIS IS WRONG.
I WAS IN ERROR. In checking Hunter Family burials, I have recently discovered his burial among graves of the Hunter family in the Lilydale Cemetery Records which records William Chapman's Burial Therein - At Burial Number 2752 In Wesleyan Section 2, Grave 204, Lillydale Cemetery. The siblings of this first Chapman child were: Frank, Ernest, Mary (Knoll), Ralph, Dora, John, Charlie, Jessie (Hayne), Walter, Amy (Moon) & Ada Chapman (Taylor).
BUT as a REPLACEMENT for Number Two I have found: ATTWOOD (mistakenly transcribed as Hatwood) HUNTER: - I found William Chapman's details by the way when investigating the record for the detail for the burial of his mother Stella Hunter's younger siblings, seven of whom died in infancy. The latter six, but not the first of the seven, are listed in the Lilydale Cemetery Burial Record, all buried in the same grave. The first of the Infants who died young was Attwood Hunter, named for his mother Roseanna Dale Hampton's father, Attwood Hampton. Attwood was an old family name. Even Attwood Hampton had it from his maternal grandfather, Attwood Searanke. Unless Attwood Hunter was buried in Heidelberg or elsewhere, then he is likely to have been buried on the old Hunter property. This is now an open question.
Attwood (sic) Hatwood HUNTER was born and died in Wandin Yallock in 1877. He lived two days. He was the family's fifth child, but the first to die as a baby.
3. Unnamed infant BROWN about 1939 [ Brown – Knoll ]
A stillborn/miscarried child of Olive Ada Brown, nee Whittingham, nee KNOLL, & her second husband Horace Richard Laurence Brown. The child was born on the western slopes of Knolls Hill in Wiseman Road, Burleigh, and taken by the child’s grandfather Karl Wilhelm Knoll who then lived to the east on the hilltop, next door, and buried it in the bush, back of the ten acres, on top of the old Knolls Hill, behind the (present lemon) orchard.
The child’s full sibling was Linda Christabel Brown born 1937 Mount Evelyn., and half siblings were Joyce Olive Jackson (nee Whittingham), Donald Lorimer Whittingham, and Leslie Hugh Whittingham.
Readers, please send me any corrections, or additions, or tell me of other unrecorded or unmarked graves in the district.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
BURLEIGH- the place without signposts
BURLEIGH
Burleigh is a deeply rich volcanic soil district of both the Dandenongs and the Upper Yarra Valley. Burleigh is situated east of the Silvan Dam [or Reservoir] which submerges the western boundaries of the area in the Stoneyford & Coralfern Creeks. Burleigh can be roughly defined as being contained in the north by the rim of the watershed of the Middle Creek up its Ferndale tributary, and in the south by the length of Stoney Creek - which is also the Monbulk border of the local land district.
Burleigh was once a shadowed land of open wet-schlerophyl forest of messmate trees on the upper slopes which could be driven through with a horse and wagon, and the white gums [manna and mountain grey gum] in the valleys, with the lower creek gullies full of treeferns and fern understories appreaching in thickness and varieties to the the nearby Dandenongs rainforests. As borderlands of what were once the rainforests of Monbulk, Burleigh was a part of what was gazetted early on, as the 'Old Woori Yalloak Forest', and it is the most southerly part of that messmate-oak open forest area, out on the borders of the Parish of Wandin Yallock. It was opened up, and settled, long before the denser-timbered area that became Monbulk.
In the east, parts of it go down to wilder 'bulls-wool' tussock and pasture lands, once called 'Kelly Country' after a large landowner there, or 'Kangaroo Country' for its more open-country wildlife, on the once-native-burnt grassy downs leading down to the floodplains of the Woori Yallock Creek.
If the main Monbulk -Lilydale road can be thought of as its screened frontage, then the grassed and tea-treed Woori downlands of Burleigh constitute its hunting grounds, its wild backyard.
As a district Burleigh or Wandin South can be said to have four institutions which have given it a sense of substance as a place in the minds of those elsewhere, where the real substance was and is, of course, in the stories and lives of the intrepid people who settled in its dripping shadows and struggled to open it up to ongoing productivity, to live and work on Burleigh's slopes, hilltops and creek valleys. I hope to publish some diary accounts of some such settlers and battlers.
Link to pages on Burleigh Settler Family, Hubert John Hollis & Eliza (nee Suckling) Hollis -by Barbara Hollis http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~barbarahollis/hubert_hollis.htm
Link to pages on Burleigh Settler family George Walter Parker & Ann Hampton (nee Wiseman) Parker - by Ian Marr
http://members.datafast.net.au/marrtronics/g0000001.html#I0135
Note: Two of the above, Eliza Suckling and George Walter Parker are first cousins. I will in future be publishing something which tells of these cousins links with the village of Widford, Hertfordshire, strong place-of-origin and family links which becomes a multiple cousinship also with two families of the Wiseman Brothers who provided capital support as a bond of relationship intergral to the first settlement of South Wandin.
'Burleigh' is prior to Silvan. Burleigh was in existence from 1908, whereas the rest of South Wandin came to be called Silvan in only 1917 after the community drew a fanciful name out of a hat for a change of name to eliminate confusion between too many Wandins.
The Four Main Institutions in chronological order are;
1. The Try Boys Society Farm at " Fernydale House" 1890s and early 1900s till WW1.
- This was defined as being "near Lilydale". [At the corner of Ferndale & Monbulk-Seville Roads]
2. The Burleigh Post Office - 1908-1963 - See archive of Burleigh Post Office post.
http://burleigh-way.blogspot.com/2007/03/burleigh-post-office.html
- Monbulk -Liydale Road (early) -then Wiseman Road, Burleigh.
3. The Silvan South Primary School -1928-1982
- the corner of Monbulk-Seville Road and Reeves (Link) Road
4. The Gospel Hall & Sunday School & Christian Endeavour - 1932-1992
- at the third Junction Corner of Monbulk-Seville Road & Wiseman Road as you go east.
Burleigh is a deeply rich volcanic soil district of both the Dandenongs and the Upper Yarra Valley. Burleigh is situated east of the Silvan Dam [or Reservoir] which submerges the western boundaries of the area in the Stoneyford & Coralfern Creeks. Burleigh can be roughly defined as being contained in the north by the rim of the watershed of the Middle Creek up its Ferndale tributary, and in the south by the length of Stoney Creek - which is also the Monbulk border of the local land district.
Burleigh was once a shadowed land of open wet-schlerophyl forest of messmate trees on the upper slopes which could be driven through with a horse and wagon, and the white gums [manna and mountain grey gum] in the valleys, with the lower creek gullies full of treeferns and fern understories appreaching in thickness and varieties to the the nearby Dandenongs rainforests. As borderlands of what were once the rainforests of Monbulk, Burleigh was a part of what was gazetted early on, as the 'Old Woori Yalloak Forest', and it is the most southerly part of that messmate-oak open forest area, out on the borders of the Parish of Wandin Yallock. It was opened up, and settled, long before the denser-timbered area that became Monbulk.
