Jeremiah Ware (1792–1878) arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1822 with his wife, Mary (née Brooks, c. 1789–1858) and their four eldest children, Jeremiah George, Joseph, Sarah Ann and Maria. The family settled in Hobart, Jeremiah initially trading in general merchandise before being appointed the head of the government’s Ordinance Stores. A further four children were born to Jeremiah and Mary in Hobart: Lucy, John, Mary Ann and Amelia. Around 1830, Ware acquired a property, named Dungrove, near the midlands town of Bothwell. By the early 1840s, he had developed Dungrove into a substantial farming and grazing enterprise; by the time he put it on the market, in 1856, it was advertised as ‘containing about 3,000 acres of fine grazing land’ plus ‘one thousand five hundred fine-woolled clean sheep and fifty head of cattle’. It was by the mid-1850s also that Ware’s sons, Jeremiah George, Joseph and John, were establishing their own pastoral enterprises in the Western District of Victoria. Jeremiah George (1818–1859), the eldest of Jeremiah and Mary’s children, had relocated to Port Phillip around 1838 and eventually became a major landholder in the districts of Colac and Camperdown, acquiring independently or in partnership with his brothers properties such as Koort-Koort-Nong, Minjah, Yalla-y-Poora and Jellalabad (purchased by Dowling’s brother, Thomas, in the 1850s. Jeremiah George later served as a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly. Jeremiah senior and Mary remained in Tasmania, returning to Hobart during the late 1850s. Mary died in Hobart in July 1858. In August 1860 in Launceston, Jeremiah married widow Ann Watson (the ceremony conducted by Dowling’s father, Henry). Jeremiah Ware died at his home in New Town, Hobart, in August 1878.
