G'day ALL ...
A few days ago I took a sideways step and wrote about the early
Methodist Church in Moorabbin, VIC which began in a tent in the 1850s
before graduating to permanent buildings in 1854 and again in 1867.
You may remember the author I was quoting concluding:
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The market gardening community of early Moorabbin had a number of shared
characteristics: most members derived from poor circumstances in the
British Isles, arriving in Australia with few or no financial resources;
they were strongly family-oriented and, in many cases, highly fertile,
spawning ancestral trees formidable in dimension; and they were
staunchly religious.
<----
Bringing this back to my HELLIER mob who came out to Ballarat and
Bendigo from Bristol, large families were part of the course, although
the elder brother, Thomas, was not so lucky as he was plagued by Scarlet
Fever at one stage and lost a son, 10, and an infant while he was
burying the son. Later in life, his wife was plagued by miscarriages or
deaths in infancy.
Thomas' brother Eli, on the other hand, raised 11 children and only lost
two in early childhood. My g-grandfather, John Thomas Eli (J.T.E.) was
born in 1860 and was his second child and oldest surviving son.
Now J.T.E. was another good breeder and he raised 9 children and only
lost one at an early age.
The odd thing was, that he married in 1880 and started having children
in Melbourne in 1881, with my grandma coming along in 1887.
To put things in perspective, His father, Eli, had his first three kids
in Bendigo, the next four in NZ, the next four back in Bendigo, and the
last one in Fitzroy in 1884 (after J.T.E had already sired two).
The final bit of perspective is that the SDAs hit Melbourne in 1885, and
more specifically, North Fitzroy where both Eli and J.T.E were now
living. So I could reasonably assume that my grandma, who was born in
1887 in Fitzroy, would have grown up with her 3 year-old Uncle Alfred
and 6 year-old Auntie Rose.
To progress the yarn a bit further, it's time to look a bit more at
J.T.E who we learned the other day took out a patent on a 'fly-trap' ...
as you do!
I'm pretty sure he was the one who along with his brother Herbert, took
to the SDA life in a big way ... we already know that Herbert headed off
to the US to become a medical missionary, but J.T.E. put his hands to
many things and apart from owning Hellier & Co. glaziers and paper
hangers, he was credited with having the building contract for the first
SDA church in North Fitzroy and holding various executive roles in the
SDA organisation as it grew in size.
He was often listed as a commercial traveler and that confused me at
first until I found ads in the Bendigo paper announcing that he had the
agency for selling SDA literature in Bendigo and Castlemaine.
My dad's cousin was quite blunt when he summed up his grandfather's
character:
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My mother described her father as a "commercial traveler", although I do
not know in what line of business. In a black-covered exercise book he
describes a journey around the world by sailing vessel in 1882-3, but it
appears to have been for pleasure only, and was the first of several long
absences from his wife and family. A faded old sepia photograph shows
him standing on the steps of a ruined building in San Francisco after
the great earthquake and fire in 1906. From another early photograph it
appears that Rebecca's parents and elder sister Priscilla looked after
her and her young family during these absences.
John Hellier was evidently a devoutly religious man, albeit a selfish
one, and in his journal he refers to his young wife Rebecca in loving
terms. Yet if the dates are correct, he departed Melbourne on his seven
months journey around the world only eight days before the birth of his
second son William on 24/12/1882!
He appeared obsessed with the social evils he found rife in London at
the time, and dwelt ad nauseam on them and on detailed descriptions of
St. Paul's Cathedral and the Tower of London. His outward voyage in the
barque "Crummock Water" of 995 tons via Cape Horn took exactly three
months; the return voyage in SS "Iberia" via the Suez Canal took six weeks.
<----
I'll have to dig a bit further, but I suspect he may have been on an
earlier voyage with his new wife in 1881 as the Bendigo Advertiser
carried a NZ shipping announcement:
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AUCKLAND, 12th November.
The Pacific Mail Steamship Company's s.s. Australia arrived here this
morning after a very fast passage of 19 days 15 hours from San
Francisco. The following is her list of passengers:—
Mr. and Mrs. Anderson and Miss Anderson, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Miss
Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Hellier, Messrs. Thomas, W. Fleming, Lucas Smith,
Arundel, Mellin, Marks, Synnot, McColl, Jaygarth.
<----
Time will tell, but this J.T.E will prove to be just as interesting as
his brother Herbert, our San Francisco correspondent.
It's a pity that the 'black-covered exercise book' that was mentioned
above isn't available, but I can only hope that I can track it down via
the family of dad's cousin. I do have J.T.E.'s heavily annotated Bible
and a publication he put out after the turn of the century when he was
engineering a split within the SDA church over which day should be
regarded as the Sabbath here in Australia.
I'll close off by attaching another early map from Brighton in Victoria
... this one shows all the land owned by Mr Dendy.
Cheers, ROB!
rnelson@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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