Caroline Chisholm

by Sarah Goldman

  In mid-1876, with the aid of their two daughters, Monica and Caroline, and the latter’s husband, Edmund Gray, Caroline and Archibald moved to better accommodation in Barclay Road, Fulham. Her daughter Caroline later recounted how, as her mother was carried from her dark room, she was told to close her eyes. Once outside the house she opened them and, looking up, exclaimed, “Oh, thank God for the beautiful sky!”18 It was also as she was being transported to this new home that, as mentioned previously, she asked to stop the carriage so that she could see the latest fashions in the shop windows.

  The Fulham residence was only slightly larger, but had a much better outlook. After years of lying in a dark room, Caroline was now ensconced in a bed next to a bay window, giving her light, air and sunshine. It was there, only a few months later, on 25 March 1877, that she died. The death certificate recorded “Senile Softening of Brain 6 years, Bronchitis 14 days”.19 She was sixty-eight years old.

  As the press announced her death, gave particulars of her funeral — she was to be buried in the Billing Road Cemetery, in Northampton — and spared room for eulogies, Caroline’s demise reverberated around the two nations that she loved. Her passing was mentioned in every nook and cranny of the British Isles; similarly, in Australia there were reports from Rockhampton in the north to Fremantle in the west and south to Hobart. The Argus in Melbourne provided one of the most eloquent tributes:

  The name of Caroline Chisholm carries us back to times in which civilisation was not yet wedded to sympathy, to times when a cruel economy was predominant in the best governed countries in the world, to times when the homes of millions of the poor in Europe suffered a painful dissolution, and the colonial problem threatened to defeat enterprise and set aside experience. Forty years ago Australia was an unknown land to politicians, travellers, and traders. The penal settlements had darkened a prospect which never was singularly bright, and had covered with shame and obloquy a reputation already worsted by the terrors of the unknown. The unhappy emigrant to the far-off island found poor comfort in the knowledge that it was the largest in the world, that its climate was generous, that it was free from the track of the panther, and knew no blight from pestilence. He felt that it was a place of banishment, that the dreary regions which one day might be his own never could be his solace, that it might be his fate to perish untimely in the dread ordeal before him, and sink in the struggle far from home and kindred. With the unhappy women who were driven out, the terrors were still greater. The journals were filled with tales of appalling woe, of starvation on board ship, and a ruin worse than death on shore. It seemed hardly possible that evils which Governments had vainly endeavoured to suppress should be utterly borne down by a woman; that a system which a Cabinet Minister dared not have attempted should be developed to perfection by the unaided exertions of an English lady.20

  Afterword

  Archibald survived Caroline by only five months, dying on 17 August 1877. He was buried next to his wife, beneath the same tombstone, at the Billing Road Cemetery, in Northampton. The graveyard is a little more than seven kilometres from Wootton, the village where Caroline’s father, William, was born in 1744 (and which is near the Caroline Chisholm School, opened in 2004). It was almost as though, after all their years of travel, Caroline and Archibald had finally gone home to where it had all started for them as a couple, just after the Yuletide in 1830.

  Caroline and Archibald left four living grown-up children divided by half a world: the two boys, Henry and Sydney, in Australia, and the two girls, Caroline and Monica, in Dublin and London. Following the couple’s deaths, several of Caroline’s friends, including Florence Nightingale, petitioned the government on behalf of Monica.1 In the Civil List Pensions of June 1878, she was awarded £50 per annum “in recognition of the services rendered by her mother, Mrs Caroline Chisholm, ‘The Emigrant’s Friend’”.2 That amount was additional to the £60 entitlement that Monica received from Archibald’s pension from the East India Company. Sometime after that, Monica married Maurice Gruggen and they moved to Moosomin, Saskatchewan, in Canada, to take up farming. From letters written by Monica, it appears that she paid for the upkeep of her parents’ grave for many years, but when her farming venture faltered, she was unable to continue. Monica had no children, nor does it appear that she ever returned to Britain. In her last recorded letter, dating from 1929, she was still in Canada and mentions her own and her husband’s ill health. She was seventy-eight years old at that time.3

