Sarah Campbell came to Australia under the program of the “Scottish Highland and Island Emigration Society.” When Sarah arrived in Belfast at the start of 1854, her role was to provide care to an elderly free settler lady, Mrs Lindsay, whose son, William Lindsay, was rapidly establishing a pastoral empire on land usurped from its Indigenous owners over the course of the previous decade.
William Lindsay and his Carmichael relatives held a portfolio of stations which encompassed the Union, Quamby, Harton Hills and Retreat runs. The leases on Union Station and Harton Hills, in particular, were taken up by the Carmichael family in the early 1840s, at a time of considerable violence, although skirmishes and conflict likely had already preceded the taking up of these runs. Lindsay married Grace Carmichael, the sister of the three brothers who first took up Union Station at Woolsthorpe.
Under the program of the “Scottish Highland and Island Emigration Society,” thousands of impoverished men, women and children were cleared from their traditional villages and transmigrated to the Australian colonies. They were allegedly at risk of starvation. While this description of a dire economic situation had some foundation, nevertheless it disguised an agenda whereby subaltern people were cleared from a place where they were not wanted and moved to a place on a distant continent where their labor was in demand.
Those brought out by this immigration scheme were expected to work for Australian employers upon their arrival. Some squatters, proprietors and landowners in the Western District subscribed to the scheme as sponsors. The pastoral and agricultural industries were expanding, yet there was a significant shortage of subaltern labor given that many working men had left for the diggings.
Landowners in Scotland, eager to rid themselves of surplus tenant families, financially supported the scheme. Concurrently, significant numbers of Australian pastoralists also contributed funds to the “Scottish Highland and Island Emigration Society.” There was a mutually beneficial arrangement made between British and Australian landholders to send impoverished Gaels to the Southwest to work on rural properties.
William Lindsay and his mother were beneficiaries of the scheme, given that they evidently secured the services of Sarah Campbell after she arrived at Port Fairy. Immigration depots at Portland and later at Port Fairy were established on the foreshore from where assisted immigrants were processed prior to being assigned to their employers.
The arrival ledger of the “New Zealander” shows where many of the immigrants were sent to, listing the names and locations of many prominent landholders in the Southwest. Belfast features very prominently as a destination where immigrants were sent, although there were many other locations as well. In the case of Duncan Campbell and his children, no employer is explicitly noted, the entry simply stating that the family left Portland “on their own account,” likely indicating that someone met them at the depot and took them in hand. This was not uncommon.
William Lindsay first arrived in the Western District in the early 1840s as a young man of around nineteen years of age. He apparently travelled from Scotland with his mother, and so it seems that he intended to stay and settle. An obituary of William Lindsay published in the Warrnambool Standard in 1898 mentions that he travelled to Australia on the “John Cooper”, the same vessel that carried the young woman who would later become his wife. His arrival at Port Phillip on this vessel seems uncertain, nevertheless it is likely that William and his mother were among the nineteen anonymous “other passengers” in steerage whose names were not recorded. Whatever the exact circumstances of his arrival, through his marriage to Grace Carmichael he consolidated his connections to her family.
The Carmichael brothers, James, George, and William were from Lanarkshire. The siblings arrived in Van Diemen’s land in 1839, where they promptly acquired a flock of sheep. They obviously had someone’s money to spend. The brothers then crossed Bass Strait to Geelong, from whence they overlanded their sheep to the Southwest. It is likely that they employed a team of emancipist shepherds to drive their sheep hundreds of kilometers, although how many sheep they actually still had with them when they first took up Union station is uncertain.
The Carmichael brothers may have helped drive their livestock to the Southwest. Some squatters were chided for the amount of physical work they did in the company of employees of very low rank. It was said in jest that at a glance they even started to look like their generally unkempt shepherds.
When the Carmichael brothers travelled through the Western District, looking for grazing land that had not yet been claimed by earlier squatters, the First Nations peoples of the Hopkins River catchment were being progressively eliminated, and were rapidly declining in number, falling before the weapons of the Europeans and becoming day-by-day more insignificant amidst the influx of outsiders.
