John attended school at O'Brien's Bridge and after he finished there, his mother sent him to school in Ennis, where he attended the Christian Brother's College in the hope that he might decide to become a priest.  However, John obviously had different ideas.

John had a cousin Mary (Carroll) who had immigrated to Victoria, Australia and had settled in the Yambuk area in 1850.  John, together with two of his childhood friends, Timothy Ryan and Michael Gleeson boarded the "Indian Ocean" and, after a long voyage of six months, arrived in Geelong in November, 1853. John talked much about the ocean voyage and always said that the ship made very hard going of the trip and that it seemed to spend much of its time going backwards.

One of the last jobs John did for his mother before emigrating was to make six woven rooves for her bees, to keep them warm in winter.

After their arrival in Geelong , John and his friends set off to Ararat to chance their luck at the gold diggings, but according to them, they didn't do much good there. The gold was just alluvial and not plentiful in shallow places. Sometime later, they arrived in the Yambuk area at his cousin‘s place. Mick Gleeson purchased his land in Yambuk, Tim Ryan in Tyrendarra and John Walsh Crowe, the first of his land holdings in June, 1858, in Codrington where his descendants still farm today. This property is called "Woodlawn", and is part of the first commercial wind-farm electricity generating facility in Victoria . It is also a working limestone quarry - a far cry from the original farming-grazing operation