Caroline Newcomb

Geelong Pioneer

Caroline Newcomb was born in London on 5 October 1812, the daughter of Samuel Newcomb, British commissary in Spain. On medical advice she emigrated to Hobart Town in 1833. John Batman took her to Port Phillip in 1836 as governess to his children, and in 1837 she went to Geelong to stay with Dr Alexander Thomson. There she met Anne Drysdale. After her partner's death she continued to run the Coryule property and to take an active part in local affairs; in June 1855 she convened the first meeting of the Ladies' Benevolent Association of Geelong. On 27 November 1861 she married the Wesleyan minister of the township named after her partner, Rev. James Davy Dodgson (1824-1892), who had arrived in the colony in 1857. She died at Brunswick on 3 October 1874, and was buried beside Miss Drysdale at Coryule; their remains were later removed to the Eastern Cemetery, Geelong.

A firm friendship developed from the business partnership. Both women were cultivated, energetic, independent, and God-fearing; but they were dissimilar in background and in temperament. Anne Drysdale combined the dignity that befitted her secure social position with a quiet determination, a cheerful tolerance, and a readiness to take the bad with the good. Lacking the same support of private means and family connexions, Caroline Newcomb had to rely on personal qualities in making a place for herself. She won esteem as an excellent horsewoman and a vital, intelligent, and kindly personality, although in later life her self-assertiveness and quick temper apparently gave her a formidable demeanour. Anne admired, and perhaps envied a little, the younger woman's abilities, and came to depend on her, not only for companionship, but also for much of the drive and initiative that secured their comfort and prosperity. Both were sustained by an abiding religious conviction, but it was Caroline who presided over their daily devotions, who actively propagated the gospel, and who left, in fragments of her personal diary, the record of her struggles to master her own nature and attain grace.