Let the Land Speak

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by Jackie French


  The first colonists failed to recognise the living larder around them. Over the next two hundred years European settlers would destroy much of the bounty of the land, and think they were doing good as they extinguished it.

  CHAPTER 8

  The second, third and fourth Australians

  The United States might proclaim, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’. It has usually been more difficult to get to Australia.

  The first Australians survived a sea voyage with the desperation and courage needed to sail beyond sight of land. Their descendants were those able to survive an ice age, subsequent catastrophic flooding and increasing desertification, as well forging cultures that enabled them to thrive in Australia’s climatic extremes. The land had shaped the people and their cultures.

  Most of the ‘second’ Australians were convicts. Apart from a few like those on the Lady Juliana, they had been relatively carefully selected to come here. That selection process is important: they might have been criminals, but they had been judged worthy of a second chance. Australia was never a ‘dumping ground’ for prisoners; it was cheaper to keep them starved in the filth of the Thames hulks, the rotting ships that were too old to be seaworthy, than send them here. Most were young, as fit as their time in jail and at sea permitted, and hadn’t been convicted of crimes like murder or rape. Despite the horror of the Second Fleet and on other notorious ships, on average less than two per cent of convicts died on the voyage here. That seems a high number today but not compared to the mortality rate for sailors of the time.

  Roughly 163,000 convicts were sent to Australia from 1788 till transportation ended in the 1860s. (This is a very rough figure – accurate records weren’t always kept and many of the records that were no longer exist.) Eight out of ten had been convicted of theft, and estimates vary from one in five to one in a hundred convicted of political crime, from being in a trade union to violent rebellion against the English in Wales or Ireland, or burning down the houses of English landowners or poaching or stealing from them. The convicts’ average age was about twenty-six. About two-thirds had been convicted in England and so were probably English; about one-third were convicted in Ireland, with relatively few from Wales and Scotland.1

  According to the official census of the colony of New South Wales, in 1820 there were 17,271 adults, of whom 9451 were convicts, 5768 were ex-convicts or those with their ‘ticket-of-leave’, effectively freeing them before they had served their sentence, and 2802 were free settlers, or those who had convict parents but were freeborn. In Van Diemen’s Land there were 5448 adults, of whom 2588 were convicts, 961 were ex-convicts and 899 born free. The census did not count Indigenous Australians, nor was it accurate – like many Colonial figures, the numbers don’t add up. And it was impossible to count those beyond the colony’s official boundaries, living in the many whaling and sealer camps around the coast.2

  There are no reliable figures about how many convicts survived their terms of seven or fourteen years, or how many stayed in Australia once they had served their time. Even when they had served out their sentence many weren’t allowed to return to Britain. An ex-convict also had to have a certificate of freedom or an absolute pardon – anyone who didn’t possess either of those and was found in Britain would have their pardon revoked. Any convict or ex-convict who was embarking to return to Britain also had to advertise his or her intention in the Sydney Gazette. The official (and incomplete and contradictory) data suggests only two to three per cent of convicts went back.

  On the other hand, it was easy enough for any able-bodied man or boy to sign up as ship’s crew, even if they had no sailing experience. So many sailors died at sea, or jumped ship, that ship’s captains always needed able-bodied men – or even a man with a peg leg and a hook instead of a hand, who could cook on a tiny coal fire in a heaving ocean. Back in the days before passports, an ex-convict could get ashore in Britain without detection as long as they didn’t go back to their home village or street, where an informer might tell the authorities they were there. (In the late 1700s and early 1800s informers were paid for each criminal they helped apprehend.)

  By 1800 Australia’s seas were dominated by American sealing and whaling ships. A convict who had been assigned to a farm, rather than shackled in a road gang, would still have been able to illegally join one of these ships and make a new, free life in the United States.

  It’s also possible that even by 1820, and certainly by the 1841 census, ex-convicts were carefully hiding their pasts and claiming to be free settlers.3 It was easy enough to do in a land of large distances, few documents or need for any, and shifting populations. At least three of my own ancestors would recreate a more respectable family background in the 1830s and 1850s, carefully confusing not just where they were born but other identifying details in case their real history could come to light. (One even claimed to be the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, a tale accepted not just by the neighbours but by his descendants until a family researcher a few decades ago discovered quite a different past for him.)

  Many convicts – like those who had been shackled in government labour building roads, or had spent years in isolation as shepherds – may have been too mentally and physically damaged to even try to leave, or lead normal lives. In those days before easy legal divorce the New South Wales government allowed convicts who had left their partners back in Britain to remarry in Australia, as long as they had been separated for seven years, but many could never hope for family life. Of the 148,000 convicts sent to eastern Australia, only about 25,000 were female. From 1790 to 1850 there were also two male free settlers for every female.

  There are no reliable statistics to tell us how many convict thieves went back to their old profession. Australia was certainly rich in burglars, pickpockets, and the new ‘bushrangers’, especially during the gold rush, when fortunes were transported with little security. Other men would became ‘Orangatangs’ – ragged, mentally unstable men with untrimmed beards, like ‘Cranky Jack’ in Steele Rudd’s stories of the late 1890s. But probably a majority genuinely did make good, just as the magistrates who had sent them here hoped.

