Jane was born 26 July 1844 and died on the 13 July 1905 just before her 61st birthday. The headstone on her grave gives her age as 59 but she was actually 60 when she died. She was the 13th child of James Ross and Catherine Urquhart of Gledfield village in Ross Shire.

Jane was born during the hard years of the Highland Clearances. In 1845, before her first birthday, the Glencalvie Estate, farther up the valley in which they lived (the Strathcarron), was cleared. She had no memory of that. But in 1855, when she was almost 11 years old, the Greenyards Estate, which was much closer to Gledfield, was also cleared, following a violent clash. The news of that awful day was talked about in the Ross home in Gledfield long after – the family knew many of the people involved, people who lost their homes and carried the trauma of the confrontation for the rest of their lives. Eleven year old Jane was not involved, but the trauma surely left its mark on her too. 

In 1866, at age 21, she embarked on a ship bound for Australia, travelling with her older brother James and his family, arriving in March after 3 months at sea. She sensed strongly that there was little hope of a future in the Highlands, as much as she loved the mountains and glens, as much as she would miss her aging parents. Her much older sister, Helen, and another brother, Andrew, had made the same journey some eight years earlier and had regularly written home to Scotland with glowing reports of a wild but wonderful land full of opportunity for anyone willing to work hard. Helen had married an English migrant (she could be forgiven for that!) and lived in Sydney; Andrew, 32, was still single and lived in “the bush” – in a remote valley far from Sydney – in a fledgling settlement known as “Boat Harbour”, but which came to be known as Bellingen in the 1880s. It lies south west of the present day coastal city of Coffs Harbour, but at that time there were no towns on the coast north of Forster which was itself just a small outpost – Bellingen then was the furthest north settlers from Sydney had ventured in the state now called New South Wales. 

After her arrival, Jane presumably lived with her older brother James and his family, with whom she had sailed from England. James, at nearly 40 years of age was old enough to be her father, and he and his wife Mary-Ann were grateful for the help Jane provided with their five children as the family established a home in Sydney.

The year after Jane arrived in Sydney a letter from Andrew arrived announcing that he had at last found someone to marry, a young Scottish immigrant named Janet Anderson, who was a similar age to Jane. In fact, Andrew had known the Anderson family of the Macleay Valley, near Kempsey, ever since he arrived in Australia nine years earlier, and was great friends with Janet’s older brother David. Andrew, I believe, worked for the Andersons at their property on the Macleay River near Kempsey, which was the administrative centre for the area, and when David decided to take up a “selection” on the Bellinger River, a few days walk north of Kempsey, Andrew did the same.

So Andrew had known Janet since she was a teenager, but it was only after he had acquired land of his own that he found the courage to ask her to marry him. She had always been an impressive girl. Perhaps she had caught his eye a long time before, but he wanted to have something substantive to offer her before he asked for her hand.

Andrew and Janet’s wedding was held at the Macleay River and I like to imagine that Jane, though she was living in Sydney, managed somehow  to get herself there for the big event; it was a few days sail from Sydney with a coastal steamer. It was there she met not only Janet, her new sister in law, but Janet’s brother, David Anderson, who would become her husband.

Andrew and Janet, after their marriage at the Anderson property on the Macleay, moved up to Boat Harbour to build their life together. David lived nearby. Inevitably perhaps, two years after Andrew and Janet had married, David and Jane also married at the Macleay, and David took his young Highlands wife to Boat Harbour, where they built a life together. 

I have found little documented about Jane; there is more about David her husband. However, ancestry.com tells me that they had seven children, so she was certainly busy. Bellingen was so remote the families there often had to travel overland to Kempsey for basic supplies. There is a wonderful story of David carrying an anvil on his back on the three day walk. He also lumped bags of flour and other basic necessities and guided new settlers to the area which was gradually becoming a community of immigrants from all over Europe.

The Andersons and Rosses were two of the pioneering families who helped build Bellingen over the next thirty-five years, though Andrew Ross died young in 1870, and his wife Janet, after remarrying, moved further north to another newly opened up area – Upper Orara. Not long after David and Jane’s marriage Helen Ross, her husband James Redstone and their children also moved to the Bellinger Valley. For many years the Redstone family ran Bellingen’s newly established post office. The history of those early days can be found at the Bellingen Museum, where the Ross, Anderson and Redstone names pop up from time to time in the museum’s publication, Pioneering in the Bellinger Valley. 

David’s obituary tells me that Jane died just a few months before him in 1905. The photograph of Jane above is enhanced from one rather damaged, grainy picture that I have in my collection though the original source I cannot remember (see note below). This was the woman who had spent her childhood in the Scottish Highlands but who crossed the world to build a life in the colony of NSW, where she laboured to build a family in the wilderness, though sadly passing on at a relatively young age in the beautiful Bellinger River valley on the Mid North Coast of NSW. She and her husband David are buried at the Fernmount cemetery, a few kilometres downstream from Bellingen. Their descendants are scattered across the region and the country. 

Notes:

• Jane’s older brother, James, was the father of William Ross, my great grandfather. William was five when his family moved to Australia, and spent three months at sea with his auntie, Jane, who was 21 at the time. William married Alice Hickson, the daughter of an Irish immigrant. They moved to Mosman on the North Shore of Sydney in the early 1900s and raised a family with five daughters, one of whom was my grandmother Winifred Ross.
• After publishing the above I received a comment from Esme Anderson (now Langridge) who owns the original photo of Jane Ross (the one enhanced above), copies of which have been reposted many times by other descendants on ancestry.com. Esme is one of Jane’s granddaughters.