The Baby Farmers

by Annie Cossins

  Sydney Town in 1844

  Sarah’s parents would have been astonished by the sights that accosted them after sailing from the backwater village of Launceston. Sydney Town had expanded rapidly in the 1830s and 1840s as the main port for the export of the colony’s produce, notably wool. Although the early settlement ‘clung to the shores of Sydney Cove’,21 by 1844 the city had expanded inland along a narrow strip of land from Circular Quay to the cemetery (where the present Town Hall stands), although it was still the size of a small English town on the edge of a vast continent—a pimple of so-called civilisation on an untamed giant with the settlers oblivious to the ancient Aboriginal culture surrounding them.

  The city struggled for a sense of order with a system of planned, grid-like streets to overcome its early days in the area known as the Rocks, which retained its narrow lanes and alleyways along with its reputation for crime and other ‘irresistible attractions’22 such as the popular Sheer Hulk. This sly grog shop represented all that was loose and licentious about the Rocks—carousing male voices blended with laughing, drunken women in ‘a large, low dilapidated, half-lit room’ filled with tobacco smoke and gamblers and convicts who had managed to escape the nearby barracks by bribing the night watchmen. Described by one patron as ‘a perfect frenzy of drunken vociferation’, it was the arse-end of Sydney Town.23

  As the Sutcliffes walked down the gangplank of the Palmyra into the Rocks, they found a port abuzz with convicts and carts loading and offloading the flotilla of arriving and departing ships against a backdrop of convict-built warehouses. While this was the ‘real’ Sydney, a commercial city dependent on imports and exports and its underbelly of licentiousness, the newspapers and periodicals of the time were keen to show off the colony’s literary pretensions.

  The Colonial Literary Journal began its life on 27 June 1844 to supply literature to those who must meet ‘the pressing calls of business, or of duty’.24 In the month the Sutcliffes arrived, the journal contained liberal doses of ancient history, poetry, chemical philosophy, tips on waterproofing walls along with some useful maxims for new, hot-headed arrivals:

  Attempt not to fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren.

  The fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.25

  It also carried a long essay on the ‘endless variety and degrees of intellectual capacity, by which some [men] are prompted to higher undertakings’ while others had to content themselves with the ‘humbler occupations’.26 This meant there was a place reserved at the bottom of the social ladder for ex-convicts like Emanuel Sutcliffe.

  But when Mr and Mrs Sutcliffe disembarked from the Palmyra in October 1844, all was not well in the New South Wales colony. Although it was only 56 years old, commerce was stagnant:

  Commercial transactions of the past week have been few and unimportant, the markets generally remain languid, as noticed for some time past, and in the absence of all speculation sales are confined to immediate requirements and cash payments.27

  A five year drought from 1837 to 1842 had caused ‘a catastrophic fall in land sales’ which plunged the colony, like a cold water splash, into an economic depression, reducing the demand for labour. Because the Governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, believed ‘the depression was a result of excessive speculation’, he was not prepared to assist private enterprise through an injection of government funds because ‘he thought thrift, not more capital, was necessary’.28

  The governor’s caution had profound effects on hundreds of Sydney-siders, including the newly arrived Sutcliffes. On 5 October, The Guardian reported the results of a parliamentary inquiry into ‘the state of distress alleged to exist amongst’ the unemployed in Sydney. The Guardian was not impressed by the inquiry or its findings, criticising it as a sop to employers and calling it a ‘farce’ with inadequate solutions.29 To the newspaper editors, the problem was simple—‘superabundant labour’ with insufficient jobs and ‘cruel’ rates paid for labour. According to The Guardian, the true rate of ‘distressed operatives in the city’ was 2000 families dying of starvation which was worsened by an influx of people from the country. The newspaper also criticised the government’s evasion of its responsibilities by refusing to undertake various public works as a way of soaking up the excess labour.

