Murdoch Munro Mackenzie

  Noted events in his life were:

• note. ¹¹⁷⁹ Murdo Munro Mackenzie of Ardross in Easter Ross. This ex-India trader intended to relocate to Canada, indeed set up two of his sons there, but instead in the 1830s purchased the former Mackenzie estate of Dundonnell. His brothers Hugh and John held on in India. Robert Mackenzie, a son, also served in India, and like many of that earlier generation of settlers enjoyed a relationship with a native woman. Their daughter, the splendidly named Mary Augusta Dashwood Mackenzie, married a New South Wales sheep overseer. Murdo was a litigious landowner - he died of apoplexy doing legal research. His heir was Hugh Mackenzie whose photograph in full highland rig was discovered by Detective Rudoe in Lymington, Hampshire. Hugh did not marry but fathered a delicate daughter whom he brought up as his heiress in the glens of Scotland and salons of Paris. The legal heir was a landowner in Australia who won a ruinous law case which went in due course to the House of Lords. The development of Dundonnell was henceforward bound up with financing properties in New South Wales (particularly Bundanon and Terrara) and in Queensland. Much of Dundonnell was sold as a separate sporting estate in 1932, the remainder including the old mansion house in 1942.

Murdoch married Christina Ross. (Christina Ross was born in 1773 and died in 1856.)