The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

One-way ticket

JIM HAYNES

FEW EUROPEANS IN THE late eighteenth century would have wanted to embark on a 12,000-mile journey to go and live on an unexplored continent at the bottom of the world. Indeed, from the time of European settlement until the middle of the twentieth century, Australia worked hard to encourage anyone to settle here freely.

Assisted passage for free settlers to the colony of New South Wales began as early as 1831. Before that time the incentive for free settlers was land—although the very first free settlers received both land and free passage!

Land grants were first given to free settlers in 1789 when, at Governor Arthur Phillip’s suggestion, the British government recruited nine farmers and others to be superintendents of convicts. They sailed in HMS Guardian, which was wrecked when it hit an iceberg south of the Cape of Good Hope. In a marvellous feat of seamanship, the captain of the Guardian brought the ruined vessel back to South Africa and ran her aground. The passengers were taken aboard the Lady Juliana at the Cape and reached Sydney in June 1790.

One of those recruited was Phillip Schaffer, a German widower with a daughter, Elizabeth, aged ten. ‘Accustomed to farming’, he was our first non-British European settler. Instead of becoming a superintendent of convicts, given his limited English, Schaffer was given 140 acres at Parramatta, which became known as The Vineyard. The colony needed food even more than it needed convict supervisors!

Schaffer was provided with a hut, tools, seed grain, two sows, and two acres of cleared land. He and his daughter and the four male convicts allotted to him were rationed from the public store for eighteen months. Schaffer soon had forty acres producing corn, wheat, vegetables and grapes. Apart from a small vineyard in the governor’s garden at Parramatta, his vineyard was the first in Australia.

By 1791 there were 87 free settlers in the colony, 44 of whom were ex-convicts who had served their terms or been pardoned. Although the shortest common sentence was seven years, many had been aboard the hulks for years awaiting transportation and served much of their time before the First Fleet sailed.

In 1797 Schaffer sold The Vineyard, for the princely sum of £140, to Henry Waterhouse, the captain of HMS Reliance, which brought John Hunter back to the colony to become governor. Schaffer had been granted more land by then and had farms at Parramatta and on the north shore at Redbank and Marsfield. He was later granted more farmland at Narrabeen as the colony expanded. By 1811 his English was good enough for him to propose marriage to Margaret McKinnon, a former convict from the Scottish Isle of Skye. The couple continued to be favoured by various governors, being granted cattle from the government and finally 100 acres ‘for their natural lives’ in 1825.

Sadly, however, early success and positive beginnings do not always blossom into prosperity long term, and it seems our first assisted migrant had a tendency towards ‘what a clergyman calls insobriety’, to quote Banjo Paterson.

Indeed, that wonderful chronicler of colonial times, John Dunmore Lang, our first Presbyterian minister, tells us that the Schaffers sold off their land piece by piece until they were left with nothing and, due to ‘old age, poverty and intemperance’, they were forced to live in the Benevolent Asylum, commonly known as ‘the Poor House’, where Schaffer died in 1828.

In 1792 the first organised group of free settlers left Britain to be settled at Liberty Plains—an area around modern-day Strathfield. Lieutenant Governor Grose, who had succeeded Phillip, made the decision to establish the settlement halfway between the two settlements of Sydney and Parramatta for the ‘convenience and safety of the travelling public’.

The original group of settlers at Liberty Plains comprised three farmers, a baker, blacksmith, gardener, millwright, two women and four children, who arrived on the Bellona in January 1793. Edward Powell, aged 30, described as a farmer and fisherman from Lancaster, was given 80 acres, as were Thomas Webb, a gardener, and his wife. Thomas Rose, aged 40, a farmer who arrived with his wife Jane, their four children and another female teenage relative, was given 120 acres. Those who were not farmers were given 60 acres. All the settlers had their passages paid and received tools and implements from the public stores, plus two years’ provisions, clothing, and the services of assigned convicts as labour. The settlers cleared the land and grew wheat, potatoes and corn, and gave their farms names like ‘Charlotte Farm’, ‘Webb’s Endeavour’ and ‘Dorset Green’.

Unfortunately, however, Liberty Plains was not very fertile, and within five years most of the settlers had left or were dependent on government rations.

It was in Thomas Rose’s hut that Australia’s first bushranger, Black Caesar, died on 15 February 1796. Probably born in Madagascar, Caesar was a large black man who was transported from England on the First Fleet for theft. Exceptionally strong, he was regarded as an incorrigible convict who stole food and laughed at the lash. He was tried for robbery again in Sydney in 1789 and sentenced to life. Some accounts say he stole food because his huge frame needed far more than the rations provided. He escaped several times, once in a canoe from Garden Island, and spent time on Norfolk Island before returning to Sydney and escaping again to lead a gang of other escaped convicts in battles against the local Aborigines while stealing from settlers.

