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Writer's pictureBill Elliott

So how did Mayflower Descendants end up in Australia?

The Mayflower Quarterly Magazine | Fall 2024 | page 16


In Australia, our schools do not stress the importance of the Mayflower's arrival in Plymouth in 1620, so we have been trying to understand the factors that brought Mayflower descendants to Australia over the last 200 years. We see this as a means of alerting potential members to their Mayflower Heritage.


In primary school, we learned about the American element in the first settlement of Australia. Convicts were sent to Sydney in 1788 only because those unreasonable Americans did not want to take convicts from Britain anymore after they gained independence; however, some of the earliest Mayflower descendants arrived from Massachusetts on whaling boats and decided to stay.


Some ninety-two American citizens were transported as convicts to Tasmania following their participation in the Lower Canadian Rebellion of 1837-1838. They had all crossed the Niagara River from New York State and had been led to believe that they would be awarded land in Canada following a successful uprising. Instead, they were quickly captured by British and Canadian forces. After their arrival in Hobart, the American consul in Hobart pleaded the case for these Americans and eventually they were each given a Ticket of Leave in 1845 and their departure was arranged on the American ship Belle. However, Hiram Sharp (a descendant of Thomas Rogers) while due to travel back to the United States, met a widow in Sydney, jumped ship, and settled in southern New South Wales. Some of his descendants have become embers of The Australian Society of Mayflower Descendants Inc. since its foundation in 2020 and other applications are pending.


Many Americans came to Australia from the California goldfields after gold was discovered in Victoria in 1851. There were multiple finds of gold over the following years all over eastern Australia attracting more Americans. One of the difficult tasks is to explain to potential members that while their great-grandparents may have been born in Australia, they may still be Mayflower descendants through ancestors who arrived in the 1850s or 1860s. My own family contributed Freeman Cobb from Brewster, Massachusetts, who having worked for Wells Fargo, shipped two stagecoaches to Melbourne in 1851 and began a transport company to the goldfields. Cobb and Co. had a major impact in developing transport in Australia and continued operating stagecoaches to distant parts of the country until 1923. There are numerous Cobb and Co. museums across Australia. Freeman Cobb was my great-great-grandfather’s first cousin; however, he did not leave any descendants in Australia and returned to Brewster to enter politics.


My grandmother Esperance Freeman (daughter of American Presbyterian missionaries in northern Thailand) was undertaking postgraduate library studies in Madison, Wisconsin, when she met my Australian grandfather who was working on a PhD in Madison, sponsored by the Queensland State Government. They married in mid-1927 and spent eighteen months traveling around the world before arriving in Brisbane in early 1929.


Other Mayflower families came to Australia after the Second World War. Our Treasurer David Magee, though born in Australia, likes to say his ancestors never moved more than 500 yards from where they came ashore in Plymouth until his father served in Australia during the Second World War, and decided to settle in Brisbane a couple of years later. Several other members in Australia are American citizens who have moved here for work or other purposes.


The better we understand the process of Americans coming to Australia at different periods of our history, the better we are at locating potential members and assisting them in making membership applications.


Submitted by: Bill Elliott, Governor and DGG

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