The discovery of gold changed everything in Western Australia.
Tag: Dyson
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On Cemetery Hill
Firsts are a tricky thing. The Old East Perth Cemetery was certainly not the first colonial burial site in Western Australia. The unmarked graves of the thirty-odd settlers who died at Clarence by what is now known as Woodman’s Point were filled around about the same time in early 1830, when the first recorded interment at East Perth was taking place. Talking of records, the record-keeping skills of the early Swan River Colonists were pathetic. There is no formal burial register for the unified aggregation of denominational Christian cemeteries that make up Old East Perth Cemetery. There has been a lot of research into who actually might be buried in the ground, but there are certainly many gaps in our knowledge.
Educated guesses are just that—guesses—there is always the possibility of being proved gloriously and magnificently wrong.
The colonial burial ground today. For a site with at least 10,000 interments within it over a seventy year period of use (roughly 1830-1899), there are mere handful of headstones surviving. While wilful vandalism during the 20th Century can account for a lot, haphazard usage over the course of its life (If Cemeteries can be said to be alive?) account for much:—
Sunday Times, Sunday 26 February 1911 p6 Most of the surviving monuments appear to be from the last years of East Perth’s formal operations in the 1890’s. There were probably many more family crypts on the ground than are visible today. Wood rots, Slate delaminates, sandstone crumbles, iron rusts, lead lettering peels away.
Drewy Dyson’s name is taken in vain when discussing the state of the cemetery in 1911. Of course most of Drewy’s immediate family were buried in a family plot on the site. The iron railings and tombstone that still exist in situ were most likely erected by Drewy himself in his capacity as funeral director:—
WHY live miserable when you can be buried comfortably by A. DYSON, Undertaker?
The Daily News (Perth, WA : 1882 – 1950) Friday 18 March 1892 p 2But the occasion of his mother’s death as an excuse for a refurbishment of the family plot was the one time Drewy did not spare every expense. It contained a tribute to his late father who had died eleven years ago and his father’s first wife who, according to Drewy’s monument, died forty-nine years ago. The problem is, Drewy was almost certainly— deliberately— lying about the dating of certain events.
The Dyson family plot lies in the Wesleyan Section of the Old East Perth Cemetery. A stone’s throw away (but I could not condone this sort of behaviour) is the monument to George Shenton, the pious druggist, the merchant philanthropist whose story seemed to intertwine with that of the Dyson family (and every other significant family in the early years of the Colony).
The Grave of George Shenton, senior. 
The Wesleyan Methodist portion of the cemetery was not inaugurated until 1854, so, as the helpful guides from the National Trust can point out to you, how could Frances Dyson have been buried in that location in 1850?Visiting the family grave in June 2018, I was sorry to see how much the Dyson grave stone has deteriorated in the five years since my last visit:—
The Dyson stone in 2018 
The same stone in 2013 I hasten to stress this is no reflection on the current custodians of the cemetery grounds. The grave is surrounded by iron railings and its hard to see how it could be better protected, short of obscuring the stone entirely. The reality is that the money available for any sort of restoration is not there, and while I’d love to see all the surviving stones in East Perth stabilised, possibly something else, like reinstating marker numbers for lost grave sites— they have numbers for existing headstones only— would be more worthwhile. This way many more hundreds, if not thousands of now anonymous grave sites could be identified for visiting, providing a focal point for the pilgrimage of many more families.
Bloody hell! its worse than I thought. This was the Dyson grave circa 1980. [thanks to Lorraine Dyson for the photo] 
More grave numbering please! 
This Star Wars-opening scroll-type stone is for Captain John Septimus Roe who surveyed the site for this cemetery back in 1829. 
Our old friend, Ben Mason 
Also in the Wesleyan section, Francis Fraser Armstrong himself. 
