Fran Brew, who has supplied the information for this article, has been one of those organising the event and has supplied a photo of her great-grandfather William Stapley.

Henry and Emma Stapley arrived in the colony and became pioneers in the O’Connell area in the early 1840s.

On August 9, 1839, Henry and Emma Stapley from the village of Wadhurst in Sussex stood bravely on the main deck of the Mary watching the gold-tinged land of England slip further astern into the distant haze as passengers and crew sang Rule Britannia followed by three cheers for old England.

They were bounty immigrants headed for NSW to make a better life. At that time, much of the farming land in their native Sussex was infertile due to overcropping and a lack of capital for pasture improvement, so agricultural labourers like Henry Stapley struggled to find work.

After arriving in Sydney, Henry and Emma lived for a short time at Parramatta before making the arduous journey across the Blue Mountains to work on the property “Brisbane Grove” on the O’Connell Plains, owned by the Reverend William Walker, a Wesleyan preacher.

He almost certainly converted the Episcopalian Stapleys to Wesleyanism, the Wesleyan churches at Macquarie Plains and Bloom Hill later becoming the focus of community life for the Stapleys. At that time, the 2000 acres at Brisbane Grove on the Fish River were devoted to sheep and cattle, and later a vineyard and orchard were developed.

Life must have been tough when the Stapleys arrived, as a harsh drought had been ravaging the land since 1837. By 1840, most stock had died, food was scarce and the Bathurst Carrying Company that brought needed goods from Sydney had sold out.

The sufferings of the drought were compounded in 1840 by a severe economic depression that only began a slow recovery in 1844. The Stapleys eked out a living for 10 years at Brisbane Grove where Emma gave birth to four children; Mary, Annie, George and William.

In May 1851, the discovery of payable gold changed the life of the Bathurst region. The first gold in the O’Connell area was found in June 1851 right under the Stapleys’ feet on Reverend Walker’s land.

However, this lode, the Havilah Diggings, was not particularly rich, so Henry Stapley, along with most of the men from the O’Connell area, rushed north to the Turon.

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald on August 13 of that year described the abandonment of O’Connell to the women and children and the brief return from the Turon of Henry Stapley and a couple of his neighbours to clothe themselves, provide for their families, take out licences and to show off a nugget as a memento of their findings so far. The paper reported that in July alone they each made £1,650.

Soon, Henry had amassed enough wealth to move his family off the land and into the town of Bathurst, building three substantial cottages in Rankin Street, using one as a residence and letting out the other two.

He proceeded to decorate and furnish the cottage in a style that they could only have dreamed about a few short months before.

Henry was now a man of means, driving his family around Bathurst in a smart gig and purchasing other allotments in town for grazing his team of horses. By late 1855, after the loss of their elder daughter Mary and baby Martha, the Stapleys sold up all their real estate and goods to make the long and perilous journey back home to Britain.

But their stay back in their home village of Wadhurst turned out to be short. Something drove them in just a few months to take to the high seas yet again to return to NSW.

Maybe the money was running out or they missed the sunshine and wide blue skies arching over the rolling plains. This time they brought with them Emma’s brother Stephen Seymour and his family, returning to the rich black soils of the Macquarie Plains.

In 1864, Henry and Stephen Seymour took up leases of several hundred acres on crown land on what is known today as Bosworth Falls Road and grew wheat crops with varying success.

Henry remained a prospector throughout his life, but, with exception of a significant copper find at Wiseman’s Creek in 1872 that resulted in a mine, he would never again accrue the fortune of his earlier efforts and misfortune was never far away.

In July 1885, a distressing item in the Bathurst Free Press described the appearance of Emma Stapley before the magistrate having been taken into custody for being of unsound mind.

Her symptoms of madness had increased over the previous few years and Henry was no longer able to cope with her escalating violence and incoherence. He was ordered to commit her to the Asylum for the Insane at Parramatta where she died a year later aged 64 and interred at Rookwood Cemetery in an unmarked grave that is covered in bright yellow coreopsis every spring.

Henry passed away a few years later in 1893 and his lone headstone stands sentinel in a farmer’s field in what was once the graveyard of the Bloom Hill Wesleyan Church.

Their legacy is numerous descendants, some of whom remained on the land. Others moved into nearby towns like Bathurst and Forbes to contribute to the fabric of society there, whereas others gravitated to the city for better prospects and education.

But life comes full circle. 

In the 21st century, the country can often offer a better lifestyle than the crowded city and some descendants have returned to Bathurst and are putting roots down not far from where their colonial story began over 170 years ago.