The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 changed everything and revolutionised the transport of people and goods between Europe, Asia and Australasia, cutting thousands of miles and up to several weeks off the journey to Queensland. This incredible feat of engineering which had taken ten years to complete, combined with the use of the new steam-powered ships, reduced the voyage time to around sixty days, although one ship managed to complete the distance in just forty five. An emigrant ship could now travel through the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal, pass through the canal from Port Said to Suez, sometimes stopping at both ends of the canal to take on coal, then sail down the Red Sea to the Port of Aden where it would make another stop before heading out into the Indian Ocean and around the southern tip of India. The ship would put into port in Colombo in what was then Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) then east to Batavia (Jakarta) in Indonesia where a final coal stop would be made. Queensland waters would finally be reached just west of Thursday Island, the northern-most point of Australia.30 The ship then had to negotiate myriad small islands (including Lizard Island, where the Duke was destined to run aground in 1902) and the Great Barrier Reef as it hugged the coast of Queensland, dropping off cargo and passengers at various small port towns along the way to Brisbane, its final destination.
I had wondered what Sarah would have made of the sights, sounds and smells of these exotic foreign ports, places far beyond her experience or imagining. Sadly, I learned that she would have seen very little of them; usually only the fare-paying passengers were allowed onshore when the ship was in port. It’s unlikely she’d have got to see much more than the docks at any stopping-place on the voyage. I found this somewhat strange. Were the migrants considered too untrustworthy to be allowed off the ship? However, it is to be remembered that Sarah and her fellow passengers were precious cargo – the Queensland government, who was funding their voyage, did not want their investments to be corrupted in any way, either physically by disease (or more likely, by alcohol) or morally.
Foreign sea ports were no places for single young women travelling alone, whatever their social status. The shipping lines contracted to the government were paid a premium for each live passenger landed in Australia, and they were not prepared to lose anyone on the way. If any outbreaks of disease were reported in the forward ports, none of the passengers at all would be allowed to disembark, and only those crew members essential to the unloading of cargo and the loading of coal were permitted on dry land. On the Duke’s previous journey, one gentleman who had been taken ill had been left behind in a hospital in Colombo.
Incredibly, I have been able to follow every day of Sarah’s voyage using old shipping reports and telegrams sent by shipping agents to the owners and local newspapers upon the Duke’s arrival at each port.
The Duke of Sutherland sailed from Gravesend on the afternoon of 1st November 1886. Her arrival in Port Said exactly two weeks later, on the 15th November, was reported in the Sydney Evening News. She reached Suez within a further two days, and appears have to sailed straight on to Colombo arriving on 2nd December. After taking on coal and provisions, she made her way briskly to Batavia in Indonesia – the Newcastle Morning Herald reports her departure on the 13th December “for the Queensland Ports”. Sarah’s first sight of Australia was of Thursday Island on around 17th December, as the Duke passed through the Torres Straits, bearing south east.
The Duke’s first port of call in Queensland was Cooktown, in the far north, where the ship remained in harbour for two days, and where the first of the immigrants disembarked on 21st December. Sarah celebrated Christmas Day on board the Duke attending a brief carol service and having a special Christmas Dinner with the other young women. The Duke’s progress was not halted by the festivities however, with more passengers and cargo being delivered to Townsville, and the small settlements of Bowen and Mackay. Keppel Bay and Port Alma near Rockhampton were reached on Boxing Day, Sunday 26th December.
A large number of passengers had disembarked in Townsville and Rockhampton, including Maurice and Barbara Jones and their five-year-old son Moffatt – tragically their baby boy had died on the voyage and been buried at sea. Baby Jones was one of four babies under the age of twelve months to perish on the journey. The others were all baby boys too – George Morgan, Jesse Wright and Henry Barker. The eight baby girls and two other baby boys on board all survived. The causes of the infants’ deaths are not noted on the ship’s passenger list – the simple words “Died on the voyage” are written in pencil alongside each of their names. Despite the advances in sanitation and technology, a two month sea voyage was still fraught with risks for the very young, although of course infant mortality rates generally were much higher in the 1880s, whether at sea or on land. Any passenger who perished on the voyage, whether a baby, an older child or an adult, would be wrapped in sail cloth or cotton sacking and, after a prayer and a few words said by the Captain, consigned to the deep.
The Duke of Sutherland arrived in Hervey Bay on 27th December, with passengers and two locomotives to be delivered to Maryborough. Progress was delayed somewhat when, during the unloading process, the crane lifting one of the locomotive boilers toppled over and the boiler crashed onto the deck. Fortunately, no one was injured. The ship was further delayed at Maryborough and the passengers were not allowed to disembark as there was no doctor available to inspect the ship for quarantine purposes. The nearest doctor, Dr O’Connor, had to be fetched from fifty miles away and was somewhat disgruntled by the experience, according to reports in the Maryborough Chronicle on Wednesday 29th December. Eventually, after a two day delay, the thirty-one immigrants were given a clean bill of health and were brought ashore by the paddle steamer Pacific.
