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Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840–1918 PAT JALLAND OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AUSTRALIAN WAY...

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Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840–1918

PAT JALLAND

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

AUSTRALIAN WAYS OF DEATH A Social and Cultural History 1840–1918

PAT JALLAND

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253 Normanby Road, South Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto with an associated company in Berlin OXFORD is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Copyright © Pat Jalland 2002 First published 2002 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission. Enquiries to be made to Oxford University Press. Copying for educational purposes Where copies of part or the whole of the book are made under Part VB of the Copyright Act, the law requires that prescribed procedures be followed. For information, contact the Copyright Agency Limited. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data: Jalland, Patricia. Australian ways of death: a social and cultural history 1840–1918 Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 19 550754 1. 1. Death—Social aspects—Australia. 2. Death—Causes— 2. Australia. 3. Bereavement—Psychological aspects. 4. Australia—Social life and customs. I. Title. 306.90994 Edited by Ruth Siems Indexed by Pam Crichton Text designed by Patrick Cannon Cover designed by Patrick Cannon Cover photograph from Typeset by Promptset Pty Ltd Printed through Bookpac Production Services, Singapore

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Part I

Immigrant Deaths at Sea: The Transition from the Old World to the New

Chapter 1

The terror of ‘a watery grave’: The deaths of infants and children at sea, 1838–90 Faith, fever, and consumption: Disease and adult deaths at sea

Chapter 2

Part II

The Good Christian Death: Transmission from Europe to Australia

Chapter 3

The transmission of the European culture of the good Christian death ‘Angels in heaven’: The common tragedies of babies’ and children’s deaths Medical and secular challenges to Christian ideals of death Funerals and undertakers Women, widowhood, and gendered mourning Christian mourning ritual and heavenly consolations

Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8

v 1

15 33

51 69 88 108 129 144

iii

IV AUSTRALIAN WAYS OF DEATH

Chapter 9 Chapter 10

Memory and mourning: Secular and material commemoration Dr Springthorpe’s memorialisation of his wife: Melbourne’s Taj Mahal

Part III

Death and Destitution

Chapter 11 Chapter 12

Sick and dying old people in ‘benevolent’ asylums An asylum system ‘degrading to the most inhuman race of savages’: Revelations and reform in New South Wales

Part IV

Death in the Bush and the Great War

Chapter 13

Death and burial in the bush: A distinctive Australian culture of death Male deaths in the bush: Frontier violence, old age, suicide, and accidents Frontier struggles for survival: Stoical women and lost children Epilogue: The Great War and silent grief

Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16

Abbreviations Notes Select bibliography Index

161 177

199

219

243 263 284 304 329 330 362 371

Acknowledgments

In loving memory of my father George Hoffman Case 1912–1999

The Australian Research Council awarded me a one-year ARC Large Grant while I was still at Murdoch University to fund research assistance for this project in Sydney and Melbourne; I am most grateful to Ann Hone and Maureen Bark for their excellent and enthusiastic work in the State Library of Victoria and the Mitchell Library in Sydney. My warmest thanks go to Pam Crichton, who has been an outstanding and indispensable research assistant in Canberra at all stages of the project and has compiled a valuable index; also to Kay Nantes, who performed the keyboard work with wonderful efﬁciency. Marion Stell provided helpful research assistance at the start of the project, and Greg Bowen has offered practical assistance at various stages. I owe an immeasurable debt to four friends and colleagues who read the entire draft of the book with great wisdom and generosity, offering advice and encouragement throughout: Stephen Garton, John Hooper, Ken Inglis, and Barry Smith. Special thanks go also to Ann Curthoys, Tom Grifﬁths, and Bev Kingston who kindly read and commented on two or three chapters each. I beneﬁted from valuable discussions, and in some cases the loan of useful books or illustrative material, from Geoffrey Bolton, Hilary Carey, Graeme Davison, David Fitzpatrick, Grace Karskens, Joan Kerr, Pat McCullough, v

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Ann McGrath, Peter Read, Peter Rose, Tim Rowse, Rebe Taylor, Paul Turnbull, and Marivic Wyndham. John Thompson was particularly helpful with the Springthorpe chapter and offered expert advice on illustrations. I am grateful Heather Fawcett, Cathryn Game, and Ruth Siems at Oxford University Press for their efﬁciency and care. My thanks go also to the staff of the major libraries who facilitated research and offered useful advice on copyright permissions: especially the Australian War Memorial; the Battye Library, Library and Information Services of Western Australia; the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; the National Library of Australia; the Mortlock Library, State Library of South Australia; and the State Library of Victoria. Permissions for quotations from manuscript collections have been kindly granted by John B. Currie, Jessie D. Clarke, Colin Angas, Joan Crommelin, and Geoff and Rod Ferguson. Copyright permissions for extracts from published works have been granted by: Hale & Iremonger (Marcus Clarke, Stories); Hesperion Press (N. K. Sligo, Mates and Gold); Ray Evans (‘The Hidden Colonists’, in Jill Roe (ed.), Social Policy in Australia); Ron Manners (W. G. Manners, So I Headed West); Elizabeth Webby (‘The Grave in the Bush’, in Dennis Haskell (ed.), Tilting at Matilda). I offer my apologies to any copyright owners I have been unable to identify or locate.

