Eliza Morrison
| First name | Eliza |
|---|---|
| Last name | Morrison |
| Country of Origin | Ireland |
| Date of Birth | 1833 |
| Year of Arrival in Australia | 1855 |
| Submitted by | Leonard Johnson |
Story
Eliza Morrison, was born in 1833 in Loughgall, County Armagh, Ireland. She was the daughter of Ellen Jane Todd and William Morrison, a shoemaker. She had two sisters and three brothers. She arrived in Australia on 21 February 1855 and lived in Victoria until her death in 1913.
She was raised in an isolated Irish rural community with all the social and economic limitations of early nineteenth century society. As a child she attended the Loughgall Protestant church school where she was taught to read and write.
In 1845 when she was twelve years old, Ireland\’s potato crop failed and the Great Famine began. She was a young woman of sixteen when the years of starvation ended.
Loughgall was situated in low lying fertile land which was suitable for growing flax so from the time she could walk, Eliza was expected to help in farm work – weeding flax shoots, ‘retting\’ (rotting) flax in stagnant pools of water, spreading and turning flax drying on fields, and bundling dried stems. Eliza worked flax until she was twenty-one when she grew tired of the monotonous drudgery of agricultural life. In the spring of 1854 an event occurred which helped Eliza make her decision to emigrate. Bored with endless weeding of flax shoots, she encouraged the workers to dance. To make music she ‘crouched, tapping two stones together to provide a beat for the others, and missed seeing the the overseer who sacked them all except Eliza, whom he thought was weeding because she was crouched\’.
Angry at the unfairness, she applied to the Emigration Commissioner in Dublin for an assisted passage to Victoria. She was accepted because she was single, young , healthy and had experience as a farm worker. She made her way by coastal steamer from Dublin to Plymouth where she boarded the migrant ship, Marchioness of Salisbury which sailed on 22 November 1854 and arrived in Geelong on 21 February 1855. On landing, the emigration officer asked Eliza her name and she replied in her broad northern Irish accent, so he registered her as ‘Eliza Moresin\’. She was recorded in the ‘Nominal and Disposal List as an eighteen year old domestic servant from Armagh.
She was collected from the immigration officer\’s shed at Geelong by Mr Bowyer from Timboon who employed her as a domestic servant for Neil Black and Company, pastoralists in the Western District of Victoria. Bowyer took Eliza in his cart to Neil Black\’s head station at Glenormiston. Neil Black was a wealthy and powerful squatter, particular about the women he took on as workers – he liked clean, intelligent, well-behaved, unmarried girls – and Eliza satisfied his conditions.
In 1856 when Neil Black was absent in Scotland, he left his nephew, Archibald Black, in charge of his properties. Eliza and Archibald became lovers and on 14 September 1857 she had a son she named Archibald Black Morrison. Neil Black decided Eliza and her son were an embarrassment to the Black family so he banished them from Glenormiston. She found refuge with her brother, James, a gold miner in Beechworth where in 1861 she met and married Alexander Dunn, a migrant from Aberdeen and a successful gold miner. They bought a number of hotels in the goldfields and by good management made them profitable ventures.
In 1874 Eliza and Alexander selected land in the newly-opened Walwa Run in the Upper Murray of Victoria where they built a hotel and cross-river ferry at Redbank. In the 1890s Eliza transferred her business interests to Walwa, the new centre of population and economic activity, where she built a hotel, leased another, built saleyards for cattle and sheep auctions, financed the ‘The Walwa Creek Dairy Company\’, built a cheese factory, selected land in the district and built houses in Walwa township.
Eliza Morrison had an instinct to succeed. Her drive, strength of character, business acumen and family loyalty resulted in an accumulation of capital, land, income and authority. Through her hard work and application the Dunn family became well known as successful pioneers of the Walwa District.
Eliza Morrison died on 25 April 1913 in Mrs Ewer\’s Nursing Home in Wodonga and next day was buried in North Albury Cemetery. Her husband, Alexander Dunn, lived on in ‘Eliza Dunn\’s cottage\’ in Walwa for another seven years until he died on 15 December 1920 and was buried in the Walwa Cemetery.