Pioneers of The Bradley Grange

One of the seventy pioneer Australian families, the Bradleys have occupied an active and distinguished place in Australian history since Jonas Bradley arrived with the Third Fleet in 1791 as a sergeant in the 102nd Regiment. Jonas Bradley was the first successful grower of tobacco in Australia. In recognition of his pioneering work in this regard - considered as immense economic and social benefit - the Agricultural Society, in the first award it ever issued, presented Jonas Bradley with a silver quart tankard. Jonas in turn offered to present the Society with a statement of his mode of tobacco culture, cure and manufacture. Jonas in his own right was a significant landholder, sheep and horse breeder and pastoralist.

Jonas Bradley and Catherine Spears, his wife, had two children :

Thomas and William Bradley, both Australian born, being born in Windsor, northwest of Sydney, in 1796 and 1800. There are not many first-generation Australian businesses still about; the Goulburn Brewery, designed by Francis Howard Greenway for the Bradley brothers, is one of them.

The older brother, Thomas, was the original grantee of the Goulburn district called Gundary Plains. He died young, at the age of 39 years, in 1835. After his brother's death, William Bradley entered into partnership with William Shelley, son of the missionary, and pioneer explorer of the Bungonia Caves.

Through William, the Bradley family became associated with the pioneer Arndell and Hovell families. Thomas Arndell, surgeon on the First Fleet, sired a daughter to an Italian singer by the name of Isabella Maria Foscari, about whose forebears Lord Byron later wrote a play which Giuseppe Verdi used as the basis of his opera 'I due Foscari'. Thomas Arndell's daughter married William Hilton Hovell, the explorer, who was born at Yarmouth in 1786 exactly 700 years after his family migrated to that port as part of the Norman conquest of Britain. Hovell's forebears were Vikings who became kings of Naples and Sicily, whence they came to England. Hovell came to N.S.W., Australia, in 1813 with John Dickson and his two apprentices, Thomas Barker and Peter Stuckey - people who were the pioneers of steam technology in Australia and who were to become extensively involved with the Bradleys and the Goulburn Brewery. In 1831 William Bradley married Hovell's only surviving child. They had eight children' many died young, the five surviving daughters marrying into distinguished families when they took Major-General James Langford Pearse, Dr. Samuel Thomas Heard, Mr. Edward Maitland, Admiral Frederick C.B. Robinson and Colonel Charles Fyshe Palmer Roberts as husbands.