Introduction

Death and bereavement are universal and inevitable facts of life for human beings in all societies. A study of dying and responses to death takes us to the heart of the history of any culture and sharpens our understanding of our own experience. The French historian Michel Vovelle has observed that ‘death emerges as a reﬂection of society’ because the way we die also affects the way we live.1 Despite the signiﬁcance of death in human life, Ken Inglis and other scholars have observed ‘a modern distaste for the physical facts of mortality and a modern aversion to the darkness of mourning’.2 Graeme Grifﬁn, a theological scholar, and Des Tobin, a funeral director, expressed concern in 1982 about the Australian tendency to avoid the subject of death and to minimise the expression of grief.3 Only in the last twenty years has death again become a subject of public concern and discussion, stimulated by the hospice movement and the AIDS epidemic, by debates about euthanasia, palliative care, and suicide rates, and by new developments in medical technology. Scholars in the social sciences and members of the caring professions have recently placed increasing emphasis on the need to study death and dying in contemporary society. However, historians in Australia have been slow to contribute to this important ﬁeld. Historians of France were the ﬁrst to study the history of death in systematic and imaginative ways—notably Michel Vovelle, Pierre Chaunu, John McManners and Philippe Ariès.4 At the time I commenced my last book, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford, 1996), little recent scholarly work had been published on the broader history of death in modern Britain; notable exceptions were the excellent books by Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987), and by Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (1990).5 In the last ten years greater scholarly interest in death in Britain has encouraged more diverse 1

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research and publications, as well as stimulating conferences and postgraduate work.6 By comparison the history of death and bereavement in Australia is still underdeveloped. This book, Australian Ways of Death, is a history of death, grief, and mourning that examines the evidence across the Australian colonies/states for the period from 1840 to 1918. I have taken 1840 as a starting point because it broadly marks the beginning of mass immigration and the end of transportation to New South Wales. The early convict system has limited relevance in a study of death and mourning practices and attitudes in a free immigrant society. Death in Australia has always been a diverse and individual experience and no single model is appropriate. There were multiple modes of death in Australia between 1840 and 1918, with considerable overlap and ﬂuidity between the different elements, not least between the urban and rural. In attempting to provide helpful models and deﬁne parameters for analysis in a highly complex history of Australian ways of death, it is not possible to explore all the local and regional variations or all the individual exceptions. For example many people lived part of their lives in the bush and the remainder in country towns or cities. Before the 1870s, the urban middle classes included unbelievers, agnostics, and secularists, as well as Christians, and many devout people sustained a Christian way of death beyond 1918. Unfortunate middle-class Christians, fallen on hard times, could ﬁnd themselves destitute in old age, dying in a benevolent asylum with no religious rituals to console them. I hope that other scholars will pursue these regional, religious, and class variations further. I have placed considerable emphasis on the more neglected aspects of a vast subject, such as death at sea, death and the destitute, and death in the bush— because these themes are distinctively Australian and represent discontinuities with traditional European culture. I have devoted least attention to some wellworked themes that have already attracted local and regional historians. Graeme Grifﬁn and Des Tobin’s book In the Midst of Life. The Australian Response to Death is a useful study of cemeteries, headstones, the funeral service, and the undertaking business.7 Valuable studies have been published by Robert Nicol on funerals and cemeteries in South Australia;8 by Joy Damousi on wartime bereavement9 and by Simon Cooke on suicide and cremation.10 The most outstanding work on a related subject is Ken Inglis’s prize-winning book Sacred Places. War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, which examines Australian commemoration of the dead.11 Allan Kellehear has recently edited a useful inter-disciplinary volume of essays on death and dying in Australia, though its main emphasis is on palliative care, nursing, and medicine since 1920.12 I have largely omitted some important related subjects which have their own experts and publications, such as the history of epidemics, epidemiology, natural disasters, urban disease and sanitary reform, and the detailed history of individual diseases.

