William Sherriff of Dunglass

William Sherriff came out from Scotland in 1839, landing with his wife, Mary, from the Georgiana that August. About thirty-five when he sailed, he took up land on the coastal slope below Reynella, named it Dunglass, and spent the rest of his life there. The Scottish Dunglass was a wooded estate near Cockburnspath, on the Haddingtonshire coast at the edge of Berwickshire, known for its fifteenth-century collegiate church. The Sherriffs were not its lairds but ordinary country people who carried the name of their district to a paddock of South Australian scrub.

By 1850, Sherriff was well settled on the ground. When the Commissioners of Roads struck a rate of threepence an acre that March, his name stood on the roll for a hundred and sixty acres — the two sections of Dunglass — among landholders like John Reynell and J. B. Myles who would soon sit beside him on the district council.

When the landowners of Morphett Vale set about organising a local council in 1853, his was one of the names chosen to lead it. The notice that constituted the new district named the five men who were to govern it.

And that John Warnock, John Reynell, Thomas Bell Kelly, William Sherriff and Edward Bradley be the first District Council.

South Australian Register (Adelaide), 23 September 1853

That first council was a caretaker body, appointed to set the district going until the ratepayers could choose their own, and the longer struggle to establish the council and settle its boundaries ran on for years. When the first election came, at the Emu Hotel in January 1854 with John Reynell in the chair, Sherriff stood for one of the three seats and was beaten badly, drawing only five votes while Edward Bradley, Edward Castle and George Worthington took the places. He would make his way back in time.

In March 1855 he was called as a witness in the Supreme Court, in a trespass case that turned on whether a track between Morphett Vale and Hurtle Vale was a public road. A neighbouring farmer, Charles Smith, had fenced the line where it crossed his section; James Craig — who had stood against Sherriff at that same election — and other settlers from further south, who used the track as their road to town, had pulled the fence down and driven through. Sherriff gave evidence that he had seen the surveyors' pegs marking the road across the sections around him, and that its existence had weighed with him when he chose his own land. The jury found for Craig and the travellers, holding that the public maps had shown a road over the ground when it was first granted.

By 1860 he was back at the council table. In 1862 he was one of four councillors serving under the chairmanship of J. B. Myles with Richard Humphris, John Short and Bannister Booth, and the minutes of those years record the ordinary substance of the job — letting contracts for metalling roads and grubbing out stumps, fixing the rate, and keeping the district's bridges in repair. In 1861 he and Humphris were sent together to the bridge on the road near the Wheatsheaf to work out what mending it needed, the kind of small practical errand that filled a country councillor's time. The road that ran past his own land would in time come to carry his name.

His public life ran on to the same practical questions of where things should go. At a crowded meeting in the new Emu Hotel in April 1864, called to settle a site for a central school, he seconded Robert Bain's proposal to build it on the ground opposite the Union Chapel — one of three rival sites that split the room, and not the one that finally carried. He held his seat on the council almost to the end of his life, dying at Dunglass on 12 July 1865.

SHERRIFF.—On the 12th July, at his residence, Dunglass, Morphett Vale, Mr. William Sherriff, aged 61 years. An old colonist of 26 years.

South Australian Register (Adelaide), 21 July 1865

William and Mary's children took up much of the public life of Morphett Vale before most of them moved across the gulf to Yorke Peninsula. George chaired the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Society, which met for instruction and debate in a room of the old Emu Hotel; he later became a justice of the peace and took up land at Bubracowie on the peninsula. Another son, William, presided at the society's quarterly soirees in the Victoria Schoolroom and took a seat on the same council his father had helped to found, retiring by rotation in 1871; he farmed from a house he called Vine Cottage, married Jessie Cameron in 1872, and died in 1880 at only forty-four, leaving a young family. John married Elizabeth Long of Hackham and went north to farm at Minlacowie, and their sister Dorothea married Peter Charles King and settled beside her brothers on the same coast.

Mary outlived her husband by nearly thirty years. Born Mary Shirriff — the family name in another spelling — she had kept the farm at his side through all its years, and in her old age she followed her children to the peninsula, dying in 1892 at the Kings' place at Koolywurtie.

SHERRIFF.—On the 29th April, at the residence of her son-in-law, Mr. P. C. King, Koolywurtie, Mary Sherriff, relict of the late William Sherriff, of Morphett Vale, aged 77 years.

South Australian Register (Adelaide), 5 May 1892

An older member of the family had gone before her: Margaret Sherriff, who died at Morphett Vale in 1877 at the age of eighty-four. The records do not fix how she stood to William and Mary, but her death notice, like the name over the farm gate, still reached back to Dunglass in Haddingtonshire, the Scottish coast the family had left.

The line carried on. A second George Sherriff — a grandson, born at Morphett Vale in 1879 to the younger William and Jessie Cameron — married Daisy Hunt, a daughter of Robert Hunt, in 1910 and raised a large family across the southern suburbs of Adelaide; the Sherriffs held land at Aldinga for many years, part of it later cut up and renamed Maslin Beach. They had spread well beyond the two sections their forebear first broke.

Dunglass itself did not last. The farm passed out of the family and the house fell to ruin, and as the twentieth century closed the open country around it was swallowed by the Lonsdale industrial estate. When the site was photographed in 1991 only a low fragment of stone wall remained standing among a stand of old gum trees, a factory shed already filling the horizon behind it.

A generation earlier the land had still been farmland. A photograph from 1964 looks west along Sherriffs Road when it was a dirt track running out over open paddocks toward the gulf, before the quarries and sheds arrived.

The road keeps the name a Scottish emigrant gave his farm in 1839, long after the farm and the family have gone from it.

Sources

• Adelaide Observer (Adelaide), 23 March 1850 — road rate for the Hundred of Noarlunga, listing W. Sherriff holding 160 acres. Trove
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 23 September 1853 — constitution of the District of Morphett Vale, naming William Sherriff among the first council. Trove
• Adelaide Times (Adelaide), 4 January 1854 — first election of councillors for the District of Morphett Vale, at which Sherriff stood and polled five votes. Trove
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 16 March 1855 — Supreme Court, Smith v Craig, the contested roadway between Morphett Vale and Hurtle Vale, with William Sherriff giving evidence. Trove
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 23 January 1862 — published roster of district councils listing the Morphett Vale council under J. B. Myles. Trove
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 25 April 1864 — public meeting at the Emu Hotel on a site for the central school, William Sherriff seconding Robert Bain's proposal. Trove
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 21 July 1865 — death notice of William Sherriff of Dunglass, "an old colonist of 26 years." Trove
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 13 September 1870 — Young Men's Mutual Improvement Society soiree in the Victoria Schoolroom, the younger William Sherriff presiding. Trove
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), family notices, 1872–1880 — marriages and births of the younger Sherriff generation at Morphett Vale.
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 24 April 1877 — death notice of Margaret Sherriff, late of Dunglass, Haddingtonshire. Trove
• Evening Journal (Adelaide), 6 August 1885 — marriage of George Sherriff, J.P., of Caller Brae, Bubracowie, to Marion Catherine Gilbrandson. Trove
• South Australian Register (Adelaide), 5 May 1892 — death notice of Mary Sherriff, relict of William Sherriff, at her son-in-law P. C. King's, Koolywurtie. Trove
• State Library of South Australia, B 19985/6W — old colonists portrait of Mary Sherriff (1813–1892), née Shirriff, recording her arrival on the Georgiana in August 1839 and residence at Morphett Vale.
• City of Onkaparinga Libraries — photographs of the Sherriff homestead ruins and Sherriffs Road, Lonsdale, and notes on the naming of the road.