Finally Governor Hunter put a price of five gallons of rum on his head. He was shot by a settler at Liberty Plains and died after being carried to Thomas Rose’s hut.

The Liberty Plains settlement was soon followed by another immediately to the north and northwest (near modern-day Concord and Homebush), where 25 acres per man was allotted to non-commissioned officers and privates of the NSW Corps. Many of these soldiers sold their lots and never even saw the land, but eventually there were about 60 settlers and soldiers farming in the two adjacent areas of Liberty Plains and Concord, most not particularly successfully.

The next governor, Hunter, was evidently not a fan of the British free settlers or their farming skills. He described them as ‘not of a high calibre’, complaining that they arrived in the colony with high expectations based on false reports of permanent government assistance, with no real understanding of the work required to develop the land—and that when they were given animals for breeding to build up flocks and herds, they immediately slaughtered and ate them. Indeed, Reverend Samuel Marsden visited the area in 1798 and reported dire poverty and very little food being produced.

The development of some maritime trade and expansion into the Hawkesbury area, and later across the mountains, slowly alleviated the food problem and the colony struggled on. In 1806 the Blaxland brothers—the first wealthy and educated free settlers— arrived and soon bought up most of the 25 acre blocks granted to the NSW Corps soldiers to form their Newington Estate. A year later, Governor Bligh suggested that more ‘respectable hardworking farming families’ be given land and asked to migrate.

In the year of Phillip Schaffer’s death, 1828, the first official census was taken. It reported a population of 36,595, of which 46 per cent were convicts.

Thus, in the 40 years since the arrival of the First Fleet carrying its human cargo of 1030, the population had grown to about the size of an average AFL crowd during the home and away season. Of course, the entire white population probably accounted for roughly one per cent of Australia’s population at that time.

A major change in policy occurred in 1831: instead of offering free land, the land was to be sold to pay for assisted migration. In 1832 the Land and Emigration Commission was established in Britain to assist migration to New South Wales and other colonies. Over the next 35 years, 1088 shiploads of migrants arrived, bringing another 340,000 migrants to Australia.

At the same time that the Land and Emigration Commission was set up, the Colonial Office in London—in conjunction with charitable groups such as the London Emigration Committee—devised schemes to help women migrate to Australia, as three-quarters of the population was male. Over 3000 women made the journey in the first four years of these schemes.

In the 35 years that the Land and Emigration Commission operated, new colonies were established in South Australia and Western Australia. Victoria and Queensland separated from New South Wales and began expanding and consolidating their own futures.

The effect of the gold rushes on Australia’s prosperity and population has been well documented. The new wealth drew many migrants to the recently independent colony of Victoria.

The colonies instituted various schemes over the years that attracted a range of migrants. Some seem quite odd in retrospect.

In 1839, for example, 150 French–Canadian political prisoners arrived in Sydney and were kept in a stockade near Homebush, before settling around that area and giving us the placenames Exile Bay, France Bay and Canada Bay.

The Scots sent shiploads of migrants to Sydney and Port Phillip Bay, as well as places that are still steeped in Scottish heritage today, such as the towns of MacLean and Glen Innes in New South Wales.

Groups of Lutheran migrants arrived from rural areas of Prussia between 1838 and 1850 as a result of their king imposing a religious doctrine that they found unacceptable. Most went to South Australia and helped establish the wine industry there, but some came to work on vineyards in Sydney. You can trace the movement of these Lutheran migrants and their descendants from South Australia along the Murray, then up through the rural areas of central New South Wales into the Darling Downs of Queensland by simply looking at the German names in local phonebooks.

Not all the shiploads of migrants arrived safely to share the future prosperity of the colonies. Many ships went down along the infamous ‘shipwreck coast’, from Moonlight Head to Cape Otway, and along the southeast coast, where names such as Wreck Bay and Disaster Bay speak for themselves. Some of the many ships wrecked near the end of their long voyages were carrying assisted migrants, such as the Cataraqui; others like the Dunbar and Loch Ard carried migrants paying their own way.

From the 1860s onward over 57,000 ‘Kanakas’ were brought into Queensland to work the sugar cane fields. The shameful ‘blackbirding’ trade, as it was called, had a major effect on our maritime history, as boats were built especially for the human trade. This led to Australian exploration of, and long-term connection with, the Pacific Islands.

In the 1870s Queensland gave free passage to Swedes and Norwegians; in the1880s the government of the small Mediterranean nation of Malta paid people to leave! Many Maltese migrated to Queensland and farmed sugar cane. Italians also arrived in numbers on the cane fields after the US restricted immigration in 1921.

