Thomas Jones died at Woolsthorpe in 1897. Thomas’s death certificate notes that he had lived in Victoria for about fifty years at the time of his death. On Thomas’s death certificate under the heading “Where born and how long in the Australian Colonies,” it states: “England, district unknown – some time in Tasmania – in Victoria about 50 years”. From this oblique reference to Tasmania, Thomas Jones was most likely a convict transported to Van Diemen’s Land in the late 1830s, although this is not certain.
Another possibility is that Thomas Jones arrived on the island in the service of a free settler. Many of the middle-class settlers of the time brought servants with them to Australia. The military also brought thousands of ordinary ranks to the colony, some of whom stayed. There is no evidence that Thomas was a soldier or a jailer. Most convicts sent to Tasmania stayed in Australia whereas most soldiers returned home with their units.
When looking at the available evidence, the most likely scenario is that Thomas Jones was born in England and was transported to Tasmania as a young man. As an individual with a very common name, Thomas’s time in Tasmania is hard to trace with any certainty. This is despite the copious convict records and indeed the sheer volume of the records makes identification difficult. Without knowing the name of the ship on which a convict was transported, it is often very difficult to trace a man’s life if he had a very common name.
The most likely scenario is that Thomas Jones came to the Southwest in the mid-1840s from Tasmania. This is consistent with his death certificate where it is noted that he had been in Victoria for fifty years at the time of his death. Subtract fifty from ninety-seven and the result is forty-seven. 1847 seems a likely year for his move to Belfast. Many people from Northern Tasmania came to the Southwest in this period, including several people who are known to have associated with Thomas. The voyage Thomas Jones made aboard the “John” in late 1848 is perhaps the last he made across the Strait. By 1848 Thomas may have already settled permanently at Port Fairy.
Throughout the 19th century, Port Fairy was profoundly dependent on shipping for connection to the wider world. In the 1840s perhaps the most important maritime connection was with Northern Tasmania. Port Fairy’ s leading men, John and Charles Mills, Griffiths, Cox, Connolly and Campbell, all lived at Port Fairy for a time. These men were Tasmanian based initially, and were active in Bass Strait trade in the late 1830s and the early 1840s. Most were associated with the whaling industry at certain times.
Marten Syme has completed a survey of shipping arrivals and departures to and from Port Fairy between 1834 and 1845. This shows that of the three hundred voyages to the port, at least 56% were direct voyages between Port Fairy and Tasmania. By contrast, just 11% of voyages were with Sydney and 8% with Adelaide. Many of the vessels coming to the port were regular visitors. Of the forty-eight vessels responsible for the total number of voyages, over half these vessels were sailing between Port Fairy and Tasmania.
A Tasmanian convict connection was quite commonplace in the Port Fairy district of the 1840s. Many people at Port Fairy and Portland had previously been in Tasmania. Convicts, ex-convicts, and children of convicts were likely the majority of the adult male working-class population of the Portland Bay District for the entirety of the 1840s. It was only from 1851 that this changed with the advent of the goldrushes and mass assisted immigration.
Margaret Kiddle, in her terribly boorish book on the squatter class, “Men of Yesterday,” which was published over sixty years ago, mentions that almost all bullock drivers in the Western District were “old hands”, that is, former convicts. Thomas Jones’s obituary mentions that he worked the roads of the Southwest as a carrier with his team. Mary Bennet’s lovely history of Woolsthorpe, “Glimpses of the Past,” mentions that Thomas Jones lived in Woolsthorpe from around 1870 and worked there as a carrier.
On his marriage certificate, Thomas Jones indicated that he was born in Warwickshire, England, the son of Thomas Jones, blacksmith, and Sarah Jones. His actual date of birth is unclear.
When Thomas married Sarah Campbell in 1854, Thomas indicated he was twenty-eight years of age, which would mean he was born around 1826. However, when Thomas died in 1897, his age was recorded as seventy-nine years, which would mean he was born around 1818. This earlier date of 1818 was probably closer to the fact of the matter. It is likely that Thomas was actually in his mid-thirties when he married Sarah Campbell. On the birth certificate of his son, Samuel Jones, born in 1861, Thomas is stated as being thirty-four of age, indicating a birth year of 1827, but this record may also underestimate his age. On that birth certificate, Thomas was said to have been born in Birmingham, then in Warwickshire. This is consistent with other information.
It was common for people to fudge the details on official records for some reason or another. Individuals would try to adjust information to suit their particular needs. Sometimes even people’s names were false. Regardless of the discrepancies, Thomas Jones was likely a relatively young man when he first came to the Southwest. A frontier society such as Port Fairy was probably “no place for old men” when he first arrived there.
Virtually all at Port Fairy were new arrivals from another place, apart from the Aboriginal clanspeople, and they were not included in the count. Many people were barely literate and many had a wariness of authority. In answer to questions, officials of church and state had to accept the responses provided by the people concerned. It could be difficult to verify a person’s personal bonafides, which was one reason fraternal lodges were seen as important institutions in determining a person’s character.
Mary Bennet’s history of Woolsthorpe specifically mentions that neither Thomas Jones nor Sarah Campbell could read or write. The few official documents they signed through the course of their lives were all marked with their X marks. Thomas’s membership of a lodge would have counted for something.
Transportation to New South Wales ceased in the early 1840s, and transportation to Van Diemen’s Land ceased in the early 1850s. Nevertheless, even in the 1890s, many working people in Victoria would have known of transported convicts in their family, perhaps even a father or mother. This knowledge would have been held quietly in many families in the Western District, not just within the Jones family at Woolsthorpe. Even though Victoria was not a major destination for penal transportation, many men of convict background ended up there. Emancipists found work in the pastoral and agricultural sectors, and a good number worked as bullock drivers and leased small farms.
