Elizabeth Verco extends her family heritage in South Australian medicine, marrying Thomas Magarey, 1848
Elizabeth Verco and Thomas Magarey had 10 children and many granchildren after they married in Adelaide in 1848.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
Elizabeth Verco started another branch of her family’s eminent heritage in South Australia when she married Thomas Magarey in Adelaide in 1848.
Their 10 children included Silvanus, the first to make the Magarey name prominent in the medical profession alongside Verco. The Magarey name became most widely known in South Australia when Elizabeth and Thomas’s great nephew William Ashley presented the Magarey Medal, awarded annually for the best and fairest player in the South Australian National (Australian rules) Football League.
With her mother Philippa and sister Catherine, Elizabeth came to South Australia from Cornwall, England, following her stone mason brother James Crabb Verco and wife Ann and brother John who had arrived in Adelaide in 1840.
Irish-born miller and pastoralist Thomas Magarey was 20 when he arrived in Adelaide in 1845. He spent most of his boyhood in Lancashire “brought up to the milling business”. At 17, with his brother James, he migrated to Nelson, New Zealand, paying his own passage.
On the Fifeshire, he met Protestant Dissenters, who, as United Christians, sbuilt Ebenezer Chapel and started a Sunday school and temperance society soon after landing. Their unity was disturbed by Anglican and Wesleyan ministers arrriving, and Nelson was suffering economic distress. The Magarey brothers decided to try their fortune in South Australia, their interest aroused by wheat imported from Adelaide.
Four years after arriving in Adelaide in 1845., Thomas and James succeeded John Ridley owners of the Hindmarsh flour mill. Thomas took over the business and built up extensive markets locally and overseas. As his first pastoral venture in 1859, he leased a Naracoorte run, its 87 square miles capable of carrying more than 20,000 sheep besides cattle and horses. He held two other smaller south-eastern properties and more areas on Eyre Peninsula, including Tulkea at Sleaford Bay.
After marrying, Elizabeth and Thomas moved to Noarlunga, then Hindmarsh, where he was elected to the district council in 1857. In 1860-63, he represented West Torrens in the South Australian House of Assembly and sat in the Legislative Council in 1863-65. As a legislator, he championed the pastoral industry. He also advocated Bible reading in public schools. Before entering parliament, he had strenuously opposed government grants to churches.
Thomas Magarey was an early joint proprietor of the Register and Observer newspapers and an original director of the Bank of Adelaide.
Thomas Magarey He was intensely religious. Converted to the idea of Christian unity in New Zealand, he was the first to introduce the teachings of the Churches of Christ to Adelaide. With a breakaway group from the Scotch Baptist Church, he had helped found the first Church of Christ in Australia by 1849. He endowed chapels at Hindmarsh (1854) and Grote Street, Adelaide city, in 1856. In 1872, he joined the Plymouth Brethren, basing his “conversion”' on a reappraisal of the doctrine of baptism.
He was very public spirited. Early in life, he started buying blocks of land in the country and renting them at reasonable rates, with the right of purchase, to struggling farmers,, He saw “poor men become comparatively well-off landowners through their application and industry”. In 1876, Thomas Magarey gave 100 guineas to help found the Adelaide Children's Hospital, and donated a fire engine to the Hindmarsh Volunteer Fire Brigade in 1890.
In the 1850s, the Magareys moved to a farm at Enfield, north of Adelaide, where Thomas died in 1903, followed by Eizabeth in 1910.