In the early morning summer sunshine of 30th December 1886, the Duke of Sutherland steamed into Moreton Bay. Sarah Marshall rolled up her mattress for the last time, put on her second-best dress, tidied her hair and climbed the steps up to the main deck.
Brisbane.
9
Brave New World
Sarah was in for a shock. Whatever she was expecting, whatever she had dreamed of, there’s a fair chance that the Brisbane of December 1886 fell a long way short. After disembarking with their luggage, Sarah and the other girls were shepherded to the overcrowded and shabby immigration depot at William Street for “processing” (the new immigration depot at Kangaroo Point would not open until December 1887). There they would have remained, possibly for a few days, billeted in the packed dormitories with dozens of other new arrivals, whilst their papers were processed and employment secured, anxious, apprehensive and perhaps even frightened.
The city itself was a building site, a seething mass of humanity which would see its population more than double from a little around thirty-seven thousand in 1881 to over ninety thousand just ten years later, through wave after wave of immigrant arrivals and the drift of rural workers from throughout Queensland and northern New South Wales.31 The 1880s saw Brisbane’s metamorphosis from a frontier town to a sophisticated urban city, a little bit of Victorian England recreated in the Australian sunshine.
Back in 1817, Lord Bathurst had established an enquiry into the transportation of felons to New South Wales – the fear was that the regimes in the existing penal colonies weren’t quite severe enough, and were doing nothing to deter would-be criminals in England. He sent John Thomas Bigge to investigate; it was decided that new, more isolated, even more grim settlements were required for repeat offenders, and Moreton Bay was chosen as a possible site. Bigge “discovered” a river flowing into the bay, and named it after the then Governor of New South Wales, Sir Thomas Brisbane.
The first settlement was established by the Surveyor General, John Oxley, on 28th September 1824, and is commemorated by a somewhat dull granite obelisk which is arguably in the wrong spot. In typical understated Australian fashion, the inscription simply reads:
“Here John Oxley Landing to Look for Water Discovered the Site of this City
.”
Terrible grammar too.
The first convicts followed shortly afterwards, and by the time of the creation of Queensland as a separate state in 1859, the settlement had grown into a town of some six thousand residents. Up until the mid-1860s, Brisbane had been very much a pioneer settlement – there was no sanitation, no drainage, no proper water supply, very few roads, no lighting and no public transport. Water was drawn from fetid swamps and there was a high mortality rate, particularly amongst the under twenty-fives – deaths from malaria and typhus and other waterborne diseases were daily occurrences, a fact of life.
Within just twenty years, the city had expanded exponentially. By the time Sarah arrived, vast improvements had been made to the infrastructure. The first Town Hall was built in 1865, and was followed by drainage and sewage systems and reservoirs to guarantee fresh drinking water. The city was illuminated by gas lighting, and public parks and recreational reserves were created. The first tramway had opened in 1885, and Central Station, which linked Brisbane with other Queensland towns, was completed the same year.
The building boom of the 1880s which created so many of the city’s grand public buildings including the Government Printing Office, Customs House, new Town Hall, together with many commercial buildings – warehouses, banks, hotels, theatres, breweries, distilleries, boatyards, foundries, brickyards and engine works – meant that labour was always in demand. It also led to a whole jumble of architectural styles, from neo-classical to Gothic revival and everything in between; columns, porticoes, pillars, arches and “pointy bits” appeared on these very grand buildings, all contributing to a vision of the city as being a bit, well, over the top.
The writer Anthony Trollope visited Brisbane around this time, and described it as:
“…a commodious town, very prettily situated on the Brisbane River…with Courts of Justice, Houses of Parliament, a governor’s residence, public gardens, and all the requirements of a capital for a fine and independent colony.”32
The novelist Gilbert Parker, arriving in Brisbane in 1889, was less impressed. In his travel journal: Round the Compass of Australia, he remarked:
“Brisbane is in appearance scraggy, low built and premature. It is far from picturesque as a whole, and the first impressions are not changed by closer inspection. There is a sense of disappointment, which grows deeper as the sojourn in the capital is continued. One gets the impression now of a town that is but half-dressed.”33
What did Sarah feel? Impressed? Disappointed? Or just overwhelmed by the enormity of her new surroundings? From the late Autumn frosts of a Durham mining village, where every face would have been a familiar one, to the sub-tropical heat and humidity of a Queensland summer and a city where she was completely alone, Brisbane was, for Sarah Marshall, a Brave New World.
Sarah may well have felt alone upon arrival but in fact she was far from it, being one of ten thousand, six hundred and thirty-one emigrants who came ashore in Brisbane in 1886. In today’s anti-immigration political climate, the scale of migration to Brisbane is almost impossible to comprehend. A total of seventy-nine thousand, two hundred and fifty-one emigrants entered Brisbane between 1880 and 1890; this figure does not include the thousands who disembarked at the more northerly Queensland ports.34 The vast majority of these souls were English, Scots and Irish, with smaller numbers of Welsh and German. Then, as now, immigration was a thorny subject, with some of the “established” population objecting to what they saw as an influx of the dregs of British and Irish society – unskilled labour. A chap by the name of Henry Jordan, ironically a former government immigration agent, wrote to his local newspaper:
“For the last 16 or 17 years we have been expanding enormous sums of money in sweeping together… the poorest of the people of England … and bringing them out to this colony. I protest at the importation of mere labourers, who come in shiploads, month after month, year after year. To that kind of immigration is to be attributed the larrikinism in our streets.”
