Overview of this Book

Part 1. How the Kennedy Murray family history can help fill in ‘the gaps’ in early Evandale (and Australian) local history

The first part of this book includes nine additional chapters which generally chart how the Murray family history can help fill in ‘the gaps’ in the origins of Evandale and its early local history. Chapter 2 describes the context of the move from Norfolk Island to Norfolk Plains by Kennedy Murray and his family and friends. This also provides the background to how the c1819 and later adjacent land grants were given to Kennedy Murray and his brother-in-law George Collins at Evandale (which locate the very ‘origins’ of Evandale). This is especially so in terms of how extended family and friends of that close-nit community then helped form the core initial ‘adjoining hamlets’ that developed to become the emerging Prosperous village that was later retrospectively gazetted as Evandale town (see later chapters).

Chapter 3 directly traces the series of successful land grants either applied for by Kennedy Murray or otherwise allocated to him from 1818 through to the early 1840s. This series of applications thus included both the successful 1818/1819 and 1825 grants by Macquarie and then Arthur for the very lands on which Murray not only built his Prosperous House in c1820, but on which he then also effectively built an initial Prosperous village. It also included Murray’s 1831 application for and grant of additional lands (after his Clarendon mentor James Cox told him that he was in the process of acquiring lands Murray had been leasing). In this application to Van Diemen’s Land Governor Arthur, KM confirmed that he had followed up (a) his appointment as the local area police Constable by personally organising the building of a local community police station, school, jail, and related accommodation and offices for other ‘crown officers’, whilst (b) also becoming a successful farmer on the land granted to him. This key chapter traces how Evandale ‘began’ as initial ‘Murray-Collins hamlets’ (including family and friends from Norfolk Plains) followed by the ‘Prosperous village’ that Murray allowed to develop mainly on his land. This process was further overseen by Kennedy Murray as also the local district Constable (and not just an emerging local farmer).

Chapter 4 covers the untold stories (revealed by a close analysis of relevant Colonial Office communications and other related items) of how (a) by 1834 Kennedy Murray had become the Chief District Constable of the then ‘Morven district’. This promotion had been linked to both the creation of a new Anglican Parish (in which Murray was also appointed as one of three main Wardens in the short-lived ‘vestry’ governance of the district made effectively obsolete by the 1837 Van Diemen’s Land Church Act) and (b) how, as part of Murray’s proactive and effective response to the district’s (and the Northern Midland’s) ‘roaming emancipist’ problem, an ‘emancipist village’ was emerging on Murray farmlands adjoining the earlier Prosperous village (an extended ‘hamlet’ of mainly Murray friends and family.

The plans for a new Evandale Parish and Morven Police District had been linked to related plans for the new 1836 county system that included the Cornwall larger district (at the time including greater Launceston). All this was also locally linked to a ‘government secondment’ of mainly Murray land (and related promises of compensation to KM) that have generally been ‘lost’ to the local history. This was except for the one main item about Murray remembered by Von Stieglitz in his histories of Evandale. This was that Murray apparently was ‘just’ one of three donors of some land to the Anglican Church. Accessing relevant survey maps and related documents, we uncover the related story of complex deals behind the conversion of mainly Murray (but also some Collins and Woolley) farmlands into: (a) not just the adjoining Churches of England and Scotland (Evandale’s unique and architecturally significant ‘twin St. Andrews’), but also (b) the commercial and residential lots of the future Evandale in distinct ‘1836’ and ‘early 1840s’ stages. Together this encompassed the present-day ‘heritage walk of historic Evandale’.

Chapter 5 covers the lead up to Murray’s c1839 ‘annus horribilis’ – and the role played by the Evandale-Launceston Water Scheme in this. To cut a long story short, we have found the connection between the ‘failure’ to gazette the Evandale Parish town (the centre also of the Morven district) and the likewise forgotten memory of one of the major projects of early Colonial Australia. This project was on the way to becoming a ‘magnificent’ success when controversially cancelled just before completion after Governor Arthur was recalled to London. The population of the town had quickly swelled to become one of the biggest towns in VDL (it was still the fourth biggest town in VDL at the time of the 1842 Census). This should have been formally gazetted by that stage and a proper related plan of streets and land lots also developed as part of the existing government policy requirement. The memory (as well as many related relevant records) of the Water Scheme was quickly buried with little trace. This was partly because of the outstanding and also fatal role convicts played in this. Convict engineer James Blackburn took a pivotal role in the scheme that saw many deaths of convicts kept quiet). So too it appears that the government may have ‘wilfully’ refused to properly plan and gazette a town that was built on Murray lands and mainly consisted of emancipists.