INTRODUCTION

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Australian Ways of Death begins with the transmission and inﬂuence of European culture and ideals concerning death in the Australian colonies, especially among the middle and respectable working classes in the growing Australian cities. Between 1840 and 1918, fundamental changes in demographic and religious patterns profoundly altered death practices and attitudes in Australia, as well as in Britain and Ireland. From about 1880 to 1918 a signiﬁcant demographic transition took place whereby the traditional pattern, marked by relatively high mortality, a short life expectancy and a high infant death rate, was replaced by a new pattern with a continuous decline in mortality, improved death rates for infants and children, and increased life expectancy at birth. The infant mortality rate fell from the 1880s, with a steep decline after 1904, and by 1930 this rate had more than halved. The most obvious feature of this transformation was that old age replaced infancy as the most probable time of death. If the great demographic transition was one major motor of change in death practices in the nineteenth century, the other was the decline in Christian faith. Several chapters explore the profound inﬂuence of Christian beliefs on people facing death up to the 1880s, in relation to deathbed scenes and rituals, funeral practices, and the consolations of religious faith. The urban middle-class and respectable working classes attempted to recreate the European Christian ideal of the ‘good death’, both Protestant and Catholic, which required spiritual preparation and submission to God’s will. Those who came to the Australian colonies in the great waves of immigration and the gold rushes from the 1840s to the 1880s often carried with them a rich Christian culture of death and mourning rituals, powerfully reinforced by the Evangelical movement in Protestantism and the spiritual revival in Catholicism. The vast majority of the migrants from the 1840s were British and Irish,13 many of whom brought strong religious convictions and customs to the new land. For them, the language of the Bible, the prayer book and familiar hymns permeated the vernacular, especially in the context of death. But as Geoffrey Serle has so astutely observed, ‘Culture is a highly perishable growth which, transplanted, cannot bloom as before. Once the geographical break was made, in creative terms the tradition was broken or became very tenuous.’ Serle also notices the cultural time-lag, and the weakness of a derivative culture drawing little inspiration from its immediate environment. Serle is not writing directly about the culture of death but his comments are illuminating.14 Certainly the traditional Christian way of death declined more rapidly in the Australian colonies than in Britain and Ireland. This Christian culture was fragile in early colonial Australia because initially it lacked clergymen, church buildings and an institutionalised structure with traditional rituals and supportive congregations. In the decade after 1855 an Irish migrant, Michael Normile, found religion in colonial Australia disorganised, indifference widespread and Australians ‘wild and careless about religion’.15 The scattered

4 AUSTRALIAN WAYS OF DEATH

population in rural areas, the lack of clergy, and the high masculinity ratios ensured that traditions withered earlier than they might otherwise have done. Moreover, a substantial proportion of the immigrants to Australia came from those portions of the British working classes that had already abandoned church attendance, if not residual religious beliefs. Though the extent of churchgoing and faith in colonial Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century has probably been underestimated because it cannot be accurately calculated, ‘religion became at best a thing of the spirit, of the private man’ faster than in the mother country.16 The transplanted Catholic culture of death survived longer than the Protestant because it relied far more on a vital combination of formal traditional ritual and comforting sacraments together with private spiritual communication between priest and dying person. Moreover, Catholic Christianity was less vulnerable than individualistic Protestantism to the challenges of scientiﬁc rationalism, biblical criticism, and evolutionary theory from the 1870s. The derivative European culture of death was at its most fragile and least adaptable amongst the poorest sections of the colonial Australian community. Some commentators talk of a ‘denial’ of death in the twentieth century as if an absence of rituals and a silence about death were entirely new features of modern society. But death was equally ignored in the nineteenth century in the case of the institutionalised destitute, especially if they were also old and frail and former convicts or children of convicts. The late-nineteenth-century Australian ‘benevolent’ asylums were more akin to the often brutal early British workhouses of 1834 to 1870 than Australian authorities liked to admit, especially in their ill-treatment and neglect of sick and dying old people. Theories of social Darwinism and utilitarianism reinforced the stigmas against paupers, former convicts and sick old people perceived as useless to society. Within most asylums there was little or no concern for the rituals of dying or the digniﬁed ending of life and inmates were condemned to obscurity in pauper graves. While the traditional Christian way of death was in decline in the colonial Australian cities, a more robust culture of death developed quite independently in the bush and initially also at sea. Sea burials obliged many immigrants to confront the stark reality of the abrupt termination of their familiar British and Irish death practices. Shipboard diaries show that while all immigrants experienced the harsh environment at sea, they suffered differentially from its treatment and consequential mortality, according to class, gender, and age. Corpses of infants and stillborn babies were sometimes thrown overboard with a sense of inevitability and an absence of religious ritual that anticipated the unforgiving conditions of early colonial settlement. Experiences of death in the Australian bush stimulated the more creative and enduring ways in which immigrants adapted to a new and initially hostile environment. The Australian tradition of simple bush burials in rural areas was necessary for early settlers living outside the reach of churches, parsons, and undertakers and it developed a ritual of its own, largely unaffected by British traditions. The bush culture of death derived from the land and

