Tom (John Thomas Porter) Wilding’s Life

To see where Tom Wilding fits into the family tree click here…

Tough days in England

John Thomas Porter Wilding, known in his early days as “John” and later in Australia as “Tom”, was born in 1813 at Lavenham, Suffolk, England (207 years ago). Lavenham is a small market town 20 miles south of the larger county town of Bury St Edmunds. The town had a large weaving industry in the early 1800′s but this was largely finished by the 1830′s. The population of the town and surrounding farmlands was approximately 2,100 people in 1831. The Wilding family had lived in the area for generations and had several large family branches living in the town of Lavenham in the early 1800′s. The closure of the weaving industry times must have been difficult and this may have led to the high level of petty crime recorded in the local Bury Newspaper of the time.

Prisoner number 3111

He had several run-ins with the law in Lavenham for petty crimes and it was the fourth occasion where he was found guilty on 5th July 1836 along with a Thomas Smith of wounding three horses and a cow and sentenced to transportation to the Colonies for 14 years. After a short stay in the Bury St Edmund’s County Gaol, he was moved to Chatham on the Thames, near London, to the Prison Hulk ‘Fortitude’.

This ‘accommodation’ he shared with several hundred other convicts for 9 months most likely working in chains on Government projects such as river dredging and the Woolwich arsenal upgrading. The Hulks were well known as extreme punishment with the conditions below decks described as putrid. It was probably a relief, only marginally, that he was eventually placed on board the convict transport ‘Lloyds’ (its second voyage to New South Wales with Convicts) departing ‘the Downs’ on 23 March 1837 with a total of 200 convicts on board. The journey took 110 days (almost 4 months) stopping at Mauritius and Hobart on the way for provisions. The surgeon’s records for the journey record that Tom had a case of Catarrh (a heavy cold, cough, and diarrhea) while on the high seas and this placed him in the ship sickbay for 4 days.

The new life in Australia

The ‘Lloyds’ arrived at Sydney Cove on 17 July 1837 where the newly arrived convicts at Port Jackson (Sydney) were marched to the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney for processing. In that period all male convicts were either engaged in Government work such as road and infrastructure projects or assigned to a private landowner as free labour. It was Tom’s lot to be assigned to Robert Mackay Campbell at Wingello, NSW, 160 kms southwest of Sydney (near to the present town of Goulburn, NSW). His time here was likely engaged in farm work particularly scrubbing the bush on the virgin land, making improvements to the accommodation, and possibly gardening to supply produce for the Campbell family and the workers.

On 18th June 1845, Tom received his ‘Ticket of leave’ but remained with the Campbells at Wingello for a while. The Ticket of Leave entitled him to leave his imposed restraint but he must remain within the District stipulated on the Ticket which in his case was the “Yass” district unless he obtained the permission of the local Magistrate.

The Campbell’s had some bad luck and they accumulated some debts while building up the property at Wingello, and RM Campbell Esq. was declared insolvent in 1848. It was in 1850 that the Campbells moved to Burrowa (now called Boorowa). Robert’s wife, Ann (nee Hassall) had a large family-owned land in the Burrowa district. It was to a property called ‘Anns Vale’ that they moved to start afresh. Tom Wilding moved with the Campbells to ‘Ann’s Vale’ and worked as a station hand on the large property and two years after arriving in Burrowa, in 1851, he gained his ‘Certificate of Freedom’ which effectively made him a free man, entitled to move anywhere and to purchase land.

Free again

Henry Castles was an early landowner in the Burrowa district, he married Ann (nee. Murray) at Sydney in 1835 when he was 38. They had four children together but Henry died in 1852 aged 55 years. Possibly to help Ann run the property Tom left the Campbells and moved to Ann Castles property in about 1852, where he became the Gardener. Three years later Ann married Tom Wilding at St Augustines’ church in Yass on 15th September 1855. Five years later (1860) Ann passed away and soon the property is recorded as ‘Wilding Paddock’ or ‘Wilding Station’ at Gunnary Creek 7 miles north of Burrowa. In an 1863 newspaper report the property was referred to as ‘Wildash’.

Over the next few years he worked on the property building it up by gaining additional leases of land and building a large barn which still exists today. An old workmate was a David Hitchen, another assigned convict on Robert Campbells property at Wingello. It was this connection that brought Tom and Susannah, David’s daughter, together. In 1862 he married Susannah back at her father’s house in the Goulburn district. Tom was 42 and Susannah was 18 years old. Over the following 20 years they were to have nine children.

