Sarah Durrington
Sarah Durrington (centre) with Eliza Cowan (right) and Sarah’s sister-in-law Lucy (left).
Sarah Agnes Durrington was a storekeeper at Lightning Ridge during the early years. Born Sarah Agnes Coleman at Singleton, New South Wales, on 27 August 1853 to James and Jane Coleman, she first married John William Brooks, with whom she had two children. After Brooks’s death, she married Edward Durrington, and together they had six children.
The Durringtons are on the 1907 survey map of Old Town. They later operated as shopkeepers at Three Mile Flat before moving into New Town by 1912. Sarah applied for a Western Lands lease in 1909, near the site later occupied by Dick Howe’s bakery. In July 1919 she sold her store to Reeves of Cumborah, intending to operate a general store and bakery, and by the 1920s she was still listed as a storekeeper in petitions. She and Edward also owned the Imperial Hotel.
Sarah Durrington died at Lightning Ridge on 2 November 1933, aged 80.
Sarah Durrington’s signature sourced from a petition to resist the relocation of residents from Old Town and The Flat to the surveyed town, 1912.
Article: Research by Leisa Carney, edited by Russell Gawthorpe. LRHS research compiled by Len Cram and Barbara Moritz. Sources: Government Gazette of New South Wales, 25 May 1933, p. 2024; ‘“Grandma’s” Vote’, Daily Telegraph, 6 May 1933, p. 10.