John Hannan : Short Biography

In 1872 my great-grandparents, John Hannan and Ellen Kelleher, had been married 20 years, having been married at Liverpool, New South Wales (NSW) in 1852. John had been born in County Leitrim, Ireland about 1820 and Ellen had been born in County Clare in 1833.

John arrived in Sydney, New South Wales on 18 Jan 1842 on the "Agnes Ewing" as a Bounty Immigrant, unmarried and unaccompanied by any relatives. John's parents were recorded as Bartholomew and Mary. Mary's maiden name is not known. John was incorrectly recorded as having been born in Kilmactranny, County Sligo. This appears to be his place of residence prior to emigrating to NSW.

Ellen had arrived in New South Wales on the "Sir Edward Parry" in 1848 with her brother, Michael, and her sister, Anne, being reunited with her parents and other siblings who arrived on the "Ayrshire" in 1841.

Caroline Chisholm played an important role in reuniting Ellen, Michael and Anne with their family as she did in many other cases. John and Ellen had been living since 1855 at Mutbilly, a small settlement on the Breadalbane Plains, midway between Gunning and Goulburn, on the Southern Tablelands of NSW. Goulburn is located 128 miles (205 kilometres) south west of Sydney; Gunning is about 30 miles (48 kilometres) west of Goulburn. In 1872 John's and Ellen's eldest child was 17 and their youngest was born in 1872. Nine children, Patrick, John, Frank, Elizabeth, Ellen, Myles, Mary, William and Christina, had been born at Mutbilly since 1855; a further child, Ned, was born at Mutbilly in 1875. St Brigid's Church at Mutbilly had been built by Father McAlroy in 1865 on land owned by John Hannan, as recorded in the obituary for John's wife, Ellen, in 1915. In 1872 Father Michael McAlroy was living at Olive St, Albury, according to Greville's "Directory". The churchyard had not been established in 1862 when John's and Ellen's daughter, Elizabeth, had died at the age of 20 months, so Elizabeth was buried at Goulburn.

The railway was now operational between Sydney and Goulburn, but had not been extended to Gunning. A mail coach operated by Cobb and Co. ran six days a week between Goulburn and Yass and called at Mutbilly at 2:45am from Goulburn, and 8 am from Yass, as recorded in Greville's Directory. Yass is located 23 miles (37 kilometres) west of Gunning.

The following extracts from a recent book about Frank Gardiner give a good idea of what coach travel was like in 1872:

 As the hands of the clock moved towards 1 am the wife of the groom in charge of this change would keep looking towards the north and, as soon as she glimpsed the lights of the coach in the distance, she would take out the dough she had just prepared for a batch of scones, and place it in the oven. As the coach pulled up, and the passengers trooped in, she would triumphantly take out a batch of scones done to perfection, and would serve tea and hot buttered scones to the appreciative assembly of passengers. ... coach travel remained a physically taxing experience. The action of thoroughbraces imparted a rolling pitching motion that made many passengers violently ill. Interiors were spartan in the extreme; solid wooden seats were covered in leather, thinly padded with horsehair. There was insufficient room to stretch the legs or lean back and passengers soon learned the best posture to adopt was to sit loosely with the body bent forwards at an angle of forty-five degrees. There were no windows, just canvas blinds, and later models had no doors, so those inside the coach were exposed to all weathers. Travel was usually non-stop, day and night, and restful sleep was   impossible; the heads of drowsy and exhausted passengers could be observed wagging, nodding, rolling and snapping up as they awoke.

Ninety-six families were registered at the Post Town of "Mutt Billy". Addresses included:
* Breadalbane, later known as Parkesbourne
* Reedy Creek, north west of the Hannan residence - the Breadalbane Hotel
* Diamond Creek, north of the property Mount Pleasant, between Cullerin and Gunning
* Little Razor Back
* Dairy Flat
* Chain of Ponds, on the Collector Road
* Wollogorang, a large property to the south east, which was also listed in the Post Town of Goulburn.

A number of families had simply "Mutt Billy" as their address in Greville's Directory, including John Hannon, whose occupation was given as storekeeper. From the birth certificates for his children, John Hannan was an innkeeper or publican from 1868 to 1875, whereas he had been a farmer from 1855 to 1866. At the time of his death in 1891, John's occupation was grazier. In 1867 or 1868 John took over the hotel, known in 1860 and 1874 as the Breadalbane Hotel, later known as Sweetwood Lea, from Thomas Lodge. An incident at Mutbilly on 24 February 1865 involving Ben Hall, when Constable Wiles was wounded, is well documented. This event took place only a month after the murder of Constable Nelson at Collector, discussed below. One report of the incident at Mutbilly records that the landlord of the Breadalbane Hotel (Thomas Lodge) was in Goulburn at the time, charged with being an accomplice of the bushrangers. However, there is some doubt as to the location of the shootout in which Constable Wiles was wounded. Rault specifically mentions that the police reached Lodge's Inn (the Breadalbane Hotel) at Mutbilly immediately prior to Trooper Wiles being shot. Craig Wilson claims the shootout occurred at Tom Byrne's hut, a mile (one and a half kilometres) or more away from Lodge's Inn. Whether the shootout occurred at Lodge's Inn or Tom Byrne's hut, John Hannan would have been very aware of the incident which occurred in the vicinity of the small settlement in which he was living in 1865. Not only was John living at Mutbilly in 1865, but within three years he took over the ownership of the Breadalbane Hotel from Thomas Lodge, whose alleged relationship with the bushrangers had been noted by the authorities.