A Selectors life

Over the ensuing years, the Wildings faced much hardship in the remote and drought-prone country. Burrowa was on the very edge of the government-imposed ‘limit of settlement’, this was an artificial arc of land drawn in a rough 200 mile radius of Sydney. This period of the Colony’s history was a transition from a largely penal settlement to a more autonomous land with a self-funded economy, exporting mainly wool and tallow back to England. The population of New South Wales had reached 77,000 by 1837, 36% of these were convicts or emancipated convicts. Convict transportation ended to NSW in 1850 and the focus of the Colonial Government shifted to the development the vast interior. Many former convicts either had to gain employment or purchase leases to unoccupied property in the virgin country hundreds of miles from the nearest main population centres. The terms ‘squatter’ and ‘selector’ were used at this time to denote either a person who occupied large tracts of Crown land in order to graze livestock, often having no legal rights to the land or the latter, a selector, was a small scale farmer encouraged by the Government to curb the massive land grab of the Squatters. Tom described himself as a squatter on various records but in reality, he was probably a ‘selector’ working towards being a ‘squatter’. In all he took leases on at least 14 plots of land, (totaling more than 1400 acres) some using the ‘dummy’ method, a very common tactic using family members names to gain additional land. Starting a station and stocking it with cattle and sheep was difficult in such remoteness and there were many property boundary, and stock ownership disputes. Tom had his fair share of this trouble, who is to know now if he was a victim or perpetrator, but more than likely a bit of both occurred. There are newspaper reports of court cases over stolen cattle, barns set fire too, stolen sheep, and other property theft. With many neighbours being old convict acquaintances they were more than likely used to a barney over property etc during that time.

Attacked by Bushrangers

The 1840-1890 period also saw a tirade of Bushranging throughout NSW and this included the area around Burrowa. A well-reported bushranging event occurred at the Wilding property on the evening of the 22nd of September 1863. Two bushrangers, James Murphy (better known as Jemmy Blackguard) and Frederick Phillips, came to the homestead, collected together at gunpoint the six men and three women of the station, and proceeded to rob the settlement of what it had. Tom Wilding was tied up whilst this was going on but managed to free himself. Meanwhile, the bushrangers had found a bottle of rum and were soon a bit merry. This enabled Tom and his overseer, Beresford Jones, to overpower the two. In the struggle, Jones smashed Murphy over the skull, the blow resulted in his death later that evening. Since ‘Jemmy Blackguard’ had been subjecting the territory to his activities for seven or eight years, his passing was not regretted, and the coroner’s jury returned a verdict of justifiable homicide. The other Bushranger, Frederick Phillips (alias Samuel Ward, and Frederic Nowlan) was a discharged soldier of the 11th Regiment and was on the run from the police, he received 5 years hard labour in the Government road gang and when eventually released he went back to his Bushranging ways.

For a more detailed story on the Bushranger incident click here.

76 years of highs and lows

A widespread turn down in the sheep industry during the 1880′s obviously had an impact on Tom’s business. In April 1886 Tom was declared insolvent and the property and assets were sold by auction in 1887. He moved to ‘Allendale’ a nearby property where not long after he became ill with stomach cancer, Tom passed away in May 1889 at age 76 years after painful several months. He left his wife, Susannah and their seven children to continue their lives. His eldest child Annie was 26 and the youngest Allan was 7 years old.

His property was sold to the neighbouring Alston family, Richard Alston being the Government appointed Magistrate for Burrowa. The name of the property however continued and to this day Tom’s legacy lives on, as it is still known as ‘Suffolk Vale’.

Descendants

Susannah eventually moved into Burrowa and earned a great deal of respect in the community. Her obituary in the local paper was very complimentary of her kind and generous personality.

The children spread out across New South Wales. The eldest daughter Annie Millicent married Henry Meurer in Burrowa, they moved to Cobar then Lithgow. Annie Millicent died in 1925 at Bathurst.

Suffolk Vale

Tom Wilding purchased adjoining portions of land under his own name and that of his family and named the property ‘Suffolk Vale’, obviously after his native homeland of Suffolk, England. The first record of the name Suffolk Vale is a newspaper story of a Catholic School being opened at Gunnary ‘near to Suffolk Vale’ in September 1873. Sometime in the 20 years after he arrived in the Gunnary area in 1852, the property became known as ‘Suffolk Vale’. From this time onwards there are reports of people being born and living at Suffolk Vale.

It appears that Thomas Wilding probably built the present homestead to the south of Gunnary Creek in about 1869. The original “Wilding Station” was the stone building at Gunnary Creek that Henry Castles had built. In 1863 his son, Henry John Castles, married and moved away from the area, leaving Tom Wilding in possession. However, the son remained the legal owner, having inherited the property, and it is known that in 1869 he was back living with his family in that building.

Thomas Wilding and members of his family held a number of plots mainly just south of Gunnary Creek and down to the Burrowa River, although a few plots were held north of the creek. Other graziers held neighbouring plots and there was much intermingling of properties. The main occupation of the grazier in the Southern Tablelands is farming sheep.

The Barque ‘Lloyds’

Lloyds barque, 403 tons built London 1830, Captain G. Pearson. The end for the Lloyds was on a journey bound Sydney to Manilla, she sunk in the Torres Strait 26th August 1850, one crew member lost, the remaining crew reached Surabaya seventeen days later. [references, per site, Loney and Bateson]

The extended family

Records show that at least three other Suffolk Wilding’s came to Australia courtesy of His Majesty’s King William IV, Government.
John Wilding, alias John Warren (b.1754)
Thomas Wilding (b.1783)
Samuel Wilding (alias Samuel Jordan)

References

http://www.oldtowns.co.uk/Suffolk/lavenham.htm

End

Update history: 22/06/13; 01/01/14; 07/01/2014; 25/09/20