Biography – Emigration blog

20th January 202023rd January 2020

‘Aboriginal’ people, ‘race’ and identity in the nineteenth century

Every blog in this series has begun with a challenge – how to make sense of something in a way that does justice not just to what is said but also to explore what is not said. As with the other blogs, I am working through the publications (a journal from 1890 and a book published in 1899) of my Dundee forebear, George Robertson Nicoll. So I want to think about what George chooses to report and why, what he deliberately omits to tell us, and what he takes for granted and does not even notice. This blog explores George’s experiences of ‘race’ and identity – his own and others – from 1848 when he landed in Sydney with his wife Sarah and infant son, George Wallace, and 1901 when he died.

George was a white, male, Scottish, Presbyterian colonist; I am a white, female, Scottish, currently-agnostic academic, living in Scotland – very much an outsider, just as he was. I have visited Australia on three occasions, and during those times, had very little contact with Aboriginal people. In contrast, on three visits to Aotearoa/New Zealand, I was privileged to meet Māori women and men, some of whom I got to know well as they shared stories of their culture and heritage with me.[1] What does this tell us, about very different approaches to the First Nations people of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand? But that is another story, and it’s George’s experience that I want to foreground in this blog.

What comes across in George’s writing is the story of a man who was trying to make sense of the very different situations he found himself in. He was, at heart, ‘Scotch’, deeply proud of ‘bonny Scotland’ (Journal, page 1), its scenery, its music, its dancing, its education, its whisky! He returned here on many occasions during his lifetime and finally chose to live out his last years in Scotland. Beyond this, he liked to think of himself as a ‘good man’, God-fearing, loyal, honest and protective of the weak and vulnerable; this is the George that he wants the reader to see. But he struggles to live up to his self-image, and this produces some dissonance in his accounts of his life and adventures. At times, he comes across as genuinely sympathetic – he understands and accepts that the white man has done real harm to indigenous peoples. Yet at other times, he seems to accept cultural stereotypes without question. Through a close reading of his book and journal, and by placing this in its wider social context, we can uncover something of the complex reality of the contradictions within a white emigrant’s views of ‘race’ and identity.

Situating George’s writing in context

One of the most striking aspects of George’s journal and book is how little he mentions Australia’s First Nations people (widely known, at that time, as ‘Aborigines’ or ‘Aboriginals’).[2] Either they were so common as to not merit attention (extremely unlikely by 1848) or they simply did not feature in his world (a more likely explanation). We hear much more about his encounters with ‘savages’ in the South Seas than we do about his interactions with the indigenous peoples of Australia. And this requires further reflection.

A white man’s interpretation of an encounter with Aboriginals

Estimates vary, but it is suggested that there were between 300,000 and 600,000 indigenous people living in Australia in 1788, at the time when the first transport ships carrying convicts arrived in Sydney Cove.[3] They had lived in Australia for some 30,000 years and were divided into more than 500 tribes, with at least 220 distinct languages. Their numbers had already been massively depleted by 1848. Not only had many been killed by conquerors’ guns, others had died from the imported diseases of pneumonia and consumption, smallpox and syphilis.[4] Tens of thousands had been forced off their traditional lands, as free settlers, assisted migrants and former convicts had cleared ‘the bush’ and destroyed forests to make way for farming. The impact of the ‘pastoral incursion’[5] cannot be overstated, as Macintyre (2009) explains:

‘[…] there was little effort to increase efficiency or conserve resources. Stock quickly ate out native grasses. The cloven hoof hardened the soil and inhibited regrowth. Patches of bare earth round the stockyards, eroded gullies and polluted water-courses marked the presence of the pastoral invader. So did the signs of human loss, the ruined habitats and desolate former gathering places of the Aboriginal inhabitants, the skulls and bones left unburied on the sites of massacres, and the names that because associated with some of them’ (page 59).

By 1848, large numbers of ‘Aboriginal’ people had been forced to far-flung mission stations and native reserves for their own ‘protection’ – protection from white settlers who shot and poisoned them and protection from each other, as rival tribes fought over land. The discovery of gold in the 1850’s was another nail in the coffin of the indigenous people of Australia, as gold digging in New South Wales and Victoria placed enormous pressure on the land and on a people whose way of life had depended upon living off, while caring for, the land.[6]

A search of local newspapers in 1848 gives a flavour of how Aboriginal people were presented at that time. In the Sydney Morning Herald, we find them convicted of stealing potatoes and sheep and killing cattle; charged with assault, rape and murder. We also find stories of ‘atrocious outrage’ like this one, as one tribe attacked another at night at Gundagai:

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954), Wednesday 26 April 1848, page 3

In contrast, there are positive stories, such as accounts of ‘our sable brethren’ providing ‘great service’ at harvest time. But two strong messages come through again and again in the newspaper coverage. Firstly, we are told that the ‘Aboriginals’ were a ‘backward’ race, ‘incapable of elevation’[7] (all attempts at ‘civilising’ them were bound to be ultimately ineffective). Secondly, we read that they would ‘soon disappear from amongst us’ (the so-called ‘doomed race theory’).[8] Both messages led to the same incontrovertible conclusion: nothing could be done, whether one showed pity for, or hostility towards, Aboriginal peoples. This was the prevailing view that George Robertson Nicoll would have inherited when he landed at Sydney in 1848.

‘Blackfellows’ in Sydney

The first mention of indigenous Australians in George’s writing appears early in his account of his travels and adventures, and it is not a favourable first impression:

‘Next day we came on shore with all our luggage and rented a small two roomed weatherboard house in Sussex Street – a dirty, damp place full of rats and blackfellows living next door nearly always drunk and noisy and singing a song with this chorus: “The world may nag, since I got the bag; for hundreds have got it before me” ‘(Journal, page 39).

This presentation of Aboriginal people as poor and drunk is a familiar one in the newspapers of the day; poverty and alcohol use remain a serious problem in indigenous communities.[9] John Pilger’s (2013) film Utopia is a damning indictment on the conditions in which many First Nations people are forced to live today.

I was unable to find the song that George refers to; it has been lost over time, along with its meaning. What was ‘the bag’ in the song. Was it ‘the sack’ (they had lost their jobs)? Or was it a sexually transmitted infection such as syphilis or gonorrhoea (both were both passed on by white men to Aboriginal women, who in turn, infected their partners).[10] Alternatively, did George misunderstand what he heard; was this actually an Aboriginal word that he was unfamiliar with? We have no way of being sure.

The next mention of Aboriginal people is a few months later, in relation to George’s trip to California as part of the 1848 gold-rush:

‘[…] we made a start. Took two Aboriginals Blacks with us, as they had better eyesight than us and would as we thought be useful to pick up the small gold specks; such was our ignorance of gold finding at the mines’ (Journal, page 47).

This is the one and only mention of these two men. We know that George and his mates failed to find gold and returned to Sydney as soon as they were able to secure their passage. But we have no idea what happened to these men. Did they manage to hitch up with other more successful diggers and make their fortunes, or as seems more likely, did they die of cold and starvation in the snow-bound country they found themselves abandoned in, without money and without support?

Later, George describes the Aboriginal people he sees at the New South Wales goldfields:

‘[…] arrived at Queanbeyan and stayed there with an acquaintance of mates and equipped ourselves with tent, tools, blankets, provisions etc., we arrived in due time and found the country hilly and very cold, well-watered with beautiful spring water on the tops of the tablelands, abundance of grass and potatoes wild, about the size of gooseberries. We dug them out with knives and boiled them. The blacks come every year for them and live on them while they last, together with kangaroo, Opossums etc., we pitched our tent on one of the hills and made ourselves as comfortable as we could. Firewood was scarce and the weather extremely cold and the ground damp’ (page 110).