It is hard to know just what proportion of male ex-convicts did manage to start families. It is likely many did not have the means to do so. The number of European women in the colonies was initially limited. In the Southwest, it was not until the immigrant ships arrived at Portland and Geelong in the early 1850s that the gender imbalance was redressed. Even then, many of the newly arrived assisted immigrants tended to marry amongst themselves. This was particularly so of the Irish Catholics, if the history of Patricia’s family is any indication.
Lionel mentioned to the author that he had heard of a report from an old local identity at Woolsthorpe that Thomas Jones had visible lash marks on his back. If this was indeed the case, this does not mean that he received them as a convict in Tasmania. The marks could have been left from a lashing while Thomas was a prisoner in England, for example. It was also quite common for British soldiers and sailors to be lashed for disciplinary reasons, not that there is any evidence that Thomas ever served in the British military.
Apart from the entry on Thomas Jones’s death certificate indicating time spent in Tasmania, and the unverified account of lash marks, there are other indicators of a Van Diemen’s Land connection. The Warrnambool Pioneers’ Register, published by the Warrnambool Historical Society and Family History Group has an entry, as follows: “Thomas Jones arrived in the Port Phillip District of NSW from Van Diemen’s Land circa 1847”. This entry in the Pioneers’ Register is consistent with Thomas having been in Victoria for fifty years prior to his death, but the entry may have been drafted purely as a consequence of what was known to be on Thomas’s death certificate, and in line with some oral accounts regarding his earlier time in Van Diemen’s Land.
A majority of the men working on Bass Strait trading vessels would have been emancipists or perhaps men on tickets of leave. A man working on trading vessels transporting goods across Bass Strait for merchants such as Stephen Henty might well subsequently be involved in hauling goods once settled on the mainland. If Thomas were born in 1818, he would have been twenty in 1838 and thirty in 1848. His age profile, class and marital status as a single man would have made him a prime candidate for the role of hauling heavy goods in a rough frontier environment. Whether he was born in 1818 or a few years later, strong young men in their twenties such as Thomas would have been valued.
If Thomas Jones was born in 1818, and supposing he was transported as a twenty year old, he would have arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in the late 1830s. In the 1830s, whaling stations on the southern coast of the mainland were governed by Van Diemen’s Land regulations, including in relation to the management of assigned convicts. According to these regulations, time served at Port Phillip while assigned to a Vandemonian master could count as time served overall. Convicts still under sentence travelled to the mainland with their employers, and it is possible Thomas worked for a squatter or merchant seeking to conduct business on the mainland.
Squatters from Van Diemen’s Land brought their assigned convicts with them, and squatters tended not to report their convict servants to the local authorities, even though Superintendent Charles La Trobe constantly requested numbers. By June 1840, in the vicinity of Melbourne and Geelong, La Trobe was able to account for just three hundred and eight such individuals, but he believed there were hundreds more not reported to the authorities by their masters. It is hard to estimate how many such men might have been living in the more remote parts of the Portland Bay District.
Charles Mills and his brother John had initially been sealers and whalers operating out of Launceston, but had gradually set up a permanent presence at Port Fairy. Charles first lived on Griffiths Island at the whaling station and then lived on the banks of the Moyne River where his brother John had built a wooden cottage, perhaps the first proper cottage at Port Fairy. Charles then moved to his newly established cultivation at the Lagoon. The community around the Lagoon seems to have been a predominantly Vandemonian one. Charles Mills lived at his farm on the Lagoon, just east of Port Fairy, for many years, until his sudden death there in the mid-1850s.
Other members of Charles and John Mills family were at the Lagoon in the 1840s. Their sister, Eliza Glare, moved there from Launceston in 1846 together with her husband James Glare, their children, and her mother. Starting from 1846, Woodbine House was constructed for the family partly from materials transported across the Strait. As the heritage report of the building states: “Stylistically, the house reflects Tasmanian vernacular building construction practices through its close eaves, sawn ashlar limestone construction and particular forms of chimney and fireplace construction.” There is evidence that Thomas Jones was an associate of James Glare at Port Fairy, and both men had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land at an earlier date. If Thomas did not actually assist in the house’s construction, it is very likely that he saw it go up, and may have helped transport materials involved in its construction.
James Glare was transported to Australia in 1820, when he was nineteen. While employed as a servant in England, he was convicted for stealing a five-pound note, a lot of money in those days. He was sentenced to hang, but this was commuted to transportation for life. He was sent to Tasmania aboard the “Lady Ridley”, and was assigned to James Hill who had a property on the east side of the North Esk river, near Launceston. This farm was adjacent to Captain John Brabyn’s property. Brabyn was the maternal grandfather of the three Mills siblings, John, Charles and Eliza.
James Glare married Eliza Mills in 1830. He was granted a conditional pardon in 1836 and a full pardon in 1846, whereupon the family all moved to Belfast to join the Mills family members who were already there. Interestingly, Thomas Jones also moved from Tasmania to the Southwest around this time.
In northern Tasmania, James Glare farmed a small property north of Launceston, near the Tamar River mouth, close to where William Manifold had his Kelso estate. The names Thomas Jones, James Glare and William Manifold are all included on a list of signatories to a letter published in the Austral-Asiatic Review of 1 Sept 1840.
