The surname Ballantyne (Ballintyne) is Scottish. Though it is mostly spelled "Ballantyne" there have been a number of variants, and by the mid 1800s many of the Australian family branches to which I am related were spelling it as "Ballintyne". For the sake of simplicity I use that latter spelling throughout this page.

Our ancestor Andrew Ballintyne was born in Scotland about 1827. We know very little about his family, save that his father was named Walter and his mother was Ellen (or Helen*) Scott. (*Helen, Ellen, and Eleanor were somewhat interchangeable names at the time).

In May 1844, Andrew's father moved from Bottacks, a small Highland village in Ross and Cromarty Shire a few kilometers north-west of Inverness, to the Lowlands town of Hawick, south of Edinburgh. We don't yet know the reasons for moving so far (three hundred kilometers), or how he accomplished the move. It appears that his wife Helen was alive till at least 1855 (and dead by 1863) and it is not known whether she went with him or remained behind. Their two youngest sons (Robert and James) were married in Ross and Cromarty Shire in 1855 and 1863 respectively, so they may have remained behind in which case they would have had to be cared for by someone as they were only children in 1844. This raises the possibility that Walter and his wife went separate ways, but the data so far is too tenuous to draw firm conclusions.

Hawick was and still is a centre of wool processing and knitwear, and the Ballantyne name was long associated with the running of several mills in the area though whether Walter was related to those families is not yet known.

The seventeen-year-old Andrew had been living with his father in Bottacks, but two weeks after the move he was still in the area (apparently for work purposes) and he made a decision that was to cost him his freedom. In the early hours of a Saturday morning in June, he took a small brown mare from the stable of farmer Kenneth Macrae at Bottacks, and rode it south to the town of Fort Augustus. The Ballintyne family had on occasion borrowed horses from Macrae, and when police questioned Andrew a few days later he claimed to have borrowed the horse with permission on this occasion also.

Unfortunately his claim was disputed by the owner's family, and to make matters rather more conclusive the publican and the post rider at Fort Augustus both testified that Andrew had badgered them to buy the horse from him. Not surprising, the 15-man jury found the youth guilty of horse-stealing.

Just a few decades earlier, such a conviction could have been a hanging offence. But times had changed, and the system favoured imprisonment for non-capital offences (fortunately for us!). Britain had few large prisons and the crime rate was increasing because of landowners' forced clearances of small tenant farmers, and the impact of the industrial revolution. Where possible, the British Government sought to remove its petty criminals altogether by transportation to overseas colonies as convicts. Our Andrew was accordingly sentenced to 7 years transportation and was taken to Millbank prison and later to Pentonville prison in London. Pentonville and Millbank were prisons designed to reform inmates. The routine was largely solitary confinement, interrupted only by bible study, reading and writing class, and lessons in a trade. 

Normally a convict would be transported fairly promptly. However, the colony of New South Wales had transportation ceased in 1840, though Van Diemans Land was still taking prisoners till 1853. There was therefore a shortage of places to send the prisoners, so apparently they remained in prison for much longer.

Fortunately for Andrew, a scheme was hatched to solve the prison problem and at the same time meet a growing demand for labourers, especially shepherds, in rural areas including those around the new settlement of Port Phillip (Melbourne). Between 1844 and 1849 some 1751 prisoners from Pentonville, Parkhurst and Millbank prisons were dumped on the colonies by the ingenious expedient of granting the prisoners pardons conditional on their not returning till the expiration of their original sentence. These prisoners were termed "exiles", and although resentment of the scheme by colonists in Port Phillip was initially fairly loud, it did not sway the British Government.

So it was that on 9 Nov 1846 the vessel Maitland docked in Port Phillip carrying Andrew Ballantyne, by this time aged 19. The passenger manifest states that he could read and write, was formerly a shepherd, and the trade taught in prison was shoemaker. He was single and his crime was horse-stealing, his sentence was 7 years and he had been convicted 19 Sep 1844 at Inverness. His warrant of pardon was dated 10 June 1846.

The manifest shows that Andrew's initial employer was to be Montgomery & Wright, for a term of 1 year at UK#20 per annum. Montgomery and Wright were presumably the same men who with Alexander Anderson owned a large sheep run near the present town of Skipton (near Ballarat) from 1839 till 1851 when it was sold to Francis Ormond. We can assume that Andrew was employed as a shepherd on such a rural property.

We know nothing more till 1851 when Andrew Ballintyne (still of the Scottish Church) married an Irish girl named Mary O'Dowd at St Francis Catholic Church in Melbourne. It seems they soon joined the throng of people moving to the Castlemaine area because of the discovery of gold.

According to Robyn Annear, gold was found in many places in Victoria during the 1840s, mainly by shepherds and farm labourers. Their finds were mainly kept secret, as mining was illegal, all gold (and other metals) being the property of the Crown. The gold rush to New South Wales in 1851 made it evident that the new colony of Victoria (till then a district of NSW) might lose its entire labouring population to the NSW goldfields, so a committee was formed to promote and reward gold discovery in Victoria.