In the east, parts of it go down to wilder 'bulls-wool' tussock and pasture lands, once called 'Kelly Country' after a large landowner there, or 'Kangaroo Country' for its more open-country wildlife, on the once-native-burnt grassy downs leading down to the floodplains of the Woori Yallock Creek.
If the main Monbulk -Lilydale road can be thought of as its screened frontage, then the grassed and tea-treed Woori downlands of Burleigh constitute its hunting grounds, its wild backyard.
As a district Burleigh or Wandin South can be said to have four institutions which have given it a sense of substance as a place in the minds of those elsewhere, where the real substance was and is, of course, in the stories and lives of the intrepid people who settled in its dripping shadows and struggled to open it up to ongoing productivity, to live and work on Burleigh's slopes, hilltops and creek valleys. I hope to publish some diary accounts of some such settlers and battlers.
Link to pages on Burleigh Settler Family, Hubert John Hollis & Eliza (nee Suckling) Hollis -by Barbara Hollis http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~barbarahollis/hubert_hollis.htm
Link to pages on Burleigh Settler family George Walter Parker & Ann Hampton (nee Wiseman) Parker - by Ian Marr
http://members.datafast.net.au/marrtronics/g0000001.html#I0135
Note: Two of the above, Eliza Suckling and George Walter Parker are first cousins. I will in future be publishing something which tells of these cousins links with the village of Widford, Hertfordshire, strong place-of-origin and family links which becomes a multiple cousinship also with two families of the Wiseman Brothers who provided capital support as a bond of relationship intergral to the first settlement of South Wandin.
'Burleigh' is prior to Silvan. Burleigh was in existence from 1908, whereas the rest of South Wandin came to be called Silvan in only 1917 after the community drew a fanciful name out of a hat for a change of name to eliminate confusion between too many Wandins.
The Four Main Institutions in chronological order are;
1. The Try Boys Society Farm at " Fernydale House" 1890s and early 1900s till WW1.
- This was defined as being "near Lilydale". [At the corner of Ferndale & Monbulk-Seville Roads]
2. The Burleigh Post Office - 1908-1963 - See archive of Burleigh Post Office post.
http://burleigh-way.blogspot.com/2007/03/burleigh-post-office.html
- Monbulk -Liydale Road (early) -then Wiseman Road, Burleigh.
3. The Silvan South Primary School -1928-1982
- the corner of Monbulk-Seville Road and Reeves (Link) Road
4. The Gospel Hall & Sunday School & Christian Endeavour - 1932-1992
- at the third Junction Corner of Monbulk-Seville Road & Wiseman Road as you go east.
Monday, April 16, 2007
The Hollis family of the Thames Valley, England and the Yarra Valley, Australia
The Hollis family of the Thames Valley, England and the Yarra Valley, Australia
by Wayne David Knoll © 8 Nov 2005-April 2007
link to Hollis Family History by Barbara Hollis http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~barbarahollis/hollis_family.htm
Frontier Sacrifice
Father Hollis dead a year or so off the ship. Mother then married to a disliked stepfather, and soon she dies. The six Hollis children are orphans before their maturity. The oldest just eighteen. There very often is an original sacrifice in the birth of our people in Australia. The travail of the journey, the ordeal of leaving home, most often forever, the grueling sea-voyage, the half-year of being at sea, the breaking of horizons in crossing the vastness of half the world’s oceans, then thin gruel, the bad food, the likelihood of sickness, and death. Our ancestors gave much for us to be here
Though many a European took the risk of sailing out to the other side of the world to seek a better life, the hardships meant casualties, and the experience of free settler emigrants was very often not a prosperous one in the first instance. The vagaries of the sea trip, bad weather, bad water, disease riddled-hulks of ships, and then the lack of fresh food and adequate shelter on arrival in the raw settlements of Australia caught many out, left them out of the rewards, and took them down to untimely deaths.
The appearance of mean beginnings
When I at first began to search out the wider pattern of my own Hollis family in early Melbourne, I thought, because of the poverty of situations I found them in here, in early Collingwood and Fitzroy I thought that they were from a landless and comfortless background in England. Not so. They had fallen from a well-to-do standing into distress through the death of the family provider, and these were common frontier circumstances outside securities of those on the other side of the globe.
The well-established Hollis family fell into tragedy soon after their arrival in Australia. John Frederick Hollis, his wife and his family of six children departed the Port of London on the ship “Chalmers”, arriving in Melbourne in November 1852. The Hollis children were Hubert John, then age 11; Arthur age 10; Fanny (Frances) age 9; Edward age 7; Edith Rachel age 6; and little Lucy age 4. Their father John Frederick Hollis was then age 42, their mother Elizabeth Frances (Fanny) Hollis nee Close, age 38.
John Frederick Hollis is recorded as having died in 1854 in melancholy circumstances, but what they might be we know not. It is possible that he died in the recordless mullock of the goldfields. He could have died at sea, or interstate. But Fanny was left a widow, and the children left fatherless.
But further research revealed that John Frederick Hollis was the second son of minor gentry, the large-landed yeoman farmers on the Thames river flats near Reading. He would seem to be an ideal Australian settler, having already been a working farmer and raised on a large yeoman farm since childhood. He and his family had emigrated from the greater Reading area where they’d lived in the rich fields of middle Thames Valley of Oxfordshire-Buckinghamshire and Berkshire.
A sender-unaddressed letter dated 31 March 1854 from ‘Cousin Gus’ to the oldest Hollis child, young Hubert Hollis (my great great grandfather) is still extant. ‘Cousin Gus’ mentions a number of people he expects Hubert to know. These are Aunt and Uncle Pearman, a cousin and a neighbour, including Tommy, who was at nearby Oxford University. This letter seems to be written from Abingdon near Reading in Berkshire, England, just south of the University town at Oxford.
[Note: Tuesday 24 April 2007 - I have just discovered who Cousin Gus is. Hubert's father had a sister: Mary Eliza Hollis. I have just researched her marriage (on the CLDS Family Search International Genealogy Index [IGI] ) - to John Pearman - (Note: not Peaman as I have first interpreted the letter). So Aunt Pearman is Mary Eliza nee Hollis and Uncle is John Pearman. The IGI records also show that John Pearman and Mary Eliza Hollis had two sons: Augustus John Pearman, -and this will be the Gus of the letter [born 28 FEB 1832], and his brother, Morgan Thomas Pearman [born about 05 MAR 1835] - who is likely to be ' Tommy' who was at Oxford, as mentioned in the letter. The Pearman boys were born where their father was born, and where their parents married, at Mapledurham, Oxford, England - on the north bank of the Thames, upstream of Reading. ]
March 31st 1854.
My dear Hubert,
We were all exceedingly sorry to hear of the death of your poor Papa so far from England and under such melancholy circumstances, but we hope that as you always have been a very good boy, you will continue to be so and try to do all you can to be a comfort to your poor Mamma and your little Brothers and Sisters who will naturally look up to you to set a good example now that your Papa is called away to another world. If you do this, as I do not doubt you will, I am sure that you will get on well, for God never fails to help those who try to please him.
