Person

West, John (1856 - 1926)

Born
23 August 1856
Mount Ararat, Victoria, Australia
Died
22 February 1926
Toolern Vale, Victoria, Australia
Occupation
Journalist and Horticulturist

Summary

John West bought 22 acres (8.9 ha) of land (Milvina) in 1886 in the first irrigation settlement in Victoria. He worked on his land until 1903, supplying vine cuttings for Chaffey Bros; propagating peach, pear and apricot stock for the orchards of Ardmona; and training future horticulturists till 1903. He also worked at various times as a journalist and was active in public affairs. West was prominent in Victoria's pre-Federation politics, founded the Triple Reform League in 1894 and was a founding member of the Kyabram reform movement c.1902.

Details

At age 13 John West worked as a garden and stablehand, before joining Brunnings Nursery and attending night-school to qualify as a state schoolteacher. After graduation he taught at Tatura and Murungi in Victoria then worked as the farming editor for the "Shepparton News" for some years. West founded the "Euroa Advertiser" in 1885 and then bought his Milvina property in 1886. In 1890 he studied irrigation in California for the Australian government. In 1903 he 'retired' from Milvina he joined the Argus and worked on a farm at Toolern Vale.

Published resources

Book Sections

  • Steven, Margaret, 'West, John (1856-1926), journalist, horticulturist and irrigation pioneer' in Australian dictionary of biography, volume 12: 1891 - 1939 Smy-Z, John Ritchie, ed. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), pp. 445-446. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A120498b.htm. Details

Resources

Rosanne Walker

EOAS ID: biogs/P002735b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 November (Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - early summer - season of butterflies)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#ballambar
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P002735b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260