Drive past St Philip’s Anglican Church on the corner of Thompson Avenue and Church Street in Cowes, and one of the most eye-catching images on the mural of the church hall depicts a stern woman in colonial black dress.
The woman is Georgiana McHaffie (1830 – 1885), pioneer settler who also held the first Anglican services in her home at Ventnor, making her the founder of the church on the island.
The McHaffie brothers – John and William – occupied Phillip Island under a license from the admiralty in 1842 and farmed it as a sheep run, the first official settlers on the island, (although seven sealers were living here when they arrived).
The brothers paid 10 pounds a year for a licence to occupy the whole of the island, which in those days of course was hard to reach, with uncertain water supply and not considered good arable land.
In 1861, John married Georgiana (nee Henderson), daughter of a captain in the Royal Navy, and they continued to farm the island until the sale by ballot of much of Phillip Island’s land in 1868-69.
From 1862 to 1883 Georgiana kept a diary, recognised as the best and most reliable source of information on the lives of the first settlers, telling of hardships endured and courage on the new frontier.
Joshua Gliddon, author of Phillip Island In Picture and Story, says the gilt-edged, leather covered diaries “reveal a robust and capable woman of wide knowledge and varied interests”.
“She nursed her family, and members of staff through various epidemics,” Joshua writes, “and also cared for cases of accident.
“She was an efficient housekeeper, pianist, and keen gardener, cultivating both flowers and vegetables, baked bread for the station, made large quantities of jam, could set up a cask of homemade sherry, was a dressmaker, and apparently thought nothing of riding for the mail 12 miles distant, shooting game, mustering sheep, or tending ewes during the lambing season.”
As a hobby, she kept silkworms, sold the silk and gave the money together with other sums to hospitals and institutions.
Today shipping in Western Port avoids the large buoy that marks McHaffies Reef, but back in 1862 the only navigation aid in the area was a small wooden beacon supporting a lamp on the high land behind the reef, with the lamp tended by Georgiana.
Some of her diary entries include:
Friday 10 January, 1862: “Bathed in the sea – dreadfully hot”; Thursday 16 January, 1862 “So cold as to have a fire.”
In that same year she reports a whale on back beach, and on another day “drove out and killed two snakes”, “went to Nobbies; killed 2 kangaroos, 1 plover”.
On November 24, 1878, Georgiana reports that “everybody gathering mutton bird eggs”, and the following year in December “still cutting peas. Millions of caterpillars”.
An indicator of how much the island has changed over the centuries, on October 25, 1880, “grand deer hunt. Mr Harbison gave a fine luncheon – no deer to be had”.
Entries in 1882 included: “sowing the croquet lawn”, “plenty of strawberries” and “came home very tired”.
Joshua Gliddon writes that in later years Georgiana suffered from arthritis, with her handwriting reflecting the affliction, with black spaces in her diary beginning to appear, with nothing written after 1883.
At the time of settlement, the McHaffies had 10,000 sheep on the island.
