Henry Joseph Curran

His parents, Joseph Curran, a shepherd, and Margaret Conba, a dairy maid, both from Cork, arrived in Sydney through the assisted passage scheme on the Lascar in 1841.

The Currans were indentured workers on the farms of the MacLeod family at ‘Maryvale’ in Liverpool and then ‘Barnsdale’ in Gundaroo, before moving to 'The Oaks' near Queanbeyan in 1847.

[2] In 1857, thirteen-year-old Curran won an apprenticeship at the Goulburn Chronicle and Southern Advertiser, which had been recently established by William Vernon and Ludolf Mellin.

[3] The Chronicle was taken over in 1864 by its less-liberal rival, the Goulburn Herald and County of Argyle Advertiser, owned by William Riley and Breadalbane’s absentee squire, James Chisholm.

[8] When Curran wrote up his account of Hall’s hold-up of the Yass Mail in which the passengers were taken to his brother-in-law’s Breadlabane Hotel and shouted lunch by the gang, the authorities came down hard.

This occurred shortly before an early morning raid on nearby Byrne’s farm, where Hall’s gang was surprised and almost captured after a fierce gunfight.

[12] Curran established the Burrowa Advocate in August 1873, but due to divisions within the community arising from Dunne’s reforms, the paper failed to gather enough support to survive.

His youngest child, Francis, aged 16 months, was put into an orphanage, while his eldest son, Henry Roland Curran, tried to support the remaining children on a factory worker’s wage.