Gallery Services, Townsville City Council and LensCap Crew collaborate to take portraiture to the streets in 2016.
Families of Townsville follows on from the highly successful Faces of Townsville project of 2014, this time tracing the history of some of the city’s founding families. The project is timed to coincide with Townsville’s major celebration of portraiture, The Percivals. While the key painting and photographic exhibitions highlight our contemporary society and capture present-day personalities, Families of Townsville takes a look at Townsville’s founding families - all the more poignant as the project takes place as part of the city’s T150 celebrations. LensCap Crew is a small community group with a shared passion for storytelling projects. Gallery Services is proud to partner with the group to help them achieve this result.
Families of Townsville is not intended to investigate every significant family that has helped build our city to what it is today. Simply, too many people have made lasting contributions. As such, LensCap Crew have made a small selection of founding families in the region, with each participant focussing their attention on one or two families, sourcing photographs, and penning short historical overviews. Without doubt, LensCap Crew’s extensive research has unearthed interesting images and facts about each of the selected families that paint a bigger picture of Townsville’s beginnings. We hope you enjoy exploring the rich histories of these families through this booklet, and encourage you to take to the streets to view the paste-ups that have been produced from these photographs. Paste-ups are located in the Townsville CBD and in the suburbs that have been named after these Families of Townsville. For a map and listing of the paste-up locations, please enquire at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery.
Aitken Family In the 1840s, as a young orphan, Thomas Aitken boarded a ship for Australia. Drawn to the life on the land he worked around Brisbane, but nevertheless returned to Scotland to marry the girl next door to the orphanage where he had spent his early years. Image: The wedding of Elsie Bryant, sister of Isabella Aitken (nee. Bryant) and Tom Vernon
Condon Family The suburb of Condon was named after William Condon and family, son of the original settlers on this land. His father Patrick and his mother Dora, pregnant at the time with their sixth child, arrived by ship, the Rajasthan in 1862, from County Cork in Ireland. Image: William Condon and his family
Ball & Douglas Families In 1864, Andrew Ball is acknowledged as the first white man to have trodden the soil of Cleveland Bay in search of an area in order to establish a settlement for his employer – Black & Co. Aged 32, he was Manager of Woodstock Station from where he set out with Mark Reid to explore unknown country lying to the north of the northwest spurs of Mt Elliott, with the object of stocking it with cattle.
Jorgen and Bodil Rasmussen arrived in Townsville in 1871 as immigrants from Denmark. Jorgen came from a family of dairy farmers, and after working on a local farm for a short period, he took up a selection of 2000 acres of land along the Ross River and started The Danish Dairy. They were the first family to take up land in the Upper Ross area.
Image: Back: Edward, John, Hugh Front: Robert, Henry c. 1900
Image: Three generations of Rasmussens
Garbutt Family
Roberts Family
Charles Overend Garbutt and his family, truly pioneers of North Queensland, represent the tireless spirit of perseverance. Charles Garbutt, aged sixteen, arrived to Australia in 1864, with his mother and brothers, leaving behind a wealthy family in Yorkshire, England.
Born in 1854, George Alexander Roberts arrived in Townsville in 1881 to set up his law practice in Wickham Street, before moving chambers to Denham Street, which still accommodates a law practice in 2016.
Image: Wedding photo of Talbot Heatley and Alice Garbutt, and bridesmaids. NQID 9341, St Abbe’s Album, NQ Photographic Collection, JCU Library Special Collections
Image: George Vivian (Viv) Roberts with one of first T-model Fords in Townsville, taken in front of his home Kennilworth c. 1938.
Heatley Family
Kelso Family
Francis Heatley was born in the village of Ternascote, Armagh, Ireland in 1857. He came to Australia on the sailing ship ‘Sir William Wallace’ in 1880.
James and Mary Kelso emigrated from Scotland to Australia in 1874. They arrived in Townsville circa 1876, residing in Cook Street, North Ward, before taking up a selection of 1200 acres on the upper Ross River, named ‘Laudham Park’.
Image: Francis Heatley and wife Kate Heatley (nee Talbot)
Image overside: John Douglas c. 1900s
Rasmussen Family
Image: Wedding portrait of Hans Christie Rasmussen and Mary Kelso
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery Cnr. Denham and Flinders Streets Townsville QLD 4810 Mon - Fri: 10am - 5pm Sat - Sun: 10am - 2pm
(07) 4727 9011 ptrg@townsville.qld.gov.au www.townsville.qld.gov.au @TCC_PercTucker PercTuckerTCC