by Jim Haynes
How he got out no man will ever know. I saw what was left of that box myself, and marvelled, when the ship got to port. I cannot tell you how he got out; but he did get out. He snapped the thin manila rope that tied him to his manger, and in the maelstrom of raging water he fought his way to that little square of steel deck I have talked about. A slip—one mere step away from that iron square—and the horse was done. But, by some amazing equine miracle, that good horse knew it, and battled on.
No-one saw him fighting there like some four-footed equilibrist for his balance, bleeding from many wounds, on that deadly night—with no friendly hand to help him. But that he did this thing is unarguable, as you shall see.
Then, after the groaning ship had lifted herself from that monstrous wave’s cold embrace, she sank back again into the bosom of the sea, as if weary of it all. The twisted port rail, four feet from the horse, sank under, and the black waters reached him with icy fingers. To his knees—his shoulders—the water came. Then he felt a steel-shod foot slip on a steel-shod deck that gave no grip as wood had done. At last his courage faltered. Terror enveloped him. He lifted his classic head to those frantic skies, and sent his shrill wild call for help to a boy who slept and could not hear him.
Red dreamed on. Wedged in his corner sound asleep. Tonight, as on so many other nights, he dreamed of horses. Of riding horses in silks and satins, among cheering multitudes. The land he came from uses bugles to call the horses to their posts. Deep in his dreams he heard the bugles call, shrill and clear. He stirred uneasily. Deep in his subconscious mind he sensed that something was amiss. His dream of horses faded out. Tormenting nightmare gripped him. A weird fantasy of strife and tumult. He stirred again—his head lifted—then he awoke, and sat bolt upright, his mind still gripped with the fear of his crazy dream.
Then, high and thin and clear over the bedlam of the night, he heard the great horse call. So that was the bugle he had dreamed about. The bugle that, even in his dream, had seemed so sharp and shrill. He was gone from that room like a freckled wraith, defying the laws of gravity, desperate with fear.
He’d slept only a few yards away—yet to him it seemed hours before he reached the horse. Then with one strong young hand he held tight to the broken halter, and talked to his friend, and reached up and patted him and soothed him—just as he had done so many times, when all that the nights had held were stars and peace.
And so, through the remainder of the hours of blackness, the boy and the horse fought it out together, each helping the other, each drawing courage and confidence from their strange companionship. No physical strength possessed by one small boy could have tipped the scale, but his cheerful voice, his gentle hand, together with the mere fact that he was near at all, was all the bay horse needed.
When the black turmoil of night at last gave way to a yellow, murky dawn, the sailors found them there and, except for cuts and bruises, both were safe and sound.
The Captain, coming aft, paused and surveyed the scene in blank astonishment. He watched his men, with cunning hands, weave hempen safeguards. He examined the shattered horse stall in amazement. He had watched over the grey ship through the anxious night, and half the time his bridge had been deep in water. He looked again at the two on their little square of steel deck, with unbelieving eyes, and shook his weary head.
All night long on his bridge high above the chaos raging below him, the Captain had fought for his footing. Time after time, the plunging steel monster he rode and guided through the blackness had hurt and bruised him. But there, high over this sea-swept wreckage, he’d had a hand hold, a little shelter to guard him from the Storm Gods’ fury. But these two! This salt-encrusted stallion, with the blood dripping from his broken forehead—this little lad with his windswept flaming hair and smiling eyes. What hell had they had?
He looked again at the gap where his portside rail had been, then lifted his eyes to the dreary skies for just a moment. ‘This thing makes no sense in any language,’ he muttered. ‘How could any horse . . .’—he paused and perhaps for a full minute more he surveyed the scene before him. Then he shook his tired head again in utter disbelief and, without another word, he turned and lurched away.
Today, on a West Australian stud farm, a great bay horse watches the sun etch the crest of the mountain ranges with purple and lemon and faint old rose. In the pastures that stretch towards him from their base, soft-eyed matrons with foals at foot browse quietly. The stallion lifts his head and calls to them masterfully, compellingly, as a king might call. His name is Zaimis.
