Caroline Chisholm

by Sarah Goldman

  Two days she spent in Bendigo. She talked land and homely comforts, the reunion of wives and children; the men talked of gold, anger at the government, licences and suffrage. She had an idea for sheds to accommodate poor travellers to the fields. They shrugged: it could be useful but wasn’t essential. It would help bring family to the diggings, she said. The men were ambivalent. If she wanted to help, they said, could she keep the Chinese away? That made her angry.

  The diggers went back to work. Caroline went back to Melbourne.1

  With Caroline’s return to Australia in the winter of 1854, her celebrity began to fade. The day she arrived in July that year, she was proclaimed in the press as “Our Benefactress” and a large gathering of people initially turned out to welcome her off the steamer that brought her ashore from the Ballarat. In what could have been a harbinger of her influence in the colony, however, there was a delay of some hours and many people left. In the end, it was a smaller, albeit vocal, crowd that cheered her onto dry land.2

  For all her experiences of Sydney and New South Wales, this was the first time that Caroline had visited Victoria. When she arrived, white settlement in Melbourne was less than twenty years old, having been founded by John Batman in 1835. Just as importantly, the newest graduate of the Antipodean colonies had gained its individual status just three years earlier in 1851 and was behaving with all the brashness of a teenager finally let off the parental leash. As in the early days of Caroline’s sojourn in New South Wales, there had been a massive population influx: in 1841 the non-Indigenous population of what was to become Victoria was less than 12,000 people; by 1854, just thirteen years later, that had grown to 237,000, or, put another way, had increased by more than 2000 per cent.3 Of course, not all the people flooding into Victoria were from overseas; thousands also came from across Bass Strait, the Tasman Sea and the Great Australian Bight or overland from New South Wales.

  The reason, of course, was gold. The same day The Argus welcomed Caroline it also reported news from Ballarat of a group of Germans digging up £2000 worth of gold. The early years of the gold rush saw a booming economy in Victoria, but as the numbers of diggers increased and the easily accessible gold began to run out, unemployment grew, particularly in Melbourne. There was a dip in the economy, although it was not all doom and gloom — the bigger population led to a building boom as the city expanded, tradesmen were in demand and their wages were high.

  Just as the main reason for the migration to the two colonies of New South Wales and Victoria was different, so too were the immigrants. A decade earlier, when Britain’s paupers were given free bounty passage to Sydney, they came for a lifetime, seeking at least a living wage and perhaps, ultimately, their own plot of land. A large proportion of those arriving in Melbourne in the early 1850s, on the other hand, were opportunists, intent on finding the quickest route to riches via the goldfields. Inevitably, most would settle in the colonies, but from the beginning they were more focused on making money and were bolder when dealing with authority. As some investment was necessary to travel to the fields and start digging there, many in this new generation of international immigrants were middle class, slightly better off financially and more educated. Amongst the many labourers and farmers there were clerks, accountants and engineers. In effect, they were far more capable of looking after themselves.

  Similarly, the typical response to their surroundings of those just landed in Port Phillip Bay was far less romantic than that of the New South Wales immigrants; instead of a eulogy about the beauty of Sydney Harbour they were more likely to write an unflattering description of the Yarra, as with this visitor, describing her journey from the port to Melbourne in 1852:

  And now the cry of “Here’s the bus” . . . I had hoped . . . to gladden my eyes with the sight of something civilized. Alas, for my disappointment! There stood a long, tumble-to-pieces-looking waggon, not covered in, with a plank down each side to sit upon, and a miserable narrow plank it was. Into this vehicle were crammed a dozen people and an innumerable host of portmanteaus, large and small, carpetbags, baskets, brown-paper parcels, bird-cage and inmate, &c., all of which, as is generally the case, were packed in a manner the most calculated to contribute the largest amount of inconvenience to the live portion of the cargo. And to drag this grand affair into Melbourne were harnessed thereto the most wretched looking objects in the shape of horses that I had ever beheld. A slight roll tells us we are off. “And is this the beautiful scenery of Australia?” was my first melancholy reflection. Mud and swamp — swamp and mud — relieved here and there by some few trees which looked as starved and miserable as ourselves. The cattle we passed appeared in a wretched condition, and the human beings on the road seemed all to belong to one family, so truly Vandemonian4 was the cast of their countenances . . . On we went towards Melbourne — now stopping for the unhappy horses to take breath — then . . . arriving at a small specimen of a swamp; . . . “The Yarra,” said the conductor. I looked straight ahead, and innocently asked “Where?” for I could only discover a tract of marsh or swamp, which I fancy must have resembled the fens of Lincolnshire, as they were some years ago, before draining was introduced into that county. Over Princes Bridge we now passed, up Swanston Street, then into Great Bourke Street, and now we stand opposite the Post-office.5