The death of Kennedy’s first wife Sarah in the first few weeks of 1839 after some illness was just one of a long series of events that shook up Murray in the wake of the end of the Water Scheme. In November 1838 Murray had discovered that some of the local magistrates (including at least one who personally benefitted from this) had secretively colluded with the Government to again ’second’ more of Murray’s land and private roads for a newly gazetted ‘White Hills Road’. He wrote a strong letter of complaint to the same Survey General Frankland who had delayed and significantly downgraded the 1834 promises to Murray of compensation for land given up for a new ‘watch-house’ as well as Anglican Parish grounds. But he never got any response as Frankland was ill at the time and soon died. And we are not sure at what date Murray further discovered that new surveys of his Prosperous lands had further chopped off more acres of his farmland in the vicinity of his South-West boundary corner behind John Williatt’s ‘Patriot King’ hotel.

Chapter 6 investigates Kennedy Murray’s further pivotal roles in the late 1830s of not just (a) the new 1837 Anglican Parish chapel and manse (plus the original plans for the building of the grand new 1842 St. Andrews Anglican Church also on the former Murray lands) but also (b) the St. Andrews Church of Scotland that was also planned with Murrays’ pivotal support as a consequence of the game-changing 1837 VDL Church Act. After her death in early 1839, Kennedy’s first wife Sarah had been buried in the Anglican cemetery on former Murray land in a family crypt. This was whilst Kennedy remained as one of the three main Wardens of the Parish. Parish. But within months Murray was re-married to the family’s Irish governess Hannah Goodall who had been appointed the previous year to help with the education of the ten children from the ‘first family’. The wedding was performed by the new Presbyterian minister in town the Rev. Robert Russell. Together with Hannah, KM had another seven children – the ‘second family’ all being members of the Church of Scotland.

The basically false family myth about how Kennedy Murray came to build two family crypts (one Anglican and the other ‘Church of Scotland’) was that he simply decided to ‘convert’ because he was angry about having to pay for Sarah’s burial plot on ‘his own land’. The truth about this is revealed to cover a much more interesting (if complex) story of Murray’s re-connection with the (Scottish) people, land and culture of his (recently ‘returned’) father that was becoming pivotal to Tasmania’s rural and pastoralist further development (and also Australia’s). The chapter also discusses how the 1830 Murray school run by KM’s daughter Annie had become the location for the new Evandale Subscription Library in the mid-1840s. This was all with the support of Annie’s husband John Saffery Martin – the new town librarian as well as the police clerk of his father-in-law Kennedy Murray.

Initially an idea borrowed from Robert Russell, the ‘library’ was mainly supported, financed and organised by the Murrays in their Anjou Villa school. The Murray school and library became the focus of other community activities and resources. It was also the focus of how a related ‘partnership’ between Kennedy Murray, John Saffery Martin and Robert Russell was a central pivot of Evandale ‘community-building’ from the early 1840s through to the late 1850s. Murray transferred both the Anjou Villa school and library to Russell in 1857 (who extended, rebuilt and re-named Anjou Villa as Marlborough to assist with it becoming one of the first ‘public schools’ in the new state of Tasmania at the time)

Chapter 7 further explores the period of almost twenty years in which Kennedy Murray also acted as the Chief District Constable of the emerging Evandale in its most formative and pivotal stage of development. This is largely framed in terms of his long-term ‘partnership’ with the new police magistrate to the town Robert Wales. Wales had been appointed in 1837 by the new ‘magistracy’ regularly chaired by James Cox JP that replaced the short-lived ’vestry’ local governance also overseen by Cox. This is all considered in terms of how Cox had been a significant mentor to both Murray and the emerging Evandale from his magnificent Clarendon estate and mansion on the Nile Rivulet. In Murray’s case this was at least early on after his crucial support for Murray’s initial land grant application in 1818. In the case of Evandale this continued through to the creation of the first Evandale Council in 1865. Murray’s close friend, neighbour and one of the three appointed executors of his Will John Ralston that year became the first Warden or ‘mayor’ of this and Cox a councillor under him.

