Foreword

 
    Donald Horne wrote: "..People have no regard for our cultural distinctiveness, and would be astounded by any comparison with Bali, which is seen to have a culture; Cairns or Australia generally isn't ... For this to happen we need more local history projects and more sense of local heritage" {Weekend Australian, August 3-4 1991)
    The difficulty arises when researching a history which begins in 1854 in Victoria, the Gold Rush period. A great gulf is revealed between thee past and contemporary thinking when this period is researched. This gulf was shown when it was mentioned to a Uniting Church clergyman that George Briant as well as four other men bought land on which to build a Methodist Church at Boort.
    He said: "That's an impossibility. It would have to be a Church Property Trust. Anyway, why would anyone want to do such a thing?"
    Today, in our ignorance, we assume that the present conditions have existed from the beginning. The Boort Shire office and the local minister of the Uniting Church at Boort were both very surprised to see the original Land Titles; there was no record of the original Grant in Shire records, and it had been assumed that the present owners had that land since it was originally granted.
    Records were haphazard in 1854, after the arrival of the Goldrush immigrants. It was possible to recreate a factual picture of George and Emma's family before 1854 from shipping records and UK archives. We are left with a mystery for the period immediately after their arrival at Geelong in August 1854. There is a brief mention of a second birth of a boy to George and Emma at the Immigration Centre at Geelong, signed by a clerk at the Depot in November 1854.
    We know from family history records that Emma's brother, David died on the goldfields before their arrival, and that he and his wife, Ann, had arrived at Ballarat the previous year. We also know that Ann lived with George and Emma after their arrival, and that she remarried in 1865.
    Memories of Emma by her descendants recall that she said that she had never been so terrified in her life as when she was on the goldfields, and that she had been used to living in a big house in England.

       Page last updated - 18 Jan 2006