Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  A helping hand for the worthy

  Australia’s first assisted immigrants arrived in Sydney on 15 November 1831, fifty young girls from the Foundling Hospital orphanage at Cork in Ireland, brought out by Dr John Dunmore Lang, a Presbyterian minister. Lang dreamed of purifying the corrupt stock of New South Wales by bringing out worthwhile women or girls, for this was an age when children as young as eight pulled coal carts in Welsh mines (children were cheaper than ponies, and more easily replaced). A ten-year-old girl could be a cook’s assistant, washing up and peeling vegetables. A ten-year-old boy might shine shoes as ‘boot boy’, too, but Australia needed girls, not boys.

  In October 1835 New South Wales Governor Bourke offered free passage for selected immigrants to try to overcome the shortage of labour in the colony. Wealthy settlers were also offered a bounty in exchange for bringing out their own workers.

  But most immigrants were probably assisted by smaller charitable organisations of which there were many amidst the poverty of the 1830s. A local church group might sponsor several local young men or couples. Two more of my ancestors, a Church of England minister and his wife, were found starving, their cupboard bare of food, despite the tithes (a tenth of parishioners’ incomes) paid to the Church; a poor parish had little to tithe. Their family donated enough money for their fare, with a little left over to establish themselves respectably in Sydney, which they did with alacrity.

  The girls of God’s police

  Other schemes became famous, the best known probably that of Caroline Chisholm. After Chisholm and her husband arrived in New South Wales in 1838, she began her work taking in many of the poor Irish women, single and illiterate, who arrived on the bounty ships with nowhere to go except the streets. Chisholm trained them as servants: any woman in the colony who could cook, clean and sew had an assured job as a servant, although with such an imbalance of men and women, few would remain servants for long. Convincing Governor Gipps to open the disused army barracks as a place of refuge for women, she established a network to get single women into service, often accompanying them on carts and bullock wagons throughout the colony to find employers.

  By the 1840s Chisholm decided that respectable women would revolutionise the dissolute ways of the colony, especially drunkenness, and the rape and prostitution of Indigenous women. Good women were ‘God’s police’ and would do more to civilise rough and drunken Australian society than any number of clergy or schoolmasters.

  She set up the Family Colonization Society in London and moved back there with her husband to supervise it, despatching thousands of families to Australia, as well as offering them money through her Family Colonization Loan Society. Families would be lent money to come to Australia and would repay the loans once they were settled. Chisholm organised ships that would take her charity cases at reasonable rates and under respectable conditions and placed them in hostels and jobs once they arrived. By 1846 hundreds of men were writing each year to Chisholm, thanking her for providing them with wives.

  It is easy to scoff at the image of ladies with pursed lips and parasols acting as God’s police. But Chisholm had a point – the lack of women in the colony meant that for many men there was no chance of companionship, a family life or a settled home. A freed convict might dream of owning a pub, but a family of his own might be impossible.

  The women brought more than morals and offspring. The diaries and letters of the time tell of men building their huts, bringing their flocks of sheep or cattle. But it was their wives who ordered fruit trees or planted them from seed; who ordered rose bushes or at least a few geraniums; who set up hen yards for eggs and demanded a paddock for a milk cow and who made the butter and the cheese. In the 1800s men built empires, or made a living. Women made homes.

  ‘Respectable’ and ‘enterprising’ were also the criteria for the settlers to the new colonies in the west and south. Western Australia was begun not as a convict prison but by British administrators like Stirling, who founded the colony in 1829 and was funded by independent investors who brought out their families and the men they employed to work their land, as well as farmers and labourers brought out by the British investor Thomas Peel in return for grants of land.

  Respectable South Australia

  South Australia, too, was founded by the respectable, although the man who first proposed it, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, wrote his influential Letter from Sydney when he was in prison for kidnapping a fifteen-year-old heiress, hoping that she’d be forced to marry him to save herself from the disgrace. Published in the English newspaper The Spectator in 1829, the Letter from Sydney had a lot of influence, even if Wakefield had even less actual experience of Australia and its farming potential than Sir Joseph Banks.

