Roderick Mckenzie
Roderick McKenzie (1829-1890) was born into a non-conformist religious community of emigrant Scots in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1829. When he was 22 years old he took part in an extraordinary maritime odyssey in which the entire community relocated to the antipodes.
When most of the group paused only briefly in Adelaide, ultimately to put down roots in New Zealand, Roderick chose to remain in South Australia. He settled in Mount Barker in 1854, working as a saddler and harness-maker, and later as a general storekeeper. He and his wife Mary Paltridge had nine children. He died in 1890, aged 61.
Archibald Little
Archibald Little (1812-1903) emigrated to South Australia in 1839. He and his wife moved to Echunga before settling in Mount Barker, where they spent their lives farming.
The family is known to historians for a surviving letter that Archibald wrote to his relatives in England, recording his experience of emigration. Other members of his extended family also entered the annals of early Australian history, sometimes in unexpected ways.
Elizabeth And Thomas Hall
Scottish-born Elizabeth Flockhart (1819-1887) described herself as a widow when she married Thomas Hall (1822-1884) in Pirie St Adelaide, but the details of any previous marriage, and the circumstances under which she arrived in South Australia, are obscure. The couple raised sheep in the Bugle Ranges near Mount Barker and had ten children, all of whom survived to adulthood.
When Thomas Hall became mentally incapacitated at the age of fifty, Elizabeth was left with responsibility for her husband and her family as well as for their farm.
Eliza Ann Hall/ Jane Sinclair/ Betsy Miller
Eliza Ann Hall (1821-1902) was born Eliza Sinclair. She emigrated from Scotland’s Orkney Islands in 1851 with an extended family group that included her husband, William Miller, and her mother, Jane Sinclair.
The male breadwinners within their immediate circle all died within a few years of their arrival in South Australia. The surviving women struggled to make a living for themselves and Eliza’s two children. They battled for support from the Destitute Board until Eliza married elderly Mount Barker Springs widower John Hall.
John Dunn
John Dunn (1802-1894) was an experienced flour miller when he emigrated from Devon to Adelaide with his family in 1840. From his base in Mount Barker he pioneered the milling business in South Australia. His company Dunn & Co. became profitable on a global scale. Its success allowed Dunn to take up a political career, and he served both in South Australia’s House of Assembly and its Legislative Council.
Dunn was renowned for his charitable largesse and his commitment to the local community. The high regard in which he was held was demonstrated by the respect displayed by the people of Mount Barker on the day of his funeral.
Eliza Dunn
In 1856, 18-year-old Eliza Dunn was the first person to be buried in the ‘Wesleyan Glebe’ cemetery (later the Mount Barker Cemetery). She was the daughter of prominent businessman and philanthropist John Dunn. Her brother John junior wrote in his journal of his grief at her sudden death, reportedly from rheumatic fever, an inflammatory disease that can result from scarlet fever or streptococcal infection.
The marble monument on the Dunn Crypt where Eliza was interred was erected after John Dunn’s own death, 46 years after that of Eliza.
William Calaby
William Calaby’s paternal great-grandparents emigrated from Norfolk in 1839 and farmed in the Mount Barker area. William died of appendicitis at the age of twenty in 1902, before surgical appendectomies became widely available.
Buermann Family
Carl Buermann (1816-1899) and Sophia Grothkast (1826-1907) emigrated on the same ship from Hanover in 1849 and married in Adelaide five years later. In 1857 they moved to Mount Barker, where Carl was a carpenter and cabinet maker. In 1871 the Buermanns suffered the losses of their three youngest children in the diphtheria epidemic that peaked in South Australia in the early 1870s.
Bell Family
Mount Barker Cemetery Precinct: Allan Bell (1817-1894) and his wife Ann (née Young, 1817-1891) emigrated from Scotland to South Australia in 1839 with their infant son. They built up a large sheep station at Monteith, and established ‘Dalmeny Park,’ a prosperous farm of 700-800 acres, north of Springs Road, Mount Barker. They won several international prizes for wheat during the 1850s, which boosted the prestige of the South Australian grain industry, and of Mount Barker in particular. Allan and Ann had ten children, all of whom survived to adulthood.
In 1890 the family’s youngest son, 45-year-old Peter Young Bell, was killed in a railway accident, and in 1903 his 13-year-old nephew, also called Peter Young Bell, died as a result of diabetes. Allan, the two Peters and other Bell relatives were all interred at Mount Barker Cemetery.
Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Bickle
Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ McNeil (1864-1892) was born at Ballarat into the family of educated Scottish immigrants Neil and Elizabeth McNeil. Lizzie married English-born doctor Leonard Watkins Bickle (1857-1921) at Gawler and they settled in Mount Barker. Lizzie died of consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) in 1892 at the age of 28, leaving two children. Her husband eventually moved from Mount Barker and remarried, but before he left he gave the town a tract of land. It is still used – as he had wished – as a green recreational space.