Home

Wilkes family tree

2. Frederick Wilkes & Christina Power

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. The first policeman arrived in 1851, the same year that gold was discovered in Victoria. In 1855 Yelta, a Anglican mission station for aboriginals set was up on the Victorian side of the Murray river. In 1859 the town was officially called Wentworth, after W.C. Wentworth, who crossed the Blue mountains in 1813, with Blaxland and Lawson. Its population then was 100; it had a school and four hotels, two of them brick.

Between 1860 and 1865, William Minogue (?-1918) and (1846-16/10/1920) arrived. They originally came from Cork in Ireland. According to Judy Ryan, Eliza may have been a convict, "whose alias was Ellen or Elizabeth Gannon aka Kelly and who was transported CA 1845 possibly to Hobart". She married William Minogue in Tasmania, and they tried their luck in the goldfields of Ballarat around 1860. Their only child had been killed when he fell from their dray at the age of four. When they arrived in Wentworth, the Minogues bought some land (said to have cost £50 - a very large sum at that time) on the east bank of the Darling, a mile out of Wentworth, where they felled a large red gum tree, cut it into slabs, and built a four-roomed house they called Tara. They planted vegetables and fruit trees, and kept livestock, so they were able to be almost totally self-sufficient.

Eliza Minogue was a midwife, and must have been busy; in 1866 there were 50 births in Wentworth. She also assisted at the Yelta mission station, opposite Wentworth. In 1873 she laid out the body of the second priest in Wentworth, Father Michael Fitzsimmons, after he drowned at Euston. In 1870 there was a record flood in Wentworth; a height of 33 feet, higher than the flood of 1956, which must have flooded Tara at that time.

Eliza Minogue

According to Des Sykes, each day there was Mass in Wentworth, Eliza would walk to Wentworth dressed in a black bonnet and black bombazine clothes, up till the age of 80 or so. The Minogues adopted two children. One, Christina Power (1879 - 1927), born in Victoria, was, according to one theory, the illegitimate daughter of Herbert Power, who had a large property ('Polia') north east of Wentworth. She apparently never knew she was adopted, and used the name Christina Minogue until she was married (thereafter Christina Wilkes). Jean Roper (nee Loomes) remembers that Christina painted pictures and had a 'good eye' for floral arrangement. The other adopted child was Richard Lowry, who went on to become manager of Bowrings in Mildura; he had no children. William Minogue died in 1918 from drowning, crossing some horses at the site of the current Wentworth bridge. His burial place is unknown. Following the gold rushes, Australia enjoyed a pastoral boom, and had one of the highest standards of living in the world. Wentworth grew rapidly; In 1871 St. Francis' Church (still standing today) was built, in 1872 John Leary built the Commercial Hotel (still standing, but maybe not for long), a bank was established, a turf club was formed, and the brick gaol begun. In 1880 the race track was built on its present site, with a grandstand (subsequenty named the EJ. Sykes pavilion, but demolished several years ago), and in 1881 the gaol was finished. In 1888 Mildura was first settled, and a railway line built to Yelta, on the Victoria side of the Murray river. Despite many official pleas, a bridge for the railway was never built into New South Wales. Consequently, rail transport, which replaced the paddle steamer, was to and from Mildura, making Mildura, in the next fifty years, into a more important centre than Wentworth.

Christina - adopted daughter of Minogues