The firm of A. Roberts & Sons made an important contribution to the Victorian mining centre of Bendigo as well as to a wider sphere of Victorian engineering. Abraham Roberts was born on 13 July 1819 in Cornwall, England. He was the son of Abraham Roberts, ‘gentleman’, and Mary Roberts, née Rentreath. On 19 August 1841, at the age of 22, he married Elizabeth Tonkin at Penzance, in Cornwall.1
He is recorded in the English census of 1851 living at Penzance with his wife and five children but his occupation is unreadable, so we know little of his early working life.2 No doubt, given the location, he would have been exposed to a great deal of the mining equipment that would come to dominate his future life.
Abraham Roberts emigrated with his family to Victoria in 1853, the voyage t
