A Portuguese at Morphett Vale: The Antonios of Hackham

In a photograph believed to have been taken about the time of their marriage in 1856, a dark-haired young man sits with a wide pale hat resting on his knee while his wife stands at his side, one hand laid on his shoulder. He was Joao Emmanuel Antonio, a Portuguese immigrant a long way from home; she was Mary Louisa Griffin, lately come from Ireland. They were married at Morphett Vale that April, and from a farm in the hills behind Hackham they raised a family that would work the southern country for more than a hundred years.

From Portugal and Ireland

The southern district drew its settlers mostly from the English counties, with a scattering of Scots, Welsh, Irish and Germans among them. A Portuguese was rarer still. How Joao Emmanuel Antonio came to the Onkaparinga is not recorded, but by the middle of the 1850s he had settled there, anglicised his name to John, and found a wife. Mary Griffin had reached South Australia from Ireland in 1854, and on 5 April 1856 the two were married at Morphett Vale.

They made their home at Warnock Farm, in the hills behind Hackham, and there their children were born. In 1863 John bought a second farm up in the hills, the long limestone house on what is now Patapinda Road that came to be called Stony Hill. For a time his tenant there was Daniel Le Poidevin, the Guernsey carpenter who would become the largest landholder in the Morphett Vale district. The Antonios kept Warnock Farm as their own home and worked the hill country above, and the long Stony Hill farmhouse still stands, ruined, at the end of the Southern Expressway.

The family was Catholic, which set them apart in a district whose chapels were overwhelmingly Methodist, Congregational and Free Presbyterian. They worshipped and were buried at St Mary's Catholic Church at Morphett Vale, and the faith ran down the generations as steadily as the farming did.

Eight Children

John and Mary had eight children, and as they grew the family spread well beyond the Hackham hills. The eldest, Joseph, born in 1857, married, lost his first wife young, married again, and ended his days at Yorketown on Yorke Peninsula in 1922. Julia went to Port Lincoln with her husband Charles Beswick. Rosina married John William Manning and raised eight children of her own; Ellen Maria married Alexander Jones and settled at Brighton; Agnes, the youngest daughter, married George Morton of Noarlunga. The first-born daughter, Mary Jane, did not live to scatter with the rest — she married Phillip Teare of Morphett Vale in 1880 and died three years later at twenty-five, and was laid in St Mary's churchyard in a grave beside her parents'.

Farming the dry hills was never certain. One of the sons gave up the land in the early 1890s, ruined by red rust in his crops and sickness in the family, and took railway work, walking away from his Hackham sections with nothing. But the family as a whole held its ground, and John and Mary lived to see it established.

John himself had died by the early 1890s. Mary outlived him, and when she died suddenly at Henley Park in September 1900, aged sixty-seven, she left three sons, four daughters and twenty-two grandchildren. The funeral notice remembered the breadth of a pioneering life:

The funeral of the late Mrs. Antonio, one of the early pioneers of the South, who died suddenly at Henley Park, took place on Tuesday at the Morphett Vale Cemetery.

The Southern Cross, 14 September 1900

Thomas at Belle Vue

The youngest son, Thomas — Tom — was born at Hackham in 1864. In 1894 he married Lizzie Corcoran of Hammond at St Dominic's Church, Willochra, and made his home at Belle Vue, Noarlunga. He devoted himself to the district and to its sport. He was patron of the Southern Tennis Association and vice-president of both the Port Noarlunga Tennis Club and the Southern Football Association, sat on the Willunga show committee and the Southern Farmers' Society, and served as a trustee of the Noarlunga Recreation Committee. When he died in July 1932, after only a few days' illness, the newspapers gave him the warmth of a man widely loved:

The death of Mr. Thomas Antonio, of Noarlunga, has deprived the district of one of its most popular residents. Born at Hackham 68 years ago, Mr. Antonio has resided in the Noarlunga district all his life. His genial manner won him a large circle of friends, and his upright character was respected by all.

The Chronicle, 14 July 1932

A Military Medal

Thomas and Lizzie's son Jack was born at Noarlunga in 1895. He enlisted in 1916 and went to the war with the Light Horse, and he came home with a Military Medal won for bravery in the field — a rare distinction for a farmer's son from the Onkaparinga. He married Nell Gawley afterwards, settled at Black Forest and worked as a cellar hand, and raised three children. He died in 1941, at forty-six, and was buried with his people at St Mary's, Morphett Vale.

Herbert and Ethel

The last of the Antonios on the hill were John's grandchildren Herbert and his sister Ethel, who lived together on the family farm at Stony Hill, north of Old Noarlunga, working the ground their grandfather had bought in 1863. Neither married, and between them they kept up the family's old attachment to the Catholic church at Morphett Vale, where their faith turned, late in their lives, into a remarkable generosity.

As the southern suburbs spread in the 1970s the small parish could no longer hold its growing congregation. In 1970 Herbert went to Monsignor Rob Edgar with an offer to buy the priest a proper house, and he and Ethel then helped purchase several properties near the church. In 1972 the pair gave eighty thousand dollars toward the building of a new church for the swelling population of Morphett Vale — an enormous sum for the time. Herbert said simply that he felt it his duty to give, the more so when he watched young couples humbly placing their envelopes in the collection plate.

When a new parish school opened on Bains Road in 1975 — the first new Catholic school in the Adelaide archdiocese in a decade — it was named the Antonio School in tribute to the brother and sister who had made it possible. On the opening day Herbert sealed a time capsule into the base of the statue of Our Lady.

Herbert and Ethel died within a few months of each other in 1977, the last of the family on the ground John and Mary had taken up more than a century before. The Stony Hill farmhouse stands empty now, and the district has been renamed Onkaparinga Heights and marked for housing. Yet the name has outlasted the farms. A Portuguese immigrant and his Irish wife who married at Morphett Vale in 1856 left it written across a schoolyard, where children pass each day beneath the family's name.

Sources

• High on the Hill: The People of St Philip & St James Church, Old Noarlunga — Kelly Dyer, City of Onkaparinga Libraries (2019). Genealogies of the Antonio, Morton, Teare and related Noarlunga families.
• City of Onkaparinga Libraries local history collection — portraits of John and Mary Antonio and their children, of Lance Corporal Jack Antonio, and photographs of Stony Hill Farm, Patapinda Road, Hackham.
• City of Onkaparinga local heritage register, Former Farm Complex, 35 Patapinda Road, Onkaparinga Heights — history of the Antonio farm and the naming of the Antonio School, Bains Road, Morphett Vale.
• Antonio Catholic School, Our Story — account of Herbert and Ethel Antonio, their gifts to the Morphett Vale parish, and the founding of the school in 1975.
• The Chronicle (Adelaide, 1895–1954), 14 July 1932 — obituary of Thomas Antonio of Noarlunga. Trove
• The Southern Cross (Adelaide, 1889–1954), 14 September 1900 — death and funeral of Mary Antonio, with notice of her marriage and surviving family. Trove
• The Express and Telegraph (Adelaide, 1867–1922), 28 February 1893 — Insolvency Court report on John Antonio of Hackham, railway labourer. Trove
• The Advertiser (Adelaide, 1889–1931), 17 April 1894 — marriage of Tom Antonio and Lizzie Corcoran at Willochra. Trove