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‘A Worthy Sisterhood’: pictures of birth death and marriagefrom among immigrant women to South Australia in 1836

Leith MacGillivray

The first women in Tandanya, later the province of South Australia, were, of course, Aboriginal women, countless of whom were here centuries before colonisation. These women deserve a separate study.

Tonight I wish to turn our attention to a few of those 117 immigrant women who arrived on the first nine ships to reach South Australia before 31 December 1836, the year in which South Australia was founded as a British province.

78 adult females on board these ships were assisted immigrants, commonly referred to as ‘the labouring class’, and 39 were paying passengers known as ‘the superior’ or ‘officer/gentleman class’, later termed the ‘middling class’ by historian, Douglas Pike. In recounting stories of a few women of 1836, I have chosen, as a linking theme, their experiences of birth, death and marriage.

On 27 July 1836, the Duke of York, first of the immigrant ships to arrive in South Australia, lay at anchor in NepeanBay, off KangarooIsland. On board, gravely ill, lay Lucy Beare, 33 year old wife of Thomas Hudson Beare, second in command of the South Australian Company.

Four of Lucy Beare’s eight children had died at birth or in infancy. Pregnant again in 1836, Lucy had endured the rigours of a four-month journey on the Duke of York, during which, with no surgeon to assist her, she gave birth to her ninth child. Her little un-named daughter died, and is believed to have been buried at sea. Lucy herself barely escaped death. Captain Robert Morgan, the godly Captain of the Duke of York, was greatly concerned about Lucy Beare butCaptain Morgan was a man of his times. He could only describe Lucy’s grief-stricken, post-natal state as ‘deranged’.

Five days later, in a hastily erected tent on shore, Lucy’s condition had so worsened that Morgan sent for William Chadwick on board the newly-arrived Lady Mary Pelham. Chadwick had some nursing experience, but he confessed that ‘he took such strong doses of opium for his nervous attacks he did not often know what he was doing’.

Lucy fought for her life and sanity, throughout August, and only in earlySeptember could Captain Morgan rejoice that she was restored to her right mind.

Within a year Lucy Beare was pregnant with her tenth child. In another difficult birth her little daughter, Mary Anne, survived, but Lucy, at only 34 years of age, died in child-bed 8 days later. The widowed Thomas Beare, with 5 children to care for, married 21 year old Lucy Bull 2 years later. They parented nine children.

Several aspects of Lucy Beare’s experiences of birth, death and marriage reflect those of early 19th century men and women. Re-marriage, often an economic necessity for women, invariably followed a spouse’s death. Without effective contraception, large families were ‘a woman’s lot’. With midwifery often considered ‘an occupation degrading to gentlemen’ infant mortality and the risk of death in child-bed were consistently high.

One feature of Lucy Beare’s experience was, however, a-typical of her sister emigrants in 1836. Official records or reports of death at sea in 1836 are not extant in South Australia, but, according to private papers, Lucy Beare was the only emigrant woman of 1836 who lost a new-born baby at sea; and no woman died of child-birth at sea.

Even allowing for non-reporting or under-reporting, in comparison with the devastating losses on later voyages, one might assume that these first emigrant women were a healthy, sturdy lot.

This was especially relevant with regard to labouring class women.Firstly,surgeons accompanied only five of the nine emigrant ships; those who did carried only minimal midwifery equipment. Furthermore, labouring class women were cooped up in steerage, in foul air with bilge water and decaying vegetable material.

Healthy, fertile women were essential to the systematic colonisation theories of Wakefield and his fellow-planners. Upon the labouring class these men had laid the onus of being the producers of a future labour force which would reduce the cost, and ultimately the necessity, of importing emigrant labour. The women of South Australia's ‘first fleet’ would seem to have conformed, at least in this respect, to the planners' aims and prospects.

From the evidence available 2 women, both assisted emigrants, did die on board ship, although not from child-birth. Elizabeth Chandler’s encounter with death was unique.

Elizabeth, with her 4 children and husband, Charles, a 28 year old ploughman from East Acton, Middlesex, engaged by the South Australian Company, left England on 3April on the John Pirie, captained by George Martin. An unidentified seaman, probably the Purser, noted in his log that Mrs Chandler had a ‘most violent temper which could cause her to be shockingly wicked On 2 June, Mrs Chandler and Mrs Powell, wife of gardener,Powell, also from Acton, were engaged in a heated brawl in which the Purser claimed ‘the most disgusting, aggravating language was used by both ladies’. Charles Chandler tried in vain to pacify his wife but, with a bundle of clothes in her arms she made towards the ship’s rail threatening to drown herself. Captain Martin caught hold of her just in time. Early next morning the helmsman sounded the alarm for a woman overboard. Elizabeth Chandler had again, in the Purser’s notes, ‘come up on deck with the bundle of clothes still in her arms, and in a terrible rage suddenly threw the bundle overboard that no other woman her husband might take should have the satisfaction of wearing them after her. After giving a momentary glance at her husband she sprang overboard to the horror and amazement of all who beheld the sight’. In that momentary glance, what didElizabeth Chandler convey to her husband? Determination? Revenge? We do not know. But rescued after 10 minutes in the water, as the Purser recorded, ‘in almost a lifeless state, Mrs Chandler was given the usual remedies for recovering the apparently drown’d’.

