Donald Sutherland

Elizabeth Sutherland and daughters

at Athol Brae, 1911

Donald & Elizabeth Sutherland with Daisy, Ethel, Eugenie, Doris and George, 1896

Eugenie Sutherland & Huon Scott

The Sutherlands came from Caithness on the rugged northern coast of Scotland near the town of Wick. John was a stonemason, as were most of his sons, including my great great grandfather George. George married Elizabeth Bakie and the couple, with their first child John, sailed to Victoria on the Lord Stanley in 1854, where they disembarked at Geelong, the next largest town after Melbourne.

The family lived in Geelong for three years before moving to the nearby Bellarine Peninsula where George took up farming at Balmoral Farm. Here they had ten more children, of whom eight survived, the four boys all becoming farmers. One of them was Donald who married Elizabeth Hardie in 1884 and had six girls and a boy at their farm Athol Brae, near Drysdale on the peninsula. Donald was an expert with a horse-drawn plough and won several ploughing competitions in the district, culminating in his acquisition of an elaborate silver championship cup in 1887.

Donald and Elizabeth's middle child was Eugenie, my grandmother. She became a milliner in Geelong and married Huon Scott, a clerk, in 1916. My father, John, was the eldest of their five children.

For further genealogical details of the Sutherland family please click on the Descendant chart link below.