The witnesses to the marriage of Thomas Jones and Sarah Campbell in December 1854 were Joseph Ogle and Mary-Ann Glare, both of whom had a Vandemonian connection. Joseph Ogle married Mary-Anne Glare’s sister, Eliza Glare, at Port Fairy in 1853 when both were nineteen years old. Joseph Ogle, Eliza Glare and Mary-Ann Glare were all children of convicts. Mary-Ann and Eliza Glare crossed to Port Fairy from Tasmania as children in May 1846. Their brother, John Glare, was an associate of Thomas Jones at Belfast.
Eliza Mills and her family sailed from Georgetown to Port Fairy aboard the “Lowestoft,” a vessel operated by Captain John Griffith and sometimes commanded by the Mills brothers. James Glare seems not to have sailed with them on this May voyage. There is a record that James Glare crossed the strait to Port Fairy in August 1846 aboard the “Minerva”, a few months after his family. The “Lowestoft” and the “Minerva” had been involved in whaling and coastal trading from the late 1830s. John Griffith was a merchant and a sea captain with extensive business connections in both Launceston, Portland and Port Fairy. As was the case with John and Charles Mills, Griffiths was Australian born, the child of a transported convict.
John and Charles Mills were among the first sea captains to come to Port Fairy, along with Alexander Campbell and John Griffiths. The Mills brothers crossed Bass Strait many times and John Mills was harbormaster at Port Fairy for many years. The “Minerva” and the “Lowestoft” were just two of the vessels which sailed regularly from Launceston to Port Fairy and Portland, one of a network of ships commanded by a small number of captains working in association with Stephen Henty, John Griffiths, James Connolly and other Launceston based merchants.
James Glare and Eliza Mills had a substantial family following their marriage in 1830. One of the children, John Glare, crossed to Port Fairy in 1846 with his mother and his sisters. John was the brother of Eliza Ogle and Mary-Ann Glare and all three were likely at the wedding of Thomas and Sarah. On the 1856 Victorian electoral roll, John Glare is listed as a leasehold tenant on land at Tower Hill, just as Thomas Jones was listed. John Glare and Thomas Jones subscribed to the Agricultural Society together and lived close to each other in the vicinity of the Woodbine property.
There is a reference in Pam Marriot’s book, “A Shamrock Beneath the Southern Cross,” which reports that a man named Jones, of Belfast, worked with James Glare to construct a bridge across the Spring Creek at Woolsthorpe. The contractors had completed the work by August 1854. Reference to the Glare family’s involvement in the construction of a sapling bridge over the Spring Creek at Woolsthorpe in 1854 is also found in “Glimpses into the Past – A History of Woolsthorpe”, written by Rachel Mary Bennett. This book mentions that it was John Glare, son of James, who was involved in work on this early bridge at Woolsthorpe. Given that Thomas Jones is associated with John Glare in other places in the archive, and that these men had farms in close proximity to each other at Belfast, it seems likely that the Jones mentioned in conjunction with the Glares in the construction of this wooden sapling bridge at Woolsthorpe was Thomas Jones.
Joseph Ogle was a witness to Thomas and Sarah’s marriage in Belfast, together with his sister-in-law Mary-Ann Glare. Joseph Ogle was a leasehold farmer at Tower Hill, just as John Glare and Thomas Jones were. All three men had farms close to each other during the mid-1850s. Joseph was the husband of Eliza Glare, the daughter in the Glare family named after her mother, Eliza Mills.
Joseph Ogle purchased one of the original town blocks in the new township of Koroit in 1857, the year it was surveyed. In 1870, Joseph was elected to the Koroit Council in the first ever council elections. In 1871, the first council rate-book for the Koroit Council shows that he also ran a pub on the highway, near Dairy Town, called the Half-Way-House, where he had a store and five acres of land. Presumably it was called the Half-Way-House because it was midway between Warrnambool and Port Fairy.
In Tower Hill cemetery there is a substantial memorial headstone to Joseph Ogle and his wife, Eliza Glare. Eliza lived until she was eighty-two and she and Joseph had a number children. Joseph Ogle was born in Northumberland in 1834. He wasn’t a convict, but his father, John Ogle, had been convicted at Northumberland Quarter Sessions. John Ogle was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years in July 1840. He departed England in April 1841 for Van Diemen’s Land aboard the “Layton”. Joseph Ogle was about seven years old when his father John Ogle was arrested and taken from the family home.
In 1849, John Ogle’s wife, Rosanna, sailed to Van Diemen’s Land with her children to join her husband in Tasmania. She was forty-two years old and the five children ranged in age from twenty to just nine years of age. There had evidently been a child born the year in which John Ogle was sentenced and sent into exile. There are many cases of family members accompanying convicts when they were transported, or of family members who were reunited with their spouses after having come out to the colony in search of their partners. There were a number of officially supported convict family reunion schemes whereby spouses and children upon application were assisted to travel to the Australian colonies to be reunited with partners. Rosanna’s barely literate letters to the authorities explaining her situation and asking for help are quite moving.
It is unclear when the Ogle family crossed Bass Strait to Victoria but it must have been around 1850, not long after Rosanna’s reunion with her husband. John Ogle is buried in the Ogle family plot in Tower Hill Cemetery, together with his son Joseph, his daughter-in-law Eliza Glare, and some of Joseph and Eliza’s children. Offspring of Joseph and Eliza Ogle remained active in Koroit’s civic and social life for many years and the family continued to run local businesses until the early 1900s.
