The story starts with Sarah Ann Cobb Plummer, who was born in England and later immigrated to Australia during the gold rush where she married Henry Hartley.
The couple had a son, also called Henry, before Henry sen died.
The solo mother then left Australia and made her way to Glenorchy, where she married Joseph Birley and grew the family. She also changed Henry’s surname to Birley.
Henry later married Mary Hood and the couple had six children, including Arthur who went on to marry Eileen May Thompson.
Their children included Gerald, of Lake Hawea, who is now the eldest Birley descendant.
His eldest son, Lindsay, of Brisbane, said he and his two brothers, Darrin, also of Lake Hawea, and Scott, of Auckland, decided it was time to have a "Birley boys’ trip" and surprise their 83-year-old dad by bringing their three sons, Shaun (33), Trym Juvik (24) and Jago (17) along.
"Dad didn’t know that — he just thought he was getting his three sons together for a couple of days ... he was just amazed to see his three grandsons there as well, it’s quite special," Lindsay said.
Plenty of stories have been shared about their forbears, particularly Henry who was "a pretty unique individual".
Born in 1863, he is understood to have been Glenorchy’s first registered birth.
The first proprietor of the Birley Earnslaw Hotel, later the Glenorchy Hotel, he was also a mountaineer and laid claim to being the first man to reach the summit of Mt Earnslaw in the 1890s.
"Some years later, some guy walked into the hotel and said, ‘I can prove that Harry was the first climber — here’s the bent penny inside the jar’.
"Apparently it sat behind the bar for many, many years and, of course, the hotel burned down in 1958 ... and the penny in the jar was lost, so that’s a shame."
Henry was also a miner, guide and surveyor, contracted to install the first telegraph poles between Queenstown and Glenorchy.
In 1919, the family moved to Taieri where he was a mine proprietor at The Grange and a coal mine proprietor at Saddle Hill until his death in 1924, aged 60.
Arthur followed in his father’s mining footsteps, but when Gerald was just 3, Arthur was electrocuted on Christmas Day when he could not got an electrician to one of the mines, "so thought he’d fix it himself", Lindsay said.
The family remained on the Taieri where Gerald worked as a sheep and cattle buyer for the NZ Refrigeration Company and married Lynette Bain.
After Lindsay and his siblings were born, the family moved to the Catlins where they grew up.
Along with sharing "war stories", Lindsay said the boys had taken a spin on the Dart River Jet, explored the old Glenorchy Hotel site and hoped to take Gerald on a helicopter ride up Mt Earnslaw with a landing to walk around.
The reunion had been a long time coming — last time they were all together was at their mother’s funeral in 1984, he said.
"It really is cool — even [Thursday] morning, just cooking breakfast, sitting at the table and chatting away, it’s very, very cool.
