Outback Family History

Sir James Daniel Connolly (1869-1962)
By Robin Connolly

Sir James Daniel Connolly was born in Queensland, Australia. Drawn as a young man to the newly discovered Coolgardie goldfields, he quickly established himself as a builder and community leader in the late 1890s and early 1900s. He went on to become a well-known state politician in Western Australia. Taking his family to war-torn Europe, he became the State’s representative in England and was knighted. He always worked to further Western Australia’s interests. The family settled in England, and James is buried in a London cemetery.

Portrait of Sir James Daniel Connolly, 1920. Source: National Portrait Gallery, London.

James was born in 1869 in Allora, a small country town in a farming district on the southern Darling Downs, Queensland. His parents, Johanna Callaghan and Denis Connolly, were Irish immigrants who took up land grants in the Warwick area. James was the third-born in a large family; he had a total of 10 siblings, eight of whom survived to adulthood and settled in Queensland.

James trained as a quantity surveyor. His first project was not surveying but building, constructing a school building at Elphinstone, near Allora, where his elder sister Mary worked as a pupil teacher. But he sensed greater opportunities in the west. Gold had just been discovered at Coolgardie when he moved to Perth, Western Australia, in January 1893, aged 23. Then, less than six months after arriving, gold was discovered at what was to become Kalgoorlie-Boulder. The finds opened up a rich goldfield, sparking a major gold rush.

James worked for a year in Perth as a building contractor before winning a government contract to build a temporary post office in Coolgardie, which precipitated his move to the goldfields. Coolgardie was booming, and better postal facilities were sorely needed; recipients sifted through mail left in a tent to find their own letters. James built a simple wood and corrugated iron building in five months for the tendered cost of £464. The building served until the new, much grander permanent post office was built in 1895.

From that simple start, James built a thriving contracting business in Coolgardie. He set up a workshop on the corner of Sylvester and Ford Streets in Coolgardie and proceeded to build a series of ever grander buildings in the town. He built Kennedy’s Family Hotel in 1893, Freemasons Hotel in 1894, various shops and halls through 1895 and 1896 and public baths in 1897.

But the grandest of all was an exhibition building on Bayley Street between Renou Street and Lady Loch Road that James completed in October 1898. The Governor, Sir Gerard Smith, opened the Coolgardie International Mining and Industrial Exhibition on 21 March 1899. Some 3,000 people came to the opening, and a staggering 61,000 visitors attended the exhibition during the three months that it ran. A special medallion was struck to commemorate the occasion.

Coolgardie Exhibition Building at the opening ceremony, 21 March 1899. Source: State Library of Western Australia

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