From Crofter to Convict Warder: Thomas Sinclair in Western Australia

Thomas Sinclair was born at Skelberry, in the parish of Dunrossness at the southern tip of Mainland Shetland, on 8 August 1828. He was the eldest son of George Sinclair, a tenant farmer, and Margaret Bain, and was named for his paternal grandfather, Thomas Sinclair of Skelberry. Sometime between 1835 and 1839 the family moved a short distance to the croft at Hillock, the small holding that would remain in Sinclair hands for the next century and a half and is held by the family still.[1]

He grew up in a community in which fishing and crofting were inseparable. The men of the southern Shetland parishes worked the inshore grounds in a ness yoal — the slim, double-ended open boat developed in Dunrossness, descended from Norwegian models, that could be either rowed with six oars or sailed.[2] On 13 December 1851, in his twenty-fourth year, Thomas married Mary Mainland of Garthsbanks, two years his senior.[3] By the 1861 census, the couple were living with their first four children at Husbrake, a tiny cluster of houses a short walk from Hillock, and Thomas was returned as ‘fisherman & crofter’.[4]

That census year proved to be near the high-water mark of Shetland’s nineteenth-century population. The islands had not fully recovered from the potato famine of 1846, the haaf-fishery was beginning its long decline, and lairds were everywhere consolidating tenancies.[5] Marjory Harper has identified a ‘discontented restlessness’ running through nineteenth-century Scotland more generally; the Sinclair brothers seem to have caught the mood.[6] Two of Thomas’s younger brothers had already gone — Laurence to Fremantle in 1856 and Jack four years later — and both had found steady work at the new harbour: Laurence as a tidewaiter in the Customs Department, Jack in the recently formed Water Police.[7] When Thomas decided to follow them in 1863, it was Jack who formally nominated the family — and Mary’s younger brother, Henry Mainland, with them — for assisted passage to Western Australia.[8]

The Sinclair party left Hillock on Friday 14 August 1863 aboard the packet Maria — Thomas, Mary, and their five children: Jessie (11), Laurence (9), Margaret (7), Mary (5) and James (2). They attended two services at Lerwick on the Sunday and worked their way south by coastal steamer to Aberdeen and on to Gravesend.[9] There they joined the barque Tartar, one of the three so-called ‘bride ships’ that brought single women out to Fremantle that year alongside families like the Sinclairs.[10] The voyage was long and at times miserable. The Tartar slipped its mooring on 27 August and ran almost at once into a fortnight of foul weather in the Channel; the route then took the ship far south through the tropics, well clear of the African coast and out towards Brazil before the long easting across to Fremantle. Dysentery, sour meat and a man overboard punctuated the months at sea. Mary suffered throughout. The wife of the Tartar’s Anglican chaplain, Mrs Edward Millett, later remembered ‘one emigrant from the far north of Scotland — I think the Shetland Isles — whose wife was always ill and low-spirited, let the weather be what it might, and who, when at her worst, could suggest nothing eatable that she fancied except “a Wick herring”’.[11] No other Shetland family appears on the Tartar’s manifest, and the description can only be of Mary. Thomas himself kept a journal of the voyage that survives, and is one of very few first-person Shetland accounts of an assisted-passage voyage to the colony.[12] The Tartar dropped anchor in Gage Roads on 12 December 1863.[13]

A year after arrival, Thomas had taken a position as an assistant warder with the Convict Establishment. His career there has been preserved in the files of the Convicts Department and recently summarised by David Barker in a publication of the Western Australian Genealogical Society.[14] The files show that he served three months in Fremantle before being transferred to a work party constructing the road to Toodyay, a farming settlement over the Darling Scarp east of Perth. His family joined him in December. He must have found the work trying because in January 1865 he was considered unfit to work with road parties and was transferred to the depot in Guildford. He was then allocated to the 4 Mile Camp on the road to York, another settlement over the Darling Scarp. Here he fell out with another warder and the department transferred him the the foot of Greenmount, still on the York Road.

