William Henry & Sarah Martin Fry

Story

WILLIAM HENRY FRY (1790-1885) and SARAH FRY (1805-1868)

William Henry and Sarah were both Irish folk who met when they were mature adults in New South Wales in the early 1840s. Sarah had already been married and widowed by the time she and William Henry decided to marry on 18th July 1842 at St. Philip\’s Church of England, on Church Hill in old Sydney Town. Banns had been read prior to the ceremony by the officiating minister.

They had their first child, George William Fry, in Port Macquarie on 18th December 1843 but he was not baptized until years later in the Burnett District. The family must have travelled via the old coach roads inland to the Beardy Plains just south of the place that was to become Glen Innes where their two daughters were born – Catherine Jane on 18th June 1846 and Martha Martin on 19th October 1848. Here William was a Lodging House Keeper/InnKeeper on the coach road at ‘Yarrowford’, a property owned by Archibald Boyd.

As the region was well beyond the Liverpool Range, the northern most limit of jurisdiction of the law, they had to look after themselves in every respect; guarding against hostile aborigines and bushrangers and having babies on your own. If anything went wrong you could not send for the police to help. William Henry must have been a very capable fellow, confident in his ability to protect his wife and children. Sarah must have been a strong healthy woman who had her babies with no complications out in the bush with no doctors or midwives.

Sometime in the early 1850s the family braved another long, dangerous journey further north through wild territory to the Dawson/Auburn Rivers region. Pastoralists had taken up holdings from 1848 in all the surrounding river valleys moving in huge numbers of cattle in the next few years which led to a labour shortage. William found employment as a cook at ‘Auburn’, a large property on the Auburn River. No doubt Sarah would also have found something useful to do.

During this decade aborigines in the region fought hard for their territory against the encroachment of European graziers, to the point of their near annihilation. William Henry and Sarah and their children would certainly have known about the murder of the Fraser family at Hornet Bank station on the Dawson River in 1857 and the series of reprisals on the tribes. They were living in a period of virtual frontier war.

By the 1860s the Fry family had moved into town at Gayndah and settled into an easier lifestyle. William Henry worked as a tradesman of some sort when his daughter Catherine Jane married Philip George Cornwall, Overseer on ‘Aranbanga’ cattle station, in Gayndah according to the Rites of the Baptist Denomination on 24th August 1865. Catherine\’s brother George, was one of the witnesses to the happy event and her parents formally consented to the marriage as she was only nineteen years old.

Later, William Henry became the Bailiff in Gayndah and remained so for many years as well as being the Ferryman for traffic across the Burnett River. Sarah occupied herself with household things and acted as nurse to her daughter on 20th December 1867 when Catherine gave birth to her first son Midford Philip Cornwall. This occurred on a station called ‘Boomerang’ just west of the township of Gayndah where Philip George Cornwall was Superintendent at the time and would have been provided with a small house for his family. Unfortunately, Sarah witnessed the birth of only her first grandchild and no more, for she died five months later in Gayndah on 16th May 1868 aged sixty three years.

William Henry lived a longer life and knew many more of his descendants. He died in his house in Capper Street, Gayndah on 20th June 1885 aged ninety four years seven months and sixteen days of ‘old age\’. Both he and Sarah are buried in Gayndah Cemetery.

< Back to the Stories