John George Gough
Representing Young, he was first elected in 1889 to the parliament's lower house as a member of the Protectionist Party, which produced Australia's first two prime ministers, Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin.
[2] One of the pioneers of the Young-Grenfell district, he began his working life as a miner and also became a successful contract builder, leaving a fine legacy of public buildings across New South Wales.
His baptismal record describes his father, also John George Gough, as a stock-keeper of Darebin Creek, today Heidelberg in north-east Melbourne.
John George Gough senior was christened in 1807 at West Lavington, Wiltshire, England, and English census returns of his twin brother William show that he was born at the nearby hamlet of Littleton-Pannell.
In 1822, in Parramatta, he married Catherine Kelly, a Catholic born around 1798 probably in Dublin, and sentenced there in 1815 to fourteen years' transportation for attempting to pass a forged banknote.
According to two different branches of fellow descendants, the story came down from previous generations that John Gough's mother Sarah had Aboriginal blood.
According to a published biographical sketch of Gough when he entered the New South Wales parliament, his mother Sarah died when he was an infant.
He may have also been a gold-rush digger—a John Gough was one of the 3,394 signatories of the February 1861 miners' petition at Lambing Flat seeking government assistance to prevent Chinese gold-diggers competing with the Europeans.
The day after his death, the local Burrangong Courier had no explanation for the event: "A man of the name of John George Gough, an old colonist, who occupied a butcher's shop adjoining Myers' cordial manufactory in Main Street, committed suicide yesterday morning by swallowing strychnine.
Gough was a widower, and leaves a young son who is now unprotected, and for whom we now appeal to the sympathies of the generous in order that he may be enabled to earn an honest living."
They erected a large steam saw-mill and joinery works near the goods sheds, Young, and also run a brick factory.
To return from Cooma to Young for the 5 February 1886 local elections there, it noted that he accomplished the 180-mile journey in two days with the same pair of horses, 'a feat which would take a great deal of beating'.
According to his obituary in the Burrangong Argus,[14] after his parliamentary career, he retired from the Young community "and returned to his old love by again attaching himself to mining pursuits.
According to the Australian Heritage Places Inventory, in the early 1890s he bought the Cullinga gold mining operation near Wallendbeen in Cootamundra shire.
On the 1903 electoral roll, described as a mining manager, he appears with his wife and daughter Effie at Yambulla, another remote area straddling the NSW-Victorian border between Bombala and Eden.
Adding that he was respectfully known as 'Jack' Gough to his many friends, the Burrangong Argus obituary commented on his enthusiasm for public matters, his militancy, strong determination, courageous opinions, and skills as a platform speaker, including a 'fine ringing voice' and 'command of emphatic language which he expressed fluently'.
A reminiscence written about John George Gough by the Young Chronicle on the occasion of the death of his widow in 1927 recalled that he was known for his jovial disposition, and was rarely seen without a cigar.
[15] John Gough's story is an inspiring tale of resilience against the odds and of the energetic pioneering spirit which drove colonial Australia's impressive progress.