Thomas Jones, John Glare, and Joseph Ogle all lived in the vicinity of east Belfast in the early 1850s. Their farms were in the same general area. The men were all subscribers to the Villiers and Heytesbury Agricultural Society. Indeed, they appear listed one below the other in the 1855 list of subscribers to the Agricultural Society, as though all three men registered at the same time. They all had previous connections to Van Diemen’s Land. They were all non-conformist Protestants, and they may have attended church services together, quite possibly at the small Wesleyan and Methodist chapel in Rosebrook. This small stone church was built in 1851 but the congregation had been active for some years. At that time, Rosebrook was an important agricultural and industrial hamlet with a greater population and importance than is the case now.
William Watson, an early member of the Wesleyan congregation, wrote of conditions at Port Fairy in the mid-1840s. “Belfast consisted then of about fifty dwellings, mostly thatched huts, the streets were covered with grass and she-oaks, there was no money in the place, but business was done by “mullock” as exchange was called. For leather, I had to take wheat, bran, butter, cheese, pigs, and anything I could get. As pioneers we were satisfied and brought our mind to our circumstances. Colonists of the present day cannot form any conception of the trials and difficulties the early settlers had to endure.” This quote was included in the History of Victorian Methodism written by Reverends Blamiers and Smith and first published in 1886.
Thomas Jones, John Glare, and Joseph Ogle were likely also members of the same masonic lodge at Port Fairy known as the Loyal Prince Alfred Lodge. Their neighbour, Charles Mills, was a community leader and prominent member of this masonic lodge. He was an admired elder and leader of the Belfast community overall. One account of his death is as follows: “In November 1855, Charles Mills attended a Masonic Ball at Point Fairy, and on the following morning set out with several of his men in a wagon to collect posts for his farm. He became sleepy and tired during the journey and slept on the floor of the wagon. On his return to the farm he complained of a slight sunstroke and his wife summoned a medical practitioner. His condition was not considered to be serious, and his sudden collapse and death, from sunstroke, was unexpected.” Newspaper reports show that the death of this notable community leader had a great impact locally.
It was widely known that many people in Port Fairy had a Launceston connection. Thomas Jones seems to have had multiple connections to this community. He and others of this connected neighbourhood probably attended local events at Belfast together, such as the ploughing match held at Charles Mill’s farm in August 1854.
When Thomas married Sarah in late 1854 he was living near Rosebrook on his leasehold property east of the river. On the marriage certificate, both Sarah and her father, Duncan Campbell, have Rosebrook listed as their normal place of residence. Sarah was probably living with her father at Rosebrook when she was working for the Lindsay family at nearby Belfast. It was a longish walk from Rosebrook to Belfast. As a personal maid, Sarah may have also stayed overnight at the Lindsay household when she was attending Mrs Lindsay.
Marriage was likely seen as a great boon for Thomas Jones. He was not a wealthy man, far from it, and a sketchy past in Van Diemen’s Land was probably not the best recommendation to attract the well off and educated amongst the ladies of the community, not that there were too many of those. He was illiterate and relied upon his farming and hauling skills for his livelihood. These attributes were sufficient for Thomas to get by in frontier society but times were changing. Males outnumbered females in his community and Thomas was unlikely to have been at the front of the queue in the eyes of many women looking for an eligible match.
Thomas was perhaps fortunate in that at the time when his farm outside Rosebrook was doing well, an additional influx of immigrants arrived at Port Fairy. They came from many parts of England, Scotland and Ireland, and among them were many young women. Some came from backgrounds which were even more impoverished and disparaged than his own.
Duncan Campbell may well have considered Thomas Jones a suitable match for his daughter, Sarah. Duncan had recently arrived penniless in the colony with a bevy of unmarried daughters. He likely spoke English rather badly as a second language. He had several unmarried daughters and he likely felt he might do well to accept whatever reasonable match they could make, especially given his advancing years. Duncan was variously described as a shepherd or farmer. As far as Duncan was concerned, Thomas might have seemed quite an appropriate husband for Sarah.
Thomas was as well off as he had ever been, and perhaps better off than he would ever be again. The gold rushes had created an economic boom. By 1854 Thomas Jones was benefiting from the high price of grain and the strong price for labor in the local economy, given that so many working men had left for the goldfields
This was a boom time for farmers in the Southwest. The prices paid for grain and other agricultural produce had skyrocketed in 1853, and Thomas Jones may have had more money than at any other period of his life. James Bonwick in his account of his travels through the Western District, notes that due to the goldrushes, “The enormous price of flour and forage in 1852 and 1853, gave an immense impetus to farming near the southern ports.” Thomas had sufficient disposable income to pay the subscription fee for membership of the Villiers and Heytesbury Agricultural Society. The good times were not to last. Bonwick notes that by 1857 the economic boom of the early 1850s had dissipated.
It is not clear how Sarah and Thomas Jones first met after her arrival in Port Fairy, although it seems they lived close to each other. Perhaps the couple were matched through church or lodge connections or a common employer. At nineteen years of age, Sarah was still under her father’s guardianship to some extent, and she was still connected to her family. William Lindsay and his mother seem to have accepted the appropriateness of the match given that the couple were married at the Lindsay residence.
Most recently arrived “poor but eligible” young women were married off quite quickly. Women of Sarah Campbell’s age would have had some currency in early Belfast. Thomas had a small farm and a trade to rely upon. Thomas also had a circle of friends and acquaintances and Sarah and Thomas were compatible in terms of religion. Neither Duncan nor Thomas were of high social status but they no doubt hoped for a good outcome from the marriage.
