Caroline Chisholm

by Sarah Goldman

  Collated and compiled, the statements formed the basis of Caroline’s second written work, part of which was published in Sydney and India under the somewhat daunting title of Prospectus of a Work to be Entitled “Voluntary Information from the People of New South Wales” Respecting the Social Conditions of the Middle and Working Classes in that Colony.12 It in turn provided the material for her testimonies on immigration before the New South Wales Legislative Council in September 1845, and the Committee of the House of Lords in London two years later. Making the most of the material, she would later refer to it in an open letter that she published in London in 1847, entitled Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered and dedicated to then Colonial Secretary Earl Grey.

  The exterior of a settler’s hut in the Australian bush, 1849 (Alamy)

  On a personal level, writing Voluntary Information showed just how far Caroline had advance from her father’s world of the itinerant day worker. Not only was she confident enough to address directly the acme of colonial authority in London, but she wrote of the working class with a condescension that suggested that her family had never been part of its commonality — like any rising star she was too busy moving forwards to look backwards. She wrote, “Their language may be rude, but their hearts are kind and true. To improve the condition of these people is my object.”13 Voluntary Information also further established Caroline’s credentials as an authority on immigration to New South Wales and was praised as presenting “a more perfect, truthful and valuable picture of bush life painted by servants and settlers, than had ever been drawn in travellers’ tales or parliamentary blue books”.14 Bridging the gap between the highest and the lowest of the white classes in the colony, Caroline gave voice to the concerns, needs, wishes and achievements of the ordinary men and women who were populating the land.

  The statements highlighted healthy attitudes to hard work, a fulsome optimism, and a predominant belief that Australia was a land with greater equality of opportunity. They also captured, however, the loneliness, heartache, and guilt of leaving loved ones behind in the Old Country, be they children, parents or siblings:

  Statement No. 12: William K. from Kildare

  I arrived here by the ship Sir Charles Napier; was single; engaged as labourer to Mr William Lawson, Prospect; wages £18 per annum, with a weekly ration of nine pound of flour, nine pound of meat, two pound of sugar, and three ounces of tea; remained in service two years and six months . . . taken a farm from Mr James M’Arthur, of Camden; expect to get on very well . . . Got married to a native of King’s County. Have four bullocks; employ one labourer, give him 7s per week, and his food. What do I think of this country? Why I think very well of it; I think I’ll get on better here; a man that is willing to work will get on here; . . . I have one sister, if she were here I should be proud. Wife says, “I think well of the country; better off here.” October 1845

  Statement No. 5: Ellen W. from London

  I arrived in 1833; I am married to George W.; We are doing well; I wish to have my sister out . . . Her name is Emma; she is about twenty-two years of age; will give her a comfortable home . . . neither of us has wanted for anything in this country . . . We pay eight shillings a week rent, but it is well we get on. Oh, what a difference there is between this country and home for poor folks. I know I would not go back again, I know what England is. Old England is a fine place for the rich, but the Lord help the poor. 11th March, 1846

  Statement No. 11: Patt D. from Kildare

  It is six years since we arrived in the ship; we brought two children with us and left one at home, named P.D.; he is about ten years of age. Oh! How we was pushed to get out when the money was to be paid . . . We are, thank God, well to do now. We have seventeen cows . . . We leaves our child wi’ a poor widow woman, one Betty Hurley; she did live in Barrack-Street, thirty-two miles from Dublin. Don’t rest till you find him, and may God reward you if you send my poor child to me. 29th January 184615

  The reasons why families split up varied. Convicts of course had no say in the matter. The cost and risk of immigration meant that many free settlers would strike out alone or with maybe only one or two family members whilst their aged parents or younger siblings remained back in the old country. Possibly the most heartrending cases were parents who had been encouraged by bounty agents to leave their small children at home because they were too young to work and therefore considered an unnecessary burden. Once in Australia, even when they prospered, communication with families in Britain was extremely difficult. Apart from the tardiness of the mail services, many of the lower classes were partially or totally illiterate, and although some did send money home, often it vanished before reaching the intended recipients. In nearly every case that Caroline documented, there were requests for close relatives to be found and sent out to the colony, to reunite families and to lessen the isolation and hardship of those trying to put down foundations in a new land.

