James Frederick Porter

His father, Frederick Charles Porter, a miner and explorer of the Gippsland district, brought the family overland to Victoria in 1859.

While his widowed mother, Eliza, took the younger children to Melbourne to live, Jim Porter remained in the district, seeking work in the local mines.

His engineering skills helped this mine produce a record yield in its first seven months of battery crushing (i.e. 1,694 ounces of gold from 1,952 ton of rock).

[4] In 1912, with the gold depleted and the town dying, Porter moved to Bruarong near Yackandandah, where he oversaw the local gold-dredging operations.

[5] Porter retired in 1917, when he was contacted by the Australian Army to collect his badly shell-shocked son, Alfred, who had been invalided home from the Somme.