Pioneers on the Bolwarra flats
George and Rachel Mead arrived in Maitland in 1848 and settled on the Bolwarra Flats near the site of today’s Lorn. Aged 18 and 17 and with a baby daughter, Ann, they had come from the village of Wing in Buckinghamshire, just north of London.
Left: George and Rachel Mead in later life.
What we know of George and Rachel comes entirely from Ian Bowrey’s book, The Ploughman, about the couple and their descendants in Australia. Bowrey himself is one of the descendants of George and Rachel.
Arrival
The Meads arrived in Sydney on 27 May, 1848 on the Thetis, a 460-ton barque which carried more than 20 former residents of Wing: several people immigrating together from individual localities in Britain was quite common in those days.
Along with the Meads on the Thetis were shepherds, carpenters, bricklayers, masons and farm labourers. These people had been forced by the depressed conditions of rural and village England to leave their homes: mechanisation was reducing the need for farm labour and causing mass displacement from agriculture and the villages. Some people went to nearby industrialising cities, but others emigrated especially to North America and Australia.
A ploughman on the Bolwarra Flats
George had a skill that was in demand in New South Wales. With convict transportation at an end when he arrived and with the convict and ex-convict workforce lacking farming skills, his speciality in ploughing held him in good stead.
He quickly obtained employment on the McDougall Estate covering the site of what later became Lorn and the areas to the east known until recently as Midlorn and Glenarvon. As a ploughman he would have been paid more than most who worked on the land.
On the Bolwarra Flats George ploughed land that was already cleared and worked on further land clearance. This involved the removal of the thick, in places almost impenetrable, brush from the floodplain. He was part of the decades-long effort to fashion farms out of the forest and lagoons of the lower Hunter floodplain.
Stained glass window in the Largs Catholic Church showing a ploughman with the Mead family name across the bottom.
(Photo credit: Maitland Mercury, 15 March 2020).
Home and land
The Meads made their home in a slab-and-bark hut, probably about 10 feet by 12 feet (or less than 12 square metres). Rachel was a home-maker who also helped on the farm. She would have had to do much hard work cleaning up after floods which were frequent in those pre-levee days. George himself was part of the first levee-building effort in the area during the 1860s. He was a member of what became known as the Bolwarra Embankment Committee.
in 1863, George acquired land of his own between today’s Sharkeys Lane and Glenarvon Rd. It cost him £668/10/-, a huge amount at the time and testimony to his ability to work hard and save. Some of that money may have come from off-farm activity possibly including gold mining in areas far from the Hunter. When floods occurred frequently, as was the case in 1857, the land of the Bolwarra Flats was for long periods too wet to farm and off-farm employment had to be sought. It was not always available locally.
George Mead died in 1894, aged about 64, of heart disease. Rachel followed four years later from a similar cause. Both were buried in the Rutherford Methodist Cemetery, in a grave with a headstone crafted from Italian marble.
Grave of George and Rachel Mead, Rutherford Cemetery.
Left: Photograph from Australian Cemeteries Index.
Right: Scan from a photograph taken by Ralph Snowball. (Hunter Living Histories Collection)
Descendants
George and Rachel had 12 children, ten of whom survived to adulthood. Most became farmers or married farmers. Several remained in the Bolwarra area.
Their eighth child, William, followed his father in becoming a skilled ploughman. At the age of 26 he won the elite ‘Class A’ ploughing competition organised by the Hunter River Agricultural and Horticultural Association. In 1888 he defeated Robert Vickery in a ‘plough off’ for first place, exhibiting (according to the certificate presented to him), ‘the best ploughing on the ground’.
By the mid-1980s there were more than a thousand descendants in Australia and, by 2021, there were seven generations born in Australia.
Noel and Ian Mead, great and great-great grandsons of George and Rachel, live on the Bolwarra Flats today.
References
Bowrey, Ian, The Ploughman: the story of George and Rachel Mead and the family, NJ Mead, Cardiff, 1985.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our Past: important role of the Mead family in Maitland’s agricultural development’, Maitland Mercury, 15 March 2020.
