Strange but very true...
I grew up in the Cairns area and I knew one of the families involved in this. The Marino family from Gordonvale. Big sugar cane area. I had no parents and I lived with an aunt and uncle and the uncle was a bank manager and he knew everyone in town and the outlying farm areas and we'd always be invited out for big spreads before the firing of the cane. Back in those days it was burned before harvest. I remember learning how to make "real" pasta on huge long tables inside tents out in the fields with all the women working away. Anyway...

"On April 7, a reunion of the Russ family at the RSL on the Cairns Esplanade will bring together a very special group of families keen to talk about their family's true-blue battlers. Edward Russ came out to Australia from England on the ship called Dorunda on 19/2/1889.
The idea came about because Catherine Marino wanted to put faces to the many pictures and stories she had collected about her ancestors from the Gordonvale museum.
Losing a mother at a young age can be devastating and for Cath it was a double blow. She not only lost her mother at a young age but she was also told that a familial form of Motor Neurone Disease had claimed many other lives from her mother's side of the family."

There's more here... http://www.cairnsnewspapers.com.au/l...il.asp?aid=498