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CALVERT

BIOGRAPHIES

Studio portrait of Lois Calvert (1955)

KATHLEEN LOIS
CALVERT
(1937-2026)

A sixth generation Tasmanian, Kathleen Lois Calvert (Lois) was born in Nipaluna-Hobart in 1937. Her parents were David Archibald Calvert (Archie) (1882-1955) and Edith Kathleen Calvert nee Johnson (1900-1992). Lois has a younger brother, David Neville Calvert (Neville), born 1939.

Lois with her father Archie and lambs, Single Hill (circa 1941)

Lois’s parents Archie and Edith both grew up on farms—Archie at Sandford (Woodlands) and Edith at Kempton (Castle Hill). After their marriage in 1936, Edith joined Archie at his farm, Single Hill, overlooking Frederick Henry Bay. The farm took its name from its location on Single Hill, a landmark to the east of Hobart between Roches Beach and Seven Mile Beach.

Lois’s memories were of an almost idyllic childhood on the farm at Single Hill. This was marred only by the threat of invasion during World War II, with the Australian Army installing barbed wire fences along Roches Beach, and the experience of boarding school from the age of seven. Lois’s childhood is described in her memoirs, ‘Single Hill—A Memoir of Place, Land and Home’ and ‘The Story of Single Hill’, published on this website.

Lois in her Friends’ School uniform (1953)

Archie and Edith had limited schooling themselves but highly valued education. In 1945, they sent Lois to The Friends’ School in Hobart, initially as a boarder. Neville joined her a year later. The Friends’ School had been founded by the Quakers in 1887 and was the first co-educational independent school in the southern hemisphere. Archie and Edith chose the school because of its reputation and Edith’s association with a former headmaster, Ernest Unwin, through nursing his wife. Lois and Neville continued to board until 1948 when the Floating Bridge was opened across the Derwent and a bus service to and from Hobart became available.

Lois went on to be a Dux of Friends’ School in her final year in 1953 and was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship for tertiary studies. Neville took over the running of Single Hill after their father died in 1955. Single Hill was badly burnt in the 1967 ‘Black Tuesday’ bushfires. Neville and his family later moved to a new property, Benbullen, in northeast Tasmania.

Lois completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Tasmania and later a Diploma of Education at the University of Canberra. She did this part-time while raising a family—her daughters Irene (b.1957) and Lynn (b.1959) and sons Dean (b.1963) and John (b.1983). While married to Roger Wettenhall (m.1955; div.1977), she was known as Lois Wettenhall.

Lois and Roger’s son Dean was born with Down syndrome in 1963. Lois was a dedicated carer and advocate for Dean. Together with Roger, she made an important contribution to bringing the lives of people with disabilities out of the shadows and into mainstream life through their many letters and submissions to newspapers and government on disability policy, services and lived experiences over many years.

Lois and her family moved from Hobart to Canberra at the end of 1971 with Roger’s academic work. Lois went on to teach writing and literature in ACT high schools and secondary colleges, and was a tutor in Canberra with the Adult Migrant English Service. She also became a Registered Nurse.

After she retired from teaching, Lois attended a number of writing and family history research courses in her journey to become a family historian and memoir writer of note. Like many Tasmanians of Anglo-Celtic descent, Lois was descended from both convicts and free settlers. On her father’s side, Lois was descended from the Calverts who arrived as free settlers in Van Diemen’s Land in 1832. Originally from Yorkshire, the Calvert family bought land and farmed in South Arm, to the east of Hobart. Members of the family also had farms and orchards in the Huon Valley, the eastern shore of the Derwent (Rokeby and Roches Beach) and Bruny Island.

John Glover, ‘Hobart Town, taken from the garden where I lived, 1832’, State Library of NSW. This was the year the Calverts arrived in Van Diemen’s Land.

The Tasmanian history of her mother’s family commenced with the arrival of the convict, Joseph Johnson (1774-1852) as part of the first British settlement in Hobart in 1804. Through both her parents, Lois was descended from a further six convicts who were transported in the First, Second and Third fleets to NSW, then on to Norfolk Island. They were among the 564 Norfolk Islanders who were involuntarily exiled a third time in 1807-08 when the first British settlement on Norfolk Island was closed and the population relocated to Van Diemen’s Land, doubling the white population there to around one thousand. The names of these ancestors appear on the Norfolk Island memorial at St David’s Park in Hobart. Lois and her mother, Edith, undertook extensive research into this history, the results of which are the memoirs and essays published on this website.

