Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

STATISTICS OF DISTRESS OF 1844.

153

well as she could with private assistance on the land of a speculator; and to go on laboriously registering agreements and distributing emigrants from farm to farm, as we shall presently describe.

The committee in their report recorded "their grateful sense of the valuable services of a lady to whose benevolent exertions on behalf of the unemployed, as well as of free emigrants of the humbler classes generally, this colony is under the highest obligations, Mrs. Chisholm, whose name is so well known for her disinterested and untiring exertions."

The chairman of the committee was the notorious Dr. Lang.

In August, 1844, the distress amongst the labourers and mechanics of Sydney had not ceased. A committee was reappointed to consider it. There was a great clamour in favour of undertaking bridges, roads, and other public works, with public money. The mob and officials were favourable to the scheme. The government immigration agent was examined before this committee. "His knowledge," he states, "of the immigrants who arrived in past years was merely general, of the present year tolerably accurate;" "had no knowledge of the number of destitute families then in Sydney;" had no detailed information, but thought a certain detailed statement delivered in by a former witness exaggerated. This was a gentleman paid for his services, who, according to colonial custom, considered it his duty to perform his strictly office duties, and think and know no more,-a very natural view, considering the ill reward that any zeal obtains, except zeal for the views of the Colonial Secretary of State.

Mrs. Chisholm, being called before this committee, produced a complete statistical statement, exhibiting the numbers, ages, sexes, characters, and trades of the unemployed (in all 2,034 souls), the number of weeks and average number per man they had been unemployed. These tables show some curious particulars: 59 carpenters and 25 joiners, 10 butlers and 10 coachmen and grooms, 15 cabinetmakers, 26 brickmakers, 10 quarrymen and 19 bricklayers, 2 surgeons, 2 hairdressers, and 1 tailor; 244 farm labourers in all 572. "The large number of children made it difficult to provide for many of these families." "The system of relieving distress has now been in operation for a year; we have been consuming capital, we can only remove distress by producing it." "Last year I settled some families on land, and, considering the many difficulties thrown in my way, they have succeeded remarkably well on private land. I wished to try the system of leasing, in order to see whether the people were industrious, and could subsist on land; and I have satisfied myself that, although any gentleman would lose a large fortune if he were to commence as a

farmer, where the family are all workers an industrious man cannot do better than get on land. The great difficulty with me has been that I have never had an opportunity of putting a sufficient number of people together; and where they are only a few they have no team, no set of tools, and there is a constant struggle; yet they do succeed."

Now, this in a few words is the true art of colonization. Locate poor men on waste land in England or Ireland and they sink under the multiplicity of money payments or debts, having to compete with a fund of cheap labour, and inferior land against superior land and skilled cultivation. Locate the same men in a colony and they rise buoyed up by a surrounding dear labour market, which enables them to barter their chief possession, labour, for seeds, tools, stock, or whatever they may need; a virgin soil, and the absence of money payments for rent or taxes, and of competition of agricultural skill, compensating for the want of capital and rural experience. Thus, a day's labour from time to time with a neighbouring farmer will buy a yoke of bullocks, a dray, a quarter of wheat or maize, and assist both. In England and Ireland a poor man clings to land in hopes of making more than bare wages by extra toil; in a colony a man desires land to keep his family together, even at some sacrifice of money wages. In old countries the little freehold must be divided with sons and sons-in-law; in a colony the full-fledged brood can always, if idle "protective" laws do not impede, go further afield, and find a new site for a nest. So argued in other words Mrs. Chisholm; and many a flockowner, now contemplating his flocks spreading wildly unshepherded over his run, and the deserted huts of his single men shepherds on their way to the diggings, wishes he had followed Mrs. Chisholm's advice, and encouraged children as well as sheep.

Not being able to induce the governor and the influential colonists to go heartily into her land-colonizing plans, she continued to employ herself in dispersing the people through the interior; and in teaching the government and the colonists, by example, how the colonial part of colonization should be conducted.

She worked hard for six years, warmly supported by some of the first among the colonists, the Wentworths, M'Arthurs, Bradleys, Fitzgeralds, Suttors, and Dr. Nicholson, the present speaker of the Legislative Council, and by the unanimous confidence of the working classes, but subject to much obstruction and annoyance in official quarters.

Sir George Gipps, who was capable of noble sentiments when his evil temper or home instructions did not override them, took a public opportunity of expressing his sense of the merit and utility of her plans,

THE GOVERNOR ALLOWS MRS. CHISHOLM TO FRANK LETTERS. 155

saying, "I think it right to make this public acknowledgment, having formerly thrown cold water upon them."

A characteristic anecdote is circulated in the colony in reference to the privilege of franking letters which Sir George had given the Emigration Missionary.