INTRODUCTION

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from immigrants’ personal experiences and responses to the unique Australian environment. The bushman’s view of death has played a signiﬁcant role in developing distinctively Australian secular ways of death which have been transmitted into the wider culture in the twentieth century. The bush was largely incompatible with elaborate imported burial ritual designed to disguise the more unsavoury aspects of death. Bush deaths were natural deaths dictated by geography, landscape, isolation, climate, gender, and the lack of established cemeteries and churches. A common characteristic of the bushman’s approach to death, revealed in bush ballads and Henry Lawson’s stories, was a stoical acceptance of inevitable death without fuss, and a concern for human survival. Despite the lack of formal religious consolation and elaborate ritual, bushmen usually had a fundamental respect for the dead, and many sought hope in the beauty and regeneration of nature. The Great War of 1914–18 marked a turning-point in the history of death, grief and mourning in Australia. It shattered the traditional Christian culture of death as a dominant model in Australia, and also accelerated a pre-existing decline in Christian mourning rituals. Terrible mass slaughter of young men could not be accommodated within a traditional Christian middle-class model of domesticated family deaths—a model already in decline because of religious indifference and the challenges of science and secularism. As Dr Robert Scot Skirving observed in his anguish on his soldier-son’s death in 1915: ‘that gulf of sorrow, the Great War, separated us from all our past lives and emotions’, creating a changed world afterwards.17 The war reinforced the stoical and private responses to death and grief learned by bushmen and isolated settlers over many decades of adjustment to the Australian environment. The extremely high rate of Australian participation and mortality in the two world wars helps to explain the preoccupation with death in the inter-war years and also the long silence about death in the next half century. Medical science did not become a major force in changing death practices in Australia until the 1930s. Doctors could do little to cure disease before the discovery of the sulpha drugs, though they sometimes compensated by a good record of care and palliative management among wealthy urban patients. Not until the later nineteenth century was death perceived as caused by particular diseases rather than by the will of God. By contrast, developments in medical science in the later twentieth century enabled doctors to contemplate prolonging life, and death would increasingly be seen as medical failure. Gendered differences in Australian ways of death are highly signiﬁcant throughout this book, from mortality and death practices to emotional responses to bereavement. Colonial Australian masculinist images of death contrasted strongly with the European middle-class ideal of the peaceful domesticated deathbed scene, typically depicting a dying woman cared for by attendant females. The dominant cultural images of death in colonial Australia were masculine and often violent, ranging from the idealised bushman and the heroic bushranger to the noble Anzac. Dead and dying bushrangers and their victims were memorialised in bush ballads and in

6 AUSTRALIAN WAYS OF DEATH

William Strutt’s painting Bushrangers on St Kilda Road. They were also prominently portrayed in the press from the 1860s to the 1880s.18 After being shot dead by a station hand near Wangaratta, Victoria, in the 1860s, Daniel Morgan was propped up to be photographed with his eyes open and still holding his gun. Joe Byrne, one of Ned Kelly’s gang, was re-hung outside Benalla gaol in 1880 for the beneﬁt of photographers.19 But European women were almost entirely ignored in the heroic representations of death in the bush, except as supporting characters. Some gendered differences in death in colonial Australia were partly biological, in that women lived longer and some diseases were gender-speciﬁc or gender-variable. Life expectancy at birth for females in Victoria and New South Wales between 1867 and 1882 was about three years longer than for males. Across all six Australian colonies/states from 1881 to 1910, life tables show that this differential remained constant at 3.5 years’ advantage for females, though it later increased and almost doubled by 1972.20 Males and females died at different rates from various causes, commencing in the ﬁrst seven years of life when male babies and young children were more vulnerable to childhood diseases. But the most distinctive and signiﬁcant gender-based deaths were those in childbirth for women and by violence and accidents for men. The complications of pregnancy, childbirth and puerperal fever were an important cause of death for women aged 15 to 45. Childbirth was the third most important cause of death in Victoria in 1870 at 7 per cent of total deaths in the age group 15 to 24; this rose to second ranking in the age group 25 to 44, after pulmonary tuberculosis, averaging 10 per cent.21 In the nineteenth century, women in their thirties had a substantial risk of dying from a combination of childbearing, overwork, exhaustion, and poor diet. In Victoria the number of deaths of mothers for every 1000 children born alive improved little from 1871 to 1905, ranging from 6.43 in 1871–80 to 6.09 in 1901–05. Even in 1920 puerperal causes of death for women aged 15 to 24 still held joint ﬁrst place with tuberculosis—a mortality rate that only declined with the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s.22 Despite the substantial death rate from childbirth during women’s fertile years of 15 to 44, there was still a greater male mortality at these same ages due to violence and accidents. Deaths from violence and accidents included suicide, drowning, fractures, industrial and transport accidents; such deaths were often linked with alcohol abuse, which was common in a society with a high disproportion of males.23 It was no coincidence that the two colonies with the highest masculinity ratios—Queensland and Western Australia—also had the worst mortality from violence and accidents.24 In general, men died from violence and accidents in colonial Australia three times more often than women between 1869 and 1903. In Victoria in 1870 ‘accident or negligence’, the category used for violence, was the leading cause of male deaths, with 16 per cent of total deaths in the age group 15 to 24 and 13 per cent at ages 45 to 54; it came second only to tuberculosis at ages 25 to 44 with an average of 18 per cent of total deaths.25 Few females died from ‘accident or negligence’.

