| TLM-P, Thomas and Eliza Prior's elder son, is the focus of this history & was the 3rd Thomas M-P in an unbroken line. In 1834 he left his home and family to emigrate to Australia. What was he like, and what drove him to leave his family for a penal colony some five months away by sailing ship? We have a huge amount of evidence, but that requires sifting and appreciating the different perspectives of the writers. He appears to be an energetic man with a driving need to restore his family fortunes. In this he was a typical man of his time: 'There was a general anxiety about status in New South Wales, and most inhabitants were attempting to assert their social respectability.'((Christine Wright, //Wellington's Men in Australia: Peninsula war and the making of empire c.1820-40//, Houndsmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p.31.)) That social respectability was crucial because it opened up opportunities and networks which enabled fortunes to be made. In TLM-P's case, in later life there was another consideration: of his father's 5 children, he was the only male to survive until middle age, and the only one to have children to carry on his surname. If he failed, his family line failed.\\ | TLM-P, Thomas and Eliza Prior's elder son, is the focus of this history & was the 3rd Thomas Murray Prior in an unbroken line. In 1834 he left his home and family to emigrate to Australia. What was he like, and what drove him to leave his family for a penal colony some five months away by sailing ship? We have a huge amount of evidence, but that requires sifting and appreciating the different perspectives of the writers. He appears to be an energetic man with a driving need to restore his family fortunes. In this he was a typical man of his time: 'There was a general anxiety about status in New South Wales, and most inhabitants were attempting to assert their social respectability.'((Christine Wright, //Wellington's Men in Australia: Peninsula war and the making of empire c.1820-40//, Houndsmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p.31.)) That social respectability was crucial because it opened up opportunities and networks which enabled fortunes to be made. In TLM-P's case, in later life there was another consideration: of his father's 5 children, he was the only male to survive until middle age, and the only one to have children to carry on his surname. If he failed, his family line failed.\\ |
| In the following, we hope to give you enough evidence to make up your own mind about him, his family and their contribution to Australian life. Their varied lives are also a window into colonial life, including the tragic story of white settlement and black dispossession, and the fate of women faced with constant pregnancies.\\ | In the following, we hope to give you enough evidence to make up your own mind about him, his family and their contribution to Australian life. Their varied lives are also a window into colonial life, including the tragic story of white settlement and black dispossession, and the fate of women faced with constant pregnancies.\\ |