A travel companion for anyone who wants to stand where the Restless Constable and his goldfields wife lived, worked and lie buried - from the Cumbrian fells to the far west of New South Wales.
Places are marked still there, partly / private, or gone / not pinpointed. Every 'what to see' note is drawn from public heritage and tourism sources; anything we could not confirm is flagged. Please respect private homes and cemeteries. Each place has its own Google map - the combined pin map lives on the family website.
The Barnes came from the small hill farms of old Westmorland (now Cumbria), on the southern edge of the Lake District - stone-walled fields, sheep on the fells and market days in Kendal. In James's day this was a settled, unhurried farming world worked on foot and by horse, utterly unlike the sunburnt colony where he would spend his life. Plan your visit: Cumbria & the Lake District (visitlakedistrict.com).
James's birthplace and boyhood home still stands near Burneside, three miles from Kendal. Far from an ordinary farmhouse, it is a genuinely ancient building - behind its plain eighteenth-century front is a sixteenth-century range built around a small medieval 'pele' tower with walls four feet thick, raised when raiders still came down out of Scotland. In the early 1500s it belonged to Sir Thomas Parr, father of Katherine Parr, Henry VIII's sixth queen. This is the house young James pored over his maps in, and the one he could not wait to leave.
What to see: The house is a private residence - please view it only from the public lane and footpaths past the farm. From the road you can see the grey stone farmhouse with its tall chimneys, the barns and outbuildings, and the dry-stone walls climbing toward the fells, a landscape almost unchanged since 1854. (Grade II listing: Historic England list entry 1479032.)
Kendal - 'the auld grey town' - was the Barnes family's market town, where they were known at market and chapel, and James's stated destination when he sailed 'home to the north of England' in 1882.
What to see: The ruins of Kendal Castle (long linked to the Parr family, tying back to Garnett House); Kendal Museum and the Museum of Lakeland Life & Industry; the yards and ginnels of the old grey-limestone town; and Kendal as the southern gateway to the Lake District.
Emily's parents came from opposite ends of Europe - her father a Lutheran miller's son from the mountains of Silesia, her mother an English country girl from the Cotswold edge of Gloucestershire - and both left everything for the Victorian goldfields. These are harder places to 'walk in their footsteps', but the ground they came from is real and can still be visited.
Emily's father, Carl Heinrich 'Theodore' Borrman, was born a miller's son at Steinseifen in Silesia, then Prussia - today the village of Sciegny in south-west Poland, at the foot of the Karkonosze (Giant) Mountains near Karpacz. He carried its slow-rolled German speech all the way to the Bendigo diggings and never lost it.
What to see: The Karkonosze mountain country around Karpacz and Sciegny - forested slopes, the region's old Lutheran churches, and the famous timber Wang Church at Karpacz. We cannot pinpoint the exact Borrman house, so treat this as the home district, not a single address.
Emily's mother, Keziah Tilley, was born at Kingswood, a village near Wotton-under-Edge on the Cotswold edge of Gloucestershire (Chippenham was only her registration district). She could neither read nor write, and signed her marriage with a cross before sailing for Victoria in 1854.
What to see: The old cloth-working village of Kingswood with its medieval abbey gatehouse; nearby Wotton-under-Edge, a handsome Cotswold market town; and the walking country of the Cotswold escarpment.
Bendigo (called Sandhurst in Emily's day) was one of the richest goldfields on earth. When the surface gold gave out it was the German miners in particular who stayed, drove the deep quartz reefs and built a settled, chapel-going world - the world Emily was born into at Kangaroo Flat in 1864. Plan your visit: Bendigo Region (bendigoregion.com.au).
Emily's birthplace, one of the goldfield camps below Bendigo (then Sandhurst), today a southern suburb. The diggings she knew - poppet-heads, mullock heaps and thumping crushing batteries - have been built over, but the goldfields city they fed is one of the best-preserved in Australia.
What to see: Go underground at the Central Deborah Gold Mine to feel the deep-reef world her father worked; ride the vintage Bendigo Tramways; see the German-influenced architecture the goldfields architect William Vahland gave 'the Vienna of the South'; and the Bendigo Joss House. The goldfields churches and cemeteries hold the German Lutheran world Emily was born into.
For thirty-four years James followed the New South Wales Police from one hard country town to the next - the goldfields, the silver country, the great river ports and the treeless plains. Much of that world survives, because these towns kept their gaols, courthouses and pubs; you can still stand in the very kind of lock-up he kept. Plan your visit: Visit NSW (visitnsw.com).
James's first posting (1880), and where he struck the gold that changed his life in April 1882. The 'bark town' of twenty thousand diggers is long gone, but Temora remembers its gold.
What to see: The Temora Rural Museum at the Bundawarrah Centre - with a replica of the huge 254-ounce 'Mother Shipton' nugget, a hardwood slab cottage, a bush church and a one-room school; and the renowned Temora Aviation Museum nearby.
Where James rejoined the Force in 1883 after his voyage home, on the Edward River in the heart of the Peppin merino country that clothed the world in wool.
What to see: The Peppin Heritage Centre tells the story of the famous merino stud James would have known; the river red gums and the Island Sanctuary; and the town's wide colonial streets.
Silverton was the original 'silver city', near its short-lived peak when James kept its tin-shed lock-up from 1886 - 'nine hotels to Broken Hill's two'. When the silver moved east the town emptied, leaving one of Australia's most atmospheric ghost towns.