This chapter also explores Murray’s many adventures as Chief District Constable dealing with the ever-present scourge of bushrangers in the area (and related dangers and controversial issues to be navigated at the time – such as the follow-up to the so-called ‘black wars’), his key responsibilities (such as the supervision of ‘ticket of leave convicts’ in the area for twenty years along with wandering or stolen sheep or cattle ‘stock’), and his need to navigate the emerging politics of public-house (hotel) licencing whilst illegal distilleries and ‘sly grog’ sales were clamped down upon. Linked to all this were related developments like the emerging VDL Road Act (that directly linked to the retrospective gazetting of Evandale in 1848), and what might be called the ‘Cox vs. Sinclair’ fault-lines of the local community as well as ‘polite society’ as the colony moved towards the end of convict transportation in 1853 as well as the later renaming of Van Diemen’s Land as Tasmania in 1856.

It was in 1853 that Kennedy Murray Jr ‘retired’ as long-time local District Chief Constable. The previous year he had taken an apparent ‘sabbatical’ to travel to Victoria (with family members like brother-in-law James Lucas thinking of heading to the goldfields there). From there he continued on to California to visit the Sodens. As well as going to check on Hannah Goodall Murray’s sister Ann Goodall Soden, KM Jr would have also wanted to see her husband Barthlomew (Bart) Soden. Bart had been a long-term Evandale Post Office master, an early head teacher in the Murray school and (as the owner and builder of the still-existing Evandale General Stores) a key part of the local community in the 1840s. This had been alongside his brother-in-law Samuel Johnson (the builder of the Clarendon Arms Hotel as well as other local buildings at that time. The Soden and Johnson families went to California with the shared vision of selling ‘kit homes’ on the goldfields there.

Chapter 8 deals with a time when Evandale was also facing tough times after the VDL colony lost around a third of its population over a year or so (c1853). This was ironically just after both the town and Kennedy Murray arguably had their linked ‘heydays’. So it was that, in the very same week of August 1853 that the end of convict transportation was announced, a large retirement dinner was held in honour of Kennedy Murray in the Clarendon Arms Hotel. This was an event attended by ‘forty leading citizens of the town’. Murray had raised his own large family at the very ‘epicentre’ of perhaps the most dangerous time and place in rural settler Australian history (whilst the families of other wealthy colonial pastoralists often remained ensconced in Launceston until it was safe to ‘return’ because of his efforts). Our own investigation has found plenty of indications that Murray really did demonstrate in practice the courage, the communication skills and the community leadership that were so celebrated by a signed ‘open letter’ thank you to him at his 1853 retirement dinner by the leading citizens of the community.

Chapter 9 of Part 1 sought to investigate the truth behind the false but enduring family myth that not long before his untimely death in 1860 (because of an earlier leg injury later requiring amputation surgery which he did not survive) Prosperous House and related Murray farmlands at Evandale were effectively gambled away by Kennedy Murray in the local Clarendon Arms Inn of Publican Thomas Fall. We have accessed LIST (Land Information Systems Tasmania) records of the largely forgotten “memorial indenture’ system (i.e. of ‘shared risks’ used by landowners for security as well as investment deals in early colonial Australia) as well as related Trove newspaper and other records to help further explore related events. We tell here the more accurate story of what really happened to the Kennedy Murrays before and also after the loss or rather sale of Prosperous House following Kennedy Murray’s late 1860 death. The loss of the house was apparently avoidable. But how so was in related ways perhaps a microcosm of challenges to the Tasmanian society in the face of post-1850s economic challenges linked to the large-scale exodus to the Victorian goldfields, the end of convict transportation, and other related challenges to Tasmanian pastoralism and rural communities. The chapter identifies and discusses a number of unexpected surprises (and even a few dramatic shocks) that emerged during the research and writing up of this chapter).

Chapter 10 provides a ‘postscript to the loss of Prosperous House’. It investigates and discusses ‘what happened next’ for second wife Hannah Goodall Murray and her still young ‘Kennedy Murrays’ family of seven children at that stage in the 1860s. To ensure the survival of the family as well as herself, it was Hannah who had to make (and did) several negotiations which culminated in her getting a long-term lease on a small 160-acre farm just outside Evandale town in the Trafalgar area originally owned by Andrew Barclay. She then built a house plus some additional cottages on this in which her children lived and where some of them ‘grew up’. It was the place where several of the daughters later got married. It was from this base that her children were able to go on and generally prosper in their lives.