  When the British Government had ordered the invasion of Australia to start its prison colony it may have been founding a strategic foothold in the Antipodes, but more certainly it was also creating a dumping ground for its teeming, dispossessed riffraff and meeting the need to exorcise from its overpopulated cities both the desperate and the petty criminals that inhabited its underbelly. Human rights did not yet even exist as a concept, let alone as a consideration in policy debates. Very few of the powerful cared about the lower orders; there was no need, as the working class and the majority of the middle class had no vote or say in the running of the country. In 1788, when Captain Arthur Philip established Sydney, only one in seven males over the age of twenty-one had the right to vote for Britain’s lower house of Parliament; there was no election for the upper house, the House of Lords, where holders of hereditary titles sat to determine legislation; and, emphasising the elite’s callous disregard of humanity, slavery was still legal. Even almost sixty years later, in 1846, when Caroline was collecting her statements, although slavery had been abolished throughout the Empire, the proportion of men enfranchised in Britain had only risen to one in five and was based on financial standing. It is doubtful whether Archibald would have been amongst them had he been living in the United Kingdom. So, whilst Britain was prepared to divest itself of its excess poor, and to use them to improve its own economy at home with increased trade to and from the colonies, there was no imperative to address the misery caused by such a massive human displacement — until Caroline discovered the need and sought to redress it.

  Based on the research she had gathered, Caroline identified three main issues that she believed the British Government should address: the shortage of females in New South Wales, the need for a family reunion policy for former convicts and settlers, and the beneficial effect on Britain’s population congestion of sending its poor to a country that would provide them with a full and healthy lifestyle and some equality of opportunity.

  These three points Caroline put forward with some force in Sydney, when she was requested to give her opinion to a third committee, on immigration, established by the Legislative Council in September 1845 and chaired by the Reverend John Dunmore Lang. To support her arguments, Caroline read from some of the statements that she and Archibald had collected. She also put forward the idea that single women should only travel on ships with married families and never with single men. The committee was interested and respectful, but unwilling to pursue her ideas.

  Since she had first commenced her work with immigrants, Caroline had settled some “11,000 souls”.16 But to achieve more she needed the British Government on side. It was time for her to return home.

  *

  Almost eight years earlier, Caroline had slipped into Sydney unknown and unnoticed. Now at the age of thirty-eight, her departure would make news throughout the colony. The Chisholms gave up their lease on the property in Albert Park and took rooms at the Queens’ Head Inn on the corner of York and King streets.17 They planned to sail on the Dublin in March 1846; however, the captain of the
boat postponed leaving Sydney until mid-April, thus allowing Caroline time to proceed, almost regally, on a farewell tour.

  Amongst the visits she made was one to Camden Park, some seventy kilometres southwest of Sydney, a Regency-style mansion that was home to the Macarthur family. Although eighty-year-old Elizabeth Macarthur, the matriarch of the Australian wool industry, was in residence, Caroline was not there at her behest but that of her daughter-in-law, the much less well known Emily Macarthur (née Stone). There were just two years between Caroline and Emily, both were well educated and both had lived on the Indian subcontinent, but that was where the similarities ended. Born in Bengal, the daughter of a successful banker, Emily had returned to England at five years of age. She was described as a plain-featured spinster in her thirties when she married James Macarthur within months of meeting him in 1838. Unkindly, biographers have suggested the marriage was more of a business deal than a love match: “The most spectacular feat of [James Macarthur’s] visit to England was his unromantic but most useful marriage to Emily Stone, daughter of a Lombard Street banker.”18 Emily, however, had more to her than just a well-connected and wealthy father; she was a remarkably good artist. Amongst her paintings were various depictions of her daughter Elizabeth, the eventual heir to the Macarthur fortune. The daughter was only six at the time of Caroline’s visit. Later, as Elizabeth Macarthur Onslow, she would head up a major dairy company that would in turn lead to the establishment of the Dairy Farmers’ Co-operative Milk Company.19

  The friendship between Caroline and Emily appears to have been of long standing and quite close. Caroline stayed three days at Camden Park, her visit documented by Emily’s young Swiss guest, Herminie Chavanne, yet another contemporary whose firsthand account describes Caroline as beautiful.20 It is also interesting to note that Caroline’s visit was without Archibald. Maybe he had other engagements, or maybe after so many years apart and then so many months travelling around New South Wales together, she enjoyed having a little space to herself again.

  Back in Sydney, and almost on the eve of her departure for London, Caroline was once again the centre of controversy. The combination of Caroline’s religion and her interest in immigration were lambasted by John Dunmore Lang, one of the most strident anti-Catholics in the colony. Scottish by birth, this Presbyterian minister had a very real, although somewhat narrow, interest in encouraging immigration to Australia, believing there were already too many Roman Catholics in New South Wales. In a fluctuating career, Lang had been both praised and scorned for his work and beliefs. As one of the first elected members of the Legislative Council in 1843, representing Port Phillip, he had served with Caroline on three council committees, at times supporting her against the majority, so there is no doubt that they were well acquainted with each other’s views and work. In early 1846 he was, like Caroline, preparing to return to Britain (and Europe) to further his latest plan: to encourage Swiss and German Protestant vine growers to settle in the Port Phillip area. He was convinced that they would make a financial and social success of the enterprise and also hoped they would help offset what he saw as a flood of Catholic economic immigrants that had arrived in the early 1840s, mostly from Ireland.

