by Anne Summers
[N]othing less than a speedy or rather an immediate, and extensive emigration of virtuous and industrious families and individuals from the mother country to the Australian colonies can possibly relieve these colonies from the baneful effects of past mismanagement … or ensure to them a reputable moral character and a healthy tone of society for the future.30
During the 1830s, Lang had arranged for the passage to Australia of more than 400 carefully selected Scottish immigrants. They were mainly mechanics and agricultural labourers, but also included several ministers and school teachers.31 Lang recognised the need to import both respectable hard-working labouring immigrants and also to provide the means for their moral and practical education. Later he, like Chisholm, saw that it was necessary to select immigrants personally, and from September 1848 to November 1849 he toured England and Scotland lecturing on the desirability of emigrating to Australia. Like Chisholm, he published a series of pamphlets and newspaper articles extolling settlement in Australia and eventually was responsible for the departure of six ships containing 1424 immigrants, the quality of whom was ‘unimpeachable’.32
In his survey of British immigration to Australia, Crowley concludes with an attack on the ‘Whig interpretation’ of Australian history:
It would be a mistake to regard the history of this migration as an expression of revolt against exploitation and social restriction, and to create a legend of high ideals and unselfish industry among these new Australians would be to extol and dramatize a movement which was seldom more than a search for higher wages, conditions and more of the comforts of life.33
The immigrants who came to Australia were only a tiny proportion of the more than 18 million people who left the British Isles in the second half of the nineteenth century. Our knowledge of them is sparse, but we do know that the majority came from the labouring classes, virtually none of them were paupers and that most were under 45 years of age.34
It is difficult to agree with the proponents of the Whig interpretation that these immigrants viewed their flight to Australia Felix as an ideological exodus. Government attempts to entice immigrants had succeeded mainly in attracting people from the lumpenproletariat, a group so oppressed by conditions in England that no matter what hopes individuals within it may have had for their new life, existing conditions in Australia were scarcely conducive to radical changes in their previous mode of living. For most of them, it was only the location of their lives that changed.
The systematic enticement of respectable immigrants to eastern Australia was mainly the work of private individuals such as Caroline Chisholm and JD Lang, and although they were responsible for the immigration and settlement of many thousands of families and single people, their efforts suffered many setbacks. Chisholm reacted with dismay to the news in 1850 that gold had been discovered. She knew that the lure of a quick fortune would attract bands of single men intent only on extracting what they could from the country, that it would break up families and would erode the precarious beginnings of the respectable, family-based society that had started to develop during the 1840s. Very few of these three groups of immigrants – government-sponsored paupers, family groups and fortune hunters – could be seen as coming to Australia with the aim of establishing a radical egalitarian democracy. It is possible to impute more plausible motives to those immigrants who intended to stay, and who had planned their immigration with a view to realising in Australia what was denied to them in England.
The British Isles in the 1840s and 1850s were not, for the working class, a propitious place in which to marry and raise children. As one immigration handbook put it: ‘Marriage is either a luxury, or an imprudence. Married men are congratulated by their friends when their wives prove childless’. It added, enticingly, ‘in Australia the working man, with a few acres of corn-growing bushland, sees in every child the source of an income. They prove useful at seven and eight years old’.35 Most of the immigration propaganda, and much of that literature that is more effective than any official propaganda – letters from people already settled in Australia to their relatives in Britain – stressed the warm, sunny, healthy environment, the economic opportunities for acquiring a small plot of land or a cottage, the availability of fresh food of a quantity and quality unknown in England – ‘meat three times a day’ – which the colony offered. These proved to be powerful inducements to people for whom marriage was either impossible or for whom it meant poverty, high child mortality, constant hunger and sharing crowded living quarters with other families.
For many, women especially, marriage was simply impossible. In England there was a huge surplus of women; between 1851 and 1871 there was a 16.8 per cent increase in the number of single women of marriageable age and there was a surplus of more than 125 000 single women.36 Thus a large proportion of the female immigrants were obviously in search of husbands. The problem was greater for middle-class women. Few of them were trained to earn an income to support themselves and if they were unable to find husbands, many were threatened with destitution. Those few occupations that middle-class women were able, and willing, to undertake could not accommodate the numbers seeking work. It was not uncommon for an advertisement for a governess to receive up to 700 applications, while the demand for delicate embroidery from the needles of gentlewomen was not high enough to provide a living for very many.
While female immigrants were subject to such abuses as met most of the women who came to Australia in the 1830s, few middle-class women would risk venturing abroad. But the problem of how these women were to survive became so severe that they banded together to try to tackle it. In May 1862 the Female Middle-Class Emigration Society was formed in England by Ms Rye.37 Prior to this, Ms Rye had arranged for large parties of working-class women – mainly servants and dressmakers – to emigrate to Queensland, New Zealand and British Columbia. When she took up the cause of middle-class women, she found what was most needed was money for passage, and also protection for the women when they arrived at their destinations; and the initial efforts of the society were directed to organising these essentials. After a year of operation, the society had obtained employment and accommodation for more than 100 women.38 But even after the women could be assured of protection when they arrived in Australia, there was no guarantee that, even with the huge surplus of men, they would be able to find husbands.
