Melody Family and Australia.

THE AUSTRALIAN CONNECTION
By Paul Melody

As well as emigrating to the USA from their home country of Ireland, members of the Melody family also shipped across to Australia. Plenty is known about the American connection, but very little is known about the life of early Melodies in Aussie. Many modern Australians like to claim they have descended from their country's big early convict population, but the original Melody clan in Australia were strongly Irish.

William Melody, the founder of the New Zealand Melody clan trekked from goldfield to goldfield when he joined the big gold-rush in California in 1849. From there he moved to Ballarat in Australia, where he met an Irish girl, Eliza Moran, daughter of a family from County Galway. When they married in 1856 he was 28 and she was 21. Their first child, Sarah Marie, was delivered in a tent on the Ballarat gold -fields in 1857.

William and Eliza stayed in Ballarat for 4 years until he was tempted by the great gold fields at Gabriel’s Gully in Otago, New Zealand. In 1861 and crossed the Tasman to check out the prospects. He was so impressed with the Gabriel’s Gully gold finds that he hurried back to Oz to collect his wife and young daughter and return with them to Otago to try his luck.

Now the Coleman family enter the picture. In 1864 a girl named Ellen Coleman was born to Edwin and Ellen (nee Dunn) Coleman, who lived in a tiny gold-mining settlement in the state of Victoria, titled Porcupine flat.

By coincidence when the original exodus of William Melody and his parents took place in 1840, the Melodies were in immediate contact with a family named Coleman in Illinois, who were said to be their cousins.

Mary Ellen Coleman grew to the age of 16 with her family. who included a brother, James Just Coleman, and three sisters. They were Susan, who was in 1943 living in Maldon. Katherine (Maldon) and Agnes (Auckland).

Photo from a 1969 Women"s Day article, with Eric"s note beneath.

When the teenage Mary Ellen came to New Zealand in 1880 she immediately took a job as a housemaid at Whangaehu Hotel, 10 miles from Marton, which was owned by her uncle, Owen McKittrick. This man had been a champion of William during his South Island goldmining days at Hokitika. Both men operated hotels along the famous Revell Street in Hokitika in the mid 1860s.

Marriage: It's not known where Mary Ellen met John Patrick Melody, but seven years after landing in New Zealand She and JP were married at Patea, where he worked as a butcher in the local freezing works. This was early in 1887, when JP was 24 and she was 25.