Lois on a return trip to Tasmania in her 70s

Lois made regular visits back to Tasmania and  travelled widely in the UK, Europe, USA, southern Africa, China and Japan. She died in Canberra on 5 May 2026, aged 89, five weeks after the launch of her website. She is survived by her four children (Irene, Lynn, Dean and John), five grandchildren and seven great grandchildren. Her brother Neville and his wife Odette live in Launceston.

Edith in her VAD uniform (1918)

EDITH KATHLEEN CALVERT
(1900–1992)

A fifth generation Tasmanian, Edith Kathleen Calvert (nee Johnson) was born in Kempton in the midlands of Tasmania in 1900. Her parents were Frederick Edmund Johnson (1870-1931) and Minnie Lyla Johnson nee Stonehouse (1871-1956).

(l to r) Basil, Freda, Linda, Lois and Edith at Castle Hill, Kempton
Edith grew up on the family farm, Castle Hill, at Kempton and was the middle child in a family of five children. Her siblings were Basil (1896-1933), Lois (1897-1928), Linda (1903-2000) and Freda (1904-1992).
Edith Johnson
Edith only attended school until the age of twelve but had a lifelong love of history and literature. She attended a finishing school in Hobart which taught domestic housekeeping skills and in 1918-19, she joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), a division of the Army. In this role, during the Spanish Flu epidemic she nursed patients in a large tent hospital in Launceston. She also helped nurse the war casualties as they returned to Tasmania. In 1922 she commenced studies to qualify as a nurse in Launceston but was unable to complete her final year of training due to illness (diphtheria).
(l to r) Edith, Lois, Neville and Archie (1942)

Because of her year of nurse-training, Edie was able to obtain employment as a partially trained nurse. She went on to provide household assistance and nursing care to family members and to several elderly people in their homes, including the wife of a former Headmaster of The Friends’ School, the artist Ernest Unwin, in Sandford. She also nursed her future mother-in-law Eliza Calvert (nee Morrisby) in her final illness. She married David Archibald (Archie) Calvert (1882-1955) in 1936 and joined him on his farm, Single Hill. Their children Lois and Neville were born in 1937 and 1939 respectively.

Edith addressing a Hadden family reunion (1978)

In the years after Archie’s death in 1955, Edith became increasingly interested in her Johnson family history. It was Edith who discovered the references to her family’s convict ancestry in 1962 when The Journals of the Land Commissioners for Van Diemen’s Land 1826-1828 were published. This was a landmark publication, suggesting to many Tasmanian families ‘the skeleton in the closet’ of a convict ancestor, long suppressed. It began Edith’s long association with the Tasmanian State Archives and State Library and research into her extended Johnson family history. She became an active member of the Hobart Town (1804) First Settlers Association.

At the age of 70, Edith travelled overseas for the first and only time, by ship to England to visit her sister Linda and to see where her ancestors came from. At the age of 77, after she moved to Canberra to be closer to Lois, Edith enrolled in a course on ‘Writing Your Family History’, run by Dr Neil Gow at the Australian National University’s Centre for Continuing Education. This gave her the skills and confidence to consolidate her notes into a continuous narrative, while she continued her research at the National Library. The result is Part One of The Johnsons of Castle Hill: The Story of a Tasmanian Family (1996, reprinted 1997), republished on this website.

Lois has noted in her Introduction to The Johnsons of Castle Hill that her mother’s extensive knowledge became a valuable resource to others working in the field of colonial history. Edith is acknowledged and thanked by Marjorie Tipping for her assistance in the story of the Calcutta convicts: Convicts Unbound (1988). The story of the Johnson-Hadden family connection recounted by Herbert G Cullis in No Tears for Jane (1982) is acknowledged by the author to be based on Edith’s pioneering work. She also contributed to The Stonehouses of Stratford by Ailsa Harvey (1980).

Edith died in Canberra in 1992, aged 91. She was survived by Lois, Neville and his wife Odette, seven grandchildren and seven great grandchildren.