Caroline Chisholm
Page 24
Whilst still recovering, Caroline sent two notes to another old friend, Catholic priest Father John Therry, the first one asking him to visit her and the second requesting a loan. “Can you for a short time lend me fifteen or twenty pounds?” she wrote simply.5 There is no record of his reply, but it is likely that he acceded to this request, as not long afterwards the family moved into a small house amongst the workers’ cottages in Albert Street, Redfern, in the city’s south, where the rent was cheap. Archibald found work in a drapery shop, and the three children were enrolled in a new government school opened just two years earlier on what was then Cleveland Paddocks.6 The school, made of temporary prefabricated galvanised iron, had more than two hundred pupils.7 In later life, one of Monica’s friends wrote a memoir that included her impressions as a child of both Caroline and Archibald: “Major — he was so called — Chisholm remains in my recollection as a gentleman perfectly refined in manner and appearance, thin and pale and sad-looking . . . I remember her . . . as a stout florid-complexioned woman, winning of manner and of soft speech . . . The family . . . were in very poor circumstances.”8
After starting with such optimism, 1858 had become a difficult year and it had still not ended when Caroline and Archibald received devastating tidings from Melbourne: twenty-one-year-old William had died suddenly after a short illness. Like salt being poured on an open wound, the tragedy was compounded only a couple of months later, in January 1859, with news that William’s daughter, ten-month-old Josephine, had also died, and had been buried next to her father in Melbourne’s General Cemetery. About three years later, William’s widow, Susanna, took Holy Orders, becoming a nun with the Sisters of Charity and eventually moving into a convent in Woollahra in Sydney. As her religious name, Susanna adopted Joseph, possibly in memory of her baby daughter.9 To lose a son and a grandchild at the end of that terrible year must have been an inconceivable sadness for both Caroline and Archibald.
As yet, they had received no financial help from their sons in Kyneton — presumably selling the business proved more difficult than buying it. It was at this time that Archibald pawned the gold medal given to Caroline by Pope Pius IX some six years previously. Although still receiving his major’s pension, that was worth only £292 per annum and the cost of looking after Caroline and relocating to Sydney with the younger children would have eaten into it considerably. Even with his income from his work in the drapery shop, there would have been barely enough to support the family; he was probably receiving only ten to twelve shillings per day.10 Nor, at sixty-one years of age, was he likely to improve his earning power or have the stamina to attempt new ventures.
With Caroline recovering slowly and confined to home and Archibald’s long hours in the shop, it was unlikely that either of them made contact with other Sydney friends from the early days. Caroline must have found it irksome to be back in the city where it had all begun and be a captive of her indisposition and poverty. The city had matured and advanced in the twelve years that the Chisholms had been absent. Like Melbourne it had grown. In 1838, the inhabitants had numbered some thirty thousand non-Indigenous white people, predominately men; by 1860 that population was edging up to almost double that number. Physically, Sydney was still the jewel of the colony according to the visitor John Askew: “The view of Sydney from part of the harbour is without a parallel. Tiers of fine buildings seem to rise one above another, like the seats in an amphitheatre, and towering above them all is the tall spire of St James’s Church”11 More importantly the city had clean water, gas lighting and excellent fresh food: “All the fruit . . . are much superior in flavour to those produced in England. I never knew how delicious a really good orange was, till I tasted one in Sydney. During the orange season, they can be bought in the market for 2d and 3d per dozen.”12 The downside, though, was that enduring challenge of Sydney, to wit, the cost of housing: “A perpetual source of dissatisfaction with the working-people was the insane manner in which the landlords raised the rents of their dwellings. The news of a new gold-field, or the finding of a large nugget at any of the mines, or any other species of prospective prosperity, sent up the rents. In some instances as much as 6s per week.”13
In such circumstances, Archibald’s wage would barely have kept a roof over their heads or put food on the table, let alone paid for Caroline’s medicine, clothes and shoes for the growing children, or other family requirements. Despite still being far from well, Caroline realised she had to contribute too. She did some work for a confectionary and gave lessons in English to “China Men, at 1s and 6d per lesson”.14 She would have been able to manage both jobs from her home. Many of the Chinese who had arrived for the gold rush ended up as market gardeners on the outskirts of Sydney.15 As in Victoria, there was considerable anti-Chinese sentiment in New South Wales. In 1861 the state Legislative Assembly passed a “Chinese Immigration Act to Regulate and Restrict their Immigration into the Colony”. Much like the Victorian legislation of 1855, it levied £10 on each new Chinese arrival and a similar cost on the captains of the boats for every Chinese adult brought to New South Wales.16 During a public lecture in 1860, Caroline spoke of her Chinese students with respect and said that she was opposed to the anti-Chinese legislation. It was an unpopular stance, showing again that she was not one to pander to the crowd.
