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Thomas Boyland¾a
farmer and close friend of the Grenier family and of
many other early settlers at Cooper’s Plains¾was
born to John and Charlotte (née Quigley) Boyland in
Antrim Ireland, about 1817. He travelled to Australia on
the 716-ton barque Alfred (Captain Eastmure)
which sailed from London on 7 September 1840 with 263
bounty immigrants on board. After fresh provisions had
been obtained at the Cape, the ship proceeded to Sydney
and arrived there on 19 January 1841. Aged 23 at the
time, Thomas was accompanied by 21-year-old Sampson
Courtney Boyland who, more than likely, was a cousin of
his. According to shipping records, they were from
County Antrim in Ireland and were recommended for the
£19 bounty voyage by ‘Samuel Peacock and two others’.
Both carpenters, they were literate single men of the
Presbyterian faith.
Thomas was not the first of his family to emigrate to
Australia. His brother John (b. 14 August 1812, a
carpenter and sawyer) and his sisters Eliza (b. 4
January 1815, a farm servant) and Sarah (b. 9 March
1816, a farm servant and dairymaid) set sail for Sydney
from Plymouth on 8 October 1838 on the Andromache
(Captain Thomas New). The ship with its 220 bounty
passengers arrived on 31 January 1839. Eight infants
died and five were born en route.
Thomas suffered a serious financial setback when, on the
evening of 4 July 1848, his ‘house, situated in South
Brisbane, was forcibly entered, and money, consisting of
sovereigns and silver, with about thirty shillings in
orders, and amounting in the whole to between £40 and
£50 sterling stolen therefrom’. He offered a reward of
£20 for information leading to a conviction of the
offender(s).
On 21 March 1849 Thomas Boyland married Margaret Orr
in the Presbyterian church at Kangaroo Point in a
service conducted by the Reverend Thomas Mowbray MA. The
witnesses were James Reid, the business partner of John
Boyland, and the bride’s sister Jessie.
A few observations might be made, in passing, about
these two witnesses who are part of the Boyland story.
James Reid
‘of the steamboat Hawk’, married Ann Gallon (née Ross),
the relict of Peter Gallon of South Brisbane, on 9 March
1852 in St John’s Church, North Brisbane. The Reverend
Henry Offley Irwin conducted the wedding service which
was officially witnessed by Francis and Elizabeth Ede.
James Reid became a prosperous pastoralist and land
speculator. Ann died on 6 September 1864.
Jessie Orr,
the ‘third daughter of Mr John Orr of Brisbane’, married
John Wylie Wilson (b. 28 August 1828), the eldest son of
Archibald and Elizabeth (née Wylie) Wilson of Dysart (Kircaldy),
Fifeshire, Scotland, by special licence on 28 October
1854 with the Reverend Mr Sinclair presiding and John
Orr and C Frederick Bell acting as witnesses. The couple
settled in Bowen, North Queensland; and it was there at
Wylie Park that Jessie died on 15 December 1897. Her
72-year-old husband, devastated by Jessie’s death took
his own life six months later on 1 June 1898. ‘Respect
for deceased and sympathy for his family were shown by
nearly all the flags in the town being at half mast.’
Thomas and Margaret lived originally in Russell Street,
South Brisbane. It is there that they would have met the
Grenier family for the first time; for Thomas Grenier
was then the licensee of the Brisbane Hotel in that
street. In 1863 they moved with their growing family to
Cooper’s Plains where they operated the ‘Chilmurah
Dairy’ at ‘Meadowlands’—an 11-acre property bounded by
Beaudesert Road, Meadow and Boyland Avenues and the
interstate railway line (UBD 199), not far from
God’s Acre. At some stage they relocated to a new
residence on a property (possibly purchased by their son
George Thomas) on the corner of Boundary and Beenleigh
Roads.
Thomas’s pastoral activities, which focused on sheep and
cattle grazing, had actually been in train for more than
a decade when this move was made. According to the
New South Wales Government Gazette, he had leased
five tracts of land, totalling 4040 acres, on the west
side of Oxley Creek. His interests also extended to the
other side of the creek where he held leases jointly
with a partner. In this connection it is significant
that the area between Chelmer and Seventeen Mile Rocks
was known as Boyland’s Pocket.
Thomas and Margaret Boyland raised a large family: John
(b. 3 March 1850; d. 29 May 1938); Jessie (b. 16 May
1852; d. 28 October 1943); Albert James (b. 31 May 1854;
d. 19 June 1929); George Thomas (b. 1 May 1856; d. 13
October 1908);
Mary Mayne Amelia
(pictured, b. 18 September 1858; d. 6 February 1964);
William Henry (b. about 1861); Courtney1 (b.
