by Clare Wright
The drawing-room accomplishments of singing, dancing, painting and crochet would stand no shadow of a chance against the highly-prized virtues of churning, baking, preserving, cheese-making and similar matters.
The above examples, and the letter from our happy wet-nurse, all appear in PHILLIPS’ EMIGRANTS’ GUIDE TO AUSTRALIA, written by John Capper and published in Liverpool in 1855. The guidebooks were intended to be of practical value but there was also an imperial agenda. Colonial expansion required skilled migrants, male and female.
The British Government wasn’t the only party with an interest in Victoria’s extraordinary new attraction for the world’s voluntary nomads. There were fortunes to be made from the traffic in human mobility: the costs of relocation and provisioning, the revenue generated by labour and taxes. The Colonial Office paid handsomely to reduce its surplus population through assisted immigration; private citizens also boosted the bank balances of the shipping magnates who were quickly (and cheaply) converting their ships to carry people instead of goods. There was a middle ground, too, between government assistance and commercial travel: the philanthropic societies to which a prospective immigrant could apply for financial aid to secure passage.
The Family Colonisation Loan Society established by the enterprising Caroline Chisholm, the woman on Australia’s first issue five-dollar banknote, is the best known of the philanthropic organisations. Chisholm’s endeavour to populate the inland of Australia with honest and industrious women who could infuse bush society with permanent prosperity began in 1840. To break up the bachelor stations is my design, Mrs Chisholm intoned, happy homes my reward. With the discovery of gold, Chisholm, now forty-four years old and wise to the vagaries of life under colonial conditions, saw the opportunity to extend her scheme to those families which could not afford passage and did not qualify for government assistance (because of the age or number of children). Keeping families together was her aim. Over three thousand immigrants were sponsored by the Family Colonisation Loan Society between 1852 and 1854.
An alternative solution was for a group of eager but impecunious emigrants—neighbours or acquaintances—to get together and charter a ship. Guidebooks often discouraged intending migrants from looking to patronage or poor law guardians, or Government, for help, counselling them to form local committees and do the work for themselves. The ethic of self-help was strong among some communities, notably the Scots, whose religious or moral code disposed them to earn the rights and privileges of prosperity rather than being handed a better life on a platter. Here the covenant was struck between the parish or civic organisations that acted as benefactors and the recipients of that local largesse; wealth would flow back to the community in gratitude for its faith. Alexander Dick aligned himself to the Christian and Temperance Emigration Society, a joint stock association, which planned to buy a 470-tonne ship that could carry 250 passengers and sell it at the end of the voyage. Dick characterised his fellow travellers as an interesting and virtuous band of voluntary exiles…run by a coterie of goody goody teetotallers and Methodists…a kind of modern Argonauts. Still a teenager, Dick was delighted to find that his ship was full of intemperate young men like himself.
Chinese immigrants also favoured the self-help model. They formed triads—a culturally distinct form of friendly society—to send family and community members to Victoria. Immigration agent Bell’s report noted that a very large, though I fear not very profitable, addition to our population is now almost daily arriving from China. Up to 30 June 1854, according to Bell, no fewer than 2895 male Chinese had landed in Melbourne…and as rapidly removed to the Gold Fields. Their women, Bell noted, never emigrate. (Bell was equally dismayed by the high number of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, a country he believed was relieving a parish of its paupers.) Bell would no doubt have been apoplectic to learn that by 1857 the Chinese population in Victoria would peak at 25,000.12
The majority of Chinese immigrants to Victoria came from one region, Guangdong Province, where they were largely involved in agrarian pursuits. Many were uninterested in cultural adaptation, even if the culture had been inclined to assimilate them, regarding Europeans as uncivilised and inferior beings—spiritual and cultural barbarians.13 Chinese diggers hung together. They maintained close-knit social relations, both informally and in community organisations such as the See Yup Society.
Historian Anna Kyi has argued too that Chinese gold diggers can be characterised as having a ‘sojourning mentality’; that is, their aspiration was to amass a quick fortune and return home to their wives and elders with wealth and respect.
The Chinese readily acknowledged that this was their primary motivation; most didn’t want a fresh start, but a way to improve their financial, familial and social status at home. But leaders of the Chinese community were also eager to dispel the near hysteria that surrounded the fact that no Chinese women accompanied the male sojourners. A petition to the government written in 1857, protesting against a poll tax on Chinese arrivals, gave an explanation for this situation.
The Chinese on first coming to this gold field thought the English very kind then the Chinese were glad to come digging gold and delighted in the mercy manifested. Now we learn that the news-papers complain that we Chinamen bring no wives and children to this country. Our reason is that we wish to leave some of the family to look after our aged parents as the climate there is very rough; our women too are not like English women, when they go into ships they cannot walk or stand and we cannot afford the passage money…as soon as we get a little money we will try to get home to our aged parents for our ancient books teach us that we must look after our parents.14
Another ethnic group prominent on the diggings, Jewish immigrants, were among the first to grasp the potential of Victoria for changing personal and collective fortunes. Long debarred from full commercial and civic participation, Jews from England and continental Europe hoped that in Victoria they would be free to integrate with mainstream society without compromising their cultural identity. In September 1853, the Family Colonisation Loan Society sent a boatload of passengers to Victoria, including a large party of girls recruited by the London Jewish Ladies’ Benevolent Society on behalf of the Jews of Ballarat. They sailed on a newly built ship, making its maiden voyage: the Caroline Chisholm.
