Scots in Australia

• • Farming was crucial and large, profitable sheep stations were set up – wool became big business

  Example: George Russell (in Geelong, Victoria) set up the Clyde Company, one of many successful Scottish owners of farming estates
• • Brewing was both an important local industry, with many jobs created and an international industry, with importance in the export market too

  Example: Samuel McWilliam, wine, in New South Wales
• • Mining was another vital industry and many Scots with experience in coal mines, migrated and adapted to a variation of the work

  Example: Brown Brothers coal mine in New South Wales
• • Iron and steel works were crucial to the development of Australian industry and Scots played a major part

  Example:  Langlands Brothers Steelworks, Tasmania
• Thomas Coutts deliberately gave poisoned flour to Aboriginal people living at Kangaroo Creek,  near Grafton, NSW. Twenty-three people died in agony and Coutts was sent for trial in Sydney, but despite the clear evidence against him the trial was abandoned, and he went unpunished.
• The first ‘Premier’ of Western Australia, John Forrest was considered ‘liberal’ at the time in his views on indigenous people – yet was also responsible in part for the Kimberley massacres of the 1890s and he defended the use of neck chains for Aboriginal prisoners in 1905.