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‘A Worthy Sisterhood’ : pictures of birth death a nd
marriage f r o m a mo n g i m mi g r a n t w o me n t o S o u t h
Australia in 1836
Leith MacGillivray
The first women in Tandanya, later the province of South
Australia, were, of course, Aboriginal women, countless of whom were
here centuries before colonisation. These women deserve a separate study.
Tonight I wish to turn our attention to a few of those 117
immigrant women who arrived on the first nine ships to reach South
Australia before 31 December 1836, the year in which South Australia was
founded as a British province.
7 8 a d u l t f e m a l e s o n b o a r d t h e s e s hi p s w e r e a s s i s t e d
i m m i gr a n t s , commonly referred to as ‘the labouring class’, and 39 were
paying passengers known as ‘ t he supe ri or ’ or ‘of fi cer/ gent l e m an
cl as s ’ , l at er t erm ed t he ‘middling class’ by historian, Douglas Pike. In
recounting stories of a few women of 1836, I have chosen, as a linking
theme, their experiences of birth, death and marriage.
On 27 Jul y 1836, the Duke of Y ork, first of the immi grant shi ps
to arrive in South Australia, lay at anchor in Nepean Bay, off Kangaroo
Island. On board, gravely ill, lay Lucy Beare, 33 year old wife of Thomas
Hudson Beare, second in command of the South Australian Company.
Four of Luc y Beare’ s ei ght children had died at birth or i n
infanc y. P r e gnant a gai n i n 1836, Luc y h ad endured t h e ri go urs of a
four-m ont h journey on the Duke of York, during which, with no surgeon to
assist her, she gave birt h to her ni nth child. Her l itt l e un -named
daught er di ed, and is believed to have been buried at sea. Lucy herself
barely escaped death. Captain Robert Morgan, the godly Captain of the Duke of
York, was greatly concerned about Lucy Beare but Captain Morgan was a man of
his times. He could only describe Lucy’s grief-stricken, post-natal state as
‘deranged’.
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Five days later, in a hastily erected tent on shore, Lucy’s condition had so
worsened that Morgan sent for William Chadwick on board the newly-arrived Lady
Mary Pelham. Chadwick had some nursing experience, but he confessed that ‘he
took such strong doses of opium for his nervous attacks he did not often know what
he was doing’.
Lucy fought for her life and sanity, throughout August, and only in early
September could Captain Morgan rejoice that she was restored to her right mind.
Within a year Lucy Beare was pregnant with her tenth child. In another
difficult birth her little daughter, Mary Anne, survived, but Lucy, at only 34
years of age, died in child-bed 8 days later. The widowed Thomas Beare, with 5
children to care for, married 21 year old Lucy Bull 2 years later. They parented
nine children.
Several aspects of Lucy Beare’s experiences of birth, death and marriage
reflect those of early 19th century men and women. Re-marriage, often an
economic necessity for women, invariably followed a spouse’s death. Without
effective contraception, large families were ‘a woman’s lot’. With midwifery often
considered ‘an occupation degrading to gentlemen’ infant mortality and the risk of
death in child-bed were consistently high.
One feature of Lucy Beare’s experience was, however, a-typical of her sister
emigrants in 1836. Official records or reports of death at sea in 1836 are not
extant in South Australia, but, according to private papers, Lucy Beare was the only
emigrant woman of 1836 who lost a new-born baby at sea; and no woman died of
child-birth at sea.
Even allowing for non-reporting or under-reporting, in comparison with the
devastating losses on later voyages, one might assume that these first emigrant
women were a healthy, sturdy lot.
This was especially relevant with regard to labouring class women. Firstly,
surgeons accompanied only five of the nine emigrant ships; those who did carried only
minimal midwifery equipment. Furthermore, labouring class women were cooped up
in steerage, in foul air with bilge water and decaying vegetable material.
Healthy, fertile women were essential to the systematic colonisation theories of
Wakefield and his fellow-planners. Upon the labouring class these men had laid the onus
of being the producers of a future labour force which would reduce the cost, and
ultimately the necessity, of importing emigrant labour. The women of South
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Australia's ‘first fleet’ would seem to have conformed, at least in this respect, to
the planners' aims and prospects.
From the evidence available 2 women, both assisted emigrants, did die on
board ship, although not from child-birth. Elizabeth Chandler’s encounter with death
was unique.