‘The Sea and the Hills’
Rudyard Kipling
(excerpt)
Who hath desired the Sea?—the sight of salt water unbounded— The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded?
The sleek-barrelled swell before storm, grey, foamless, enormous, and growing—
Stark calm on the lap of the Line or the crazy-eyed hurricane blowing . . .
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
One-way ticket
JIM HAYNES
FEW EUROPEANS IN THE late eighteenth century would have wanted to embark on a 12,000-mile journey to go and live on an unexplored continent at the bottom of the world. Indeed, from the time of European settlement until the middle of the twentieth century, Australia worked hard to encourage anyone to settle here freely.
Assisted passage for free settlers to the colony of New South Wales began as early as 1831. Before that time the incentive for free settlers was land—although the very first free settlers received both land and free passage!
Land grants were first given to free settlers in 1789 when, at Governor Arthur Phillip’s suggestion, the British government recruited nine farmers and others to be superintendents of convicts. They sailed in HMS Guardian, which was wrecked when it hit an iceberg south of the Cape of Good Hope. In a marvellous feat of seamanship, the captain of the Guardian brought the ruined vessel back to South Africa and ran her aground. The passengers were taken aboard the Lady Juliana at the Cape and reached Sydney in June 1790.
One of those recruited was Phillip Schaffer, a German widower with a daughter, Elizabeth, aged ten. ‘Accustomed to farming’, he was our first non-British European settler. Instead of becoming a superintendent of convicts, given his limited English, Schaffer was given 140 acres at Parramatta, which became known as The Vineyard. The colony needed food even more than it needed convict supervisors!
Schaffer was provided with a hut, tools, seed grain, two sows, and two acres of cleared land. He and his daughter and the four male convicts allotted to him were rationed from the public store for eighteen months. Schaffer soon had forty acres producing corn, wheat, vegetables and grapes. Apart from a small vineyard in the governor’s garden at Parramatta, his vineyard was the first in Australia.
By 1791 there were 87 free settlers in the colony, 44 of whom were ex-convicts who had served their terms or been pardoned. Although the shortest common sentence was seven years, many had been aboard the hulks for years awaiting transportation and served much of their time before the First Fleet sailed.
In 1797 Schaffer sold The Vineyard, for the princely sum of £140, to Henry Waterhouse, the captain of HMS Reliance, which brought John Hunter back to the colony to become governor. Schaffer had been granted more land by then and had farms at Parramatta and on the north shore at Redbank and Marsfield. He was later granted more farmland at Narrabeen as the colony expanded. By 1811 his English was good enough for him to propose marriage to Margaret McKinnon, a former convict from the Scottish Isle of Skye. The couple continued to be favoured by various governors, being granted cattle from the government and finally 100 acres ‘for their natural lives’ in 1825.
Sadly, however, early success and positive beginnings do not always blossom into prosperity long term, and it seems our first assisted migrant had a tendency towards ‘what a clergyman calls insobriety’, t
o quote Banjo Paterson.
Indeed, that wonderful chronicler of colonial times, John Dunmore Lang, our first Presbyterian minister, tells us that the Schaffers sold off their land piece by piece until they were left with nothing and, due to ‘old age, poverty and intemperance’, they were forced to live in the Benevolent Asylum, commonly known as ‘the Poor House’, where Schaffer died in 1828.
In 1792 the first organised group of free settlers left Britain to be settled at Liberty Plains—an area around modern-day Strathfield. Lieutenant Governor Grose, who had succeeded Phillip, made the decision to establish the settlement halfway between the two settlements of Sydney and Parramatta for the ‘convenience and safety of the travelling public’.
