Ormiston House, Accommodation, Strahan, Tasmania

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The Ormiston House Book

Preface

  A house can be many things to many people.  As well as the bricks and mortar, which are the material fabric of the structure, the house inherits the experiences from within and absorbs them.  These experiences can be felt as you enter a house.  It can be the difference between a cold unfriendly feeling and a warm welcome.  And so it is with Ormiston House.  Even though the house was in a bad state of repair in 1995, when Mike and Carolyn  first saw her, (for this house is a she), there was a calmness about her.  Albeit a little in distress and desperate for a little tender and loving care.

  This was, and is again, a grand stately mansion.  Built in a time when monuments such as this were built as a testament to achievements of the day.  These homes were a measure of the status of the occupier and in this wilderness area such a grand mansion was not only unique but a wonderful undertaking by F O Henry, his family and of the pioneers and tradesmen who could utilize the meager resources around them and create masterpieces that would not only outlive them but many generations to come.

  This story will never be finished as long as Ormiston House remains standing.  There will always be more stories to tell and more history to unfold.  In that respect this book is but the first chapter with many to follow.  " If walls could talk "…perhaps they can.

The Immigrants

This story starts, not with the building of Ormiston, but many, many years before, in the village of Lerwick in the Shetland Isles.  It was here that the Henrys lived on this wild and isolated group of islands.  Around 100 individual islands make up the Shetlands. The local dialect is derived from Norse and these islands were under Scandinavian rule from 875-1468.  If it were not for the Gulf Stream bringing with it warm waters from the Caribbean these islands would be below the ice belt of the Arctic.  But these are productive fishing grounds and provide for the Shetland Islanders with a wonderful bounty from the ocean.  There would not have been many Shetland Islanders who were not connected with the sea in some way or another and so it was with Robert Henry.  Robert was known as a fisherman and master shoemaker, born in 1777 in the Parish of North Deltane.  His forebears were said to have arrived in the Shetland Islands from Cumberland, which may have been during the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745.  Research continues as to the exact origins of the Henrys, also known as Harry and Harrie.

  On the 8th December 1799 Robert Henry married Margaret Halcrow from the parish of Easting.  They had four children, James, William, John Henderson and Arthur.  In the census of 1841 Robert and Margaret were living at No.19 Barns South Close with a nephew by the name of Alexander, aged 15.  John Henderson Henry was living in Main Street Lerwick with his wife Christina and six children.  In this census, John Henderson Henry is listed as a 'leatherman' by occupation.  After the 1841 census there appeared to be a migration by most members of the Henry family to Leith near Edinburgh.  In the 1851 census there is only reference to William Henry, his wife Elizabeth and four children, remaining in Lerwick.

  We are, of course, most interested in John Henderson Henry.  Born on 11th March 1807, he married Christina Henderson of Whalsay on 15th February 1827.  They had 10 children by the time of emigration to Australia, the youngest of which was Frederick Ormiston Henry.  It would seem that John Henderson Henry and family left the Shetlands just prior to Frederick being born.  John Henderson Henry is noted as building the Queens Hotel House in around 1846 yet Frederick is listed as being born in Edinburgh in 1846.  In those days the Queens Hotel House was a house adjoining two other buildings known as Murray's Lodberri and Murray's Hol.  Named after  Jock Murray, a joiner who had his workshop there.  In a book of old Lerwick it is stated that to the south of Murray's Lodberri stands a house built by the father of the Hon. John Henry of Tasmania.  John, of course, was the elder brother of F.O. Henry and John became a prominent Tasmanian politician.  The house in question now forms the southern part of the Queen's Hotel in Lerwick.

It would appear that Robert and Margaret Henry moved to Leith along with most of their children and  families.  Robert and Margaret lived at 21 Sheriff Brae, Leith.  Robert died on the 28th June 1852 aged 75 and is buried at Rosebank Cemetary, Edinburgh.  Margaret died between 1851 and 1855.

On 20th February 1854 John Henderson Henry and sons John, William and George,  brother Arthur Henry and his wife Anderina, left Liverpool on the Guiding Star bound for Melbourne, Australia arriving on 22nd May 1854.

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