The first of the postcolonial assisted migration programs was again a result of war. Just as the post-Napoleonic War period had boosted transportation and migration in the 1830s, so post-World War I Britain encouraged British migrants to make new homes in other parts of the Commonwealth.

All non-Aboriginal Australians have a migrant story in their not-too-distant past, and here is where this story becomes a personal one.

Life was hard in England in the 1920s for returned soldiers like my grandfather Albert Edward ‘Bert’ Ray, who was born in Houn-slow, Middlesex, in August 1891. The eldest of six children, Bert delivered mineral water and worked as a nurseryman in his mother’s market garden. Bert married Nellie Bearcraft in March 1913 and went to war in September 1914, leaving Nellie with their baby son, Albert. Their second child, Grace, born in May 1915, was two years old before he saw her.

Times were tough all round after World War I. Work was not easy to find in 1919, and Nellie had a series of miscarriages. Bert’s mother was making ends meet working as a housekeeper and growing flowers; his father had died years earlier in an accident. In 1923, Bert’s younger brothers, Fred and Les, migrated to Canada, under the Canadian Harvesters’ Scheme. Most men lasted only weeks on the scheme before returning to Britain; Les and Fred lasted three years.

Bert and Nell had taken a poorly paid job as caretakers for a village church. They had a cottage and could grow some food and feed their family. Nellie gave birth to another son in 1922, but he died of pneumonia at six months. Nellie gave birth to eight children, only three of whom survived. Her last child, born in 1925, was my mother Sylvia.

In 1927 Fred and Les again set sail from England, this time to Australia. They found work in Sydney as nurserymen and wrote to Bert, encouraging him to follow them. So Bert, Nell and their three children—Albert, sixteen, Grace, fourteen, and Sylvia, three—visited all their relatives and took photos to remember them by, in preparation for the journey to a new life, from which they were unlikely to return.

On 26 October 1929, they set sail on the Orontes, on her maiden voyage to Australia. Built in 1929, Orontes had a gross tonnage of 20,186 and was 664 feet long. Strangely, she had two classes of passengers: 460 first class and 1112 third class. Evidently all passengers in third class were assisted migrants. There was no second class.

As they passed through Suez, at Port Said, my grandmother bought a cheap paper fan, which we still have today. It was the only souvenir she could afford.

They arrived in Fremantle on 25 November 1929 and in Sydney around 10 December. The new liner attracted quite a bit of attention, but Bert and Nell were just glad to arrive. They had only just scraped in as migrants: with the Great Depression biting deeply, Australia stopped migration at the end of 1929.

The Orontes must have been one of the last—if not the last—ship to carry sponsored migrants to Australia for a number of years. She continued to service the London to Australia route throughout the 1930s as a luxury liner, and carried the English cricket teams to Australia to contest the Ashes, including the infamous ‘bodyline’ team in 1932.

Bert found himself on unemployment relief—building a retaining wall at Banksmeadow to keep Botany Bay from eroding the local parks and houses. Their son, Albert, found work in a tannery. Their staple diet was bread and dripping. Bert could fix anything that broke and Nell could make all their clothes, curtains and furnishings.

Slowly, things improved. In 1933 Bert and Nell rented a house on a double block in Botany and established the Bonnie Doon Nursery, raising seedlings to sell in Paddy’s Market every Friday. It was hard work and our mother was taken out of school at age thirteen to help out. By 1940, Bert and Nell could afford such luxuries as an electric sewing machine and a pianola.

Apart from my mother, who made several trips to Britain as an adult, none of the family ever returned, or showed any desire to do so. Bert and the three children loved Australia, but my grandmother never felt at home here and lived out her days to a very old age as a stranger in a strange land.

World War II put pressure on women, and men past recruitment age, to take up jobs in factories. Bert gave up the nursery and went to work in a fabric factory. Our mother worked in a factory during the day making radios, and was a waitress at night.

Bert enjoyed having British servicemen to dinner and showing them around Sydney. In June 1945, daughter Sylvia brought home three British sailors from HMS Formidable, an aircraft carrier that had been hit by a kamikaze between Japan and the Philippines, and was in Sydney for repair. One of them was to become my dad. When the Formidable returned to Sydney with freed Australian prisoners of war, he chose to be demobilised in Sydney and they married in January 1946.

While this was happening, the Orontes was also at war. In 1940 she was converted to a troop-ship, landing troops in North Africa in November 1942, Sicily in 1943 and Salerno, during the re-conquest of Italy.

When her wartime duties were completed, and all prisoners of war had been carried safely home, Orontes resumed her civilian duties, after being reconditioned as a single-class ship carrying 1370 passengers.