You can tell your Mamma that we often think of her but have never received the letter which she told Susannah she had written to your Aunt Pearman. You may also say that Mrs Hodson (late Miss Wells) died suddenly at Abingdon not long ago, and that Mr Lewis Rose is also gone. I think you heard that your cousin Frank West was engaged to be married to Miss Key. I have now to tell you that the engagement was broken off, at the desire of the lady, shortly after it was formed. This will amuse your Mamma if it does not much interest you.
The chief subject of conversation in England is the war with Russia which has now been formally declared. Everything is in consequence dreadfully dear and some of the taxes have been doubled. The past winter (your summer) has been the dreariest and most severe which has been known for many years. But the weather is now very beautiful and at present there is every prospect, with God’s Blessing, of a productive season.
Your Aunt Pearman is as well as usual and would no doubt send her best love if she knew that I was writing to you. Your Uncle has been very poorly and seems to me to be much changed in appearance and habits during the last few weeks. Tommy has been some time at Oxford, has passed one examination, and was never in better health than at present.
Give my best love to your dear Mamma, kiss her for me, and tell her how sorry I am to hear of her loss in poor Uncles’ death. Also kiss all your brothers and sisters, especially those who are old enough to remember me.
and Believe me ( I am) your affectionate
Cousin Gus
Cousin Gus, Augustus John Pearman obtained his MA from Oxford, and became the Reverend A.J. Pearman, vicar of St. Margaret's Church, Bethersden, near Ashford, Kent; & The Precincts, Rochester, Kent, & Minor Canon Row, Rochester (1898), and the author of the History of Ashford, as well as several papers on the church archaeology of Kent. He later was ordained Canon Augustus John Pearman. His brother Tommy [Morgan Thomas Pearman], also obtained his M.A., of Pembroke College, Oxford and became the Reverend M.T. Pearman, and was the vicar incumbent for 37 Years at Iwade, near Sittingbourne in Kent, England. Both the Reverends Augustus John Pearman and Morgan Thomas Pearman became historians and writers. The Reverend M.T. Pearman wrote "Historical Notes on Caversham' the Hollis's homeland. So The Hollis cousins were certainly of the professions, and able to take up incumbencies in parishes far from Mapledurham or Cane End, and to make a lasting contribition to the life of the mind and spirit.
For the once-yeoman Hollis family in Melbourne, with this obvious history of a highly literate and respectably affectionate family who kept in correspondence with cousins at Oxford, with a former networks of neighbours with mixed prospects, found that their fate soon reduced to a grim mean and then straightened some indeed. I do not know of their movements in the first years in Victoria. The Hollis family ended up living in the Richmond-Collingwood area of Melbourne. Mrs Fanny Hollis remarried, to Pennsylvania USA-born, widower and Richmond brickmaker, Mr Thomas Simmonds, at St Stephens Church, Richmond on 2 June 1857, and at that time she gave the date she’d become a widow as 11 Jan 1854. So we presume this to be the date of John Frederick Hollis’s death. No death certificate exists. His death is not listed in any index to be found. His place of burial is unknown.
For the children’s mother and guardian, Fanny Simmonds, had soon gone herself, dying on the 4th of June 1860 in Crown St, Yarra-Berg, Richmond. She was buried in the Melbourne General Cemetery. The Hollis children were now orphans, and their stepfather Simmonds seems to have been no parent to them. When they became orphans Hubert was age 18; Arthur age 17; Fanny age 16; Edward age 14; Edith age 12/13; and Lucy age 10 or 11. The younger Hollis children were made wards of the State of Victoria and put under the guardianship of Mr Septimus Martin J.P., of Collingwood.
The dissolution of the adulthood of the family and the loss of family memory caused by the early deaths of both parents must have been traumatic for the young Hollis’s, for the geographical and emotional contrasts within nine years were great indeed. For, on the 30 March 1851 when the British Census man paid a visit, the whole Hollis family were found at home at the ‘Albert Cottages’ in the village of St Giles, near Reading, Berkshire. John Frederick Hollis was then registered as being ‘formerly a farmer’. It seems likely that he had eased himself off the farm in preparation for his family’s journey of relocation to the other side of the world, which they were then a little over a year from embarking upon. I’m not sure how he was making a living at that juncture, maybe in property. They had not always lived in Berkshire, though they’d always lived with an hour’s walk from the rural English River Thames or its tributaries. The youngest girl, Lucy, was born at Hurley, near Crookham, Berkshire in 1849 and Edith had been born in 1846 nearby where they were living in 1851, at Burghfield, near Reading, Berkshire. So the John F. Hollis family can be seen to have lived in Berkshire only since about 1845 or 1846. The older children were all born where they had their farm, at Long Crendon, near Thame, in Buckinghamshire, on the borders of Oxfordshire, about ten miles east of the city of Oxford. Hubert was born in 1841, Arthur-1842, Fanny-1843, and Edward Payne Hollis in 1845, all at Long Crendon, near Thame in Buckinghamshire. This is not far away. Thame is only about twenty or thirty miles north of Reading.
But the Hollises were Yeoman farmers on 450 good acres with 20 Servants
John Frederick Hollis was a second son of the yeoman farmer William Hollis, Esq. and his wife Elizabeth nee Pottinger. His Sire is listed for Reading in the 1830 Directory of Berkshire, among the Nobility: as ‘William Holles, Gentleman and Farmer, of Cane End, Caversham’. William’s brother, Thomas Hollis, was a professional Surveyor who lived as a neighbour with his family across the river Thames at Sonning, Berkshire. William died in 1828 and his three adult children still lived with his widow Elizabeth, recorded in the census of that year as proprietor of his ‘Lashbrook Farm” an establishment still employing 20 labourers then, at Cane End, Caversham.
The William Hollis children were: the eldest, William Pottinger Hollis, who established his family on the Thames at ‘Charville Farm’ of 450 acres, with a force of 15 farm servants, in Sonning, Berkshire. Of his own children, his eldest, also William Pottinger Hollis (II) was later a surgeon in London. Second son Frederick Hollis established himself later as a farmer with 4 servants on ‘Borough Farm’ Sonning, Berkshire, after he married Fanny Hayden Masters and raised their children during the 1870s.
The second son was our John Frederick Hollis who came to Melbourne.
The other siblings were: Thomas Adolphus Hollis b. 1810/1; Harriet Hollis b. 1912; Richard Augustus Hollis b. 1813-15; and Charles Ernest Hollis b.1816.
Richard Augustus Hollis went to London and established himself as at first as a master grocer, and then as a Tea Dealer at 25 Chapel Street in Somerston, St Pancras. His nephew William P Hollis lived with him while he was a medical student. Charles E. Hollis, who was working in 1861 as a Tea Dealer with his next older brother Richard, in London, is back on the home turf, recorded in the Directory for Berkshire of 1864 as a farmer on ‘Charville Farm’ along with his eldest brother William P. Hollis.
