John Hodgson (Australian politician)
John Hodgson (1799 – 2 August 1860) was an Australian politician, member of the Victorian Legislative Council and Mayor of Melbourne 1853–54. He died at his house in Kew of bronchitis.
According to his great, great grand daughter, Hodgson was born at Studley, Wadworth, Yorkshire in 1799 to William and Mary Hodgson. The Re-member database puts his birthplace in the small west Yorkshire village of Wadsworth.
Studley in Wadworth, and therefore its use in Melbourne, probably draws on the now World Heritage site of Studley Royal Park Yorkshire, famous for the gardens developed over a hundred years from 1716 by the Aislabie family. The gardens were a popular tourist destination during the 19th century.
The oral source says he and his wife, Annie Buckley Hodgson, with three sons and three daughters arrived in Sydney, Australia in 1837. Later that year they settled in Melbourne.
In 1837 a passenger of the same name is reported travelling from Launceston to Sydney on the wooden paddle steamer James Watt. Image of James Watt. Almost a year later, on the same vessel, a Hodgson is recorded taking passage for Port Phillip.
Hodgson became a merchant and speculated in land and in 1840 he took a squatting licence over Studley Park, on Kew's eastern bank of the Yarra River. He built house in Flinders Street and country quarters on the Yarra where he established a punt in 1839; insolvent 1841; grazing interests in Heidelberg district from 1842'.
An early-20th-century report says that in 1837 he bought the land on which the Block Arcade now stands for £23, but that he forfeited the purchase and lost his £2/6/ deposit. In 1839, as the land boom was nearing its bust, he is recorded buying 211 acres (0.85 km2) for just over £1,300. 'The investment of money in land has now become a perfect lottery' said the Argus reporting the sale.
On 11 February 1841 Hodgson became the second person to be registered as insolvent in the Port Phillip district. It appears that like many in the 40s he ran out of cash. By 18 October 1842 he received his Certificate signalling the end of his insolvency. In 1842 a Mr Curr purchased at a sheriff's sale 'at a great bargain' a house ‘lately the property of Mr Hodgson’ on a ‘pretty little spot on the Yarra.’ In 1843 his Flinders Street properties were sold at auction by the Trustees of the Insolvent Estate.
He clearly solved these early problems.
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