Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  Even though convict assignment had ceased in 1838 Governor Gipps, upon the Molesworth Committee’s recommendation, in March 1843 approved a scheme to place some of ‘the best conducted women’ with reputable employers. Mary Shields was due for her ticket-of-leave that year, after four years of her sentence, so it is a little mystifying that her release was cast in official papers as part of this plan of reward. In any case, by April 1843, twenty-two women were selected for the scheme, and then in June a further eleven were added, amongst them a number of the Whitby women, including Mary. Applications from potential employers were to be accompanied by references from clergymen or magistrates, and the Colonial Secretary took the trouble to draft a special set of rules for the employment of these women. They were to be paid between £8 and £10 per year—Gipps said he wanted this group to have purchasing power from the day they left the Factory. Money the women earned was to be sacrosanct and not taken by the police.

  Middle-aged Cecily Naughton and her children were to go to Campbelltown, no more than a day or two’s ride away. Mary Carroll, who had a convict husband, was to remain as close as Penrith, barely 25 kilometres from the Factory. But another Whitby woman, Anne Morrow was to be sent by ship to distant, beautiful Port Macquarie, four hundred kilometres up the coast, and Mary Smith and Mary Gallon to Yass, a remote town in the interior at the limits of the old Nineteen Counties.

  Three women were to travel initially to the inland town of Goulburn—Mary Shields; Bridget Conelly, who had arrived on the Diamond from Cork in March 1838; and Margaret Carthy whose transport, Sir Charles Forbes, had put into Sydney on Christmas Day 1837. Shields had been applied for by William Bradley of Lansdown Park, Goulburn.

  Each of the three women carried on her person her ticket-of-leave, indicating that she was permitted to stay in the district of Goulburn. The women were to present their papers on demand to magistrates and police along the way, in the knowledge that any dallying or diversion from their approved route would be reported. This was their first extended and open experience of a society which was said to be the most debased on earth, and of a landscape in which any European woman was a rare sight likely to release male frenzy. How they negotiated it, how they evoked protection and respect from some men to balance the savage intentions of others can only be surmised. Ticket-of-leave men driving wagons or droving sheep watched them pass, and there were also men to ignore or fraternise with amongst the crowds of English and Irish convicts in road and timber-cutting gangs. Unhappy and angry felons, some in chains, brushed their eyes over the travellers in sullen desire. That these three came from the Female Factory was evident in their well-kept clothing, and women from the Factory possessed a certain éclat. Whether it was swamped by the male brutality of their surroundings we do not know.

  By day, the three women travelled on their own recognisance on the outside of coaches—the fares consuming part of their 10-shilling advance—or took rides on wagons, walking up the steeper grades. They took pains to look like nobody’s fools, not that they could have seemed an impressive company. Margaret Carthy was a squat worldling, a Dubliner, 155 centimetres, with light blue eyes. Brown-eyed Bridget Conelly, the marks of smallpox on her face, the tallest of the three at 160 centimetres, was from Galway and therefore an Irish-speaker. The offences of all three women were identical: stealing clothes.

  The authorities did not want to see women molested or prostituting themselves around the night encampments, so police magistrates would have assigned the three travellers shelter in empty cells or unused police shacks. To the Factory women, a roof was welcome, for the Australian winter nights were growing frosty, and in the mornings a skin of ice needed to be broken on the washing pails.

  The browned, dusty country Shields, Carthy and Conelly journeyed through was beginning to revive after some hopeful winter rains and to show an occasional burst of green now that the biblically long drought was ending. In this countryside, drought and land speculation had obliterated a great number of William Bradley’s fellow entrepreneurs and squatters. William Brodribb, Hugh Larkin’s employer, had had to abandon his pastoral lease in the Monaro and was pleased to be given well-paid work managing Bradley’s ever-increasing squatting leases beyond the Limits of Location. The Bank of Australia also failed that year of Mary’s release, and some of the oldest free settler families were swept away by this disaster. The emancipists’ bank, the Bank of New South Wales, survived, underpinned by the massive trading deposits of the late Samuel Terry, ‘the Botany Bay Rothschild’, a convict who had been transported for stealing four hundred pairs of stockings in Salford, Lancashire, and who made his fortune speculating in property in Sydney and rural areas.

