Yorkshireman Peter Nettleton arrived in Australia in 1849, having worked in the woollen cloth trade, and commenced work as a fellmonger and wool scourer in Melbourne in partnership with a Mr Mills. On discovery of gold he visited the Ballarat, Bendigo and Mt Alexander goldfields and was highly successful as a digger. Returning to Melbourne, he set up his own fellmonger’s business by the Yarra River in Abbotsford towards the end of 1852. He had married Mary Ann Hill in March of that year, and the couple would remain on the property until their deaths in 1901 and 1903. Buildings on this property are a remarkable and rare survival of an early Collingwood industry.

E B Norton spent only a short time in Melbourne but made his mark in farming, land-owning and subdivision of Yarra Grange on the banks of the Yarra in Abbotsford. The youngest son of the Reverend Eardley Norton, rector of Blythburgh cum Walberswick in Suffolk, he was farming at Elsternwick or East St Kilda shortly after arriving in Melbourne.

Richard Norton was a respected and well-known member of Collingwood society, despite his origins. A chair maker in London, he was convicted of theft in 1831, sentenced to transportation, and arrived in NSW on 22 July 1832. Obtaining his Certificate of Freedom in 1839, he had arrived in Melbourne by 1844 when his third child was born. He eventually married his children’s mother, Ann Laing, in 1849 and the couple added to their family until Ann’s death in 1860.