In Collingwood, Victoria, Australia
I do not know how the young Hollises survived financially during those years. But there is evidence that Hubert was loaded with the responsibility of being big brother and proxy father to his sisters and brothers, a load which was often, no doubt, too much for him to bear. But the respect with which his sister Fanny Smith (nee Hollis) regarded him can be seen in the fact that her children named their children after their Uncle Hubert, including Hubert Thomas Stott, born 1888 in Collingwood, his son Lindsay Hubert Stott, born 1918 Clifton Hill, and George Hubert Smith, born 1913 in Clifton Hill.
Fanny (Frances Elizabeth) Hollis was first to marry, in 1864 in Collingwood. Her husband was John Thomas Smith, a brassfounder born in London. They had five children from 1865 to 1877, three daughters and two sons. Their eldest Rosa Frances Smith later married Thomas Stott, who had a wholesale produce agency at Melbourne’s Victoria Market which lasted generations.
My father tells me that my grandfather and my great grandfather sent produce from the (Hollis-linked) Knoll, Shaw and other Hollis descendant farms in South Wandin (Burleigh) to be sold by the Stott Market Agency.
This Stott family would show respect for their Hollis ancestry both in naming their third son Victor Hollis Stott, born at Collingwood in 1891 and dying at Ringwood in 1968, as well as their eldest son Hubert, mentioned above.
Survival and non-Survival is our true story
The job these orphan Hollises had to survive, let alone make a seat in pioneering a new country, with or without patronage, was, more often than not, an overtaxing one. The more bare-footed travail and pain of the orphan is not often appreciated by children of the well-heeled. Hubert’s lot was helped by the patronage of his wife’s Wiseman relatives. Sister FannyElizabeth had the good fortune to marry a provident husband, John Thomas Smith, a brassfounder, a raise a large family in Melbourne.
But not many of this Hollises lived very long. Either their health, their circumstance, or their self-possession seems to have broken down by middle age. The pioneer of Wandin South, Hubert, died of Brights Disease in 1888, at age 47, also leaving six children fatherless at ages from 7 to 20. His brother Edward, who had long suffered from recurrent mania, died in the unrelenting lovelessness and loneliness of an incarceration which ended in a fit of epileptic convulsions in Beechworth Asylum in 1892 at age 46.
Of his sisters, Edith, who had been deserted when her husband, William Henry Grass, fell into the pickled grip of the cheapest alcoholism, was made a widow when Bill died as he had lived, in the stables of a Richmond hotel in 1883, at age 44, in a state of ulcerous neglect and godforsaken dereliction. Edith responded to that lifelong devastation with compassionate dignity and lamentation for her children. She soon died herself, in 1892, aged only 46, leaving the two Grass children orphans. By then the youngest, Lucy Hollis was already dead, dying in 1891 at age 43. Who with a heart among us would dare boast before them of the so-called blessings or deserved merits of a long life, or to judge one of them for the foreshortened sufferings of an often bitter pilgrimage?
Only Fanny and Arthur, a bachelor, lived longer. Arthur died age 67 and Fanny nee Hollis lived to be 83, dying in 1928, the same years as her husband John Thomas SMITH, in Armadale.
An orphan heritage on the far side of the world
While these Hollis orphans were struggling to find a way ahead in life in early Melbourne, their cousins, were being educated at public schools in England, and the oldest cousins William Pottinger Hollis, son of their father's older brother of the same name, was studying to be a doctor and then became a surgeon, in London. For these first generation Australian Hollises, a family with connections in Oxford, where cousin and associate could take studies which might lead to life in the professions, that fateful life of loss, servitude or the unrelenting hardship or drudgery of pioneering Australia must have held disappointments indeed.
Such things are often put out of mind of children who do no grow up with such expectation. Despite these disappointments, life yawned to be lived, so offspring of the English-born Hollis pioneers went on to make lives as best they could by the more constrained lights of their circumstances, in the opportunity which Australia offered.
Hubert John Hollis married in Fitzroy on 5 March 1867. His wife, Eliza Suckling, also an orphan, had lost her parents earlier, in England. But in the census of 30 March 1851 she had been in the Ware Union, with her younger siblings. The Union was more commonly known as the workhouse or the poorhouse, this one in the town of Ware, Hertfordshire, north of London where she’d been born. The Suckling parents had died tragically of the epidemic in 1848 leaving all their children orphans. Us Australians are often of an orphan heritage on the other side of the world.
But Eliza Suckling had then but lately come to Australia with her older sister Elizabeth following her cousins Parker, with two cousin sisters married to the prosperous Wiseman brothers. The sisters arrived in Melbourne on 26 Sep 1865 on the ship "Sam Cearns" from England and Eliza soon found work with her cousin at that Wiseman estate in Yarra Street, Collingwood.
Hubert John Hollis, made an orphan by the losses in transit and arrival of his family in trying to make a new life in Australia, married Eliza, an orphan of the English epidemics whcih were among a blacksmiths likely options. Hubert was loaded with the expectation of manhood and responsibility from the time he was eleven. And, if he failed Eliza, and his children, it was by a tough life, teh hard struggle to survive, and then dying young, carrying what may have been a too heavy a burden of responsibilty. He had witnessed each of his sisters marriages as a father would, even though the younger two were under age, and maybe saw the dissolution of their lives in tragedy as his partly within his own faailures. Hubert and Eliza had nine children, three in Collingwood area, and the rest born in the valleys of South Wandin, six of whom survived, four sons and two daughters. They lived in the deepest of bush after 1873 as its first co-settlers.
Hubert died at 48, and left his own sons and daughters fatherless. The eldest, Charlie Hollis, became a blacksmith with his maternal uncle, Charlie Suckling, in Prahran, and died young. Two of the fatherless sons George and Edward, went to the Boer war, and became policeman in South Africa. George became a missionary and stayed in Africa. Edward later brough his family back to Silvan. The youngest son, Alfred, a cripple, became a diarist and recorder of the life on the Burleigh farms of his nephews and neices, and managed 'Hillcrest' the rental property on Silvan road he inherited from his mother. Florrie married Albert Stewart, mine manager, and died young.
The yeoman legacy passed down through his daughter Ada, who married the son of a Schwabian vinedresser and German farmer, K. Wilhelm Knoll. who restored productivity and the building of public and private grace and spirit to the life of their Hollis-blooded sons and daughters in South Wandin, in Burleigh and Silvan.
But their is a residual nobility of freedom in all the Hollis scions.
The Character Trace of the old Yeoman Freedom
In the shadowy bush of South Wandin, Hubert Hollis carved out a square mile, not of his own land, but as proxy and site-manager for Albert Wiseman. With his brother Arthur working with him on wages, he set to falling trees, splitting and sawing them to length, and building a post and rail fence around the whole square mile, 360 acres. Building a hut, clearing land for crops, berry vines and orchard trees. The selection was the kind of size his yeoman ancestors were used to, but it was not his to claim. His reward for service to Wiseman's was in selecting his own property to be paid for in earned installments, in the next valley, sized to suit his reduced means at sixty acres.
