Leviathan (10 page)

As with their convict predecessors, a long slow grind of attrition rather than spectacular catastrophes accounted for most of the migrants' deaths. Children and babies died because the conditions on board seemed almost calculated to kill them. John Dobie, surgeon on the
Duncan
, reported that nineteen children died of marasmus on his vessel. They just wasted away after foul weather during six weeks of the voyage ‘necessitated locking the passengers below with the hatches battened down'. Even on a passage blessed with calm weather, the crowded holds were great incubators of disease. Smallpox took ninteen children aboard the
Amelia Thompson
; scarlet fever killed thirty-five on the
Maitland
; while parents on the
Layton
buried seventy of their children, killed by a measles epidemic. After the
Lady MacNaghten
arrived in February 1837 carrying ninety cases of typhus, the quarantine officer, James Stuart, reported that when the luggage and bulkheads were cleared away he found ‘every sort of filth, broken biscuits, bones, rags and refuse of every description; putrifying and filled with maggots'. Demonstrating an awesome inability to learn from the past, the shipowners had placed poorly sluiced toilets in between decks where they polluted the air to the point where it was ‘almost insufferable'.

Fourteen adults and fifty-three children died aboard the
Lady MacNaghten
, finally forcing authorities to reduce the proportion of children allowed on migrant ships. That restriction merely split families, with many youngsters aged seven and less orphaned on the docks as their parents were told they could not take them. No formal machinery existed in Sydney for receiving the migrants. When the recession hit hard in the early 1840s, families already torn by separation and death were further oppressed by the cruel demands of the time. Landowners would not employ large families because the children were an unproductive drain on their resources. The Benevolent Society, which was empowered to break up families, put many children into its orphanage while their parents worked in the bush. These children became another lucrative form of cheap labour. They were apprenticed for up to seven years, until they reached twenty-one, receiving no wages until the last three. Nor was that money paid directly to them. Employers deposited their young workers' earnings into a bank. That was often as close as the youngsters ever came to it. And if a girl married before turning eighteen, her employer did not have to pay her anything.

The immigrants' woes were attended to in the end not by colonial authorities – who in a spirit of ferocious social Darwinism thought migrants had no right to call on the support of the state – but by a private citizen, a woman named Caroline Chisholm. She overcame entrenched misogyny and sectarian ignorance to effectively become Australia's first immigration department. A Catholic in a place where the Roman Church was regarded with suspicion if not outright hostility by the ruling classes, she burned with a fierce inner light – one of those few people truly affected by the suffering of others and, even more rarely, one driven to do something about it.

Arriving in Sydney late in 1838 from Madras in India where she had established a school for the wild, untutored children of the British garrison, Chisholm settled into a quiet cottage life at Windsor, far from the bustle of the city's heart. Her husband, Captain Archibald Chisholm of the East India Company, had come south for his health and the short time they spent at Windsor before he was called back to the company's service in the first Opium War was the last period of private respite they would enjoy for many decades. The wave of good economic fortune, on which rode the fate of so many individuals in the colony, was cresting and breaking even as Captain Chisholm took sail for China to prosecute his drug-dealing employers' turf war.

As in every collapse before and since, asset prices, which had climbed stratospherically on the folly of investors who could not believe they would ever move in the other direction, suddenly did just that. Catastrophically. Horses going for £70 when Caroline Chisholm settled in Sydney could fetch no more than a tenth of that price two years later. By 1842 so many investors had become ruined debtors that a Bankruptcy Act was passed allowing them to remain free if they handed in their estates. The prison colony's own jails would otherwise have been insufficient to contain the defaulters.

Exacerbating the problems was Governor Gipps's decision at the very tail end of the boom to issue a huge number of bounty immigration orders at the urging of landowners and businessmen who feared a labour shortage with the imminent winding down of convict transportation. Combined with troubles in Canada which would have diverted a large number of migrants to Sydney in any case, Gipps's order saw the number of migrants jump from 6500 in 1840 to just over 20 000 the following year. With no work available and no formal structure for coping with the arrivals, the city was overwhelmed. A shanty camp of tents and humpies and open air fires sprang up. Hundreds of young women roamed the streets, sleeping in doorways and under trees, turning to prostitution for their subsistence.

Chisholm took a number of these women back to Windsor, gave them food and shelter and sought employment for them. But she knew that the magnitude of the disaster gathering in the streets of Sydney called for a much greater response. She was particularly aggrieved by the condition of the young women who were easy prey for any man with a few coins in his pocket. She lit upon the idea of founding a home for these women but was beset not only by official prevarication but also by the active opposition of her own Church. Chisholm was well aware of the sort of prejudice which would be inflamed by a woman, especially a Catholic woman, engaging in public activity, but she vowed to help all regardless of their faith. In response, she later wrote, several leading Church figures put every possible obstacle in her way and she was relentlessly entreated to give up her mad scheme.

As her biographer Margaret Kiddle points out, Caroline was essentially a very conventional woman, but one who took the teachings of the Christian faith seriously, unalloyed by hypocrisy or intolerance. She did not want to rebel but was forced to by the failure of her betters. She was so tortured by the opposition of Church elders that she resolved to take a few days' solace and contemplation in Parramatta to examine her conscience.