The Carmichael siblings were intent on “going outside,” in other words going beyond where other Europeans were in occupation of country. By the end of 1839 this meant travelling west of the Hopkins River to the more modest streams of the Southwest. Runs based on the water holes of the Spring Creek and the upper reaches of the Moyne River were still available. Additionally, the swamps and waterholes of the Eumeralla River country provided some opportunities. There was no time to lose. Earlier squatters had already staked claims to some of this territory, landing at Portland and Port Fairy with their flocks.
In his reports and journals, George Augustus Robertson, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, makes clear that the decline in First Nations peoples corelates closely with the expansion of the squatters, who first cleared and then locked up the land wherever they became established.
Given that their capital was at risk, the Carmichael brothers needed to stake their claims and secure their runs before all the suitable land was taken. They first took up Union Station on Spring Creek in 1840, and then they moved to take up more land further west on the Eumeralla River country.
A record in the newspaper archives shows a connection between William Lindsay and William Carmichael from 1843. There is a letter in William Lindsay’s handwriting from that year which shows that he helped William Carmichael with the legal paperwork involved in obtaining an extensive squatter run on the Eumeralla River near the present day town of Macarther. Although still a young man at the time, Lindsay would appear to have had some professional knowledge of how this was to be done. It is unclear whether William was based in the Southwest at that time or whether he was still based in Melbourne.
All three Carmichael bothers did manage to become prominent squatters in the Southwest. The husbands of the two Carmichael sisters did as well. In many ways this enterprise was a family business, although the source of their start-up capital is quite obscure.
William Carmichael’s run on the Eumeralla was called Harton Hills, carved from the original 1840 Eumeralla leasehold claimed by the Bolden brothers. After the Boldens vacated, James Hunter acquired the leasehold on the Eumeralla runs. Hunter then sold the lease over part of the original Eumeralla run to William Carmichael. James Hunter and his brothers were among the most rapacious of all the squatters.
William Carmichael’s occupation of country along the Eumeralla River coincides with a change in the name of the run. Previously called Blackfellows Creek, Carmichael adopted the name Harton Hills for his run. In North Yorkshire there is a hamlet called Harton close to the Derwent River and perhaps there is a connection to that location.
William Carmichael’s headstation was just outside the modern day town of Macarther, although the station predates the town. This run covers some of the territory over which a conflict known as the Eumeralla War was fought.
It is perhaps apt that the town of Macarther in the Southwest is named after a gentleman of the Macarther family. John and Elizabeth Macarthur are known as the pioneers of the Australian wool industry. When a town on the Eumeralla River was surveyed in 1857, it was named after a son of this famous family. Prior to the survey, a hamlet called Eumeralla already existed at this spot on the river. The first building there was called the Eumeralla Inn.
The town surveyed in 1857 was named after General Edward Macarthur, John and Elizabeth Macarthur’s eldest son. Edward was Victoria’s Crown Administrator for twelve months at the time the town was surveyed. He wrote several tracts on how best to colonize a continent, expressed in papers such as Colonial Policy of 1840 and 1841, (London, 1841), and Brief Remarks on Colonization, (London, 1846). These are of interest to those examining the history of the pastoral industry. They are also pertinent to the debates within colonial Australia with regard to migration policy. The controversy over the best sort of immigrants to bring to rural Australia was a hotly debated topic among the elite.
Edward Macarthur lamented that the British government explicitly prohibited the importation of indentured laborers from India as a source of subaltern workers. The gentlemen of the colony were forced to rely solely on people migrated from Britain and Ireland. In 1841 he wrote: “The Australian colonist, it should be borne in mind, is debarred by a British Act of Parliament from availing himself of his proximity to India, and drawing thence a cheap and plentiful supply of labourers. He is therefore limited by statute in the choice of his market, and becomes of necessity dependent on immigration from the United Kingdom.” Macarther wanted greater flexibility in the migration of labor to Australia.