  Wakefield urged that land in this colony should be sold at a high price so that only wealthy people could buy it – and by wealthy Wakefield meant respectable. The money from land sales would pay for the emigration of labourers to work the farms. There would be an equal number of men and women, and thrifty labourers might in time earn enough to buy their own farms.

  Within a year Wakefield had inspired enough supporters to form the National Colonisation Society to encourage emigration to Australia. Land in New South Wales and the other colonies was to be sold and part of the money used to subsidise people’s fares to Australia. Wakefield’s plan inspired George Fife Angas, a rich ship owner and banker who was also a ‘dissenter’, a religious radical. Dissenters weren’t allowed to go to university or be buried in churchyards, but they still had to pay a tenth of their income to the Church of England. Angas dreamed of a colony where labourers had hope for a future, where immigrants would be carefully selected, where there’d be no convicts and all the crime a convict class might bring – and where no one would have to pay a tithe to the Church of England.

  For five years English idealists formed committees, wrote pamphlets and worked towards a South Australian colony. A South Australian Association was formed, with the respectable Member of Parliament Colonel Robert Torrens as chairman. Finally in 1834 the British government passed an Act that established the British province of South Australia by removing about 800,000 square kilometres from New South Wales. The new settlers were carefully selected by Angas’s company and the government’s Board of Commissioners.

  Angas also paid for German Lutheran refugees to come to the colony after they had been forced out of Silesia when King Frederick William tried to set up a state religion. By January 1839 four boatloads with 537 German migrants had arrived and leased land from the company, led by their pastor, Augustus Kavel. They began building a village they called Klemzig, after their native town in Prussia, on the Torrens River.

  Wakefield and Angas’s South Australian plans to establish a colony of prosperous, respectable farmers failed in many respects, but the town of Adelaide still has the nickname the City of Churches. (My father was on a troop train the day World War 2 ended. He danced in Sydney’s streets. In Melbourne he was part of a two-up game. In Adelaide he went to church.)

  Cooksland: A suitable destination for criminals and the virtuous

  Brisbane – or rather Moreton Bay – began its existence as a penal colony when, in September 1824, Governor Brisbane sent fourteen soldiers and thirty convicts under Lieutenant Henry Miller to set up the settlement. But reports of fertile land and high rainfall soon attracted immigrants. It was also seen as a suitable destination for the virtuous. In 1845 the Reverend Dunmore Lang convinced a boatload of settlers to sail for Moreton Bay by promising they’d get land grants in return for paying for their passage. They didn’t, but one way or another Lang enticed about a thousand sturdy Presbyterian Scottish settlers to the Queensland colony.

  On 30 March 1849 another 250 Scottish immigrants arrived as part of Reverend Lang’s ‘Cooksland’ scheme to start cotton farming in the area and stop Australia becoming an Irish Roman Catholic colony. Unfortunately, Lang had not got around to either getting permission from the British or colonial authorities nor getting
land grants. The settlers camped temporarily in the valley they named Fortitude after the ship that had brought them to Australia. (Lang’s ghost may have haunted ‘The Valley’ a century later, when it was a byword for carousing and brothels.)

  By the 1840s the respectable white residents of Australia – or those who had made a reasonable pretence of being so – outnumbered convicts and ex-convicts. By 1841 in New South Wales there were 131,000 settlers of which 27,000 were convicts still serving their sentences and about 20,000 were ex-convicts.7

  Australia’s very distance from Europe and northern Asia continued to create a selection process for the settlers. To come here required a degree of fortitude that could accept not just the terrors of the voyage (the longer the voyage, the greater the danger of shipwreck, storms and disease) but also the knowledge that following their emigration they were unlikely to ever see their home again. Letters would take more than a year to exchange. Those tempted by the Australian gold rush could more easily have gone to the Californian goldfields. Even post-World War I and 2 there were easier, closer destinations, and official Australia has never been particularly welcoming to newcomers.

