Running roughly parallel to the eastern coast of Australia, a little bit inland, is a line of mountains known as the Great Dividing Range.  It extends from Victoria right up into Queensland.

The Great Dividing Range is, more accurately, a series of ranges which were discovered one by one and eventually correctly positioned on the map.  In the early days of white settlement, Australia was a difficult place to map.  The terrain was hard and the weather was extreme. The Great Dividing Range was truly a barrier which divided coastal Australia from the inland.   Even in the 1830’s after fifty years of settlement in New South Wales, what lay beyond those mountains was still wild and unseen by many.

The highest mountain in Australia, Mt Kosciuszko, is in the Snowy Mountains, a section of the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales.

The farming district of Mannus is also in the Snowy Mountains Range, but further north and close to the forestry town of Tumbarumba.  You can see Mt Kosciuszko from Tumbarumba, but somehow I did not take a picture.  Tumbarumba has an elevation of 592m (1,942 ft) above sea level and I choose to visit in summer, as does my mother.  It snows here in winter and can have very chilly daytime maximums and seriously cold nighttime minimums.

Mannus is about 10km from Tumbarumba.  Like so many rural districts, it once had more of a centre than it does now.  It was the location of a cattle station owned by Robert McMicking/McMeekin/McMeakin who settled in 1856. He seems to have been something of an autocratic man.  He established share farming on his land in the 1890s and my William and Fanny Morey were amongst the share farmers.

The climate must have been a shock to Wiliam and Fanny coming from Bethanga.

As soon as we turned off the Hume Freeway towards Tumbarumba, the surroundings changed from flat open fields to close trees.  The road is a slow uphill all the way, and I can remember doing this trip in my grandfather’s old car in the 1970’s when this leg of the journey took us about two and a half hours if not more.  The road is much better now.

There are still both Moreys and Peards in Mannus – plenty of the former but very few left of the latter.  The current Peard was the only son and has no children. The property will probably pass to one of his married sister’s children.  At least it will be in the family, but sad to see a line die out after 115 years.

William and Fanny Morey’s daughter Stella was my great grandmother.  Stella was born in Bethanga in 1887 and was aged about 12 or 13 when they moved to Mannus.  She was nearly of an age to go out to work.  I don’t know much about her childhood.  She could read and write, but not very well.  She had the sunny disposition which seems to characterize most if not all female descendants of Fanny Morey nee Fox.  Of the nine children in her family, Stella was bang in the middle with four older and four younger siblings. I have no pictures of her in her young days and no good picture at all. She is the lady who is responsible for my family history work, it was her family stories and her interest which got me started when I was ten.

The ruins of William and Fanny’s home can still be seen at Mannus, but it is a long way from the road on land now owned by the Mannus Correctional Facility – known thereabouts as ‘The Prison Farm’.  There’s always a chance of a private landowner granting permission to access their land to photograph a ruin, but the chances are pretty slim when it’s a jail.  This picrure was the best I could do.  This is the area.

My great grandfather, Burleton Peard, arrived in Mannus in a year unknown but probably somewhere around 1900 also.  Our existing family at Mannus were pondering during my visit on which of them arrived first, but we did not have enough information to deduce it.

Burleton was born in Bowna, New South Wales in 1879, the seventh child in a family of twelve.  His father was an Irish immigrant, listed on the shipping record as a ‘gentleman’.  His mother was the daughter of a family of good name in Somerset, England.  We know that Burleton began working on the family farm at the age of 12, and that he had no choice in this.  His father was a strict man, but a fair man and one who had an understanding of property management.  Burleton’s first visits to Mannus were as a young man when he would ride a pushbike up there for seasonal work, and return to his parent’s property afterwords.

That’s a colossal amount of uphill riding!

Somewhere up there, Burleton Peard met Stella Morey who was eight years his junior. He and Stella were married at St Jude’s in Tumbarumba in 1908 when Burleton was 29 and Stella was 21 and they lived first at Tallangatta near Bethanga. Their first child, a son, was born here.   Five years later they had moved back to the mountains and were settled on their own land, a thousand acres or so sold off from the original McMeakin property.

Burleton and Stella only had two children, the boy born in Tallangatta and my own grandmother Dulcie.  Both children were born in Mannus in Burleton and Stella’s own house, one Burleton built himself with the help of Stella’s father and brothers.

As a child, I listened to Stella’s stories of her life.  I was ten, and had no idea what to ask about.  She used to drive a sulky with a horse, and she would drive it to the train station to collect goods.  It sounds as if she drove everywhere – into Tumbarumba, down to Wagga Wagga and Henty, to nearby Rosewood,  She was baptised Emily Estelle but she had a cousin of the same age who was also Emily Morey, so she became Stella.