Publicans' Licences show that Thomas James Lodge was the licensee of the Coach and Horses Inn on the Breadalbane Plains in 1856 and 1858 and licensee of the Breadalbane Hotel in 1860. The records show that Mrs James Lodge was also the licensee of the Coach and Horses Inn in 1856 when the distance from the nearest licensed house was 15 miles (24 kilometres). In the list of contributors to the Catholic Church in Gunning in 1859 John Hannan and Thomas Lodge are listed one after the other. Mrs Lodge was the nurse or witness at the births of Francis Hannan and Elizabeth Hannan in 1858 and 1860 - Mrs Lodge could have been either Thomas's mother Rebecca, who gave birth to John Benjamin Lodge at the Breadalbane Hotel in 1851 or Thomas's wife Mary, whom he married in 1853. It is not clear where Thomas Lodge was living in 1872 - there is a Thomas Lodge living at Jacqua, 135 miles (216 kilometres) south west of Sydney, near Goulburn. Thomas Lodge, son of Henry and Rebecca Lodge, died in 1906 at Carcoar, near Bathurst, in central western NSW, aged about 73. Thomas's mother, Rebecca, died in 1893, aged 87, and is buried in the Catholic section of Queanbeyan Riverside Cemetery, on the Southern Tablelands of NSW. Thomas's younger brother, John Benjamin, died in 1910 and is buried in the Anglican section of Queanbeyan Riverside Cemetery.

The name of the Postmaster at Mutbilly in 1872 is not disclosed in Greville's Directory, but is known to be George Davies, who owned a store about two miles (three kilometres) east of the Breadalbane Hotel. This was an inefficient arrangement because the mail contractor changed horses at the hotel and in 1860 the Post Office had been established there while James Lodge was the proprietor. The location of the Post Office in 1872 was obviously unsatisfactory and this was rectified in 1874 when the Post Office was once more located at the Breadalbane Hotel even though some residents objected to the Post Office being located on licensed premises. It was John Hannan who took over the Post Office in 1874. The Post Office operations were carried out from a small room on the western end of the front veranda of the hotel. Most inhabitants of Mutbilly were farmers but the range of occupations is varied
- blacksmith, bootmaker, builder, carpenter, carrier, farmer, innkeeper, Justice of the Peace (JP), labourer, mason, overseer, shepherd, stockman, storekeeper and teacher (there was only one teacher and he was at the settlement which is now called Parkesbourne).

The school at Mutbilly, which had been opened in 1868, was closed in 1869, because of insufficient pupils attending, and would not be reopened until 1875. John Hannan's name was the first on the list of parents who applied in 1868 for a school to be established. His name was also first on the list of parents who, in 1885, requested the Department of Instruction to provide more adequate accommodation for the teacher and his family of nine. By 1885 there were 64 children attending the school.

The Sisters of Mercy had set up boarding facilities in Goulburn in 1863, but it is not known whether any of the Hannan girls attended school there in the nineteenth century. St Patrick's College (for boys) in Goulburn was not opened until 1874, run by the diocesan clergy until taken over by the Christian Brothers in 1896. Two of John and Ellen's children would later go to school at St Pat's - Myles (born 1866) was there from 1883 to 1885 and Edward (born 1875) from 1890 to 1891.

The name Mutbilly was replaced by the name Breadalbane for the locality, once the railway between Goulburn and Gunning had been completed and the Post Office had been moved from the Hannan residence to the Railway Station (at Breadalbane) in 1877. The village of Breadalbane is located about two and a half miles (four kilometres) south east of the old settlement of Mutbilly. St. Brigid's Church, Sweetwood Lea and the original school house still stand on their original sites. The Anglican Church and the school were rebuilt at the new site of Breadalbane, but the Anglican Churchyard and Cemetery still exist on the old south road, on the northern side of the Sydney-Melbourne railway line. At about the same time that the Post Office moved, the settlement previously known as Breadalbane became known as Parkesbourne.

The name Mutmutbilly lives on as the name of a creek near the source of the Lachlan River and in the name of the parish in Argyle County in which Sweetwood Lea is located.

The name Mutbilly (Mutbilly Creek) lives on as a variant of the name of the upper reaches of the Lachlan River. The Geographical Names Board of NSW describes the Lachlan River as "a watercourse about 1,500 km long ... It rises at its junction with Hannans Creek and Mutmutbilly Creek about 25 km W of the City of Goulburn...". Hannans Creek (presumably named after John Hannan) flows from east to west, about a quarter of a mile (400 metres) north of Sweetwood Lea, the former Breadalbane Hotel. The junction of Hannans Creek and Mutmutbilly Creek is about a mile (one and a half kilometres) west of the Mutbilly Catholic Cemetery. What the Geographical Names Board of NSW omits to state is that a stretch of the Lachlan River near Gunning was known in the late nineteenth century as Fish River. Fish River is discussed in more detail in relation to the Hynes and Hallam families.

John died in 1891 and is buried in Mutbilly Catholic Cemetery. Ellen died in 1915 and is also buried at Mutbilly.