This description fails to indicate that the diggers were making it extremely difficult for the Aboriginal people to live in their traditional ways. Not only were they competing for food, they were also devastating the land, polluting streams and rivers and clearing forests and bushes so that wildlife disappeared.[11] Bruce Pascoe has written a powerful riposte to the conventional presentation of Australia’s First Peoples as hunter-gatherers who lived in an uncultivated land. He argues that they planted, irrigated and harvested; they stored the surplus in sheds; they built dams, houses and villages. But they did so with a larger goal in mind:

‘Earth is the mother. Aboriginal people are born of the earth and individuals within the clan had responsibilities for particular streams, grasslands, trees, crops, animal, and even seasons. The life of the clan was devoted to continuance’ (Pascoe, 2018: 209).

What the First Nations people were faced with was the destruction of their land and culture, as the new ‘Australians’ consolidated their hold on the country. George was inevitably implicated in this process in all his activities, on the gold-fields, in forestry, in farming, and finally, in trading with settlers up and down the rivers of New South Wales. This is not, however, something that he chose to write about.

Experiencing racism first-hand

An interesting aside is that George himself experienced discrimination in San Francisco in 1848, where he and his mates were greeted with posters bearing the message: ‘NO SYDNEY MIGRANTS HERE’. As he explains:

‘[…] A deal of misery existed at this time. The Sydney people were camped at a place outside the town called Happy Valley, where they pitched their tents and erected portable wooden houses which they brought from Sydney and other parts of the colony. We came across some we knew who had arrived before us and who were at work on the streets, but they were much afraid to speak to us for fear any of the Yankees working alongside would hear we were from Sydney in which case they would be discharged or perhaps something more befall them, so we had all to say we were from New Zealand or Canada’ (page 54).

The posters illustrated the widely-held perception that all Australians were convicts – thieves and murderers – and California did not want them! Nevertheless, George does not comment on the much more widespread anti-Chinese hostility at this time, which reached a head in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting the immigration of all Chinese labourers.

Encounters with ‘savages’, ‘natives’ and ‘cannibals’

Returning from California early in 1849, George was shipwrecked at the Bay of Islands for some months. While he was there, he was helped by a number of locals (white men and black men, women and children), and he writes very forcefully about a ship’s captain’s double-crossing of the ‘natives’ who had rescued them.

George describes his encounters with the South Sea Islanders in great detail. He admired the ‘natives’, whom he describes as big and strong, although sadly lacking in clothes (he saw this as a marker of how ‘civilised’ they were). He was especially relieved to be advised that he and his fellow sailors had been ‘tabooed’ – they were not to be eaten! His account includes the following stories:

‘[…] we were in great suspense, when a native came on board. He was very big man, a regular giant. He said nothing but took up my blanket, which I had saved, and a tommy hawk. He placed the blanket over his shoulders and with the axe in his hand sat in the bow of the boat staring at us and waving the small axe for about two hours. He brought neither coconuts nor anything with him and we were in a sad plight to know what was up. In the meantime we were showing off two rusty red flint guns which were no use as we had no powder but thought they might frighten the savage […] the savage plunged in the sea and swam off with blanket and tommy hawk. Nothing occurred until daylight when a native swam to us with some young coconuts tied around his neck and, as this was a sign of peace, we lifted the kedge and went into the beach with the boat (Journal, pages 62-3).

The story continues:

‘We now spread our clothes out on the grass to dry. As soon as they were laid out however, they were all stolen. I saved nothing but what I had on, a shirt and pair of trousers. The natives now came to us in scores, men, women and children. We had saved a saucepan or two and took possession of an empty hut. The cook caught a sea turtle and made some turtle soup for our dinner. There were two natives here from Tonga who were building a canoe and who had been among the missionaries and were now trying to connect the natives. They came to us and made signs that we were to be tabooed. That is, not to be hurt by the natives’ (Journal, page 64).

He then travelled to another island where he lived for a few weeks with a ‘Yankee’, who had a ‘black wife’ and a ‘black man slave and black woman slave’. George describes his shock at the treatment of the black woman slave:

‘One morning his female slave forgot to put the salt on the table for our eggs, he called his tall man and told him to get the whip and bring the female slave to the door of the kitchen, tie her to the post and whip her on the bare back, for that small offence, or rather mistake, in order to show us what he could do and what power he had over these poor creatures. This cruelty interfered very much with our digestion. We had previous to this learnt from him by conversation that he had been colleged in Salem, South America. His father was a clergyman and owned several slaves and said that there was no more pain in that than whipping a horse. After this he fell very much in our estimation’ (Journal, page 68).

George continues:

‘At this time, a white wishing to settle on any of these islands could buy a male or female servant from the chief for about 10/- of trade, such as a cheap gun. The chief would also build him a Fijian house for the same amount. The few whites who were living on these islands got their wives and servants through the chiefs in this way. The wives and servants do all the work, build the houses, plant yams, catch fish, dig the yams, cook, wash etc. The black men do only as they fancy. They make the canoes and implements of war and do any fancy work etc. as well as go to the wars’ (Journal, page 69).

He also writes very critically about missionaries and the harm they had done in the South Sea Islands. His observations are telling:

‘As far as I have seen and heard, it is my opinion that the white missionary has a splendid time of it and may come home to England in less than twenty years with a handsome fortune. However, if they would only send home true reports about the grand life they have they could be forgiven as it is a great shame that the poor people in England and throughout the British Empire should be induced to give so much of their hard earnings away under the cloak of converting the poor heathen. It is all a great mistake for the “poor heathen” in the South Sea Islands are far better fed that the British poor with the advantage of having no work to do, as a rule they are far happier before the missionaries come among them, for they afterwards know the use of money, strong drink, tobacco and vice of which they were innocent before. The money however that is collected for the poor heathen never reaches them, the missionaries agents, presidents, secretaries and other officials, eat it all up in grand style but the “poor heathen” does not want it, they themselves say – feed your own poor in your own country, for missionary eat it all (Journal, pages 72-3).

It is noteworthy that George does not describe the mission stations and native reserves in Australia in the same way; it seems he had no contact with them. Nor does he comment on the notoriously racist Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, which was first passed in Queensland in 1897, and followed in Western Australia in 1905, Northern Territory in 1910 and South Australia in 1911.[13]

George finishes the account of his shipwreck by introducing another story of an inter-racial marriage:

‘Among the whites was a Scotch chap from Montrose, who had the share of a small boat. He had a black wife and black slave, had a family of children and some goats and fowl. I asked him if he would not like to leave the island. He said no, never. I am happy, get a good living, am my own master and can do as I like, with no rent, taxes or wages to pay, with plenty to eat and drink. We also bade adieu to our host and black Nancy, his wife, as well as the other whites and darkeys who were so kind to us. We felt as if we were parting from friends’ (Journal, pages 77-8).

This is the George he wants us to see – open, accepting, non-racist.

Later years

There is no other mention of black or First Nations people at any point in the rest of George’s narrative of his life and adventures in Australia. In his final years, he travelled the world as a tourist almost non-stop, and he provides vivid accounts of his trips to mosques, temples and churches, to museums and burial sites, to shops and schools. He also visited World Fairs on three occasions, in Paris in 1889, in 1893 and 1895 in Chicago, where he would have seen displays of First Nations’ peoples, seen at the time as educational, not controversial in any way.[14]

In all this writing, George comes across as someone who was interested in how other people lived their lives, open to difference, with a curiosity and lively intelligence. He was not obviously racist in any way. But maybe that is not the point. George benefited from the privilege of his own gender, ‘race’ and culture. As Satnam Virdee (2019) points out, racism works through ‘multiple routes’; it is ‘incremental’ and ‘relentless’:

‘It is only through concretisation that we can demonstrate the interplay among causal mechanisms, idiosyncratic events as well as powerful contingencies. In that process, we can illuminate what work racism accomplished across time and place as well as for whom and why’.[15]

George Robertson Nicoll was a man of his’ time and place’. His story is both unique and, at the same time, symptomatic of this wider reality. He was, at the end of the day, a British coloniser, complicit in the imperial project. Two of his sons went on to become prominent politicians: George Wallace Nicoll at local level as an Alderman in Canterbury, Sydney and Bruce Baird Nicoll at state level as the Protectionist member for Richmond on the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (M.L.A.) between 1889 and 1894. Both men were ‘Federationists’, proud Australians who supported the coming-together of the six self-governing colonies of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, and Western Australia into the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. Bruce was also a Protectionist, and as such, would have been sympathetic to the ‘white Australia’ policy as outlined in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, which outlawed the immigration of non-Europeans, specifically Chinese people and Pacific Islanders.