  One of the chief signs of the recent economic crisis which the three women bound for Goulburn noticed from the start of their journey was the stench of boiling-down works in the bush, and on the outskirts of every settlement. Earlier that year an Irish settler from Mayo named Henry O’Brien had decided that the few pence value bankruptcy sheriffs put on sheep could not be a correct assessment. He conducted an experiment in his premises in Fort Street, Sydney, boiling down sheep for the tallow used in the manufacture of candles and soap. O’Brien reasoned that a sheep could produce twelve to fifteen pounds (5.4-6.8 kilos) weight of tallow even if starved. Eight hundred tolerably fat sheep would cost £109 to boil down and deliver to London, where the tallow would sell for £350. O’Brien thus calculated that, boiled down, a sheep was worth 6 shillings. There was a bottom value to livestock. It could be said therefore that a Mayo man had saved European New South Wales from economic devastation—but at an environmental price. As flocks of sheep were driven to tallow houses and boiling-down vats, the foulness of the process pervaded the country, increasing the suspicions of the native people that these white intruders were an accursed and poisonous race.

  Having crossed the Razorback Range and then sloped down Towrang Hill, the women approached the Goulburn police magistrate, who arranged for them to be delivered to their employers. Mary, at the end of her institutional existence, said goodbye to the last of her Factory comrades. She went in the first instance to Lansdown Park, Bradley’s home near Goulburn, a fair imitation of a British country estate, which employed dozens of convicts and former convicts. Recently elected to the new Legislative Council of New South Wales, representing the County of Argyle, Bradley had left management of his business within the Limits to a young Englishman, John Phillips, to whom Mary would have presented herself. She was not to stay long, however, in the defined regions, but was slated to work as housekeeper or servant in the Monaro bush with the manager of the huge Bradley sheep runs further south, Mr Brodribb.

  When Mary and her son, Michael, went off on a wagon to the far south, they still had to travel about the same distance as already covered, and in wilder and less administered country. The wagon advanced over the Limestone Plains and gradually upwards into the broad, grand, windy, stone-strewn, mountain-rimmed reaches of the Monaro, where European women became a rare phenomenon, and where men might feel liberated by suffering and distance from restraints they might have chafed under in the church-ed and saint-ed world. Young Michael served as something of a protection as mother and son took their rest in rough company, in overseers’ and shepherds’ huts along the way.

  The homestead at which Mary and Michael arrived at last, their Factory neatness jaded by distance, lay beyond Cooma Creek at a place named Coolringdon. The main house was certainly nothing like Lansdown Park. Brodribb planned to marry, though, and to introduce refinements. Inside the slab timber and bark walls, on the packed earth floor, Mary found an occasional excellent item of furniture, and good linen and silverware, and bound editions of the Latin and Greek classics as well as volumes of sermons, histories, and even novels.

  The bark kitchen where Mary fulfilled some of her duties was separate from the house. The huts of the workers on the station stood nearby, of no more elevated construction than that of the master. In one of them resided her future lover, Hugh La
rkin, whose Irishness and humour were, she clearly felt, close to her own.

  * Some readers will have encountered events narrated here in the author’s The Great Shame, although emphasis will differ from that earlier account.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE POOR EMIGRANT ASHORE

  The ship bearing young Henry and Clarinda Parkes anchored in Sydney Harbour on 25 July 1839, after Clarinda had given birth at sea to a baby girl just after they cleared Bass Strait. The couple possessed two or three shillings when the anchor was let go, and ‘the first news that came on board was that the four-pound loaf was selling at half a crown [two shillings and sixpence]!’.