  Caroline arrived in a Melbourne that was thriving on the wealth only recently dug from the soil. Apart from streets of shops, there were schools, churches, libraries and even art galleries being built. Australia’s first telegraph line had been erected between Melbourne and Williamstown the year before and the first passenger railway was about to start operating between Port Melbourne (then called Sandridge) and Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station. The University of Melbourne would open the next year. The city had an immigration reception centre (which Archibald had helped establish) and there was also an extensive tent city south of the Yarra called Canvas Town. Residents there paid a rent of five shillings per tent per week; the shelters were set out in rows to form streets which, it was believed, were better signposted than the thoroughfares in town. Whilst there was undoubtedly unemployment and poverty in Melbourne, by 1854 it was not on the same scale that had so distressed Caroline in Sydney in the early 1840s, and possibly it was better managed. Her first action on arriving was to ensure that the immigrants that had landed with her off the Ballarat could be lodged at the Government Immigration Barracks. Unlike the old days in Sydney, though, there was no need for her to hunt up jobs for them — indeed, it was a measure of the ebullient state of the economy, or the lure of the goldfields, that within a week and a half all had moved out of the barracks.6

  Caroline’s interest in the Family Colonization Loan Society seems to have washed away on the voyage to Melbourne. A few days after her arrival, she did write an open letter to The Argus newspaper asking immigrants to repay money they owed the society; however, there is little evidence of her ongoing interest in the society after that time.7 About eight months before she arrived in Melbourne, Archibald had finally found a replacement to take over his role as secretary of the society and had left to start a business. Following his and Caroline’s exit from the London committee, and with fewer of the society’s boats arriving in Port Phillip Bay, the Melbourne committee eventually petered out. Although she was still interested in immigration, Caroline began championing a new cause: the need to make land available to new settlers — land that in Victoria was comprehensively tied up by the squattocracy.

  At the start of her residence in Melbourne, Caroline assumed that she would be fêted in the way that she had become accustomed to during the past fourteen or fifteen years in Sydney and London. That expectation was fuelled about six weeks after her arrival by a large public soirée held to officially welcome her to the southern capital. Although only tea and cakes were served, it was a substantial affair, with the mayor along with leading politicians such as Dr Palmer, the Speaker of the Legislative Council, and senior clergy attending. An orchestra and a renowned songstre
ss, Mrs Tostar, performed twice before the start of several speeches, the longest, according to the newspapers, being made by Caroline herself. She had no qualms about accepting admiration for her work or acknowledgement of the good that she had done. As reported in The Argus, she began by saying that it was pleasant to receive accolades: “Many gentlemen, if they were in her place that evening, would say that they were quite over-whelmed, and that they were utterly undeserving of these praises. For her part, she would say that she deserved about half the ratio that had been uttered in her favour. (Cheers and laughter.) She would rather that they charged her with egotism than that she should mislead them.”8 They were the words of an exceptionally confident woman who had grown not only to expect the tributes but who also recognised her own contribution to society. She was, maybe, sounding more like a politician of the twenty-first century than a philanthropist of the nineteenth. Even 160 years later few charity workers, male or female, would be quite so bombastic about their achievements.