INTRODUCTION

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In nineteenth-century Australia, women were far more active than men in performing the roles and rituals associated with death and grieving. These gendered differences in relation to death and mourning were even more pronounced in colonial Australia than in Britain. Nurses at the deathbed were usually female because the care of sick and dying family members was regarded as a natural part of women’s nurturing role. Female family members, assisted by female servants, attended to the vital domestic rituals following a death, including the laying out of the body. The one exception was that funerals were organised by men, and women were often discouraged from attending, on the assumption that men could better contain their emotions. Women were expected to play a more sustained and important role than men in the process of mourning the dead. This is illustrated most vividly by the common practice of middle-class widowers returning quickly to their professional work and seeking consolation in early re-marriage. By contrast, widows were expected to grieve quietly at home for many months, if not years, and follow complex mourning etiquette concerning their widow’s weeds and their very restricted social behaviour. Widows outnumbered widowers by a ratio of about 3:2 in New South Wales in 1888, a gap which widened with age.26 Material and social prospects for widowed females were far more limited than for men, especially if they were poor and lacked family support. There were also signiﬁcant differences in the expression of feelings on bereavement in that men were generally expected to be more restrained in communicating their sorrow, and women more emotional. This seems to have been a response to powerful social conditioning regarding the required behaviour of men and women in their separate spheres, rather than the consequence of innate differences in grief patterns. Silent repression of sorrow by colonial men seems to have been most acute and painful on the loss of children, when some fathers had difﬁculty in communicating their grief to their wives. They were trying to meet cultural expectations of masculinity and to minimise their vulnerability in a tough pioneering environment. Stoical and silent responses to death were common in single men in the bush—behaviour powerfully reinforced for Anzac soldiers by the requirements of masculinity, honour, and survival in the Great War. Migration splintered colonial families through geographic distance from birth families and broader kinship networks. Scattered migration patterns over a vast continent meant that huge distances could separate families, not just across the globe but also across Australia. The ﬁrst two generations of immigrants often felt torn between two countries and two cultures. Death and burial were crucial components of this ambivalence and disorientation. Those who had left parents behind in Britain and Ireland, as well as the graves of beloved family members, felt especially torn, and more likely to feel that home still lay elsewhere, offering the prospect of ultimate burial at their side. Geographical distance usually meant that colonists could not care for dying parents, nor say ﬁnal farewells, nor attend their funerals. Letters took so long in transit both ways that they would sometimes never know when

8 AUSTRALIAN WAYS OF DEATH

those loved ones were sick and dying. Frances Mary Bowler noted in her diary in 1837: Most truly may this distant residence be denominated a kind of living death to all who live here, and have many dear … relatives and friends so far off, that they may be numbered with the clods of the valley months before either party can know their loss. I have scarcely the courage to break the seals of letters from home, and however pleasant may be their contents, I cannot prevent the inward inquiry, Has sorrow, sickness, or perhaps death, visited any of that loved circle since this letter was penned?—and in an evening over the ﬁre picturing to myself all who should assemble at home, I am fain to ask, are all there? None absent? Gone forever? These feelings will intrude at all times, in spite of my utmost endeavours not to meet trouble halfway.27

Patrick O’Farrell has underlined the passionate desire of many Irish immigrants to be buried with their family in Ireland, rather than in a strange, distant land. But for most Irish immigrants, burial in Ireland could only be a dream and spiritual reunion in heaven the only possibility. When immigrants—Irish or British—became reconciled to the prospect of ultimate burial in Australia, however, they often developed a sense of belonging to the Australian land. The grave in the Australian bush became an important cultural image in its own right, establishing a sense of national identity and individual belonging, as Charles Harpur recognised in his poetry.28 The death and burial of spouse and children in the new land usually conﬁrmed this sense of identity with the land; a sad letter from Robert Gouger of Adelaide in 1857 reports the death of his wife and baby son within two days of each other. He describes his agony of mind at the double catastrophe, but concludes: As to me, I am more a South Australian than ever. I shall never leave the remains of my dear and sainted wife; they are buried in an area of my own in the town No. 685 and there I shall spend, in all earthly probability, the remainder of my days.29