As George’s descendant and a British person, I have benefited both from his individual achievements and from the imperial colonising project in general, just as I currently benefit from my own privileges of class and ‘race’ every day of my life.

Viviene Cree

20^th January 2020

Primary Sources

Nicoll, George Robertson (1890). The Life and Adventures of Mr George Robertson Nicoll, unpublished journal.

Nicoll, George Robertson (1899.) Fifty Years’ Travels in Australia, China, Japan, America Etc. London: self-published.

References

Cree, Viviene E. (ed.) (2013). Becoming a Social Worker, Global Narratives. London: Routledge. ISBN 978 0 4156 6694 7

Macintyre, Stuart (2009). A Concise History of Australia. 3^rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pascoe, Bruce (2018). Dark Emu. London: Scribe Publications UK Ltd.

Ritchie, John (1975). Australia As Once We Were. Melbourne: Heinemann.

Endnotes

[1] For more information, see chapters written by Moana Eruera and Gaylene Stevens in Cree (ed.) (2013).

[2] To find out more about the various terms given to Australia’s First Nations people, see https://www.commonground.org.au

[3] Ritchie, 1975 page 26; Macintyre, 2009 page 61.

[4] See Campbell, Judy (2002). Invisible invaders: smallpox and other diseases in Aboriginal Australia, 1780-1880. Carlton South, Vic: Melbourne University Press.

[5] Sheep numbers increased from 100,000 in 1820 to 1 million in 1830, and while the production of other livestock and cereal crops also increased sharply, it was sheep that were ‘the shock troops of land seizure’ (Macintyre, 2009: 58). New South Wales flocks numbered 4 million in 1840 and 13 million in 1850.

[6] See my previous blog for a fuller t of the negative impacts of gold digging. https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/emigration-blog/2019/12/21/nothing-but-gold/

[7] See Westgarth, William (1948). Australia Felix, Historical and Descriptive Account of Port Philip, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd.

[8] See McGregor, Russell (1997). Imagined Destinies. Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880-1939. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. It was this idea that led to the conclusion that aboriginal children should be taken from their mothers (both so-called ‘half-castes’ and ‘full-blooded’ children) and placed with white families for their own ‘protection’; they have been called the ‘stolen generation’. See https://aiatsis.gov.au/research/finding-your-family/before-you-start/stolen-generations/

[9] Study reported in the Guardian newspaper, 20^th February 2015. See https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/feb/20/alcohol-abuse-behind-high-rates-of-early-death-among-indigenous-study-finds/ For more recent research, see Lee, K.K., Conigrave, J.H., Wilson, S. et al. (2019). Patterns of drinking in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as self-reported on the Grog Survey App: a stratified sample. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 19, 180. doi: 10.1186/s12911-019-0879-8

[10] See Dowling, Peter J. (1997). ‘A Great Deal of Sickness’: Introduced Diseases among the Aboriginal People of Colonial Southeast Australia. Unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra.

[11] See my previous blog for a fuller account of the negative impacts of gold digging. https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/emigration-blog/2019/12/21/nothing-but-gold/

[12] Although cannibalism was practised in a number of the islands at this time, white people (and missionaries) were treated as ‘taboo’ (ref).

[13] This legislation established reserves to which Aboriginal people could be forcibly taken and removed their civil rights, treating them as dependents rather than citizens. The Act was strengthened by subsequent amendments.

[14] Such displays were a common feature at the fairs. There has been much debate about how far this was degrading and exploitative, and to what degree Native Americans, for example, were able to use these displays as an opportunity to represent themselves in an authentic way. See Beck, David R.M. (2019). Unfair Labor?: American Indians and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

[15] Satnam Virdee, Unthinking Sociology and Overcoming its History Deficit, The Sociological Review Annual Lecture, 18^th August 2019, available on Youtube: https://youtu.be/sKfbMBphsYg

Jan 20, 2020

25th November 201926th November 2019

Stand by your Man

‘Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, giving all your love to just one man.
You’ll have bad times and he’ll have good times, doin’ things that you don’t understand
But if you love him you’ll forgive him, even though he’s hard to understand
And if you love him oh be proud of him, ’cause after all he’s just a man
Stand by your man’ (Billy Sherrill & Tammy Wynette, 1969).

The previous blog focused on Sarah Baird’s early life in Dundee, before she left with her young husband, George Robertson Nicoll, on the Royal Saxon in 1848. It’s now time to turn to her life in Australia, acknowledging that neither George’s book (Fifty Years’ Travels etc.) nor his journal (The Life and Adventures of Mr. George Robertson Nicoll) say very much about her life. Children were born and died, gold was discovered and stolen, houses were built and sold, businesses were established and passed on, ships were purchased and wrecked, and through all of this, George was constantly on the move, either travelling within Australia or journeying to and from America, Dundee, the Far East and eventually around the world twice. Sarah, meanwhile, was (we can only imagine) the loyal wife, mother and home-maker, living as a single parent for sometimes years on end, and at other times, travelling with George, putting up with the privations and hardships that went along with being a settler in New South Wales in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Because George makes so little mention of Sarah, I have had to follow his story, thinking all the while – but what about Sarah? – locating this in wider literature and using my imagination to do the rest.

Emigrating to New South Wales (NSW), March-July 1848

Sarah’s emigration journey must have been exhiliarating, terrifying, and often gruelling. It is reasonable to assume that she may never have been at sea before, and yet here she was, responsible for not just her own life and well-being, but for that of 10 month-old George Wallace, whom she was still breastfeeding. The small family left Dundee on a steamer for Leith (Edinburgh’s port) in March 1848 and then travelled to London by another steamer (a three-week journey) where they waited for a week at an emigration depot while the barque, the Royal Saxon, was made ready for sail.

Adapted from image of Duke of Lancaster merchant ship in 1842, with the Royal Saxon (pictured here) off her starboard bow. See http://www.australianbrickhills.com/412022519

Conditions on the Royal Saxon were, initially, good – there was plenty of fresh food and water, and the passengers settled down and organised themselves for the three-month passage. Over the course of the journey, however, everything changed. First, they hit storms in the Bay of Biscay, and everyone was seasick. George tells us that he could ‘hear the heavy seas coming on board the upper decks, thumping like great guns, which made the women and children scream, thinking they were going to the bottom’ (Fifty Years Travels, page 2). They then passed Gibraltar and onto the Tropics where they were becalmed for two weeks. The drinking water was, by this time, stinking and rotten, and passengers and crew alike became ill with fever. A young Scottish man from Glasgow in Sarah and George’s berth died and was buried at sea, his body sewn in canvas with a lump of stone, and ‘slid over a hatch into the deep’ (journal, page 36). Meanwhile, baby George Wallace became ‘very ill indeed’, ‘reduced to a skeleton, having got the Ricketts’ (op. cit.) The ship’s doctor advised Sarah to wean him, which, George notes ‘was very bad at this time’ (op.cit.). How George Wallace must have cried and cried! The doctor himself died soon after, and was also buried at sea.