Throughout July the Purser nursed his patient faithfully, tending her wounds and ‘took a pint of blood as advisable’. One night, however, she became ‘quite delirious and the smell from her breath uncommonly strong.’ On the following morning, Elizabeth Chandler died. All passengers were mustered on deck to see her body committed to the deep, ‘sewn in three or four old sacks with a weight of iron made fast to her feet’. Charles Chandler later married Harriet Clark, but should you some day climb Chandlers Hill, near Clarendon, you might spare a thought for his first wife.

Yet suicide was either undocumented or rare. No other 1836 woman apparently took her life, but three husbands of that contingent did. Ironically one was Captain George Martin, six years after he had rescued Elizabeth Chandler. In a suicide note, found by his daughter,George Martin, of nervous instability, shothimself at his home in Currie Street leaving destitute his widow, Maria, and 8 children.

Several women, heavily pregnant on board ship, gave birth soon after arrival. These women now faced problems additional to those of giving birth in England. They were in an unknown land and an untested environment. Among such women was Anne Finniss, emigrant on the Cygnet, and of ‘the officer-gentleman class’ as wife of Boyle Travers Finniss, soldier, surveyor and first premier of South Australia. Their child, Fanny Lipson Finniss, delivered by Dr Woodforde for 3 guineas in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1837, was the first born in the colony. The baby and her mother spent their first days in a reed and grass but built by Aboriginals at RapidBay. As Finniss recorded, ‘Aboriginal women also nursed Fanny with all the care of a practised nurse’. After 10 days mother and child were moved to Glenelg and housed in a 12 feet diameter Bell tent. Here, Finniss tells, he found his wife one morning ‘in a pitiable state from weakness ... harassed by flies ... in the almost insupportable heat of the January sun ...Dr Woodforde had himself thrown buckets of water on the outside of the tent to cool the atmosphere within’.

Anne and Fanny Finniss survived their first Australian summer, but another trial soon followed. A chill lodged in Anne Finniss’ suppurating breast. In her husband’s words, ‘This rendered a surgical operation necessary’. This was a decade before the use of ether, either in England or South Australia. Yet the adaptations of giving birth and enduring pain in makeshift accommodation and a trying climate were peculiar to Anne Finniss and her fellow-colonists in their new and alien land.

The greatest killer in the 19th century was pulmonary consumption. Therapeutic emigration became popular, firstly because sea-sickness on the voyage often induced vomiting believed to be curative. More importantly, South Australia was early and widely publicised as having a ‘salubrious climate’ with ‘the total absence of cold, damp fogs’, and therefore of particular advantage to those suffering from pulmonary affections.

Although not explicitly stated, there is every indication that Harriet Gouger, wife of Robert Gouger, first Colonial Secretary, left England, not only 4 months pregnant, but also suffering from consumption. Her family showed great reluctance and anxiety at her departure but she determinedly set sail with her husband and 2 servants on the Africaine.

Harriet’s journey was fraught with ‘constant sickness, violent headaches and serious liver and stomach symptoms’. Despite his propensity to depression, Gouger was a solicitous nurse even to making a swinging canvas cot, believed helpful for consumptives, to replace the one left at home.

After their arrival at Holdfast By in November 1836, Gouger erected an especially spacious tent. In this tent on the 28th December, while oaths of office were taken and the Proclamation read for the first time, Harriet lay deep in labour. By the following morning Gouger rejoiced in his diary, ‘I have given the new province a son!’ Harriet and Robert Gouger named their baby ‘Henry Hindmarsh Gouger’ —‘Henry’ after Gouger's brother, and ‘Hindmarsh’ so that his son’s birth‘might be a matter of permanent interest’ in the province’s history.

Sadly, at any Proclamation Day commemoration I have attended, I have not heard mention of Henry Hindmarsh, or his mother, the woman in such close proximity to that first ceremony. Nor, for that matter, have I heard mention of any other women of 1836.

By mid-January a consultation of doctors openly declared Harriet was in the advanced stages of pulmonary consumption. Neither a sea voyage nor a short time in a new environment had been of any benefit. ‘Not even hope now exists as my solace’ wrote the stricken Gouger. Harriet Gouger died on 14 March 1837 and her little 11 week old son, 2 days later. Gouger buried his family in Town Acre 685, one of his 8 Town Acres bordered by King William and Gilbert Streets and South Terrace.

In November 1837, Gouger returned to England ‘to seek justice for himself and the colony’. In late 1838, he married his cousin, Sarah Whitten, before returning to South Australia. Here he found his home in utter disrepair. ‘Let to a low working man who had in turn let out every room to South Australian Company tenants’, wrote Gouger, ‘they used even the cemetery of my late wife as a summer house and asleeping-room.’