As well as Harry Murray VC, both Kennedy and Hannah had another grandson who was also a significant WW1 hero – Captain Charles Augustus Murray Littler DSO (aka ‘the Duke of Anzac’). The two cousins were both also prominent at Gallipoli before they fought in different divisions around the same time at the Battle of Mouquet Farm in 2017. In this battle Charles was killed leading his men in a charge against a German machine-gun nest, whilst Harry was lucky to survive a bomb blast that wounded him on a ‘recce’ in no-man’s land. As recognised ‘fighting officers’ who led from the front and inspired great loyalty from their men, the cousins were also both personally well-known by the noted Australian War Historian Charles Bean. Bean followed and reported on the Australian divisions throughout the ‘great war’. Both cousins therefore helped inspire Bean’s articulation of the ‘Anzac legend’. We argue that the rural, family and related personal values embodied by both should be recognised as part of the wider ‘Kennedy Murrays legacy’. As reflected by his ‘Prosperous’ naming of his first house, his first farm and the initial village community at the later Evandale, from a young age through to this death KM Jr held a personal as well as family and community vision of ‘future prosperity’:

“A prosperity borne out of resilience and hard work., that is fair and inclusive, and that can be (and should still be) celebrated despite the often-related tragedies, obstructions, betrayals and apparent futility (at times) of life’s changing circumstances… From the start, KM’s notion of prosperity clearly well beyond the individual achievement of mere wealth as an end in itself (so typical of the incoming UK settlers as well as of Australia today) to embrace related notions of shared resilience and social inclusivity uniquely also involving at ‘Evandale’ the convict emancipists, Irish Catholics, and the generally less wealthy or fortunate (so often looked down upon by those typical later UK ‘migrants’). KM did not just anticipate but helped inform and inspire the emerging ‘bush ethos’ of mateship, of optimism even in difficult times, and a ‘can-do’ attitude even in the face of large obstacles, hardships and fickle fate that typically characterised the increasingly native-born rural communities of 19^th Century Australia”.

Organisation of this book Part 2: Related reflections

Part 2 includes a series of related further reflections with both family and local significance. Chapter 11 revisits the roles of some key ‘background players’ in the fortunes of not just Kennedy Murray but also those of the emerging town Evandale. Lachlan Macquarie’s 1811 trip to the area clearly helped inspire not just his solution to the ‘Norfolk Island problem’ (hence the Norfolk Plains settlement) but related Macquarie visions of a future Australia. This originally projected ‘more democratic’ rather than ‘merely privileged’ civil, economic and social reforms as well as building programs and agricultural policies. Likewise, Macquarie’s journal account of his 1821 extended stay at David Gibson’s Pleasant Banks farmhouse helps clarify the truth lost in time about how and why the district was projected by Macquarie to be named ‘Evans’ Dale’.

Accompanied on this trip by his good friend Surveyor G.W. Evans, Macquarie’s related plans for a future town ‘Morven’ and his projected name of the area around this as ‘Evans’ Dale’ evidently became confused, misspelt and ‘reversed’ by the locals. This was before ‘Evandale’ settled as the name for the Murray village in the 1830s. The alternative contraction of Evandale to replace ‘Evan’s Dale’ (and Evansdale) was almost certainly the preference of James Cox. It was Cox who verifiably accompanied Macquarie the day he inspected the future Evandale district in 1821. Therefore, the chapter further details just how the town as well as district came to be eventually ‘named’ (as Macquarie intended) after Evans, an important early colonial explorer and surveyor who was also an educator, artist and published writer.

Another focus of this chapter will be on how the family of one of Kennedy Murray’s earliest as well as long-life mentors (Clarendon’s James Cox) were also inextricably linked to the fate of his father and at least half-brother William. This linked back to Kennedy Murray’s time at the NSW settlement of Windsor. James Cox’s father William was an early senior officer of the NSW Corps (fortuitously away at the time of the Rum rebellion scandal) who went on to greatly benefit from a close working relationship with Macquarie in helping to build the new colony (e.g. the building of the road across the blue mountains surveyed by Evans). This included a particular connection at Windsor to KM Sr who (after his wife was institutionalised with a mental illness), with his children rented from and lived with one of Cox’s close friends Archibald Bell – the man who replaced Cox as Hawkesbury chief magistrate in 1820.

It may be coincidence (or it may not), but the fate of Kennedy Murray’s half-brother William remained tied to the Cox family for much of his life. After being indentured at the age of 13 to William Cox’s associate John Blaxland, William ended up working for James’ brother (and William’s eldest son) George Cox and his own son George Henry Cox on their Burrundulla property at Mudgee from 1848 onwards. William worked for the Coxes until 1866 when he got the license to run the Burrundulla Inn he had built the previous year. This was adjacent to the Cox farm on land acquired from the Cox family). This all happened whilst KM remained closely linked in various ways to James Cox in Tasmania – including indirectly so in terms of his important relationship with friend and neighbour Evandale’s Clarendon Arms Hotel publican Thomas Fall. Fall was another to benefit greatly from the support of James Cox after saving his wife from a shipwreck on the voyage to Port Dalrymple from Sydney Town.