The original group of settlers at Liberty Plains comprised three farmers, a baker, blacksmith, gardener, millwright, two women and four children, who arrived on the Bellona in January 1793. Edward Powell, aged 30, described as a farmer and fisherman from Lancaster, was given 80 acres, as were Thomas Webb, a gardener, and his wife. Thomas Rose, aged 40, a farmer who arrived with his wife Jane, their four children and another female teenage relative, was given 120 acres. Those who were not farmers were given 60 acres. All the settlers had their passages paid and received tools and implements from the public stores, plus two years’ provisions, clothing, and the services of assigned convicts as labour. The settlers cleared the land and grew wheat, potatoes and corn, and gave their farms names like ‘Charlotte Farm’, ‘Webb’s Endeavour’ and ‘Dorset Green’.
Unfortunately, however, Liberty Plains was not very fertile, and within five years most of the settlers had left or were dependent on government rations.
It was in Thomas Rose’s hut that Australia’s first bushranger, Black Caesar, died on 15 February 1796. Probably born in Madagascar, Caesar was a large black man who was transported from England on the First Fleet for theft. Exceptionally strong, he was regarded as an incorrigible convict who stole food and laughed at the lash. He was tried for robbery again in Sydney in 1789 and sentenced to life. Some accounts say he stole food because his huge frame needed far more than the rations provided. He escaped several times, once in a canoe from Garden Island, and spent time on Norfolk Island before returning to Sydney and escaping again to lead a gang of other escaped convicts in battles against the local Aborigines while stealing from settlers.
Finally Governor Hunter put a price of five gallons of rum on his head. He was shot by a settler at Liberty Plains and died after being carried to Thomas Rose’s hut.
The Liberty Plains settlement was soon followed by another immediately to the north and northwest (near modern-day Concord and Homebush), where 25 acres per man was allotted to non-commissioned officers and privates of the NSW Corps. Many of these soldiers sold their lots and never even saw the land, but eventually there were about 60 settlers and soldiers farming in the two adjacent areas of Liberty Plains and Concord, most not particularly successfully.
The next governor, Hunter, was evidently not a fan of the British free settlers or their farming skills. He described them as ‘not of a high calibre’, complaining that they arrived in the colony with high expectations based on false reports of permanent government assistance, with no real understanding of the work required to develop the land—and that when they were given animals for breeding to build up flocks and herds, they immediately slaughtered and ate them. Indeed, Reverend Samuel Marsden visited the area in 1798 and reported dire poverty and very little food being produced.
The development of some maritime trade and expansion into the Hawkesbury area, and later across the mountains, slowly alleviated the food problem and the colony struggled on. In 1806 the Blaxland brothers—the first wealthy and educated free settlers— arrived and soon bought up most of the 25 acre blocks granted to the NSW Corps soldiers to form their Newington Estate. A year later, Governor Bligh suggested that more ‘respectable hardworking farming families’ be given land and asked to migrate.
In the year of Phillip Schaffer’s death, 1828, the first official census was taken. It reported a population of 36,595, of which 46 per cent were convicts.
Thus, in the 40 years since the arrival of the First Fleet carrying its human cargo of 1030, the population had grown to about the size of an average AFL crowd during the home and away season. Of course, the entire white population probably accounted for roughly one per cent of Australia’s population at that time.
A major change in policy occurred in 1831: instead of offering free land, the land was to be sold to pay for assisted migration. In 1832 the Land and Emigration Commission was established in Britain to assist migration to New South Wales and other colonies. Over the next 35 years, 1088 shiploads of migrants arrived, bringing another 340,000 migrants to Australia.
At the same time that the Land and Emigration Commission was set up, the Colonial Office in London—in conjunction with charitable groups such as the London Emigration Committee—devised schemes to help women migrate to Australia, as three-quarters of the population was male. Over 3000 women made the journey in the first four years of these schemes.
In the 35 years that the Land and Emigration Commission operated, new colonies were established in South Australia and Western Australia. Victoria and Queensland separated from New South Wales and began expanding and consolidating their own futures.
The effect of the gold rushes on Australia’s prosperity and population has been well documented. The new wealth drew many migrants to the recently independent colony of Victoria.
The colonies instituted various schemes over the years that attracted a range of migrants. Some seem quite odd in retrospect.