  In one final grand public gesture towards Caroline, led by both the local newspapers and the remaining members of her society’s Melbourne committee, it was suggested that another testimonial be presented to Caroline, particularly as it was known that she and Archibald were far from wealthy. More than one newspaper editorial submitted that without financial distractions Caroline would be much more able to continue her humanitarian efforts.9 (Initially, there was also acclaim for what Archibald had done in Australia for the Family Colonization Loan Society and the family reunions of poorer immigrants; his name was mentioned once in the articles but then slipped from notice.) It was decided that a substantial cash amount should be gathered for Caroline, from both government and private sources. After four divisions in the Legislative Council, a vote was carried by a majority of twenty to three to award Caroline a gratuity of £5000, conditional on private subscriptions raising another £2500. The gift was to be made the following year, in 1855.10

  The money was most welcome. After years of working for little or no pay, and with only Archibald’s East India Company pension to support them and their six growing children, the Chisholms were broke. Following his resignation from the society, Archibald had tried to bolster the family’s fortunes by opening a warehouse called Chisholm & Sons, off Flinders Lane East. Its business was to provision the stores on the goldfields. The family lived on Flinders Lane too.11 Archibald’s business skills, however, were questionable. He would have had little experience in running a going concern, and years of working altruistically, allied with his more reticent personality, could hardly have stood him in good stead for the cut and thrust of a commercial enterprise. So, despite the warehouse, the family’s finances desperately needed an injection of funds.

  Setting aside her previous reticence regarding financial assistance, Caroline asked the testimonial committee for an advance on what they were intending to collect on her behalf. They gave her a “small sum of money to put them in a position of earning their livelihood”.12 This allowed Chisholm & Sons to open a retail shop on the northern end of Elizabeth Street, a better location for picking up passing trade, particularly diggers on their way to the goldfields.13 The family moved there as well. It must have been incredibly difficult for a proud woman like Caroline to go cap in hand for money, even though she, and most others, were well aware that what she was asking for was only a soupçon of the amount that she and Archibald had expended over the years on their charitable endeavours. Indeed, The Argus newspaper pointed out that the Chisholms were now poorer than many of the immigrants that they had helped in the past. Apart from the advance, there was no reporting of the balance of the testimonial, either private or government, being presented to Caroline, but it is likely that she did receive it, as the Chisholms later had money to start another business. By then, though, stories of rebellion and conflict on the goldfields were dominating the news, to the exclusion of many other events.

  *

  In the spring of 1854, just three months after she had arrived in Melbourne, Caroline took to the road again. She may have felt that because of the generous testimonial already given, and the promise of more to come, she should advance some new cause for the colony in addition to her campaign to free up land. Alternatively, she may have been reacting to targeted criticism from the writer William Howitt, who claimed that she was ignorant of the conditions in Victoria and had therefore, whilst living in Britain, deceived would-be immigrants into believing that the colony was some sort of pauper’s paradise. Howitt, another contemporary of Dickens, had arrived in Melbourne with his two sons on the same boat, the Kent, as Richard Horne, in 1852.14 In his published letter from Bendigo in April 1854, he was scathing about the deception that he claimed Caroline had practised upon susceptible British workers. He described her lectures promoting emigration to Victoria as “most mischievous, because totally untrue . . . Had these people come out with a fair statement of the truth of things, nine-tenths of them would have succeeded. It was the fallacious picture which disgusted them.”15 Howitt agreed that there were some good wages to be had for the right workmen, but he insisted that that advantage was outweighed by the three great evils that Caroline’s ignorance had hidden: the inability to buy small landholdings for farmers, the ruggedness of travel to and from the goldfields and on the diggings themselves, and the excess of drunkenness throughout the colony. Possibly even more wounding was his attack on Archibald: why, asked Howitt, when he had been resident in Victoria for so many years, had he not informed his wife as to its true nature?16

  Nor was Howitt’s the only criticism. A speaker at a large meeting of jobless immigrants in Melbourne in November 1854 claimed that unemployment was rife, that most could not find work within the first six weeks of arriving, and that, however benevolent a person she might be, Caroline had injured the colony: “Those who advised persons to come here inflicted a serious evil if they did not advise them also to bring six months’ provision with them.”17 Acting in accordance with his constituents’ views, the Member of the Legislative Council who had spoken in favour of these workers at public rallies was J.P. Fawkner, one of the three members who had voted against the public testimonial to Caroline.