The tyranny of distance was naturally greater in the earlier years of immigration, but it had an equally severe impact from 1914 to 1918 when about 60 000 Australian soldiers died in the Great War, 12 000 miles away from home. Their families had to grieve without a body to bury in Australia or the consolation of a funeral, and they could rarely afford to visit the graves in Europe. Even worse, some 25 000 Australian soldiers had no known burial place in Europe because their bodies were never recovered. The Aboriginal culture of death over forty thousand years and more, which was as rich and complex as the Europeans’, has already been the subject of substantial anthropological scholarship. Since there were numerous Aboriginal groups, with more than 500 distinct languages, anthropologists undertook intensive research journeys to isolated parts of the remote

INTRODUCTION

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Australian outback for a year or more at a time to live among the people who were the subjects of study. From the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, early anthropologists felt a keen sense of urgency to study what they saw as a primitive and ancient race which they believed to be on the verge of extinction. Social Darwinist theory of the ‘survival of the ﬁttest’ races gave impetus to anthropological research for evidence of a backward race in remote parts of northern and central Australia least affected by European contact.30 The accounts of Aboriginal death and burial customs by three distinguished anthropologists, who drew on their own research in the outback as well as on a large anthropological literature, can point readers to a ﬁeld of study complementary to this book. A. P. Elkin, Professor of Anthropology at Sydney University, devoted a chapter of his 1938 book, The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand Them, to their social prescriptions at death and their complex burial rites. Elkin noted that Aboriginal people considered death ‘the most signiﬁcant and important social event’ since it regularly weakened each group and threatened its future social cohesion. Elkin compared Aboriginal death culture with the Christian way of death in nineteenthcentury Britain—both rich and purposeful in helping survivors to reorient themselves and face the future: Amongst [the Aborigines] social and individual behaviour is standardised in the presence of a dying person and death; and mourning is a series of socially sanctioned and expected customs and rites which include not only expression of sorrow and grief, but also taboos, inquest, revenge and burial.31

Elkin pointed to the common features in Aboriginal death scenes across Australia, with mourners watching close by or at a distance, according to relationship rules; they wailed, sang or chanted, mutilated themselves by scratching or cutting their bodies, and occasionally threw themselves on the dying person. Following death, this emotional expression of grief could intensify to a state of frenzy, sometimes including threats against the sorcerer considered responsible for the death. According to Elkin, these rituals helped to remove the soul from its worldly contacts and spiritualise it in the sacred totemic realm.32 Burial rites among Aboriginal people in Australia varied widely in different regions, including interment, mummiﬁcation, cremation, platform exposure and burial in hollow trees. More complex and prolonged rites were often reserved for the more important personages, such as the fully initiated men. An ‘inquest’ was usually held to identify the person responsible for the magic that caused the death; when the deceased was a person of importance, the ‘inquest’ might be followed up by a revenge expedition. Beliefs about the fate of the dead varied; in general, after the mourning and revenge rituals were completed, Aboriginal people were eager to sever connections with the spirit, to speed it on its way to its spirit-home, and to avoid any offence that might bring it back. This necessary dissociation from the body and spirit of the dead

10 AUSTRALIAN WAYS OF DEATH

required the deceased’s belongings to be puriﬁed and his camp and grave deserted, while the name of the dead person could not be mentioned for months or years.33 In 1964, two anthropologists in Western Australia, Ronald and Catherine Berndt, published The World of the First Australians: Aboriginal Traditional Life Past and Present.34 This book included a chapter on ‘Death and the Afterlife’ in traditional Aboriginal culture which drew on the research ﬁndings of many anthropologists, including Elkin, W. L. Warner, and Kenneth Maddock.35 The Berndts emphasised the fundamental association of death with rituals and religion even more strongly than Elkin. They observed that elaborate ceremonies and funerary art indicated a pervasive belief in an afterlife in the land of the Dead, where the spirit achieved some measure of immortality, merging with the great ancestral beings in the sacred world of the Dreaming. ‘All over Aboriginal Australia, the concept of the Eternal Dreaming is basic to people’s view of the world and of man’s relationship to his social and physical environment.’ The ﬁnality of death in a material sense was fully recognised, as was also some manner of spiritual continuation.36 It is revealing that European settlers in colonial Australia largely ignored the richness and complexity of Aboriginal death and burial customs, except when they were anxious to plunder Aboriginal burial places to collect skulls and skeletons for allegedly scientiﬁc purposes. Aboriginal human remains were collected as vital relics of stone-age people before the race became extinct, including relics obtained from the very recently dead. When Lanclot [sic] Cockram, an Aboriginal farm worker, died on a farm at Yorkrakine in Western Australia in 1918, his body was ‘sent to the Pathological Department in Perth for preservation in the interests of science’.37 Cockram’s was not an isolated case. I found little evidence of genuine cross-cultural Aboriginal–European contact concerning death and mourning practices in colonial Australia, except where some Aboriginal people accommodated themselves to European ways of death. Occasionally, however, the historian gains a rare, tantalising glimpse of such contact. Paul Turnbull observes that Europeans could be profoundly distressed upon witnessing Aboriginal funerals, ‘not least because of the more open and unrestrained ways in which Indigenous communities mourned the dead’. The missionary Lancelot Threlkald depicted the funeral of a Lake Macquarie woman in 1825 as ‘truly horrid’; he was shocked by the sight of the bereaved mother who had gashed her head in her anguish and sat crooning over the bark-wrapped body.38 Another illustration of cross-cultural contact in grief occurred when Alfred and Ellen Bussell, Western Australian pioneers, lost their 12-month-old son Jasper in 1864, having already suffered the deaths of two other infants. The Bussells lived an isolated life as the ﬁrst European settlers at Margaret River, southwest of Perth, and Alfred was unable to talk about his intense grief at Jasper’s death with his wife. Ellen had no local support network of church, community, or nearby family to help her through this ‘dreadful time’ of silent

