Caroline Chisholm
Please note, this is not a biography, and only easily sourced research has been carried out. If you have any questions, or are interested in the gaps we identify in our knowledge it would be worth your while to check out your local library, or maybe some or you can afford the extraordinarily high extra cost on Ancestry and its ilk to access whatever birth, baptism, death, and other such material that exists. |
shortly, after she is dead. Unless, we guess, one believes dead saints are in some way capable of communicating with living authors. And, of course, it's not our atheistic leanings that cause us to suspect that if you believe all the other magical mumbo jumbo of religion, perhaps this is not as great a leap of faith for you as it would be for us!
Finally, we note some biographies are the opposite of hagiographies, purposefully intended to destroy the subject in some way * * . And, fortunately, some are far from blatantly either hagiographic or intentionally destructive. Well, fortunately, except these can sometimes be the most difficult in which to detect hidden purposes. |
All open-air statues are inevitably covered in pigeon shit, making one wonder at the precise intent of bunging one up for anyone. Perhaps the answer is in the fact this commemorative form seems to include a plethora of totally undeserving white male scum.
The woman the subject of the above statue, however, was not one of the undeserving, and the reason was more than the fact she wasn't male. Caroline Chisholm was one of the greatest British women, indeed one of the greatest British people, to have a hand in the British occupation of the land they were stealing from its original inhabitants. This may seem to be the beginning of a diatribe about cruelties, massacres, and invasions, but it's not. As far as we know Caroline had no direct input to that side of Britain's invasion of this continent. Rather, she was intent on making the most of the bad lot Britain had created through incompetent, corrupt, self-serving policy. So let's have a brief (Honest! True dinks! Rewly trewly!), cut down look at the lead-up to Caroline's arrival and why she found a heap of work to do. By the 1830s some within the British government wanted to minimise the impact of what they started in 1788. But Australia was an extremely long way away, and the government was seriously out of its depth, unable to exercise much control over events in its Australian colonies. The government had shipped in great numbers of cruelly treated poverty-stricken folk, corrupted by the almost unbelievably savage society created in their birth land by the wealthy class, uncaring, hypocritical, corrupt, and violently repressive, dominating their unrepresentative government, desperately trying to exercise control over the social hell they created by passing more and more vicious laws. From 1787 to 1839, the year Caroline arrived in Sydney, the population of the colony of New South Wales who did not have a known skerrick of First Australian heritage had grown from 0 to some 114,000 (London Quarterly Review [LQR], June 1841, p. 56 - the writer is unnamed, at least in our copy). Having established a population of slaves, work was needed to occupy them, and, perhaps more to the point, make them too worn and broken to rebel. Initially, convicts were put to work building colonial infrastructure and working on farms owned by corrupt military officers and the few free settlers. As the years passed, convicts began to complete their sentences. The great majority either didn't want to, or couldn't return to their homeland. Some took up farms, others established businesses of various kinds, including whaling and sealing. The former employed convicts, much cheaper than free workers. Added to them were the soldiers, responsible for guarding convicts and the colony, who had served their time, or if they were officers had bought their way out of the army, or were in the process of corruptly enriching themselves with bogus land grants. So, the numbers of free settlers very gradually increased, despite occasional efforts by London to keep the colony as a prison. Along the way, the colony began to make a profit, principally, but not only, from the sheep's back, led by the Australian version of Spain's merino sheep developed principally by Elizabeth Macarthur and her mentally ill husband. And as private profit potential grew, so did the demand for workers. As time went on, and the convict population grew, the British government realised they didn't have enough people to make use of them. Initially, the cheap labour available from the convict pens filled the need left by a shortage of free workers. But as settlement spread, and the various industries grew, especially the wool industry, demand outstripped the convict supply. In response, free workers were increasingly shipped in, and in the 1830s various immigration programs were set in place. A writer in the London Quarterly Review of June, 1841 (p. 56, the writer is unnamed, at least in our copy) stated that in 1838 the population of New South Wales (which at that time included what are now Victoria and Queensland) was in the order of 77,000 - well, 77,000 people without a skerrick of known First Australian heritage. Of these around 28,000 were convicts and 49,000 free