And if he or his sons had some inner air of pride, or authority, as if they were not born to a life of drudgery and toil, maybe it was not because they were trying to big-note themselves out of bluff and false pride, but because they had come down in the world in truth. Their people had long been used to being in charge, in authority, and giving jobs and tasks in the thrifty oversight and management of a productive farm. And the noble freedom of their yeoman heritage gave urge to all the hopes of the gentleman in them, hopes which did not have much hope of being fulfilled in the constrained circumstances which necessitated the grubbing a living out from among the stubbornly rooted trees of the deep forests of Wandin Yallock. .
And yet, that heritage of yeoman freedom and enterprise is with us yet, for the land Hubert Hollis selected is still held in part by men who are turning it to a productive living, and men who are some of his great great grandsons, with sons of their own being raised on the land, and off it. Sons, and daughters, who might also take a degree to enter the professions, or else to farm.
The desire of the Hollis blood is to be in charge, to think for yourself, independent, one's own boss, and to have the means to do it, a task that has sometimes proved, as it is eroded by the bitter cracks of orphanhood, to be beyond the urge and passion of the old blood.
link with Hollis Family History by Barbara Hollis http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~barbarahollis/hollis_family.htm
by Wayne David Knoll © 8 Nov 2005-April 2007
link to Hollis Family History by Barbara Hollis http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~barbarahollis/hollis_family.htm
Frontier Sacrifice
Father Hollis dead a year or so off the ship. Mother then married to a disliked stepfather, and soon she dies. The six Hollis children are orphans before their maturity. The oldest just eighteen. There very often is an original sacrifice in the birth of our people in Australia. The travail of the journey, the ordeal of leaving home, most often forever, the grueling sea-voyage, the half-year of being at sea, the breaking of horizons in crossing the vastness of half the world’s oceans, then thin gruel, the bad food, the likelihood of sickness, and death. Our ancestors gave much for us to be here
Though many a European took the risk of sailing out to the other side of the world to seek a better life, the hardships meant casualties, and the experience of free settler emigrants was very often not a prosperous one in the first instance. The vagaries of the sea trip, bad weather, bad water, disease riddled-hulks of ships, and then the lack of fresh food and adequate shelter on arrival in the raw settlements of Australia caught many out, left them out of the rewards, and took them down to untimely deaths.
The appearance of mean beginnings
When I at first began to search out the wider pattern of my own Hollis family in early Melbourne, I thought, because of the poverty of situations I found them in here, in early Collingwood and Fitzroy I thought that they were from a landless and comfortless background in England. Not so. They had fallen from a well-to-do standing into distress through the death of the family provider, and these were common frontier circumstances outside securities of those on the other side of the globe.
The well-established Hollis family fell into tragedy soon after their arrival in Australia. John Frederick Hollis, his wife and his family of six children departed the Port of London on the ship “Chalmers”, arriving in Melbourne in November 1852. The Hollis children were Hubert John, then age 11; Arthur age 10; Fanny (Frances) age 9; Edward age 7; Edith Rachel age 6; and little Lucy age 4. Their father John Frederick Hollis was then age 42, their mother Elizabeth Frances (Fanny) Hollis nee Close, age 38.
John Frederick Hollis is recorded as having died in 1854 in melancholy circumstances, but what they might be we know not. It is possible that he died in the recordless mullock of the goldfields. He could have died at sea, or interstate. But Fanny was left a widow, and the children left fatherless.
But further research revealed that John Frederick Hollis was the second son of minor gentry, the large-landed yeoman farmers on the Thames river flats near Reading. He would seem to be an ideal Australian settler, having already been a working farmer and raised on a large yeoman farm since childhood. He and his family had emigrated from the greater Reading area where they’d lived in the rich fields of middle Thames Valley of Oxfordshire-Buckinghamshire and Berkshire.
A sender-unaddressed letter dated 31 March 1854 from ‘Cousin Gus’ to the oldest Hollis child, young Hubert Hollis (my great great grandfather) is still extant. ‘Cousin Gus’ mentions a number of people he expects Hubert to know. These are Aunt and Uncle Pearman, a cousin and a neighbour, including Tommy, who was at nearby Oxford University. This letter seems to be written from Abingdon near Reading in Berkshire, England, just south of the University town at Oxford.
[Note: Tuesday 24 April 2007 - I have just discovered who Cousin Gus is. Hubert's father had a sister: Mary Eliza Hollis. I have just researched her marriage (on the CLDS Family Search International Genealogy Index [IGI] ) - to John Pearman - (Note: not Peaman as I have first interpreted the letter). So Aunt Pearman is Mary Eliza nee Hollis and Uncle is John Pearman. The IGI records also show that John Pearman and Mary Eliza Hollis had two sons: Augustus John Pearman, -and this will be the Gus of the letter [born 28 FEB 1832], and his brother, Morgan Thomas Pearman [born about 05 MAR 1835] - who is likely to be ' Tommy' who was at Oxford, as mentioned in the letter. The Pearman boys were born where their father was born, and where their parents married, at Mapledurham, Oxford, England - on the north bank of the Thames, upstream of Reading. ]
March 31st 1854.
My dear Hubert,
We were all exceedingly sorry to hear of the death of your poor Papa so far from England and under such melancholy circumstances, but we hope that as you always have been a very good boy, you will continue to be so and try to do all you can to be a comfort to your poor Mamma and your little Brothers and Sisters who will naturally look up to you to set a good example now that your Papa is called away to another world. If you do this, as I do not doubt you will, I am sure that you will get on well, for God never fails to help those who try to please him.
You can tell your Mamma that we often think of her but have never received the letter which she told Susannah she had written to your Aunt Pearman. You may also say that Mrs Hodson (late Miss Wells) died suddenly at Abingdon not long ago, and that Mr Lewis Rose is also gone. I think you heard that your cousin Frank West was engaged to be married to Miss Key. I have now to tell you that the engagement was broken off, at the desire of the lady, shortly after it was formed. This will amuse your Mamma if it does not much interest you.
The chief subject of conversation in England is the war with Russia which has now been formally declared. Everything is in consequence dreadfully dear and some of the taxes have been doubled. The past winter (your summer) has been the dreariest and most severe which has been known for many years. But the weather is now very beautiful and at present there is every prospect, with God’s Blessing, of a productive season.
Your Aunt Pearman is as well as usual and would no doubt send her best love if she knew that I was writing to you. Your Uncle has been very poorly and seems to me to be much changed in appearance and habits during the last few weeks. Tommy has been some time at Oxford, has passed one examination, and was never in better health than at present.
Give my best love to your dear Mamma, kiss her for me, and tell her how sorry I am to hear of her loss in poor Uncles’ death. Also kiss all your brothers and sisters, especially those who are old enough to remember me.
and Believe me ( I am) your affectionate
Cousin Gus
Cousin Gus, Augustus John Pearman obtained his MA from Oxford, and became the Reverend A.J. Pearman, vicar of St. Margaret's Church, Bethersden, near Ashford, Kent; & The Precincts, Rochester, Kent, & Minor Canon Row, Rochester (1898), and the author of the History of Ashford, as well as several papers on the church archaeology of Kent. He later was ordained Canon Augustus John Pearman. His brother Tommy [Morgan Thomas Pearman], also obtained his M.A., of Pembroke College, Oxford and became the Reverend M.T. Pearman, and was the vicar incumbent for 37 Years at Iwade, near Sittingbourne in Kent, England. Both the Reverends Augustus John Pearman and Morgan Thomas Pearman became historians and writers. The Reverend M.T. Pearman wrote "Historical Notes on Caversham' the Hollis's homeland. So The Hollis cousins were certainly of the professions, and able to take up incumbencies in parishes far from Mapledurham or Cane End, and to make a lasting contribition to the life of the mind and spirit.
