Caroline Chisholm

by Sarah Goldman

  DEDICATION

  For Steven, Charles and Rupert

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1 Love Child

  2 Marriage and Faith

  3 Life and Death

  4 India

  5 The Bounty Girls

  6 Flora’s Story

  7 The Immigrants’ Home

  8 Going Bush

  9 The Trouble with Men

  10 On the Move

  11 Back Home

  12 Cultivating Fame

  13 A Golden Land

  14 The Female Radical

  15 The Final Journey

  Afterword

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Photos Section

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Sydney 1841

  “Madam, what would you have me do?” The voice was elegant, indifferent, giving no hint of the speaker’s irritation, though his raven eyebrows bushed together ominously above his chalk white face, his lips pale and dry as parchment. Sir George Gipps, Governor of New South Wales, had little time to waste on do-gooders, even one as attractive as this woman.

  Indeed, he had been surprised when Caroline Chisholm had been ushered into the room, even wondered if he had misheard the name. Instead of the frumpy, bespectacled matron in plain gown and white cap that he had expected, he had been confronted by a handsome, even stately young matron, fashionably dressed and wearing a very fetching bonnet. He was no connoisseur of female attire, but he liked the way she looked.1

  She was smiling at him now, and he couldn’t for the life of him resist smiling back. It put him at a disadvantage. That was the trouble when dealing with women. With a man you could be curt, even dismissive. It was easily done: a nod or handshake and they were gone. But how did you get rid of a lady who looked more suited to your wife’s drawing room than your office? His own wife, Elizabeth, was part of the problem: she had plagued him to meet Mrs Chisholm. And now look what had come of it. He had to invite her to sit down and listen to her concerns about the bounty women. They were needed, of course, as workers and wives, and his government paid boat captains a fair price for each woman of good character brought to the colony. But he had little interest in them.

  Mrs Chisholm, though, had made it her business to haunt Sydney’s wharves, meeting the boats, giving advice to these immigrant girls, the debris of Britain’s overcrowded towns, now looking for a toehold in the New World. Times were difficult, respectable jobs scarce; some females, destitute, resorted to immoral activities just to survive. This woman, this Mrs Chisholm, wanted to start a home for them. He was told that not everyone was on her side: strangely, churchmen, both Anglican and Catholic, were suspicious of her. So even if he agreed to help her, there was no guarantee of success. He had imagined that Mrs Chisholm would talk to him about goodness and his soul and being in God’s grace, but there was little of that. She was dealing in practicalities, as though, he realised with some amazement, she imagined her reason and experience were worth as much as his own.2

  Now she was answering his question. Had she not the wit to realise that it had been rhetorical?

  “Sir George,” she said, “what I would have you do is let me have the old Immigration Barracks, the one up near the Domain on the corner of Bent Street. It stands empty. It could provide shelter for the girls.”

  It was an audacious request, too expensive a proposition for the Colonial Government. He would have no truck with it, and said so.

  “What if I raised the funds to support the costs, Your Excellency?” she countered.

  She spoke with poise, her voice soft, pleasing. But he would not be outwitted by a female. Did she really expect to go through with this outrageous plan? To work as though she were a man in need of employment? If he remembered aright, she was the wife of a military captain; she ought to have been at home looking after her children.3 He would finish this now.

  Deliberately pulling out his watch, Sir George stood up to indicate that the interview was over, while softening the blow with an indulgent smile. “Mrs Chisholm, I understand that your motives are of the purest. There is, however, very little that you can do by yourself. I suggest that you consider joining the Ladies’ Committee, or some such thing.” He put out his hand. “It has been a pleasure having this little chat.”

  She stood also, but refrained from taking his hand; instead, delving into her reticule, she pulled out a package of letters tied together with blue ribbon. “Before I go, Your Excellency, would you be willing to frank these letters for me? 4 I wish to write to farmers, churchmen and police magistrates in the bush to find out what prospects and wages are available for the girls outside Sydney Town.”

  “By Jove, you would try the patience of a saint, madam!” he exclaimed, exasperation and amusement warring within. She stood perfectly still like a graceful figurine, an almost penitent smile hovering about her lips. She reminded him of one of his nieces caught in some mischief. The humour won out; unable to contain a bark of laughter, he requested the letters.

  Completing the task, he once more held out his hand to her. “Mrs Chisholm, I am glad that I was able to assist you with something, but you are not to harbour expectations of me changing my mind. That is a bird that will not fly, madam.”

  She put her gloved hand into his. “Sir, I do not easily give up hope.”