folk, around a third of whom were convicts who had completed their sentences, generally known as emancipists. So, by this time, free settlers were well on the way to doubling the convict population, and would thoroughly pass it in the next few years. But, almost inevitably considering the folk in London didn't really give a stuff about a joint full of the scum of Britain, as the governing class mostly thought of them, at the arse end of the earth - or, rather, at the other arse end of the earth to England! Despite some worthy mouthings and occasionally, rarely for the rulers of Britain, some good intentions, little they said had much impact in New South Wales. And such good intentions as did exist tended to fall apart when it came to their implementation, with which, of course, those doing the mouthing rarely, if ever, actually bothered to oversee. We're trying to keep this introduction/background to a minimum, believe it or not, but we want to give an example, so you get a hint of the true foul-up the immigration system was. A wonderful amateur historian called Jim Donaldson has researched and written a greatly informative book called Farewell to the Heather, about the 1837-1840 government assisted emigration program from the highlands and islands of Scotland to New South Wales¹. |
¹ You can possibly get a copy by contacting Jim on (03) 9815 0490, the contact number on the book. Lex was lucky to have bought a copy at an opportunity shop in 2015. That copy was a 2006 revision of the 2005 publication, and we're writing in 2018. The situation in the Highlands and Islands was unbelievably terrible. Most people know about the highland clearances. For those who don't, in a nutshell (?! Well, perhaps a couple of coconuts!) the social structure in those lands was tribal. We know these tribes as clans. Each tribe controlled land, fought for it, defended it, died for it. They were centred around a warlord who fulfilled a patriarchal role - recognising that some were good men, others were scum. But, the warlord owned neither the land nor the tribal members.
As time went on, ideas percolated up from south of the border. Surnames were the least of them, needed for the taxation concepts the anglicised lowland kings brought up from the comparatively wealthy England. The taxation, of course, was necessary to pay for the lowland kings' and their lords' needs. The kings had primarily been warlords, a strongman, or psychopathic murderer, the other tribal warlords, or psychopathic murderers, allowed to lead their combined tribal armies into battle. The following is arguable, but in our belief more likely a history than that described by Shakespeare! The documentary evidence is vague, extremely limited, and sometimes contradictory. The last highlander to be king was probably a bloke called Macbeth. Well, actually, it was his stepson Lulach, Macbeth's wife's son by a previous marriage, the husband of which had been challenged and killed by Macbeth, or at Macbeth's instigation if not personally. At that time, Macbeth was a major lord, and the king of Scotland was an apparently weak scumbag called Duncan. The king had made his way up his lords' noses with his taxation demands and what they regarded as weak rule, so he was killed by Macbeth, or at Macbeth's instigation if not personally, who was accepted as Duncan's replacement. Macbeth was apparently a good king, whatever that meant in those days, perhaps no more than that he was more scarey than anyone else (!). He seems to have ruled for around 12 years, and trusted his sidekicks enough, apparently, to go on a visit to Rome. But Duncan's grandson, yes, a bloke called Malcolm, who had hidden out in England, and been raised by the English. Eventually, having, in Scottish terms, sold his soul to the devil, he returned at the head of an English army he used to overthrow and kill Macbeth. Malcolm then went on to use his army, and those of the psychopaths flocking to his side declaring they were only joking about Macbeth being a better king than Duncan, to kill Macbeth's unfortunate teenaged stepson Lulach, who had been declared king by Macbeth's remaining highland supporters. and "simple" by later hagiographers of Malcolm and his descendants. Malcolm had little or no interest in the gaelic culture or language. He took the opportunity to introduce the Norman-style feudalism being gradually introduced by the Norman-raised, Norman-mothered, roman catholic King Edward, and later by the Norman Duke William the Bastard. One of the lesser claimants for the English throne after Edward's death in 1066 was Edgar, the Saxo-Norman who claimed to be the Aetheling, or Crown Prince, because he was the son of the only man Edward actually incontrovertibly named his heir. This heir, a nephew of Edward's, was probably murdered (probably poisoned) shortly after arriving in England, and his then baby son Edgar was not in turn named as heir, or, indeed, as Aetheling, at least not by Edward. Edgar was probably born in exile in what is today called Hungary, but was only a small child when he travelled to England, and grew to teenagehood there. Edgar was declared king, but not crowned, by some of the saxon nobles and churchmen remaining after Earl Harold Godwinson, declared king by the Saxon nobility and churchmen, but also uncrowned, was defeated