  ‘House-rent’ was a particular form of distress, indicating that times were not good for new arrivals like the Sutcliffes, who merely exacerbated the rental crisis since Sydney was overpopulated by 5000 to 6000 people.30 Assisted immigration brought more and more British settlers to the colony and town people were reluctant to move to the country. No-one acknowledged the fact that Sydney society was still dependent on convict labour, which meant that many employers were unable or unwilling to employ free settlers for a living wage.

  The problems were eloquently expressed by Mr Adam Smith, a recent arrival to the colony from Ireland with his large family, in a letter to The Guardian:

  [Employment] is the thing that is wanted, let us get permanent work, good and honest masters, and we shall ask little else . . . [B]ut we would if it were available, ask a little more. We would claim equal wages with what allured us from our homes . . . [N]ot only have I not bettered my situation by my adventures, but have hardly got anything to do since I came out.

  Unlike many other new settlers, Mr Smith did, in desperation, try his hand in the country as his money ran out. He travelled more than four hundred miles, stopping at various settlements and stations on the way where he had to beg for food:

  On returning to my wife and children I found them in great poverty, and their anxiety was at its height . . . when I had no relief to give them.31

  Finally, the governor was forced to offer inducements to the unemployed to work on the roads leading out of Sydney32 in order to relocate families inland and ‘eradicate the desire’ to stay in Sydney.

  As new immigrants from Tasmania, it is possible the Sutcliffes found themselves in a similar situation to Mr Adam Smith. Although they stayed in Sydney for at least fourteen months until the birth of their first child, Sarah Jane, they eventually left the high rents of Sydney. One of the main public works outside of Sydney included the new line of road to the Illawarra in the south-west on the way to Camden, the small town in which the Sutcliffes settled. Emanuel was an ideal employee given his experience in the convict road gangs of Launceston. Since the Legislative Council had requested the governor to put aside £160 for repairs to the bridge over the Cowpasture River where Camden was located,33 this may have been the reason why the Sutcliffes set out in a horse-drawn coach or wagon into the wilds of the Australian countryside.

  A family tragedy

  For 30 years, Camden Park’s 28,000 acres was the largest farm in the colony. It was owned by John Macarthur, the son of a Scottish draper, who is known as the father of Australia’s wool industry—one of the ironies of Australian history since it was his wife, Elizabeth, who was largely responsible for the development of the Macarthurs’ sheep breeding project during the eight years Macarthur spent in England between 1809 and 1817.

  Although Macarthur refused to cede any of his huge parcel of land for the creation of a town for workers, after his death in 1834 his two sons subdivided 50 acres which were sold in lots of half an acre for the creation of Camden Town in 1840.34 Six years later, the Sutcliffe family—Emanuel, Ellen and baby Sarah—travelled 65 kilometres south-west from Sydney to Camden, which was a blossoming town with two churches, a school, an inn, a post office and a courthouse. Ellen Sutcliffe gave birth to a boy, George James, on 26 October 1847, exactly three years after she and Emanuel had arrived in Sydney.

  Nothing more is known about the Sutcliffes until five years later when they were living in the District of Maitland in the Hunter Valley, about 160 kilometres north of Sydney. The bridge over Wallis Creek on the outskirts of Maitland had been another badly needed public work.35 It is possible Ellen and her children found themselves living in this distant rural outpost as Emanuel
followed the road building work available in the colony.

  The next to be heard of Emanuel Sutcliffe comes from an advertisement in the local paper on 24 July 1852 when he offered a reward for a lost filly that had strayed from a farm near the Paterson River where the Sutcliffes were living:

  Ten Shillings reward will be given for her recovery, on delivery to the undersigned, at Mr. Nicholson’s mill.36

  While road building may have taken the family to the Hunter Valley, Emanuel had found work in a local mill in West Maitland. Three years later, the family’s social and economic status had improved, with Emanuel becoming the proprietor of a flour mill. On 16 March 1855, Emanuel was charged with malicious injury ‘by destroying a certain dwelling house, valued at £10, the property of Patrick Doolan . . . at Black Creek’. But he had good reasons for doing so. He had pulled down a slab hut about a quarter of a mile from the mill he operated since he had a four year lease over the land on which the slab hut had been built. Since Emanuel’s lease, dated 1 April 1854, pre-dated the sale of the land to Mr Doolan on 1 June 1854, the court dismissed Doolan’s case against Emanuel who, as lessee, was entitled to possession.37 He had shown Doolan who was in charge.