  In early March, the Catholic newspaper The Morning Chronicle severely denounced Lang’s vine growers plan and his highly biased attitude towards immigration. A furious Lang then launched an energetic diatribe at his detractors. Whilst his letter to the editors of The Sydney Morning Herald on 14 March certainly attempted to explain the reasoning behind his scheme, most of its three-thousand-word tirade took vicious aim at the religious affiliation of the Chronicle’s editors and what he claimed was the threat that the colony would fall under the “dictatorship of a Romish priesthood”. Caroline’s work with immigrants and her own Catholicism were swept up in his somewhat confused verbal assault. He attacked Caroline for being an unwitting tool of the priesthood, describing her as a “zealous and devoted Roman Catholic, who . . . will, as a matter of course, render her influence and efforts . . . to the extension and prevalence of Romanism in this colony and hemisphere”, before backtracking to say “I do not say that Mrs C will do so” and even going on to describe her as a “truly benevolent lady” who had rendered valuable service to “many poor immigrants in this Colony for years past”. Even so, he warned that Australia could be “transformed into an Irish Roman Catholic Colony” and expressed his desire to “live and die among my own people”, suggesting that he would have been in favour of some sort of Protestant theocracy.21

  Caroline’s much shorter reply was also published in The Sydney Morning Herald, six days later. Obviously distressed by the vitriol launched partially at her, but more certainly at her faith, she displayed an air of fatigue and despondency that was unusual in her. She may have despaired of ever defeating such entrenched bigotry, or, after managing alone with the physical, emotional and mental exertions of the past few years, she may have just been genuinely tired. Denying that she held any sectarian principles, she maintained that “there is something unkind in all this; I feel conscious that I do not deserve it”. Addressing directly Lang’s desire to “live and die among his own people”, Caroline once again outlined her vision of a multicultural society, albeit in nineteenth-century terms: “My idea of good neighbourhood is not so contracted; I have lived happily amongst pagans and heathens, Mahometans and Hindoos — they never molested me at my devotions, nor did I insult them at theirs; and am I not to enjoy the same privilege in New South Wales? . . . Am I not to be allowed to address my Maker after a weary day’s work in the way that my conscience dictates.”22 It was an appeal that won her many friends from across the religious divide.

  It seemed, however, that despite the respect that Lang insisted he held for Caroline, the colony was too small for both of them. As it would transpire, even Britain would not be large enough to hold them both without further verbal aggression, but that was still in the future.

  In April 1846, strangely, given his professed views, John Dunmore Lang was one of the first people to subscribe one guinea (£1 1s,), the maximum amount allowed, to the collection for Caroline’s farewell testimonial from the people of New South Wales. The list of contributors to the testimonial read like a who’s who of the colony, being headed by Governor Sir George Gipps and including magistrates from across New South Wales, clergymen, merchants and members of the Legislative Council, most of whom also donated one guinea. They were not the only ones desirous of expressing their thanks to Caroline. From across the colony, from Sydney to the furthest outback towns came pledges from the faceless settlers, ticket-of-leave men and women and emancipists that Caroline had aided, people like Betsy McMahon and Patrick Guines, who each gave 2s 6d, or Ann Clark, who forwarded 1s 6d.23 The total collection raised a staggering 200 guineas, more than two-thirds of Archibald’s yearly pension. Knowing that Caroline would not accept money, the organisers used it to buy her a commemorative plate, and presented it to her just two days before she left Sydney.24

  The Dublin finally sailed on 14 April 1846. For Caroline, it would be the first time that she had set foot back in Britain since she had left to follow her husband to India in 1833. Then she had been twenty-five years old, mourning the loss of her first child and uncertain about the future, a far different creature from the assured and motivated woman who was undertaking this trip as part of her mission to improve the lot of immigrants and settlers. Family ties, although of some importance, would be relegated to second place. For her three sons — ten-year-old Archibald Jnr, nine-year-old William and seven-year-old Henry — going back to Britain would be a revelation: after the wide-open spaces of the scantily populated colony, they would finally become acquainted with what all white Australians still referred to as “home”.

  As the Dublin sailed out through Sydney Heads and pitched into the open ocean, there would have been much excitement amongst the five Chisholms, but there would have been considerable anxiety too. For the delay in leaving would have significant consequences.
Caroline was pregnant once again and now she would, in all likelihood, give birth on the high seas.

  CHAPTER 11

  Back Home

  1846–47

  Somewhere between Hull and London, August 1846

  “Wheesht! There’s enough commotion without you laddies adding to it.” Archibald, taciturn and forbidding, glared at the three boys rumbling over each other and fighting for the window. Abashed, they sat down in some disorder, but the excitement throbbing through their veins meant that as soon as Papa’s head was turned, there were sly pinches and elbows, kicks and punches, until they flared again into full-blown noisy dispute. “Ach! One more twitch and you’ll be outside to continue your brawl. That’s yer last warning.” The startling threat had the desired effect.