Elizabeth, with her 4 children and husband, Charles, a 28 year old
ploughman from East Acton, Middlesex, engaged by the South Australian Company,
left England on 3 April on the John Pirie, captained by George Martin. An
unidentified seaman, probably the Purser, noted in his log that Mrs Chandler had a
‘most violent temper which could cause her to be shockingly wicked On 2 June, Mrs
Chandler and Mrs Powell, wife of gardener, Powell, also from Acton, were engaged
in a heated brawl in which the Purser claimed ‘the most disgusting,
aggravating language was used by both ladies’. Charles Chandler tried in vain
to pacify his wife but, with a bundle of clothes in her arms she made towards the
ship’s rail threatening to drown herself. Captain Martin caught hold of her just in
time. Early next morning the helmsman sounded the alarm for a woman
overboard. Elizabeth Chandler had again, in the Purser’s notes, ‘come up on deck
with the bundle of clothes still in her arms, and in a terrible rage suddenly threw the
bundle overboard that no other woman her husband might take should have the
satisfaction of wearing them after her. After giving a momentary glance at her
husband she sprang overboard to the horror and amazement of all who beheld the
sight’. In that momentary glance, what did Elizabeth Chandler convey to her husband?
Determination? Revenge? We do not know. But rescued after 10 minutes in the
water, as the Purser recorded, ‘in almost a lifeless state, Mrs Chandler was given
the usual remedies for recovering the apparently drown’d’.
Throughout July the Purser nursed his patient faithfully, tending her wounds
and ‘took a pint of blood as advisable’. One night, however, she became ‘quite
delirious and the smell from her breath uncommonly strong.’ On the following
morning, Elizabeth Chandler died. All passengers were mustered on deck to see
her body committed to the deep, ‘sewn in three or four old sacks with a weight of
iron made fast to her feet’. Charles Chandler later married Harriet Clark, but should
you some day climb Chandlers Hill, near Clarendon, you might spare a thought for his
first wife.
Yet suicide was either undocumented or rare. No other 1836 woman
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apparently took her life, but three husbands of that contingent did. Ironically one was
Captain George Martin, six years after he had rescued Elizabeth Chandler. In a
suicide note, found by his daughter, George Martin, of nervous instability, shot
himself at his home in Currie Street leaving destitute his widow, Maria, and 8
children.
Several women, heavily pregnant on board ship, gave birth soon after
arrival. These women now faced problems additional to those of giving birth in
England. They were in an unknown land and an untested environment. Among such
women was Anne Finniss, emigrant on the Cygnet, and of ‘the officer-gentleman
class’ as wife of Boyle Travers Finniss, soldier, surveyor and first premier of South
Australia. Their child, Fanny Lipson Finniss, delivered by Dr Woodforde for 3
guineas in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1837, was the first born in the
colony. The baby and her mother spent their first days in a reed and grass but
built by Aboriginals at Rapid Bay. As Finniss recorded, ‘Aboriginal women also
nursed Fanny with all the care of a practised nurse’. After 10 days mother and child
were moved to Glenelg and housed in a 12 feet diameter Bell tent. Here, Finniss tells,
he found his wife one morning ‘in a pitiable state from weakness ... harassed by flies
... in the almost insupportable heat of the January sun ... Dr Woodforde had himself
thrown buckets of water on the outside of the tent to cool the atmosphere within’.
Anne and Fanny Finniss survived their first Australian summer, but another
trial soon followed. A chill lodged in Anne Finniss’ suppurating breast. In her
husband’s words, ‘This rendered a surgical operation necessary’. This was a
decade before the use of ether, either in England or South Australia. Yet the
adaptations of giving birth and enduring pain in makeshift accommodation and a trying
climate were peculiar to Anne Finniss and her fellow-colonists in their new and alien
land.
The greatest killer in the 19th century was pulmonary consumption.
Therapeutic emigration became popular, firstly because sea-sickness on the
voyage often induced vomiting believed to be curative. More importantly, South
Australia was early and widely publicised as having a ‘salubrious climate’ with ‘the
total absence of cold, damp fogs’, and therefore of particular advantage to those
suffering from pulmonary affections.
Although not explicitly stated, there is every indication that Harriet Gouger,
wife of Robert Gouger, first Colonial Secretary, left England, not only 4 months
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pregnant, but also suffering from consumption. Her family showed great
reluctance and anxiety at her departure but she determinedly set sail with her husband
and 2 servants on the Africaine.
Harriet’s journey was fraught with ‘constant sickness, violent headaches and
serious liver and stomach symptoms’. Despite his propensity to depression,
Gouger was a solicitous nurse even to making a swinging canvas cot, believed helpful
for consumptives, to replace the one left at home.
After their arrival at Holdfast By in November 1836, Gouger erected an
especially spacious tent. In this tent on the 28th December, while oaths of office were
taken and the Proclamation read for the first time, Harriet lay deep in labour. By
the following morning Gouger rejoiced in his diary, ‘I have given the new province a
son!’ Harriet and Robert Gouger named their baby ‘Henry Hindmarsh Gouger’ —
‘Henry’ after Gouger's brother, and ‘Hindmarsh’ so that his son’s birth ‘might
be a matter of permanent interest’ in the province’s history.
