Victoria, arriving in Melbourne on theJoshuain January 1852. Thefirst gold
rushes in Victoria had begun in mid-1851, and family tradition had always
held that the Shaws and McKays came in quest of gold. However, the news of
the gold discoveries did not reach Ireland until well after they had left, so it
appears that it was just good luck that they arrived in Melbourne in January
- They could not have chosen a better time. It is not often talked about
these days but Victoria was the Saudi Arabia—or perhaps, more accurately, the
Norway—of the 1850s. Gold mining made Victoria enormously wealthy. On a
per capita basis Victoria was probably the richest place in the world from the
1850s to the early 1890s.^3 And it was a wonderful place to be a worker. Labour
was scarce so wages were high and unemployment low, factors which account
for Australia leading the world in the introduction of the eight-hour day (from
the mid-1850s) and legislation regulating working conditions (first introduced
in Victoria in 1873 (Gollan 1960)).
Thefirst generation of Shaws in Australia did very well. George Shaw, the
author’s great-grandfather, spent a short time on the gold diggings at Ballarat
but he quickly realized that, barring a lucky strike, there was more money to be
made in selling provisions to the miners than being a miner. With his brothers
he began buying goods cheap in Melbourne and selling dear in Ballarat and
Bendigo. The businessflourished and, by the 1860s, he was a wealthy man
with large shops in Melbourne and the goldfields. In my largely teetotal family
it was always said that George Shaw sold groceries, but his newspaper advert-
isements from the 1860s and 1870s show that he was primarily a wine, spirits,
and tobacco merchant.^4 The McKays, on the other hand, persisted longer with
mining without ever striking it rich, and then settled on a farm near Raywood
in central Victoria in the 1860s. The two families always remained close, and
in 1869 George Shaw, then aged 41, married 29-year-old Eliza McKay. They
built a large house in East Melbourne and settled down to raise their family
of eleven children. Eliza’s brother, Nathaniel McKay, and his wife, Mary, had
twelve children in their little farmhouse near Bendigo, the fifth being
named Hugh Victor, more commonly known by his initials H. V., who was
born in 1865.
The Shaw children were educated at private schools in Melbourne, with the
boys either entering the professions—medicine or law—or being settled by
their father on large grazing properties in western Victoria. In stark contrast,
their cousin H. V. McKay left school at the age of 13 to work on the family
farm. During the 1870s and 1880s, the wheat industry in Victoria was growing
rapidly, but farm labour was expensive and in short supply. Consequently,
(^3) During this period Australian gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was perhaps 25 to 30 per
cent above the USA and up to 20 per cent above the UK (McLean 2013, p. 12). 4
A lively, but not altogether accurate, history of the Shaw family is Shaw (1976).
Peter Yule