This must have been an extraordinary personal and occupational shift — from a Shetland crofthouse to gangs of British convicts on a road party — and it was made at a moment when the colonial government, with the help of Imperial money and Royal Engineers, was driving roads east across the Darling Range to open the Avon Valley to wheat and pasture. Alexandra Hasluck observed that the 1860s were the decade in which the convict system reached its widest geographical spread in Western Australia, with rural depots and road parties knit together by warders living more or less permanently in bush camps.[15]

The choice of work was less idiosyncratic than it might first appear. By the mid-1860s the colony was deep into its convict-period economy, and the Imperial expenditure that flowed from London paid most of the wages on offer in and around Fremantle. Thomas’s brothers had already entered that orbit — Laurence in the Customs Department, Jack in the Water Police; both would spend the bulk of their working lives in those services.[16] Mary’s brother Henry Mainland would, in time, follow the same pattern: by the early 1870s he had moved north to Greenough and on to Shark Bay, where he served a period in the colonial police force before settling as a hotel-keeper.[17] Four working-age men of the connected family — three Sinclair brothers and one Mainland — all found their way in the new colony through some form of public-order or harbour-service work. It is a striking outcome for a fishing and crofting family from Dunrossness, but it makes more sense set against the structure of the colony’s labour market. Wage employment in the 1860s was dominated by the Convict Establishment, the harbour services and the colonial police, all of which wanted men with maritime experience or steady habits, and a literate Shetlander whose census occupation was ‘fisherman & crofter’ was exactly the kind of recruit those services were looking for. Whether the men themselves saw any continuity between watching for fish from a ness yoal and watching convicts breaking stones is hard to say; what is clear is that the same maritime habits of patience and reliable observation that made a Shetlander a competent inshore fisherman also made him a useful recruit to the colony’s marine and constabulary services. Once one brother had a foothold, chain migration did the rest.

Two near-contemporary observers have left descriptions of what such a posting looked like in practice. Janet Millett, the wife of the Anglican chaplain at York, had crossed the Darling Range on her own way out from Perth shortly before Thomas began his service, and remembered passing a road party at a deep, sandy stretch of road. The convicts looked so listless at their work, she wrote, that her sympathy went instead to the warder watching them — it would, she thought, have been ‘pleasanter to break the stones oneself than to have the officer’s occupation’.[18] Mrs Millett’s observation has a particular force here: her husband Edward had been the Tartar’s chaplain on the Sinclairs’ voyage, and his chaplaincy at York from late 1863 until July 1868 coincided almost exactly with Thomas’s years in the Convict Establishment, including a regular pastoral round through the road parties of the Toodyay and York districts.[19]

A more analytical account came from Howard Willoughby, sent to Western Australia in 1864 by The Argus to report on the convict system. His Melbourne readers had been led to expect the horrors of Van Diemen’s Land; Willoughby found the men instead ‘remarkably comfortable both as regards shelter and diet’.[20] The discomfort fell more heavily on the warders and their families: men on long watches in remote bush camps, with rations carted in over long distances, and — in the case of married men — with wives and small children quartered in slab-built cottages well outside any town.

By 1866 the family had joined Thomas at the Warder’s Cottage at Greenmount, in the wooded hills above Guildford. Two more children had been born to Mary by then — Julia, at Fremantle in 1864, and, in March 1867, George Thomas, the seventh and last of the Sinclair children.[21]

It was at Greenmount, in 1866, that two-year-old Julia Sinclair, the first of the children to have been born in Australia, died in an accident at the cottage. An inquest was held at Guildford. Mary, already pregnant with George at the time of Julia’s death, gave birth six months later — a small mercy at the wrong end of a hard year.[22] After Julia’s death Thomas seems to have come unmoored. Departmental files record growing criticism of his work, complaints from his fellow warders about his temperament, and an ‘impertinent’ letter to a superior officer for which he was fined; dismissal was being discussed when illness intervened.[23] He died at Guildford on 6 July 1868, aged thirty-nine, and was buried alongside Julia in the Guildford cemetery.[24] His eldest daughter, Jessie, then sixteen, later wrote a poem in his memory which she called ‘The Absent Sire’. The departmental file leaves a man losing patience with his work and his superiors; Jessie’s verses preserve a much-loved and compassionate father, and serve as a useful corrective to the bureaucratic record.[25]

Thomas Sinclair lived less than five years in Western Australia. The Convicts Department made Mary a small widow’s allowance, which cannot have run for long.[26] Whether his brothers helped out is unknown — Laurence at Fremantle and Jack at Bunbury were close enough to have offered something, but there is no record. Mary’s brother Henry Mainland might in other circumstances have been an obvious resort, but he had by then gone north to Greenough and on towards Shark Bay, beyond regular communication. In the short term, Mary and most of the children seem to have stayed on at Guildford. A ‘Miss Sinclair’ — almost certainly one of Thomas’s daughters — appears in a Guildford inquest report soon after, identified as working at one of the local stores.[27] Her brother Laurence, fourteen, and her sister Margaret, twelve, were taken on by the Dempster brothers at the Buckland — the connection that would in time carry the rest of the family east to Esperance.[28]