Duncan Campbell was a poor immigrant, getting on in years, his wife long dead, and he had several further daughters to see married. He came to Australia with nothing but his children. As a cotter on Mull he may have had access to just a tiny plot of land on which to grow potatoes and raise a cow or two, or perhaps he may have been involved in kelp harvesting, a fast declining industry on the island.
The story of the scheme which saw Sarah Campbell come to the Western District tells us much about the wider forces at play in the British Empire of the 1850s.
How Sarah Campbell came to Port Fairy via the “Scottish Highland and Island Emigration Society.”
Transporting poor people across continents was a well-organised business of the British Empire, but it was not just about commerce. Migration policies have often been shaped by politics. For example, Irish migration to Australia became a matter of considerable political debate in the mid-nineteenth century. The continuation of British convict transportation to Australia also became highly contentious.
A significant number of people arrived in Australia without exercising any great agency in the matter. They came to Australia under various programs of “assisted” passage. On Patricia’s side, some of her Irish forebears were transferred from one colony and transplanted into another. There was great variation in the degree of agency exercised in their coming here.
Eighteen-year-old Sarah Campbell was relocated to Australia under one of the assisted emigration schemes that saw thousands of impoverished people arrive at Portland and Geelong. The “Scottish Highland and Island Emigration Society” took Sarah and her family from their home on Mull to a frontier society on the far side of the world.
In the Australian colonial period there was a distinction between those who arrived as free settlers and those who arrived as assisted emigrants. There was a tendency to valorize those middle-class British people who chose to voluntarily migrate to Australia. They were pioneers of a new Britania in the wilderness. These resourceful men were the embodiment of the free settler ideal according to the historiography of the empire boosters of the late nineteenth century.
Victoria was frequently described in the late nineteenth century as a shining example of colonial prosperity, wealth, and loyalty. It was conceived as the “fairest daughter of the British Empire.” In this fantasy, an idealized man was at the core of what was exceptional about the new colony. He was an extension of what was best about Britain: white, loyal, and a paragon of middle-class Victorian virtue. Needless to say, such ideology was a distorted reflection of the actualities of European migration to Australia. Those who came were not one people. There were great divisions of nationality, religion and class.
Migration was a systematically organized business governed by policy decisions taken at the highest levels. People who arrived at Portland as assisted immigrants were seen as subjects of the British Crown regardless of who they were or where they came from. They were pre-judged in terms of their perceived loyalty, moral standing, and work ethic. Assisted migration was not slavery, or penal transportation, or the worst forms of indentured servitude. The primary objective of assisted migration was not the well-being of the migrants. The primary objective was to address specific labor shortages, the maintenance of law and order, and the achievement of desired demographic outcomes based on race, nationality and religion.
Plantation projects were undertaken by Britain in various parts of the globe, not just in the Western District. It is perhaps precisely because the project in the Western District was such a “success” that the plantation nature of what was undertaken and the costs incurred are now largely hidden from view. The program of the “Scottish Highland and Island Emigration Society” is a salient example of how plantation proceeded. It was through this scheme that Sarah Campbell and her family came to the Southwest.
The specific operation of this scheme has been studied in detail by Eric Richards. Several other academics have written extensively about how the “Scottish Highland and Island Emigration Society” fits into Scottish history more generally. For example, Tom Devine’s 2018 book on the Scottish Clearances is quite remarkable. Devine makes it clear that the people who emigrated from that country were not all from the same linguistic and cultural background, and differed markedly from each other in terms of class, education and religion.
Historical developments in Scotland are particularly significant in understanding the genealogy of the Western District. In the 1820s when an influx of middle-class Scottish families migrated to Tasmania, the majority of the workers available to them were English convicts or emancipists. Assigned convict servants were promised to the free settlers. By contrast, in the 1840s and 1850s, when a wave of Scottish squatters came to Victoria, a considerable proportion of the subaltern workers made available to them were assisted immigrants from the Scottish Highlands and Islands, and also from Ireland.
There were many Scots among the immigrant working men and women of the Western District, arriving in distinct waves. There was a wave of Scottish migration in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and then another wave of Scottish assisted migration in the 1850s. Some of the workers who arrived in the second wave came through the program of the “Scottish Highland and Island Emigration Society”, although by no means all Scottish migrants came to Victoria in this way.
Not all Scottish workers arriving in Victoria remained as servants and laborers. Some become squatters themselves, while others became established in the professions and in business. Levels of education among the Scots from the Lowlands tended to be higher, which aided their social mobility.
The experience of Lionel’s great-grandmother, Sarah Campbell, is a study concerning the ramifications of immigration policy for ordinary people. Arriving in Victoria in 1853 with her family, Sarah belonged to a social class known as cottars. Impoverished people from the far Western coasts of Scotland were relocated to Victoria. At home they were surplus to requirements but in the post-frontier society of Western Victoria their labor was in demand.
“The Scottish Highland and Island Emigration Society” was established in 1852 through private subscription and sought to address famine and destitution in the Highlands by facilitating the emigration of surplus members of the lower classes to the Australian colonies. The Society oversaw the relocation of thousands of impoverished Gaels to Australia. The people “assisted” in this way belonged to a distinct ethnic community with its own language and traditions.
This transfer of population was promoted by influential figures within the British government and was presented to the public as a humanitarian gesture in response to the imminent threat of starvation. The threat of mass starvation was real enough. In 1848–1849, the British government started delivering cheap grain to starving families in settlements along the western Scottish coast due to the dire conditions there.
