The only place John Edge's name appears at the Euroa Cemetery.
At the entrance to the Euroa Cemetery stands a frame with the names of those buried in paupers’ graves, without any headstone.
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Visitors may notice one curious engraving: John Edge, aged seven years. Cowherder.
The boy was indeed employed on a farm north-west of Euroa, in a district known as Molka, for three months.
But his story could have stayed buried with him, unknown and unheard, if it wasn’t for the curiosity of local history buff John Gribben.
Mr Gribben heard about the story and set out to uncover the truth of John’s life and death.
Born in Collingwood in 1886, John Edge was given up by his poverty-stricken father and handed over to an orphanage at the age of eight.
John’s father, Charles Edge, was a bootmaker facing hard times because cheap US footwear was flooding the Australian market. And due to the 1890s depression, little other work was available.
Charles turned to a home for children run by Selina Sutherland — a trained nurse who established societies to care for abandoned and neglected children in Melbourne during a period where church groups engaged in child rescue.
Charles brought John into Selina’s care, saying the mother had deserted five children. The real story is probably more complex as Charles had a dark past and had regularly been in trouble with the police.
After being taken into care, John was transferred from Melbourne to a Molka farm in the care of a farming couple, William and Mary Leckie, who gave him up after two weeks and passed him on to another district farmer, Thomas Robinson, with disastrous consequences.
The Molka plains must have been quite a change for the boy who was living in the crowded, depressed and often polluted suburb of Collingwood during the 1890s depression.
Castle Creek, near where John Edge disappeared for two weeks.
On some nights on the farm, John crept out of the room he shared with another orphan, Harriet (described as a servant girl), took some food from the kitchen and disappeared for a few hours.
The stars would have illuminated the dark, northern Victorian sky and the only noise would be the odd dog barking, cattle shifting in the paddocks and perhaps a few sheep bleating in the distance.
The house was about a kilometre from the nearest road, but only about 150 metres from Castle Creek, a small tributary of the Goulburn River which often runs in the winter but dries up in the summer.
But wherever John wandered to in the middle of the night, he wouldn’t have reached a town, as Euroa was 17km away and Murchison 24km.
The boy told Harriet he would run away.
But before he could escape, before his unsatisfied foster family could return him to the orphanage, disaster intervened.
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