Early Life
Cain was born, one of 18 siblings, in Greendale, Victoria, near Bacchus Marsh. His father, Patrick Kane, was an Irish-born Roman Catholic who worked as a small farmer and contractor.
As a young man John Kane changed the spelling of his surname and converted to Anglicanism. He left no personal papers and very little is known about his youth (so little, indeed, that reference works published during his lifetime, and shortly after his death, continued to give the year of his birth as 1887). He had little education, and worked from an early age as a farm labourer. By 1907 he had moved to Melbourne, where he worked as a fruiterer in Northcote.
Read more about this topic: John Cain (senior)
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