The little organ that we have here, it's a little pedal organ,
but perhaps the most important thing about it is the stories that go with the organ
and in particular the stories that are associated with the woman, Sophia Dent.
This is known as Sophia Dent’s organ.
Sophia Dent is a significant person in Western Australian history in an odd sort of way
because she is the first known colonial child to be born in Western Australia.
Her parents came on the ship the Marquis of Anglesey
and when it arrived in 1829 it was caught up in a gale and blown ashore
and was wrecked and couldn't go anywhere else.
Her mother gave birth to Sophie, so the story goes, on the beach near Rockingham.
And along with Sophie, there is the organ.
And, you know, we have all these stories — these sort of apocryphal stories
about 1829 and people being stranded —
these lovely middle-class people — stranded on the beach with their grand pianos
and other things. Well, here we have not a grand piano, but an organ.
It's for travelling. So parts of it could fold up.
And it's there on the beach as the little baby Sophie is born.
So first few months are spent in a tent in the sand hills.
You can imagine that's in September. So the weather's getting hotter and warmer.
It's all very strange and foreign to the people.
They don't know what's coming. They're full of anxiety.
This is the world that Sophie Dent is born into
right there at the birth of Western Australia, what we call Western Australia now.
You can imagine there may be times even in the tent when someone actually played it at different times,
maybe when it became Christmas and Sophie Dent's first Christmas, even when
she was just a baby and wouldn't remember that.
So Sophie goes on through her life.
She born in 1829. She dies in 1900, just a few weeks before Federation.
So she lives in her life the entire life of the colony of Western Australia.
She married quite young when she was 17 or 18 to a man named William Ellery.
Now he was an American who had jumped ship and they had seven children
and she just had the seventh child, it was only three weeks old,
when William Ellery was killed in an accident on the boat.
The boiler that they were trying to do some work on exploded, basically.
He was terribly scalded around his head and his neck and his shoulders in particular.
He was taken off to Perth Hospital. And the newspaper reports talk about how
he died in excruciating pain and agony.
The next year, she married again to a man named William Mitchell,
and they later moved to Toodyay. And so she had another family with him.
So in total, she had 12 children, only one of whom died as an infant,
which is quite remarkable.
Sophie, in 1900, when she's 71, she passes away from old age
and she's buried here in the Dongara cemetery.
So here in the Dongara cemetery, we have the grave with the headstone
of the first, reputedly the first, colonial baby born in Western Australia
and that story that goes with her.
So the organ, you know, meanwhile, is coming along and travelling around
and it stays with her eldest Ellery daughter named Amy.
It's easy to make Sophie Dent seem like someone unique and unusual,
but in fact, I think she is illustrative of the lives of so many women of that period.