Letters from Australia
to family and friends at home
from Brighton emigrants,
1849-1855
Edited by Joyce Collins
Contents
Page
Introduction
Chapter 1 Farewell to England 1
Chapter 2 Leaving Brighton: Making Plans 5
Chapter 3 The Voyage of the Harpley 1849 12
Chapter 4 The Juniper & Wood party:
Arrival in Australia 21
Chapter 5 Early Days in Melbourne
and the Gold Rush begins 26
Chapter 6 Gold Fever reaches Brighton:
more Plans to Emigrate 35
Chapter 7 The Voyage of the Statesman 1852 44
Chapter 8 Arrival of the Gold Seekers 52
Chapter 9 Getting to the Diggings 60
Chapter 10 Life at the Diggings 74
Chapter 11 The End in Sight 93
Chapter 12 Conclusion 101
Sources and Acknowledgements 106
Index of names 108
Introduction
This is the story of some of the men, women and children who left their homes in Brighton over a century and a half ago to embark on new lives at the other side of the world. They were by no means the first, and certainly not the last, Brightonians to cross the seas in search of a better life, but those who left around the year 1850 are of particular interest as emigrants bound for Australia, and specifically for Melbourne, Victoria. At this time, and for several years during the 1850s, the Brighton Gazette and other local newspapers published regular items of Emigration News which included letters received by families and friends of two large parties which left the town in 1849 and 1852. The first of these ― the “Juniper and Wood Party”― sailed together on the Harpley, arriving at Port Phillip for Melbourne in January 1850. A much larger number of emigrants (probably around 200) left in 1852 on board the Statesman and several other ships. The letters written home by people from both parties form the core of this account but there is a further invaluable source of information about the experience of the Brighton emigrants to Melbourne. Among those who left with the earlier group was the Chandler family ― father, mother and four children, the eldest of whom was John, then ten years old. John never returned to England, and in 1893, when he was in his fifties, he wrote a detailed account of his life and this was published under the title Forty Years in the Wilderness. His memories, together with the letters recording fresh impressions of recent experience, enable us to follow the emigrants’ reasons for going, what happened on the way and what lay ahead for them in their future lives.
The letters themselves are reproduced in their entirety, as published in the Gazette. Occasional spelling errors have generally been left uncorrected. Repetition, e.g. of food prices, indicates the importance to writers and recipients of particular pieces of information. These letters are, of course, only some of the hundreds that must have been written home by the emigrants who left in 1849 and 1852. Their survival in the pages of a local newspaper does however enable readers in the twenty-first century to share in the experience of the men and women who sought to make new lives in Australia – John Juniper’s “land of promise.”
By Charles Bennett. Published in the Illustrated London News,
June 19, 1852.
Chapter 1. Farewell to England.
These affecting words were reprinted in the Brighton Gazette on Thursday July 29, 1852, at a time when the town was full of talk about the large number of Brightonians then about to emigrate to Australia. During the whole of the nineteenth century millions of men and women were prepared to leave their homes in Europe to seek better lives in other parts of the world. As far back as the seventeenth century, ships had crossed the Atlantic taking men, and often their families, from Britain to the Canadian and American colonies. They went as settlers to the relatively empty lands where they could establish themselves as independent farmers or businessmen, still maintaining the practices and habits of their old life but also enjoying a certain freedom to experiment in new ways of doing things. Some crossed the ocean more than once, but very few returned to settle in the homes they had left in the mother country.
Even after the Declaration of Independence in 1776, America, with its reputation for freedom and equality of opportunity, continued until modern times to be the most popular destination for European migrants. However, one result of Independence was that America would no longer be available for the reception of criminals who were sentenced by English courts to transportation. Happily, from the point of view of the penal authorities (if not the convicts) new possibilities opened up after the arrival on January 26, 1788 of the “First Fleet” in Australia, with its eleven ships bringing the first contingent of 717 transportees. Over the following 80 years there were to be some 160,000 of these involuntary emigrants to England’s Australian colonies.