and killed at Hastings. Edgar's would-be kinghood didn't last long. He was first betrayed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stigand. Not that it did Stigand any good in the longer term. Then, as William approached London, Edgar and his "supporters" met with Billy the Conk, and subjected themselves to his dominance. Following this, he had to stand and watch William's crowning in Westminster. The rest of Edgar's life was a mish-mash of rebelling against and supporting various of his Norman overlords. , also not crowned, at Hastings. only teenaged, and was chased out of England easily by the Normans, having been betrayed by understandably lying Saxon lords trying to suck up to the brutal and truly scarey Norman William who reduced many of the northern English to starvation and, allegedly, cannibalism. Not that it did almost all of the Saxon lords any good in the end, they all got the good old Norman heave-ho, usually at the end of a sword or executioners axe. Edgar escaped into Scotland with his sister, Margaret, along with, allegedly, the progenitor of Scotland's (and Lex's) Borthwick family. Malcolm, attracted to Margaret, married her. Margaret, often known as "Saint" Margaret, is held responsible for the replacement of the Celtic form of christianity in Scotland with roman catholicism. It is possible/probable Malcolm had a first wife, but little, or next-to-nothing is known about her. Or how and when she died! One rumour is Malcolm's first wife had been Macbeth's wife, even having the same name, but the Macbeth connection seems unlikely as her age would probably not fit. Another rumour is Malcolm had her murdered to enable his marriage to Margaret. While this seems more possible, there's no currently provable evidence of any kind. Not even of her existence, let alone her death. Malcolm was known, among other things, as Malcolm Canmore. "Canmore", in one possible meaning, is "big head", although it's normally translated along the lines of "great chief". We had a good laugh at the "big head" option, but wonder if "head" could, in those days, mean something the same as one of the ways we use it, as "head" of something. Whatever, if not a joke about his hat size, "number one chief", an equal among equals, is probably a good translation, and would be closest to the role and status of a traditional Scottish leader. But, Malcolm introduced the feudal idea of a leader being a king, rather than chief of chiefs - superior, not the leader of equals. As such, he drove forwards the idea he owned all of Scotland, and controlled who was lord of which areas. He was assisted in this by having some Normans to replace especially some lowland lords distrusted by the king, (among them, for example, the father of the bloke known as Robert "the" Bruce, who was really Robert, pronounced "Robair", de Brus). This feudal social disease gradually spread its way into the highlands and islands, and the people lost any say in who their warlord was, and perhaps more devastatingly, any absolute right to profit or even sustenance obtained from what had been their clan lands. And as the lord could give, he could also take away. And, of course, so could the king, meaning if their current lord peeved the king, they could find themselves under the control of someone completely unconnected with their clan, and even possibly a long term clan enemy. If quick, the prior lord could at least do a runner, but the great majority of the clan had no such option. As more time passed, the lords were anglicised, educated in English schools, and began to speak English as their first and eventually only language, losing the Gaelic spoken by their people and with it their understanding of highland culture and tradition, eventually leaving the common highlanders and islanders speaking Gaelic, a language not understood and regarded as savage and primitive by the other Scots. The lords' lives began to be spent more in Edinburgh, and later London, than on their lands, and the cost of their lives began to stretch beyond their lands' capacity to pay. By then it suited the lords, whose people still naively regarded as their clan chiefs, to do what the kings had done, that is, use the idea of feudalism, backed by god's desires, as the pope authorised, to claim the lands the kings awarded them as theirs, capable of being used for the profit of the lord alone, so long as the lord paid the king's taxes. In other words, the idea the clan chief managed the land in trust for the clan members no longer suited the lords. Thus, in essence, the lords stole the land, with the assistance of the king and his concept of feudalism, and the encouragement and authorisation of their peers and "superiors" in the feudal and religious systems, completely dispossessing the people of the clan. The lord moved from being clan patriarch, the father of the clan, responsible to and at least theoretically appointed and replaceable by the clan members, to the clan members' landlord. Eventually, this led to the clearances, as the lords realised they could only pay their increasing bills by replacing the people living on "their" (the lords') land with four-legged, woolly money-makers shaking their shitty-tailed booties around the population-deserted highlands. The people were forced into areas it was impossible to