A victim of the greatest cause of death until the turn of the century, Harriet’s life, death and the aftermath of her death had brought nothing but pain and grief to this emigrant woman of 1836 and her husband.

In January 1831 Gouger had submitted to the Colonial Office a plan for assisting pauper children to emigrate, which may have led to the sponsorship of two servants, Margaret Clarke and Mary Anne Vincent, aged 15 and 16 respectively. Margaret, or Peggy, and Mary Anne were inmates of Victoria Asylum in Chiswick, London, run by the Children’s Friend Society. Formerly known as the ‘Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy’, the Society’s purpose was to rescue children from ‘a life of wretchedness and crime’on London’s streets; ‘to teach them the habits of industry under the influence of moral and religious habits’. After 3 months’ training the Society considered the children fit for agricultural or domestic labour in the colonies.

Many were sent to Cape Colony, South Africa, for, after the abolition of slavery, their labour was in demand there. Western Australia was also a popular placement, but Peggy and Mary Anne were sent to South Australia.

At first the girls found favour with their mistress but soon Peggy was in disgrace for ‘lightness of conduct towards the sailors’; for ‘the effect of spiritous liquors’; and for biting and scratching Mary Anne so mercilessly that she drew blood. The Captain, the steward and Gouger agreed that cutting Peggy’s hair from one side of her head was fitting punishment.

After their arrival in 1837, then 16, Peggy married Mr Matthew Piesse, who was a grocer before going to the diggings. By 1857 they had 6 children. Mary Anne married George Thomas Elias Jones in 1838. In 1855, presumably with Mary Anne still as his wife, Jones was a clerk in the Port Elliot–Goolwa railway system. Both couples then disappear from trace. We cannot speculate whethertheir life and marriage in South Australia offered social mobility or material opportunities of a degree they might not have had in England. But this we do know: Peggy and Mary Anne were forerunners of those thousands of young people in the 19th and 20th century who were part of England’s .industry to export labour to the colonies, as recently and so poignantly portrayed in the T.V. series The Leaving of Liverpool. Many became ‘lost children of the Empire’. Yet here, in South Australia as early as 1836, we can number two London ‘street kids’ among our founding mothers.

Marriage was the common expectation of 19th century men and women. Insurance against loneliness, far from family and friends made marriage even more acceptable to intending marriage. Three labouring couples married on board the Buffalobefore the vessel had left the Channel. Several men of the middling class married, sometimes hurriedly, as soon as they saw opportunities opening up in the new province. One who refrained from so doing confided his misgivings to his diary: ‘Sunday 14 Aug: This day I attained the age of 30 years, therefore cease to be a young man:—an awful, painful reflection, being still a bachelor and likely to continue so for some time’.

The conventional tradition of marriage accorded well with the systematic colonisers. Under their theoretical planning the married state took on a special significance for women. Women were, the planners argued, the moral agents in establishing stable marriages. Stable marriages led, the planners further reasoned, to settled, civilising communities without fear of dispersion or a dreaded loss of population, and hence production and prosperity, to the other colonies.

To convert their theorising to reality, the colonising fathers proposed that emigrants should be young married couples under thirty. The 1836 contingent fell. far short of this ideal.

Of the 48 labouring class women, only a third were under thirty. Moreover there were three times as many single labouring class men as women. These women soon seized their opportunities and by mid-1838 the majority had married either their fellow emigrant men of 1836 or those who arrived in the following 18 months.

Only 3 single superior class women arrived in 1836, these being a widow and two sisters past marriageable age accustomed to living with their relatives. With marriage a social norm, Victorian matrons of this ‘superior class’ had the same responsibility as the redoubtable Mrs Bennett of Pride and Prejudice to find suitable husbands for their eligible daughters.

Susannah and John Hindmarsh had 3 daughters of marriageable age—Jane, Susan and Mary. Susan’s parents found her marriage to Alfred Miller Munday, wealthy landowner, Colonial Secretary, and later inheritor of ‘Shipley’ estate in Derbyshire, entirely suitable.

The Hindmarshes also strongly approved of Thomas Bewes Strangways as Jane’s suitor. In the words of John Hindmarsh, Strangways was ‘a gentleman of high feelings, of moderate wealth, and of a very old family’. These were excellent but, for reasons unknown, no marriage took place. In time when spinsterhood was a problematic situation Jane remained unmarried, living with her parents. In her late forties, she became the wife of widower John Ellis, pastoralist and benefactor of St Peter’s College. But her parents did not live to see either the suitable marriage or the comfortable retirement Jane enjoyed at Kelverton Hall, Essex.

The marriage of their youngest daughter, Mary, to George Milner Stephen, first Crown Solicitor, then Advocate-General and finally Acting-Governor, had two hallmarks of suitability.