  Caroline had always been quick to respond to criticism in the past. This time she ignored the attacks. But maybe concerned that she had, indeed, been responsible for misleading information, she paid a flying visit to the goldfields in late October and early November 1854. Leaving Archibald in Melbourne to run the business with William and Henry, along with a young Irish widow, Mrs Ann Gately Clinton, to look after the children, Caroline departed with her eldest son, eighteen-year-old Archibald Jnr.18 A pair of horses were offered to her for the journey, but she paid for the dray and driver herself; some of her accommodation was at the Gold Commissioner’s expense, and elsewhere locals assisted her with lodgings. She later claimed that by paying her way she remained independent and would otherwise be considered a “servant of the state”.19 The moot point, obviously, was that without the money she received as a testimonial, she would have been unable to go.

  The trip took her through the treacherous Black Forest to the diggings at Bendigo, some 150 kilometres northwest of Melbourne. In the short time that she was absent she also visited Kyneton, a prosperous town on the way to the goldfields, and diggings at Castlemaine, Forest Creek and Simson’s (near present-day Maryborough). Unlike the settlers of New South Wales, the diggers were not interested in long-term goals so much as their immediate problems on the goldfields, including the cost of licences and finding the increasingly elusive pay dirt. Caroline never fully appreciated what was important to the diggers, as opposed to what she thought they needed to be successful citizens of the colony.

  Returning to Melbourne, Caroline held a public meeting to address two of “the three great evils” Howitt had accused her of perpetuating. (The one she didn’t mention was the drunkenness of the diggers, but by then Chisholm & Sons was advertising and selling both wine and spirits, so she may have felt it was a tick
lish subject.) Discussing the rough conditions travelling to and from and in the goldfields, she asserted, “I have always told people coming to this colony they would have to rough it, and I think it is rougher now than it was.”20 This issue was one that she was to address with some success within twelve months. Regarding the lack of available land, she castigated the government and set out a plan: “The great grievance of the diggers is that they cannot get the land . . . This . . . requires to be immediately remedied. (Renewed applause.) . . . I want to see the lands unlocked . . . The energy and activity of the people is beyond anything . . . If the land in the neighbourhood of Simson’s diggings were sold in garden allotments, and in farms of a hundred acres, we should soon have a fine body of yeomanry in the district.” She went on: “I never could — I never would have recommended any man to come to this country if I did not think this possible, and that it would be done soon.”21

  William Howitt was delighted when he heard that she had visited the goldfields and even more so that she had admitted her fault. He described it as “the honest and noble confession of an heroic nature”.22 He did not, however, comment on Caroline’s claim that the diggers were mostly intelligent men who would do so much better farming than rushing around from one digging to the next, or her statement that the diggers “enter their blankets at night, more like dogs than men”.23 Clearly she thought the steadiness of a home and farm far preferable to the adventure of living rough and taking a chance on the future.

  At the meeting in Melbourne, Caroline spoke at length and with energy. Her investigations, however, had been vastly inferior to the ones she had conducted in New South Wales almost a decade earlier. There she had spent the better part of four years travelling across the colony, meeting and talking to hundreds if not thousands of men and women about the minutiae of their lives, their living conditions and their ambitions. In forensic detail, she had compiled evidence of what was good, what was bad, what was necessary and what needed altering to improve their circumstances. Without doubt, through her own hard work, she made herself an expert on the subject. By contrast, this time she had spent only a few days moving from one goldfield to another and into the local towns, certainly talking to whomever she met, but without engaging at the detailed level of her earlier ventures. On such a shallow examination, she could not have understood the nature of the goldfields or the diggers as she professed to do, nor should she have offered professional opinions as she had in the past. Maybe she could not see past her own view that all immigrants would inevitably require farmland, maybe she did not see the difference between Victoria in the 1850s and New South Wales in the 1840s, or maybe she was no longer really interested — after so many years she may simply have been tired and in need of a rest from her work. Whatever the case, Caroline totally missed the burning issue that was about to bring revolution and death to the goldfields.