As I write this, the story takes on a new importance. I have not identified a cousin for Stella called Emily.  I have not located marriages at all for two of her Morey uncles.

It was Stella who showed me the family bible, which I have never seen again.  We looked for it this visit without success.

The family property is looking very neglected now, a consequence of the age and infirmity of the current occupant.  Once there were three habitable houses on the place, now there is only one.  But the fences remain along with the remnants of landscaping and early bridges.  They place has charm.

Burleton and Stella – known to us all as Pa and Ma – built their house, planted their orchard and did very well for themselves.  Burleton was an able farmer, his cattle and produce won prizes and his farm thrived. In later years after their death, the house was cannibalized to repair the sheds and other houses.  Not much remains.  On this visit, I did not go in due to the likelihood of snakes.  In other years the area nearby was cleared.

Their son built himself another house on the property in the 1930s.  That house has not been lived in for 15 years and was in a poor state at the time of death of its occupant.  It still holds furniture but nature is taking over.  This house is where I hoped to find the family bible, but did not.  It may be there, buried deep in a cupboard under some blankets or clothing.  I was a visitor and even in an unoccupied house, had no right to go poking into all cupboards.  I asked for permission to look in a few likely drawers but found nothing.

I did find the Boer War medals, but apparently a cousin had come through and removed some of the photographs only six weeks earlier.  Hopefully she also grabbed the family bible.

I have many memories of this house, and it was sad to see it in its present state.  I remember my sister and I sleeping in the third bedroom, sharing the room with my great grandmother who was living there in her old age.  We slept in a very old high bed which felt miles from the floor, and were horrified to find a chamberpot under our bed for our use, as the house at that time only had an outdoor toilet.

This was the house my mother grew up in, and I have heard her stories too. I know where she did her homework, where she slept, how the dining room was kept in pristine condition and the children were not allowed in it.  I remembered sitting at the kitchen table for meals because in my childhood, the dining room was still not used for family.

Sadly, the ceiling in that room has now given out – only a few weeks ago – and the room’s contents are apparently ruined.  I don’t know this for sure as I could not obtain permission to undo the barricade and poke my head inside.  I have some fear that at this point, some of the room’s contents might be salvagable and even precious, but I was always the optimist.

The third house on the property is smaller and currently occupied, so will not be posting a photograph.

In my next blog post, I’ll cover the relics.

In many ways, I found my tribe when I met my family in Wangaratta.

This was quite unexpected.  I’ve met some of them before, admittedly as a child on my best behaviour under the eagle eye of my mother.  I guess I assumed I knew them all, despite having only met a couple of them.

The first thing that struck me was the family resemblance.  They look like my mother. No one ever looks like my mother, but all of these people did. One of my mother’s sisters looks so much like her that I was continually glancing at her.  Although her appearance was strikingly similar, she was far more outgoing than my mother is.

And they write!  This was a big one for me.  I have been a writer since about the age of seven.  Writing helps me think, helps me relax, helps me daydream and find solutions and understand the world.  My mother writes letters, but beyond that there are no other writers in the family I grew up with, and at times my writing time was forcibly curtailed to get me out of doors and participating in local sports.  Not my scene at all, but the world I lived in.  Writing for me has always been surreptitious, something I couldn’t stop but knew was an aberration.

In Wangaratta, I was amongst a group of people who treated writing as part of life.  One of my aunts, it turns out, is a published author.  One of my cousins is another.  They write in very different genres but the love of written expression is the same.  Those who do not write complete books write newsletters, diaries and pamphlets for their workplaces and hobby groups.   These people were word people.  The family is not highly educated, many of them working in manual labour or industrial jobs, but they are thinkers and perceivers.   One of my cousins, now aged nineteen, and my own son, are the first in the family to go to university.   Education was another strong area of interest in the family and we discussed different education systems in some depth, all of us knowing a great deal of background.

When researching a family tree I often do see interests which are passed down the generations, but I have always assumed they were interests encouraged by the older family members.  My own mother was raised as a foster child without knowledge of this family, and she certainly did not know about their love of writing.  So how is that I have it too?  My grandfather’s desire to be a journalist came back to me this week with more meaning. Even by just meeting the family, I had gained a new clue about him.

Despite all this, what I learned about my grandfather was that he was something of a mystery to all of them. He will be the subject of my next blog post.

My recollection of Wangaratta was a quite large town, with suburbs and traffic lights and a major passenger train station.  Admittedly it had been at least twenty years since I was there, but it had industry and employment and was the centre of its region’s health service.  I fully expected to find it mentioned on road signs from a long way away.

