In the great narratives of Britain and the World, migrants feature routinely, although the sheer diversity of their experience has not always been fully recognised. Migrants played a major role in the creation and settlement of the British Empire and the wider âAnglosphereâ and established global mobility as a defining feature of the Empireâs life. Most often this was outward movement, from Britain and Ireland to the far-flung destinations of emigrant settlement, not least to Australia, the focus of this volume. But there were also counter-flows, often distinctive and not always welcome, from the Empire back to Britain itself, establishing pockets of immigrants in the Imperial homeland long before the better known large-scale Commonwealth immigration of the post-colonial era. Likewise, despite the numerical and cultural dominance of British-Irish emigrants in Empire settlement, the complexity of global movement had attracted other European migrants to Britainâs Imperial project, creating new avenues of loyalty and identity. Contact between settlers and Indigenous peoples was similarly complex, in Australia as in other Imperial destinations, the nature of cross-cultural relations informed by the diversity of migrantsâ backgrounds, ethnicities, religious affiliations and other factors. This, in turn, alerts us to the fact that British-Irish migrants were by no means the homogenous group often assumed by historians, especially in the Australian context. Despite their shared experiences of migration and settlement, not to mention the primacy of the English language, these migrants nonetheless often exhibited distinctive cultural identities, ones that could be deployed for community, political or economic advantage. In the same way, gender could be a powerful determinant of attitudes and behaviour, overlapping issues of ethnicity and class to influence ways that immigrant women in Australia and the wider Imperial world understood their role and purpose.
This volume is designed to address each of these considerations, using Australia as our example in illuminating the complexity and diversity of the British Empireâs global immigration story. Eric Richards, in his chapter, sets the scene and establishes many of the themes elaborated in the book. He alights upon the mass emigration from the British Isles to the Empire and wider âAnglosphereâ, noting especially its sudden acceleration in numbers and intensity during the 1820s, an unprecedented surge that underpinned the fundamental relationship between migration and Empire. It was an outstanding outrush, a new dynamic force unleashed upon the world. But the first stirrings of this âgreat emigrationâ had been noticeable in previous centuries, especially after 1770, and the outward movement from Britain and Ireland remained significant until at least the 1950s. Eventually about 19 million left the British Isles and they re-populated three continentsâNorth America, South Africa and Australasiaâcreating the Anglosphere and acting as the spear carriers or foot soldiers of the greater Empire narrative. But there were discontinuities, as new destinations for potential emigrants appeared, and within the British Isles there was a fundamental disparity between the trajectories of Ireland on the one hand and Britain on the other. Within this dichotomy, there were also significant regional variations, such as the distinctive emigration regions of Ulster and Cornwall, and identifiable shifts in population from localities such as Scotland, Wales and various parts of England.
Within the grand narrative of a globalised Anglosphere, there were, as Richards notes, the sub-narratives of specific destinations. South Australia, he explains, forms a significant case study. The newly proclaimed colony began recruiting immigrants at the very moment emigration from the British Isles acquired its mass characteristics, entering the migrant market in 1835â1836 and offering special incentives to intending migrants who could meet the criteria. In this way, South Australia was successful in diverting some migrants away from more âmainstreamâ destinations within the Anglosphere. Yet, as Heidi Ing shows in her chapter, among the early intending migrants to South Australia who had already applied for assisted passages and had been accepted, there were those who after all did not embark in the ships bound for the new colony in 1836. Some had become disillusioned by the seemingly interminable waiting and delays. Life-changing eventsâsuch as marriage, pregnancy, the birth of infantsâalso served to change peopleâs minds or lead to eleventh-hour alterations of plans. Some of these people may have merged back into the general population but many eventually chose competing destinations in the Anglosphere, such as New South Wales, Van Diemenâs Land, Canada and the USA, which lured potential emigrants away from the South Australian scheme. As Heidi Ing demonstrates, these individuals and families can be âhunted downâ by using techniques to interrogate online-digitised databases to identify their varied outcomes, and she employs such forensic methods to discover the fates of those early applicants for assisted passage to South Australia. Thirty-year-old Joseph Dennis, for example, was scheduled to emigrate to the colony in 1836, along with his wife, two sons and daughter, but instead the family headed for New South Wales in 1837. John Garread, meanwhile, abandoned plans to go to South Australiaâa long and potentially hazardous journey of some four to five monthsâdeciding upon the alternative destination of New York. His wife was pregnant, and they had a three-month-old son as well as an eighteen-month-old daughter, so the shorter trip across the Atlantic no doubt appeared a safer and more attractive option.
Emigration to early South Australia, then, was not quite as straightforward as its founders had hoped, and, despite the special attractions of the new colony, including incentives, not all intending migrants took the plunge, many ending up eventually in more âmainstreamâ destinations within the British Empire and wider Anglosphere. Likewise, the seemingly attractive plan devised by the British government in the 1830s to encourage single female emigration to New South Wales was met with unanticipated opposition. Designed to address the acute gender imbalance in New South Wales, thought to be the source of all manner of social and moral evils in the colony, the single female emigration programme was seen by the British government as an âimprovingâ device. However, as Melanie Burkett explains in her chapter, the plan was viewed as anything but improving in the colony itself, especially among its elite. Still smarting from its reputation as a âconvict colonyâ, New South Wales was alert to any development that might further damage its reputation. The prospect of a flood of single women, mostly from working-class backgrounds (with lives and socio-economic characteristics not unlike the convicts themselves), filled many with horror. The potential female immigrants were seen, not as models of acceptable (middle-class) femininity and ârespectabilityâ, but rather as a potential new threat to the moral fabric of New South Wales. This was a theme taken up in the colonial press, the planâs vociferous detractors often motivated by their own political agendas, the emerging debate linking the proposed single female immigration explicitly to the convict âproblemâ and highlighting the stark disconnect between British and colonial expectations of the programme. As a result, as Melanie Burkett concludes, âthe single female immigrants were doomed to disappointâ.