  ‘Made good’, of course, came in a variety of guises. Some, like my ancestors, became wealthy landowners, factory owners or army officers, carefully hiding their convict antecedents. For others, a cottage and small holding – and all the meat they could eat as well as the chance of a grant of free land, and even convicts assigned to them to work it – was paradise compared to what they had come from back in Britain.

  It is tempting to think that those who ‘made good’ were stronger, smarter or simply more stubborn and adaptable than those who returned, died, or became so mentally unstable that they died without adding their genes to the population. This evolutionary ‘weeding out’ of the less capable happens everywhere. But in the Australia of the first half of the 1800s there were both more opportunities (free or cheap land and labour) as well as dangers (isolation, lack of experience of the land’s dangers and few family support networks), so it’s reasonable to assume that the land continued to influence those who survived to breed – and whose children survived – to a greater extent than in more established societies.

  * * *

  Male and macho?

  Australia wouldn’t get a fairly even male-female ratio till about 1900.4 Did this early gross imbalance change our society? South Australia was the first place in the modern world to give women the vote; federal Australia was the second. Were women valued more in a society with relatively few of them?

  But until the late 1960s Australia also had a grog-swilling, male-only culture that wouldn’t even allow women into a public bar - except for the barmaid - very different from the British pubs where women would join in for a quiet half-pint of ale. Even though the first professional shearers in Australia were women (from what is now Germany), even up till 1970 if a woman even entered a shearing shed all work would stop, with the cry ‘ducks on the pon
d’ until she left.

  It would take a much longer book than this to evaluate the effects of the scarcity of women for the first 110 years of European settlement had, but it is unlikely that there would be no effect at all.

  * * *

  Currency lads and sterling lasses

  The ‘third’ Australians were their children, born in Australia and referred to as ‘currency lads and lasses’ as opposed to immigrants from Britain, who were known as ‘sterlings’. The currency kids were mostly illiterate but, compared to their immediate ancestors, extremely well fed.

  Others came, the fourth Australians. Some were poor, refugees from religious or political persecution, or those who were left starving when the potato crops rotted in the fields. Some were younger sons who wanted an estate in those times of primogeniture when the older son inherited almost everything, leaving younger sons and all daughters to shift for themselves, coming to Australia to buy land and establish their own prosperity. Black sheep (the dissolute and disreputable offspring of respectable families) and the shiftless, like Charles Dickens’ two younger sons, were sent out to the colonies in an attempt to make them independent of their fathers’ support. (One of Dickens’ sons became a politician, the other made a living by giving readings of his father’s work.) An Australian estate was also sometimes a gift in return for distinguished military service, especially after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Crimean War of 1853–56.

  They came for many reasons, but all had one thing in common. They chose far-off Australia.

  Still the longest voyage

  That choice is important. Back in the 1800s there was a wide choice of destination for poor and scapegrace alike. Of the 27 million people in Britain in 1841, 120,000 emigrated. Forty-four per cent went to the United States; only 28,000 came to Australia, and this was in the year of the greatest immigration until the gold rushes. The United States were still welcoming the ‘huddled masses’, and it was faster – and cheaper – to go to the States or Canada from European ports than Australia. If you were a starving Irish peasant you had a far better chance of getting to New York before you died of hunger than Sydney or even Perth. A bag of potatoes might even last the journey, if you couldn’t afford a fare that also gave you meals.

  Even when better sails and then steamships brought the voyage down to about six months by 1830 and three months by 1860, Australia was still at the other end of the world. Why not go to India, where fortunes in trade might be made, or South Africa, Rhodesia and other African colonies, where, as in the United States, Canada and Australia, land taken from the inhabitants was given or sold cheaply to the colonisers.

  Rich passengers might travel in reasonable comfort, with separate cabins, their own servants, stores like dried fruit, ‘portable soup’, plum puddings, a terrier to keep rats from their cabin, or even their own personal cow (with her fodder) to give milk. But they still had to face the dangers of rounding the Cape and the storms of the Southern Ocean. Those unable to afford their own cabin lived in divided holds, where men slept on pallets or mouldy hay on one side, and women on the other, eating a hot gruel of oatmeal or ship’s biscuit twice a day if it was calm enough to light the fire in the galley, or cold ship’s biscuit if it wasn’t. A better ship would offer bunks or hammocks, with salt meat and dried pease stew and bread and cheese, and ship’s doctors to ensure that no one who was ill came aboard, inspecting hair and bodies for fleas or lice that might carry disease. There was no way to tell who might be infected and not yet showing symptoms. The cramped conditions meant that cholera, whooping cough, typhoid, typhus or tuberculosis often swept through the passengers and then through Australian ports, until quarantine stations were introduced by Governor Darling. Why risk a longer, more dangerous voyage to come here?