Chapter 12 focuses on the ‘Kennedy Murrays’ (i.e. Murray along with family and friends at Norfolk Plains as well as the developing Prosperous village as it became Australia’s ‘quintessential Georgian village’) as interesting and even exemplary pioneers of ‘Vandemonian architectural styles’ in early colonial Australia. There are several intersecting threads of this chapter. One is Murray’s demonstrable commitment to quality standards of building construction from the early days of his initial Prosperous cottage in 1820 through to related police and school buildings as well as Mansion and less ambitious residential buildings in his Prosperous village and on his farms over the next two decades. Many of those buildings still exist today and several that don’t (e.g. Woodstock cottage) were sketched or painted c1850 by the significant early colonial artists John Richardson Glover and Charles Constantini.

A second thread locates Murray’s choices and standards within two distinct although overlapping types of the most influential early types of Australian colonial buildings. One is the early ‘Georgian cottage’ that was transformed by Murray and other ‘Vandemonians” (early Tasmanian settlers) into a blueprint for the rural (or urban) ‘Australian homestead’ that was taken to Victoria and further developed there. The second is the ‘prosperous pastoralist mansion’ model adapted later around Australia which Prosperous House can be viewed as a particularly interesting early example of the unacknowledged Scottish influences on Australian buildings as well as wider culture and society. A third related thread closely explored in this chapter how Murray and also others built later Georgian style (and other) buildings in ‘Evandale’ as well as its surrounding district. This remains significant in terms of the main ‘heritage trail’ (especially along and adjacent to Russell Street) of Evandale as a ‘historic Georgian village’ today.

For present purposes, chapter 13 will focus on various and mostly ‘un-told’ details of KM Sr’s fascinating life. This includes the time before as well as after being sent to the colony in 1792 as a convict for an offence in Glasgow at the age of fourteen. He was one of the first group of Scotsmen to come to Australia. It will explain how Kennedy came to be born in the Dundonald ‘Auchens Castle’ of Lady Susanna (nee Kennedy) Montgomery, Countess of Eglington. Lady Susanna was likely the most admired as well as famous woman in 18^th Century Scotland. Both of KM Sr’s parents were part of the Countess’s Auchens household because of longstanding family connections which, in his mother’s case, also included being a close Kennedy cousin. It will also tell the story of how Kennedy’s unusual first name was apparently given by his parents in honour of Lady Susanna for her assistance when Kennedy’s mother (Elizabeth Kennedy Calder) became pregnant before she married Kennedy’s father John Murray. It will further detail the later move to Glasgow likely after the 1780 death of Lady Susanna. It was here that Kennedy Murray Sr ‘went off the rails’ as a teenager in the fast-changing new ‘modern city’ that was Glasgow in the 1780s.

After also detailing the story behind Murray’s aided petition to a Glasgow Court in 1786 to be banished ‘to the colonies’, this chapter resumes KM Sr’s general story. This includes how, after siring both KM Jr and sister Elizabeth on Norfolk Island, he underwent many more adventures and challenges. Many of these related to a second family with Ann Parker which produced four children in the early Windsor-Richmond area of early Sydney. This was before KM Sr made it to Evandale in around 1831 to ‘re-join’ son KM Jr at Prosperous House. It is here he lived until his death at the age of 82 in 1853.

It will provide evidence which helps detail how there has been much ‘false gossip’ about the man’s life in Australia before getting to Evandale c1831. For instance, the 2019 episode of the SBS program Who Do You Think You Are? (focused on fellow descendant Roger Corser) suggested that KM Sr was a colonial cad who simply left both his partners in the lurch. We present reliable new evidence that some of the projections about him and his movements are demonstrably wrong. Contrary to false projections that he had run off from first partner Ann White on Norfolk Island as soon as she had given birth in 1802, there is reasonable evidence that he returned to Australia from Norfolk Island in 1804 on the Brig Harrington to seek land on the mainland for his family to move to. This fits with related evidence indicating he got approval by early 1805 from Governor Collins to travel on the Governor Hunter in April that year to be one of the first free settlers in Tasmania. But he then found that his common law wife Ann White on Norfolk Island had given up waiting and had started a new relationship.

