The East Gippsland Historical Society will host its latest historic walking tour at the Bairnsdale Cemetery this month, offering a fascinating window into the lives of the district’s pioneering identities.
Scheduled for Sunday, June 28, 2026, at 2pm, the 1-to-1.5-hour guided walk will meander through the cemetery’s oldest sections. Walks directly contribute to the Society’s Museum on Macarthur Street.
Among the many local stories featured on the tour is the remarkable life of Joseph Amphlett Taylor, a man whose history spans colonial kidnappings, the goldfields, and 55 years of local government service.
Born in Worcestershire, England, in 1846, Taylor immigrated to Australia as a two-year-old aboard the Trafalgar. Following his mother’s tragic death shortly after arrival, his father moved the family to Melbourne to establish a butchering business in Collingwood.
It was there, in 1859, that an 11-year-old Joseph became the centre of a sensational colonial crime when he was kidnapped for more than three weeks. He was discovered chained to a wall in Brighton and subjected to regular floggings before being freed by the offender’s wife.
The kidnapper — a notorious sheep stealer also named Taylor — received a 20-year sentence for livestock theft but only two years for the child’s abduction. The discrepancy so enraged the public that police had to intervene to prevent a lynching outside the courtroom.
Seeking a fresh start, the Taylor family moved to Port Albert and onward to the Crooked River gold diggings, where they mined and supplied fresh produce to miners, before permanently settling in Bairnsdale in 1868.
The family acquired land on the eastern bank of the Mitchell River, naming the property “Madresfield”.
The farm became highly successful, winning first prize for its hops at the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition. The family constructed distinctive hop kilns on the riverbank in 1882, which remained a well-known local landmark until they were destroyed by fire in 1994.
When the local hop industry slumped, Taylor and his father returned to their original trade, opening a butcher shop on the corner of Riverine and Bailey streets.
In 1878, Taylor married Elizabeth Harris at St John’s Church of England. Elizabeth possessed her own extraordinary pedigree; born in a tent on the Bendigo goldfields where her father was an early bank manager, she was the granddaughter of Captain Hardy — the legendary naval officer who served under Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar and famously cradled the dying admiral aboard the HMS Victory.
Locally, Taylor was a highly civic-minded community member, serving as a founding member of the Bairnsdale Hospital Committee and as a Freemason. Following his father’s passing, he left retail butchery to become the Bairnsdale Shire Council’s pound keeper—a position he incredibly held for 55 years, only retiring at the age of 90. He passed away in 1941 at the age of 95.
Aside from fundraising walks, the East Gippsland Historical Society Museum (located at 40 Macarthur Street, Bairnsdale) houses a vast collection of local artifacts, historical documents, and photographs. It is open to the public on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and the first Sunday of each month from 10a to 3pm, with research assistance available from society volunteers.