Many of the single men who immigrated both before and during the gold rushes planned merely to amass a quick fortune and return to England. The adventurous types one meets in the pages of the many accounts of colonial life during this period, working their way through various jobs, accumulating exotic experiences to recount back home, seldom seem to have marriage on their minds. Lt Col Mundy, a chronicler of mid-century colonial life noted:
Strange to say, too, the well brought up and pretty maidens of the middle and servant classes of Sydney do not appear to be much sought in marriage. Yet it is undoubtedly in these classes that the well-known preponderance of males exists. The single men do not want wives, and the responsibilities and encumbrances of family life. They prefer working hard – working like slaves – four or five days, and ‘larking’ the rest of the week.39
As the century progressed, however, family life became more widespread as colonial society began to be organised around this institution and it became more difficult for these free spirits to avoid matrimony. Of those men aged between 25 and 29 in 1871, 24 per cent had never married; by 1901 this had dropped to 20 per cent and ten years later was 15 per cent.40
Indeed, the taming and domestication of the self-professed independent man became a standard theme in late-nineteenth-century fiction, especially that written by women. It seems that the initial reluctance of the wild colonial boys to marry was eroded fairly quickly: most of the women who immigrated to Australia in the 1840s and 1850s eventually did find husbands, and the overall marriage rate for women in Australia was much higher than in Britain. In 1881, 96 per cent of women aged between 45 and 49 had married; a great ma
ny of these women would have come to Australia as single immigrants. Had they stayed in Britain or Ireland their chances of marriage would have been significantly less. The percentages of women aged 45 to 49 who were married by 1881 are as follows: England and Wales – 87.7 per cent; Scotland – 80.6 per cent; Ireland – 82.4 per cent.41
For working-class families in England, the contrast between their current lives and what Australia offered must have seemed irresistible. These families had by now internalised the ideal of the bourgeois family, but economic conditions made its realisation in England virtually impossible for them. Few could afford to buy, or even rent, their own home and most were forced to live in the warren-like slums depicted by both Engels and Dickens in their accounts of poverty in Victorian England. The average number of inhabitants per house in the major cities of Britain and Ireland was as follows: London (1831) 7.48; Edinburgh (1841) 5.94; Dublin (1831) 12.74.42 By contrast, in Sydney in 1841 there was an average of 6.67 people per house and this had dropped to 5.96 by 1846; in the suburbs of Sydney it was only 4.79.43 The building of houses progressed rapidly during this period: in the five years between 1841 and 1846 there was a 92.0 per cent increase in the number of new houses completed and an 82.2 per cent increase in the habitation of these houses.44 Mansfield claims that, in the same period, infant mortality in Australia was less than half of that in England.45
Wages for workmen were high in Australia. Professor NG Butlin has shown that in the second half of the nineteenth century, Australian incomes per head were substantially higher than in Britain or even the US.46 In 1852 a wage-earner wrote that he ‘had no prospects in England but here thank God I have, and I have never yet regretted leaving my native country and I hope I never shall do’.47 And McQueen notes that sections of the workforce were prepared to accept a 10 to 20 per cent wage cut in 1856 in order to maintain their recently won eight-hour day – how many workers could afford such reductions today?48
Thus conditions in colonial Australia enabled working-class individuals and families to adopt the bourgeois family as their lifestyle. They could inhabit, and often purchase, their own cottage, thereby fulfilling the requisite of family privacy. Wages were high enough for a man to be able to support his wife who need no longer slave in a factory or mill but could remain at home, engaging in the never-before-experienced task of having an entire house to care for, and babies – who thrived instead of dying in their first year – to look after.
The idea that women ought to be homemakers and full-time mothers was beginning to gain credence in England at this time. In the 1830s and 1840s a host of books appeared, written by both men and women, which sought to establish the precise place of women in society and to set out the exact duties of the wife and mother of a family. The most common line of argument was that ‘the sphere of Domestic Life is the sphere in which female excellence is best displayed’ and advocates of this thought that it was a woman’s fundamental task to create a home that would provide an environment of emotional stability for her husband and children.49 In Australia after the 1840s, working-class people could realise these goals and it was these concrete aspirations involving their everyday lives, rather than abstract political notions, that brought thousands of immigrants flocking to these shores and enabled ‘the family’ to be established as a basic unit of social organisation with a widespread rapidity that was probably unequalled anywhere else in the Western world.
Both Lang and Chisholm were infinitely aware of what these immigrants sought and both believed that the budding colony could meet their needs if sufficient efforts were made to accommodate them. Both had religious convictions, which impelled them to want the penal colony’s rough and wild ways replaced by what they considered to be a more moral civilisation. Ultimately the government was to agree with them. Although ‘the family’ would have been established, albeit more slowly, as the basis of colonial life, their endeavours served as a catalyst. And it is important to recognise Caroline Chisholm’s specific contribution, not only in promoting family colonisation, but in articulating a role for women.