Edward Macarthur made a clear distinction between “colonists,” who were gentlemen, and the poor white emigrants he considered little more than indentured servants. Nevertheless, he was a great advocate for planting surplus British people in the Australian colonies, partly as a means to expand the market for British exports. In 1841 he wrote: “At the present moment, fully thirty thousand, perhaps even fifty thousand people, would find ample employment and comfortable subsistence in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. By judicious measures, all the Australian colonies together might, at no distant period, possess five millions of British subjects, whose demand for our manufactures would, according to the ratio of that demand in past years, amount to fifty million sterling.”
While Edward Macarthur was of the opinion that mass migration would be of great commercial benefit to Britian and to the Empire generally, he was also of the view that it would be to the personal benefit of the immigrants, provided they worked hard for their employers. He envisaged that an exclusive cohort of superior gentlemen should hold extensive pastoral estates and that this class of superior person should constitute the backbone on which his vision of a new Britannia might be built.
The fine country mansions set in the countryside of the colony’s pastoral districts were to him representative of Britain’s finest settlers. He advocated for the permanent primacy of a quasi-aristocratic caste. An insignificant number of primitive Aboriginal people should not be allowed to impede a great colonial enterprise.
While an aristocratic class did not materialize in Australia, nevertheless in parts of the Western District a debased form of gentry rule had some approximation to Macarthur’s ideal scenario. Edward Macarthur was by no means just an armchair commentator without influence. Two of his relatives sat on the Legislative Council, together with several close friends and colleagues. His brother James Macarthur sat on the Council, together with his cousin Hannibal Macarthur. Captain Foster Fyans, the Crown Lands Commissioner for the Portland Bay District, was a good friend of Hannibal Macarthur.
Conflict was particularly significant on the Eumeralla runs. William Carmichael obtained his Harton Hills portion of the original Eumeralla run in 1843. The remaining part of the Eumeralla run, the section not acquired by William Carmichael from James Hunter, was taken over by Benjamin Boyd, well known as an enslaver of Pacific Islander people. Boyd wanted to import Indian indentured servants to his runs, which was not allowed by law. Boyd leased the bulk of the Eumeralla run until 1846, by which stage Eumeralla had been further divided into Eumeralla West and Eumeralla East.
When Boyd sold out, the worst of the violence had subsided and few Aboriginal people remained on this country, where previously there must have been many hundreds at least. After resistance subsided in the wake of the deaths of the main leaders of the resistance, there are accounts of armed parties of mounted gentlemen roaming the countryside looking for unconvinced blacks to terrorize. Oral tales of widespread massacre persisted for decades amongst the white working class.
If any place in Australia should be renamed, it might well be this town named after a gentleman of the reprehensible Macarther family. While renaming places might be appropriate from one perspective, it would also be very divisive. It would not necessarily contribute to a greater understanding of our shared history, or educate people on the role genocide plays in our national story. Locals would be upset at having their community discussed in such a negative way by outsiders with no contingent understanding and with no empathy for people now living there. For those wishing to “decolonize” “so-called Australia,” the feelings and interests of local people in the Southwest is of no concern whatsoever.
As children, the author and his siblings would occasionally visit relatives in Macarther, although the main attraction for us was always the scenic Lake Surprise at nearby Mount Eccles. This landscape is now part of the Budj Bim National Heritage Park. Merv Nield, Aunty Mary’s husband, was from a Macarthur family. Other relatives lived in the town, including Archibald Bowman, who was practically blind.
Grace and Elizabeth Carmichael both arrived at Port Phillip in 1841 aboard the “John Cooper”, and travelled as steerage passengers, possibly as bounty immigrants. The “John Cooper” departed from Greenock in 1840 and stopped over in Cork, Lisbon, and Port Adelaide before arriving at Port Phillip. The Adelaide Chronicle newspaper of 10 March 1841 has an entry concerning her arrival at Port Adelaide after “a very unfortunate passage of upwards of five months, during which time she was no less than four times dismasted. … she was caught in a hurricane off the coast of Spain, during which she lost everything above the lower masts. She then put into Lisbon, where she lay six weeks, and sailed thence on the 22nd November. On the line she was again caught in a squall, and lost her main and fore top-gallant masts; and again off the Cape, she lost her fore top-mast and top gallant-mast. She brings about ninety passengers: cabin, intermediate and steerage. Several are for this place, and the rest go on to Port Phillip.”