A list of Sentences of Transportation compiled by the Friends of the East Sussex Record Office includes the names of nearly 250 men, and nearly 40 women from Brighton sent to Australia before transportation to New South Wales and Van Dieman’s land came to an end. (Convicts continued to go to Western Australia until 1868.) The most usual sentence was for seven years, but for some it was ten or twelve years and for a few for life. The Brighton transportees included a boy of eight in 1847 and another of eleven in 1852. Both of these were sentenced to seven years, like the majority of adult male and female convicts, though 19 of the men and three of the women received life sentences. Transportation for life meant just that. For many years (though not in fact after 1835) it was a capital offence to attempt to return to England. An important element in the plot of Great Expectations, published in 1861, was the return of Magwitch, and the danger he faced of discovery ― not to mention the danger to Pip and his friends who harboured him. Aiding and abetting was a crime, however philanthropic the intention.
Dickens was interested in emigration and it was a topic introduced into several of his (and other contemporary writers’) novels. Magwitch of course had made good during his years of banishment, and become a rich man. He had “done wonderful well” as “sheep-farmer, stock-breeder and other trades besides …. spec’lated and got rich.” The Artful Dodger who befriended Oliver Twist also made good as a drover, but the ultimate Successful Emigrant must surely have been the impecunious Mr Micawber who, with a little help from his friends, took his family to Australia to join Mr Peggoty and Emily, already prospering there. Relieved at last from his debts, he ended up ― perhaps rather improbably ― as a “much esteemed colonial magistrate.”
We do not know how the Brighton or other Sussex transportees had fared in Australia, but by 1850, when our emigrants from the Harpley arrived, a large number of convicts would have served their time and earned their freedom. Many would have settled, more or less respectably, in and around Melbourne, and there may well have been some interesting encounters between them and the new arrivals. Thomas Barnes, transported in 1819 for burglary, may or may not have had any Brighton connections, but in 1838 he had written from New South Wales to his mother, “Widow” (Margaret) Loftey, then living at Boreham Street, Wartling, East Sussex:-
1 August 1838
My dear Mother, ― I have long weighted with a painful hart expecting To heir from you. I at last received a letter from my unkell Tos Baker. I was happy to heir you was alive and I hope that this Letter will Find you and all my dear brothers and Sisters all well as it Leaves all of us at present. Thank God for it. My Unkell Stated in his letter that you thought I was Engarey with you for not wrighten be fore no no do not Think So. God forbide I should be Engarey with my own flesh and blood I did think I was Cast of ― My unkell has revived me once more My hart is fild with Joy ― It is a great comfort to hir from any of you
The growing population in the Australian colonies was however far from being completely made up of ex-convicts. Even from the early days of transportation there were increasing numbers of “free emigrants” leaving Britain to settle in Australia. The governments of the eighteen thirties and forties still clung to their laissez-faire attitude to emigration, neither encouraging nor discouraging prospective emigrants, but the setting up in 1826 of H.M.Colonial and Land Emigration Commission with an office in London had at least provided a channel for enquiries and information.
Since the 1820s Brighton newspapers had carried occasional advertisements for shepherds, horsemen, and stock breeders to take up jobs in New South Wales (which then included Victoria) and Western Australia. There is interesting evidence of one settler couple from these early years whose son was in Brighton in 1852. On April 19 of that year a public meeting was held in the Town Hall to discuss arrangements for chartering a ship to take the second “Brighton band” of prospective gold-seekers to Melbourne. One of the speakers was (?Henry) Franklyn who said, “When he was there in 1844, labour was in such demand that the workmen were better off than their masters, and the shepherds than the sheep-owners,” and that “if the work was not to their minds they could be sure of getting it elsewhere.” Franklyn also said that he had been born in Australia and that he intended shortly to return there. He in fact sailed on the Hebrides a few weeks later with several other Brightonians.