Echoing on both sides of the Atlantic, and reverberating through continental Europe and across Asia, there was one clear, resounding message. Fabulous wealth, a healthier, happier life, self-respect and limitless freedom were yours for the price of passage or your mark on a government paper. Whether you chose to come to the mountain, dig, make your pile and stay; or come, dig, make your pile and hightail it home, the route was unambiguous and unobstructed. The attraction was potent. The doomsayers were few.
But even in the early days of the miraculous gold rush, there was more realistic writing on the walls if you chose to read it. Dysentery, cholera and ophthalmalgia are rife, and committing dreadful ravages, testified the DAILY ALTA in April 1852. By July 1853 the DAILY ALTA conveyed reports of deceptions practised in England to induce emigration to the colonies. In Britain too, some journalists warned emigrants not to be deluded by exaggerated claims of prosperity. Miserable homes, rags and filth, wives savagely beaten, children deserted and starved, warned the London TIMES in October 1853, all the evils to be found in the overcrowded centres of Europe may be seen in as great a proportion here. Even some guidebooks were apprehensive about the possible backlash against a colonisation project based on flights of fancy. Should the emigrants suffer privation, if they could not obtain from the stubborn soil sufficient for mere subsistence, let alone indulge in the refinements they have been accustomed to, Samuel Mossman warned, there would be untold distress for those charged with governing these people. The starved will revolt against all the laws of God and man however stringent.
If the dream of independence was but a chimera—just wait and see moral man revert into that of retrograde nature. The spectre of savageism. The perils
of a mixed multitude too hungry to keep its covenant.
THREE
CROSSING THE LINE
Two weeks out, and Louisa Timewell took it as a good sign that she had the strength to write in her ship journal: make a loaf with sour leaven every day. Details were beginning to come back into focus. I save some of the dough for the next day’s bread. Louisa could even start to see the humour in it. Although the ship swayed like a hammock in the breeze, she and the other women still needed to go about their daily business. They held their babies on one hip while washing out clothes, trying to keep the basin steady. It’s very laughable to see them pitching about so. Fortunately for Louisa Timewell, leaven and babies are strict taskmasters. I got on deck all day with the children, Louisa wrote after the morning’s baking was complete, and the time passed off very pleasantly watching the flying fish, sharks, whales, porpoises [and] fin backs.1
For the fact is that no matter how devoutly some passengers held to the familiar markers of their former selves, by the time the gold rush immigrants reached Ballarat, they’d already endured a life-altering journey of colossal proportion. A new era, as one shipboard journal proclaimed grandly, for men, women and children who had hitherto hugged the land. These novice mariners now committed their destinies to the wild world of water, seeking a far off land of Promise, where they may find wealth, social distinction and domestic happiness.2 A sourdough leaven might demand slavish reliability, but no ritual can hold together a universe that has burst apart at the seams.
Today it’s hard to comprehend that the journey can be as transformative as the destination. We can cross the globe so fast that we might not even speak to the strangers in the seats around us. We might grimace when they belch or remove their shoes, but our lives and bodies will not connect in any meaningful way. Unless disaster strikes, the journey itself does not change us.
For most passengers, the first few weeks of the sea voyage seemed anything but promising. MURRAY’S GUIDE advised what to take on the three- to five-month journey: pickles, anchovies, potted herrings, smelling salts, camphor, perfumes to burn, musical instruments and good humour, a close tongue about your own affairs, and a go-a-head spirit. It seemed a practical kit, but no amount of sensible preparation could hold back the forces of physiology. Few first-timers took to the sea unscathed; even old hands felt the effects. Like war and childbirth, seasickness was a truly democratising experience. Mal de mer. Seekrankheit. Mareo en barco. Wan syun long.
With land disappearing astern and the waving handkerchiefs dwindling to specks in the distance, the body knows what the mind has yet to register. It has lost its bearings. Lines of sight no longer find fixed reference points. The equilibrium between eye and ear is disturbed. Even when the ship ceases to pitch and rock and sway, still there is the constant nauseating motion in the head and, as familiar visual anchors come unstuck, the brain adjusts to a new paradigm for balance. It helps to keep busy and concentrate on mechanical tasks, as Louisa Timewell discovered; the worst thing to do is stay below deck with no fresh air and no horizon.
Céleste de Chabrillan, wife of the new French consul to Melbourne, described the scene on the Croesus as it headed for open sea in 1854.