From here on, the voyage seems to have been unremarkable. George tells us that they fell in with the trade winds, which made it cooler and everyone’s health improved, and the journey progressed satisfactorily. He made himself useful repairing blocks for the ship’s captain, while Sarah looked after her own and other families in their berth. Eight babies were born on the voyage, one to Sofie McDonald (aged 23) from Ross-shire, who gave birth to a son. It seems very likely that Sarah would have been involved in the birth in some way, either supporting Sofie’s labour or looking after her other children, John (aged 4) and Murdoch (aged 2). Three children died on the journey (no names are given); the mortality rate for seaboard infants was extremely high, with as many as one-quarter of infants not surviving the voyage.[1] Margaret Hinshelwood, who travelled to Queensland as a Scottish emigrant in 1883, gives some clues about what it felt like to be a woman passenger:

‘What a strange world we live in, one weeping and another rejoicing. Last night the sound of mirth and music ranged from forecastle to stern, and before dawn the wail of sorrow echoed over the peaceful sea. A fine little fellow of eighteen months was seized with croup and severe bronchitis in the night, and though the doctor tried every remedy, it was of no avail. The poor mother was nearly frantic, it came so suddenly, so unexpected. I could not go on deck to see the little body consigned to the waves. I felt it would be more than I could stand. The captain desired as much quietness as possible, as there is so much illness on board.’[2]

Life in NSW, 1848-1858

Arriving in Sydney must have been a welcome relief for everyone – the sun, the sky, the birds, the light, the dry land! Then again, the mosquitoes, the flies, the snakes, the spiders… And yet this was Sydney in winter, and the Southern hemisphere was experiencing a period of unusually cold and wet weather (Ashcroft et al., 2014; Neukom et al., 2014). Maybe this felt a bit like home? Sydney, like Dundee, was a place of great contrasts, with a lot of poverty, unmade streets and hastily thrown up buildings, but at the same time, a substantial number of public and private buildings, churches, libraries, theatres, banks and shops, a court and a police station. With a population of around 50,000 people, it was considerably smaller than Dundee (reckoned at about 80,000 in the 1851 census). But it was a city that was growing all the time, and one that was about to benefit – as Melbourne did – from the profits from gold.

This was a busy time for George: he travelled a lot and spent considerable amounts of time away from home, chasing gold in California, NSW and Victoria, and farming at Shoalhaven. It was also a busy time for Sarah, who had four more pregnancies that we know about and four more children (there may have been other pregnancies that did not go to full-term). It seems that every time George returned home, Sarah got pregnant again. Was she happy? We cannot know, but there is at least one suggestion in George’s journal that she may have felt lonely; why else would she have walked miles each day to bring him his lunch (journal, page 41). Of course, Sarah would have made friends – she would have had to, just to survive. But the family’s constant moves must have made it difficult to sustain mutually supportive relationships, and while Sarah would have received occasional letters from home, these would have taken months to arrive. [3]

Five months after they arrived in Sydney, George headed off for the Californian gold rush, leaving infant George Wallace and Sarah, now 4-months pregnant, living in a two-roomed house at Miller’s Point in Sydney; Mary was born in May 1849. When he returned in 1850, George was penniless. Not only had he been unable to get anywhere near the goldfields because of snow, he had been shipwrecked on the way back. How did Sarah manage when he was away? And how did they all manage when he came back? Over the next two years, George spent many months away from home, firstly, digging for gold at Maitland Point in NSW, and then at Mount Alexander in Victoria. Another child was born in October 1851 – Bruce Baird – and in March 1852, the family relocated to Melbourne, where George rented a small cottage in William Street, before heading off with the family for the goldfields, along with ‘two mates’ (sailors William Trail from Dundee and Jamie Lawton from Lerwick). He writes in his journal:

‘The wife and children rode on the dray while we [the men] walked. This was the only way we could get up as the road was very rough and the weather hot with plenty of mosquitoes, flies and hot winds, worse than Sydney. We arrived there in about six days, camping at night underneath a tarpaulin. We enjoyed it much as we were young and strong…’ (page 94).

This does not sound like much fun to me, with three children under five years of age! At Golden Gully, George and his two mates built a wooden-framed house covered in tarpaulin, divided into two rooms (one for the men and one for the family). The men worked together for a time digging for gold, while Sarah kept house.

Men digging gold, by Edwin Stocqueler. With thanks to National Library of Australia

Life in the gold fields cannot have been easy for Sarah. Not only were there few women, but those who were there were as likely to be sex workers as they were wives and mothers.[4] George tells us that the children became unwell because of the heat and the ‘bad water’, and George was left working alone, after his two mates took off for Bendigo and Ballarat following new discoveries there. One of the only stories that George tells us of this time is of Sarah’s care for two neighbours on Golden Gully. The men were very sick, and Sarah fed them, cleaned them and looked after them for a week until they were well again; they gave her 2 ½ ounces of gold in thanks. George’s digging was ultimately successful: over time, he amassed 17lbs of gold (a considerable amount, then and now), and with this carefully stashed and a loaded gun by his side, the family headed back to Sydney, where he bought and renovated an old property, the Saracen’s Head Hotel, then a shop and dwelling-houses ‘which proved a good investment’ (journal page 99). George returned to the goldfields, working with limited success, until Sarah wrote to tell him to come home again; we do not know why. He stayed only for a short time and returned to the diggings again, ‘just making wages or thereabouts’ (journal page 103), before returning to Sydney where he bought the goodwill, stock and a general store in Burwood, Sydney. From here, he supplied goods to the team of navvies working on the construction of the Sydney to Parramatta railway. He also got up early each morning to go into the bush and fell ironbark trees, selling firewood around the houses in Sydney. After building up the business, he sold it for a profit, and having heard there was money to be made in farming, he decided to try his luck in Shoalhaven. He subsequently bought a farm with crops and cattle at Shoalhaven, where land was said to be fertile and plentiful, and took his family to live there, including another baby boy, Allen George, born in November 1854.

Time passed, and George tried and failed to make a success of farming. Sarah was pregnant again, and George tells us in his journal that she was unwell, so he bought 2.5 acres of land, along with a clearing lease, and built a cottage at Nowra on higher ground, because the doctor said that ‘the low ground was killing her’ (page 105).

A typical early slab and dash Nowra cottage — A typical slab and dash early Nowra cottage, from Coombs (2014).

Soon after, another baby (James) was born in May. Meanwhile, George sustained heavy losses at farming and Sarah was still unwell, so the family went back to Sydney, again renting a house on high ground. When the doctor recommended a return to Scotland, I can only guess that Sarah must have been overjoyed.

But what was wrong with Sarah? Was this a physical illness – perhaps a respiratory problem (such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD) brought on by her 10 years’ working in a linen factory, and made worse by the damp flood-plains of Shoalhaven?[5] Or was this a mental health problem – was Sarah suffering from postnatal depression, or was she simply missing her family back in Scotland? Powell (2007) outlines many of the challenges faced by women in this new world:

‘The trauma of being a new immigrant and the loneliness and separation that it entailed could prove to be defeating for both men and women. […] But women more likely to die from other causes – high numbers of women died from respiratory diseases such as bronchitis and pneumonia. Moreover, women of childbearing age throughout the country had to contend with the complications of pregnancy and childbirth which often proved fatal’ (page 76-77).[6]

Return migration, 1858-1862

After 10 years in NSW, the family (Sarah, George and their five children) returned to Dundee in 1858. George paid for second-class berths on the clipper Duncan Dunbar, sailing on 10^th February 1858, a ‘splendid passenger ship’ with ‘mostly squatters and wealthy colonists’ (as George’s journal relates, page 107).

Duncan Dunbar, by T.G. Dutton (1819-1891). See https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?192436

After a 90-day passage, they travelled by steamer to Dundee, arriving in the middle of May 1858, with a white cockatoo, two Gilear parrots and two dozen Java sparrows. They returned, to all appearances, as successful colonists, coming ‘home’ to Dundee to educate their three older children, no doubt bearing gifts for their many nephews and nieces, and something special for Sarah’s mother, now 69 years of age (Sarah’s father had died the previous year in 1857). The family moved into a rented house in Lochee, with a large fruit and vegetable garden, and spent the summer visiting friends and enjoying the climate and scenery of ‘Bonne Scotland’ (journal page 108.) Six weeks later, the lure of gold meant that George was off again on another ship to Sydney. He was then away for the best part of three years, digging for gold at the Snowy River goldfields, and later working as a carpenter near Bathurst. During this time, Sarah’s lifestyle and happiness took a dramatic turn for the worse.

