Bryan Fuller, 72, has written a history of the Fuller family in Australia.

Mr Fuller, who recently relocated from Coolah to Jamberoo self-published Against All The Odds. 

William and Ann Fuller left Ireland with their seven children in August 1839. 

The family arrived in Sydney in December, but William had succumbed to Typhoid fever near the West Australian coast. Ann gave birth to a son who also died on the voyage and two-year-old Charlotte died in quarantine in Sydney. Ann and the children settled in Wollongong where she ran a shop. 

Her youngest son, George Laurence Fuller, produced 14 offspring and acquired land at Kiama.

One of the children, Sir George Warburton Fuller became a member of the first Federal Parliament in 1901 and was Premier of NSW in 1921 and 1922-25.

His first, Nationalist government lasted only seven hours and 40 minutes - the shortest in NSW history.

The author is a great-great-grandson of William and Ann. “I was motivated to start all this because I was under the impression that no one else had done any research of much consequence on the Fuller family,” Bryan said. 

“I soon discovered that this was quite incorrect.

“(However) the descendants of George Laurence Fuller’s siblings who arrived on the North Briton with their mother Ann, being Elizabeth (Cadden), Thomas, William, Sarah (Warburton) and Annie (Waldron) have for the most part just not received the attention they deserve.”

George Laurence Fuller married Sarah, a member of Gerringong’s Miller family. 

“George made a great success of (his shop in Kiama), and he made enough to buy some country around Shellharbour,” Bryan said. “He called the block he had there ‘Dunmore’, after the town they came from in County Galway. He built a house there, which is still standing, called Dunmore House.” 

Another key figure within the family’s history is Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Fuller.

“He was a soldier of note in World War I, and I believe he was actually the last Australian officer to leave Gallipoli when they pulled out of there,” Bryan said. 

Bryan said “the members of that family were always taught that they have to put back into the community”. 

“Sir George’s father, for instance, donated an organ to the Presbyterian Church here in Kiama which is still in use, and put a lot of money into the hospital here.

“He was always on the lookout for things to do around the place to help develop the district. And his children were brought up to be the same really.”