At some date not yet documented, Mary moved with Jessie and Mary junior to Albany, where she opened a boarding house and named it Dunrossness Cottage for the croft she had left a quarter of a century before.[29] The choice of place may have been more than nostalgia. The Sinclair brothers and Henry Mainland had all settled close to the sea: Laurence at Fremantle through his career; Jack moving down through Busselton to Bunbury; Henry working his way up the western shore from Greenough to Shark Bay, where, after his time with the police and as a hotel-keeper, he spent his last working years in the pearling fleet.[30] Of the four men, only Thomas had gone inland, into the road parties of the Darling Range and the Avon, and he had not lived long there. Mary’s move to Albany was, among other things, a return to a coastline.

The Albany years brought another loss: Mary junior died there in 1891. Mary senior and Jessie afterwards joined Laurence, James and George at Esperance, where the surviving family slowly re-formed on the south coast. Laurence had gone east with the Dempsters in 1870 to help build their station at Esperance, and only later turned to prospecting; in 1894 his strike in the Dundas country gave its goldfield the Shetland name Norseman. James worked at Esperance as the telegraph operator. Margaret married John Cook and spent most of her life with him at Israelite Bay, east again on the same coast. Of the seven Sinclair children, only George, the Australian-born son, broke for the inland country altogether, and his trail thins out in the eastern goldfields.[31] Mary the elder, who had buried a husband and a daughter at Guildford and another daughter at Albany, outlived Thomas by forty-seven years.[32] The lives of Mary, Jessie, Laurence, James, Margaret and George are each taken up in separate posts elsewhere on this blog.

What Thomas would have made of any of it is unknowable. But the family’s slow drift back to the coast in the years after his death, to remote places not unlike the islands they had left, and the Shetland names attached to some of them — Dunrossness Cottage at Albany, Norseman on the road out to the eastern goldfields — read, at this distance, like an instinct.

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Figure: ‘Old Prison Camp, Greenmount, 1893’, sketch by James Cummings. Reproduced in Darlington Review, 58(5), 2018, p 40, courtesy of Robert Lowe and the Mundaring & Hills Historical Society. The Sinclair family had lived in a warder’s cottage at this camp twenty-five years earlier.

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[1]Baptism registration for Thomas Sinclair, born 8 August 1828, Dunrossness, Shetland, in National Records of Scotland, Old Parish Registers, Births 003/Dunrossness, Sandwick and Cunningsburgh, p 42 of 197, ScotlandsPeople, accessed 20 March 2026; on the family’s move from Skelberry to Hillock between 1835 and 1839, see the Sinclair entries elsewhere in this blog.

[2]Alexander Fenton, The Northern Isles: Orkney and Shetland, John Donald, Edinburgh, 1978 (rev. edn, Tuckwell Press, East Linton, 1997).

[3]Marriage registration for Thomas Sinclair and Mary Mainland, married 13 December 1851, Dunrossness, Shetland, in National Records of Scotland, Old Parish Registers, Marriages 003/Dunrossness, Sandwick and Cunningsburgh, p 193 of 197, ScotlandsPeople, accessed 20 March 2026.

[4]Census record for Thomas Sinclair, Parish: Dunrossness, 1861 Scotland Census, Ancestry.com, accessed 20 March 2026.

[5]Véronique Molinari, ‘A most “valuable class”: the Shetland Female Emigration Society and the emigration of single women to South Australia and Tasmania in the early 1850s’, Northern Scotland, 2025, 16(1):1–27, p 5.

[6]Marjory Harper, Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus, Profile Books, London, 2003, p 63.

[7]Rica Erickson (ed), The Bicentennial Dictionary of Western Australians, Vol 4, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1987, pp 2825–6.

[8]Margret Sinclair, ‘Half a World Away’, unpublished report, Albany Library, 2010, p 2; Timothy J Hatton, ‘The political economy of assisted immigration: Australia 1860–1913’, IZA Discussion Paper Series, No. 16298, 2023, pp 5–6.

