Alexander Mathewson (1827-91) arrived in Victoria in 1854 with his wife Margaret and infant daughter and, by 1857, the family was living just south of Ballarat. Alexander probably chose to emigrate to the colony of Victoria in the hope of making his fortune in the goldfields that had been discovered only a few years earlier. But he would find that much of the alluvial gold had already been mined and that the best returns were now from deep mining. Such mines required much more capital and were mostly developed by joint stock companies. So, recent immigrants like Alexander would have worked a range of jobs to support his family as an employee of these larger mining companies as well as his usual trade of stonemason and doing some surface mining on his own account.

When his wife Margaret Alison died in 1874 at the age of 47 years, Alexander was left with four children aged from 11 to 19 years. He moved then to Melbourne, presumably to be near his eldest daughter who had already moved there after getting married. After initially living in rented houses, he bought a small house in what is now Prahran, re-married in 1884 to a Welsh widow and died in 1891.

Alexander Mathewson was born in Polton St, Cockpen on 6 May 1827. Cockpen-Lasswade is about 20 kms south east of Edinburgh and, at that time, would have been an industrial town with flour and paper mills and coal mines in the area. His father John Mathewson (1787-1868) had been a soldier in the Edinburgh Regiment of Militia during the war with Napoleon and had been stationed near Dunbar where he married Agnes Porteous (1789-1855) in 1809. The Mathewson family had been in the Cockpen area since before 1750 and earlier generations seem to have lived in the Carrington, Temple and Borthwick areas that are 4-7km to the south of Cockpen.

Alexander’s mother Agnes Porteous, his brother William and his wife Euphemia (Preston) all died a few days apart in 1855 during an epidemic of cholera. Their orphan children John (1842-94) and Agnes (b1844) arrived in Victoria in 1862 to join Alexander’s brother Archibald (1832-98) and wife Elizabeth Steven (1833-1912) who had also emigrated there in 1859. After living initially near Ballarat, this other Mathewson family moved to Walhalla around 1871 where John Matheson became the Manager of the Great South Long Tunnel Mine.