  Monica’s letters also reveal a little of her older sister’s undulating life. At the time of her marriage in 1869, Caroline’s husband, Edmund Gray, was something of a hero, having received an Irish bravery award, the Tayleur Fund Gold Medal, for helping rescue the crew of a schooner sinking off Killiney Bay the previous year. Strangely, Caroline Jnr is thought to have witnessed the event, although she had not yet met Gray.4 Her husband became an Irish newspaper proprietor, politician and a Member of Parliament in the British House of Commons, who was, notably, in favour of Home Rule. He also became Lord Mayor of Dublin and later High Sheriff of the City of Dublin. Despite this stellar career, Gray, a heavy drinker and asthma sufferer, died at forty-two years of age, after a short illness. He had been a very wealthy man, probate showing that he left Caroline Jnr an estate of some £90,000, the equivalent of being a multi-millionaire today. One of Monica’s letters refers to Edmund Gray’s wealth, saying that he also had “a lovely house in Dublin and a seaside house — when my sister was Lady Mayoress of Dublin she was very popular and the Corporation presented her with a lot of diamonds.”5 Unfortunately, Caroline Jnr’s fortune did not last. She married again, to a Maurice O’Connor, and according to Monica “lost everything during her second marriage”. Caroline Jnr died in 1927 at the age of seventy-nine. Her first marriage had produced at least two children: Mary, on whom there is little information, and Edmund Dwyer-Gray, who migrated to Australia, finally settling in Tasmania. He became a farmer and a journalist, joined the Labor Party, hyphenated his name to help his election prospects (the change moved it up the alphabetically listed ballot papers to capture the ‘donkey vote’), and rose to become state treasurer and briefly, in June 1939, premier of Tasmania. Though he married, he and his wife did not have any children, and he passed away in December 1945.6

  Caroline’s two surviving sons, Henry and Sydney, remained in New South Wales. Little is known about Sydney, except that he married and had no children. Henry was undoubtedly the most successful of Caroline’s offspring. He was appointed a police magistrate at both Yass, on the state’s Southern Tablelands, and at Wollongong, on the coast south of Sydney. At the same time and, no doubt influenced by his father’s career, Henry became a colonel in the Duke of Edinburgh Highlanders and helped found the Highland Society of New South Wales. He died in 1923 at the age of eighty-four, leaving his widow, Kate, and six children: William, Mary, Archibald, Henry, Edmund and Caroline.

  Fittingly, it is the descendants of Henry, the successful Antipodean son, who have done the most to keep Caroline’s story alive. They are still living in Australia, contributing mightily to the nation’s social fabric. There are at least three generations of Chisholms, including, today, three successful brothers, Caroline’s great-great-grandsons Robert Chisholm, a retired journalist; Professor Richard Chisholm AM, Adjunct Professor of Law at the Australian National University and a retired judge of the Family Court, who was also a founding member of the Aboriginal Legal Service and of the children’s rights group Action for Children; and, the eldest brother, Professor Don Chisholm AO, Professor of Medicine at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney, the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the University of New South Wales, who works primarily in the treatment and research of diabetes. Don Chisholm’s son James is on the international board of the Hunger Project, whose mission is to make hunger throughout the world obsolete, whilst his daughter Sarah, like her great-great-great-grandmother, Caroline, began her work by aiding female immigrants and newly arrived refugees in New South Wales. S
arah, too, looked for practical solutions, helping establish social enterprise projects whereby new arrivals could settle into their surroundings and access paid work. Like her forebear, her prime objective was to give the women respect and autonomy. More recently, Sarah has been involved in environmental social enterprise. Expressing her motivation, she could be channelling Caroline when she says: “The world’s resources and opportunities are not always accessible to a range of people in our communities. Some struggle to access basic human rights and decent opportunities. I have always believed that something has to be done to address this. I see some amazing work being done, at other times, I realise that there is still so much more to do.”