Back at the beginning of 1859, though, she was still struggling with her health and finances and lectures were far from her mind. Across all the contours of her career, what had sustained Caroline the most was her faith. She had not cast her religion aside, yet it seems that its representatives in Sydney had abandoned her, for a time, at least. When Jabez King (J.K.) Heydon, the publisher of the Sydney Freeman’s Journal, and like Caroline a convert to Catholicism, visited her at home in May of 1859, he was troubled by her condition, both physical and financial, and deeply concerned for her religious isolation. In a letter to Father Therry he wrote, “I was greatly shocked yesterday, on calling on the celebrated Mrs Chisholm . . . to find her in the deepest distress from sickness and poverty. Although extremely ill from disease of the kidneys and unable to get out, no clergyman has visited her for about four months.”17 Caroline was obviously upset at being ignored by the clergy, particularly now when she most needed them. Yet her reaction was not bitterness. Instead she analysed what had happened and why, and then she sought a solution. She still had an extraordinary ability to rise above the petty and the banal, to find a way of addressing a problem that was, she would have realised, not just pertinent to her, but to so many others as well. In this case her manner of dealing with it was inspired, allowing her to vent her feelings, earn some money and promote her ideas and passions.
Through the latter part of 1859, as her health slowly improved, Caroline penned a novelette, Little Joe. It appeared in eleven instalments in The Empire newspaper between Boxing Day 1859 and 15 May 1860. A moralising story full of ill-concealed homilies in the guise of conversations between characters, it highlighted the clergy’s failure to frequent their poor parishioners. Caroline ascribed this absence to what was then called “State Aid”, whereby the government rather than the people paid the clergy’s wages. That was only one of the issues that spilt from her pen: her other main concern, land for the poorer settlers, featured strongly, as did the honour and love of the working class compared with the brutal indifference of the capitalist. The story itself is about a young boy, Joe, orphaned at the start of the narrative and taken in by a kindly, though impoverished widow with children of her own. Joe’s adventures bring him into contact with jovial and caring ordinary people, a wealthy man who learns to put humanity ahead of profit, and a villain whom Joe betters with the help of his friends and supporters. It is hardly a rollicking tale, nor is one left in suspense at the end of each instalment, but it twists and turns enough to hold some interest, gives a fair description of everyday life in the late 1850s, and must have been well received as The Empire ran so many chapters. The end of the last instalment is ambiguous: it may have been the completi
on of the tale or, possibly, Caroline may have intended to continue writing but, as so often happened with her, became distracted by other events.
One of those disruptions would have been the arrival in Sydney during 1859 of her two sons, Archibald Jnr, now twenty-three, and Henry, twenty, with the proceeds from the sale of the Kyneton business, after all the debts had been paid. The funds meant that the Chisholms were able to rent a larger home in a slightly better area closer to the town, Stanley Street in East Sydney, and with both boys working, the family’s finances improved further — Archibald Jnr took a job as a clerk and Henry found a position with the New South Wales Civil Service.18
*
Almost as though she knew that time was now running out, Caroline, with her health and finances improving, went on the political offensive. This time it wasn’t in the latent guise of letter writing, but full force in front of hundreds of people in a series of lectures in Sydney between the winters of 1859 and 1861. It was as though committing her thoughts to paper whilst writing Little Joe had not been enough: she needed to give physical vent to her ardent views. Her initial decision as a young woman in Northampton to turn charity into a lifetime career had defined Caroline as being deeply concerned with the destitute and disadvantaged. Her initial attempts at philanthropy had focused on helping young girls and women, but as the years passed and her experience of the world dilated, so too did her convictions, resulting in a fervent belief in the need for a democratic society in which everyone should share. In effect, she was advocating that quintessential Australian maxim of a “fair go”.