  However, more neighbourly discord was to follow. On 29 July 1855, Constable Joseph Davis was charged with assaulting Emanuel ‘by wresting a gun from him’. One Sunday evening, when Emanuel was riding on the road near Black Creek, he fired a shot which caused Mr William Monk’s horse to run off. Monk called Emanuel a ‘blackguard’ who replied in kind. Half an hour later, Monk turned up at Emanuel’s house with Constable Davis while Sutcliffe was taking the powder out of his gun. Davis challenged him, ‘Will you repeat the words again?’ When Emanuel refused, Davis ‘rushed on him and wrested the gun out of his hand’.

  At his trial for assault, Constable Davis defended his actions because Emanuel was ‘in the habit of going about with a loaded gun, and many of the neighbours had complained of him’. Although he had seen Emanuel with the gun on the road earlier, he took the gun from him ‘at his own door’ because he regarded Emanuel as a dangerous person. But the magistrate was not happy about an individual being attacked in his own home. Instead, Davis ‘should have taken the gun from [Emanuel] when he saw him on the street with it’.38 For this lapse in judgement, Davis was fined five shillings, with four shillings and sixpence costs awarded against him. The ex-convict had won a battle against authority.

  After this incident, it seems that Emanuel’s neighbours took their revenge. One year later, he advertised a reward of £10 in the local paper:

  STOLEN or STRAYED from Black Creek, on the 29th October, 1856, one large STRAWBERRY BULLOCK, branded RB near side on rump.

  If stolen, the above reward will be paid on conviction of the thief, and recovery of the bullock; if strayed, £1 reward will be paid for such information as will lead to recovery.39

  Since Emanuel waited until 25 November to place his advertisement, he may have received information that his bullock had been stolen, a piece of do-it-yourself justice in a small rural community against the man with the loaded gun.

  In January 1857, Emanuel placed another notice in the local paper which suggests he was in financial trouble or planning to quit the mill:

  All parties INDEBTED to me are requested to pay the amount of their bills on or before the 16th of this month; if not, they will be handed over to my solicitor for recovery; and all persons that have claims against me will please forward them at once for liquidation.

  EMANUEL SUTCLIFFE

  Black Creek Steam Mills40

  This ad confirms that Emanuel was running a flour mill, using the skills he had learnt as a convict. But 1857 was not turning out to be a good year for the Sutcliffes, with Emanuel experiencing further losses and offering a huge reward in the local newspaper at the end of January:

  STOLEN or STRAYED, from the Mill Paddock, Black Creek, THREE HORSES, of the following descriptions and brands . . .

  If strayed, One Pound reward will be paid for each of them; and if stolen, Fifty Pounds will be paid on conviction of the thief or thieves and the restoration of the horses to me at Black Creek.41

  Perhaps the missing horses amounted to another form of local payback against the temperamental ex-convict who had upped the stakes by offering the extraordinary sum of £50, equivalent to £4305 or $6504 today. But the ad appeared to have no effect since Emanuel was still advertising the reward one month later.42

  On top of these losses, worse was to come. To end a year that had begun badly, a family tragedy was reported in the local newspaper. On 22 December 1857, the Sutcliffes’ son drowned at the age of nine years. While the details of George’s death were reported, there is only imagination to document the grief of Sarah’s parents upon the discovery of their son’s body in Anvil Creek and during the inquest held on Christmas Eve:

  An inquest was held before the coroner . . . at the house of Emanuel Sutcliffe, Black Creek on the body of George James Sutcliffe . . . On Tuesday morning he had been seen bathing in a water-hole in Anvil Creek, where horses were usually watered. In the evening he was missed, and on searching the water-hole next day his body was found. It was supposed that he had been drowned in trying to catch a goose belonging to him which had been seen in the water-hole.43

  At the age of 12, Sarah witnessed her grieving parents, as well as suffering the loss of her brother, the family’s only son. As the older sister, had it been her responsibility to look after her brother? Did Emanuel take out his grief on her? In later life Sarah was known for her own violence and quickness to anger, as she followed in the footsteps of her unruly father, who rode around the neighbourhood with a loaded gun and a chip on his shoulder. With a father who had suffered the brutality of the convict system, perhaps it was inevitable that Sarah would suffer a punishing childhood.

