Thomas Hannigan Junior

When Bridget Hannigan died in 1840, her son Thomas was effectively alone in the world. His father, Thomas Hannigan Snr., had been sent to Port Arthur, his older sister Mary was serving 7 years for theft. 

Thomas Jr, born in 1826, would have been 14 years old.

 According to researcher Brian Sullivan, Thomas went to sea, working on ships that sailed up and down the east coast of Australia, from Sydney to the new settlement at Port Philip, and on down to Launceston and Hobart. The shipping lanes were busy, as schooners and sloops carried timber, livestock, passengers and mail. There were new settlers and their (mostly convict) employees, intent on making the most of the new land being opened up. Thomas would have watched as horses, cattle and sheep were offloaded for the pastoral runs of Port Phillip. He would have heard talk of fortunes made and lost, and business opportunities aplenty for those who weren’t afraid to work.

He would also have discovered that convicts, and their descendants, were held in much greater contempt in the mainland states.

In the early years of Van Diemen’s Land, convicts at first outnumbered free settlers, and even in 1846, 75% of the adult males were, or had been, convicts.

Most had gained a measure of freedom, those who could find a wife had married and settled down to a measure of working class respectability. Many had started a small business, and were often successful and well-accepted members of the community.

It is important to remember that few of the convicts were actual criminals, as we understand the term today.

Most were ordinary working class people, who had been caught “helping themselves” to something that didn’t belong to them – a few sheep, some game, a pair of trousers – in an effort to make ends meet. The overwhelming majority of those transported to Australia were convicted of fairly minor thefts, and most did not offend again. The really bad offenders – murderers, arsonists, and the like, were summarily executed.

So the residents of Van Diemen’s Land were very willing to live and let live; it simply wasn’t done to enquire too closely into another fellow’s past, for fear of what you might find.

Not so in the other states. NSW had received about the same number of convicts, but had far more free settlers, and there was consequently more freedom for suspicion as to the other fellow’s history. Convicts and their offspring were thought of as belonging, without possibility of redemption, to the “criminal classes” , and thus to be shunned by all right-minded people.

Port Phillip, which would become the colony of Victoria in 1851, prided itself on being free of the convict taint, and the new Government tried to stop ex-convicts from settling there, even passing a law to that effect. They were too late, of course; thousands of former convicts had already moved there, though probably few admitted to their origins.

Thomas was a sensible young man. When he abandoned the sea, sometime in the late 1840's, he too kept his origins to himself.

He began working as a carrier, taking goods from the Port of Melbourne up to the Goulburn river district, and carrying farm produce down to the city. Presumably, at least at first, he was employed by one of the squatters who had settled along the Goulburn. And here he would meet his wife.