Not so.  Wangaratta is the town that the signwriters forgot.

Leaving Bendigo we had the sign in the above picture, but that was okay.  We were still more than 200 km away and we knew Shepparton was on the road so we headed that way.  The weather was quite cool for summer and we were a little tired from the poor night’s sleep, but fresh enough to enjoy the drive.

A large storm passed through Shepparton the day before we arrived.  We saw it in front of us near Kaniva, but luckily we stopped for the night and avoided it.  Debris was everywhere along the roadside, in the paddocks and in people’s yards as we neared the small city of Shepparton.  Some quite large trees had come down, but we did not see any worse damage. It was furious but fast, as storms often are in Victoria.

Shepparton started out as a cattle station in the 1840s, and was named for it’s first legal owner, Sherbourne Sheppard. It has a long history.  No doubt my ancestors from their early days in Australia have visited the place, but I know of none who lived there.  I remember looking on the map before we left home and noticing that Shepparton was about 100km from Wangaratta, so I definitely expected good signage from here.

We did not enjoy Shepparton.  The traffic was bad, the drivers were very aggressive and honked each other all the time.  In just a few kilometres we saw a road rage incident, two cars run red lights and multiple drivers fail to acknowledge pedestrian crossings.  For a small city, it was very unfriendly.  I was told in the next few days that it has a reputation for it.

Having said that, in the end we found a Woolworths Petrol station which was quite busy but at that moment someone had parked over the exit lane and traffic had blocked up while more cars queued in the entry lane. One attendant was pointing out to the driver that he needed to move and while matters were at a momentary standstill I asked for directions.  They were very helpful and very friendly and directed us towards the road to Benalla.

Finally, coming out of Benalla there it was.  A sign to Wangaratta.

The last 41 km were relatively smooth with just one wrong turn taking us onto the old Hume Highway instead of the new, but that was no biggie.  We drove into Wangaratta at about 4.30pm and by some miracle found the house we were heading for almost instantly.

Finally – after all that driving – the family history research could begin.

On the morning of Wednesday 3rd December, my 17 year old son and I packed my little car with tent, bedding, camera, laptop and some personal effects for a long journey.

Road trips must be in the blood for our family.  My parents undertook these expeditions every few years of my life, and I have certainly taken my own children on a few such trips.  I love that preparation stage – car service and check, packing baggage as efficiently as possible, clean and vaccuum the car and bring it as close to ‘new car’ status as possible.  We packed everything very precisely, worked out where in the car was the home for each item and made sure we could quickly access the things we would need the most.  We didn’t need a very early start as we were only travelling 480km on this day, so we set off about 10AM.  We were in the city of Adelaide by 1PM.

As I said in an earlier blog, the early white Australian settlers generally took a while to find their eventual home.  Often their arrival port was the wrong climate, or already crowded, or just not to their liking.  My paternal ancestors in Tasmania had less ground to tramp and/or were convicts with a restricted area, so I find them pretty easily.  On my mother’s side, most if not all of them were free settlers on the vast mainland of Australia, and in those early decades rarely settled for more than five years in one place.

I actually live only 15km from the birthplace of my maternal great grandfather, Herbert Dunstall.  I have written quite a bit about James Dunstall and Annie McLeod, and Herbert was one of their sons.  So practically from my own home I can look around at the scenes they also viewed.  Another of their sons, Kenneth Norman Dunstall, died as a baby in 1871 and was buried at Gawler.  James Dunstall and Annie McLeod were married in Adelaide, and James was born to the south of Adelaide on the Fleurieu Peninsula.  But there isn’t much left of their presence now.  If I hadn’t looked up the records I’d never have known they were ever there.

After James and Annie Dunstall died of tuberculosis in the 1880s, their surviving children headed for the minefields of Western Australia, as did some of their cousins which I only located through my DNA test.  Herbert, my great grandfather, was one of these.  He married an English girl, Alice Head, in Kalgoorlie and they settled in the very isolated mining district of Lake Darlot. Alice ran a boarding house and Herbert purchased a mine.  They had one son, my grandfather Kenneth.

One day, I’ll get over to see the town.  Wikipedia says it is an ‘abandoned town’ and officially had the name of Woodarra. In the meantime, my intention was to ‘meet’ as closely as possible my grandfather Kenneth, who has always been a shadowy and insubstantial figure to me.

Herbert was killed in an accident in his own mine when only in his twenties, when my grandfather was aged 7.  As I set out on this journey, all I knew about Kenneth’s life was that he ended up in the eastern states where he married my grandmother.   My grandfather passed away in 1991 so I am way too late to ask him his life’s story, but one of my objectives on this trip was to deduce as much as I could.

So far – about 150km – so good.