While William Lindsay’s obituary states that he too travelled aboard the “John Cooper,” there is no record of his arrival at Port Phillip on this vessel, although there were a number of passengers in steerage on the vessel whose names were not recorded. William would have been around eighteen years old when the John Cooper sailed from Greenock and perhaps nineteen when he arrived. Interestingly, Mrs Lindsay’s maiden name was said to have been Kath Ritchie, the surname being prominent in the squatter community of the Southwest, although it is not known whether she was related to any of them.
It is perhaps worthwhile noting a report published in the Geelong Advertiser the month after the “John Cooper” arrived at Port Phillip with Grace and Elizabeth Carmichael aboard, and perhaps with William Lindsay and his mother also aboard. The article ventilates the frustrations of many colonists regarding the government’s policies in relation to the “blacks” and takes aim at the indulgent policy orientation and the incompetent personnel of the Aboriginal Protectorate. Under the ominous headline “THE BLACKS,” the Geelong Advertiser of 27 March 1841 contains the following disturbing report: “This never-ending subject becomes more and more urgent upon our notice every week; and if any doubt ever existed in the public mind as to the necessity for entirely abandoning the present system, and commencing a different course of legislation for the blacks, it must now be cleared away.
The intercourse between settlers and aborigines is invariably pernicious in its results. The invaders are generally divided into two large classes — the Exterminators by cruelty, and the Exterminators by indulgence. The two classes are alike injurious — the pseudo-philanthropist will effect the destruction of a native race, as surely as the most sanguinary hunter. The chief duty of a government therefore ought to consist in preventing as much as possible any collision between the whites and blacks, until time shall reconcile the former to acknowledge their inferior fellow creatures, and wean the latter from their savage propensities, so as to fit them for a higher range of duties, and to induce a different set of wants in order to make their interests less opposite to those of their more civilised conquerors.
That the Government had this laudable object in view, when the Protectorate was first organised, we do not call in question: but that it has turned out a decided failure must be acknowledged even by its most sanguine originators. The causes of this inefficiency (not to press the various charges of a more criminal nature), are partly to be traced to the measures and partly to the men. The plan was badly contrived and badly executed – nothing was good about it but its OBJECT and THAT can never he attained but by completely remodeling the MEANS.
The system pursued by Colonel Gawler, revolting though it be in appearance (namely, shooting a few blacks in a summary manner, to strike terror into the remainder,) will, in the long run be found to have a more merciful tendency than the “blank-cartridge system” of our government. By the meaningless tampering manner which has been displayed, all the difficulties which naturally beset the question have been greatly aggravated; the conduct of the government has been marked by the most wanton cruelty and the most foolish indulgence. The consequence is a universal, mutual, and too well-grounded distrust between the settlers and the aborigines. … It is not only in Geelong that these grievances exist, as the following remarks, published simultaneously in Sydney and Adelaide, will show.”
Grace Carmichael’s three brothers were already in the Southwest since 1839. William Lindsay married Grace at the Presbyterian Church in Portland in 1846, and their first son was born at Union Station in 1846. Grace was several years older than her husband. Their first son, also called William, was reportedly the second “white child” born at Woolsthorpe, an observation meant as a credit to the family. William Lindsay and Grace took over the lease of the neighbouring Quamby run in 1854. This was the year in which Thomas Jones and Sarah Campbell were married at the Lindsay’s town house in Belfast, where Sarah worked as a maid to Mrs. Lindsay. Thomas Jones was just a few years younger than William Lindsay.
The Carmichael siblings have long been memorialized as the “first pioneers” to settle in the Woolsthorpe district. In 1840, the brothers collectively took out a license to pasture stock on 25,600 acres of country at Spring Creek, as the Woolsthorpe district was known at the time. The Carmichael’s Union station was officially recorded as Portland Bay Lease Number Sixty-One. In 1843 this leasehold run at Spring Creek was still listed in the name of the Carmichael family, meaning that the family had made it through the worst of the economic downturn that afflicted the pastoral industry the previous year. It was said that it mostly was only those with deep pockets who survived this crisis.
