People Australia

Robert Ross Haverfield, no date

Royal Historical Society of Victoria

Robert Ross Haverfield (1819–1889), grazier, miner, journalist, editor, and newspaper proprietor, was born on 26 February 1819 at Bideford, Devon, England, to Robert Tunstall Haverfield (1783–1839), a commander in the Royal Navy, and his wife Mary Haverfield, née Ross (1798–1853).[1] Although born in Jamaica, Mary was described as ‘an Englishwoman’, and was the daughter of Robert Ross (1737–1821), a Scottish owner of estates including Bybrook, which he owned from 1799.[2] Ross settled £8,000 on Mary, his ‘natural daughter’, at the time of her 1818 marriage, payable on Bybrook and Palmer Hut estates, and left her a further £2,000 and one-third of his residual estate in his will. The same will left £50 to her mother, Elizabeth Upton Swarbreck (1770–1852), a woman of mixed descent. Ross’s estate was the beneficiary of three compensation claims for 275 enslaved people, totalling £4,831 17s 11d.[3] Mary also inherited a modest amount from her mother, who received compensation for her slave holdings. In 1817 Swarbreck was listed in the slave register for the Parish of St Catherine’s as the owner of eleven slaves, three of them children. In 1835 she received compensation to the value of £613 6s 7d for 31 slaves she owned across two properties in the parishes of St Catherine and St John.[4]

It is unclear when Mary Ross moved from Jamaica to live permanently in England, but records show she married Robert Tunstall Haverfield in Surrey in 1818.[5] Once back in England, it was her wealth that likely sustained the family. After her father died in 1821, she received an annual income of £1,500 based on the continued revenue generated by his Jamaican estates.[6] Her mother died in Jamaica in 1852, leaving another daughter, Isabella, to distribute what was left of her estate.[7] Mary’s income enabled her son’s education, firstat a private school in Great Torrington, then at the local grammar school at Bideford, where he read privately in classics with the principal until he was seventeen. Robert Haverfield junior was set to attend the University of Cambridge, but ‘that expectation was not realised, owing to a sudden and serious curtailment in the family resources’.[8] That curtailment came as a direct result of the abolition of British slavery: Mary’s income was reduced to £300 per annum. Haverfield later claimed that the promised compensation for emancipated slaves was never paid to his family,[9] but compensation records reveal that £4,511 2s 2d for 260 people reached Mary as her father’s beneficiary.[10]

Haverfield found himself shut out of any of the learned professions at home. Without any firm plans, but recognising the straitened family circumstances, he decided to travel to Australia, based on the excitement of the talk about the possibilities for young men there. His mother managed fund his passage and gave him £80 ‘for a start in the world’.[11] On 1 October 1837 he sailed from Portsmouth aboard the ship Perfect, arriving at Sydney on 1 February 1838 at the age of nineteen.[12] His father died the following year.[13]

Adapting immediately to the changed personal circumstances that led to him becoming an economic immigrant, Haverfield thrived in the colonies, going on to have multiple careers as a grazier, a miner, a journalist, an editor, and a newspaper proprietor. His first break came when a fellow passenger on the Perfect, Captain Kennedy, invited him to join his ‘run’ on Gundungurra Country, near Goulburn.[14] There, Haverfield quickly learnt the business of running cattle. An old friend, Joseph Halloway, urged him to come to his property on Wiradjuri Country, Jingellac Station, near Albury. Haverfield worked there for some years in the mid 1840s, bringing herds of cattle to Melbourne on Wurundjeri Country from the north.[15] He placed some of these cattle on land he ‘took up’ in Wadarruwung Country near Ballarat, at Warrenheap Station.[16] After a short sojourn working as a bookkeeper on the Melbourne Herald, he went back to taking charge of livestock, this time sheep, across Yorta Yorta land (Violet Town), Gariwerd land (the Grampians), Gunditjmara, Jardwadjali and Boandik land (Glenelg district), and Tatiara land (Bordertown).[17]

In 1848 Haverfield formed a partnership with Joseph Jardine. They tendered an application ‘for the plains lying to the north and west of the salt marsh known by the Aboriginal name of “Tyrril”’. The application was accepted, and they took possession of Eureka, Gerahmin, and Tyrell South stations – more than 86,000 acres in total. They took 3,000 sheep to run at Eureka, and it is said that Haverfield was ‘the first white man to cross from Lake Tyrell to Lake Hindmarsh’ (a journey across the lands of the Wotjobaluk, Jaadwa, Jadawadjali, Wergaia, and Jupagulk peoples). It is also said that he learned some local Aboriginal language while there.[18]

A falling out with Jardine, who Haverfield described as having ‘gone wrong in the head’, combined with the fact that there was no fresh water at Lake Tyrell, led to the dissolution of the partnership.[19] Haverfield relocated and invested in the new goldfields in Bendigo. The money he made through investments supported the establishment of the Bendigo Advertiser in December 1853.[20]

Henceforth, Haverfield invested in several allotments of land on Wiradjuri Country (the Riverina) and on Yorta Yorta Country around Echuca.[21] It is unclear how successful these investments were: he declared himself insolvent in 1863, around the time he became editor and part owner of the newly established Riverine Herald, after ‘pressure from creditors’.[22] By 1870 one of his Echuca lots had been declared forfeit under the Land Act as ‘unimproved’.[23]