I was shocked to find her listed in the 1861 census records, living in a tenement flat in Albert Street, Dundee, with only her three eldest children; the two youngest had died, James, on 24^th January 1859 (aged 1 year 8 months) of ‘scarlatina dropsy’ (scarlet fever), and Allan George, three months later, on 4^th April 1859 (aged 4 years and 5 months) of ‘effusion on the brain’ (possibly meningitis), which George calls ‘hooping cough’. Both deaths were registered by George’s brother, Thomas; George is recorded on the death certificates as a ‘farmer from Nowra, Shoalhaven, Australia’. This was not actually accurate, but may have been felt to be more appealing than ‘itinerant gold digger’! George does not mention the children’s deaths in his book, but he does in his journal, where he describes arranging for a headstone to commemorate them when he returned to Dundee in July 1861, with the intention of ‘settling for good in Scotland’ (as he says in his book, page 68).

How did Sarah cope with all of this loss and grief on her own? Of course, infant mortality was a massive problem in early Victorian Scotland. For example, in 1861, children under 10 years of age made up 54% of all deaths in Glasgow, and figures for the years 1861 to 1870 show that tuberculosis, whooping cough, and diarrhoea and dysentery accounted for the highest number of child deaths. (Flynn et al., 1977: 404-5). But knowing that it is a common occurrence cannot in any way take away from the terrible loss this must have been to Sarah and to the other children.

And how did the little family readjust to George’s presence again in 1861? It must have been strange for everyone. He had been away for three years, and it seems likely that George Wallace (at 14 years of age) would have, by then, seen himself as the ‘man of the house’. The other children were 12 and 10 years, and were used to having Sarah to themselves. And how did Sarah feel? She was pregnant again within a month of George’s return. I would like to think that she still loved George and that this was a union of equals. In truth, George had conjugal rights[7] and this pregnancy may not have been something she wanted. Whatever the truth, George could not settle back in Dundee. He hated the Scottish winter and suffered from ‘rheumatics, headaches and toothaches’ (Fifty Years’ Travels etc., page 69). He longed for the warmer climate, and persuaded Sarah to go back to Sydney with him again. I can only guess that she was glad to go too, sickened by the deaths of her two youngest children. The family returned to NSW, again travelling as assisted migrants in March 1862, this time on the Hotspur. Baby John Baird was born on the journey, and it was Sarah who appeared in the statistics of births on board.

Settling in NSW, 1862-1897

The next thirty years or so seems (on the surface) to have been a more settled time for the family. George set up a new business in Sydney, working as a produce agent, first representing the South Coast, and later trading on the North Coast on the Richmond and Manning Rivers, and he brought his two elder sons into the business. George named one of his steamers the Sarah Nicoll and another the Lass o’ Gowrie, built for him in Dundee. Another child was born in Paddington, Sydney, in October 1867. Named David, he was a much-cherished last child; his siblings were 20, 18, 16 and 5 years of age. George was, by this time, relatively wealthy. Son George Wallace married in 1872 as did Bruce Baird the following year, and both went on to have children of their own soon after. George says very little about this period in either his book or his journal, so it is difficult to be sure what either he or Sarah was doing. An obituary states that Sarah was ‘of a lively and intellectual disposition, and was possessed of considerable literary ability, and her kindly efforts in the cause of charity were many’ (The Australian Star (Sydney) Monday 9 August 1897 p.7). This suggests that Sarah – never afraid of hard work – was probably a volunteer for some voluntary organisation or church society, and she may even have written about her own adventures (though presumably without using her own name[8]). So far, I have not been able to find any evidence either of Sarah’s writing or her charitable work.

Inevitably, there were highs and lows over this time. The two elder sons did well in the shipping business, building it up considerably, and between them, had a combined fleet of 44 steamers. They have been described as ‘iconic figures in the Northern Rivers region’, who had ‘opened up the area to trade’.[9] They also became politicians, at both local and state level: George Wallace was an alderman and later Mayor of Canterbury in Sydney, and Bruce Baird represented the Richmond electorate in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (Jehan, 2007). Behind the story of the family’s success, there were, nonetheless, other, more difficult life-events. In 1870, their only daughter Mary ran off with a married man, whom she married bigamously, each using false names. Mary came back home the following year, presumably in disgrace, and her father initiated a private prosecution against her former partner. Mary did not then marry until 1882, and this was to a middle-aged widower friend of her father and brother. Just as shocking for the family, son George Wallace’s wife, Helen, had an affair in 1882, while George Wallace was in Dundee commissioning the building of a steamship; two of her babies had died earlier that year, and it seems that she was struggling on her own. George Wallace subsequently divorced her, taking custody of their three remaining children. The divorce caused a public scandal (as all divorces did)[10], and was carried in all the local newspapers for days on end; extremely distressing for Sarah, who may have felt either/or/ both sympathy and fury with Helen, whose experience of motherhood was not unlike her own.

George Wallace married again in 1883, and went on to have six more sons. Soon after this marriage, Sarah and George’s last child, David, a painter, died of ‘phthisis’ (tuberculosis) after ten months of illness, at 18 years of age on 12^th October 1885. George and Sarah were distraught, as demonstrated by the eulogies in the press and also the huge obelisk that was erected in the Rookwood cemetery in Sydney (Blog 3 discusses the impact of loss and bereavement on this family).

Soon after David died, George and Sarah went back to Scotland in 1886 to visit family and friends. They travelled in relative comfort on the New Zealand steamship, the Tongariro, and if George is to be believed, they both enjoyed the trip, following it with a three-month holiday in Tasmania. George went on to spend the next ten years travelling around the world twice, while Sarah lived with her son Bruce and his family. She died there on 6^th August 1897, not long after celebrating her 74^th birthday; George was not with her.

Conclusion

This blog began, tongue in check, with the first verse of the song, Stand by your Man. Looking at Sarah’s life as a whole, it is clear that this is what she did: she stuck by George ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health’, as traditional marriage vows dictate. But did she? She did not accompany him on his last two world trips and was not living with him at the time that she died. In the end, I suspect that she stood by her children and her family, not her man. And maybe that was the best – and the only thing – that she could do, as a woman of her time.

Viviene E. Cree

25th November 2019

Primary Sources

Nicoll, George Robertson (1890). The Life and Adventures of Mr George Robertson Nicoll, unpublished journal.

Nicoll, George Robertson (1899.) Fifty Years’ Travels in Australia, China, Japan, America Etc. London: self-published.

References

Ashcroft, Linden; Gergis, Joëlle & Karoly, David, John (2014). A historical climate dataset for southeastern Australia, 1788-1859, Geoscience Data Journal 1(2): 158-178. doi: 10.1002/gd3.19

Cooms, Roger (2014). Shoalhaven District. Pictorial History. Alexandria: Kingsclear Books.

Frost, Lucy (1995). Immigrant women in narratives of divorce. In Richards, Eric (ed.) Visible Women. Female immigrants in Colonial Australia, Visible Immigrants: Four. Canberra: Centre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies, National University: 85-111.

Jehan, Jean (2007). The Nicoll Brothers. Pioneers of Northern Rivers Shipping, Hurstville: Hurstville Family History Society Inc.

Lai, Peggy S. and. Christiani, David C. (2013). Long term respiratory health effects in textile workers. Curr Opin Pulm Med. Mar; 19(2): 152–157. doi: 10.1097/MCP.0b013e32835cee9a/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3725301/ Accessed 15th October 2019.

MacDonald, Charlotte (ed.) (2006) Women Writing Home 1700-1920: Female Correspondence Across the British Empire, Volume 5: New Zealand, London: Pickering and Chatto.

Neukom, Raphael; Gergis, Joëlle; Karoly, David J.; Wanner, Heinz; Curran, Mark; Elbert, Julie; González-Rouco, Fidel; Linsley, Braddock K.; Moy, Andrew D.; Mundo, Ignacio; Raible, Christoph C.; Steig, Eric J.; van Ommen, Tas; Vance, Tessa; Villalba, Ricardo; Zinke, Jens & Frank, David (2014). Inter-hemispheric temperature variability over the past millennium, Nature Climate Change 4: 362–36, doi: 10.1038/nclimate2174.

