Patrick Dwyer
| First name | Patrick |
|---|---|
| Last name | Dwyer |
| Country of Origin | Ireland |
| Date of Birth | 1810 |
| Year of Arrival in Australia | 1841 |
| Submitted by | John Schooneveldt |
Story
THE DWYER STORY
Patrick Dwyer was one of the first immigrants to arrive in the ‘Canberry’ district in 1841 and lived and worked in what is now the National Capital for around 20 years. He was first employed as a shepherd on Yarralumla station and after his marriage in 1851 leased and farmed a block of land in the vicinity of the Immigration Bridge.
Paddy Dwyer was a ‘Bounty Immigrant’ who arrived in Sydney on the Portland on 11 March 1841. He was born in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, Ireland in 1810 and was 31 years old when he arrived in Australia. It is not known why he chose to leave Ireland.
At the time, Yarralumla was owned by Terence Aubrey Murray who established a thriving Irish community on the site which is now the Governor General\’s residence. In a letter to the Queanbeyan Observer of 27 August 1901, Stewart Mowle, who worked at Yarralumla at the time, wrote a long letter describing his experience and mentioning many of the people living there by name. There were 10 sheep stations attached to Yarralumla with three men at each. According to family tradition Patrick Dwyer was a shepherd. There were also watchmen whose job it was to cook, move the hurdles daily and at night protect the sheep from native dogs.
There were no fences and shepherds and watchmen stayed with their flocks. They slept in shepherd\’s boxes which were sentry-box shaped, placed horizontally on four legs and generally made snug with sheep skins to protect against winter frosts. In evidence given to the NSW Committee on Immigration in 1841, the wages of a shepherd or watchman were about £30 per year with weekly rations of about 7-10lb of meat, 10lb of flour, 1lb of sugar, 2 oz of tea or in place of tea and sugar, milk. These were good conditions at the time and may explain why Patrick chose to take up shepherding.
But these conditions were not to last. According to Charles Campbell, whose nearby property at Duntroon supported a thriving Scottish community, wages were reduced to £18 pounds per year during the terrible drought and depression of the mid-1840s. Terence Aubrey Murray was hard hit by this depression and lost the ownership of Yarralumla.
On 16 April, 1850 the Elizabeth arrived in Sydney with 230 immigrants. Included among them was a recently widowed John Halloran, then aged 48, and his three adult children: John jr. 26, Ellen 24 and Patrick 22. These ages are the ones they gave the immigration officials on arrival. There is some evidence that John sr. and Ellen were quite a bit older. The family came from Golden, Tipperary. John and his two sons were blacksmiths. Ellen gave her occupation as ‘farm servant’.
The Halloran family was on the way to Cooma where they settled, but on the way through, Patrick Dwyer and Ellen met and decided to marry. The ceremony took place in Queanbeyan on 7 July 1850 some two months after Ellen\’s arrival in Australia.
In 1856 Patrick Dwyer was listed as a ‘leaseholder’ in the electoral district of the County of Murray in the police district of Queanbeyan. We have been unable to locate the precise lease, but it is likely to have been very close to the Immigration Bridge as the address of their first son John, born 12 September 1853, was given as ‘Canberry’, the area generally described as being along the Molonglo River east of Black Mountain and close to Commonwealth Avenue Bridge.
Other children born to Patrick and Ellen were James (born Yarralumla, 10 July 1855); Mary (born Cooma, 9 May 1856, possibly while Ellen was visiting her father and brothers who were resident there); Bridget (born Yarralumla 15 January 1857) and William (born Yarralumla 27 March 1858). Bridget died on 2 July 1857, aged five and a half months, and William died on 26 October 1858, aged 7 months. Both are buried in the Queanbeyan Cemetery. Another son, Michael, was born 13 August 1859 at Queanbeyan.
Around 1860, Patrick and Ellen moved to the Yass district where the ‘the soil was better’ and two more children were born: Patrick on 11 December 1862, and Mary on 15 June 1865.
Ellen died on 5 September 1890 at the age of 68, and Patrick died in 1906 at the age of 96 while visiting one of his sons near Canowindra, where he is buried. Patrick smoked twist tobacco most of his life, and at his funeral, one of his sons estimated that he had smoked about one and a half ton of tobacco in his long lifetime!
One direct descendent, John Dwyer, a great-great-grandson, currently lives in Canberra close to where Patrick arrived in 1841. There are also a number of great-great-grand-daughters in the area, including a number of fourth and fifth generation descendants.