For the once-yeoman Hollis family in Melbourne, with this obvious history of a highly literate and respectably affectionate family who kept in correspondence with cousins at Oxford, with a former networks of neighbours with mixed prospects, found that their fate soon reduced to a grim mean and then straightened some indeed. I do not know of their movements in the first years in Victoria. The Hollis family ended up living in the Richmond-Collingwood area of Melbourne. Mrs Fanny Hollis remarried, to Pennsylvania USA-born, widower and Richmond brickmaker, Mr Thomas Simmonds, at St Stephens Church, Richmond on 2 June 1857, and at that time she gave the date she’d become a widow as 11 Jan 1854. So we presume this to be the date of John Frederick Hollis’s death. No death certificate exists. His death is not listed in any index to be found. His place of burial is unknown.
For the children’s mother and guardian, Fanny Simmonds, had soon gone herself, dying on the 4th of June 1860 in Crown St, Yarra-Berg, Richmond. She was buried in the Melbourne General Cemetery. The Hollis children were now orphans, and their stepfather Simmonds seems to have been no parent to them. When they became orphans Hubert was age 18; Arthur age 17; Fanny age 16; Edward age 14; Edith age 12/13; and Lucy age 10 or 11. The younger Hollis children were made wards of the State of Victoria and put under the guardianship of Mr Septimus Martin J.P., of Collingwood.
The dissolution of the adulthood of the family and the loss of family memory caused by the early deaths of both parents must have been traumatic for the young Hollis’s, for the geographical and emotional contrasts within nine years were great indeed. For, on the 30 March 1851 when the British Census man paid a visit, the whole Hollis family were found at home at the ‘Albert Cottages’ in the village of St Giles, near Reading, Berkshire. John Frederick Hollis was then registered as being ‘formerly a farmer’. It seems likely that he had eased himself off the farm in preparation for his family’s journey of relocation to the other side of the world, which they were then a little over a year from embarking upon. I’m not sure how he was making a living at that juncture, maybe in property. They had not always lived in Berkshire, though they’d always lived with an hour’s walk from the rural English River Thames or its tributaries. The youngest girl, Lucy, was born at Hurley, near Crookham, Berkshire in 1849 and Edith had been born in 1846 nearby where they were living in 1851, at Burghfield, near Reading, Berkshire. So the John F. Hollis family can be seen to have lived in Berkshire only since about 1845 or 1846. The older children were all born where they had their farm, at Long Crendon, near Thame, in Buckinghamshire, on the borders of Oxfordshire, about ten miles east of the city of Oxford. Hubert was born in 1841, Arthur-1842, Fanny-1843, and Edward Payne Hollis in 1845, all at Long Crendon, near Thame in Buckinghamshire. This is not far away. Thame is only about twenty or thirty miles north of Reading.
But the Hollises were Yeoman farmers on 450 good acres with 20 Servants
John Frederick Hollis was a second son of the yeoman farmer William Hollis, Esq. and his wife Elizabeth nee Pottinger. His Sire is listed for Reading in the 1830 Directory of Berkshire, among the Nobility: as ‘William Holles, Gentleman and Farmer, of Cane End, Caversham’. William’s brother, Thomas Hollis, was a professional Surveyor who lived as a neighbour with his family across the river Thames at Sonning, Berkshire. William died in 1828 and his three adult children still lived with his widow Elizabeth, recorded in the census of that year as proprietor of his ‘Lashbrook Farm” an establishment still employing 20 labourers then, at Cane End, Caversham.
The William Hollis children were: the eldest, William Pottinger Hollis, who established his family on the Thames at ‘Charville Farm’ of 450 acres, with a force of 15 farm servants, in Sonning, Berkshire. Of his own children, his eldest, also William Pottinger Hollis (II) was later a surgeon in London. Second son Frederick Hollis established himself later as a farmer with 4 servants on ‘Borough Farm’ Sonning, Berkshire, after he married Fanny Hayden Masters and raised their children during the 1870s.
The second son was our John Frederick Hollis who came to Melbourne.
The other siblings were: Thomas Adolphus Hollis b. 1810/1; Harriet Hollis b. 1912; Richard Augustus Hollis b. 1813-15; and Charles Ernest Hollis b.1816.
Richard Augustus Hollis went to London and established himself as at first as a master grocer, and then as a Tea Dealer at 25 Chapel Street in Somerston, St Pancras. His nephew William P Hollis lived with him while he was a medical student. Charles E. Hollis, who was working in 1861 as a Tea Dealer with his next older brother Richard, in London, is back on the home turf, recorded in the Directory for Berkshire of 1864 as a farmer on ‘Charville Farm’ along with his eldest brother William P. Hollis.
In Collingwood, Victoria, Australia
I do not know how the young Hollises survived financially during those years. But there is evidence that Hubert was loaded with the responsibility of being big brother and proxy father to his sisters and brothers, a load which was often, no doubt, too much for him to bear. But the respect with which his sister Fanny Smith (nee Hollis) regarded him can be seen in the fact that her children named their children after their Uncle Hubert, including Hubert Thomas Stott, born 1888 in Collingwood, his son Lindsay Hubert Stott, born 1918 Clifton Hill, and George Hubert Smith, born 1913 in Clifton Hill.
Fanny (Frances Elizabeth) Hollis was first to marry, in 1864 in Collingwood. Her husband was John Thomas Smith, a brassfounder born in London. They had five children from 1865 to 1877, three daughters and two sons. Their eldest Rosa Frances Smith later married Thomas Stott, who had a wholesale produce agency at Melbourne’s Victoria Market which lasted generations.
My father tells me that my grandfather and my great grandfather sent produce from the (Hollis-linked) Knoll, Shaw and other Hollis descendant farms in South Wandin (Burleigh) to be sold by the Stott Market Agency.
This Stott family would show respect for their Hollis ancestry both in naming their third son Victor Hollis Stott, born at Collingwood in 1891 and dying at Ringwood in 1968, as well as their eldest son Hubert, mentioned above.
Survival and non-Survival is our true story
The job these orphan Hollises had to survive, let alone make a seat in pioneering a new country, with or without patronage, was, more often than not, an overtaxing one. The more bare-footed travail and pain of the orphan is not often appreciated by children of the well-heeled. Hubert’s lot was helped by the patronage of his wife’s Wiseman relatives. Sister FannyElizabeth had the good fortune to marry a provident husband, John Thomas Smith, a brassfounder, a raise a large family in Melbourne.
