THE CONNELLS, KEATINGS AND DWYERS
Mostly
from Jack Broderick of Yenda but also information
from some of those who attended the early Broderick Reunions
including Tricia Broderick of the Broderick Famly Tree fame
-- as compiled by Dick Condon (married to Jack’s daughter Dorothy)
in the mid-1970s.
In the late 1800s, the Connells lived out near "Molka" station near Pranjip? and some of the family moved to Barooga ( on the north side of the Murray River, south of Berrigan) with the Keatings, Brodericks and Dwyers.
The Keatings were one of the families involved in the construction of the Catholic church at Euroa. Father Mort Kerrins (who attended the 1973 reunion -- then from the Sacred Heart Monastery at Kensington) is a son of Joe Kerrins who married one of the Connell girls and was farming at Myalla (?).
The families had moved to Barooga to take up sharefarming on Barooga station, all in the same 6,000 acre paddock marked out in 320-acre (half a square mile) blocks. This was sandy country carrying white cypress pine and had been cleared by the Chinese ringbarking gangs after the gold rush at Ballarat and Bendigo had faded out. (The above and following paragraphs taken from the account of the Brodericks at Miepoll).
Prior to the 1870s, the country had carried only scattered timber, but a run of wet seasons in the 1870s, coinciding with the lack of fires by which the Aborigines had managed the landscapes, brought about a thick scrub of young white cypress pine and associated species. This had seriously hindered government plans for farming settlement until the ringbarking gangs employed by the big pastoral stations had killed all the scrubby timber. The forest of dead trees then had to be cleared to enable the land to be farmed.
The lay-out of the farms at Barooga was as below (per Jack Broderick)
The Ganmain-Coolaman-Narrandera area was also settled by farmers coming up from the Barooga area to grow wheat.