INTRODUCTION

11

grief, though she found her Christian faith consoling. But her husband made a remarkable reference in a letter to his brother to the support and sympathy Ellen received from the local Aboriginal people: Their grief was manifested in a wonderful manner, they sat beside and encircled the bereaved mother as she lent upon the fence, the big tears rolled down their black faces, they sat a while in this way and then passed off in silence with heads cast down, it was very remarkable. Why did they feel, or seem to feel for an infant’s death in a white man’s house?39

The strongly emotional and shared communal response of the Aboriginal people contrasted with that of the baby’s father who sought to repress his intense feelings for his lost only son. Also unusual was the case, recorded by John Mulvaney, of Yuranigh, who was honoured by memorials from mourners of both cultures. Yuranigh, a Wiradjuri from the Molong area earned the respect of Sir Thomas Mitchell when he guided the Queensland expedition of 1845. On Yuranigh’s death in 1850 his people honoured him by carving distinctive geometric designs into nearby trees—a traditional burial custom for distinguished men. Mitchell later added his own tribute with a traditional British engraved headstone and fenced grave—one of the few memorials erected by Europeans to honour Aborigines.40 Many Aboriginal people adapted in time to European ways of death and burial, especially if they worked for European settlers or became Christians. The reverse was exceptional and likely to draw censure. The 1878 request by a prominent Victorian pastoralist, Samuel Pratt Winter, ‘to be buried in the stones where the blacks are buried’ was seen as an insult to his own people, as we shall see.41 Relations between Europeans and Aboriginal people were not always characterised by violence and in some regions they probably lived fairly amicably much of the time. The above example from the Bussell family supports Ann McGrath’s view that ‘interdependency and friendships occurred between Aboriginal women and white’, often ﬂowing on from the European women’s role as employers. But as McGrath observes, the frontier was a highly ﬂexible ‘meeting place of two very different worlds’, and all too often Europeans and Aborigines met in tragic conﬂict.42 I consider the debate about frontier mortality in a later chapter dealing with death and the bush, emphasising the European silence about such massacres and the lingering guilt. The killings of Aboriginal people on the frontier were never compared to the noble deeds of the Anzacs at Gallipoli, where the soldiers fought courageously for chivalric virtues. The conﬂicts between armed Europeans and Aboriginal people were far too uneven for the frontier victories to be sources of colonial pride. The minds of the immigrants were largely closed to the depths and richness of Aboriginal cultures that had survived for more than 40 000 years in one of the most challenging environments on earth. Death was the ﬁnal frontier of incomprehension and exclusion between the two cultures.

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PART I

Immigrant Deaths at Sea The Transition from the Old World to the New

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Chapter 1

The Terror of ‘a Watery Grave’ The Deaths of Infants and Children at Sea, 1838–1890 The scale of migration from Britain to Australia was vastly increased by the discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851, reinforced by government schemes for assisted migration, chieﬂy by sailing ship up to 1880. The ﬁrst two chapters look at aspects of death and burial at sea from 1838 to 1890 through analysis of 44 shipboard diaries.1 The voyage to Australia allows us to examine a microcosm of the population of colonial Australia. We can study a crosssection of the future Australian population of all classes and ages living together within a conﬁned space. At sea, direct comparisons between cabin passengers and working people in steerage were unavoidable, generating envy, discrimination, and resentment, as well as some cooperation. The diaries reveal the surprising degree of cultural diversity and also the marked degree of reinforcement of British class distinctions. The little community on board the immigrant ship inevitably reﬂected the old world more than it could foreshadow the new.

