[BALLARAT] Wesleyan Sabbath School, Scotchman’s Lead : book prize awarded to George Harland, April 1870. (With associated ephemera)

PROSSER, Mrs. (Sophie Amelia). Quality Fogg’s old ledger. London : The Religious Tract Society, [1869]. Square octavo, gilt-decorated brown cloth over boards (rubbed and marked); front free-endpaper inscribed in ink: ‘Presented to George Harland by the Primitive Methodist Sabbath School, Scotchman’s Lead, April 5th 1870’; pp. 162, [6], woodcut illustrations; occasional staining, otherwise sound; [TOGETHER WITH] An early (c.1870?) copy of the marriage certificate of George Harland’s parents, Robert Harland and Elizabeth Crawford, who were married in the District of Ballaarat in June 1857; quarto sheet (250 x 200 mm), ms. in ink on recto only; old horizontal fold, well preserved.

George Harland (1858-1902) was born at Scotchman’s Lead, southeast of Ballarat, the first of eight children of Robert Harland (1828-1870), gold miner, and Elizabeth Crawford (Smith) (1838-1921). Both his parents were born in England, but had emigrated to Port Phillip during the gold rushes. They were married in Ballarat on 3 June 1857 by the Wesleyan Minister, James Bickford. Elizabeth, who was just 18, had only recently arrived in Australia.

George Harland had gold mining in his blood: in the 1890s he became manager of one of the gold mines at Walhalla in East Gippsland. He married a local Walhalla woman, Jane Binns (1863-1908), and the couple had seven children – the youngest of whom, Rosetta, was born in 1896 and died in 1998 at the age of 102. (It’s fascinating to contemplate that a person alive at the end of the twentieth century had a parent born on the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s!).