Caroline Chisholm was no feminist and she was well aware of the contradiction between her own political and public activities and the function she wanted other women to fulfil. But she felt compelled to act, and to neglect her own family, in order to see other families established and within them, women policing the morals of their husbands and, indirectly, the entire colony. Thus her public life in no way set a precedent for women to follow. She herself was opposed to any measures that would discourage women from marrying. While arranging employment for single women, she wrote:
[T]he rate payable for female labour should be proportional on a lower scale than that paid to the men … high wages tempt many girls to keep single while it encourages indolent and lazy men to depend more and more upon their wives’ industry than upon their own exertions thus partly reversing the design of nature.50
Her philosophy of women’s role was rapidly and widely accepted for she was voicing a view that was evidently compatible with the rapid and stable growth of colonial society.
Once the British Government conceded that a new nation was emerging where once had stood a conventional jail, and British and local capitalists began to realise the rewards that could be reaped from this outpost of the Empire, it became essential to ensure that the population would increase with some degree of predictability, and that it could be harnessed to the needs of an evolving capitalist economy. As was shown in Chapter Six, the bourgeois family had become almost synonymous with ensuring these requirements were met. Obviously this form of organising people had to be introduced to Australia if its rulers were to prosper. That Chisholm’s efforts were not radical ones, that she was in fact serving the needs of the bourgeoisie, was evidenced in the kind of support she received. Although the colonial authorities were slow to recognise her work, local capitalists were not: they could see the advantages of securing a family-based population. An extravagant editorial in The Empirein 1859 was evidence of the esteem in which she was held at the time:
If Captain James Cook discovered Australia; if John Macarthur planted the first seeds of its extraordinary prosperity; if Ludwig Leichhardt penetrated and explored its before unknown interior; Caroline Chisholm has done more: she has peopled, she alone has colonized it in the true sense of the term. To her influence, her untiring efforts, her self-sacrificing devotion is owing, in great measure, the spreading over the land of a prosperous – a happy – a teeming population … hundreds of homes have been founded … families throughout the length and breadth of Australia by her untiring efforts.51
Henry Parkes is quoted at the beginning of this chapter as saying that the only way to colonise Australia had been to spread over it ‘all the associations and connections of family life’. This occurred in the form of laws and social or industrial practices that complemented or reinforced the bourgeois family and were often implemented long before they were adopted in Britain. The need for a plentiful supply of wives in a colony where men were still a distinct majority obviously influenced the passing of legislation to enable marriage to a deceased wife’s sister – long before it was enacted in Britain. An integration and balance between work and family life was secured for men with the introduction of the eight-hour day. The sexual division of labour and responsibility was confirmed by the granting of universal manhood suffrage in all colonies – women, who were by now increasingly confined to the home, were presumably supposed to be represented by their husbands’ or fathers’ votes. Early industrial unionism was designed to secure better wages and conditions for men and was conducted on the apparent assumption that only men were in need of this protection. Women workers had to toil without such benefits.
By 1890 there were large numbers of women, especially single working-class women, in the workforce. In 1891 over 40 per cent of all women in New South Wales between the ages of 15 and 24 were in employment; most of them worked as domestic servants but increasing numbers were going into factories.52
The majority, in both occupations, had to labour long hours for pittance wages. In 1888 William Lane, the radical socialist who was later to found a Utopian colony in Paraguay, wrote:
The position of working women in the cities of the colony is becoming worse and worse every year … They are becoming herded in stifling workshops and ill-ventilated attics … They are forced to stand all day behind the counters of large emporiums … They are ‘sweated’ by clothing factories, and boot factories … the children too are being dragged into the slave-house of toil; little ones are working in factories and shops, and the Law, instead of rescuing them … stands by to ply the whips on their backs if they revolt.53
In 1891, 3 per cent of females aged 5 to 14 in New South Wales were in the workforce.54 Commissions into conditions in shops and factories, which were conducted in various states around 1890, confirmed Lane’s description of the conditions of women in industry, but the infant trade union movement, while it made ritualistic condemnations, did little to alter these conditions and evinced little desire to include women workers in its ranks. At a series of Intercolonial Trade Union Congresses held between 1879 and 1891, the position of women as unionists, or as members of the labour movement, was barely considered.55
Women workers had either to endure this gross exploitation or else attempt to organise themselves to fight their employers. Most of their attempts to do the latter met with interference, if not opposition, from the male trade union movement. In the 1880s and 1890s several women’s unions were formed within specific trades, and in 1891 an embracing Female Employees Union began. It was intended to accommodate waitresses, barmaids and laundresses. Four months after its inception, the FEU organised a strike of laundresses in Pyrmont, Sydney, after the dismissal of a girl they believed had been victimised because she was a unionist.56 The strike generated considerable public support and the union gathered more members, but in July 1892 the Trades and Labour Council announced that it intended bringing charges against the FEU and shortly afterwards the union collapsed.