David Johnstone Davidson (1865-1954)

In Uralla, a small town just south of Armidale, one of these blacksmiths was John Davidson, who had established himself by the age of just 21 in his own blacksmith forge.  That same year, 1857, he married Elizabeth Frizell, a local girl from a property with the discouraging name of "Terrible Vale".  John and Elizabeth started their family soon after, and their third child, a son, David Johnstone Davidson, was born at Uralla in 1865. 

Young David followed in his father's footsteps, learning the blacksmithing trade, going first into the business at the mining town of Hillgrove, just east of Armidale.  Hillgrove started life as an antimony mine in 1876, and a decade later, gold was discovered there, with a resulting boom in population.  David set up his workshop there under the name of Hillgrove Ironworks.  In the photograph at left,  David is on the left, with his brother Alfred George (also a blacksmith) on the right.

 According to Wikipedia,

Hillgrove then had four churches, six hotels, two schools, a school of arts, a hospital, several banks, a stock exchange, a court house, police station, a recreation ground, a technical college, debating society, a temperance league and a cordial factory. The town also printed its own local paper, the Hillgrove Guardian. In 1895 it became the first town in Australia to be supplied with power by means of hydro-electricity which operated from Gara Gorge to the west.

During the same period, David set about wooing an Armidale seamstress, Sarah Farrell, the youngest daughter of an Irishman who came to the colony in 1839. David and Sarah married in Armidale in 1890 and had their first child, a son William at Hillgrove in 1892. Three years later, James Henry, who would be universally known later as "Harry", was born.

Very soon after that, David must have realised that prospects at Hillgrove were lessening, while those of the goldfields in Western Australia were getting better and better. Before the turn of the new century, the young couple packed up their belongings and David's tools of trade, and set out for the Kalgoorlie-Boulder fields in WA. Gold had been discovered there in 1893, and the gold rush picked up pace.... At the time of the arrival of the Davidson family 1898, which included David's brother Archibald,, the population of Kalgoorlie had reached 2000, three quarters of them men - and within three years, the number of people seeking their fortune had more than doubled.  David Davidson didn't join the gold seekers - he wanted to practise his trade there, and set about establishing himself as a blacksmith.

At this time, the Davidson family increased by one, with the birth of John, in October 1900, but early in the following year, 35 year old Sarah succumbed to a case of enterica, a type of food poisoning, and died within three weeks.

left: The funeral notices for Sarah, posted in the Kalgoorlie Miner, Friday, 8 February, 1901, p6

Sarah's death posed a major problem for David - as well as the loss of his loved one, he also had no one to care for his three sons, the youngest only three months old.  David's sister Frances came to the rescue and crossed the continent to join the family.  This arrangement wasn't an entirely happy one, at least for the middle son, Harry.  From stories told a century later, it appears Harry and his aunt didn't see eye-to-eye, and perhaps Harry didn't want to see anyone taking his mother's place in the household.  Whatever the reason, Harry, then aged about 10, was dispatched back across Australia to his maternal grandmother Jane Garrett, who took him in at her family home in Wandsworth, near Guyra, on the New England tablelands (for Harry's story, click here)..