The MacDonald Family of Coll and Australia

This is the story of the MacDonalds of Coll, their journey to Australia and their life after their arrival in Australia.

Roderick MacDonald and Marian or Sarah (her names are interchangeable) MacLean are recorded in a 1776 list of the people who lived on Coll. Five of their children also appear on the list and a sixth was baptised in April 1777.

This list was a catechists list and was a type of early census compiled for the minister of the people who lived on Coll. They lived on the common farm of Feall, which was on the north west coast of Coll, at the foot of Ben Feall. It was the largest settlement on the island at the time, numbering approximately forty houses, in which lived fifty eight families.

Feall appears on a map of the estate of 1794 and is on the edge of the worst of the areas where the sand has blown over the cultivatable land. Two of the farms in the area were buried early in the 1700s and it seems possible that the same happened to the lands of Feall.

At the end of the 1790s all the tenants at Feall appear to have been moved away to other farms, most of them to Grishipoll and Grimisary.

Roderick MacDonald, his wife and their six children moved to Grimisary some time before 1800, including John who was born in 1786.

By 1827 John MacDonald, who by this time had married Isabella Cameron, was a tenant on one of the crofts at Grishipol and the family remained at Grishipoll until they emigrated.

John's son Hugh was a cottar (he had no land of his own) on John's croft. Hugh and his wife finally got their own croft at Grishipoll in 1833/34 and kept it until the time of their emigration.

By 1839 John and Isabella MacDonald were grandparents, with their son Hugh and his wife Flora having two children of their own.

On 16th September 1839 John and Isabella MacDonald and at least four of their children left for Australia. In addition, Hugh and Flora MacDonald and their two children joined them on their voyage.

They left Tobermory, Isle of Mull, on the George Fyfe. This ship was a barque of 460 tons carrying a total of 178 emigrants from the highlands of Scotland. It is unclear when the McDonalds left Coll for Mull and what ultimately their reason was for emigrating from Coll to Australia.

What is known about the emigration of the McDonald's is that some of them were sponsored on their voyage to Australia. The person that they were "by whom engaged" would have employed them until at least the cost of bringing them to Australia was recovered.

A Mr McAlister of Clifton engaged John McDonald while two of his daughters, Catherine and Jane, were engaged respectively by a Mrs Hayes and a Mrs Robertson of Sydney. The other members of the two families were dependent on family members or did not appear to be sponsored or engaged by people in Australia, as was the case with Hugh.

The McDonald's arrived in Sydney (then known as Port Jackson) on 23 January 1840 after a lonely passage of 129 days. No ship communicated with them during the voyage, there was no case of sickness on board and all passengers arrived in excellent health.

High conducted services on the ship in Gaelic during the voyage and after arriving in Australia refused placement with any but people of his won faith.
Eventually he left with other members of his family for Seaham in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales to work on land owned by the Reverend Henry Carmichael at a place called Porphyry Point. They worked clearing the land at this location for one year. Hugh and his brothers James and Roderick then cleared land leases at a place called "Brandon" at Seaharn for five years.

Hugh, his wife Flora and other members of the family eventually moved to the MacLean area on the north coast of New South Wales and began farming in that area. MacLean now promotes itself as the Scottish Capital of Australia.

Hugh and Flora's son, Joseph, chose to stay in the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales and was a share farmer in the area until he retired in 1918. Speculation has it that an affair of the heart kept him from moving to MacLean with the rest of the family.

Joseph married Isabella Philip and they had nine children, one of whom was John Robert Hugh McDonald. John owned farms in the Hunter Valley and married Gertrude Morrow in 1903. John and Gertrude had six children, one of whom was Kenneth McDonald.

Kenneth McDonald now resides in Raymond Terrace in the state of New South Wales with his wife Muriel and they have two daughters.

The McDonalds of Coll have grown into a large clan in their adopted country of Australia, but will never forget their humble origins on an island on the other side of the world.

Elaine Croker