But not many of this Hollises lived very long. Either their health, their circumstance, or their self-possession seems to have broken down by middle age. The pioneer of Wandin South, Hubert, died of Brights Disease in 1888, at age 47, also leaving six children fatherless at ages from 7 to 20. His brother Edward, who had long suffered from recurrent mania, died in the unrelenting lovelessness and loneliness of an incarceration which ended in a fit of epileptic convulsions in Beechworth Asylum in 1892 at age 46.
Of his sisters, Edith, who had been deserted when her husband, William Henry Grass, fell into the pickled grip of the cheapest alcoholism, was made a widow when Bill died as he had lived, in the stables of a Richmond hotel in 1883, at age 44, in a state of ulcerous neglect and godforsaken dereliction. Edith responded to that lifelong devastation with compassionate dignity and lamentation for her children. She soon died herself, in 1892, aged only 46, leaving the two Grass children orphans. By then the youngest, Lucy Hollis was already dead, dying in 1891 at age 43. Who with a heart among us would dare boast before them of the so-called blessings or deserved merits of a long life, or to judge one of them for the foreshortened sufferings of an often bitter pilgrimage?
Only Fanny and Arthur, a bachelor, lived longer. Arthur died age 67 and Fanny nee Hollis lived to be 83, dying in 1928, the same years as her husband John Thomas SMITH, in Armadale.
An orphan heritage on the far side of the world
While these Hollis orphans were struggling to find a way ahead in life in early Melbourne, their cousins, were being educated at public schools in England, and the oldest cousins William Pottinger Hollis, son of their father's older brother of the same name, was studying to be a doctor and then became a surgeon, in London. For these first generation Australian Hollises, a family with connections in Oxford, where cousin and associate could take studies which might lead to life in the professions, that fateful life of loss, servitude or the unrelenting hardship or drudgery of pioneering Australia must have held disappointments indeed.
Such things are often put out of mind of children who do no grow up with such expectation. Despite these disappointments, life yawned to be lived, so offspring of the English-born Hollis pioneers went on to make lives as best they could by the more constrained lights of their circumstances, in the opportunity which Australia offered.
Hubert John Hollis married in Fitzroy on 5 March 1867. His wife, Eliza Suckling, also an orphan, had lost her parents earlier, in England. But in the census of 30 March 1851 she had been in the Ware Union, with her younger siblings. The Union was more commonly known as the workhouse or the poorhouse, this one in the town of Ware, Hertfordshire, north of London where she’d been born. The Suckling parents had died tragically of the epidemic in 1848 leaving all their children orphans. Us Australians are often of an orphan heritage on the other side of the world.
But Eliza Suckling had then but lately come to Australia with her older sister Elizabeth following her cousins Parker, with two cousin sisters married to the prosperous Wiseman brothers. The sisters arrived in Melbourne on 26 Sep 1865 on the ship "Sam Cearns" from England and Eliza soon found work with her cousin at that Wiseman estate in Yarra Street, Collingwood.
Hubert John Hollis, made an orphan by the losses in transit and arrival of his family in trying to make a new life in Australia, married Eliza, an orphan of the English epidemics whcih were among a blacksmiths likely options. Hubert was loaded with the expectation of manhood and responsibility from the time he was eleven. And, if he failed Eliza, and his children, it was by a tough life, teh hard struggle to survive, and then dying young, carrying what may have been a too heavy a burden of responsibilty. He had witnessed each of his sisters marriages as a father would, even though the younger two were under age, and maybe saw the dissolution of their lives in tragedy as his partly within his own faailures. Hubert and Eliza had nine children, three in Collingwood area, and the rest born in the valleys of South Wandin, six of whom survived, four sons and two daughters. They lived in the deepest of bush after 1873 as its first co-settlers.
Hubert died at 48, and left his own sons and daughters fatherless. The eldest, Charlie Hollis, became a blacksmith with his maternal uncle, Charlie Suckling, in Prahran, and died young. Two of the fatherless sons George and Edward, went to the Boer war, and became policeman in South Africa. George became a missionary and stayed in Africa. Edward later brough his family back to Silvan. The youngest son, Alfred, a cripple, became a diarist and recorder of the life on the Burleigh farms of his nephews and neices, and managed 'Hillcrest' the rental property on Silvan road he inherited from his mother. Florrie married Albert Stewart, mine manager, and died young.
The yeoman legacy passed down through his daughter Ada, who married the son of a Schwabian vinedresser and German farmer, K. Wilhelm Knoll. who restored productivity and the building of public and private grace and spirit to the life of their Hollis-blooded sons and daughters in South Wandin, in Burleigh and Silvan.
But their is a residual nobility of freedom in all the Hollis scions.
The Character Trace of the old Yeoman Freedom
In the shadowy bush of South Wandin, Hubert Hollis carved out a square mile, not of his own land, but as proxy and site-manager for Albert Wiseman. With his brother Arthur working with him on wages, he set to falling trees, splitting and sawing them to length, and building a post and rail fence around the whole square mile, 360 acres. Building a hut, clearing land for crops, berry vines and orchard trees. The selection was the kind of size his yeoman ancestors were used to, but it was not his to claim. His reward for service to Wiseman's was in selecting his own property to be paid for in earned installments, in the next valley, sized to suit his reduced means at sixty acres.
And if he or his sons had some inner air of pride, or authority, as if they were not born to a life of drudgery and toil, maybe it was not because they were trying to big-note themselves out of bluff and false pride, but because they had come down in the world in truth. Their people had long been used to being in charge, in authority, and giving jobs and tasks in the thrifty oversight and management of a productive farm. And the noble freedom of their yeoman heritage gave urge to all the hopes of the gentleman in them, hopes which did not have much hope of being fulfilled in the constrained circumstances which necessitated the grubbing a living out from among the stubbornly rooted trees of the deep forests of Wandin Yallock. .
And yet, that heritage of yeoman freedom and enterprise is with us yet, for the land Hubert Hollis selected is still held in part by men who are turning it to a productive living, and men who are some of his great great grandsons, with sons of their own being raised on the land, and off it. Sons, and daughters, who might also take a degree to enter the professions, or else to farm.
The desire of the Hollis blood is to be in charge, to think for yourself, independent, one's own boss, and to have the means to do it, a task that has sometimes proved, as it is eroded by the bitter cracks of orphanhood, to be beyond the urge and passion of the old blood.
link with Hollis Family History by Barbara Hollis http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~barbarahollis/hollis_family.htm
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Wood Smoke
(In memory of Aunty Kit Knoll and the Brick Chimney)
A single wisp breathes
such volumes
from a creeper-clad farm-stone
and brick chimney
a wraithed old cowl of wood
smoke says
somebody home, a living presence
still, beneath its
all-weather’s of farm-cottage yard
and garden
and a screen door opening out, a soft
voiced "Come on in".
25 August 2003 © Wayne David Knoll
A single wisp breathes
such volumes
from a creeper-clad farm-stone
and brick chimney
a wraithed old cowl of wood
smoke says
somebody home, a living presence
still, beneath its
all-weather’s of farm-cottage yard
and garden
and a screen door opening out, a soft
voiced "Come on in".