Powell, Debra (2007). ‘It Was Hard to Die Frae Hame’: Death, Grief and Mourning among Scottish Migrants To New Zealand, 1840 -1890, Unpublished Master of Arts in History dissertation, Waikato: University of Waikato.

Shlomowitz, Ralph and McDonald, John (1991) Babies at risk on immigrant voyages to Australia in the 19th Century. Economic History Review 44(1): 86-101.

Weber, Brooke (2018) ‘A Mad Proceeding’: mid-nineteenth century female emigration to Australia, Unpublished PhD thesis, London; Royal Holloway, University of London. https://2018weberphd.pdf.pdf

Endnotes

[1] Schlomowitz and McDonald (1991) state that although the seaboard adult death rate had declined to roughly the same level as the poorer classes of land-based people from Great Britain and Ireland, the child death rates remained significantly higher. Nearly one-quarter of infants died on voyages between 1838 and 1853. See also Powell (2007).

[2] Extract 1.5 Margaret Hinshelwood, account of voyage to Queensland, 1883 (NLS, Acc. 12149). In Breitenbach 2013: 293.

[3] Letter-writing was hugely important means of women keeping in touch, in spite of the great time-gaps. See MacDonald (2006).

[4] See permanent exhibition, Melbourne: Foundations of a City, Old Treasury Building, Melbourne.

[5] Textile dust related obstructive lung disease has been found to have characteristics of both asthma and COPD. See Lai and Christiani (2013).

[6] See also Weber (2018) on migrant women’s mental health.

[7] The assumption that ‘marital services’ (i.e. sexual intercourse) should be expected was not abolished in the UK until 1971.

[8] A delightful book written by ‘A Lady in Australia’, entitled Memories of the Past (1873), recounts the experiences of one middle-class woman who travelled to Australia in the early 1840’s with her husband on a convict ship from Gravesend, England.

[9] Website accessed 17 April 2019:

https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/Hansard/pages/HansardReult.aspx#docid/HANSARD-1820781676-75242

[10] Public scandal was one of the ways that the behaviour of women and men was policed. See Frost (1995).

Nov 25, 2019

10th October 201912th October 2019

Who was Sarah?

When George Robertson Nicoll begins his account of his Fifty Years’ Travels, he does so with the following words:

‘We left London on March 17^th, 1848, in the good ship Royal Saxon, a 700-ton vessel with three hundred passengers’ (page 1).

What George does not tell us is that his 24-year old wife, Sarah, travelled with him on that first journey, and remained his partner over the next 49 years until she died in Sydney in 1897, aged 74 years. There is, in truth, very little mention of Sarah in George’s book or in his very detailed journal, The Life and Adventures of Mr. George Robertson Nicoll. She is, like so many women in history, an enigma, there but not there, sometimes a passing mention but more often, missing completely from the narrative. As early as 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote:

‘The history [of England] is the history of the male line, not of the female. Of our fathers, we know always some fact, some distinction. They were soldiers or they were sailors; they filled that office or they made that law. But what of our mothers, our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers, what remains?’

Over the course of this and the next blog, I will try to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Virginia Woolf and countless feminist historians ever since and ask: what of Sarah, or rather, who was Sarah Baird? I will set on record what is known about her from official sources, starting in this blog with her early life in Scotland, and moving on in the next blog to her life in New South Wales (NSW). In piecing together her story, I will draw widely on women’s history from the UK and Australia. I will also, inevitably, make calculated speculations to fill in the gaping holes that are her own thoughts, feelings and experiences.

In attempting to shed light on Sarah’s story, it needs to be acknowledged that I am not forgetting all those other women whose stories are erased in history (Weisner-Hanks, 2001): in the context of this story, that includes the poor, often Irish women who worked as spinners in the Dundee mills, and the Aboriginal women who were persecuted and displaced by the colonising settler women (and men) who took over their land. Their stories deserve to be heard in their own right, not as a postscript or ‘add-on’ to this story, but if it is at least possible to wave in their direction, I will do so.

Childhood in Perthshire

Sarah was born on 23^rd June 1823 at Errol, a parish in the Carse of Gowrie, Perthshire, on the east of Scotland. The Carse of Gowrie is a low-lying, fertile plain between the River Tay to the south and the Sidlaw Hills to the north, and is about half-way between Perth and Dundee. Sarah’s father, John Baird, was a mason. The work of stone-masons in the nineteenth century was highly variable. Sometimes, they would have been employed on prestigious building projects, and at other times, on more mundane work, carving, paving, fixing sinks and chimneys as well as doing ‘memorial work’ (building gravestones), as described in the diary of Arthur Peck, a stonemason in the 1850’s and 1860’s in Hertford, England.[1] Their work would have been physically hard and, at times, extremely dangerous, especially if they were carving stone inside poorly-ventilated buildings or working out-of-doors high up on scaffolding with the minimum of protection. And (as Arthur Peck tells us) the work was never well-paid, in spite of the skill it required.

John Baird had been born in Muiravon, Stirlingshire, the son of Alexander Baird (mason) and Heneretta (also spelt Henereta and Henrietta) Thorntown (sometimes spelt Thornton and Thomson); it is likely that he would have served his time working for his father at Muiravon. He probably travelled to Errol for reasons of work; in the early years of the nineteenth century, the village was growing, with the establishment of a brickworks at Inchcoonans to the north-west in the 1810’s,[2] and the building of new houses and then a new parish church (known as ‘the cathedral of the Carse’), completed in 1833.

Errol Parish Church (from Errol website)

John Baird married Elizabeth Tait on 23^rd September 1810, three months before the birth of their first child, William, as was common at the time.[3] Elizabeth had been born in Errol. Her father was William Tait, a handloom weaver; her mother was Isabel Baxter. William would have worked from home, assisted by his wife and children, which means that Elizabeth would have been familiar with the weaving process (Turner, 1983). Humphries (1995) asserts:

‘Women have always worked. What has changed historically has been the form their work has taken’ (page 85).

Over the course of 20 years, Elizabeth gave birth to 12 children: seven boys and five girls (Sarah was her eighth child). Six of the seven boys died young: two aged 21 years and one aged 11 years; three more were drowned at sea (this information is gleaned from the Baird’s gravestone at Errol church-yard).[4]

None of the children’s deaths appear on the Old Parish Registers (OPR’s), suggesting that John and Elizabeth may have been members of one of the dissenting churches. This suggestion may be significant, because George’s mother, Margaret Ogilvie Robertson, also worshipped at a United Free Church until her death in 1832.

We have no way of knowing whether Elizabeth worked in an occupation other than as wife and mother, but it is very likely that she did. Whether she did needlework, took in a lodger, looked after other women’s children or carried on her father’s occupation of weaving on a small loom at home, she would have had to contribute to the family income in some way.

All John and Elizabeth’s children would have attended the parish school in Errol. It was a feature of the Scottish education system at the time that although the school leaving age was 12 years, both boys and girls learned the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, while girls were also taught housewifely activities such as needlework.[5] This meant that when Sarah and George travelled on the Royal Saxon in 1848, both were able to read and write, unlike their Irish and some of the English fellow assisted migrants.[6]

Working in Dundee

Whenever anyone mentions Dundee and the textile industry, it is usually in the context of the production of jute rather than linen, and spinning rather than weaving (Miskell and Whatley, 1999); this is clear in the name given to Dundee in the nineteenth century – ‘Juteopolis’. But the experience of the Baird family reminds us that it was linen manufacture that preceded jute, and that powerloom weavers were as much part of Dundee’s story as were the spinners and all the other textile occupations.