21 October 1864; d. 22 October 1864); Eleanor Jane (b.
30 April 1867; d. 9 August 1959); Courtney2
(b. about 1868; d. 28 April 1956); Ernest Wylie (b. 1
January 1872; d. 7 January 1943); Francis Orr Leichhardt
(b. 30 July 1873; d. 26 October 1958).
Before concentrating his efforts on his farming and
dairying interests, Thomas once transported freight and
passengers between Brisbane and Ipswich, initially on
the steamer Experiment which he owned jointly
with James Reid, and then on three steamers he had
purchased (probably in partnership)¾Bremer,
Hawk and Swallow. One who availed of his
services on several occasions was the prominent
businessman Nehemiah Bartley who in 1854 recorded in his
book Opals and Agates:
The ‘Swallow’ steamer was sunk by catching under the
wharf; she tilted, and filled by the rising tide, and
the steward [Richard Brandon], who rushed on board to
get his money out, was drowned in the cabin; so I
travelled up and down [to Ipswich] in the ‘Hawk’,
Captain Thomas Boyland; a guileless hard worker was old
‘Dash it’ (as his nickname was).
Refloated after this mishap, which occurred at Towns and
Co.’s Wharf, South Brisbane, on 6 March 1854, the
steamer Swallow was even more badly damaged when
it ran aground at Seventeen Mile Rocks on 31 August 1855
en route from Ipswich to Brisbane with a cargo of wool
and tallow.
In the shipping business Thomas was following the lead
of his brother John who, in partnership with James Reid,
was a South Brisbane ferryman and a pioneer of the
Brisbane-Ipswich trade. Their barge, Mary Ann (50
feet x 11 feet), was launched in Brisbane on New Year’s
Day 1847 and soon began carrying wool and other goods
between the two towns. In this connection John moved to
Ipswich to supervise the erection of a large storage
facility which was duly opened in September 1847.
This partnership was ‘dissolved by mutual consent’,
possibly because of failing health on John’s part.
John Boyland
died in Ipswich on 16 August 1853 in the presence of his
brother Thomas and was buried there on the following
day. In the absence of a Presbyterian minister, the
local Baptist minister, the Reverend Thomas Deacon,
officiated at the service. Only a month before John’s
untimely death, advertisements had appeared in the
Moreton Bay Courier listing rates of freight for the
steamboat Hawk and confirming that he and his
brother Thomas had become partners..
As John, who never married, died intestate and without
any dependents, Thomas signed a statement on 25 June
1862 before a commissioner for taking affidavits in
which he declared himself ‘heir at law’ to his brother’s
estate. He duly inherited John’s property ‘in the now
colony of Queensland’.
Charles Melton, writing under the pseudonym ‘Nut Quad’,
recalled Thomas’s shipping activities in one of the many
articles he contributed to the Brisbane Courier:
Many of us can recall the genial captain, who was well
known in connection with the river trade between
Brisbane and Ipswich in the early days. In fact he was
connected with the first steamboat that plied between
the two towns, for in 1846, with Mr. Reid, he [or John?]
purchased from Mr. J. C. [James Canning] Pearce, for
£200, the unlucky steamboat
Experiment,
which was said to have been the first steamer built in
Australia, and was stated to have originally cost about
£2000. But it was as master of the steamer
Hawk—built
by Captain Taylor Winship, in 1840, on the river bank,
about 300 yards from the present West End Brewery—that
Captain Boyland was best known. The
Hawk
and the
Swallow
(the latter built by Mr. Winship in 1852) did a fair
passenger trade between Brisbane and Ipswich in the
fifties, for there were no coaches in those days. The
steamers also conveyed large quantities of station
requirements to Ipswich, whence they were taken by
bullock dray to the various pastoral holdings in West
Moreton and on the Darling Downs, the return loading
consisting of wool, tallow, and hides. Captain Boyland
was a fine type of man, who looked the strenuous life of
those days squarely in the face. Earnest resolution was
written in well-marked lines on his face, and his eyes
had the seaman’s trained keenness in their gaze. Even
now one can recall his cheery voice as he called out
“Let go that bow line there,” when the little steamer
was moving from the wharf. When the present scribe was a
lad he was privileged to possess Captain Boyland’s
friendship, and made several trips to Ipswich with him
in the middle fifties. In those far away days the
steamers left Brisbane at an hour that enabled them to
pass the Seventeen-mile Rocks at high water; so that
while at times they left McCabe’s wharf before daylight
in the morning, it was often 10 or 11 o’clock in the
forenoon before they got away
…
[‘Nut Quad’ goes on to name some of the squatters who
were on board on a trip he made on the
Hawk
in September 1855 and recalls the camaraderie that
existed among them. He singles out for special praise
Boyland’s cook ‘who was a past master in the art of
coffee-making’.]