In 1839, for example, 150 French–Canadian political prisoners arrived in Sydney and were kept in a stockade near Homebush, before settling around that area and giving us the placenames Exile Bay, France Bay and Canada Bay.
The Scots sent shiploads of migrants to Sydney and Port Phillip Bay, as well as places that are still steeped in Scottish heritage today, such as the towns of MacLean and Glen Innes in New South Wales.
Groups of Lutheran migrants arrived from rural areas of Prussia between 1838 and 1850 as a result of their king imposing a religious doctrine that they found unacceptable. Most went to South Australia and helped establish the wine industry there, but some came to work on vineyards in Sydney. You can trace the movement of these Lutheran migrants and their descendants from South Australia along the Murray, then up through the rural areas of central New South Wales into the Darling Downs of Queensland by simply looking at the German names in local phonebooks.
Not all the shiploads of migrants arrived safely to share the future prosperity of the colonies. Many ships went down along the infamous ‘shipwreck coast’, from Moonlight Head to Cape Otway, and along the southeast coast, where names such as Wreck Bay and Disaster Bay speak for themselves. Some of the many ships wrecked near the end of their long voyages were carrying assisted migrants, such as the Cataraqui; others like the Dunbar and Loch Ard carried migrants paying their own way.
From the 1860s onward over 57,000 ‘Kanakas’ were brought into Queensland to work the sugar cane fields. The shameful ‘blackbirding’ trade, as it was called, had a major effect on our maritime history, as boats were built especially for the human trade. This led to Australian exploration of, and long-term connection with, the Pacific Islands.
In the 1870s Queensland gave free passage to Swedes and Norwegians; in the1880s the government of the small Mediterranean nation of Malta paid people to leave! Many Maltese migrated to Queensland and farmed sugar cane. Italians also arrived in numbers on the cane fields after the US restricted immigration in 1921.
The first of the postcolonial assisted migration programs was again a result of war. Just as the post-Napoleonic War period had boosted transportation and migration in the 1830s, so post-World War I Britain encouraged British migrants to make new homes in other parts of the Commonwealth.
All non-Aboriginal Australians have a migrant story in their not-too-distan
t past, and here is where this story becomes a personal one.
Life was hard in England in the 1920s for returned soldiers like my grandfather Albert Edward ‘Bert’ Ray, who was born in Houn-slow, Middlesex, in August 1891. The eldest of six children, Bert delivered mineral water and worked as a nurseryman in his mother’s market garden. Bert married Nellie Bearcraft in March 1913 and went to war in September 1914, leaving Nellie with their baby son, Albert. Their second child, Grace, born in May 1915, was two years old before he saw her.
Times were tough all round after World War I. Work was not easy to find in 1919, and Nellie had a series of miscarriages. Bert’s mother was making ends meet working as a housekeeper and growing flowers; his father had died years earlier in an accident. In 1923, Bert’s younger brothers, Fred and Les, migrated to Canada, under the Canadian Harvesters’ Scheme. Most men lasted only weeks on the scheme before returning to Britain; Les and Fred lasted three years.
Bert and Nell had taken a poorly paid job as caretakers for a village church. They had a cottage and could grow some food and feed their family. Nellie gave birth to another son in 1922, but he died of pneumonia at six months. Nellie gave birth to eight children, only three of whom survived. Her last child, born in 1925, was my mother Sylvia.
In 1927 Fred and Les again set sail from England, this time to Australia. They found work in Sydney as nurserymen and wrote to Bert, encouraging him to follow them. So Bert, Nell and their three children—Albert, sixteen, Grace, fourteen, and Sylvia, three—visited all their relatives and took photos to remember them by, in preparation for the journey to a new life, from which they were unlikely to return.
On 26 October 1929, they set sail on the Orontes, on her maiden voyage to Australia. Built in 1929, Orontes had a gross tonnage of 20,186 and was 664 feet long. Strangely, she had two classes of passengers: 460 first class and 1112 third class. Evidently all passengers in third class were assisted migrants. There was no second class.