Yesterday, his great-grandson arrived in town to dig deep into his family history.

William Macquarie Serisier visited the city for the first time from Queensland and looked with interest at the information available at Macquarie Regional Library.

To mark Anzac Day he planned to head down to Victoria for the celebrations and passing through Dubbo on his way he decided to stop and learn about his ancestry.

He told the Daily Liberal he wanted to learn more about the pioneer he called great-grandfather.

Three generations of the family, beginning with Jean Serisier, pursued the family trade as vignerons.

“My father ran the vineyard ‘until the Second World War when he joined the Royal Australian Air Force from 1941 to 1946,” Mr Serisier said.

“When he came back he found the vineyard in a mess so he went into dairy farming.

“It’s a hard life to milk the cows so early in the morning in all sorts of weather.”

As for himself, William worked neither on the vineyard nor the farm but spent all his years at sea.

Fourteen years were spent as a chief petty officer in the Royal Australian Navy, two years in the Dutch Merchant Navy and 17 years with the British Merchant Navy as an electrical engineer.

“No ships came out this way so I couldn’t come earlier,” he said, laughing.

Mr Serisier described his great-grandfather’s journey from France to Sydney and how he came to call the vacant land Dubbo.

In 1838, 14-year-old Jean arrived in Sydney where, on account of ill health, he was placed in the care of Mr Despointes, a wealthy merchant.

“Soon after he received permission from the Despointes merchants to borrow a horse cart and wagon and went to Wellington where he was employed at the general store there,” he said.

At that time, the future location of Dubbo had a lot of traffic passing through as drovers went back and forth and nothing other than land existed.

“He saw an opportunity to set up another general store in Dubbo and it went very well,” Mr Serisier said.

Following that Jean bought large stretches of land from the Crown and in November 1849, Dubbo became a town.

“He was the very first sitting magistrate [at Dubbo], ran the post office, was the guardian of minors and very involved in the Dubbo jail,” Mr Serisier said.

“He seemed to go in for everything that was going on.”

Jean was a visionary, Mr Serisier said, and he was very proud of his great-grandfather’s achievements.

The Macquarie Valley wine industry was pioneered by him as he established a winery nine miles from Dubbo on the what is now the Old Dubbo Road.

His cellars, the second largest in the New South Wales colony, held 55,000 litres of wine.

Later in his life his vision deteriorated and he left for France with his son Hippolyte on a ship to seek medical treatment.

After Jean arrived in Paris he contracted smallpox and died shortly after in 1880, aged 56.

Mr Serisier said for the Frenchman to have learned English and to have conversed so well with others was the most fascinating piece of information he learnt about the founder of Dubbo.

“His drive to do things and his ambition to establish a town in Australia, his vision to establish a post office, a magistrate’s court and a police station,” he said.

“To think he did so much and he only lived until 56 makes him a pretty wonderful man.”