A few days after the permission had been granted, the governor sent for Mrs. Chisholm in a great hurry. She found him in one of his fits of excitement, the table covered with her own letters.

"Mrs. Chisholm," he exclaimed, "when I gave you the privilege of franking, I presumed you would address yourself to the magistrates, the clergy, and the principal settlers; but who, pray, are these John Varelys and Dick Hogans, and other people, of whom I have never heard since I have been in the colony?"

"If, she replied," "I had required to know the opinions of those respectable gentlemen on the subject of the demand for labour, and the rate of wages they could afford, I need not have written; I can turn to half a dozen blue books and find there "shepherds always wanting and wages always too high"; besides, to have answered me they must have gone to their overseers, and then answered me vaguely. I want to know, as nearly as possible, what number of labourers each district can absorb, and of what class and what wages. If your Excellency will wait until I get my answers, you will admit that I have applied to men humble but intelligent, and able to afford exactly the information I require."

Sir George Gipps was satisfied with the explanation, and still more with the replies of the bush settlers; so the sub-officials were on this occasion discomfited.

By Mrs. Chisholm's exertions, applied to the elastic resources of Australia, before 1845 the distress of 2,000 souls was so far removed that some parties were ready in a few years to assert, forgetting that a detailed list was on record, that it had never existed; and in 1845, as Mrs. Chisholm, in her evidence before the committee of 1844, prophesied, the demand for labour was more vigorous than ever, and has never since been checked, even for a moment; on the contrary, the supply has always been under the demand, both in quantity and quality.

It was while making forced marches at the head of armies of emigrants, as far as 300 miles into the far interior, sometimes sleeping at the stations of wealthy settlers, sometimes in the huts of poor emigrants or prisoners; sometimes camping out in the bush, teaching the timid, awkward peasantry of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Protestants and Roman Catholics, Orangemen and Repealers, how to

[graphic][subsumed][merged small]

"bush it"; comforting the women, nursing the children, putting down any discontented or forward spirits among the men; now taking a few weary children into her covered tandem-cart; now mounting on horseback and gallopping over a short cut through the hills to meet her weary caravan, with supper foraged from the hospitable settlers;-it was in the midst of marches in which she managed the discipline, the route, the commissariat, the hospital, and the billetting, all herself, with such aides-de-camp as each army happened to furnish, that she commenced another great work subsidiary to colonization, the "Voluntary Statements of the People of New South Wales," for the use of the home country. These were statements in answer to the series of printed questions, taken down in the words of the informant, of which we shall give some examples at the end of this chapter.

They were written down in all manner of dwellings, but chiefly among the humbler, in cottages and bark huts, on the roadside, on the top of a hat, in the field, on a plough, in the forest, on the first log of a frugal bush servant's first freehold.

There were nearly eight hundred of these statements from natives

APPLICATIONS FOR WIVES.

157

of almost every county of the United Kingdom, from emigrants, from "old hands," and from ticket-of-leave men.

They proved incontestibly that Australia was a country in which any industrious man could thrive; that there was ample verge and room enough for millions; that land which squatters then and now assert to be only fit for sheep pasture would support yeomanry in comfort and independence. They laid bare much injustice, exhibited in a striking manner the demand and necessity for an increased female population, and presented a more perfect, truthful, and valuable picture of bush life, painted by servants and settlers, than had ever been drawn in travellers' tales or parliamentary blue books.

It was in consequence of the habit of collecting these statements that she was able to tell the committee of the House of Lords in 1847 :— "I never returned from a journey to the interior without gaining information which would enable me to provide for a second number; and it was frequently unnecessary to go into a district more than once; then I knew the character of the people and the sort of servants that would suit them, and it enabled me to advise people when they called at my residence to say, 'You go to such a place and I can guarantee you employment.' My first object was always to get one female emigrant placed: having succeeded in getting one female servant in a neighbourhood, I would leave the feeling to spread among this class. These girls eventually married best, for the parents were thankful if their son married her.

"One of the most serious impediments to transacting business of hiring servants in the country were the applications for wives. Shepherds left their sheep and would come for miles for this purpose, with their certificates of good character, and of money deposited in the savings banks, and list of their stock and even bank notes. I had more than forty applications of this kind in two years. One man, according to a note in my register-book, who came down to Sydney for a wife, was very anxious to know when we should have a new governor who would attend to matters of consequence like that."

The governor took a different view of the subject, for when, in the early days of the "Home Protection," it was suggested to him that many of the forlorn girls if sent into the interior would marry well, "His excellency drew himself up to his full height, and exclaimed indignantly, What, Mrs. Chisholm! is it my business to find wives for bush servants?" "

He might have done worse.

In 1845 Mrs. Chisholm was examined before a committee of the

« AnteriorContinuar »