The majority of all emigrants to the colonies ― about four fifths of them ― made their own arrangements for travel and paid their own fares, from savings or probably loans from their families and friends. The cost of fares to Australia, which had to cover at least three months at sea, was several times that of crossing the Atlantic. Employers who advertised for workers perhaps paid or helped with fares, and at times of particular shortages of labour in the colony, the government offered assisted passages to certain categories of emigrants - shepherds or drovers or house servants. The scheme started in 1838, was suspended in 1841 and then resumed in 1847.
These were years of economic hardship at home, above all in rural areas where agricultural labourers were thrown out of work. Some migrated internally to the towns which offered greater opportunities, but those left behind in the countryside were forced to seek help under the Poor Law. Ratepayers were among the most vociferous in claiming that emigration to the colonies was the ideal solution to the problem of “superfluous population.” Even so, poor families seeking (or being actively encouraged) to emigrate could not have gone without financial and practical help. Many charitable and philanthropic societies were consequently set up to help prospective emigrants. The Brighton Emigration Society started its work in the 1820s and was still active at the end of the century. In 1849 Mrs Caroline Chisholm (known as “the emigrant’s friend”) addressed a letter to the Right Honourable Lord Ashley M.P. in favour of the “Colonisation Loan Society, By the Grant of Loans for two Years or more without Interest; or, A System of Emigration to the Colonies of New South Wales, Port Phillip, and South Australia.” Mrs Chisholm stressed the need for a Society “that will tend to discourage idleness and diminish pauperism,” which would help the poor man “to obtain a passage to that Colony, not as a pauper, not as a criminal, but in the worthy position of a borrower.” This was manifestly mid-Victorian Self Help in vigorous operation.
Economic hardship at home was reason enough for many to take the enormous decision to leave, almost certainly for ever, the land of their birth, but this was not always the most important factor. There were undoubtedly a few “black sheep” trying to put their past behind them. (Even the Brighton physician, Dr Christopher Rawson Penfold, who with his wife Mary, settled in Adelaide in 1844, very probably left England because of financial trouble. Mary’s special interest was wine-making, and the development of her business was the foundation for the firm which today is one of Australia’s major wine producers.) Some emigrants wanted to escape from business failure (this was the case for at least one Brighton man) or an unhappy marriage or other personal tragedy; some were advised to go for the sake of their health. Many undoubtedly went in a spirit of adventure, and generally coupled with this was the belief that a new land offered new opportunities and the chance somehow to make a better life.
Chapter 2. Leaving Brighton: Making Plans.
There was one further important reason for people to emigrate if their political or religious situation was in some way marginal to main society. Not just from Britain, where there was by this time a slowly growing, if reluctant, tolerance of religious differences, but from mainland Europe too, thousands emigrated because of restrictions or persecution in their homeland. Their chosen destination was generally America ― “the land of the free”― but Australia increasingly offered the freedom they craved.
This was essentially the reason for the departure from Brighton in 1849 of “the Juniper and Wood party,” who were all members of, or associated with, the Ebenezer Chapel on Richmond Hill. As Particular (or Strict) Baptists they enjoyed freedom of worship and were not persecuted as were many dissenting Protestants on the Continent, but they deeply resented the imposition of compulsory church rates. This legal requirement was enforced to pay for the upkeep and repair of the parish church and “the providing of things necessary for Divine Service therein.” There had long been a strong radical and dissenting tradition in Brighton and church rates (not abolished until 1868) were a continual source of vexation to Nonconformists and Jews. Defaulters could be, and were, prosecuted for non-payment and “suffered distraint” on their goods. Nine Brighton men were summoned for non-payment early in September 1849, among them W. Samuel Tankard, Charles Robert Thatcher and the attorney Richard Mighell. They had engaged a London solicitor, Mr Boykett, to defend them. The case was adjourned until later in the month and then dismissed (probably on a technicality) but by this time Mighell had already joined the Juniper and Wood party on board the Harpley and was on his way to Australia. Tankard and Thatcher were to follow three years later with the Brightonians bound for the gold diggings.