  *

  In every epoch, there are exceptional travellers, individuals who help reconfigure and reshape their world until what they stand for becomes the touchstone of a humane or equitable society. Caroline Chisholm was one such person. The breadth and scope of her achievements would be exceptional today; in an era when most females were confined to domestic banality with little say in their own lives, they were truly extraordinary. Her initial mission was to free vulnerable women from their cruel dependency on men, to give them choices and opportunities for self-determination, the chance to work for decent wages in fair conditions. In doing so, she demanded a new level of safety and respect for women, indeed for all workers. In her early years in Sydney, Caroline widened the scope of her activities to eventually aid some eleven thousand men, women and children — finding them employment, saving them from destitution and helping to create thriving country communities. Later she was to instigate family reunion schemes whereby left-at-home relatives in Britain could join their kin in Australia to put down roots in the New World. There are many successful families across Australia today that owe their place in society to the start Caroline gave their forebears. Yet, notably, Caroline also acknowledged the Indigenous inhabitants of Australia as the “original owners of the land”, a recognition that would take 145 years and the 1992 Mabo decision to finally be enshrined in law.

  By instigating the Carthaginian case, Caroline underlined that boat captains and surgeons should be responsible for the wellbeing of their passengers and, moreover, owed them a duty of care. That was a significant victory for impoverished immigrants, who previously had had no legal redress against the brutality many had to endure on the long voyage to Australia. Similarly, during her Family Colonization Loan Society days, Caroline insisted that boat surgeons were well paid and, hence, experienced medical practitioners. Challenging the British Government’s Passengers Act, she introduced a new standard of travel for steerage class, whereby immigrants had reasonable cabins, washhouses and cooking space and were entitled to good food and water; she also made some attempt to ensure that they had clean air below decks and, most importantly, privacy. Her plans were to define a new style of travel for long-distance passenger ships. She set standards that were eventually to become minimum requirements under law.

  In an issue that still chimes today with the great Australian dream of owning your own home, one of Caroline’s most consistent and passionate campaigns supported the rights of everyone to purchase their own land. In addition to the Shellharbour experiment, she lobbied continuously during her appearances before select government committees in both Sydney and London, during her public lectures and, repeatedly, for years, in letters and articles to newspapers on both sides of the world. She was not the only one advocating the freeing up of land, but she was a powerful and well-known voice, and her efforts undoubtedly rallied support to the cause. Before she left Australia in 1866 she had her reward, with both New South Wales and Victoria legislating in favour of small landholders.

  Many of Caroline’s most radical ideas showed a vision far in advance of her time. Whilst many twenty-first century societies still struggle with ethnic divisions, she supported multiculturalism decades before the word was even invented, clearly understanding the modern concept of “unity in diversity”. At a time of determined anti-Asian sentiment, Caroline wrote and spoke of the need to welcome Chinese immigrants and treat them as an integral part of the community. For Caroline, what mattered was not a settler’s past but the innate morality of their character, their ability to be positive, to work and achieve results. She found no cause to discriminate against any person because of the god they worshipped or the colour of their skin. She believed in inclusiveness, and saw creeds and ethnicities as part of the vast, delightful patchwork of humanity. Equally, she espoused the benefits of democracy, universal suffrage and fairer working conditions. In the 1850s and 1860s she defied the conventions that kept women bound to a private domestic life, speaking out in public lectures to argue that all women should have full self-determination and, even, eventually be enfranchised.

  Despite her avant-garde ideas, Caroline made no revolutionary demands; instead, the key to her success was her ability to encompass intellectual, practical and compassionate considerations while expressing a robust self-belief that instilled confidence in others and encouraged them to see beyond myopic conventions. Caroline had an unequivocal, ebullient faith in the future of the colonies. She knew that a truly hardworking, eclectic community would eventually produce a proud, successful society full of heart and soul. Our generation, and future ones, should recognise her part in shaping a flourishing, egalitarian and, most importantly, humane Australia. We are all in her debt.

  Endnotes

  Introduction

  1Samuel Sidney, Sidney’s Emigrant’s Journal and Traveller’s Magazine, Second Series, Wm. S. Orr and Co., London, 1850, p. 271.

