Meet the Borowski Family

by David F Radcliffe

When writing Changing Fortunes in 2020, I could not find any photographs of the many people and families featured in the book. Through writing their stories, I came to know them, even though I had never ‘seen’ them. Just before Christmas 2024, Rudolph and Mary Borowski, who lived at 47 Spring Street East for nearly fifty years, suddenly ‘appeared’. The picture quality was not perfect, but there they were, looking back at me, the Borowski family.

Rudolph Heinrich Borowski was born in a small village near Danzig, Prussia (now Gdańsk in Poland) in 1861. He became a mariner and was a crew member on the steamer Etna from Hamburg to Sydney in 1882. He decided to stay in Australia and soon moved to Melbourne. When he purchased the land at 47 Spring Street East in November 1884, he was renting in Gladstone Place in Montague. In January 1885, Rudolph married Mary Matilda Johnston. He was 23, and she was 22. Mary came from Belfast (now Port Fairy). Her fisherman father, Thomas Johnston, drowned there when Mary was in her late teens, so her mother and younger siblings moved to Melbourne.

Mary and Rudolph moved into the unpretentious three-room house he built on Spring Street East. He worked as a wharf labourer. Their daughter Matilda Elizabeth was born there in 1886, and their son, James Rudolph, in 1888. In 1891, as the depression following the boom of the 1880s struck, they rented their house and moved next door to the small shop on the corner of Esplanade East and Spring Street East and operated it as a greengrocer. Their daughter Ruby May was born there the following year. By the end of 1896, the young family had moved back to 47 Spring Street East. In September 1897, the mortgage was paid off.  Rudolph Borowski was naturalised on 20^th December 1900.

The first decade of the new century saw joy and sorrow for the Borowski family. Their daughter Matilda Elizabeth married William Dunn Comber in 1906, but he passed away the next year just after she had given birth to their son, Willy. After remarrying in 1909, Matilda lived around the corner at 313 Esplanade East with her new husband Reuben Fuller. 

There was anguish and disbelief when the love of Ruby’s life, Jim Dellar, died in 1911 aged 25. On the first anniversary of Jim’s death, Ruby and her mother placed the following tribute in the Age “in the sad, sad loving memory of my dear friend, Jim, who died on 7^th June 1911”.

Kind was his heart, in friendship sound.
Patient in pain, loved by all around.
Sweet to our memory, dear to our heart.
Our love for his memory never shall part.

James Rudolph married Myrtle Carroll in 1912, and they lived around the corner at 301 Esplanade East, a house rented from engineer and First World War hero John Monash. Later, they moved to 295 Esplanade East and, subsequently, to 18 Spring Street East. James and his brother-in-law Reuben were office bearers at Port Melbourne Railway United footy club, VJFA premiers in 1910, 1913 and 1914.

Ruby overcame her grief and married in 1914. Her three children were baptised at Holy Trinity Church in Bay Street, even though she had moved to Coburg by the time the third one was born. Sadly, the marriage was not a happy one, ending acrimoniously in divorce, with Ruby successfully arguing in court that the house they shared was hers alone, built on land that her father Rudolf had given to her.

Mary Borowski was a thoughtful neighbour always lending a hand to others in need. During the First World War, she was an energetic member of the Women’s Welcoming Committee, responsible for the floral arch. Later she was active in the Australian Women’s Association, becoming president of both the Port Melbourne and South Melbourne branches. 

The family often picnicked at Cockatoo on land originally purchased by Annie Porritt of 271 Esplanade East. Annie subdivided the land into long narrow blocks which she sold to ladies across Port and South Melbourne, including one to Mary Borowski. In early 1919, Mary and Rudolph’s two-year-old grandson, Ernest William (Billy), son of James and Myrtle, tragically drowned during a family camping trip to Cockatoo. 

The Borowski family later built a cottage on the Cockatoo property, a place of sanctuary. The matriarch, Mary Borowski, died there in January 1934. Rudolph had passed away six months earlier. The holiday home remained in the family until the 1950s, a place of many family memories. It was one of the three hundred or so homes destroyed in the tragic 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires. 

These photos of the Borowski family came to light after Ruby’s grandson, John Peck, discovered a copy of Changing Fortunes while he was gathering material for a pictorial history of the Peck Family. It is always exciting to meet a descendant of someone whose story you have endeavoured to tell and to learn more about them from the family’s ‘insider’ perspective. This was also the case with Jane Adam and Bessie Ross.