25 August 2003 © Wayne David Knoll
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Cortege to Beenak Creek: OBITUARY of AUNTY KIT
Katherine Winifred Knoll - nee Thompson (1915-2006)
Cortege to Beenak Creek
Leaving Monbulk, it’s early May 2006, under autumn yellow poplars, again the red dying is in the oaks, the russ brightens, the chestnuts are fallen, whole clans of colour gather for this death which we follow down Sassafras Creek under manna gums and overhanging treeferns till it becomes the Woori Yallock.
Forty, fifty cars with headlights on in the slow daytime out through Fairy Dell, rounding left at Emerald, through Avonsleigh and Cockatoo where a schoolboy salutes. Rising, to the hills, we do not stop at Gembrook, and the Telstra workers on the edge of town stand to stare at this cortege turning out onto the little-trafficked roads toward the mountains. They wonder who is this being buried? Why this cavalcade of slow respect going into the sticks? They watch gloss cars of the 21st century going back to the charcoal lands that sprung this easy prosperity, like the backs of glib beetles caught or escaping liking lemmings from the bright lights of some doom.
Now the autumn trees are erased by bark-strung bush and we enter granite country, gullies of boulder caves and underground streams, roads of muddy sand verges. Over the scrub, banksias rise up in the dim, branched in rough candelabras, full of yellow candles, the soft plumes looming. Beside these shadow-flames, near Shiprock Falls, a hearse turns east onto the narrow dirt roads, winding thinly up, following a creek towards a source, going into the townless mountain wildernesses.
Here, today, in a lonely cemetery, at a place opened for peace since Black Friday 1939 when the world burnt down, we are burying one of the WW1 and Depression-maturing children, one who was there in 39, in 41. One who spent a war building garden walls and hedges, planting trees. One who lived without fruit of her womb, but who made and gave jams, bottled fruit, made pies and clothes and treated half a thousand nieces and nephews, adopted or otherwise. One addicted to generosity, one who lived unbitterly. Also reticent, humble. It is Aunty Kit: Catherine Winifred Knoll nee Thompson, who died as she wished, at home on the farm. 1915-2006.
She did not need to fill her world with manufactured stimulus. She accepted that vast, deeper and lasting quietness. So in love with peace she knew it. She lived unhurried, a gracious lady of that modestly-veiled ancient stock, alone the last twenty four years, true queen of one valley, one hill. Here, at home, soil-blooded, stoic, a glad peasant full of the old knowing of plants, trees and wild birds, wife of pioneer stock, kind, an austral Viking, willful, tough, delightful and independent as a flame robin, and as tough on pests.
She had no children, but everybody’s were her children. She had no family, but we were all her family: to three and four generations of nieces and nephews. She never wrote a book, but a book could not contain what was written by her between unspoken lines. She loved conversation, yet words could never catch all she meant for people. She never traveled far, but her letters reached around the world.
Growing up on one South Silvan farm till eighteen, then marrying a widower neighbour, her life’s journey went like a landslip down one hill, over a single fence, she reached the next farm, but in that short step she reached for an above and to certain depths, as if real travel truly needed such travail. She worked, she did for others. Crossing fences. And here in this cortege are the many messages without borders, this world’s pilgrims are here for her, or else with an email or call from England, from America, Cambodia, from around the world. A
nd, as I spade this earth that rains down onto her well flower-arranged coffin, I can hear her words: she is commenting on the quality of the soil, appreciating this aspect, the peace in the air, the birds; and, wary of wallabies or wombats or worse, she warns of the need for this planting to be staked and firmed, to be so named with simplicity and practicality, for the gift she can still give by resting here in this geography of peace, that simple, unregarded place to be guarded well by and for us left behind.
© Wayne David Knoll 9-24 May 2006
Cortege to Beenak Creek
Leaving Monbulk, it’s early May 2006, under autumn yellow poplars, again the red dying is in the oaks, the russ brightens, the chestnuts are fallen, whole clans of colour gather for this death which we follow down Sassafras Creek under manna gums and overhanging treeferns till it becomes the Woori Yallock.
Forty, fifty cars with headlights on in the slow daytime out through Fairy Dell, rounding left at Emerald, through Avonsleigh and Cockatoo where a schoolboy salutes. Rising, to the hills, we do not stop at Gembrook, and the Telstra workers on the edge of town stand to stare at this cortege turning out onto the little-trafficked roads toward the mountains. They wonder who is this being buried? Why this cavalcade of slow respect going into the sticks? They watch gloss cars of the 21st century going back to the charcoal lands that sprung this easy prosperity, like the backs of glib beetles caught or escaping liking lemmings from the bright lights of some doom.
Now the autumn trees are erased by bark-strung bush and we enter granite country, gullies of boulder caves and underground streams, roads of muddy sand verges. Over the scrub, banksias rise up in the dim, branched in rough candelabras, full of yellow candles, the soft plumes looming. Beside these shadow-flames, near Shiprock Falls, a hearse turns east onto the narrow dirt roads, winding thinly up, following a creek towards a source, going into the townless mountain wildernesses.
Here, today, in a lonely cemetery, at a place opened for peace since Black Friday 1939 when the world burnt down, we are burying one of the WW1 and Depression-maturing children, one who was there in 39, in 41. One who spent a war building garden walls and hedges, planting trees. One who lived without fruit of her womb, but who made and gave jams, bottled fruit, made pies and clothes and treated half a thousand nieces and nephews, adopted or otherwise. One addicted to generosity, one who lived unbitterly. Also reticent, humble. It is Aunty Kit: Catherine Winifred Knoll nee Thompson, who died as she wished, at home on the farm. 1915-2006.
She did not need to fill her world with manufactured stimulus. She accepted that vast, deeper and lasting quietness. So in love with peace she knew it. She lived unhurried, a gracious lady of that modestly-veiled ancient stock, alone the last twenty four years, true queen of one valley, one hill. Here, at home, soil-blooded, stoic, a glad peasant full of the old knowing of plants, trees and wild birds, wife of pioneer stock, kind, an austral Viking, willful, tough, delightful and independent as a flame robin, and as tough on pests.
She had no children, but everybody’s were her children. She had no family, but we were all her family: to three and four generations of nieces and nephews. She never wrote a book, but a book could not contain what was written by her between unspoken lines. She loved conversation, yet words could never catch all she meant for people. She never traveled far, but her letters reached around the world.
Growing up on one South Silvan farm till eighteen, then marrying a widower neighbour, her life’s journey went like a landslip down one hill, over a single fence, she reached the next farm, but in that short step she reached for an above and to certain depths, as if real travel truly needed such travail. She worked, she did for others. Crossing fences. And here in this cortege are the many messages without borders, this world’s pilgrims are here for her, or else with an email or call from England, from America, Cambodia, from around the world. A
nd, as I spade this earth that rains down onto her well flower-arranged coffin, I can hear her words: she is commenting on the quality of the soil, appreciating this aspect, the peace in the air, the birds; and, wary of wallabies or wombats or worse, she warns of the need for this planting to be staked and firmed, to be so named with simplicity and practicality, for the gift she can still give by resting here in this geography of peace, that simple, unregarded place to be guarded well by and for us left behind.
© Wayne David Knoll 9-24 May 2006
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