Self-publishing books about one’s ancestors is an increasingly popular pastime. In many cases, it gives unrelated people with an interest in local history or broader social history the real treat of a thoroughly-researched insight into the past. Catherine’s Story, by Gail Barnes, is one of those cases.
Barnes is the great-great-granddaughter of Catherine McKinnon-McDonald-Ballard of the book’s title. This is primarily a work of family history, but it is of considerable interest for those interested in the history of the Glen Innes district, or indeed in the history of nineteenth-century migration to Australia.
Catherine was thirteen years old in 1837, when she and her family sailed from the Isle of Skye for New South Wales on the Midlothian, part of John Dunmore Lang’s bounty scheme. This group of Scottish Gaelic-speaking migrants became infamous on their arrival in Sydney, due to their insistence on being settled as a community. In the end, they were settled on the Lang family lands around Paterson in the Hunter Valley. Of interest for Glen Innes is the fact that Christina Cameron (or MacLeod as she was then), who became the wife of our first minister, was also in that group.
Catherine had various adventures, two (consecutive) husbands, nine surviving children and two step-children. After rising and falling fortunes and aged over fifty years old, she relocated to Red Range with her husband Thomas Ballard and several of their children, in 1876. Pioneers of that locale, they became prominent citizens of Red Range, featuring in politics, religion, sport, and much more besides. Their home hosted frequent meetings. Thomas had the mail run from Glen Innes to Red Range for many years.
In a remarkable coincidence, when Catherine died in 1904, it was the Reverend Archibald Cameron who conducted her funeral service. Barnes doesn’t mention this, but his wife Christina, Catherine’s shipmate, was quite likely present. It is nice to speculate that the two ladies might have been friends, conversing in Gaelic after being reunited in Glen Innes all those years after the voyage.
Gail Barnes has written a beautifully researched book, drawing on an impressive array of primary sources, which give us many fascinating details about life in nineteenth-century New South Wales, and about the Glen Innes district in particular.
Catherine’s Story is available for purchase from the Land of the Beardies Museum in Glen Innes.
