page_title: Ailsa O'Connor
section_title: Paternal family - Heyfield
hierarchical_section_title: Ailsa O'Connor / Background / Paternal family - Heyfield
caption_attribution_description: English: Portable Iron house, erected 1853 - back door &amp; foundation of outdoor kitchen
context_page_description: Ailsa Margaret O'Connor was an Australian artist specializing in sculpture and painting in the style of realism. Following her belief that art and artists cannot be separated from questions of society and politics, she was an activist against social injustice in Australia and abroad, and particularly against suppression of the rights of women.
context_section_description: Her paternal ancestors descended from a line of stonemasons living in the 14th century town of Airdrie, North Lanarkshire in Scotland. David Donaldson (1820-1886), had left Scotland for America, then joined the new gold rush to Melbourne, Victoria in about 1852. There he married another Scot, Annie Thomson (1826-1906), and set up his own stonemason's company.
  For five years the Donaldsons lived in a pre-fabricated iron house in North Melbourne that is now heritage-listed and conserved by the National Trust.
  In the 1860s the high country to the east of Melbourne caused a number of gold rushes, including in Matlock in 1861. The Gippsland area originally attracted not only gold prospectors but also settlers with agriculture in mind, as well as service providers catering to locals and travellers bound further afield.
  David Donaldson and his family moved east, setting up a general store first in Matlock and then in 1878 in Morwell where he remained until his death in 1886.
  His widow Annie and the two youngest sons, John Goulburn Donaldson and David Donaldson (Jnr) continued to run the general store for more than a decade, until Annie moved back to Melbourne for health reasons and the sons traversed the continent to another gold-rich area, Coolgardie, Western Australia. Annie's daughter, Agnes, had settled in Western Australia in 1894 with her husband, Charles Sommers, who became a member of the Western Australian parliament from 1901-1918, after having been the mayor of Coolgardie, 1896-1900.
  Meanwhile, two other of David Donaldson's children had left Morwell for nearby Aberfeldy: the oldest daughter Elizabeth married an Aberfeldy butcher, the Irishman Thomas Dwyer from Tipperary, in 1879. Shortly afterwards, her brother Henry became the postmaster in the village, from 1880-1885.
  After the death of Elizabeth (September 1884, aged 29) which was followed by that of her husband Thomas Dwyer (December 1885), the three orphaned Dwyer children lived with their grandparents, David and Annie Donaldson, in Morwell. The eldest, John Patrick Dwyer, showed extraordinary academic and sporting abilities, and would later become Chief Justice of Western Australia and be honoured with a knighthood and then a KCMG in 1949.
  At the time of Elizabeth's death, her brother Henry Donaldson and his wife and children also moved away from Aberfeldy to Heyfield, where he was postmaster until 1896. His wife, Elsie, née Scott (1862-1948), took over from him for five years, being Heyfield's postmistress from 1886-1900.
  Heyfield remained their home, and their third son, Ralph Charles continued to live there for many years with his widowed mother Elsie and his wife and three daughters, until the move to the Portland Bakery in 1928.
caption: Portable Iron House, erected 1853 - back view with outline of brick foundation of external kitchen; National Trust property B0354
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