[John] Arthur Archer (1848, Port Louis, Mauritius - 1932)
Frederick Samuel Archer (1850, Port Louis, Mauritius - 1932)
Although Samuel's Australian death
certificate says he was born in Marseilles, in France, this information
was a few hundred kilometres in error. In fact, he was born
in Herbelles in northern France after the Napoleonic Wars, when
his father Thomas, a soldier, was camped near St. Omar, midway between
Calais and Bethune.
Samuel went on to become a soldier himself, enlisting in the 6th
Regiment of Foot (the Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers) in London, on May
23, 1838 when he was 21 years old..
He subsequently transferred to the 12th Regiment, and in 1842, he was
a sergeant stationed in Winchester, England, when his daughter Emma was
born. Emma's mother, Mary Gould Greenaway, was a native of Warwickshire,
also the home county of Samuel's father Thomas.
Soon after Emma’s birth, Samuel’s Regiment was sent to Mauritius.
This island in the Indian Ocean was a French outpost taken over by the
British after the Napoleonic Wars, and as such, required Army units to
look after Britain’s strategic interests on the sea route to the East
and to Australia.
In August 1844, Samuel was promoted to Colour Sergeant, while based
at Souillac on the southern coast of the island. The Archer family was
still in Mauritius when Emma’s brothers, Arthur and Frederick, were born
(1848/50).
During his time there, Samuel served with the 12th (Suffolk)
Regiment, the 5th (Northumberland Fusiliers) Regiment, the Corps of
Military Labourers and was finally transferred in 1855 to the Staff of
the Quarter Master General’s Department in Port Louis. The years in
Mauritius were almost certainly influential in Samuel's decision to take
his family to Australia in the mid 1850s. As the half-way port across
the Indian Ocean, Mauritius was a staging post for vessels heading for
Australia. After gold was discovered, first in New South Wales and then
in Victoria in the early 1850s, there was an exodus of fortune seekers
from Mauritius to Australia. (Samuel's old regiment, the 12th, had been
involved in putting down the Eureka uprising of December 1854).
After leaving the Army, Samuel and his three children travelled in
1856 to Australia from Port Louis, on board Marchioness, which
arrived in Melbourne on May 28. (Samuel and his by then presumably
deceased wife Mary had also lost three children, two boys and a girl).
The Archer family were the only passengers listed on board the
Marchioness, and her captain certified they were not immigrants "within
the meaning of the Act of the Governor and Legislative Council of
Victoria" (an Act "which makes provisions for certain passengers"); the
significance of this note is as yet unknown.
After the family’s arrival in the Colony, they joined the huge
throngs making their way to the Victorian goldfields. For a time, the
family's home was a tent, pitched on Strathfillan station near St.
Arnaud, west of Bendigo. In 1858, the property of Strathfillan, then
owned by David Peters, was the setting for one of the hundreds of gold
strikes in central Victoria during the Gold Rushes. The alluvial
diggings, known as Peters', achieved a temporary fame, with 1300 miners
there at the height of the rush, but this soon dropped to 200.
The country was very fertile, highly suited to agriculture, and many
of the miners cultivated their own plots to supplement their earnings
from gold[10]. If he ever
started prospecting, Samuel did not stay long at it - he gave his
occupation as "shepherd" on his daughter Emma's marriage certificate.
Two years after Emma’s marriage, Samuel moved north to Queensland
with his two young sons, John Arthur and Frederick Samuel, when Emma and
her husband Felix Pobar (with their newborn son Felice) left the
Victorian goldfields to make a new life in southern Queensland.
When Felice and Emma moved in to Toowoomba from the Jandowae area,
Samuel and his two sons accompanied them. There, the Archers and Pobars
first settled at Black Gully, then a semi-rural area in Toowoomba's
north-west.
In 1868, Samuel and his two sons took up land at Emu Creek (now East
Greenmount), in the Drayton area south of Toowoomba. The Land Act of
that year enticed selectors to areas not already acquired as freehold by
squatters, and Samuel and his sons joined the numbers who elected to
settle in the popular districts clustered around Toowoomba-Drayton.[11] Samuel’s selection had been part of the
renowned pastoral property of Eton Vale resumed for selectors.
Samuel
Archer’s land selection at Greenmount, No. 194a from the original State
Archives documentation and (below) where it would appear on a modern map
Samuel’s
first selection consisted of 60 fertile acres with water access to Emu
Creek, adjoining the Toowoomba-Warwick road. Some years later, he
acquired an adjoining 20 acres.
A report dated Feb 9, 1874 lists the improvements as a:
"weather board and galvanized iron cottage (see photo below) all
fenced in with a good fence; 21 acres ploughed and cultivated with 6
acres lucerne and the remainder corn and wheat".[12]
The Archer
cottage in 2005. Neighbours say it was shifted several hundred metres
from its original location on the selection, to a site closer to the New
England Highway, 2 km north of East Greenmount.
Among Samuel's neighbours was the Davis family, of On Our
Selection fame, cast into Australian literary folklore as “Dad
and Dave” by Arthur Hoey Davis writing as Steele Rudd. Davis wrote
about the trials and tribulations in the life of a selector and his
family living in “Snake Gully” (based loosely on the Davis family’s
own experiences at Emu Creek).
Samuel, however, evidently prospered on the Darling Downs, and by
1874, he was listed in the Post Office Directory as a squatter, at St.
George Farm, Greenmount. In the same directory, his then 26-year-old
son Arthur is recorded as being a farmer, at Emu Creek, Greenmount.
In April, 1899, Samuel died in Toowoomba General Hospital, after
being in hospital only one day. His death certificate says he
collapsed and died of "Morbis cordis" (heart disease). A probate
notice described him as a farmer, "late of Emu Creek, near Drayton, in
the Colony of Queensland".[13]
He is buried in Toowoomba Cemetery. Samuel’s sons, Arthur and
Frederick, never married. They continued to work the farm until their
deaths in 1932.
(right): Samuel's gravestone in
Toowoomba cemetery
[1]Samuel's death
certificate [2] Inward Passengers to Victoria
from Foreign Ports, 1852-1859. Victorian Archives [3] Samuel's death certificate [4] Ship's passenger list of
Marchioness [5] Samuel's death certificate. [6] As above
[7] The registrar who recorded
the details of Samuel's death was George Essex Evans, a noted
Queensland poet of the period, who had probably been given the
Government appointment as patronage
[9] England,Marriages,
1538-1973, Salt Lake City, Utah, FamilySearch, 2013, FHL Film Number,
1866577, Ref ID: item 4 p 136 (this record was located for me by an
English researcher, Judith Le Sage)
[10] Yvonne S. Palmer, Track of
the Years: the Story of St. Arnaud, Melbourne University Press, 1955,
p82 [11] D B Waterson, Squatter,
Selector, and Storekeeper: A History of the Darling Down, 1859-93,
Sydney University Press, 1968, p139. [12] Lands Department selection
file under the C.L.A. Acts, 1868 & 1876 [Qld State Archives: LAN/AG,
Toowoomba, selection no. 194]. [13] Toowoomba Chronicle, April
29, 1899.
Life
on the Victorian goldfields (image by Education Services Australia)
Although Samuel's Australian death
certificate says he was born in Marseilles, in France, this information
was a few hundred kilometres in error. In fact, he was born
in Herbelles in northern France after the Napoleonic Wars, when
his father Thomas, a soldier, was camped near St. Omar, midway between
Calais and Bethune. 
