Gordon Roy Cameron, 1899-1966

Abstract

Gordon Roy Cameron was born in Australia on 30 June 1899 at Echuca, a small town on the Victoria side of one of the bends on the Murray River. His father, George Cameron, was then a Methodist minister at a small village called Wamboota. George Cameron’s parents (Grandfather Cameron and his wife, earlier a Miss Miller) who came of hard-working farming stock in Dyce, Aberdeenshire, with forbears in Inverness and Fort Augustus, had left Aberdeen for Australia the day after their marriage early in the 1870’s and taken up land in Minlaton in St Vincent’s peninsula, South Australia. They had eleven children, of whom George Cameron was the eldest; he seems to have had a hard life on the farm. When he was twelve years old the Government of Victoria began opening up the Mallee area in northern Victoria, and he and his father each drove a wagon containing members of the family and their few goods over the 500 miles trek—much of it over uncleared scrub, desert and hill country—from Minlaton to the Mallee area, where they took up about a hundred acres of scrub to make a farm, later extended to some two thousand acres. There they and their neighbours built the mud house that still survived in 1920. Some fourteen years later the farm was going well, the younger children were growing up, and George Cameron, who had recently taken part in Bible Christian services and had developed a reputation as a local preacher, decided to join the Bible Christians as a candidate for the Ministry. In due course he was appointed to a circuit as a probationer in Horsham, North Victoria, where he met Emily Pascoe, whom he later married.