farm, or to areas where they had to survive by fishing, something most knew nothing about. On the tiny island of Iona, the island on which Lachlan Macquarie was born, some were allowed to stay on the island, but they had no land to grow food, the fishing was next-to-impossible, so they were reduced to eating seaweed, and gradually, under the eyes of the then owner of the part of the island on which they had once lived, starved to death. In the mid-1830s, the situation was so bad even the London government and its English overlords took notice, and recognised something had to be done. And thank goodness for small mercies, because not long afterwards they chose to ignore the even worse situation in Ireland and the Scottish highlands and islands, making a consciously genocidal decision to commit what today we would call "genocide", by potato blight. But back to the mid-1830s. The harvests, such as they were, failed, the fishing failed, and even the poor buggers depending on the collection of seaweed found their seaweed industry failing as cheaper alternatives were found. Not that the gatherers and processors were responsible for the cost of the seaweed. They were paid bugger all for appalling workloads. A small proportion of the seaweed was used in cooking, but as the starving folk on Mull were to prove, it was not suitable as the sole food. The rest was processed for use as fertiliser, and as a source of various minerals and products such as soda, potash, and iodine used in a wide range of industrial processes. The sociopathically corrupt bastards who sat on their stolen land showed their true nature, and history records them and their names, but those of few of their victims. This is the wrong way around. We choose not to name these criminals, creatures of a system that specialised in corrupting those not already sociopathic, as they deserve nothing less than to be forgotten, forever. But their deeds must be remembered. So, some few Scots observed this situation with a sense of guilt, or maybe humanity. These included several senior members of the Presbyterian church, who were receiving a string of appalling reports from their ministers in the field. This is but one, from Coll Macdonald, minister for Portree, Isle of Skye, in a letter dated 18 February, 1837 (Donaldson, p 61): I beg leave to intimate ... the population of this Parish ... consists of nearly four thousand souls. Awful and melancholy to relate, of that number, one thousand and seventy-six are wholly without provisions; and, what is more deplorable, without the means of procuring them; for they have neither money or credit or employment ... They are at present supported by the very scanty supply they procure from the charity and sympathy of their almost destitute neighbours; and if they are not relieved in a short time, famine, starvation and death must follow ... The whole body of the inhabitants of this Parish with few exceptions indeed will in the course of two months be destitute: and the kind of food on which they now live is better fitted to engender disease than to afford nutrition to a human being, and to aggravate their sufferings they are as much at a loss for clothing as they are for food. Some Scottish newspapers picked up the story. This is an extract from the Inverness Courier of 1 March, 1837 (Donaldson, pp 61-62) about the situation on Skye (remembering that Skye was not the only or, indeed, worst of the places of suffering):
The unfavourable weather destroyed their peats, and they have neither money nor opportunities to purchase coals or wood. In this extremity the poor people have lately in some places been driven to consume their turf huts and cottages for fire. They meet and draw lots whose house is to be taken down for fuel, and afterwards in the same manner determine which of their number is to maintain the poor family deprived of their home. Almost shut up by the stormy elements, crowding round their miserable fire thus scantily and painfully supplied - and with only, at long intervals, a handful of oatmeal or potatoes ... "... the fact points out most strongly the necessity of sending out as many female convicts as the home government have in custody, instead of shutting them up in gaols and penitentiaries in England, at an enormous expense, from whence they generally come out more debased than when they entered : whereas transportation has not only saved crowds from misery, and not a few from the gallows, but has actually converted thousands into wealthy citizens, and many of them into good moral and religious subjects." Caroline Chisholm's response to the problem was similar in intent, but quite different in its focus, as we shall see in due course. In fact, the LQR writer, for all his apparent knowledge of the colony, doesn't seem to have been aware that transportation of convicts to NSW stopped in 1840, and the last arrived in 1841. Certainly, many of the wealthy, desperate to continue to grow their wealth on the back of cheap labour, would mostly have supported the continuation of transportation, but were much less inclined to favour female transportation as it was primarily male workers they wanted, and to hell with the social consequences. The wealthy, of course, could always retreat to the "home country" if things became too uncomfortable in the colony.