In July 1851 a shepherd found gold at Specimen Gully (5 km north-east of Castlemaine). Soon all of the area's streams were being scoured by hopefuls from all over the world. By 1852 it is thought that there were some 25,000 people on the diggings around Castlemaine, living in shanty towns of canvas tents which housed stores, the first school (1852), dwellings, sly-grog shops and even an office of the Bank of NSW (also 1852).

Andrew Ballintyne's younger brother Walter was one of many assisted immigrants coming to the colonies to start a new life away from the destitution faced by the poor in England, Scotland and Ireland. He appears to have arrived in Tasmania on the Ocean Chief on 25 March 1855. He was described as single, a shepherd from Ross Shire. In 1858 he married Mary Flynn, a bounty immigrant from Ireland, and they had several children in Tasmania before moving to Victoria in the mid 1860s.

Of the four sons of Walter and Mary who reached adulthood, it appears that three never married and worked most of their lives as drovers and stockmen. One of them (Robert) worked in north-west Queensland as far away as the Gulf of Carpentaria, and in the Northern Territory.  Walter's son William married Mary Jane Goodall in 1892 and they had four sons, three of whom had children.

Walter Ballintyne died in 1891 at "Tweedside", his home in the Melbourne suburb of Flemington, just three years after his brother Andrew had passed on. The death notices for the two brothers make no reference to other family members apart from the (deceased) parents in Scotland, so it seems that Walter and Andrew's siblings remained in the U.K. or possibly migrated to other countries. We know that the youngest brother Robert married in Ross and Cromarty shire in 1855 and had a dozen or so children; sometime after 1851 the family moved south to Ayrshire, where his wife had been born, and the couple lived into the early 1900s in Ayrshire. We also know that the other brother James married in 1863 in Ross and Cromarty though we have no further record of him after 1871.

Andrew and Mary Ballintyne had a number of children in the Castlemaine area between 1852 and 1867. We also believe that Mary had a brother Michael O'Dowd who migrated to Melbourne  in 1860 with his wife Ann (Guerin) and their four children in 1860. They too ended up in the Castlemaine area. The likely connection between the families is evidenced by the fact that a single grave in the Castlemaine cemetery contains  five O’Dowd children (4 died 1863, 1 in 1868) and two Ballintyne children (Andrew and Eliza, both died 1868). Looking at the death certificates, it is clear that epidemics of illnesses such as enteritis claimed many young children. Michael and Ann O'Dowd had at least two children (both daughters) survive to adulthood and marry, and their families farmed land near Bendigo, Mildura and Winchelsea at various stages. Michael and his wife died at the home of their grandson John Malone in the early 1900s.

Andrew and Mary Ballintyne lost four of their ten children as infants or toddlers. One of the surviving daughters was my great-grandmother Ellen Ballantyne, born around 1864 near Castlemaine. At age 19 she married Edward Dwyer from Wilcannia, NSW, but had divorced him by 1890. In 1891 she married George Hildebrand and their daughter Bertha is my paternal grandmother.

Andrew and Mary's only son to  survive to adulthood was John, who married his cousin Agnes (born in Tasmania to Andrew's brother Walter). John and Agnes moved from suburban Flemington to the Castlemaine (goldfields) area, then in late 1892 they relocated to the mining centre of Broken Hill, in far west New South Wales. John worked in the mining industry, as evidenced by an entry in the member's payment ledger for the Barrier Branch Amalgamated  Mines Association of 31st March 1904. Three sons were born there, two of whom (John junior and William) survived.

Around 1909, the Ballintynes  journeyed across the Nullarbor Plain to seek work at the gold mines in Boulder, Western Australia. Judging by the appearance of various relatives in Boulder in the period from 1910-1916, we assume that a number of families travelled from Broken Hill together. Amongst them were John's daughter Annie with husband Thomas Tupper.

The rail link to the west was not completed until 1917, so the only way to make the greater part of the trip would be by ship from Adelaide to Fremantle, or by going overland. The vast expanses of the continent were then being navigated by teams of Muslim cameleers from India and Afghanistan, and the oral tradition is that the families travelled from Broken Hill to Boulder in such a camel convoy; an enterprise which must have been extraordinarily demanding.

By 1916 John and Agnes are recorded on the electoral roll at Boulder, and John remained there till his death in 1923. Some time after 1925, Agnes moved to North Adelaide to live with her daughter Annie and husband Thomas (Tupper), and she died there in 1938 aged 78.

Agnes and John's son John junior served in World War One and on his return married in Adelaide but moved back to Boulder. He later divorced and married again, settling in Adelaide; the two families were apparently ignorant of each other's existence for decades. His second wife divorced him when the children were young and later in life John lived with his son Don in Melbourne and died there in 1962.

John's brother William married in Boulder but settled in Adelaide. He had four daughters and two sons, and died in 1954.

The two Scottish brothers (Andrew and Walter) who came to Australia a century and a half ago now have descendants carrying the Ballintyne/Ballantyne name in Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

Take a look at the family photo album

Detailed listing of Andrew Ballantyne's descendants

If you would like to get in touch about this family line,