The Mortlock Family
Authors: Margaret Allen and Denise Noack
William Ranson Mortlock was born in 1821. His family were china merchants living at Moat House, Melbourn, in Cambridgeshire. He arrived in South Australia in 1843 with a very heavy money belt. He first worked as a miller, owning two flour mills while running the Globe Hotel in Adelaide. In 1847 he took up a lease on Yalluna, a 9,500-hectare pastoral property near Tumby Bay. In 1850 he married Margaret Tennant, from another Eyre Peninsula pastoral family. When one of his mills burned down on 17 April 1855, he gave up milling and extended his pastoral holdings on the lower Eyre Peninsula, which included Strawberry Hill station, Coffin Bay and Lake Wangary.
The area had ‘the worst race relations in the colony’.1 In these early days of white expansion on the Eyre Peninsula, it was said that ‘the blacks [sic] were very troublesome’. This meant that Indigenous peoples were resisting the settlers encroaching on their lands. Mortlock and his employees were involved in a war between the settlers and the Barngarla and Nauo peoples.2 Margaret Tennant’s sister recalled that the settlers fortified their dwellings and had loopholes ‘from which to shoot at the blacks [sic]’.3
In June 1848, some of Mortlock’s sheep were speared as was his shepherd, Charles Goldsmith. ‘Ngurkalta’, who was accused of spearing Goldsmith, was furious that he would not give him a sheep. Presumably, Indigenous people thought that as the settlers had taken their land, they should give them a sheep or two. ‘Ngurkalta’ was imprisoned for two years with hard labour.
In 1849, five Aboriginal people died after eating poisoned flour, which they took from a hut on Mortlock’s Yellana station. The hut-keeper, Patrick Dwyer was charged with murder but then released and fled the colony.4 Clearly, the ‘odds were stacked against fair treatment of the Aborigines’.5
In 1859, Andrew Tennant of Mount Wedge station was said to have beaten Aboriginal worker Colotoney to death for having allowed his sheep to mingle with others. The Government Resident in Port Lincoln, Andrew Murray, ordered an inquest. Some members of the jury had close ties to Tennant, including foreman Mortlock, who was Tennant’s brother-in-law. Mortlock thought the investigation of Tennant was frivolous and would ‘seriously affect the character’ of ‘a young man just entering the world’. Mortlock claimed, ‘Everybody knew that it was the general practice in the bush to thrash the natives when they deserved it, it being the only way of managing them.’
“Everybody knew that it was the general practice in the bush to thrash the natives when they deserved it, it being the only way of managing them.”
Mortlock objected to Indigenous witnesses giving evidence, saying ‘as they could not vote at elections, their statements were not admissible in a Court of Law’. With such intimidation, it appears that these witnesses, knowing the power of Mortlock and his associates in the area, moderated their evidence. Furthermore, the Government Resident could see that the jury was ‘averse’ to the case and that ‘the body was so decomposed that it was difficult to ascertain the cause of death’. The inquest was thus adjourned, but the Resident wrote in his report to the Chief Secretary’s Office that he had since heard ‘several other cases of ill-treatment of natives [sic] by the same individual’, including that Tennant ‘hung a native named Tahrie by the neck to a tree and kept him all night in that position’.6 Murray was later removed from office. He claimed that the squatters wanted him removed because he had held an inquest into the death of an Aboriginal man ill-treated by a white man.7 Mortlock was likely a leader in Murray’s ousting. Murray also claimed that on his removal, the squatters ‘commenced a system of persecution of the natives’. By 1866, Mortlock was himself a Resident Magistrate in Port Lincoln.
The intermarried Tennant and Mortlock families prospered. After a trip to England, W. R. Mortlock extended his properties in 1867–1868, acquiring leases at Pichi Richi and Angorichina in the Flinders Ranges, and at Yudnapinna and Mt Arden west of Port Augusta. It was said that by 1901, the Mortlock holdings, including both freehold and pastoral leases, covered an area the size of England.
At Yudnapinna alone, over 100,000 sheep were shorn each year. W. R. Mortlock served three terms in the House of Assembly between 1868 and 1884, and was well placed to protect the interests of the pastoralist class. He had a large ten-roomed house, Avenel Gardens, with extensive grounds in Medindie. When he died in 1884, his estate was worth £100,000.
His heir, William Tennant Mortlock (1858–1913), attended St Peter’s College before going to Jesus College, Cambridge University, around 1875. He read law and was admitted to the Inner Temple. Returning to Australia in 1881, he managed Yudnapinna station. In 1891, he married his cousin, Rosye Tennant, daughter of Andrew Tennant, who made a magnificent gift of £20,000 on the wedding day.
In 1891, W. T. Mortlock purchased Martindale Hall and 4,000 hectares for £33,000, also purchasing some of the Bowmans’ furniture. He and Rosye had five children, but only two sons survived to adulthood. A photograph upstairs in the Hall shows little Valentine who survived until he was almost nine years.
