Dunbar and Boyle Family collection

Jane Ann Dunbar was born in January 1864 in Hertfordshire, England, the daughter of Lewis and Jane Dunbar. She attended the Buxton Lodge School, Luton, and the North London Collegiate School for Girls which is generally recognised as the first girls' school in the United Kingdom to offer girls the same educational opportunities as boys. She worked as a teacher in Jersey (where her mother kept house for her), before emigrating to Australia in early 1884 on board the ship "Ballarat", to take up a teaching position at the Girls' Grammar School in Maryborough. She was twenty at the time. She taught at the school from 1884 to 1887 when she left to marry Robert John Boyle, a music teacher, on the 21st December of that year. In 1893, with three children, the family moved to Bundaberg where Jane established a school for girls. In 1896 they moved to a small dairy farm at Barolin and in 1898 moved to a larger house at Sharon, eight miles from Bundaberg. In 1900 their sixth child was born, but Jane continued going to her school in Bundaberg, an hour and a half journey both ways. In 1906 Jane sold her school and in 1908 the family bought land on the Burnett River, twelve miles from Gin Gin. In 1913 they adopted a child, Elwyn Hilda. Jane eventually visited her family in England in 1923 retuning just before the death of her daughter Dorothy Agnes Boyle (Dossie), of tetanus on Christmas Day of that year. Jane died in 1951 and her husband, Robert John Boyle in 1931. They spent their later years in Brisbane, living at Wynnum North.