Thomas Boyland had been living in Australia for 42 of
his 71 years at the time of his death at Cooper’s Plains
on 18 June 1886. His funeral, which was conducted by the
Reverend John Stewart Pollock of the Presbyterian
Church,
took place at ‘Grenier’s Cemetery’ on the following
afternoon in the presence of official witnesses, Job
Minchenton Sr and John Rowcliffe.
The Boyland name lives on in Boyland Avenue and Boyland
Street in Cooper’s Plains and Seventeen Mile Rocks
respectively. It is also remembered in the locality of
Boyland near Canungra in the Beaudesert Shire. In this
last instance the name derives from the railway station
which was named on 15 October 1914 after George Thomas
Boyland, the son of Thomas and Margaret, who was
chairman of the Tamborine Shire Council (1907-08) and a
strong advocate of the Canungra Branch Railway.
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According to her death notice in the Moreton Bay
Courier, Janet Orr passed away aged 55 on 16 July
1856 when she and her husband were living at Stanley
Quay, Stanley Street, South Brisbane. She was the second
daughter of James and Jean (née Galt) Orr of
‘Towerlands, and Slane Castle’, near Irvine, Ayrshire,
and the sister of the controversial Reverend George Orr
DD, Symington, Ayrshire, of the Free Church of Scotland.
Her parents were married in Dundonald on 1 August 1796.
Janet’s husband, John Orr Sr, the son of John and
Margaret (née Young) Orr, was a native of Knowehead in
the parish of Dundonald, Scotland. He worked as a
gamekeeper/farmer at Cooper’s Plains where, having been
cared for in his last illness by Dr Albert Emmelhainz,
he died on 11 August 1871 aged 82 years. His remains
were interred in the ‘Presbyterian Burial Ground’
(presumably in the old Paddington Cemetery, Lang Park)
three days later. The Reverend Charles Ogg led the
burial service which was certified by George Barney
Petrie (undertaker) and witnessed by William Baynes.
Margaret Boyland’s death certificate indicates that she
spent seven years in Victoria before accompanying her
family to Queensland where aged about 18 she married
Thomas Boyland. She passed away in Cooper’s Plains on 10
August 1911 and was laid to rest beside her husband
according to the rites of the Presbyterian Church two
days later. The Reverend John Stewart Pollock presided;
the undertaker was W Cannon and the official witnesses
to the burial were George Sutherland (the son-in-law of
the deceased) and JH Cripps.
The following obituary notice appeared in the
Brisbane Courier:
Many relatives and friends will regret to learn that
Mrs. Boyland, widow of the late Captain Boyland, passed
away at her residence, Cooper’s Plains, last Wednesday
night, at the ripe old age of 80 years. One by one the
links binding the present to the past are being broken,
yet there are many persons still living who can recall
the genial captain, so well known in connection with the
steamer trips between Brisbane and Ipswich many years
ago. Mrs. Boyland had lived at Cooper’s Plains for 48
years, and there are many people who will miss the
kindly old lady, who was always ready to lend a helpful
hand when any neighbours were in distress. The deceased
leaves six sons, three daughters, 22 grandchildren, and
three great-grandchildren. One son [George Thomas] died
about three years ago [13 October 1908].
In one of his numerous historical articles, sharing his
recollections of our pioneers, in the Brisbane
Courier, ‘Nut Quad’ (Charles Melton) wrote of
Margaret Boyland:
But one by one the links which attach the past to the
present are broken, and a paragraph which appeared in
your paper a little while ago announced the death of a
very old colonist in the person of Mrs. Boyland, widow
of the late Captain Boyland, at the age of 80 years.
Many old residents of Brisbane will remember the
deceased lady when she lived with her family in
Russell-street, South Brisbane, near the site of the
present Melbourne-street railway station. Mrs. Boyland
possessed a kindly and lovable personality, and during
the 48 years she lived at Cooper’s Plains she made many
friends, who now sadly miss her, for her ministering
hand was always helpful when neighbours were in trouble.
The truth of the last sentence is borne out by the fact
that Margaret Boyland fostered and provided employment
for many ‘State children’ over the years, including
Frank Hubert Hall and his friend who was with him on the
day that he was accidentally shot, George Lee. Her
ministrations in that tragedy and her part in the
subsequent inquest are outlined in the Hall entry.
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