  On landing, they could not afford a carriage and Clarinda had to walk a mile across town, her infant in her arms, to ‘a little low, dirty, unfurnished room, without a fireplace’. It would cost them 5 shillings per week rent. ‘When she sat down within these wretched walls overwhelmed with fatigue, on a box which I had brought with us from the ship, I had but threepence in the world, and no employment.’ At length, ‘completely starved out’, Henry took a job inland from Sydney as a common labourer with Sir John Jamison, whose model property, Regentville, lay near the Nepean River some 58 kilometres from Sydney. Though Sir John agreed to a yearly wage of £25 for Henry to work in his 6-hectare vineyard, Henry Parkes’s status as a labourer would have put him in contact with the common assigned criminals who tended Sir John’s vines and good horses, Sir John being the enthusiastic chairman of the Turf Club.

  At work in the vineyard, Henry met a convict transported two years before from his own home town, Birmingham. The convict, ‘who evidently knew the circumstances, brought me a share of his rations’. And when for some reason Parkes had to travel through the bush in the middle of the night, an old lag touched him by insisting on carrying luggage for him ‘out of pure respect’. But he and Clarinda ate the same rations as the convicts. Thus Parkes, a free Englishman, had the chance to comment on the complaints made by many convicts about what masters gave them to eat. He told his sister that they each received weekly 10 ½ pounds (4.8 kilos) of beef sometimes unfit to eat; 10 ½ pounds of rice—of the worst imaginable quality; 6 pounds (3 kilos) of flour, half of it ground rice; 2 pounds (900 grams) of sugar; a quarter pound (114 grams) of inferior tea; a quarter pound of soap (‘not enough to wash our hands’); and two figs of tobacco (‘useless to me’). And this from a master considered to be a reputable one. Parkes had no time to make a vegetable garden since ‘the slave masters of Sydney require their servants to work for them from sunrise till sunset’.

  The Parkes’s marriage bed consisted for the first four months of their habitation at Regentville of a disused door laid on cross-pieces of timber, lined with a sheet of bark off a box tree and covered with articles of clothing for warmth. The hut’s walls and roof admitted sunshine, rain, moonlight and wind. Their boxes, coming up from Sydney on Sir John’s dray, had been broken open along the way, and almost everything worth carrying away was stolen. ‘I made this first a very grave complaint, but only got laughed at for my pains, and told that was nothing.’

  Towards the New Year Henry and Clarinda and the baby returned to Sydney, where he found employment with Russell Brothers, Engineers and Brass Founders, in George Street, getting 5 shillings per day finishing brass work. He did not like the work much and thought he might need to return to the country after all. The town of Sydney was an execrable place. ‘I have been disappointed in all my expectations of Australia, except as to its wickedness; for it is far more wicked than I had conceived it possible for any place to be, or than it is possible for me to describe to you in England. For the encouragement of any at home who think of immigrating, I ought to add that I have not seen one single individual who came with me in the Strathfieldsay but most heartily wishes himself back at home.’

  But slowly Parkes began to meet kindred souls—not least a bookseller named McGee of Pitt Street, of whom he was a client. And by September 1840 he had got work as a Customs House officer, and things were better. ‘I spend most of my time on board ships, where I have a great deal of leisure to write poetry.’ Some of it was published. And Robert Lowe, a member of the Legislative Council, a descendant from one of the most illustrious families in England, had not thought him undeserving of his kindness, Henry said. ‘I lately sat down to table with some of the most respectable merchants in Sydney.’ He had ‘a more comfortable home than it was ever my lot to possess in England’, and was accumulating books again, though regretting that poor Clarinda spent a solitary life apart from the company of their daughter, ‘our dear little blue-eyed ocean child’, Clarinda Sarah.

  Like many, however, whose future would prove entirely Australian, he did not think he would finally settle there. From ships’ officers he collected books and newspapers but also heard stories of commercial chances in Java, Manila and Calcutta.

  Parkes saw the onset of the colonial depression. ‘The merchants of Sydney are all in a state of bankruptcy.’ (And the four-pound loaf, he remarked, was now only 8 pence.) He believed too many immigrants were arriving for everyone’s good. ‘A week ago there were eight vessels lying at anchor in the harbour, all crowded with emigrants! And though many of them have now been engaged to go into the interior, I am afraid great numbers will not be able to obtain employment.’ The cry for increased immigration came from those who wanted to keep labour prices low and keep Britons in the role of coolies, said Parkes.