  2Ibid.

  3Captain Archibald Chisholm was with the East India Company, not the British Army. The title of captain outside the East India Company was honorary.

  4Postage in the colony was expensive: a half-ounce letter sent from Sydney cost 4d to Parramatta, 7d to Windsor or Campbell Town, 10d to Bathurst and a shilling for three hundred miles; see Margaret Kiddle, Caroline Chisholm, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1950, p. 23.

  5Governor Gipps wrote to an English friend that Caroline had overrated the powers of her own mind; see Sidney, Emigrant’s Journal, p. 271.

  6Caroline Chisholm, Female Immigration Considered, in a Brief Account of the Sydney Immigrants’ Home, James Tegg, Sydney, 1842, p. 5.

  7Thomas Callaghan, Callaghan’s Diary: The 1840s Sydney Diary of Thomas Callaghan of the King’s Inns, Dublin, Barrister at Law, Francis Forbes Society for Australian Legal History, Dream Weaver Publishing, Sydney, 2005, p. 116.

  8Ibid., p. 168.

  9Mrs William Parkes (Fanny Parkes, née Byerly), Domestic Duties; or, Instructions to Young Married Ladies, on the Management of their Households, and the Regulation of Their Conduct in the Various Relations and Duties of Married Life, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, London, 1828, p. 30.

  10Mrs Ellis (Sarah Stickney Ellis), The Daughters of England, Their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities, D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1843, p. 6.

  11Samuel Sidney, The Three Colonies of Australia: New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia; Their Pastures, Copper Mines and Gold Fields, Ingram, Cooke and Co., 1853, London, p. 135.

  12Mary Hoban, Fifty-one Pieces of Wedding Cake: A Biography of Caroline Chisholm, Lowden Publishing Co., Kilmore, Victoria, 1973, p. x.

  13Elizabeth Windschuttle, “Feeding the Poor and Sapping their Strength: The Public Role of Ruling-Class Women in Eastern Australia, 1788–1850”, in Elizabeth Windschuttle (ed.), Women, Class and History, Fontana/Collins, Melbourne, 1980, p. 53.

  14Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, Penguin Books Camberwell, Victoria, Australia, 2002, p. 51.

  15Carole Walker, A Saviour of Living Cargoes: The Life and Work of Caroline Chisholm, Wolds Publishing Ltd, Leicester, UK, 2010.

  16Eneas Mackenzie, Memoirs of Mrs Caroline Chisholm, with an Account of Her Philanthropic Labours in India, Australia, and England; To which is added a History of the Family Colonization Loan Society; also the Qu
estion, Who Ought to Emigrate? Answered, Webb, Millington and Co., London, second edition, 1852, pp. x, 152.

  17Kiddle, op. cit., p. xxiv.

  18Callaghan, op. cit., p. 169.

  Chapter 1: Love Child

  1Walker, op. cit., p. 186.

  2Max Roser, “Life Expectancy”, published online at OurWorldInData. org; retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy/

  3Jane Randall, Women in an Industrializing Society: England 1750–1880, Basil Blackwell Ltd, Oxford, 1990, pp. 38, 40.

  4Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution, Oxford University Press, New York, 2012, p. 181.

  5“Philogamus”, The Present State of Matrimony: Or, the Real Causes of Conjugal Infidelity and Unhappy Marriages, John Hawkins, London, 1739, pp. 11, 10.

  6Dabhoiwala, op. cit., p. 92.

  7Edith Pearson, “Caroline Chisholm, ‘The Emigrant’s Friend’, 1808–1877”, reprinted in Rodney Stinson (ed.), Unfeigned Love, Yorkcross Pty Ltd., Sydney, 2008, p. 171.

  8Ibid.

  9F.K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England, Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 1980, p. 9.

  10The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, in Ten Volumes, vol. VII, J. & J. Harper, New York, 1826, p. 152.

  11Eneas Mackenzie, Memoirs, p. 2.