Whilst there she was walking by the river when she came upon a ‘frail beauty' whom she was surprised to discover she already knew. A beautiful Highland girl named Flora, Caroline had last seen her in the tent city near the immigration barracks where she had drawn the eye of a wealthy married man. Chisholm had tried to warn the girl but this cad had ‘ruined' and abandoned her. Now spastic with rum and rage and bitter self-loathing, Flora had determined to drown herself in the river. Caroline walked and talked with her for an hour, up and down a sandy little beach, comforting the girl and easing her suicidal passions. In doing so she rid herself of any doubts about the rightness of her own cause or the arrogant dimness of her opponents, and she returned to the city with all her fears burned away by righteous certainty.

With the crisis worsening daily in the city's centre public indignation was finally stirring. In early September of 1842 the
Chronicle
reported that another 2500 migrants had poured into Sydney in the last fortnight and reported the story of one, Mary Teague, who was placed in the stocks for drunkenness. She had been found collapsed in a ditch, but from hunger not rum, having been turned off her ship a day before with no food and nowhere to go. Chisholm redoubled her efforts in an increasingly receptive climate. She had already had an audience with Gipps, who had expected to be harangued by a wizened old biddy in a white cap and granny glasses. ‘I was amazed,' he wrote, ‘when my
aide
introduced a handsome, stately young woman, who proceeded to reason the question as if she thought her reason, and experience, too, worth as much as mine'.

Amazed though he was, the Governor agreed to another meeting at some stage in the future. When the future arrived with starving Englishmen and women ranging through his streets like Indian beggars, he was forced to agree to his stately young visitor's request for access to the disused immigration barracks. Ever the bureaucrat, however, he made her sign an undertaking that her scheme would not cost the government one penny.

And so, in the last days of October 1841, Caroline Chisholm moved into the small wooden storeroom, a little over two metres square, crawling with vermin, where she built the basic machinery of Australian immigration. She later recalled the horrors of her first night. Weary, after a day of heavy labour, she had just laid down her head and put out the light when she was assailed by such a racket that she thought wild dogs had broken in and were planning to eat her. She relit her candle to find the floor of her cramped little cabin crawling with giant rats.

The barracks were soon full of indigent young females. Chisholm moved quickly to disperse them through the countryside, where there was always work to be done in spite of the depression gripping the city. She sent questionnaires out to determine the needs of settlers in the various districts, quizzed her charges closely about their own skills and backgrounds, and matched up each up with the other. She received permission to use bullock trains, returning to the bush after dropping their load of wool, to transport her colonists to their new employers. Riding her white charger Captain, she took convoys of women into the bush where there was no shelter, often no road, and no protection from native attack or bands of bushrangers. Her fame soon spread, however, and her wagon trains were never molested.

Whilst her first concern had been for the young women scavenging in the streets of Sydney, she did not forget the children, the young men and the families still being deposited in their thousands at Circular Quay and around the Rocks. She believed that if only a little more logic and forethought could go into planning mass migration, it still offered the best hope for the colony and the poor of Great Britain. To this end she established her own settlement at Shell Harbour, south of Sydney; she initiated the prosecution of the captain and surgeon of one particularly awful immigrant ship; she established the Family Colonisation Loan Society to replace the network of corrupt and hopeless agents in Britain; and she gathered stories of those who had successfully made the transition from the old country to the new. These voluntary statements, as she called them, many of which she took in fields and farmhouses throughout the vastness of the bush, served to counteract some of the grim economic news filtering back to London, but also cast an objective light on the shameless boosterism of the immigration agents' propaganda. She is supposed to have addressed the House of Lords and, when challenged on some point of fact, glanced briefly at the sceptic, untied a large sheaf of papers, and begun to read case after case from the voluminous files she had gathered to support her arguments. Further moves towards her files were enough to quickly kill off any ill-mannered interruptions after that. Caroline Chisholm toured the United Kingdom seeking potential immigrants, introducing them to each other before the voyage, attempting as far as possible to draw groups of colonists from extended support networks of friends and relatives within small local areas. She sent her own ships out from England, the first two full of children previously abandoned at the docks by their parents. She scoured workhouses all over the country looking for them, and when they sailed it was under the curling blue banner of the Family Colonisation Loan Society.

By 1845 she had placed 11 000 migrants into work, reunited 600 broken families, and built a huge network for moving and supporting her people in the outback. Her genius lay in administration and perseverence but she also brilliantly intuited certain patterns which were natural to successful migration. In seeking to gather colonists from neighbouring regions and groups she anticipated the chain migration which would characterise nearly 200 years of human movement into Sydney. As it would be later with Greeks, Italians and Vietnamese, so it was first with the English: small groups of the adventurous and the desperate striking out across the seas to establish a base for their families and neighbours who followed.

 

Not everybody agreed with Chisholm that the colony's future depended on mass immigration. Workers benefited from labour shortages during boom periods, demanding and receiving much better wages than they could ever hope to achieve in the UK. The migration of large numbers of impoverished British workers threatened to undermine the locals' position during the good times and to destroy their livelihood in the bad. Government assistance for immigration came under sustained pressure from the working class during economic downturns such as that which afflicted the city in the late 1850s. Agitation and large, frequent public meetings calling for an end to assisted passages led the government to briefly curtail assistance in June 1860.