Description
Willie Wimmera, an Aboriginal boy, was ten years old when clergyman Lloyd Chase brought him from Melbourne to Reading in 1851. Tragically, he became ill and died only a few months after his arrival. He is buried in Reading Old Cemetery, his grave marked ‘An Australian boy’.
A member of the Wotjobaluk People from the Wimmera region of Victoria, Australia, Willie couldn’t have been further from home – or in a place more different. What was he doing here? Who knew him and where did he live?
A contemporary memoir, republished here for the first time, provides the starting point for this investigation. With information gleaned from the 1851 UK Census and other primary sources, Mary Chambers paints a fascinating picture of Willie Wimmera – creative, curious, affectionate, and sometimes rebellious – and his ‘kind hosts’, the people closest to him during the short time he spent in England.
Mary Chambers. Paperback, 210 x 135 mm, 72 pages, August 2026.
About the author: Mary Chambers grew up in Australia and Devon. She is a proofreader and copyeditor specialising in linguistics and anthropology, and is a volunteer researcher at the Museum of English Rural Life. She lives in Reading, and has always been fascinated by the histories of the people who lived their lives in the streets around her. She published her first local history book aged 18. She is co-author (with her daughter) of a picture book, Alina Saves The Moon, a children’s adventure set around Reading’s last gas tower, and is also working on a novel.
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