For the government, the long-term solution to the structural problems on the islands was thought to lie in the systematic emigration of poor families from the region. Emigration organised through the “The Scottish Highland and Island Emigration Society” emerged as the preferred option. Relocating cotter families to rural parts of Australia was seen both as commercially expedient and as a humanitarian response. A well-regulated imperial labor market was acting rationally and responsively in redistributing surplus labor in one place to meet demand in another.
The Emigration Society was backed by very senior British government officials, and they ensured that a flotilla of ships were mustered to bring emigrants to Australia. The ships pressed into service included British naval vessels refitted to carry the selected emigrants from the Scottish Isles to Australia. On the islands, estate managers confronted the poorest families with a bleak choice. Either they could be cleared from their homes and workplaces and left destitute to wander the countryside in search of some means of survival, or they could accept passage on an emigrant ship bound for Australia, a distant land about which they likely knew very little.
Most of the cotters could not read and many had limited English, and most left the islands with nothing. The language of the powerful decided their fate. Large-scale emigrationwas strongly supported by Sir Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury in London. He saw emergency food supplies as a “useless palliative” and thought that only emigration to Australia, or to Canada, would provide the permanent relief needed. From its inception, the program of the Society was quasi-governmental in its organization and implementation, and from an Australian perspective is best seen as a plantation project.
Prior to 1833, the Trevelyan family owned more than 1,000 slaves spread across six sugar plantations on Grenada. Charles Trevelyan never set foot in the Caribbean but a good deal of his family wealth derived from there. After the 1833 abolition of slavery in the British Empire, the Trevelyans received a very substantial amount of money as compensation for their loss. Charles Trevelyan was a devoutly religious man of Evangelical persuasion. His religious belief was welded to his commitment to the free-market and to small government.
Nevertheless, when it came to his own interests, Trevelyan supported the government’s decisive intervention in the market to ensure that he and other slave owners were compensated handsomely for the loss of their slaves. It is perhaps not surprising that Charles Trevelyan was educated at the East India Company’s training college in Hertfordshire, where white supremacy was inculcated.
Charles Trevelyan is most remembered for his poor response to supporting destitute Irish people during the famine in Ireland. He held a strong belief in laissez-faire economics and in the Irish case he felt the market was best placed to sort out who should survive. He wrote disparaging remarks about the Irish in a letter to an Irish peer, stating that “the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson”. His view with regard the Scottish Gaels was hardly better. As Tom Devine notes, “He regarded both Irish and Highland Celts as profoundly racially inferior to Anglo-Saxons.”
With respect to the Irish, he believed the government should not interfere with a natural process of the attritional death of the weakest in society. He argued that this type of rational policy had been tested to good effect in British India, where hundreds of thousands had starved in a recent famine, and so there was no reason to suppose why it should not also apply to Ireland.
Trevelyan’s response to the impending famine in the Scottish Highlands was rather different to his approach to the Irish famine, perhaps because of some residual sympathy for those of his own stern Protestant belief. He may have felt some obligation to the Presbyterian people of the Scottish Islands. Between 1852 and 1857, the Scottish Highlands and Islands Emigration Society assisted almost five thousand men, women and children to leave the Highlands and Islands. The task was sold as economically justifiable because these people were wanted by landowners in Australia.
The background to the famine is historically complex, but beginning in the late 1840s, a succession of potato crop failures precipitated widespread hunger across the Scottish Isles. This was compounded by the decline of gleaning industries such as kelp harvesting. Because of earlier economic policies, members of the cottar class had become increasingly dependent on the potato crop, which could be cultivated on small household plots. By the mid-1840s, cotters on small plots relied on potatoes for at least three-quarters of their diet. The catastrophic failure of successive potato crops precipitated severe economic and social hardship.
The wool industry in Australia was to a great extent integrated with the Scottish and English wool and textile industries. Government officials and estate managers concluded that many of the cotters should be removed to the new colony of Victoria, where wool production had emerged as the most profitable primary industry. Policies designed to force emigration were pursued and in the end the poorest people had little alternative but to leave. The families deemed particularly attractive for the Australian labor market were those which had a preponderance of daughters.
The Scottish Highland and Island Emigration Society laid down specific criteria for assistance in their “Rules of the Society.” Preference was given to assisting entire large families over single men. Preference was especially given where the majority of the children in a family were female. The Scottish landlords were expected to contribute towards the payments made by the Society to cover the cost of the emigrants’ passage to Australia, as a down payment for being rid of them. Some of the Australian colonies contributed funds to the Society so that they might receive a share of the emigrants.
British corporations which had invested in the Australian wool industry provided finance. The Queen and other British royalty, themselves large landowners in Scotland and England and with substantial interests in the wool industry in both Britain and Australia, also provided funds. They hoped to set an example for other wealthy aristocrats and gentry to follow.
The emigrants were required to “repay” the Emigration Society a proportion of the funds which had been allocated for their passage. Repayments were made by docking a proportion of the wages paid to these immigrant workers by their Australian employers. In practice, the enforcement of this requirement to repay the cost of passage seems to have been rather lax.
This exercise in demographic transfer was designed to engineer a set of specific social outcomes. The transfer of population was highly regulated by governments in Britain and Australia. Regulations were issued by a body called “Her Majesty’s Colonial Land and Emigration Commission”. The commissioners stipulated that the emigrants should meet specific moral and physical requirements which they called their “Qualifications of Emigrants.”
The first requirement was that “emigrants must be of those callings which are in most demand in the colonies. They must be sober, industrious, of general good moral character, and have been in the habit of working for wages. They must also be in good health and free from all bodily or mental defects. The candidates who will receive a preference are respectable young women trained to domestic or farm service, and families in which there is a preponderance of females.”