It jolted and tossed about on the waves so much that passengers and objects all came tumbling down on top of each other…The famous line ‘hare you sichowek’ (are you seasick?) went from one passenger to the next, some escaping to their cabins, others leaning over the side. The only reply one hears is moaning, groaning and retching.3
Céleste herself felt the initial effects of this horrible sickness, but she refused to yield to its power: I am fighting against it. She stayed on deck—alone—for all the passengers have disappeared as if by magic. Her husband Lionel remained in their cabin with his head between two pillows and didn’t emerge for three days. I was distressed to see him suffer so and I could do nothing to bring him relief, lamented Céleste. But neither would the headstrong Céleste, a former dancer and courtesan, keep vigil by his side in their dark, cramped cabin with the waves lashing against the sides of the ship, the planks, doors and masts cracking as if thousands of woodcutters are cleaving them with axes. Céleste was a fighter: I prefer to face the enemy and I go back up on deck. She stayed up all night, favouring fatigue to the suffering I see endured around me. Even her two dogs were curled up in the bottom of their wicker basket, playing dead.
Brave-faced Fanny Davis was mortified to discover that defiance alone was not enough. One week into her voyage she wrote, It was a great mistake me being ill as I did not mean to be; it offended Fanny’s dignity that crewmen needed to come down with mops and buckets to clean out her cabin. Agnes Paterson was, by her own admission, reduced to a most pitiful condition. Charlotte Spence was a pitiable mess, refusing all nourishment for days. Henry Nicholls distributed his recipe for bilious pills: four scruples compound extract of ‘coloquth’, one scruple powdered seammony, one scruple powdered ‘soccolorine’ aloes, six drops oil of cassia. The formula was probably more enterprising than effective. On the Lady Flora the doctor prescribed wine and porter for the invalids, which passenger John James Bond thought might explain why some of the ladies are again disposed to faint. Emma Macpherson worried at first that she didn’t have the necessary faith for her homeopathic tincture to work; she was delighted to find it relieved her distress. Frances Pierson, sailing from New York with her husband Thomas, drank salt water and found that she was a good deal better.4
For Bethuel Adams, seasickness was his first reminder that leaving England meant forsaking the comforts of his mother’s home. Popular mythology about male wanderlust would have us believe that men collectively revelled in the freedom from domestic constraints offered by frontier living; that women were but shackles on footloose masculinity. But listen to Bethuel Adams’ anguish as he reflects on the privileges of the hearth:
To be ill at sea is very dreadful, nothing but men to attend you and to perform those little kind offices which only come natural from a woman. Ah woman, we know not how to estimate your value until we are deprived of your presence!! Never before did I think so highly and with so much interest of the fair sex as I have since I have been at sea.
In his dismal queasiness, the future seemed to Bethuel not gloriously free but bleak and lonely. How I shall be able to endure a bachelor life for half a score years in the solitary bush of Australia I don’t know. The poor fellow didn’t have to worry for long. He arrived in Port Phillip on 3 January 1854 and died the following month in a shooting mishap, killed by his own gun.5
Only the most charmed of passengers avoided the gruelling initiation into life at sea. The rest may have failed to reflect, as they lay prostrate and retching, on the symbolic purging of old identities that seasickness represented. With heads reeling and stomachs churning, many immigrants prayed for death to deliver them from their misery.
Three weeks out, the passengers of the Lady Flora, the ship carrying Sarah Hanmer and her daughter Julia to their new home, petitioned the captain to put in to shore so they could happily desert, so sick of the sea were they. Poor winds meant the coast of England was still maddeningly in sight. One ship’s surgeon-superintendent summed up the predicament of his charges:
Unused to the sea, seasick, homesick, cold, wet, fearful and battened down, few aggregations of human wretchedness could be much greater than was to be found…in the close dark ’tween decks of an outward-bound emigrant ship.6
But when sufferers finally crawled out of the putrid cracks and cavities to face the light again, it was as if they were born anew. The first challenge had been overcome, and they were away. In time I might make a brave sailor, wrote Fanny Davis, marvelling at the new possibilities that suddenly seemed to arise before her.
For the vast majority of gold rush immigrants, those making their way from British ports, the early part of the journey proceeded in a southwesterly direction down the east Atlantic Ocean to the Equator. The English coastline might still be visible for weeks if conditions were poor,
but eventually it receded into the distance. Then there was only the vast rolling ocean. The stars of the northern hemisphere constellations provided the last familiar markers. As Fanny Davis put it, the emigrants had entered the pathless deep. Heading south, the ship’s route would descend past the Bay of Biscay, Lisbon, Madeira, the Canary Islands and the lumpy knob of West Africa, where the Tropic of Cancer was silently traversed.
The route for ships leaving the east coast of America, before the Panama Canal opened in the early 1900s, was south towards the Gulf of Mexico, then east across the Atlantic, joining up with the European clipper route in the tropics. Only six days after her departure, English schoolgirl Jane Swan noted it was getting perceptibly warmer.7 Bethuel Adams finally had the strength to look around him and appreciate the vast beauty of the ocean, especially at night when we can see the phosphoric lights dancing amid the spray like a shower of sparks from a blacksmiths anvil. Thirteen-year-old Jane was less transfixed: we get quite tired of having nothing to look at but the sea, she complained to her diary. Perhaps adolescence and ennui are universal bedfellows.