Caroline did proselytise, but not at all in a religious sense. She prayed and practised as a Catholic herself, but had absolutely no interest in converting anyone to Rome. She probably didn’t see the point, believing that apart from a belief in a god and living a good life, the style of one’s observances was immaterial. Caroline’s interest in conversion was to do with social equity, and that included females being liberated from domestic bonds and being allowed to play a greater part in a society that had hitherto excluded them. Her lectures fomented much interest, not just because she presented aberrant theories, but also because, and despite the respect she received, she was a curiosity, a woman inhabiting the male domain. It was unheard of for women to talk at public meetings, let alone be bold enough to be the focal point of the gathering. Even ten years later in London, when Mrs Peter Taylor was chairperson of the first public suffragette meeting, she was mocked as being not only ridiculous but immoral as well.19
Caroline spoke, of course, about land and immigration, but she broadened her agenda to include, amongst other issues, her support for further electoral reform, the eight-hour day, the value of the press, the avarice of landlords (which she had experienced) and the future of women. She was not the only one advocating fundamental change and there is little doubt, judging by the reaction she received, that she spoke to sympathetic audiences, but she was alone in promoting women’s rights.
A poster advertising one of Caroline’s lectures in Sydney, in 1861 (Museums Victoria)
In her very first lecture, on a variety of topics including “the land question”, she addressed her own peculiarity, defending her right as a woman to speak on serious matters. A report in The Empire explained how she countered her detractors: “They forgot this, that real property can be bequeathed to posterity in a variety of ways, whilst the mental property of ideas and experience can only be conveyed by constant and personal teaching. Why then should the ideas and experience she might possess be lost to the public through any want of fashion and form in her as a lady.”20 Caroline was taking aim at two targets here. When she mentioned “bequeathing real property” she would have been highlighting the fact that a married woman in New South Wales was still barred by law from owning or inheriting anything — until 1879 the husband was the sole beneficiary. The insistence on female intellectual ability was another spear aimed at a complacent male audience, and one that would only reach its target some twenty-five years later, when first Melbourne University and then Sydney University finally began to admit women students. Both universities were founded in the 1850s.
In the same lecture, Caroline advanced the idea of female suffrage. The year before, 1858, in New South Wales, all white men over the age of twenty-one had finally won the right to vote in a secret ballot, without any property conditions (interestingly, their counterparts in the United Kingdom would wait another sixty years, until 1918, to receive the same benefit). Indicating how comfortable she was with public speaking, Caroline first launched a satirical attack on her male audience, asking, as The Empire reported, “What had they, the men of Australia, done towards advancing the political and social interests of the country, and yet they called themselves the ‘lords of the creation’?” The reaction was laughter and cheers. Then Caroline made her point: “Undoubted, they had a great deal yet to do before the political system of this country could be placed on a firm and satisfactory basis. Some people imagined that vote by ballot would lead to the enfranchisement of ladies, and they appeared to look upon such a result with apprehension. But under a proper and enlightened system she believed that such a contingency would be more advantageous than otherwise.”21 Whilst the concepts were radical, the language was not, allowing her audience to ease into the philosophies rather than be bludgeoned by them. Even so, there was no laughter or cheers this time, and she passed directly on to her next subject.
It is possible that amongst the crowd that night there was a young girl who had arrived in Sydney a few years earlier aboard one of Caroline’s Family Colonization Loan Society boats. Maybanke Anderson (née Selfe) would, some thirty years later, be a leader of the women’s suffrage and education movements in New South Wales.22 Australian male attitudes to female suffrage in the 1850s and ’60s can best be explained by what happened in Victoria a few years later, when the wording of an electoral act allowed women to vote in the 1864 general election, which they subsequently did. The male legislature, however, then decided that the act had been a mistake and they revised it the following year to once again disenfranchise women.
