The daughter of George Sommerville and his second wife Mary Cherry, Janet Sommerville was born in Melbourne in 1840. Her parents had arrived in Australia just two years earlier, travelling from Sydney to the tiny settlement of Melbourne by bullock dray. Janet was the first child in the family to be born in Australia, growing up amongst a large, blended family of older half-siblings, brothers and sisters.
Her childhood was spent amongst the bustle of hotels and accommodation houses managed by her father. In 1849 George built the Young Queen Hotel on New Sydney Road at Coburg, where Janet spent many of her formative years before the family moved to the Warrnambool district.
Janet was nineteen, when her mother Mary died in childbirth; a tragedy that would later echo cruelly through Janet’s own life.
In 1866 Janet married William Finnis and the couple settled in Colac where William established himself as a stock and commission agent. Together they built a comfortable life in their timber cottage on an acre of land, raising three young children, William, Mary and Robert.
Sorrow overcame the household when two later pregnancies ended in stillborn sons. Then in 1876, Janet became gravely ill with peritonitis. Four days later she died. She was only thirty-four.
Friends spoke warmly of the young mother, “greatly respected and esteemed,” while sympathy poured out for William and the children “suddenly deprived of a mother’s tender care.”
The family scattered in later years and fortunes declined, yet Janet remained at the heart of the family story — remembered beneath the graceful stone that still bears her name alone.
Research by Merrill O’Donnell
Story by Merrill O’Donnell

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