  She curtsied and withdrew as his secretary entered the room with a sheaf of papers. However comely she was, he hoped it would be the last he saw of Mrs Chisholm, about this matter at least. He had an uneasy suspicion, though, that he was being challenged by an unusually adept general. She might wear petticoats and overrate the powers of her own mind, but as a military man he recognised that this could be just the first skirmish in a long campaign.5

  Sydney in 1838 was fifty years old: a violent, unequal, racist town slowly developing a conscience. It was a time of fluidity: the Myall Creek massacre trials were dividing society between supporters of the stockmen accused of butchering defenceless Aborigines and the relatively few determined to see justice prevail; the economy was brittle; transportation was ending; and thousands of poor new settlers — free bounty immigrants whose passage was paid by the Colonial Government — were pouring into Sydney. The white settlement camped on the eastern edge of the continent was an eclectic mix of peoples, whose only commonality was a shared language. Half a century had not been enough time to put down roots, create traditions or meld social cohesion. Each disparate group, be it convicts, emancipists, poor immigrants, wealthy free settlers or the military, was striving for survival and some measure of success. Few had even registered the growing humanitarian crisis in front of them. If a measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable, then the penal colony of Terra Australis was just beginning to discover its character. This is the world that Caroline Chisholm had entered. Confronted by the desperation of the poorest and most vulnerable immigrants, she sought help from the pinnacle of colonial authority.

  We can only speculate on the details of Caroline’s first meeting with the most powerful person in the Colony of New South Wales. She deemed it a success, believing that ultimately Sir George would not refuse her request, even if he would rather not grant it.6 The governor’s initial opinion of Caroline, though, comes down to us loud and clear: he was bemused that a female had the temerity to argue her case on equal terms; he also found her undeniably attractive and was not the only man in Sydney to describe her so.7 There is other evidence too that she possessed considerable personal charm and congeniality, without which she would have floundered in polite colonial society.8

  What is most remarkable
is that Caroline, emerging from the lowly strata of British society, had the self-confidence and determination to take on the governor, the church and the establishment and ultimately win. It was not the first time, and it would not be the last, that she successfully pitted her resolve against the authority of the opposite sex. In India in the 1830s, she had founded a school for the daughters of ordinary soldiers and in doing so convinced one of the most formidable heroes of the Battle of Waterloo, Sir Frederick Adam, then the Governor of Madras, not only to support the school but also to contribute to its establishment. Years later, in London, she would persuade the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Earl Grey, to comply with her request to help reunite convicts and adult immigrants with wives and children they had been forced to leave behind.

  Even more surprising was the ultimatum Caroline had given the man she loved. Displaying a bold disregard for social custom, she had refused to marry Archibald Chisholm unless he agreed to let her lead a public life. For an Englishwoman in 1830, that was an extraordinary bid for freedom.

  Born into the flux of the nascent rural middle class, and uncertain of her actual parentage and legitimacy, Caroline faced the same prospects as most women: marriage, child-bearing and governing the minutiae of domestic trivialities. “The first object of every woman in married life should be the happiness of her husband,” wrote a respected woman author of the era.9 The man held all legal, financial and social power in the relationship. Indeed, a nineteenth-century wife was a ghostly being without any lawful entity: her money and possessions, owned or earned, belonged to her husband, who also had indisputable conjugal rights and ultimate authority over his wife and children. Women of all standings were conditioned from birth to believe fathers, brothers, husbands and even sons superior, both cerebrally and emotionally. “As Women, then, the first thing of importance is to be content to be inferior to men — inferior in mental power, in the same proportion that you are inferior in bodily strength,” wrote Sarah Stickney Ellis, advising young women on their preparation for marriage.10

  The few female contemporaries who dared to challenge the system came mainly from the upper-class intelligentsia, for example the French author Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin (George Sand), who scandalously revelled in cross-dressing and extramarital affairs, and English writer Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), who, just as shockingly, lived openly with a married man. As a young woman, Caroline was no revolutionary. Boldly negotiating her own future put her directly at odds with her conservative roots, yet she was morally and socially conventional. Her radicalism developed from her profound desire to help the poor and distressed and, amazingly, given her background, from her inherent belief in her own abilities. That overarching confidence is more typical of a woman of the twenty-first century than one of the 1800s.

  Caroline Chisholm’s position in Australian history has been subject to fashion and fancy. Among her contemporaries and for about ninety years after her death in 1877, she was lauded as “the Emigrant’s Friend”.11 Her conversion to Catholicism following her marriage in 1830 and her deep-seated religious faith led ardent admirers to suggest that she was a candidate for canonisation — at least one biography appears to have been written in support of this aim.12 By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, sentiment was turning against her. She was belittled by some writers who claimed that her reputation and achievements had been exaggerated by the Catholic Church.13 Others decried her “anti-feminist” stance: notably, the prominent journalist and feminist Anne Summers accused her of providing “the ideological underpinnings for more than a century of domestic servitude by Australian women”.14

  More recently, Caroline’s name has remained vaguely familiar through its association with many places and institutions. She was the first woman, apart from the Queen, to feature on our currency, adorning the five-dollar note from 1967 to 1994, and in 1968 she was pictured on a five-cent stamp. A federal electorate named Chisholm, a suburb of Canberra, a hill in the New South Wales Southern Highlands, parks, buildings, and streets too numerous to mention, various aged care homes, schools and an anti-abortion pregnancy counselling society all bear her name.