  So has the fortitude and enterprise of colonial to post-World War 2 settlers affected Australian society? The popular image is that those who had the endurance and stamina to stay here and raise families created a proud nation of independent, resilient men and women: our clichéd sun-bronzed Anzacs, the settler wives who gave birth under the dray, then turned the handle on the chaff cutter with one hand while they held the baby in the other. While there were many who fitted the cliché above exactly (I still have the chaff cutter that Mrs Griggs used with one hand while she fed her babies in the early twentieth century) there are also stories of the lazy, the stupid, and the feckless, as well as the extremely unremarkable.

  But you can tell a lot about a nation from the clichés it clings to. It doesn’t mean that the cliché is true, but it does mean that there is likely to be a whisper of reality. We are not, and never have been, a nation of strong, selfless heroes and heroines. But our distance from the rest of the world – until the last decades of cheap air travel – did dictate and select those who came here. Even now it takes courage and imagination to leave your land. As you get older much of your joy comes from sharing memories. When you leave your community, you leave the daily sharing of those memories, too. (‘Why did you come?’ I asked my elderly Greek landlady, forty years ago. ‘For the children,’ she answered. ‘Always, always for the children.’)

  Distance helped select our ancestors. But that same distance – and the inevitable deep, unknowing ignorance of the land that they were coming to – would annihilate much of the Australian soil, ecosystems and ‘living larders’, too.

  CHAPTER 9

  The lost tigers and the sheep that ate Australia

  They toiled and they fought through the shame of it -

  Through wilderness, flood, and drought;

  They worked, in the struggles of early days,

  Their sons’ salvation out.

  The white girl-wife in the hut alone,

  The men on the boundless run,

  The miseries suffered, unvoiced, unknown -

  And that’s how the land was won.

  Henry Lawson, ‘How the Land was Won’1

  A young man stands on the deck of the ship that has carried him from Galway to Port Jackson. It is 1839. His wife, Charlotte, is at his side, twelve years older than him and with a jaw that denotes a far stronger character than her mild-looking husband.

  My ancestor Peter Ffrench, like most free immigrants to Australia in the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s, was the offspring of a farmer. He had grown up among cultivated Irish acres, stone fences, fields of potatoes and maize, fat cows and white sheep on green grass. It had been a mostly treeless land: few survived winds and the need for firewood. Peter knew his land well. But not this land.

  Peter Ffrench had come here to farm. His older brother would inherit the family property in Ireland, but here in Australia land was, if no longer free, very cheap indeed. A young man of industry – especially backed by a wife with a determined chin – might end up with a large estate.

  He did. Peter Ffrench went first to work on the farms of the pardoned Irish rebels who lived at ‘Irish Corner’, now Reidsdale in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. Peter’s father, John, had fought and won against the English at Vinegar Hill. (The family history does not relate how many Ffrenches fought against the English and lost.)

  The Irish Corner squatters had been rebels in their youth, and transported for their rebellion. Now, in Australia, with part of their sentences served and a pardon for the rest, they left politics alone and became prosperous farmers, respectable apart from brewing poteen, the illegal homemade whisky that Irish Corner was famous for.

  When gold was discovered in the area Peter didn’t join the digging. (I am tempted to speculate that Charlotte of the firm jaw dissuaded him.) Instead he became a bullocky, selling supplies at vastly inflated prices to the often starving diggers – or rather to those who made enough to buy food. Before long he became wealthy enough to buy many thousands of acres and developed a nearby property he called Glenelly after the district he grew up in. (It was broken up by the successive inheritances of generation after generation of large families. My cousin three times removed now owns the last portion of it in family hands.)