As the fiancée of Grace Carmichael, William Lindsay was an integral part of the family by the mid-1840s. Another gentleman, David Kennedy, courted Elizabeth Carmichael, the remaining sister of Grace and her brothers. After David and Elizabeth married, Kennedy’s interests were also integrated into the affairs of the family.
George and William Carmichael departed Scotland from Greenock in October 1838. Greenock is a port on the Clyde Estuary near Glasgow and its docks were famously associated with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and later with the mass migration of Irish and Scots to the “New World.” In the initial decades of the nineteenth century, Greenock was mainly a trading port for goods such as sugar and cotton. Ships sailed from there to West Africa and from there carried people to be enslaved in Britain’s American colonies. On the return voyage to Scotland the vessels carried the fruits of enslavement.
By 1838 Greenock was a major port of embarkation to Australia for both impoverished emigrants and for middle-class free settlers alike. Slave trading in British colonies had officially ceased in the years before the Carmichaels left, but the port remained an important piece of infrastructure for the mass transfer of people. Wool from the Australian colonies was loaded onto vessels making the return voyage.
The Carmichael brothers sailed to Hobart aboard the “Potentate,” a trading vessel on her maiden voyage laden with supplies and prospective settlers. The vessel arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in February 1839. The Carmichael boys brought their youth and ambition with them. The plan seems to have been to obtain sheep in Tasmania, transfer to the mainland, take up a run “outside,” and once established in the wilderness bring their sisters across to join them.
The “Potentate” carried Scottish emigrants at a time when there was a surge in Scottish migration to the colonies. In 1838, when this surge in migration experienced a peak, over three thousand Scottish people of all classes left for Australia. The “Potentate” was one of approximately fifteen ships which left from Scottish ports that year under various government and “private bounty” schemes bringing emigrants to Australia. Generally, about fifteen percent of Scottish emigrants of the period 1837 to 1842 arrived unassisted, whereas the remainder came under assisted passage of one form or another. The situation changed after 1842 because in that year the government’s bounty scheme for the assisted emigration of British subjects to New South Wales was halted due to the depressed economic conditions in the colonies.
The Electric Scotland website has sections headed “Scotland Emigration to Australia 1815 – 1832” and “Large Scale Emigration to Australia after 1832” both written by David S MacMillan. MacMillan’s careful examination of the archive shows that the British government pursued a systematic policy of emigration in the nineteenth century that constitutes a form of organised colonial plantation. People from the “mother country” were transferred to a distant continent. The original inhabitants of the land paid the ultimate price for this enterprise, and of course many of those transported as assisted emigrants suffered lives of misery, madness, and early death.
In terms of gentry emigration from Scotland, it is clear that what was envisaged for the Port Phillip colony was “a system of landlordship that would be very similar to that existing in the Scottish Lowlands.” The financial godfather of the settlement of the Port Phillip District, East India merchant and estate proprietor George Mercer, was explicit about this when he applied for land in the colonies. In his application of 1831 he outlined his plans for “forming an establishment for some of the younger members of my family in Van Diemen’s Land”.
As it turned out, the younger members of his family ended up as squatters and proprietors in Victoria, in addition to expanding the family’s landed interests in Tasmania. In Van Diemen’s Land, gentlemen such as Mercer could rely upon assigned convicts to do the work, whereas in Victoria it was predominantly emancipists and impoverished assisted migrants who filled this need.
The Carmichael siblings were from Lanark, a historic town on the Clyde River and noted for its wool industry. Little information has come to light about the family in their homeland, although Carmichael is a prominent Lanarkshire surname. After several months in Tasmania the Carmichael brothers arrived with sheep at Point Henry near Geelong.
It is evident that the Carmichael’s did have sufficient financial backing to stock their runs and to make improvements in line with the requirements of the licensing system, although they may not have been wealthy themselves, and it is even unclear whether they paid their own passage to Australia. Nevertheless, it does seem likely that the Carmichael siblings were sponsored by Scottish commercial interests of one form or another, as it is difficult to conceive how they managed to establish a successful pastoral business without backing from “home.”