However, at the key times, the anti-transportationists managed to hold sway in the NSW parliament with its limited powers, and the government back in London was dominated by evangelical christians who, whatever other faults they may have had, were increasingly concerned at the inhumanity of the convict system and its social consequences in NSW. But first, it's worth noting three of the LQR writer's comments to get an image of the New South Wales Caroline found in 1839. First is his comment on how "thousands" of former convicts have been "converted" into "wealthy citizens". In simplistic terms, albeit of relevance here, the economy of New South Wales and such political power as existed was dominated by two gangs comprised of wealthy white men. The membership of one, generally known to historians as "the Emancipists", required the member to be a former convict or a convict's free born descendant. The other, known as "the Exclusives", required the member to have no known legitimate familial relationship with a convict. Both gangs excluded anyone who could not display copious wealth, or who had a legitimate familial relationship to a "coloured" person of any ethnicity, including, of course, all First Australians and their already extant part-European descendants. Women were excluded from overt economic and political power by both gangs, although they enthusiastically took part with the men in gossip about, sniping at, and excluding people from the other gang. Catholics were iffy, although the proportion of Irish catholic convicts means they tended to fall into the Emancipists' gang. Jews were blackballed by both gangs. If one then excludes all free settlers and their descendants, the number of wealthy Emancipists was far from the LQR writer's claimed "thousands" who attained wealth consequent upon their transportation to Australia. There are various ways to assess the likelihood of the LQR writer's claim. The following table extract is but one. It is taken from Table 1 in R V Jackson's 1977 book "Australian Economic Development in the Nineteenth Century" (p 7) (at the time Jackson was Senior Lecturer in Economic History at the Australian National University). As the extract indicates, by the 1851 census the maximum proportion of the workforce employed in areas that could conceivably indicate an employment field including people who might be wealthy is 29% (those "engaged in commerce, trade or manufacturing", "other occupations", and "professional and educated persons"). The official areas of paid employment for women would almost solely be in "commerce" and "trade" as shop assistants, seamstresses, laundry women, prostitutes, and the like, and as domestic servants. Without dredging through endless records, at a very rough guess women would comprise somewhere in the order of 15% of the total workforce. We guess this guess would be pretty much at the upper end of the likely female paid workforce, and they would be at the very bottom end of likely incomes. At the most, this would reduce the likely proportion of the male workforce in the prospective wealth fields to around 14-15% of the total. The same book (p 43) says that in 1843 there were 939 stations (694 in 1839!), employing 6277 free people (who would be all men apart from a few domestic servants on each station) and 1296 "bonded" who would be convicts working off their sentences (no new convicts, as such, were transported to NSW after 1840 [arrived 1841]). In 1840, the population of NSW was around 130,000 (from Gordon Beckett's 2013 book "A Population History of Colonial New South Wales, The Economic Growth of a New Colony", p 116). The workforce-aged male proportion of the population in 1861 (the earliest available figure) was around 39% of the population after some 20 years of greatly increasing population and an increasing female proportion of the population. So, let's rather generously allow for the workforce-aged male proportion of the population around the time Caroline arrived in NSW to be about 50%. This would represent around 65,000 people. If so, the absolute maximum of "wealthy" men would be around 15% of the 65,000, which is nearly 10,000. Well, there are your "thousands". Except, nowhere near all of those 10,000 were what anyone could call wealthy, although those in employment were probably better off than their homeland's equivalents. At least, most of the time. For example, on the 639 "stations" in 1839, or even the 939 in 1843, the only potentially wealthy man would be the station owner or squatter, and too often even these were up to their eyeballs in debt. In reality, however, for a variety of reasons many of these stations would provide far from a "wealthy" level of income for anyone. We can carry this further. The table below indicates some 20% of the total workforce was employed in typical station jobs - shepherds and stockmen. TABLE 1INDICATORS OF THE ECONOMIC STRUCTURE OF EASTERN
SHARE OF WORKFORCE, 1851 %
Shepherds and stockmen 20 Engaged in agriculture or horticulture 15 Engaged in commerce, trade or manufacturing 15 Mechanics and artificers 8 Domestic servants 13 Professional and educated persons 4 Labourers (unspecified) 15 Other occupations 10 Total: 100 |