Meanwhile, as potential migrants from Britain and Ireland mulled over the relative advantages and disadvantages of competing destinations, and as British emigration schemes sometimes met colonial resistance, so the new waves of emigrants intruded upon the traditional owners of ânewâ land ostensibly only now being opened up for settlement. Again, South Australia is our case study. Skye Krichauff, in her chapter, focusses on the agricultural mid-north of South Australia. Initially, in the years after 1836, the mid-north was pastoral country, where the âsquatters-cum-pastoralistsâ ran large herds and flocks across extensive leases. During this period, the Aboriginal population outnumbered the new arrivals, and there were numerous opportunities for, and instances of, cross-cultural contact, sometimes violent. By the 1870s, however, the pastoral leases had given way to the freeholder farmers of the wheat frontier, a time of much closer settlement with fewer opportunities for cross-cultural contact, the European settler population now larger and the numbers of Aborigines already much diminished.
It is in this historical context, argues Skye Krichauff, that one can begin to explain the relative absence of Aboriginal people in the historical consciousness and oral narratives of those farming families today in South Australiaâs mid-north descended from the nineteenth-century settlers. Conventional explanations for the absence of Aborigines in the historical consciousness of such descendants have ranged from âdenialâ to âaverted gazeâ, a collective conspiracy (almost) to perpetuate what William Stanner famously labelled âthe great Australian silenceâ. Skye Krichauff, however, calls for a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon, pointing out that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peopleâs experiences of colonialism were diverse across Australia and often specific to particular eras and areas, with a range of factors, including geography, topography and resources, affecting cross-cultural contact. In the case of South Australiaâs mid-north, she shows that settler families today, far from exhibiting the discomfit of the âaverted gazeâ, express genuine ignorance and sometimes surprise when asked to consider the erstwhile Aboriginal owners of their land. Moreover, the same lack of historical consciousness extends to an absence of knowledge regarding the earlier âsquatters-cum-pastoralistsâ, the oral narratives of today generally going back no further than the arrival of a descendantâs first forebears on the land. If the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land are forgotten, then so too are the âsquatters-cum-pastoralistsâ who predated the freeholders.
Memory of a different sort helps explain the otherwise puzzling role played by South Australia in responses to the âDistress in Irelandâ in 1879â1880. Although, as Eric Richards once observed, South Australia was for the nineteenth-century Irish immigrant, âthe most alien corner of the new continentâ, the colony retaining its overwhelmingly Protestant flavour well into the twentieth century, there had been a significant arrival of Irish, particularly after 1850. Irish settlement was on a smaller scale than in the eastern colonies, and although their numbers were relatively low, the Irish formed a visible minority within the South Australian settler population, even to the extent of attracting the anti-Irish sentiment observable elsewhere in Australia. Moreover, many of those who had arrived in the colony in earlier years had experienced or remembered the great Irish Famine of 1845â1851, and when news broke of the renewed dearth and distress in Ireland in 1879â1880, they were moved to do something about it. As Stephanie James observes in her chapter, the actual extent of this response is at first sight surprising, given the modest size of the Irish community. Yet South Australia led the continent in initiating the relief movement. As she explains, the rapid and largely seamless mobilisation of South Australiaâs populationâIrish and non-Irishâin raising funds for the âIrish Distressâ, when prejudicial opinion was broadly put to one side, was mainly due to the fund-raising energy and public relations flair of the Fundâs enigmatic Honorary Secretary, Irishman M.T. Montgomery. Although Adelaideâs Lord Mayor, E. T. Smith, was pivotal in launching the official response to the appeal, it was Montgomery who systematically engaged local government to support the establishment of colony-wide relief committees. Subscription lists demonstrated the breadth of community generosity, and extensive newspaper coverage revealed the range of fund-raising events and activities, which garnered more than ÂŁ8000 in just three months. It was not all plain sailing, as Stephanie James shows, and there were very public disagreements, with Montgomery emerging as a somewhat divisive figure. Nonetheless, South Australians pulled together in a remarkably efficient and well-organised campaign to rise to the challenge of the âIrish Distressâ.
Significantly, as Fidelma Breen argues in her chapter, the relatively small Irish population was likewise able to make its influence felt in the wider South Australian community during the debate over Irish Home Rule. Between 1883 and 1912, envoys from the Irish Parliamentary Party visited South Australia at the behest of its Irish population, engaging in fund-raising and enhancing the reputation of the Irish (in the absence of a coherent Orange opposition to Home Rule) through favourable press treatment of Irish issues. It is clear that the assumed assimilation of the Irish into the broad âBritis...