At Martindale, Mortlock amassed a fine merino flock, planted gardens and orchards, and installed a racecourse as he was keen on horseracing and horse breeding. His horse ‘Yudnapinna’ won the Grand National Hurdle Race in 1911, and he hosted race meetings at the Martindale course. He was keen on hunting, and a photograph of him at his Coffin Bay property around 1900 shows shark jaws, dolphin and whale skulls, and other such trophies hanging on the walls there. He and Rosye regularly hosted the Adelaide Hunt Club at Martindale. Like his father, he was a parliamentarian, representing Flinders in the House of Assembly from 1896 to 1899 and 1901 to 1902. He was seen to be ‘of value in legislative matters connected with pastoral affairs’.8 As befitting a member of the colonial gentry, he was a member of the exclusive Adelaide Club. He built a summer house on East Terrace, Adelaide, which served as his residence when in town. It was said that both he and Rosye each had a Rolls Royce garaged there.
The Mortlocks were very hospitable, and the visitor book shows a regular stream of visitors to Martindale for house parties, luncheons, dinners and jolly musical evenings. Rosye’s sister married R. M. Hawker of nearby Bungaree station and the family was part of the colonial gentry. They were public-spirited as the leading family in the district. Rosye supported St Peter’s Anglican Church in Mintaro, while her husband donated Mortlock Park to the local community. They employed a number of local people at the Hall and were seen as good employers.
In 1903 W. T. and Rosye made an extensive trip of Europe. In London, they watched the Trooping of the Colour and visited the Tower of London. They travelled via the Suez Canal and also visited Egypt, then under British rule. They collected many artifacts on this trip. In 1905, a visitor to the Hall reported ‘a large collection of native weapons and utensils gathered from various parts … including some from Aden, London, and the interior of Australia’.9 Mortlock liked to display the weapons of Aboriginal people whom his family had dispossessed and those of other Indigenous groups.
Mortlock liked to display the weapons of Aboriginal people whom his family had dispossessed and those of other Indigenous groups.
In 1912 W. T. and Rosye’s older son, John Andrew Tennant (Jack) Mortlock, enrolled in Cambridge University, but his father’s death in 1913 cut his studies short. W. T. Mortlock’s estate was worth £550,000. Apart from his South Australian properties, he had holdings in Victoria, Western Australia and England.
When Jack turned twenty-one in 1915, he inherited his father’s vast estate. He oversaw the fortunes of his pastoral empire, leaving day-to-day operations to station managers. Later, Mr Ernest Scarfe, his right-hand man, oversaw all Jack’s properties. Jack visited his properties from time to time and presided over directors’ meetings, including that of the Brilliant Gold Mining Company. He was able to devote much of his time to leisure. He enjoyed horseracing and always went to Melbourne for the Cup. He had marvellous cars and a chauffeur to drive him around, whether he was going between Martindale and Adelaide, around Port Lincoln, up to Sydney and North Queensland, or around New Zealand. He had a speedboat, Wizzo, and won races in it.
Jack was commodore of the Port Adelaide Yacht Club and spent many days cruising in his motor yacht Martindale at Port Adelaide or around Coffin Bay and Port Lincoln. There were three permanent staff on this boat and on longer trips, a cook was taken on. The boat scarcely left South Australian waters. Even when Mortlock went over to the Eyre Peninsula, his staff took the boat across and he travelled on one of the gulf steamers, such as MV Minnipa, with his car in the hold.
Jack Mortlock was interested in a scientific approach to agriculture and the pastoral industry and, with his mother, made significant donations to the Waite Agricultural Research Institute. In 1936 his brother, Ranson, died in Colombo. His mother died in 1939. Jack was unmarried and could not pass down the family name, so his mother made a number of bequests. When Jack married Dorothy Beech in 1948, he made arrangements for his vast estate to be donated to the State Library and the University of Adelaide. He died in 1950, leaving an estate worth £1,148,124. Dorothy was the guardian of the Martindale Hall until the University of Adelaide took it over in 1965.
He was one of the first in the state to own a movie camera and loved taking movies of his boats and trips. Jack was an enthusiastic hunter and fisherman. He kept a record of all his kills and most enjoyed spending time on his Coffin Bay property, shooting, fishing and reading. He was a loner and, like his brother and father, a heavy drinker. In July 1930, Jack confided in his diary that he felt ill: ‘Too much Whiskey’. Periodically, he and his brother spent time sobering up at the North Adelaide Private Hospital (Calvary Hospital).
Footnotes
- Peggy Brock and Doreen Kartinyeri, Poonindie: The Rise and Destruction of an Aboriginal Agricultural Community (Government Printer, 1989), 9. ↩︎
- Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence (Wakefield Press, 2012), 53. See also ‘Eyre Peninsula’, The South Australian Frontier and Its Legacies, https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/4755c59ae93447a9b0acf9b2b0b265f6/page/Eyre-Peninsula/. ↩︎
- ‘Early Reminiscences of Port Lincoln’, West Coast Recorder, 20 August 1913, 5. ↩︎
- Robert Foster, Rick Hosking, and Amanda Nettelbeck, Fatal Collisions: The South Australian Frontier and the Violence of Memory (Wakefield Press, 2001), 47. ↩︎
- Brock and Kartinyeri, Poonindie, 7. ↩︎
- Government Resident Port Lincoln to CSO, May 1859, CSO no. 819, 61/59, State Records of South Australia, Adelaide; Brock and Kartinyeri, Poonindie, 7–9. ↩︎
- A. J. Murray, ‘Fowlers Bay Murder’, South Australian Advertiser, 11 September 1861, 2. ↩︎
- ‘Death of Mr W. T. Mortlock’, Advertiser (Adelaide), 18 August 1913, 14. ↩︎
- Kapunda Herald Illustrated Supplement, 3 November 1905, 1. ↩︎