  He had fellow feeling for the uncertain futures facing the immigrants. They were permitted to remain on board their vessels for up to ten days after their arrival in Port Jackson, but then had to come ashore and find their way into society. One young woman, who left one of the immigrant ships when the ten days were up, was found by a policeman sitting on the Queen’s Wharf and was taken to the watch-house. The next morning she was brought before the magistrate charged with being drunk, and though she stated it was faintness, she was sentenced on the oath of a policeman to sit one hour in the stocks. ‘What encouragement for persons to come to Australia!’

  Parkes confessed that when he went home in the evenings, his daughter would run to him with the plea, ‘Father, take us in a big ship to see Grandfather and aunties in England, do, Father!’ But distance from England had its benefits. It made him willing to offer peace to his father-in-law. ‘Tell Mr R Varney that his daughter is comfortable, and as happy as a virtuous woman in her situation can be. Tell him it is time any enmity he may feel towards me should cease, though in some measure he may have had cause for it. The fact of our being separated to the opposite extreme of the earth, should, I think, help to make us friends.’

  Pleased to report that the greatest poetical personage of Birmingham was now living in Australia—the Chartist-leaning, independently minded Miss Louisa Twamley, now married to the Vandemonian pastoralist Charles Meredith— Parkes himself was preparing for press a volume of verses, Stolen Moments, for which he had subscribers for one hundred copies. By now he knew Charles Harpur, the Australian-born poet. ‘I am now more happily situated,’ he wrote, ‘but there is much bitterness at best in the lot of an exile.’ His poetry would emphasise the banished British spirit and potential Australian democratic glory. Seeing convicts working to level Pinchgut Island in Sydney Harbour, Parkes’s eye caught one of them. Perhaps he was the subject of some bitter urban or rustic arrest, Parkes mused.

  He perchance is one

  Who yonder lifts the pickaxe in the sun

  To level Pinchgut Island! If e’er joy

  Gladdened your heart on England’s shores, oh Never

  Forget that Englishmen are banished here forever.

  PASTORAL MIGHT

  While convicts struggled with poor rations and hoped for tickets-of-leave and free emigrants battled to survive the economic downturn, patriots, patriarchs and pastoralists were at work in the politics of the colony. In 1842 an Imperial Act granted New South Wales, which still included Victoria, the right to elect twenty-four members to a legislature. A £20 rent or li
cence fee franchise was the basis of the Electoral Act, and there were democrats, from Charles Harpur the poet to Henry Parkes the customs officer who considered it far too high. It was not corruption of society by convicts which worried these men, it was the concentration of political power, whether in New South Wales or Whitehall, in the hands of the pastoralists, the men who, living under bark, had grown the Golden Fleece in the great distances and ennui of the bush.

  The gentry were already hostile to the extension of the Land Commissioners’ powers by Governor Gipps in 1839. In 1842, for example, William Lee had his squatting licence cancelled when his servants, moving herds westward beyond Bathurst into unauthorised areas, fought with Aboriginals. There was a fierce, denunciatory public meeting at Bathurst. The meeting asked the government to grant licences on the advice of three local magistrates, but Gipps believed this would give regional settlers the power to administer for their own benefit the vastness beyond the Twenty Counties and even the Crown lands still within. Gipps had earlier written, ‘As well might it be attempted to consign the Arabs of the desert within a circle, traced upon the sand, as it would be to confine the graziers or woolgrowers of New South Wales within any bounds that could possibly be assigned to them.’

  A great political crisis emerged in April-May 1844 when Gipps stated new terms under which settlers and squatters could occupy land. He and the British government were appalled that squatters could occupy unlimited acres for a mere £10 licence fee. He now proposed that squatters pay a licence fee for each run of twenty square miles (52 km2), that the squatter could buy his land over a long period at not less than £1 per acre, and that to achieve security over his land, the squatter should purchase a 320-acre (1.29 km2) homestead area which would secure his title to the run for eight years, and that he pay £320 every eight years to renew his rights. Gipps wanted this revenue to finance more immigration. Though he did not know it, the potato blight which would bring famine to Ireland and Scotland and which would produce great waves of immigration was but a few years away.