Hi Judith, I have been wondering the same myself. My Australian Geography is not great. I live in S W Scotland now. However I see he wa arrested for being drunk and disorderly in Petersham in 1892 reported in Sydney Herald. I am not sure whereabouts that is will try and check it out. He was a brick makers foreman according to a report into his death at Millingtons I think, but he still lived in camp. He was a bit of a step up from a casual labourer if he was a foreman and I have read earlier reports and he held that position when giving a report into a shooting. I would imagine there was a great deal of building going on in Australia at that time which is probably why he came out in the first place, maybe he heard about opportunities from the brickworks in Ruabon where he worked. Maybe his mothers death affected him, he had 4 sisters and he was the baby of the family, sure they would have made much of him but they had all married by 1881 last census report of him over here and started their own families. He seems to have been a nice mannered lad certainly when younger he was injured at Bowers Brickworks about 1874, be only about 12 or 13 then and he was in hospital for 12 weeks so must have been a serious injury. He wrote to the local paper thanking the hospital for his care and named various people in his letter who had been very kind to him during his stay in hospital. I puzzled over his name, he was born Samson Lemon, later Lionel was added as a middle name. He came from a family of very recent Jewish background. His father had been a devout Jew, (know this from Liverpool Archives Synagogue Records) till he married out of the faith, I think it was a desperate measures marriage, although from other things I have read/researched I believe it to have when they both settled down to have been a happy marriage. Samson appears to have changed his name to Samuel unofficially I presume, I wonder if that was to escape from possible Jewish connections. I do wonder though like you, why he did not settle in one place, I am not sure there would have been a lack of job opportunities in the brick trade at that time. I wonder why he did not marry as again he was a step up from a labourer. I think some of his behaviour stems from the hard life of a single man with no stable home and a hard job as well. I don't suppose we will ever know. I don't think as he was British he would have had to apply for naturalisation. I looked at the cemetary records and there is nothing for him which is a bit sad.
He must have been buried in an unmarked grave and even though he only left £7, that was worth a lot more than it would be nowadays. Jenny