The Old East Perth Cemetery is located (surprise surprise!) in East Perth, Western Australia. It is only open to the public for a couple of hours on Sunday afternoons. There is a small admission charge. I cannot over-stress how helpful the volunteer guides of the National Trust on duty at the cemetery have been to me for my research, particularly on the Dyson family, over many years. -
Happy Gunpowder Treason Day
Bristol, England at dusk on an evening in November 2015. The pops and bangs were very loud and seemed to be right outside of the tiny bedroom I was staying in. It was right outside my window and I was bemused on investigation to find that a collection of children and their parents were setting off full-blown fireworks in the lane-way outside.
5 November 2015 Fireworks Day, or Guy Fawkes Day, or (as it was initially celebrated as a public holiday after 1605), Gunpowder Treason Day, has not been a feature of Western Australian life for at least a generation, and really has passed out the common memory here. I can not ever remember a time when personal fireworks have been legal, and nor should they be. In the dry heat of an Australian November spring, it would be like saying personal nuclear weapons are perfectly safe and socially acceptable.
Knowing a little bit about the history of Guy Fawkes also made me wonder why this was still an event in England, even with the rebranding to Fireworks Day. Elsewhere in that country would still have been bonfires burning, and on many of the pyres the effigy of the eponymous Fawkes would still be combusting.
The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal (WA : 1833 – 1847) Sat 27 Apr 1833 Page 66 For centuries, November the fifth was the official “We all hate the Catholics” day within the British Empire. If you doubt this, look at the calendar of public holidays gazetted in the then newly formed Colony of Western Australia back in 1833. Jesse Hammond recollects back fondly on his school days in Perth in the 1860’s when the Government School boys would fight running battles in the streets with the boys from the Catholic school. On one occasion the local magistrate intervened: He offered three shillings for the winner of that particular brawl…
Hammond reckoned it was all good clean fun, and no-one got hurt—apart from those who did, I suppose.
The original Guy, or Guido, Faulkes had indeed been part of a conspiracy to blow up the English houses of parliament in 1605. There can be no real doubt of his involvement, he was captured in the cellar under the building guarding an enormous cache of gunpowder. Nevertheless he was privately tortured in the Tower of London for some time afterwards to obtain the properly signed and sealed confession that was felt to be necessary before he could be publicly tortured to death. Here are his famous signatures pre and post-interrogation:
Fawkes cheated the executioner’s meat hooks by falling off the scaffold and (accidentally?) breaking his neck, just prior to his legal strangling on the 31 January 1606. But he was destined to be burnt in effigy in perpetuity, every November for the rest of history. Burning had been the preferred method of dispatching heretics (ie: non Catholics) during the reign of the last Catholic monarch England had known prior to the reign of James I (who Fawkes had planned to detonate). If Fawkes and his conspirators had succeeded, the whole of the English ruling class would have been gone overnight. The ramifications of what would have ensued are pretty much impossible to calculate. I suspect the civil wars that would tear England, Scotland and Ireland apart thirty years later and cost the head of James’ useless son Charles, would have commenced a generation earlier. It was by no means certain that the Catholic restoration that the gunpowder conspirators desired would have been the final outcome.
But the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in the very nick of time was a propaganda coup for the administration of the new-ish monarch of England, James, who prior to inheriting this throne in 1603, was (and continued to be) King James VI of Scotland (His own father had been assassinated in a bombing when the future monarch was only 8 months old). The newly proclaimed national holiday was initially celebrated by pope-burning in effigy, but eventually Faulkes would top the pyre on most occasions. In Northern Ireland, the Orange-men could parade through the streets in a “fuck-you” to their next-door neighbours, glorying in how they had stripped them of their political, property and economic rights in the name of religion (then be appalled when stones, and then bombs were thrown back), but for the rest of the British Empire, there was Guy Faulkes.
So it was, in the most loyal British Colony of Western Australia, in Perth, on the 5th November 1900 that my great-grandfather was born, and in memory of a day established to remind everyone of the Protestant supremacy over a hated and persecuted Roman Catholic minority, his parents named their first-born child after a religious extremist, convicted terrorist and would-be-mass murderer.
Bless!
Leslie Guy Dyson (5 November 1900 – 16 September 1974)