  Peter knew what a proper farm should be like. He recreated his hunk of Australian landscape and within two decades it looked much like the Glenelly of Ireland, at least in a wet year. The trees were ringbarked and burnt or cut down. The understorey of thorn bush (Bursaria spinosa and Hymenanthera violacea), hop bush (Dodonea spp.), wild cherry (Exocarpos cupressiformis) and tens or even hundreds of other species of natives were burnt, too. His sheep and cattle, tended by ex-convict shepherds and his tribe of sons, soon exterminated the native ground covers, orchids, dichondra, murrnong and hundreds of other plants, as well as the native grasses.

  I first saw the land near the old homestead in 1983. It looked like Ireland: grey rain from a grey sky. The erosion gully ran swift with clear water, disguising the clay bank that would have glared pale and bright in dry weather. The mist hung over green rye grass and clover. The cattle were fat and wet, looking at us with that resentful gaze of domesticated animals who know you have come from a dry ute and have coats to keep off the rain. The only trees on the property were old pines, half rotted and perhaps even dating as far back as Charlotte Ffrench. There was no gum tree to be seen, except on the far-off hills.

  Peter Ffrench and his descendants had done a good job of recreating his Glenelly, but they stole the land’s health and productivity to do it. They thought they were heroes, not villains, taming the wilderness and bringing forth grain and fruit and civilisation where there was none.

  The truth was that civilisation was already here, nor was the land a wilderness but a carefully created sustainable living larder. Don’t underestimate the courage, determination and endurance of these early settlers and their families. But their inability to see the land as it was, and determination to recreate it into British parkland, would lead to the 1840s and 1890s depressions, and add to the misery of the 1930s Great Depression and the recessions of the 1990s and the later global financial crisis. They also turned a generous landscape – one where every two or three steps would give you something to eat – into a simplified semidesert.

  Almost every form of standard Australian agriculture is an example of a profound misunderstanding of the land2, from ploughing and land clearing to adding superphosphate or growing orchards in neat rows. These were compounded by stocking with animals unsuited to the soil, water resources and native vegetation, from domestic stock like sheep, goats, pigs, deer and cattle to wild rabbits, cats, starlings, blackbirds, pigeons and cane toads. These were all introduced because of a rigid mindset: this is the way a farm should be, with rabbits nibbling at the hedges, sheep eating rain-fat grass on pastures grown with almos
t daily showers, and all on young soils washed down by recent rivers. There was no understanding of the burden of salt carried by this ancient land where millennia of winds from the sea have raised natural salt levels, so that clearing and irrigation could create a desert in less than a hundred years.

  First they cleared the land, making it vulnerable to erosion in dry years, or in the violent storms Australia is subject to, leaving only an English park-like scatter of trees. This made the few remaining trees easy targets for pests like Christmas beetle, who recognise their food by its silhouette, an attack intensified by the removal of plants like thorn bush that support the blossom-feeding wasp that predates Christmas beetles.

  Farmers like Peter Ffrench shot eagles and goshawks, fearing that they’d attack their lambs. Actually, both only attack feeble newborn lambs as they prefer smaller prey. But the loss of the predator birds led to plagues of the species they had kept in check, like white cockatoos. In Van Diemen’s Land, the Tasmanian tiger was hunted to extinction because the farmers believed it was a sheep eater, not a scavenger.

  Swampland was drained, or compacted by the feet of sheep and cattle, more heavy-footed than kangaroos, driving away colonies of cranes and ibis. One mob of ibis can eat two and a half tonnes of grasshoppers or plague locusts a week, but if you spray for grasshoppers you are killing the food supply of the animals that would control them. Now plagues of locusts can destroy tens of thousands of square kilometres of crop and pasture a year.

  They meant well, those men like Peter Ffrench, the women like Charlotte who endured isolation and childbirth away from family networks or even the village midwife to carve what they thought of as civilisation from wilderness. They were farmers, from generations of farmers, who had grown up with the lore of the land – but not this old, worn down land, with slow rivers that cycled between flood and drying up completely.