In 1865 Haverfield was one of several Echuca investors in the Echuca Vineyard Company, 524 acres of land on the Goulburn Flats near Yambuna Creek, sold at £10 per share.[24] His paper, the Riverine Herald, played a significant role in boosting and promoting the early vintages of the vineyard. While receiving praise, it did not initially succeed. By 1875 the company was in liquidation, with shareholders only salvaging two out of every five pounds invested.[25]

Always a speculator, Haverfield continued his adventures in land while running newspapers and creating columns. As a newspaper proprietor and editor and a local landowner, he promoted the area around Echuca as an area of interest for wealthy investors from Melbourne. As a public servant, he worked as a government arbitrator in the reassessment of runs for the Ovens district under the new Land Act of 1869.[26]

Haverfield was an accomplished storyteller who wrote for the Bendigo Advertiser almost until this death in that town on 20 April 1889.[27] He told tales of his younger days running and moving cattle, his life on the Bendigo goldfields, and his conversations with Robert O’Hara Bourke north of Menindie when the expeditionary group decided to split up. [28] (He was appointed secretary to the Royal Commission on Burke and Wills in November 1861). A tribute published two days after his death in the Bendigo Advertiser, said: ‘In private life he was a most gentle, amiable and estimable man, very fond of his wife and children…By his writings he exercised an influence on the public and political life of Victoria and of this district, the full extent of which it is difficult to estimate, and he leaves a void in the Sandhurst journalistic world that will not be readily filled.[29] He was remembered fondly and respectfully by those who knew him and mourned deeply by his wife Mariana Rubina Collier (1842–1934, whom he had married in 1863) and his four sons and daughter.[30]

At the end of his life, Haverfield had not accrued the fortune he likely hoped to make as a ‘promising young man’ seeking economic opportunity in the ‘new world’. Probate records indicate that at his death his debts were almost as great as his assets.[31] But there can be little doubt that his life left an impact on a new settler colony. Although his expectations of inheriting slavery wealth were thwarted, Haverfield sought to emulate his extended family’s landholding lifestyle and forged a successful colonial career grounded in and founded on the taking of Indigenous land.

[1] Carole Woods, ‘Haverfield, Robert Ross (1819–1889)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 4, 1972, accessed 19 March 2026, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/haverfield-robert-ross-3733/text5871.

[2] ‘Death and Funeral of Mr. R. R. Haverfield’, Bendigo Advertiser, 22 April 1889, 3.

[3] ‘Robert Ross of Henrietta Street and Bybrook’, Legacies of British Slavery, accessed 19 March 2026, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146635592.

[4] ‘Elizabeth Upton Swarbreck’, Legacies of British Slavery, accessed 19 March 2026, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/14241.

[5] Church of England Marriages and Banns, Richmond Upon Thames, St Annes, Kew, 1818, London Metropolitan Archives, London, UK, London Church of England Parish Registers, DW/T/6065.

[6] ‘Robert Ross of Henrietta Street and Bybrook’; ‘Death and Funeral of Mr R.R. Haverfield’.

[7] ‘Elizabeth Upton Swarbreck’, Her Majesty’s Court of Probate, Calendar of the Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration Made in the Principal Registry and in the Several District Registries of Her Majesty’s Court of Probate, 1865. ST-SZ (London: HM Stationery Office, 1866), 114.

[8] ‘Death and Funeral of Mr. R. R. Haverfield’.

[9] Ibid.

[10] ‘Robert Ross of Henrietta Street and Bybrook’.

[11] ‘Death and Funeral of Mr. R. R. Haverfield’.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] ‘The Contributor’, Albury Banner and Wodonga Express, 3 May 1889, 15; ‘Death and Funeral of Mr. R. R. Haverfield’. Also cited in Keva L. Lloyd, Then Awake Sea Lake: A History of Sea Lake district and Tyrell Station, (Sea Lake, Vic.: Sea Lake Centenary Committee, 1997).

[15] ‘The Contributor’.

[16] ‘The Contributor’; ‘Death and Funeral of Mr R.R. Haverfield’.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.; ‘Death of a veteran journalist’, Age (Melbourne), 22 April 1889, 5.

[21] Haverfield purchased land around Wentworth, Menindie, Hay, and Deniliquin in the 1860s. Rusheen Craig, ‘Information on early Western and Central NSW’ (2013), pp. 104, 109, 139, 154, accessed 19 March 2026, https://rusheensweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/information.pdf.

[22] ‘Insolvencies’, Victoria Government Gazette, no. 116 (20 November 1863), 2616; Public Record Office of Victoria (PROV), Supreme Court of Victoria, Insolvency of Robert Ross Haverfield, 1863, VPRS 759/P0000, 7490.

[23] ‘Supplement to the Victoria Government Gazette of Friday, January 28, 1870’, Victoria Government Gazette, no. 8 (31 January 1870), 200–201.

[24] Riverine Herald, 10 June, 26 August, and 20 September 1865, cited in Susan Priestley, Echuca: A History (North Melbourne, Vic.: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009), 143.

[25] Riverine Herald, 10 June, 26 August, 20 September 1865.

[26] Woods, ‘Haverfield, Robert Ross (1819–1889)’.

[27] ‘Death and Funeral of Mr. R. R. Haverfield’, 3.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Woods, ‘Haverfield, Robert Ross (1819–1889)’.

[31] Public Record Office Victoria (PROV), Grant of probate, Robert R. Haverfield, 11 June 1889, VPRS 28/P0002, 39/299.