Squatters were required to mark out their own runs. They had to ensure that their valuable stock was protected. Huts and yards needed to be constructed. The establishment phase of such an enterprise required finance from somewhere, and there had to be sufficient backing to see a squatter through the inevitable economic downturns in the industry.
The Aboriginal clanspeople were a short-term frustration and a temporary impediment to business. Those who survived needed to give up any thought of resistance and then they might be of marginal use as a labor force. Resistance was not tolerated in this “distant field of murder”. Attacks on hut keepers and shepherds were interpreted as an afront to the squatters’ ability to control the situation on the ground. Squatters were concerned that servants, hutkeepers and shepherds would not work in locations that were under constant threat. When attacks on workers did happen, there were murderous reprisals. Clanspeople were hunted and attacked indiscriminately regardless of culpability. Unrecorded acts of preemptive and retaliatory violence likely occurred, although by its nature the extent of clandestine violence cannot be determined.
By the mid-1840s William Carmichael was well established on his Harton Hills station on the Eumeralla River. Harton Hills was acquired in the immediate wake of the financial crisis and may have been considered something of a distressed asset. George Carmichael took over Retreat Station on the Glenelg River above Casterton in the early 1850s. This country is at the margins of the Southwest. George eventually became a prominent Glenelg Shire Councilor and Shire President. Meanwhile, Grace and Elizabeth Carmichael were settled with their husbands at Woolsthorpe, together with their brother James Carmichael.
William Lindsay’s early life in Scotland prior to his supposed arrival on the “John Cooper” is largely unknown. Grace married William Lindsay in 1846 and Elizabeth married David Kennedy in 1847. Both weddings took place at the Presbyterian Church in Portland. These two couples held Union and Quamby stations throughout the 1850s and 1860s. One street in Woolsthorpe is called Carmichael Street and another is Kennedy Street. The main street is called Manifold Street, after another prominent squatter family of the Southwest. Thomas Manifold was the proprietor of property at Grassmere southeast of Woolsthorpe, although the Manifold brothers are best known for their extensive runs near Camperdown.
When William Lindsay died in 1898 he left a fortune to his family. The Lindsays benefited from being in a position to purchase large parts of Union and Quamby as freehold from an early date, again indicating a stream of finance in excess of what most others could muster. Union was almost entirely held as freehold by the end of the 1850s. The added security of freehold ownership allowed the family to make improvements to their land, which greatly added to its value.
The Age newspaper of 31 August 1898 ran a report of the finalized probate for the estate. Under the eye catching heading: A SQUATTER’S WILL. ESTATE VALUED AT £62,000, it states: “The will of the late Mr. William Lindsay, station owner, Iate of Union Station, near Woolsthorpe, who died on 7th ult., has been filed for probate. The testator made his will on 22nd March, 1892, and left property valued at £61,947 18s. 1s., consisting of £55,848 realty and £6099. 18s. 1d. personally. Subject to the payment of legacies of £5000 each to his three daughters, Catherine E. Lindsay, Agnes Cameron and Jessie Lindsay, he bequeathed his estate to his two sons, James and William Lindsay, in equal shares”. As was customary at the time, the sons inherited the real estate whereas the daughters were provided with cash bequests. Such an arrangement was an incentive for daughters to be married off to men of their own class and background.
As a youth, the author was well aware that violence involving numerous massacres had occurred in the early days of European settlement. It is only in the later decades of the twentieth century that frontier violence faded from community memory. It was made clear to the author that the squatters were behind the violence, even though it was also known that servants and workers were involved. The servants and workers were by no means blameless but they were not the ones in charge and it was not for their benefit that it was done. People knew who was in charge. Violence always followed the squatters. Even a cursory examination of the record is sufficient to realise there was indeed a form of warfare in the district.
Upon moving to Melbourne to attend university, the author was constantly surprised that people there knew so little about such matters. It was frustrating that people in the city should be so surprised to hear about things that seemed such basic facts. Many of the author’s campus colleagues had a theoretical understanding of colonisation arising from exposure to various left leaning currents then circulating at university. Nevertheless, they had virtually no understanding of the social realities of life in the Southwest. They seemed to set themselves apart from the consequences of our history.
