The Bilney Homestead, Kangarilla

Tucked into the background of a photograph taken in 1880, barely distinguishable from the scrub behind it, is the wattle-and-daub cottage where four generations of the Bilney family had lived since George Bilney first cleared that Kangarilla hillside forty years before.

George Bilney arrived in South Australia on the ship Duke of Wellington in 1840. He came from Norfolk — his death notice, half a century later, would ask the Wisbech papers to print the news — and he settled at Kangarilla in the colony's fourth year. The family was among the founding Methodists of the district. He and his wife raised at least four children: Daniel, Mary Jane, Sarah Ann, and a second son. He died at his residence at Kangarilla on 6 October 1896, aged eighty-one, leaving a wife, two sons, two daughters, fourteen grandchildren, and twenty-nine great-grandchildren.

His son Daniel, born in England around 1838 and brought to the colony as a toddler, grew up on that hillside and stayed. By 1850 his name appeared in the Clarendon Methodist class book, among the small group of families who gathered for worship in each other's homes on the district's steep hillsides. He was close enough to his neighbours to be called before dawn in March 1862 when Edward Dix's stackyard caught fire near Eyre's Flat — Dix had married Daniel's sister Mary Jane — and he gave evidence at the coroner's inquiry that followed:

Daniel Bilney stated that his brother called in on Friday morning, and said Edward Dix's stackyard was on fire. That was between 3 and 4 o'clock. When witnesses got to the stackyard the straw, wheat and chaff were all on fire.

South Australian Register, 2 April 1862.

He married Mary Ann Holder and continued to farm at Kangarilla, and in a district with a long memory the Bilney name was still attached to that hillside well into the following century.

Daniel William was born on 5 April 1861, the son of Daniel and Mary Ann. He was nineteen years old when the photograph was taken.

Three years after the photograph was taken, in 1883, Daniel William married Maria Mitchell, born 9 June 1866, daughter of Charles Mitchell. They settled in the cottage behind the farmyard: a small building of wattle and daub, its walls of sun-dried earth, its roof thatched. At some point two further rooms were added in sandstone, and an iron roof was laid over the original thatch, which remained beneath and acted as insulation. The scrub was thick on the hillside when they arrived and the district was still being cleared.

It was there that Daniel and Maria raised six children over eleven years — three sons and three daughters, all born in the cottage or in the sandstone rooms added to it. The eldest, Elizabeth Anne, married a man named Wickers and settled in the district; it was Elizabeth Anne's daughter-in-law who later supplied the family's account of the cottage and how it was built.

Maria died at Kangarilla on 7 June 1941, aged seventy-five. Daniel William followed on 6 November 1944, aged eighty-three. They are buried in adjoining plots in the Clarendon-Kangarilla Cemetery. His father Daniel lies two sections along; his father's headstone reads simply: Died 10 January 1934. Age 96 years.

In 1953 Arthur Daniel Bilney, by then farming near Mount Barker, told a newspaper that his great-grandfather had come from England, his grandfather had lived to be ninety-six, and his father had farmed at Kangarilla all his life. Three sentences to account for more than a century of one family on one hillside. The cottage was already gone by then.

Sources

• City of Onkaparinga Libraries, catalogue no. 1425415 — photograph of the Bilney homestead, Kangarilla, 1880
• Chronicle (Adelaide), 24 October 1896 — George Bilney death notice (Duke of Wellington, 1840; Kangarilla; wife, two sons, two daughters). Trove
• Advertiser (Adelaide), 23 October 1911 — "Clarendon Methodism: Diamond Jubilee" (Daniel Bilney in class book c.1850). Trove
• Coromandel, 21 December 1946 — "Clarendon's First" (Daniel Bilney in Methodist class book). Trove
• South Australian Register, 2 April 1862 — "Supposed Incendiary Fire Near Eyre's Flat" (Daniel Bilney's testimony). Trove
• Mount Barker Courier, 13 May 1953 — "Round the Farms" (Arthur Bilney; grandfather lived to 96; father farmed Kangarilla). Trove
• City of Onkaparinga cemetery records — Daniel Bilney (d. 10 Jan 1934, age 96), Maria Bilney (d. 7 Jun 1941, age 75), Daniel William Bilney (d. 6 Nov 1944, age 83), Clarendon-Kangarilla Cemetery
• Geoffrey Webster, Ted Webster, Roger Norris-Green, Clarendon — the Town, Its People (1973) — Daniel Bilney ploughing matches; Joe Bilney shingle roof and gold panning
• Margarette Powell OAM, Audrey Green, Bob Stupple, Pioneers of Reynella (2015) — Daniel Bilney (b. 1861); Maria Mitchell; Elizabeth Anne Bilney marries Harold John Wickers
• City of Onkaparinga Libraries, catalogue no. 1441636 — portrait of Daniel Bilney (1838–1934); family information supplied by Margerie Wickers