The info on this page was researched by Phillip Dwyer. Note that this person is not one of our ancestors, though for a while we thought he was.
Birth extract for son William notes John's age as 36 in January 1860, giving probable year of birth as 1823. Place of birth is shown as Co. Tipperary, Ireland.
We know that John was in Australia before 1851, the year of his marriage.
The Public Record Office of Victoria VPRS 14 Register of Assisted British Immigrants 1839-1871 identifies only four John Dwyers who arrived in Victoria before 1851 - and all four arrived in either 1840 or 1841.
Our John Dwyer should have been around 18 years of age in 1841. Two of the John Dwyers can therefore be discounted because they were only 8 and 2 respectively. The remaining two were 20 and 23 years of age in 1841.
The 20-year-old John arrived on the Neptune in March 1841, and he is shown as being a protestant who could read, but not write (www.geocities.com/vic1840/41/ne41.html). Since our John is noted on his marriage register as being Roman Catholic, and was able to sign his name, I'm inclined to doubt that this was our ancestor.
This leaves John Dwyer who arrived on the Gilmore in December 1841, having departed from Plymouth on 26 August 1841. John was a labourer, single, a Roman Catholic and could both read and write (www.geocities.com/vic1840/41/gi41.html).
There were sixteen other Dwyers who sailed on the Gilmore and all but one of them were from Tipperary, according to the Tipperary Emigrants to Victoria, Australia listing: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~maddenps/TIPPEMVIC.htm
One of the remaining Dwyer passengers was noted to be a protestant, so is unlikely to be related to John.
Of the fourteen still remaining, there was Patrick Dwyer (age 25) and an Edmond Dwyer (age 20). A Patrick Dwyer lived at Kilmore at the same time as John (see Later Life below), as did an Edmond Dwyer.
As an assisted immigrant, John would have been indentured for a period of time until his bounty of £19 had been paid. No details of this - who he was indentured to, where, and until when - have yet been located, but see Later Life below.
Many single men (like John) came out to the colony as labourers. Typically these immigrants worked around the Port Phillip District for wages, built up some capital and then rented farm blocks.
By the time of his marriage, John was already living in Kilmore.
John married Mary Coffey of Melbourne in St. Francis' Catholic Church, Melbourne on 4 March 1851. This would be the church at 326 Lonsdale Street, the oldest Catholic Church in Victoria (built between 1841 and 1845). Mary MacKillop made her first communion at St Francis' in 1850, the same year that Ned Kelly's parents were married in the church.
Gerald A. Ward celebrated the marriage, and the witnesses were Bridget Coffey and John Coffey, both of Melbourne, and presumably related to Mary.
Both John Dwyer and Mary Coffey signed their names in the register, proving they could read and write. But there's this - "Women were very scarce in the early days and a wife was best found when an emigrant ship was in port." [Kilmore Historical Society A taste of old Kilmore, Kilmore Historical Society, Kilmore, Vic., 1967]. Maybe John did just that.
At the time of their marriage John was noted as being a resident of Kilmore and Mary of Melbourne.
How John and Mary matched up is unknown - there was a ten-year age gap between them.
John Dwyer is linked to the "Willowmavin Survey" (outside Kilmore). This was a "Special Survey" area of 5120 acres first purchased by William Rutledge in 1841. It was usual for owners of these "Special Survey" areas to import tenant farmers, and this is one possible explanation of the circumstances of John's arrival in Australia.
After Rutledge sold the Survey in 1843, the new owners leased it to tenant farmers. As these leaseholds were quite small (all but 5 less than 100 acres) they were not profitable, but likely to have been adequate for subsistence level farming. Many leaseholders left and the remaining leaseholders were able to increase their leases. It is assumed that John was one of the leaseholders who remained, as he was still in the area in 1856:
Small farms in the area grew potatoes, wheat and other cereals, and may have also run some livestock (cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry). Some smaller tenants augmented their income by carting for the surrounding squatter stations like Moranding and Glenoura. With Kilmore on the road between Melbourne and the goldfields, many farmers were able to generate cash crops for gold miners, and this enabled some of they to buy their block. [Source - Braniff, Valerian, The quest for higher things: a history of the Marist Brothers' hundred years in Kilmore, with special attention to the foundation and development of Assumption College, Assumption College, Kilmore, Vic.: 1992
It's likely that John and Mary's dwelling was typical of the period and the area: made of rough bush timber with tree trunks for corner posts and uprights (sunken well into earth), beams with axe hewn grooves for ground/wall plates, split slabs and palings for walls, roof rafters and braces from saplings covered by sheets of bark. [Source - Maher, J. A. The tale of a century: Kilmore 1837-1937, Lowden Publishing, Donvale, Vic., 2002]
John's son William's birth extract shows that John was still living in the Kilmore area in 1860.
There was a short-lived Niagra Hotel in Sydney Street Kilmore owned in 1870 by a John Dwyer (publican was Phillip Dwyer), but there is no obvious connection to our John Dwyer.
Details for John's wife Mary Dwyer are that she had 8 children by 1868, and assuming these were all John's and that Mary had not remarried, this indicates John was still alive in 1867-68.
I've been unable to find a death registration for John so far. The Births, Deaths and Marriages Victoria (BDMV) historical database has no records for a John Dwyer who died at Kilmore between 1860 and 1910. In the same period there were 78 death registrations for a John Dwyer across Victoria. The lists do not provide enough information to determine which of these (if any) is the correct John Dwyer. In 'The Victorian Pioneers Index 1837-1888' (on CD-ROM in the National Library Canberra) there is no perfect match for either John or Mary in the deaths listed. There is one John Dwyer who died in 1876 aged 55 - a close match on age, but no more, and he's listed as having been born in Kilkenny, not Tipperary (but then again, they do share a border). It could be though that John and Mary both lived beyond 1888 - John would have been in his late sixties and Mary her late fifties.
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