Moreover, when he returned to Sydney after the ill-fated early Derwent settlement, KM Sr settled down with a new partner Ann Parker who he married in 1814. In addition to his earlier 1809 land grant near Penrith, the couple got a land grant to farm at Windsor. And the records show that he spent more than ten years doing his best struggling to raise a family of four children whilst making solid efforts to farm his allocated land in the difficult circumstances of early ‘emancipist agriculture’ at the Sydney colony. And then when Ann was institutionalised for the rest of her life (for forty-two years) in a mental institution, the evidence is there that he tried his best for several years with four young children. This was until he had no other option but to let the three younger children be accepted into the Cabramatta orphanage in 1823. His eldest son John was looked after by Archibald Bell’s family whilst Murray later went labouring and returned to collect his son before setting up a residence at Pittwater a few years before departing for Tasmania.

And despite all the struggle and ill fortune, Kennedy Murray Sr ended up spending most of the last twenty plus years of his life at Prosperous House. He died there happily surrounded by good friends (like contemporaries John Glover and David Gibson) and the large extended ‘Kennedy Murrays’ family that developed at Evansdale in the 1830s. And so, chapter 14, will detail the ‘extended family’ that included (a) the families of Kennedy Murray’s ‘half-siblings’ (his mother Ann White’s four children with Sydes) living in Evandale at that time as well as his own and that of sister Elizabeth (e.g. this included the large family of George Collins and Mary-Ann Sydes that played a key role in the town through to the early 20^th Century) (b) thus also the extensive circle of Kennedy Murray’s nephews and nieces, the cousins of course of Kennedy Murray’s own seventeen children. Additionally, in addition to the extended tree including the Sydes half-siblings, the chapter will outline the main family tree of the Kennedy Murrays descended from the fifty-nine grandchildren of Murray Sr via not only Kennedy and Elizabeth’s large families but also those of William and James (Kennedy’s other half-siblings). All are part of one of modern Australia’s larger ‘family trees’ (estimated at possibly 40- 50,000 descendants).

Finally, and perhaps most astonishingly, this book will also summarise in chapter 15 the related story of how we investigated the Scottish ancestry of Kennedy Murray Sr. Like other family descendants who had thought about or tried to investigate the Kennedy Murrays ancestry, we suspected that this might be linked back to the ‘Atholl Murrays’. KM Sr had believed he might be descended from John Murray, the 3rd Duke of Atholl). After finding evidence to apparently prove an ancestral tree back in time to 17^th Century Ayrshire, we heard that a cousin had done a DNA test with unexpected results. This suggested that KM Sr was actually a ‘hidden MacGregor’ who had taken on the Murray alias because of the 1603 Act of Proscription against Clan Gregor. This was an Act banning all the MacGregors from using their family name under pain of death or other severe punishment.

As further discussed in this chapter, we then took up this matter with Clan Gregor Society historians and their related ‘DNA Project’. Eventually we received a formal confirmation based on a ‘triangulated’ combination of DNA and documentary evidence that the Kennedy Murrays are indeed direct descendants of Sir James MacGregor from Fortingall (a ‘Glen Lyon MacGregor’) – the early 16^th Century author of the famous Book of the Dean of Lismore. Besides its general significance for other reasons that are further explained, this publication also included a ‘credible’ Clan Gregor genealogy suggesting a possible lineage (also for KM Sr) back to King Kenneth MacAlpin or another in his ‘royal house of Alpin’. This gives some weight to the suggestion that the first King of a united Scotland in 843 CE (including both the Picts and the Gaels) may have been Kennedy Murray Sr’s 30 X great grandfather.

After he was awarded his Victoria Cross in London in 1917 (and mentioned this assumed link in the newspapers at the time), Harry Murray had been an invited guest of honour by the then Duke of Atholl to Blair Atholl Castle in Scotland’s Perthshire. On that same trip he had also been invited by the Montgomerys in nearby Glen Lyon to come and stay there as well. It was here that he started a lifelong friendship with a young Clementine Montgomery. Glen Lyon was regular ‘stop-over’ until his departure back to Australia in 1919 twelve months after the WW1 Armistice (he had been given special leave by the AIR to study UK farming methods). However, like many other family myths, the actual ‘historical truth’ turns out to be no less astonishing. And Harry Murray (who had also later coincidentally purchased a sheep station named Glenlyon in North-West Queensland in 1928) would we think have been most pleased to discover his true ancestral story and related central ‘Glen Lyon lineage’ of one of the Scottish Highland’s pivotal clans – one generally sharing similar values to himself and ‘the Kennedy Murrays’ of modern Australia.