Sadly, at any Proclamation Day commemoration I have attended, I have not
heard mention of Henry Hindmarsh, or his mother, the woman in such close
proximity to that first ceremony. Nor, for that matter, have I heard mention of any
other women of 1836.
By mid-January a consultation of doctors openly declared Harriet was in the
advanced stages of pulmonary consumption. Neither a sea voyage nor a short time
in a new environment had been of any benefit. ‘Not even hope now exists as my
solace’ wrote the stricken Gouger. Harriet Gouger died on 14 March 1837 and her
little 11 week old son, 2 days later. Gouger buried his family in Town Acre 685, one of
his 8 Town Acres bordered by King William and Gilbert Streets and South
Terrace.
In November 1837, Gouger returned to England ‘to seek justice for himself
and the colony’. In late 1838, he married his cousin, Sarah Whitten, before returning
to South Australia. Here he found his home in utter disrepair. ‘Let to a low working
man who had in turn let out every room to South Australian Company tenants’,
wrote Gouger, ‘they used even the cemetery of my late wife as a summer house and a
sleeping-room.’
A victim of the greatest cause of death until the turn of the century,
Harriet’s life, death and the aftermath of her death had brought nothing but pain and
grief to this emigrant woman of 1836 and her husband.
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In January 1831 Gouger had submitted to the Colonial Office a plan for
assisting pauper children to emigrate, which may have led to the sponsorship of
two servants, Margaret Clarke and Mary Anne Vincent, aged 15 and 16
respectively. Margaret, or Peggy, and Mary Anne were inmates of Victoria
Asylum in Chiswick, London, run by the Children’s Friend Society.
Formerly known as the ‘Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy’, the
Society’s purpose was to rescue children from ‘a life of wretchedness and crime’ on
London’s streets; ‘to teach them the habits of industry under the influence of moral
and religious habits’. After 3 months’ training the Society considered the children fit
for agricultural or domestic labour in the colonies.
Many were sent to Cape Colony, South Africa, for, after the abolition of
slavery, their labour was in demand there. Western Australia was also a popular
placement, but Peggy and Mary Anne were sent to South Australia.
At first the girls found favour with their mistress but soon Peggy was in
disgrace for ‘lightness of conduct towards the sailors’; for ‘the effect of spiritous
liquors’; and for biting and scratching Mary Anne so mercilessly that she drew
blood. The Captain, the steward and Gouger agreed that cutting Peggy’s hair
from one side of her head was fitting punishment.
After their arrival in 1837, then 16, Peggy married Mr Matthew Piesse, who
was a grocer before going to the diggings. By 1857 they had 6 children. Mary
Anne married George Thomas Elias Jones in 1838. In 1855, presumably with
Mary Anne still as his wife, Jones was a clerk in the Port Elliot–Goolwa railway
system. Both couples then disappear from trace. We cannot speculate whether their
life and marriage in South Australia offered social mobility or material opportunities
of a degree they might not have had in England . But this we do know: Peggy and
Mary Anne were forerunners of those thousands of young people in the 19th
and 20th century who were part of England’s .industry to export labour to the
colonies, as recently and so poignantly portrayed in the T.V. series The Leaving of
Liverpool. Many became ‘lost children of the Empire’. Yet here, in South
Australia as early as 1836, we can number two London ‘street kids’ among our
founding mothers.
Marriage was the common expectation of 19th century men and women.
Insurance against loneliness, far from family and friends made marriage even more
acceptable to intending marriage. Three labouring couples married on board the
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Buffalo before the vessel had left the Channel. Several men of the middling class
married, sometimes hurriedly, as soon as they saw opportunities opening up in the
new province. One who refrained from so doing confided his misgivings to his diary:
‘Sunday 14 Aug: This day I attained the age of 30 years, therefore cease to be a young
man:—an awful, painful reflection, being still a bachelor and likely to continue so for
some time’.
The conventional tradition of marriage accorded well with the systematic
colonisers. Under their theoretical planning the married state took on a special
significance for women. Women were, the planners argued, the moral agents in
establishing stable marriages. Stable marriages led, the planners further reasoned, to
settled, civilising communities without fear of dispersion or a dreaded loss of
population, and hence production and prosperity, to the other colonies.
To convert their theorising to reality, the colonising fathers proposed that
emigrants should be young married couples under thirty. The 1836 contingent fell.
far short of this ideal.
Of the 48 labouring class women, only a third were under thirty. Moreover
there were three times as many single labouring class men as women. These women
soon seized their opportunities and by mid-1838 the majority had married either their
fellow emigrant men of 1836 or those who arrived in the following 18 months.
