For many Shetlanders who left in the nineteenth century, the story ends at the shoreline: a departure, a voyage, an arrival in a distant colony. But for the Sinclair brothers of Dunrossness, the story did not end there. It continued far inland, into a dry...
When Thomas Sinclair brought his family to Western Australia on the Tartar in 1863 he kept a diary of the voyage. The original is in the Esperance Museum, Western Australia. It is a fascinating document because it vividly describes what it must have been like for a...
This is a short essay written for the Diploma of Family History course at the University of Tasmania. Much of the information appears elsewhere on this blog, but this brings the emigration story together. sinclairjourneyDownload © 2026 Michael Robinson. Non-commercial use permitted with attribution. Last...
Jessie was the eldest child of Thomas and Mary Sinclair, born in Dunrossness, on the 2nd April 1852.1 She spent her childhood in Dunrossness, where she went to the local school. The 1861 census recorded her as a ‘scholar’ living with her family at ‘Husbrake’.2...
The usual story about the discovery of the Norseman goldfield is that it was accidentally discovered by a horse named Norseman. For example, Rica Erickson said: Station hands left work, sometimes without giving notice, to go prospecting, Larry Sinclair among them. By luck, in 1894...
My wife’s great great grandfather was Thomas Sinclair, a Shetland Islander who was, at the time of his death in 1868, an assistant warder with the Convicts Department. I have discussed him elsewhere on this site. As the old records show, he was buried in...
The year after Thomas Sinclair arrived in Western Australia he got a job as an assistant warder at what was then called the Convict Establishment in Fremantle. After the convict era was over the establishment was utilised as a regular prison, the Fremantle Gaol. Thomas’s...
Writing about her experiences onboard the migrant ship Tartar, Janet Millett stated that whenever the ship encountered really bad weather her husband would go to the married persons’ quarters where he would look after the women and children, presumably to reassure them and also to give...
John Skinner Prout (1805-1876) was an artist who came to Australia in the 1840s. He described his voyage out to Australia in an article in The Illustrated London News, with sketches of life on board ship. Emigrants to the Swan River Colony would have had a similar...
Laurence Sinclair was the youngest of three Sinclair brothers to come to Western Australia from the Shetland Islands in the mid-19th Century. He was born in Skelberry, Dunrossness, on the 30th of January 1831, to parents George and Margaret Sinclair.1 It’s not known precisely when...
© 2026 — Michael Robinson, Bedford, Western Australia.