William Buck, Convict "Earl Grey" 1843

GEDCOM Note

William Bucks convict record on Tas bmds online and he married his 1st wife also a convict Mary Kennedy he 32 she 44 on the 23 Apr 1849 (permission granted 27 Mar 1849) he was a labourer on a T of L she a servant William died at his residence at Clarence Plains (near Rokeby) 7 Feb 1901 he had arrived on the "Earl Grey" convict no.

8389 on the 14 Jan 1843 after embarking on 26 Sep 1842 he was tried at Somerset Wells, Buckinghamshire 4 Jul 1842 and got 15 years for stealing coal from his employer, he was described as a line (husner?) and coal miner 5'51/2" tall ,age 26, Sallow complexion, small head, Dark brown hair, thin dark brown whiskers, long face high forehead, brown eyebrows, hazel eyes, medium nose, small mouth and chin, bled(?) both arms small blue mark back of both left and right wrists mole on right arm near elbow

Early History of Apples in Australia.

The first apple tree was planted in Tasmania by Captain Bligh in the 1700’s. Apples were among the first crops introduced to Tasmania by the early settlers. These were initially planted around the homesteads as "house orchards", being part of a near subsistence economy.From the 1820's onwards an ever increasing surplus was exported to new English settlements throughout Australia. By 1860 (the first year of detailed statistics) there were 120 varieties of apples produced in Tasmania - mostly concentrated in the urban and suburban fruit gardens of Hobart in the South and Launceston in the North. The largest concentration of orchards in 1860 was in the Launceston area. The Huon was of minor importance with only 3% of the total crop.In the period from 1860 to 1890, fruit production in Tasmania moved from the northern to the southern areas and hastened the development of commercial orcharding. By 1883 there were 552 orchards in the Huon which gave the district a dominant position with respect to both total production and the quality of its fruit.The initial stimulus for the emergence of specialised commercial apple growing in Tasmania were the good prices obtained in British colonial markets in the 1870's and early 1880's. A much greater incentive was the beginning of successful apple shipments to England in 1876.Overseas exports were aided by two developments in the 1880's - firstly a regular steamship service between Britain and Australia and secondly the adoption of refrigeration. Trial shipments were made to California, British Columbia, Syria, India and Ceylon. The first shipments to Germany were made in 1901. With the changes to Australian trading regulations (Act of Federation in 1901), all inter-colonial duties and tariffs were removed and interstate trade increased to over one million boxes annually.The boom in commercial plantings reached a peak in 1915 when Tasmanian orchards contained 4,420,000 apple trees of which 1,765,000 were non bearing. The major cause of the sharp fall in new plantings was World War I. During the short lived recovery in the 1920's exports from Tasmania reached three million cases (in 1923).Exports have con