Times had changed. Australia had been shocked out of complacency by the war. The Japanese had bombed Australia over a hundred times, and sunk our shipping with relative impunity. There was a growing threat of communism and nations developing to our north. It was ‘populate or perish’.

Displaced Europeans were encouraged to come; our former allies the Greeks were encouraged to come; our recent enemies the Italians, who had been here in thousands as prisoners of war, were encouraged to come back; most of all, however, we wanted Poms! So the Labor government set up a scheme allowing the British to migrate to Australia almost for free. Migrant hostels were waiting to acclimatise them, and there was the promise of a much better life than post-war Britain could offer. However, as a token of their commitment to their new home, the Australian government made them pay £10 each! ‘Ten Pound Poms’ needed to be healthy and under 45 years of age, and there were no skill restrictions at first.

The Orontes resumed the London to Australia service in June 1948 and continued until March 1962. She was the busiest migrant ship on the ‘Ten Pound Pom’ run from 1948 to 1960, as over a million British migrants flocked to Australia.

When not undertaken out of desperation or the simple need to survive, migration—even to a place with the same language and a similar culture—is still a major life upheaval and requires a certain amount of bravery and sense of adventure.

I collected many stories from Ten Pound Poms from my weekend segment on Sydney radio, and most had a poignant or funny element that highlighted the changes these migrants experienced.

Doug Ashdown came as a six year old in 1948 and became one of our best loved singer-songwriters. He remembers his mum, who had lived through the Depression and a war and over a decade of rationing in England, bursting into tears when she saw the amount of fresh food available in a market at Fremantle.

One listener remembered the shock of waking one morning with the ship moving and seeing an Arab leading a camel when he looked out of the porthole; the ship was in the Suez Canal!

The scheme, which reached its peak in 1969 when more than 80,000 Ten Pound Poms arrived, was not a total success. Many were disappointed or homesick, and about a quarter returned home— but there was also a not-uncommon syndrome, which I call the ‘double return’. This occurred when disappointed British migrants decided to return home, did so—then realised life was better here, and came back again!

Many prominent and successful Aussies were Ten Pound Poms, including Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the Bee Gees! Assisted migration schemes were later extended to include migrants from countries such as the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, West Germany and, much later, Turkey.

Typical of the success of the scheme were the Hammonds from Yorkshire. Their story was sent to me by their only child Sheena, who remembers coming as an eleven year old with her Scottish mother in 1960.

Sheena says all she knew about Australia before leaving the UK was that there were sheep stations and a bridge. She has vivid memories of the voyage out, leaving Tilbury Docks in the middle of winter and arriving in Sydney six weeks later to a January heatwave. She, too, remembers Arabs and camels walking beside the ship through the Suez Canal. She remembers the posh cabin that had been First Class before the ship was converted to a migrant vessel, the elegant dining room and seasickness in the Bay of Biscay.

Sheena’s childhood memories of the voyage must be typical of the hundreds of thousands of Ten Pound Poms:

When the ship went over the equator, there was a party and King Neptune came with seaweed for hair. This took place up on deck all around the pool. We were all given a certificate celebrating the occasion. I still have mine too, somewhere.

This is how she remembers crossing the Great Australian Bight:

It was very, very rough but we had our sea legs. The roll was sideways there. I remember being in the dining room, our table was in the middle of the room, and looking to the port hole to see sky one minute and sea the next. There was a big swell and everything was tipping off the tables and breaking. That was the first and only time that I wondered about the ship’s ability to cope with the ocean.

Sheena told me she admired her parents’ bravery at migrating in their late 30s and starting all over again in a new country. My sister and I feel the same way about our grandparents; it’s a common story. Often the parents do it tough as migrants and the kids derive the benefits of a better life.

When the assisted migration schemes ended in 1982, inflation had taken the cost from £10 to $75. Times had changed again by then, and more migrants were being welcomed under family reunion, special skills and refugee programs, many from Asia.

Many Aussies retain the imprint of the migrant experience from their not-too-far-distant past. There’s a certain flexibility, resilience and willingness to have a go at something new in the Aussie character, along with a willingness to travel and move around. There’s also an understanding and appreciation of those who take risks to give their children a better life, and gratitude to a country that provided the opportunity.

Maybe we should have a national day to celebrate our migrant heritage and the hybrid vigour it gives our nation. Aussies might like to drink a toast to a man who liked a drink himself—good old Phillip Schaffer, soldier of fortune, farmer, and the first foreigner, i.e. ‘non-Britisher’, to come to Australia of his own free will.

After all, not many people living in Europe back then wanted to go and live 12,000 miles away on an unexplored continent at the bottom of the world . . . and we should give some credit to those who did.