Caroline’s first lecture was held in the voluminous Prince of Wales Theatre in Castlereagh Street. About four hundred people were present, but were almost lost in an auditorium big enough to hold up to three thousand. Although her other talks were to be free, Caroline shared the profits from this one with the theatre’s manager. Taking Caroline back to the days of the height of her influence in New South Wales, the lecture was attended by not just her friend Dr Bland, but also by several prominent politicians, including Jack Robertson and Charles Cowper, who would both become premier of the colony, and would promote the liberalisation of the male franchise and reformation of the land laws.23
Caroline’s second lecture was held some eighteen months later in the early summer of 1860, in the middle of the election campaign for the lower house, the Legislative Assembly. Her topic, land reform, was the defining issue on the hustings, with both sides, in modern terms, seeking a mandate for their policies: either to maintain the status quo for the wealthy squatters or free up the land for the less affluent. The talk was held in the Temperance Hall in Pitt Street and attracted well in excess of the four hundred people who came to the first lecture — The Sydney Morning Herald described it as a “very large audience”. Stuffy and hot, the room was so crowded with members of both sexes, that before she commenced Caroline invited as many women onto the stage as would fit. It was certainly more comfortable there, but it was likely that Caroline, skilled at engendering publicity, was also making a strong visual statement about the need for female involvement in politics and the crucial questions of the day. Much of this lecture was a reworking of arguments that she had put previously, including an attack on that bastion of conservatism, elitism and the squattocracy, the all-male Australian Club, which even today does not accept women members.
At the end of the two-hour talk, a vote of thanks was proposed, the speaker jovially commenting that
Caroline herself should stand for election. She answered the suggestion seriously, and it was in reply to this that she described her opposition to any anti-Chinese legislation. Perhaps reflecting widespread scepticism that a woman would ever stand for parliament or that there would be support for Chinese immigration, only one of the three Sydney newspapers that covered the lecture, The Empire, reported these comments. The single person of note to attend this lecture, and draw praise from Caroline, was her old adversary John Dunmore Lang. Although there was no evidence of any closer contact between the two in the following years, this was obviously an olive branch, both offered and received. At the end of the lecture, both were hailed by a vocal audience with three resounding cheers.
The 1860 election was won by Caroline’s supporters, Jack Robertson and Charles Cowper. The following year, much to her delight, Jack Robertson pushed through his land reform legislation, giving up the premiership and changing from the Legislative Assembly to the Legislative Council to achieve it. In the following year, 1862, Victoria passed similar laws. Caroline has never been credited with any part in bringing these laws to fruition; however, undeniably, her constant campaigning in both colonies did influence the establishment of more equitable land laws. Australia in 1860 had tossed off most of its convict shackles; now it was wriggling out of its colonial fetters. It would be another forty years and more before it stood as an independent, inclusive nation, but like white male suffrage, the land reform laws were crucial to its development.
There were to be two more lectures from Caroline, both focusing substantially on social issues and improving the quality of life for the working class. In what may have been a first, Caroline even raised the still fractious issue of equality in housework. In February 1861, she spoke at a church hall on the corner of Abercrombie Street, Broadway, to the St Benedict’s Young Men’s Society, of which her son, Archibald, was the president. This talk was on the early closing movement not of hotels, but of shops. It was not a large audience but many of those in attendance were female.24 Although her husband, Archibald Snr, no doubt worked long hours at the drapery, she addressed the subject principally from a woman’s point of view. A few days previously at a similar meeting, a man had blamed women shopping “after tea” for the reason that stores remained open until ten o’clock at night. Caroline threw the responsibility right back onto the men. The Sydney Morning Herald reported what she said: “The gentlemen — husbands — instead of doing much of the work at their homes — work that the husbands alone ought to do — they left it at an early hour for their business, and spent their evening hours in other places than their homes, and consequently the time of the wives was taken up in doing the work referred to . . . They had to defer shopping till the evening.”25 Raising various other arguments, she also suggested that it was dangerous for women shop assistants to go home alone late at night. She said instead that the free evening could be better spent either improving their minds or — another radical proposition for the time — enjoying some well-earned recreation. (Caroline did not, however, address the inevitable reduction in pay that early closing would have incurred for shop assistants, only maintaining that work was always more fruitful in the morning.)