The Emigration Society was unusual in that it was specifically designed to assist the emigration of family groups to provide labor for the pastoral industry in Australia. It focused on sending suitable young women with a view to promoting population growth of a specific kind. There was a desire for rural people who were not of convict background. By contrast, most previous programs of assisted immigration to Australia had focused on unmarried people who were mostly from English urban or semi-urban environments.
Pastoralism in Scotland and Western Victoria had many things in common. Capital and ownership were linked in many ways. Certain associations and values linked men in both places. Many of the most successful squatters in the Western District were Lowland Presbyterians with strongly held Calvinist views on how a good society should be ordered. Quite a few had gotten their start in Van Dieman’s Land and then expanded to Victoria, but they also had ongoing connections with the Scottish wool and textile industries.
Nearly one thousand families were removed to Australia via the program of the “Scottish Highland and Island Emigration Society.” This was but one of the assisted emigration schemes bringing impoverished immigrants to Western Victoria. Many of Patricia’s Irish forebears were assisted to the colony through broadly similar schemes, although Irish immigration was more controversial and was more resisted in some quarters.
It would be interesting to survey just how many people now residing in the small towns of Western Victoria are descended from transmigrated families who arrived from the fringes of Scotland and from rural Ireland through the various programs of assisted migration. Many others arrived as a consequence of convict transportation, a system of population transfer which had many aspects in common with the assisted migration schemes. In Australia, historians have rarely characterised British imperial population transfer from the center to the periphery as government sponsored ethnic transfer.
Those selected to emigrate under the program of the Scottish Highland and Island Emigration Society were generally the poorest from each community. The majority of the emigrants were impoverished cottars and Duncan Campbell and his family seem to have been of this class. Cottars held small lots of land in an arrangement of co-dependency with small tenants in coastal hamlets. They were dependent on small leaseholders who were in turn dependent on the landowning laird or his agent. When the potato crop on which they were dependent failed the cottars were extremely vulnerable.
Underpinning the mass transfer of population was the realization on the part of Scottish estate owners that they could make more money from extensive sheep runs than from renting small plots to multiple low value tenants. This process of “improvement” created larger farms with fewer tenants. The Highlanders were considered culturally different from the Lowlanders, and natively spoke a separate language and maintained a distinctive society. Yet increasingly, nouveau riche Lowlanders were making decisions which determined the constitution of Highland society.
In 1852, the first year of the Emigration Society scheme, two thousand five hundred and sixty nine Scottish islands people emigrated to Australia on twelve ships contracted for the purpose. It was felt that such emigrants from remote Hebridean locations were well suited for the remote squatter runs of the Western District. Most were taken off their islands in coastal trading vessels, and then had to survive an open deck voyage to ports such as Liverpool, whereupon they were loaded onto emigrant ships bound for Australia.
During the five years of the Emigration Society’s program, almost five thousand people were assisted to emigrate. In 1857, the last year of the scheme, there were just two hundred emigrants and in 1858 the Society was dissolved. Conditions on the islands had indeed improved once the population was drastically lowered, and the rural labor shortages in Australia had become less acute as gold fever wound down and other sources of immigration filled labor gaps.
The numbers of people transported may not seem large, but in the context of the then low populations in rural districts of Western Victoria, these people and their subsequent Australian families greatly contributed to the overall population of rural Victoria. An examination of local football and netball teams clearly attests to the contribution of people of Scottish descent, many of whose forebears came out on assisted migration schemes. Less discussed is the enduring trauma associated with this population transfer.
Thephycological effect of forced dislocation on people and families is largely unexamined to this day. What constitutes inter-generational trauma and how it is transmitted is a matter of controversy. Whatever the cause, the consequence of trauma and dislocation for people’s welfare is real enough. Many emigrants did not survive or they lived lives of poverty, uncertainty, and misery. Trauma from displacement is not generally talked about. People are encouraged to just get over it and be grateful for what this country has to offer.
Details of the men and women transmigrated under the “Scottish Highland and Island Emigration Society” are recorded in the Society’s passenger lists. These records still exist and allow us to learn something of Sarah Campbell and her family. The inventory lists kept by the Society record the surname, first name, age, residence, and estate of the people whose emigration to Australia was assisted under the scheme. In some ways, the bureaucratic and administrative process was not dissimilar to that employed when transferring convicts. Records were arranged by ship’s name. They list the departure port, departure date, and the arrival port. Individuals were generally listed as part of their family group, sometimes with notes on their health, appearance and economic situation.
The emigrants travelled on ships chartered by the Emigration Society. They travelled on twenty-six different ships on thirty-one separate voyages. The majority sailed via the port of Liverpool. The size of the groups varied. The largest group were seven hundred and fifty eight passengers who set sail from Campbeltown, Skye, bound for Victoria aboard the H.M.S. Hercules. Many of these people did not actually arrive on that ship as they had to be disembarked in Ireland due to an outbreak of disease aboard the vessel. Voyages could be dangerous. For example, out of six hundred and fifteen immigrants on the 1852 voyage of the “Ticonderoga”, one hundred and sixty-eight died, including eighty-two children under seven.
By far the most common arrival port for Highland and Island Emigration Society ships was Portland Bay, followed by Geelong. Other ports also received some immigrants but the Western District was the favoured destination, due to the rapid development of the wool industry and the impact of the gold rushes on the existing workforce. The Victorian gold rushes had resulted in a great shortage of labor and the landowners were crying out for suitable rural workers.