  After the death of their son, more misfortune visited the Sutcliffe family. Despite his success as a mill owner, Emanuel continued his wild, gun-toting ways. On 20 January 1858 he appeared in the Maitland Quarter Sessions Court where he was:

  indicted for wilfully presenting fire-arms, to wit, a gun, at the person of William Schofield, at Aberdeen . . . with intent to alarm him. A second count charged the prisoner with unlawfully producing fire-arms, near to the person of William Schofield, with intent to alarm him.

  The jury returned a verdict of not guilty, the prosecution case having collapsed because a key witness failed to appear.44 Yet again Emanuel’s predilection for pointing loaded guns at people had gone unpunished.

  By the 1860s, Emanuel and his family had quit the Hunter Valley and moved back to Sydney, although the reasons are unknown. Perhaps their departure was due to more neighbourly discord, financial failure of the mill or failure of the new landowner, Mr Doolan, to renew Emanuel’s four year lease, which lapsed in 1858. As the Colonial Literary Journal had warned in 1844, ‘Attempt not to fly like an eagle with the wings of a wren’.

  Sarah and the ship’s captain

  Sarah’s life with her parents ended at the age of 19 when she married Charles Edwards in Sydney on 29 April 1865 by special licence at the Reverend Dr Fullerton’s, in Elizabeth Street, Sydney. Because the marriage was not in a church and under a special licence, there may have been urgent reasons, such as pregnancy, for the ceremony. Charles Edwards was a 26-year-old from Dundee, Scotland and was described as a master mariner in the marriage notice in the newspaper.45 Only one child was born after Sarah married, a girl named Minnie Josephine, in either 1866 or 1867, although her birth was not registered.46

  Very little is known about Sarah’s first husband or how long the marriage lasted. There are a number of references to a Captain Charles Edwards in the newspapers over three decades in the mid to late 1800s. Unfortunately, there were two Charles Edwards in Sydney around the same time, both mariners, making it impossible to determine which Charles Edwards was the commander of the various ships which sailed the coasts of north-east Australia and New Guinea during this time, including the first scient
ific voyage to New Guinea. In 1875, Captain Charles Edwards was appointed commander of an exciting expedition to collect animal and plant specimens from what was considered to be the last great frontier. Setting out on the Chevert on 18 May ‘with a fair wind’, Captain Edwards commanded a ship full of naturalists, zoologists, taxidermists, botanists, a complete armoury of weapons and items of trade to ‘facilitate friendly intercourse’ with the natives. The ship was given a huge farewell by the public, the premier and his ministers, members of Parliament, government officials and ‘other influential residents of the city’.47

  Did Sarah and her daughter, Minnie, read about the exciting adventures of this Captain Charles Edwards? Had Sarah’s mariner husband been ‘converted’ into a captain through wishful thinking? Unfortunately, there are no hints in the historical material to indicate either way. All we know is that by 1886 Sarah’s first husband was dead since Minnie’s marriage notice stated that she was the only daughter of the late Captain Charles Edwards.

  Sarah’s parents: inglorious endings

  While Sarah’s parents lived long lives, their endings were inglorious. At the age of 72, Sarah’s father entered the Liverpool Asylum in October 1885. Less than a year later, in August 1886, Emanuel Sutcliffe died from paralysis. Liverpool Asylum provided refuge for infirm and destitute men in an era when nursing homes and government assistance for the elderly were unknown. A small daily wage was paid to those who were able to work in the Asylum’s farm and workshop.48 For the old and infirm, however, the asylum provided very basic living conditions in overcrowded wards with underpaid workers.