SAMUEL MCWILLIAM
Founder of the “McWilliam’s Wines” family
Samuel McWilliam was born on the 15th
April 1830 at Raloo, near Larne, in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. He was
the second son of a family of six boys and one girl from the marriage of
Samuel McWilliam, snr. (1800-1882) and Elizabeth Crawford (1801-1872). His
great-great grandfather had been an immigrant from Wigtonshire in the south
west of Scotland and had settled in Larne around 1700.
Samuel arrived in Melbourne on the 2nd November 1857 aboard the “Morning
Light” and was typical of the more than half a million immigrants who
arrived in Victoria during the main period of the gold rush. He was
following the strong pioneering tradition of his uncles and, in particular,
his older brother, Crawford, who had immigrated to America eight years
before. Samuel became a land holder in the parish of Denison, County of
Rosedale, near Sale. In 1863 he married Martha Steele (1841-1889), only
daughter of the second marriage of a Martha Saunders (nee Pulsford, who
immigrated from Tiverton, Devonshire) and an Edmund Steele, a pardoned
convict who had been originally convicted and transported for “machine
breaking” during the last of the labourers’ revolts in Southern England and
had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land on the “Eliza” on the 29th May 1831.
Samuel and his family of six sons and one daughter left the Gippsland area
in 1875 and settled on pastoral land on the northern edge of Corowa where he
planted his first vines in 1877. He became a leading member of the “Corowa
Vine and Fruit Growers’ Association” and an acquaintance of Dr. Henry John
Lindeman, an earlier pioneering vigneron of the area. Samuel’s wife, Martha,
died on the 18th May 1889 at the age of 48 and left nine children, the
youngest being only six years old. Within two years, Samuel retired to
Sydney taking his young daughters with him and leaving the “Sunnyside”
vineyard and winery in the hands of two of his sons, John James and Thomas
and his eldest daughter, Eliza Jane, who also turned her hand to winemaking.
Samuel died on the 12th June 1902 in Sydney and was buried in the “Pioneer
Cemetery” in Corowa with his wife.
It was to be his third eldest son, John James McWilliam (1868-1951), who
continued the winemaking tradition eventually leaving Corowa and
establishing his own vineyard at Junee around 1896 and subsequently the
“Markview” winery in 1904. In 1913, John James McWilliam (“JJ”) and his
eldest son, Laurence John (“Jack”) took up two adjacent irrigation blocks in
the newly opened Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area near the village of Hanwood.
From these vineyards and the Hanwood winery, built in 1917, was to flourish
the “McWilliam’s Wines” family who, 150 years after the arrival of Samuel
McWilliam, are into to their sixth generation of winemaking.
Samuel McWilliam
John James McWilliam
9. Hanwood and the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area
Mark View Winery
