in Australia
Mylnefield then Eatonswill
By 1840, the Mylnes were "of Mylnefield" only in a historical sense. Thomas fifth of Mylnefield, his wife Elizabeth Guthrie and two of their ten children (Agnes and the first Charles) had died, and Mylnefield had been sold. Thomas's two elder sons James and John had come to Australia in 1839, and in 1840 they established a cattle grazing property near Grafton, New South Wales, which they called Eatonswill. The younger sons left Scotland as they came of age: Thomas to join James and John at Eatonswill (1841), William and the second Charles (named after his brother who died young) to join the Bengal army of the Honourable East India Company Service (HEICS) (1845 and 1853), and Graham Douglas to join the British Army (1853). Their sisters Anne and Elizabeth (Elizabeth was always known as Letty) remained in Scotland until 1857.
In August 1857 John and Tom, who were returning to Eatonswill from a holiday in Scotland, and Anne and Letty who had left Scotland intending to join their brothers at Eatonswill, were all drowned in the wreck of the Dunbar off Sydney Heads. Later that year, James died at sea off Malta, as he was on his way home to the UK.
The three younger brothers, now the only surviving children of Thomas, were fighting in India in response to the Indian Mutiny, and they took some time to deal with the fact that they now owned an Australian cattle station. Charles visited Eatonswill in 1858, but returned to India in 1859, and it was the youngest brother, Graham Douglas, who came to Australia in 1859 to take over the management of the station on behalf of himself and his two brothers William and Charles.
Graham Douglas Mylne and (after April 1861) his wife Helena White lived variously at Eatonswill, Amby Downs (a sheep station in Queensland of which Graham was part-owner) and Brisbane. They had seven children, of whom one (Algernon) died in infancy, and four (Anne, Tom, Helena and Nina) did not marry. Ethel married William Ogilvie, the son of a neighbour, and Graham Ernest married Kathleen Nicolls. Both have living descendants, but there were Mylnes at Eatonswill for just 36 years. The station was broken up and sold after Graham Douglas's death in 1876.