1836 Elizabeth Kelly (1846-1920) was born in County Cork Ireland.

She married William Minogue (?-1918) (no direct relation, that we know of, to Kylie Minogue) when she was twenty. They escaped the potato famine in Ireland and travelled to Australia to join the goldrush around Ballarat in the 1850s. On those goldfields, they might by chance have met William Green, the grandfather of Bill Green, also from Ireland. Bill married Joan Sykes, grand-daughter of the Minogue’s adopted daughter, Selina Wilkes (see picture). More on Eliza.

In 1860 the Minogues purchased a large block of land on the east bank of the Darling, just half a mile from Wentworth, New South Wales, on what is now Wentworth Street, and started to build Tara.

For an overview of the first four generations of Eliza and William Minogue, see the Minogue/Wilkes family tree.

Wentworth is located on the junction of the Murray and Darling rivers in New South Wales.

The site was originally occupied by the Barkindji and Nanya tribe, and first visited by Europeans when Captain Charles Sturt passed through in 1830. In the 1840s some settlers set up tents, and in 1850 two paddle steamers sailed from Goolwa in South Australia to the river junction that would be Wentworth.

Timeline – 1851 - 1870
1851 First houses in the area - then called ‘The Junction’ (or McLeod’s junction?) (being the junction of the Darling and Murray rivers). First policeman.
1852 Regular paddleboats on the Murray river.
1855 Yelta, an Anglican mission station for aboriginals, set was up on the Victorian side of the Murray river. Gran Minogue would later be the midwife there.
1858 Mildura station named.
1859 The town site of Wentworth was approved and was named after the New South Wales explorer (he, with Blaxland and Lawson, was one of the first Europeans to cross the Blue mountains in 1813) and politician William Charles Wentworth.
Population of Wentworth 100 - one school and four hotels, two of them brick.
1870 Cobb and Co started operations in the area.

Timeline 1870-1900