  Economic refugees

  Yet despite distance, cost and privation, free settlers came in increasing numbers. Poverty drove most of them – Britain in the 1820s and 1830s was a time of desperation, with bread and fuel expensive, and farm and factory wages so low that a family still needed to grow or gather most of its food. Many arrivals had been oppressed by England’s domination of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In Wales and Scotland, absentee English landlords had been granted much of the land. Roman Catholics in Ireland were prevented from owning land, and weren’t allowed to even own a horse worth more than five pounds till 1829; they couldn’t go to school, or vote. It was even illegal to meet and discuss Catholic suffrage.

  Scotland was in upheaval from what would be known as the ‘Highland Clearances’. By 1800 the tribal chiefs in Scotland had lost most of their powers to the English – and also the close ties that bound them to their people. The chiefs cleared their glens and hills of men and women so that they could lease the land more profitably to English farmers to run sheep on. Men, women and children were forced from their homes that were then torched so that they couldn’t return. Whole villages vanished and rural Scotland lost most of its people.

  The evicted might harvest seaweed, knee-deep in near freezing water, dragging it to pile on the beach to be sold to make jellies; they might gather winkles, huddling for shelter in rough huts on the shore.5 Mostly they ended up starving in Glasgow slums but, if they were young and healthy and ‘of good character’, they might be chosen by one of the main charitable committees that raised funds to send them to Canada, the States – or Australia.

  And this was why so many did come here, and not to the nearer United States or Canada. Charities, often with Australian connections, paid their fares or even paid them a bonus as well as their fare, especially if they were farm labourers (men) or domestic servants (women). Only about a third of free settlers between 1815 and 1850 paid their own fare.6 Possibly, too, the warmth of Australia was especially tempting to those who had seen their loved ones lose limbs to frostbite as they gathered seaweed to burn to make kelp ash for glassmaking, or who had come from highland crofts, snowbound for four months of the year, with only a few hours of daylight in mid-winter.

  The men of Sollas, a town on North Uist, one of the Western Isles of Scotland, were told that as Australia didn’t have enough women any man had to have a wife before the Perth Migration Committee would allow them to go. Bachelors roamed the island for weeks trying to find a woman willing to marry them – and to go to the end of the world with them. But it is said that each man found one, even if they were not matched in age or temperament, such was the desperation to leave.

  They were the lucky ones. Highland chiefs – or English gentry who had been given their lands and title – would also do as Colonel Gordon of Cluny did on the island of Barra in August 1851, calling his 1500 tenants to a meeting where his men overpowered them, tied them up, and put them on a ship for America, the cheapest option to get rid of men who might rebel against his rule.

  Life in Ireland would grow even more desperate when the potatoes the poor depended upon for survival rotted from the ‘blight’ during the 1840s. A poor Irish family would eat little else, only half-cooking them as raw potatoes took longer to digest, staving off the pain of hunger. Between 1845 and 1850 more than a million Irish out of a population of about eight million starved to death while other food was still being exported. Another million would emigrate. The starvation and poverty was also a product of the large estates granted to English landlords, disposing the original tenants, as well as once prosperous farms being divided into small and smaller farms with each generation of sons given a share.

  The poorest went to England, to tramp the lanes looking for work helping with the harvest, sleeping under hedges, dying of hunger in hay barns. Those who were homeless either because they had been evicted by landlords or were orphans were sometimes able to get shelter of a kind at their local workhouse. But in the 1840s it was cheaper for the workhouse governors to send orphan girls between fourteen and eighteen years of age to Australia than to feed them in the workhouse. In 1850, more than 4175 girls from Ennistymon in Ireland alone were sent out to serve in Australian houses.

/>   But others migrated here by choice, men like my ancestor Peter Ffrench, younger son of a prosperous farming family, who could hope for a large, cheap estate in Australia instead of a few cold acres in Ireland. Irish army officers of the 1840s could sell their ‘officer’ commissions for about a thousand pounds, enough to buy two thousand acres of farmland in New South Wales, and even more in Tasmania.

  Australia offered hope – if you had the courage to spend months at sea, rather than the days or weeks to get to England, Canada or the United States. It is also possible that just as immigrants after World War 2 chose Australia principally because it was the furthest they could travel from the horrors they had seen, the earlier immigrants also wanted a symbolic as well as a literal distance between their new lives and their old ones.

  Nor did the newcomers have to be so very respectable to get their fares paid, and even a bonus, from the charities. Most societies merely asked for a reference from a clergyman, magistrate or employer, easy to forge or cajole. The Layton, for example, left London on 15 August 1833 and arrived in Port Jackson on 17 December, bringing 232 women of supposedly good character to be brides for lonely Australian men. Their fares had been paid and each given five pounds bounty. It turned out that many of the women were London whores, who shocked other female passengers by their behaviour with the sailors. They may not have been respectable but they were certainly enterprising, and probably excellent businesswomen.

  My great-great-great-grandmother, Anne Lamb, was on that ship; a cook, not a prostitute. But when the family needed money in the 1860s she remembered the stories she’d heard of the balls held by the more expensive courtesans of London. A gentleman would pay a fee to attend them, and another fee to dance and otherwise disport himself with the lady of his choice. Great-great-great-grandma Anne did not ask her daughters to provide her guests with anything but extremely good food and drink (my source here is my great-grandmother), but she did organise balls at her new inn with the same efficiency as her old companions on the Layton.

 

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