Only 3 single superior class women arrived in 1836, these being a widow and
two sisters past marriageable age accustomed to living with their relatives. With
marriage a social norm, Victorian matrons of this ‘superior class’ had the same
responsibility as the redoubtable Mrs Bennett of Pride and Prejudice to find
suitable husbands for their eligible daughters.
Susannah and John Hindmarsh had 3 daughters of marriageable age —
Jane, Susan and Mary. Susan’s parents found her marriage to Alfred Miller
Munday, wealthy landowner, Colonial Secretary, and later inheritor of ‘Shipley’
estate in Derbyshire, entirely suitable.
The Hindmarshes also strongly approved of Thomas Bewes Strangways
as Jane’s suitor. In the words of John Hindmarsh, Strangways was ‘a
gentleman of high feelings, of moderate wealth, and of a very old family’. These
were excellent but, for reasons unknown, no marriage took place. In time
when spinsterhood was a problematic situation Jane remained unmarried,
living with her parents. In her late forties, she became the wife of widower
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John Ellis, pastoralist and benefactor of St Peter’s College. But her parents
did not live to see either the suitable marriage or the comfortable retirement
Jane enjoyed at Kelverton Hall, Essex.
The marriage of their youngest daughter, Mary, to George Milner
Stephen, first Crown Solicitor, then Advocate-General and finally ActingGovernor, had two hallmarks of suitability.
Stephen’s high and powerful connections in both England and
Australia made him eminently suitable. So did his musical and artistic talents
which he shared in the evening with the equally artistic Hindmarsh sisters,
and which earned him many a dinner at Government House.
Yet S t ephen’ s app ea rance was gen eral l y unprepossessi n g. On e
contemporary described him as being ‘a dapper little man, with curly hair and
whiskers ... Small in every way ... he wore Ladies’ number four in boots ... and was in
fact what goes by the term of a Lady’s man’. George Milner Stephen also had
eccentric habits. He kept a pet monkey, and translated Cicero or read Wilberforce
before breakfast. Stephen was also intolerably vain as confirmed by his diary jottings,
three of which must suffice here.
They have named a long Terrace [on the Walkerville Estate] after me! I
was prayed for in church as Acting-Governor! The singularity of my position
flashed upon me! Cheers! How very valuable popularity is!'
Eccentricity and vanity paled, however, beside George Milner Stephen’s
unscrupulous ventures, particularly in mining schemes and land speculation both in
South Australia and Tasmania. As a result, in 1839 Stephen faced trial for forgery and
perjury. The trials were abortive but Stephen's corruption ‘lost him his job and he was
advised to leave South Australia’.
Hindmarsh was one of Stephen’s very few supporters, conceivably because of
Mary. When he was recalled to England, Susannah Hindmarsh faced the disdain of
Adelaide’s prominent citizens alone. This did not deter her, however, from combining
her own business acumen with Stephen's wily skills.
Together they added to Governor Hindmarsh’s already huge profits from land
sales. When she left South Australia to join her husband in his governorship of
Helgioland, Susannah Hindmarsh’s bank credit of £12,000 was the highest in the
State.
Mary Stephen mothered 13 children, 4 of whom died, while travelling back
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and forth several times between South Australia, Helgioland, England and New
South Wales while her husband followed among other occupations, that of
geologist, miniaturist painter, barrister, inventor and public servant.
By 1847 even Hindmarsh was declaring his son-in-law’s excesses and
failures sprang from his untempered self-confidence and vanity. To his daughter,
Susan, Hindmarsh wrote that despite all the vicissitudes of her life, her sister
‘poor Mary ... poor dear Mary ... had not flagged in spirit’. But neither had Mary ever,
he continued, ‘ceas[ed] to build castles in the air ... that one day her husband might
take up a settled office’. This was not to be, however. Thirty years later Mary
Stephen was still leading a nomadic existence in the wake of a husband now
become spiritualist and itinerant faith healer.
Despite his weaknesses, John Hindmarsh was a family man. He and
Susannah were at least spared these last years of what to them, as aspiring middle class
parents of 1836, would have been far from the suitable marriage they would have
wished.
The title of my talk, ‘A worthy sisterhood’ is taken from a poem by a
grandson of another woman of 1836, Mary Thomas, well-known poet and
diarist. In conclusion, I should like to elevate one aspect of their ‘worthiness’.
I believe they are worthy to have their story told — not in light isolated
accounts, tenuously linked, as I have done tonight.
In short, if ‘history is a region thick with competing voices’, as Alan Atkinson
wrote recently, the voices of early South Australian women are, I believe, among
those competing voices. They too are ‘part of history’. They too matter.