What to see: The Silverton Gaol & Historical Museum, in the 1889 gaol - you can walk the old cells, and its thousands of relics even include Bibles dating back to 1862, an echo of James's own 1862 family Bible; the classic Silverton Hotel; the Mad Max Museum; the Mundi Mundi lookout over the endless plain; and the heritage walk. This is the closest you can stand to the world of James's 'wild times on the field'.
Hay, where the Murrumbidgee meets the great treeless plain, was James's posting for three and a half years from 1887 - the town of long coach escorts and the 'bitten ear' court case, and a Cobb & Co coaching centre.
What to see: The Hay Gaol Museum, built in the 1870s (prison, then maternity hospital, then a WWII internment camp) - the very kind of gaol James worked; Bishop's Lodge, an extraordinary 1888 iron house with one of the region's oldest heritage rose gardens; and the Dunera Museum in the old railway carriages.
The busiest inland river port in Australia, at the meeting of the Murray and the Darling - the town that gave James a wife, and where his darkest morning came in January 1902. He lived and worked in the police residence and lock-up on Darling Street, the beating heart of a port where some ninety paddle-steamers worked the Darling.
What to see: The Old Wentworth Gaol (1879-81), the oldest Australian-designed gaol and in the best original condition of its type, with original stocks, whipping stool and prisoners' shackles - this is where David photographed the prisoners' tree and chains that illustrate James's world. Across from it the Wentworth Pioneer Museum; and Junction Park at the Murray-Darling junction, with a viewing tower over the confluence. Paddle-steamers still work the river.
The little church on the banks of the Darling where James married Emily on 21 October 1891 and where their children were baptised - the true starting point of everything that follows in their story.
What to see: The 1871 church itself, in the historic river precinct - stand where they stood at the altar; and a walk along the old Darling wharf.
In 1892 the silver field erupted in one of Australia's great strikes, and James was one of some three hundred police entrenched on the hill above the town - three days and nights in the trenches in the cold before the relief came, 'perhaps the most stirring time' of his career.
What to see: The Line of Lode Miners' Memorial on the great mullock hill above the city, naming over 800 miners killed underground; the 1905 Trades Hall (the first union-owned building in Australia) and the Women's Memorial, which commemorate the very strikes James was sent to hold; and the two-hour Heritage Walk of Australia's first heritage-listed city.
James's metropolitan posting for about four years after the 1902 crisis - the force's quiet kindness in moving a broken man to the city. It was here the family lost the elder twin, Myrtle, buried at North Sydney.
What to see: This is now dense inner-city Sydney; the exact station and the infant's grave are not confirmed, so treat this as a place on the map rather than a site to visit. (The North Sydney burial is flagged for further research.)
A brief posting early in 1906, one of the short steps that carried James across to the central west and, at last, to Kelso.
What to see: A tidy tableland town on the Belubula River - a pause-and-photo stop rather than a destination in itself.
A short 1906 posting - little Ivy remembered the backyard here as a small child - before the move to Kelso.
What to see: Cowra is famous for its Japanese Garden and for the site of the 1944 wartime POW camp breakout, with the campsite and war cemetery - a moving day out quite apart from the family link.
Kelso is the older half of Bathurst, on the eastern bank of the Macquarie - the first European settlement west of the Blue Mountains. Only the river separates it from Bathurst, Australia's oldest inland town. This quiet crossing was where James found rest at last, and where he and Emily lie buried together. Plan your visit: Bathurst Region (bathurstregion.com.au).
James's final posting from September 1906 - 'the quietest place I ever struck' - and the house where both Emily (1908) and James (1914) died. The brick station and lock-up on the Sydney Road were decommissioned in 1943; the residence (72 Sydney Road) was auctioned in 1998 and restored by a local business.
What to see: The building can be seen from the Sydney Road (the Great Western Highway) - it is in private hands, so view it only from the roadside. Nearby, the surviving nineteenth-century streetscape of Kelso gives the feel of the village James policed. (Source: McRae & Churches, Kelso Village.)
In July 1913, with his pension in sight, James did something he had never done in sixty years of wandering - he bought a block of his own, freehold, a stone's throw from the station (now 13a-15a Boyd Street). The first land the tenant farmer's son ever owned outright; he did not live to retire onto it.
What to see: The block still lines up with the original land grants; it is now suburban Kelso housing, best viewed from the street.
The most important stop of all - the churchyard where James and Emily lie together in the one grave. Their shared headstone (photographed in 1917) reads: 'In loving memory of our dear mother Emily Keziah Barnes... Also dear father James Barnes... Abide with me.'
What to see: Holy Trinity Anglican Church on the Sydney Road, one of the oldest churches in inland Australia, and its cemetery, where the Barnes grave can be found. Emily's coffin was carried here by James's fellow officers in 1908; James joined her in 1914.
On the evening of 1 April 1914, in the Police Barracks on the corner of William and Durham Streets, James's comrades gave him three silver-mounted pipes and a walking stick and asked for the tale of his career - the scene that opens his story.
What to see: The Bathurst Mounted Police Barracks (built 1890) still stands. While in Bathurst, see the magnificent 1880 Courthouse (designed by Colonial Architect James Barnet - a near-namesake), the Bathurst & District Historical Society Museum in its east wing, and Machattie Park with its Boer War Memorial, a quiet echo of James's brother Anthony, a Boer War prisoner.