To the sounds of bagpipes and with the toasting of whiskey, a headstone was unveiled in honour of the Scottish pioneering Campbell family on Saturday, March 23, 2024.

Richard Henderson had been restoring the gravestone of his Henderson great-great grandparents when he discovered the unmarked grave of Niel and Mary.

"I really wanted to recognise these ancestors' resilience and their contributions to the local community by securing their memory with a new and more detailed headstone," he said.

Family members chipped in to cover the cost to remember Niel, who died in 1889, and his wife Mary who died the previous year.

Their son Donald and his wife Agnes are also buried there, and three of their children are buried in neighbouring plot.

Niel was born into the traditional highland community of Galtrigill on the Isle of Skye - a place that had changed little since medieval times, Rod Duncan told the crowd of more than 50 family members who gathered at the Warrnambool cemetery at the weekend.

"But historical forces were disrupting this highland life," Mr Duncan said.

The modest rents from those living on the estates and cultivating crops couldn't sustain their lifestyle, and wool growing had become the new "white gold", he said.

Niel and his young wife Flora MacAskill were forced to become fishers and farmers on a rocky offshore island, but that was soon abandoned.

Tragedy struck when the couple's first son died in infancy, and then Niel lost Flora who died during childbirth.

He remarried Mary McDonald but life in the Scottish highlands wasn't easy with rent payments outstripping their capacity to pay.

"Whether by choice or coercion, in 1854 Neil, Mary and five children - including two teenage sons of Flora - were aboard a bounty migrant ship headed for Portland Bay," Mr Duncan said.

They were among 300 other highlanders gathered from across Skye and Argyll "for export as surplus population", he said.

The trip was funded by the colony of Victoria who was in the grips of a worker shortage.

The family went first to work on a property at Yangery where they lived in a tent.

The couple had four more daughters and eventually moved to their own farm near Framlingham in 1977.

"While becoming familiar with the trials and dispossession and achievements of our ancestors, we can also acknowledge the irony that their arrival contributed to consolidating displacement and dispossession of another long-established population and culture, also swept aside in the quest for land for wool-growing," Mr Duncan said.