It wasn’t just the “mere labourers” who faced criticism either. In some quarters the young women who poured into the city under the Single Female Migration Scheme were viewed with hostility. The Northern Argus newspaper featured an article on the 23rd February 1881 which viciously portrayed these young women as harbingers of crime and vice:
“…many of whom have shewn directly upon their arrival that they have come direct from the streets; from reformatories, without reformation; or were girls from country towns and villages, who, having made themselves disagreeably conspicuous in some shape or other, were packed off to London to a labor agent…it is not necessary to insist upon what is known to be a fact, namely, that many of our female immigrants become charges upon the public, either by their being compelled to seek assistance from the Benevolent Society, or by becoming inmates of our Hospital or Gaol.”35
Although there was always the odd “bad apple” who slipped through the system, and no doubt a few unfortunate women who fell upon hard times on arrival and into prostitution, particularly during 1883 when there was a massive influx of migrants and the supply of workers briefly exceeded demand, these were certainly a very small minority. The opinion expressed in the Argus was, quite simply, based upon prejudice and not fact. The Queensland government imposed strict criteria upon the selection of would-be immigrants, and it is very likely that most of those considered “unsuitable” or of “questionable morals” would have been weeded out by the immigration agents back in England.
Fortunately for Sarah, she arrived at the height of the boom years of the 1880s, when the demand for experienced domestic servants was at its peak. The Daily Observer newspaper reported in March 1886 how: “Every servant, good or bad, is snatched up the moment she offers”, which of course meant that wages were relatively high. General servants could expect to earn a weekly wage of around ten to fifteen shillings, housemaids ten to twelve shillings, domestic cooks fifteen to eighteen shillings, and cooks in the larger hotels as much as twenty to twenty five shillings.36 For some reason hotel barmaids were paid particularly well, perhaps because they were hard to come by, it being considered “inappropriate” employment by many young ladies.
Massive population increase in a very short space of time meant a shortage of housing. While Brisbane’s elite could afford to build grand villas, the majority of the populace was crammed into simple wooden cottages. Just because a domestic servant could earn a relatively decent wage, she was not guaranteed adequate living accommodation. Generally, she would have “lived in” with the family or provided with quarters if she was employed in a hotel. One well-off lady complained that:
“Many, very many indeed, of the rooms reserved for servants in this colony are totally unfit to be occupied by any human creature as often as not the servant’s room is some outhouse or a room next the stable; I have even known of a girl being put to sleep in the saddle room.” 37
It wasn’t just the living conditions that were problematic; the working conditions were appalling, especially for women working in the factories who did the same work as their male counterparts, for incredibly long hours, for a fraction of the pay. In this respect, the working environment differed little from what might have been encountered by workers in the industrial towns and cities back home in England. Unskilled workers were particularly vulnerable, and the horrors of child labour loomed as large in the colony as they did back home in the factories, mines and mills of Victorian Britain. An article in the imaginatively-titled newspaper The Brisbane Boomerang in January 1888, described how working conditions for women in the city were deteriorating year after year:
“They are becoming herded in stifling workshops and ill-ventilated attics; they are dragged back to work late on summer nights; and they are forced to stand all day behind the counters of the large emporiums that are the boast of great towns. They are ‘sweated’ by clothing factories and boot factories; they are housed, when servant girls, in disgracefu
l kennels; they are used in this fair Australian land, well-nigh as badly as they are used in the modern Babylon of Wealth and Want…And the children too are being dragged into the slave-houses of toil; little ones who should be at school, or at play, are working in the factories and shops, and the law, instead of rescuing them…stands by to ply the whip on their backs if they revolt.” 38
The plight of the city’s working poor led both to a Government Commission in 1891 (and subsequent legislation to reduce working hours), and a burgeoning labour and trade union movement. Skilled and unskilled workers alike began to organise, campaign and in some cases strike, much as the miners of Seaham Colliery had done ten years before. The bakers of the city, after striking and with widespread public support, managed to negotiate a reduction of their working hours to ten a day (fourteen or even sixteen hour days prior to this was not uncommon). Very slowly, over subsequent decades, conditions for the workers of Brisbane began to improve.
In 1887, Sarah found herself to be one of almost three thousand domestic servants in the city. I wondered what had become of her. Did she find employment straight away? Was she snapped up by some respectable family with a nice home, well treated and well looked after? Or did she end up as a “slavey”, the Australian equivalent of the maid-of-all-work, the lowest of the low, working herself into the ground, ten thousand miles from home and wishing she was back there? No record of her employer exists, but after much searching, I managed to find a record of Sarah living in Turbot Street, in the commercial heart of Brisbane. Because of this, I believe it is likely that Sarah found work in one of the many hotels which lined that street.
The Horsekeeper's Daughter Page 8