  Despite this and at least one new biography this century, Caroline has now all but faded from our national consciousness.15 Only a few schoolchildren today know her name or what she achieved for our infant colony; indeed, it was my own sons’ lack of knowledge of Caroline that drew me to her. I found previous biographies fulsome with facts and figures relating to her path through the politics of the day, but, frustratingly, what I couldn’t discover in these otherwise excellent accounts was a sense of the woman herself, the flesh and blood creature.

  What she did and where she went has been well documented. Who she was, much less so. The first biographies of Caroline were written in 1852, 165 years ago, by contemporaries, men who eulogised her work but had little or no interest in her personal life or her motivation. Eneas Mackenzie, for instance, said that he would not gratify “a mere morbid taste by rudely peering behind the veil of domestic life” whilst describing her work as “God-like . . . in fervid devotion to the Christian duties of charity and mercy. Her zeal has been apostolic.”16 This was a theme continued by most subsequent biographers, with her religious beliefs taking precedence over any investigation into her true character or personality. The result was the creation of a Caroline Chisholm too perfect to be true. Even Mary Hoban’s extensively researched book of more than four hundred pages published in 1973, Fifty-One Pieces of Wedding Cake, offers a Caroline without any human frailty. Anyone who did criticise Caroline, and there were a few, were in Hoban’s opinion themselves at fault rather than the other way around. There were two exceptions to this biographical whitewash approach. The first was Margaret Kiddle’s Caroline Chisholm, initially published in 1950. It was very well researched, but Kiddle noted in her preface, “This is not the personal biography of Caroline Chisholm . . . I have been unable to trace her private papers.”17 The second was Carole Walker’s A Saviour of Living Cargoes, based on her PhD thesis and published in 2009. Walker’s excellent investigations discovered a few of Caroline’s letters and other details not known to previous biographers. However, whilst both Kiddle and Walker have placed Caroline within the political world and temperament of the times, they have ignored both the social and emotional sides of Caroline, leaving a character, who, although admirable, is at best two-dimensional.

  My approach has been different. I have adhered to the evidence and facts of Caroline’s life, but have tried to focus more on Caroline as a woman. For instance, I have considered what it might have been like for Caroline, a nineteenth-century woman, to give birth, to lose a child and to be separated from her husband for years at a time — particularly when an attractive and eligible bachelor made her the centre of his attention. Just as salient, how did she manage the work–life balance of a working mother, recognised today as a major challenge for women, but almost unknown to the females of Caroline’s era? In a similar vein, and partly in response to the attacks of the feminists of last century, I wanted to determine her true attitude towards the role of women in society.

  I also wanted to reveal Caroline as a living, breathing person in a real world, not just a historical figure from a bygone age. I have therefore, at the start of most chapters, imagined scenes that relate directly to incidents covered within the subsequent pages. In creating these scenes, particularly when writing about Caroline’s interaction with named people, I drew on historical records. For example, the short piece, including most of the dialogue, at the start of Chapter 6, “Flora’s Story”, comes directly from Caroline’s own pen. Her meeting and interaction with Charles Dickens at the start of Chapter 12 is based on what Dickens subsequently wrote about Caroline and their ensuing collaboration. Elsewhere, I have used evidence from both Caroline and other sources to convey a sense of the world she was entering, whether it was India, Sydney or the bush. The endnotes provide further details on the sources.

  Delving into the environments Car
oline inhabited, in Britain, India and Australia, I learnt something of how she dealt with the challenges of both her physical and social surroundings. Reading her few private and many public letters, pamphlets and other writings, along with newspaper reports and accounts from people who knew her and others who inhabited the same or similar space, provided further revelations. Caroline was not perfect. Some contemporaries found her “unreasonable and indiscreet”.18 She also displayed a fair measure of hubris and sarcasm.

  On balance, though, the Caroline that I discovered was surprisingly modern in her approach to ethnicity, religion and women; she was also charitable, humane and immensely self-confident. I came to know a charismatic, pragmatic, political reformer with a large vision of her world, a lively sense of humour, great intelligence and an unexpectedly active imagination, all of which gave her the scope to conceive what could be done and accomplish it.

  Caroline has been my constant companion for the past six years. What has fascinated me most about her is that she was a woman so far ahead of her time that many of her ideas fit easily into our era. She believed essentially in the rights of women and a fair go for all. Her influence is still being felt in modern Australia today.

  CHAPTER 1

  Love Child

  1808–28

  Spring slipping into summer in the English Midlands at the end of May 1808 was most likely a dulcet time, a world of sensual delights: the spicy sweetness of crab-apple flowers, bees humming over lilac bushes, clumps of buttercups raising their yolky heads against a soft breeze smelling of sunshine. The town of Northampton, though on the verge of massive expansion, was then home to only seven thousand souls. The shoe trade, whilst dominant, was still cottage-based and although there was a busy market square and a cathedral, nowhere in the town was far from the farming culture that had sustained it for centuries.