The basis of selection, the gender mix, and the indebtedness inherent in the design of the Society’s program was meant to ensure that workers could be induced to stay with their employers, at least for a time. Emigrants were expected to repay the “loans” associated with their passage. It was believed that young women were more constrained in where they could go and would be easier to control than other cohorts. Males with females family members to look after would not rush to the diggings, it was hoped.
The program had a nation-building dimension to it in line with what some commentators demanded of immigration policy. When Victoria became a colony in 1851, it was hoped that importing young women of “decent” backgrounds would promote the establishment of decent families, free of criminal associations and Protestant in their faith.
Sarah Campbell arrived in Portland in November 1853 aboard the “New Zealander”. The ship departed Liverpool with three hundred and fifty nine emigrants and the voyage to Portland lasted one hundred days, with a stopover in South Africa. Once the ship was anchored in Portland Bay, passengers were put ashore. After a health check, the passengers were processed by an immigration officer. At both Portland there was an immigration station close to the wharves where people were processed prior to assignment to employers.
Not all the emigrants who came out on the “New Zealander” were sponsored by the “Highland and Island Emigration Society.” Shipboard travel from the Scottish islands to Liverpool was wholly filled with those sponsored by the Society, but onward voyage to Australia was on vessels whose passengers were travelling under various schemes of assisted migration, including that of “Highland and Island Emigration Society.”
Sarah Campbell left the ship with her family on 5 December 1853. It was just as well they disembarked when they did. On 16 December 1853, fire broke out on the “New Zealander” while she was in Portland harbour. She burnt to the waterline and sank. Sarah and her family were taken to Belfast, where demand for labor was great in 1853.
On occasion, when vessels arrived in Portland, squatters in the vicinity of Port Fairy were so desperate to get their hands on newly arrived migrants that they rode to Portland themselves to waylay the passengers. There were instances where squatters and proprietors would spirit immigrants away to their properties, without all the proper arrival procedures being completed.
The archive of the Highland and Island Emigration Society has a record for Sarah Campbell. She is described as an “Eligible young woman.” Her age was listed as eighteen, with a birth year of 1835. Her residence on Mull is a place called Dervaig Quinish, which is a stunningly beautiful location on a peninsular on the north coast of the island. When she left Mull, Sarah may have already started work away from the rest of her family, as the other members were then living at a place called Salen, a village on the sound between Mull and the mainland.
The Mull Historical & Archaeological Society website provides some insights into what was happening at Dervaig Quinish when Sarah and her family left the island, via the following entry: “Glengorm Castle lies approximately 8.8 km from the junction with the Tobermory to Dervaig road. Situated on the northern tip of the Isle of Mull, it has commanding views of up to 80 km to the Outer Hebridean islands of Uist, Rhum and Canna. The castle was built in 1860 by James Forsyth of Dervaig. It is said that the laird asked a local woman what she thought would be a good name for the castle. She suggested Glengorm and he agreed, obviously not knowing that this was the Gaelic for Blue Glen – a reference to the blue smoke that filled the air when so many of the houses were burned down. Legend has it that one of the evictees put a curse on James Forsyth saying he would die before the castle was finished. In 1863, just before completion of the castle, he was killed in a riding accident and his son inherited the property.”
James Forsyth purchased his new estate at Dervaig Quinish in 1847 from Hugh MacLean of Coll. The McLean Clan were the traditional lairds of Coll Island, but also owned land on Mull, and they had been the lords on these islands for generations. James Forsyth was not a local. He was born in Jamaica, where his father owned a slave plantation. When James died, his will of 1863 indicates that he had property in Edinburgh as well as estates at Quinish on Mull and on the mainland just across the Mull Sound. According to the Legacies of British Slavery website his parents for many decades owned slaves at their Leighfield Estate on Jamaica, and it is noted that in 1835 upon the abolition of slavery his mother received compensation for thirty-seven slaves she owned on that island.
When James Forsyth purchased his estate on Mull in 1847, Sarah and her family were still there, but not for much longer. By 1853 she was gone, together with many others of her community, their crude homes destroyed. Shortly after Sarah’s departure, Forsyth commenced building his immense modern castle at Dervaig Quinish, and today “Glengorm” sits in splendid isolation in an abandoned landscape, with only a few sheep for company.
It is ironic that capital accumulated through slavery in the Caribbean, and invested in Scottish financial institutions, should be used to fund clearances on Mull at a time when similar sources of capital were funding pastoral estates in the Western District, where clearances of Indigenous people had also recently happened. After being cleared from her own country, Sarah Campbell ended up working for people who were involved in clearances of Indigenous people in this land.
Duncan Campbell, Sarah’s father, was described as a “widower with a poor family but very suitable for the Colony”. The record for Duncan lists seven children in the family group. In all, there were five girls and two boys, spanning ages from twenty-five to eleven years old. Duncan Campbell’s wife, Janet, had died sometime after the birth of her last child in 1843 and before the census of 1851. This census is useful for reference as it compiled lists of the members of the families on Mull prior to this mass emigration. The records of the Emigration Society read something like an inventory of stock, but at least genealogists now have a source of data available to trace forebears.
Upon arrival in the Southwest, most assisted immigrants were assigned to large landowner, some of whom had paid a contribution to the scheme. William Lindsay was likely a subscriber to the scheme. Sarah Campbell was assigned to the Lindsay family as a domestic maid to Mrs Lindsay, just the kind of servant girl the family needed
Shadows of the Western District 