|
| In this issue... | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|

| Cornishmen on the up |
|
|
|
Page 4 of 4 In 1866, John’s family joined him after an absence of more than ten years. Catherine came first, then the children followed a year later and were soon settled into their new home, named Rosemundy after his own home area in St Agnes. John and Catherine had three more children in Australia, of which one died as an infant. By the early 1880s, John Goyne had become a wealthy man. Shipments of English sheet iron and steel were arriving constantly at his factory to keep up with the production of his gold sieves. His property at Rosemundy had grown to include the house, offices and factory all within its bounds. It was a large house, and one of the first houses in Bendigo to be lit by electricity. On his retirement, one of John’s sons took over and the factory continued to make stamper gratings well into the 1920s. ![]() Pictured is Perranarworthal Church where Isaac Killicoat was baptised and the old road that he would have used each Sunday to walk to church. They say that all the best ideas are quite simple and that necessity is the mother of invention and here we have a simple devise, created and developed by one enterprising Cornishman who saw and met a need. John Goyne died in 1907 at the age of 81 years. He was a man who played no small part in the prosperity of the Bendigo mining area. He made his money from a small and simple invention which helped others to recover an incalculable amount of gold which would otherwise have been washed away and lost. To this day there is still a Goynes Road and Rosemundy Road in the area where he lived and Rosemundy, the house he named after his childhood home still stands, perhaps no longer echoing to the sounds of the servants bells, horses hooves and the factory next door or even approached along a formal drive with impressive gates and picket fence but, there for all to see as a reminder of this Cornishman whose name is imbedded in the history of the area. Bob Richards Cornwall Family Finders, email: bobr.stkilda@dsl.pipex.com | ||||||