So, why did the family relocate to Dundee in the 1830’s? Given that the parish church had been completed in 1833, John Baird may have also found himself without work, or at least without enough work to care for his large family. The children were growing up too; they needed to find work with they left school at 12 years of age. Dundee would have had far many more opportunities than the village of Errol. The family appears in the 1841 census, living in the Hilltown of Dundee, a place where a large number of handloom weavers lived, described in 1850 as ‘one of the poorest and most populous quarters’ (see Turner, 1983: 24). The census reports that Sarah and her sister, Elizabeth (aged 18 and 15 years), were now both working as powerloom weavers. Their sister Henrietta was away from home by then, married to a lapper[7] called James Robertson Nicoll (no obvious relation), and probably a powerloom weaver herself. No occupation is given for her mother, in common with recording practice (enumerators were instructed not to include married women’s work in 1841).[8] The 1851 census records the family living at 12 Rosebank Road, by which time Sarah’s father was a mason (journeyman) of 70 years of age, paid by the day for his work, while her sister, Mary, and brothers, Robert and Andrew, had joined the textile industry and were working as a powerloom weaver and starchers respectively.[9]

We have no way of knowing which mill (or mills) the young Bairds worked in. Were they employed at the Laing Works, about half-a-mile from home, or perhaps at W.G. Grants in Constitution Road? Wherever it was, it was likely to have been close to home; a 12 hour-day (with two breaks for breakfast and lunch) meant that most mill workers lived near their place of employment, and bells and whistles signalled that the working day was about to begin. The mechanisation of the linen industry had a major impact on Dundee; by the late 1830’s, Dundee rivalled Leeds as the principle British linen town (Jackson 1991: 2) and in 1851, there were 43 spinning mills and eight powerloom factories in Dundee, as well as 10 finishing, calendaring and packing plants. The industry by then employed 11,382 workers and imported 40,000 tons of flax (Lenman et al., 1969), turning out coarse linen for sacks and bagging (for transporting cotton and other goods), osnaburg (for plantation slaves’ clothing), and sailcloth and canvas (for the expanding merchant and naval fleets) (Turner, 1983).

We have already seen that Sarah and her sisters were powerloom weavers. Weaving had been a male occupation, and a skilled one at that – their grandfather had been a handloom weaver – but when machinery was introduced to the production process, powerloom weaving became a women’s job, viewed as less skilled and meriting lower wages. The first powerloom factory in Dundee was built by Messrs. Baxter in 1836 at their works in the Dens. Baxter’s factory was 150 feet long, 75 feet wide, and, on one floor, lit from the roof (this was heralded as a progressive development).

Dens Mills was followed soon after by Alexander Rowan at Dudhope, John Laing at Dens Road, and Messrs. Edward at Logie and for some years, these four works were the only powerloom factories in Dundee. Later, their numbers multiplied, to the extent that almost all the spinning works had weaving departments.[10] Wainwright (2002) draws attention to the rigid hierarchy that operated within the mills. Not only were there men’s jobs (so-called ‘skilled’ tasks such as beaming and dressing, and supervisory and maintenance tasks), there was also a strict differentiation between women weavers (who were the aristocrats of the mills) and the lowly spinners (see also Cox, 2013). This is demonstrated vividly in a description of weavers and spinners in the Dundee Year Book for 1903:

‘In at the same gates […] go the respectable, well-dressed industrious girl, and the frowsy-haired, bare armed, short petticoated, shawlied lassie of hard voice and rough manners.’[11]

The weavers, unlike the spinners, underwent a period of on-the-job training alongside an experienced weaver so that they could learn to operate their loom or looms. They were ‘piece-workers’. This meant that their earnings depended on their own exertions and were therefore more variable. But it also meant that they had a measure of control over their work that was not available to the spinners who worked for set wages. Weavers experienced higher rates of industrial injuries than any of the other processes, because they were often tempted to do minor adjustments and repairs to machines themselves, sometimes ignoring the safety procedures that slowed down production and their affected earnings (Cox, 2013: 23). Their work environment was cleaner and less dusty than those of the spinners. But what the weavers suffered from most was the incessant din of the machines. They developed severe hearing loss because of their work, and were forced to use a kind of sign language and lip reading to communicate with one another on the factory floor.[12]

Sarah meets George

How did Sarah meet George? It would have seemed, on the surface, more likely that she would have teamed up with a young man from the mill, as her sister had done. But Sarah married a young man aged 21 years, almost two years younger her junior, someone whose life was spent at the docks, not the mills. My guess is that they may have met at church, rather than the dancing or any other popular entertainment venue. Both were devout Protestants, and we know that in his journal, George expressed great antipathy towards alcohol. Putting two and two together, I suspect that they may have shared a religiosity, which may also explain Sarah’s willingness to ‘stand by her man’ (as the song goes) over the many difficult years that followed. (We will find out more in the next blog.)

The decision to leave

By the time that George and Sarah discussed emigrating to NSW in early 1848, life must have been difficult for Sarah, as it was for George, whose wages in the warehouse at the Shore had just been cut, as recounted in his journal). George and Sarah were living with their baby in two rooms in the West Port in Dundee. It is very likely that Sarah would have returned to work soon after George Wallace was born on 13^th May 1847, almost exactly nine months after they were married.[13] She probably fed him before leaving for work (her day would have started at 6am) and then returned at lunchtime for another feed, before the last feed after she got home in the evening. George Wallace was probably cared for through the day by her mother (who lived for another 19 years) or by one of her younger sisters, fed boiled water or gruel (powered milk was not available until 1923), and Sarah would have been permanently tired, hungry and thirsty. NSW must indeed have seemed like ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’, as George describes it in his journal (page 33). Estimates suggest 51,000 emigrants left Scotland in the 1830’s, rising to 59,000 in the 1840’s and 154,000 in the 1850’s; the figures for the 1840’s and 1850’s include the very many Irish people who came to Scotland before travelling on when they had made enough money. Emigration, Cage (1985) argues, was ‘becoming part of the consciousness of an increasing number of families’ (page 7).

So who was Sarah Baird?

The picture that emerges from this story is one of an independent, self-reliant, family-oriented young woman, educated to a point, able to look after herself and others, brave and willing to take a risk for her young family. She had, George acknowledges, more to lose than him, as he writes in his journal:

‘My wife had some good cries about parting with her people but I had no reason to cry as my home would now be where I could make my best living and enjoy good health’ (page 34).

Lucky George!

Viviene Cree

10th October 2019

Acknowledgements

With thanks to all those on the Facebook group, Dundonian History for all, and staff from Verdant Works and Dundee City Archives – your insights were most helpful!

Primary Sources

Nicoll, George Robertson (1890). The Life and Adventures of Mr George Robertson Nicoll, unpublished journal.

Nicoll, George Robertson (1899.) Fifty Years’ Travels in Australia, China, Japan, America Etc. London: self-published.

References

Anderson, Robert D. (1983). Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland. Schools & Universities. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Cage, Robert A. (ed.) (1985). The Scots Abroad. Labour, Capital, Enterprise, 1750-1914. London: Croom Helm.

Cox, Anthony (2013). Empire, Industry and Class. The imperial nexus of jute, 1840-1940. London: Routledge.

Gleadie, Kathryn (2001). British Women in the Nineteenth Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Humphries, Jane (1995). Women and paid work. In Purvis, Jane (ed.) Women’s History in Britain, 1850-1945. An Introduction. London: UCL Press.

Jackson, Gordon with Kate Kinnear (1991). The Trade and Shipping of Dundee. Dundee: Abertay Historical Society Publication No. 31.

Lenman, Bruce, Lythe, Charlotte and Gauldie, Enid (1969). Dundee and its Textile Industry 1850-1914, Dundee: Abertay Historical Society Publication No. 14.

Miskell, Louise and Whatley, C.A. (1999). ‘Juteopolis’ in the making: Linen and the Inustrial Transformation of Dundee, c.1820-1850, Textile History 30(2): 176-198.

Turner, W.H.K. (1983). Flax weaving in Scotland in the early 19^th century, Scottish Geographical Magazine 99(1): 16-30, doi: 10.1080/00369228308736540

Weisner-Hanks, Merry (2001). Gender in History. Oxford: Blackwell.

Woolf, Virginia (1929). Women and fiction, The Forum, March, reprinted in Virginia Woolf (1966). Collected Essays, volume 2, London: Hogarth Press, page 141.