[9]Thomas Sinclair, ‘Journal of Thomas Sinclair on his voyage to Fremantle aboard the “Tartar” 1863’, Esperance Museum, Sinclair Family Collection, Item 2/1, p 1.

[10]Rica Erickson, The Bride Ships: Experiences of Immigrants Arriving in Western Australia 1849–1889, Hesperian Press, Carlisle, 1992, p 73; State Records Office of Western Australia, ‘Manifest of the Ship Tartar’, Arrivals at Fremantle, Western Australia, 14 December 1863, Cons 36, Item 530.

[11]Mrs Edward Millett [Janet Millett], An Australian Parsonage or, the Settler and the Savage in Western Australia, Edward Stanford, London, 1872, p 8. The Tartar’s passenger manifest lists no other Shetland family: SROWA, ‘Manifest of the Ship Tartar’, Cons 36, Item 530.

[12]For the journal’s later history and material biography, see Michael Robinson, ‘An Unfinished Page: The Biography of a Shetland Emigrant’s Journal and the Material Practice of Family Memory’, Taylor Family History blog, 24 April 2026, https://taylorfamilyhistory.com/journal-as-object/.

[13]‘Shipping Intelligence’, The West Australian Times (Perth), 17 December 1863, p 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article3367396, accessed 18 March 2026.

[14] David Barker, Warders and Gaolers: A Dictionary of Western Australian Prison Officers, 1829-1879, Western Australian Genealogical Society, Perth.

[15]Alexandra Hasluck, Unwilling Emigrants: A Study of the Convict Period in Western Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1959, pp 84–8; D J Barker, Warders and Gaolers: A Dictionary of Western Australian Prison Officers 1829–1879, Western Australian Genealogical Society, Perth, 2000.

[16]Erickson, Bicentennial Dictionary, Vol 4, pp 2825–6.

[17]Rica Erickson (ed), The Bicentennial Dictionary of Western Australians, Vol 3, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1987, p 2054.

[18]Millett, An Australian Parsonage, ch III (also at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Australian_Parsonage/Chapter_III, accessed 6 May 2026).

[19]Millett, An Australian Parsonage, ch XIV; on Edward Millett’s incumbency at Holy Trinity, York, December 1863 to July 1868, see ‘Janet Millett’, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Millett, accessed 6 May 2026.

[20]Howard Willoughby, Transportation: The British Convict in Western Australia, Sampson Low, Son & Marston, London, 1865; the passage quoted is reproduced in J S Battye, A History of Western Australia, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1924, App 3, and was originally published in The Argus (Melbourne) and reprinted in The Sydney Morning Herald, 29 June 1864, p 2 (‘The Convict System in Western Australia, no. III’), http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13085774.

[21]Sinclair employment file, Convict Department, State Records Office of Western Australia [exact reference to be confirmed]; Birth registration of Julia Sinclair, Western Australia, 1864, and George Thomas Sinclair, born 17 March 1867, Western Australia Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages.

[22]Death of Julia Sinclair, Western Australia, 1866, Western Australia Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages; inquest record, Guildford, 1866 [exact reference to be confirmed].

[23]Sinclair employment file, Convict Department, State Records Office of Western Australia [exact reference to be confirmed].

[24]Death certificate of Thomas Sinclair, died 6 July 1868, Guildford, Western Australia, original held by Michael Robinson, Bedford, Western Australia.

[25]Jessie Mainland Sinclair, ‘The Absent Sire’, undated manuscript in Sinclair family papers; see the section on Jessie elsewhere in this blog.

[26]Convict Department records, State Records Office of Western Australia [exact reference to be confirmed].

[27]‘Inquest at Guildford’, [newspaper title and date to be confirmed], evidence of ‘Miss Sinclair’, shop assistant, Guildford [reference to be supplied].

[28]Michael Robinson, ‘The Norseman: Laurence Sinclair’, Taylor Family History blog, 2 August 2022, https://taylorfamilyhistory.com/norseman-find/.

[29]Michael Robinson, ‘George Thomas Sinclair’, Taylor Family History blog, 5 May 2026, https://taylorfamilyhistory.com/georgesinclair/, with figure caption to Dunrossness Cottage, Albany.

[30]Erickson, Bicentennial Dictionary, Vol 3, p 2054; on Henry Mainland’s later work in the pearling industry [reference to be confirmed].

[31]Robinson, ‘George Thomas Sinclair’.

[32]Death of Mary Sinclair, Western Australia, 1915, Western Australia Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages [reference to be confirmed].