Endnotes

[1] Peck’s great grandson, Ian Fisher, has reproduced Arthur Peck’s diary. See https://www.ourhertfordandware.org.uk/content/people/the-diary-of-a-nineteenth-century-stonemason, Accessed 4^th September 2019.

[2] https://www.scottish-places.info/towns/townfirst1298.html

[3] Gleadie (2001) suggests that premarital sex was not only common amongst the rural working-class but was actually encouraged by the kirk in Scotland. I have not found any confirmation of this claim elsewhere.

[4] The gravestone in Errol churchyard records: William (born 28/12/1810, died 10^th May 1832 aged 21); James Nichol (born 8/8/1821, died 19^th October 1832 aged 11); Alexander (born 12/6/1814, drowned at sea); John (born 22/12/1819, drowned at sea); Thomas (born 21/4/1816, Captain, drowned at sea); Andrew (born 1831, died 1853 aged 21 years).

[5] The school leaving age was not raised to 14 years in Scotland until 1883.

[6] In 1855, 89% of Scottish men and 77% of Scottish women could sign their name compared with 70% of men and 59% of women in England and Wales. There were, of course, regional differences, so that Lowland counties did much better than some Highland counties such as Argyll. See Anderson (1983: 8).

[7] A lapper was a textile industry worker who transferred yarn between machines. See https://www.familyresearcher.co.uk/glossary/Dictionary-of-Old-Occupations-jobs-beginning-C5.html Accessed 4th September 2019.

[8] Humphries (1995) argues that as a result, the 1841 census probably displays a gross under-remuneration of women workers (page 91).

[9] Starchers worked on machines for saturating cloth with hot starch, prior to the cloth going through an ironing machine.

[10] From ‘The Staple Trade of Dundee’. From The 19th Century History of Dundee reproduced by FDCA. See https://www.fdca.org.uk/Staple_Trade.html, Accessed 1^st October 2019.

[11] ‘Women’s Work and Wages in Dundee’, Dundee Year Book for 1903, page 154, repeated in Wainwright (2002) page 188.

[12] Interview with Lily, former power loom weaver at the Verdant Works, Dundee, on 21^st September 2019.

[13] Although the 1847 Factory Act had restricted the working hours of women and young persons (aged 13-18) in textile mills to 10 hours a day, it was not until 1850 that subsequent legislation established a legal working day, and this affected all workers.

Oct 10, 2019

24th June 201923rd August 2019

A Document of Life? – exploring the memoirs of George Robertson Nicoll

This blog post has been a difficult one to write. I wanted to unpack the process of researching a family history, but I have become so immersed in the story of George Robertson Nicoll and his extended family that, for a time, I have been unable to work out what it is that I am actually doing. Am I writing historical sociology (as I had initially intended) or is this a work of fiction (novel, movie or serial)? Or is it both? What are the implications if this is so?

In a classic text on history, E.H. Carr (1961) reminds us that historians always have an angle; history is never neutral, it is always told for a purpose and from a particular point of view, so that one person’s account of an historical event or situation may be very different to that of another person. More recently, critical humanist researchers have argued that people are ‘active, competent interpreters and theorisers of their own lives’ (Stanley 2013: 5). Because of this, those telling a story do so in full knowledge that others will read what they have written. They choose what should be said and what should not be said, in doing so, present a version of themselves that they wish to share with others.

This is a helpful way into thinking about Fifty Years’ Travels in Australia, China, Japan, America Etc and its accompanying manuscript, The Life and Adventures of Mr George Robertson Nicoll. The author of these biographical memoirs, George Robertson Nicoll, is the hero of his own life story, which is a tale of action, adventure and derring-do; he is also a social commentator and chronicler of other cultures and societies, even though he is at pains to tell readers in the introduction to the manuscript that he is ‘not a scholar’.

Of course, George Robertson Nicoll is not the only active, generative voice in this project. This is equally true of me, self-appointed narrator/ interrogator of George’s memoirs. What I bring to this project is many years of studying history and sociology, as well as a life lived as a self-confessed feminist and socialist, mother, and most recently, social work academic. I inevitably see George’s story in a particular way, and the things that interest me most may not be the same as those that capture the imagination of others, family members and external readers alike.

But there is another complicating factor. This isn’t just any old historical memoir that I have come across and found fascinating. It is the journal of a distant relative of mine, my great great great great-uncle, and all the stories that he tells, and the people who came after him, have a real connection with me. This brings a whole extra dimension to the project, because this becomes not just a biographical study, but, in many ways, an autobiographical one too. What will I do if I come across a story that places a family member in a bad light? Will I be tempted to skip over this, or look for alternative explanations that I would not have done if George had not been, in a sense, part of ‘me’ and me of ‘him’? The need for reflexivity will be no less in this historical project than in any more conventional social science research project.

One example of something that currently perplexes me relates to Blog 2, in which I suggested that George’s last surviving son, John Baird Nicoll, probably died before he had been able to retrieve the manuscript from the National Library of Australia in Canberra, after he had tried (unsuccessfully) to sell it to the librarian. Further research (thanks to my very distant cousin John Macvean from the Gold Coast) proves that John Baird did collect the manuscript after all. His wife Gertude (Cassie) subsequently went on to sell it to the library following John Baird’s death in 1938 because she needed money to pay for doctor’s bills; what can only be described as a begging letter to the library demonstrates that this was indeed the case. But why were they so short of money at this time? We know that John Baird and Gertrude went on a cruise in 1901, presumably paid for with John Baird’s share of his father’s estate (his account of the trip is attached to the manuscript of George’s adventures). We also know that George was a wealthy man when he died in 1901. His elder sons, George Wallace and Bruce Baird, also died wealthy, as did his daughter Mary (they all died in their 50’s, in 1904 and 1906). So was John the ‘black sheep’ of the family, the one person who had not inherited an aptitude for business and for making money? Or is there another explanation, one that is caught up in the relationships within the family, and which may emerge at some point over the course of this biographical/autobiographical journey? Time – and further investigation – may tell. Then again, it may not. This might become one of the very many questions that remain unanswered, even after the genealogical digging has ended, and the story has been put to rest.

This short scenario illustrates the way I hope to use this blog as an opportunity to practise the ‘uncomfortable reflexivity’ that Pillow (2003) urges on all researchers. It will be a place to ask questions, try out ideas and share vulnerabilities in a way that might be less possible within the confines of a more formal academic paper (Guerin et al., 2015). Through this process, I hope others may bring their own observations and inquiries, here or on my new Facebook site, and that this then may lead to more questions and more insights, and with luck, a deeper understanding of this personal, social and cultural journey.

Viviene E. Cree

24^th June 2019

References

Carr, E.H. (1961). What is History? London: Pelican.

Guerin, C., Carter, S. and Aitchison, C. (2015) Blogging as a community of practice: lessons for academic development? International Journal for Academic Development, 20(3): 212-223.

Pillow, W. (2003). ‘”Confession, catharsis, or cure?” Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 16(2): 175-196.

Plummer K. (2001). Documents of Life 2. An Invitation to a Critical Humanism. 2nd edition. London: Sage.

Stanley, L. (2013). Documents of Life Revisited Narrative and Biographical Methodology for a 21st Century Critical Humanism. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.

Jun 24, 2019

Tag: Biography

‘Aboriginal’ people, ‘race’ and identity in the nineteenth century

Situating George’s writing in context

‘Blackfellows’ in Sydney

Experiencing racism first-hand

Encounters with ‘savages’, ‘natives’ and ‘cannibals’

Later years

Primary Sources

References

Further reading

Endnotes

Stand by your Man

Emigrating to New South Wales (NSW), March-July 1848

Life in NSW, 1848-1858

Return migration, 1858-1862

Settling in NSW, 1862-1897

Conclusion

Primary Sources

References

Endnotes

Who was Sarah?

Childhood in Perthshire

Working in Dundee

Sarah meets George

The decision to leave

So who was Sarah Baird?

Acknowledgements

Primary Sources

References

Endnotes

A Document of Life? – exploring the memoirs of George Robertson Nicoll

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