Fear of death and burial at sea The sea voyage between Britain and Australia was a bridge between the old world and the new—13 000 nautical miles apart—a period of transition, almost of limbo. This hazardous voyage was a trial run which tested endurance, courage, and adaptability—the qualities that would be vital when immigrants faced the harsh climate and environment of Australia. Death at sea was the ﬁrst experience of death, burial, and bereavement in an alien and inhospitable land which abruptly challenged prevailing notions of the good Christian death. The prospect of death at sea sent terror into the minds of many migrants to Australia in the nineteenth century (see plate 1). The voyage itself was imaginatively like a trip to Mars today—an adventure on a tiny 15

16 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

craft into the unknown for three to ﬁve months, a stressful rite of passage towards life in a new country, with small prospect of return. The attitudes to death among steerage passengers were often still inﬂuenced by a complex combination of superstition, folklore, and fundamentalist Christianity. Many working-class people in Britain had great fears of the anatomists destroying bodies of paupers and criminals in the 1830s. Many people of all classes later found cremation abhorrent and for the same reason —they still had a residual belief in the need for the resurrection of the physical body after death. Sea burial aroused similar concerns, as a fate that was swift, heathen, and unnatural, as well as peculiarly distressing. When a relative died in 1872, Eleanor, Lady Stephen, wife of the chief justice, observed from Sydney that ‘it would have added terribly to the distress if the death had occurred on board ship’.2 Joseph Clifton in Perth in 1900 was most upset to learn of the death of a relative at sea: ‘It must have been a crushing blow to his poor wife. I think death and burial at sea must wrench the feelings of the mourners more severely than death on land.’3 There was no cemetery plot at sea, no ﬁxed place of burial as a lasting memorial, and no visits to the grave pending the resurrection. Deaths at sea were especially threatening because most people who had considered the matter probably preferred to die a ‘good death’, variously deﬁned, but at least surrounded by family, friends, and community at home, and to receive a Christian burial in the earth. Death at sea meant death in a hostile and unknown environment, often without family and close friends. Andrew Hamilton commented on the sudden death of a passenger on the Birmingham in 1852: ‘It is a sad sad thing, death at sea, no friend to perform an act of kindness—plenty of onlookers verily—crowds—but no kind and well-known voice to soothe the spirit on its entrance into the eternal world.’4 William Nichols, a labourer travelling on the James Gibb in 1849, made a most unusual diary record of the ﬁnal ramblings of a devout 23-year-old tailor, ‘an entire stranger to everyone on board’, who died from ‘an overﬂow of blood to his brain’. A constant refrain in his extended prayers was his repeated request to God to ‘save him from a watery grave where there was none but the stranger to weep over him … “Oh God, do not let the waters hurt me, spare me O God”.’5 Cabin passengers often tried to reconstruct at sea the conditions of a ‘good death’ back home, if at all possible. James White, a thoughtful, educated 16year-old student from Edinburgh, travelling to Australia on the Henry Fernie in 1862 to join his brother, was horriﬁed yet fascinated by the death and sea burial of a consumptive girl precisely his own age. They were both in the second cabin, so James watched her wasting away. An hour after her death ‘we all went in to see the corpse which was tastefully decorated with all kinds of artiﬁcial roses’. But this attempt to imitate a traditional death at home failed for James. He was distressed when her body was consigned to the sea after the funeral service, since no one could identify ‘the watery grave’. Mourners on land could visit their loved ones’ graves in peaceful churchyards, soothed by the knowledge that the material body lay there. As James observed in his diary:

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17

The green grave thus blends life and death, linking the seen with the unseen. But in that seaburial there is such a sudden change from the body being with us to its being to us, nowhere. A momentary splash and the ship passes on, and leaves it in the boundless, unfathomable, mysterious sea.6

Another immigrant passenger, Francis Taylor, watched his ﬁrst sea burial on board the Stag in March 1850 and could not repress macabre speculations about the corpse’s fate: ‘although it matters not what becomes of the perishable body, still a thrill of horror ﬁlls the heart at the thought of a human creature being undoubtedly devoured by some of the innumerable inhabitants of the Ocean’.7 Such anxieties were reinforced when passengers saw or heard of crew members being lost overboard, which occurred more frequently than the occasional loss of an immigrant, given their dangerous work. In November 1863, the Great Britain passed ‘a dead body ﬂoating on the surface of the water, the hands crippled up and the entrails all out, it may be the body of some poor sailor who has dropped from some yard arm’.8 None of the passengers who stared at this terrible sight wished to share the poor man’s fate. In 1852 Edwin Pegler recorded a ‘shocking accident’ when a sailor fell overboard from the Prince Albert; he hit his head and was considered dead before he hit the water, which was fortunate as an albatross settled on the corpse, doubtless to ‘pick him to pieces’ and remove his eyes.9 That passengers chose to immigrate, despite their fear, was a measure of their desperation and determination to improve their lives, as well as their hopes for a new future.

Mortality differentials and discrimination at sea The fear of a ‘watery grave’ probably affected all passengers to some degree but the real risks of death, and the form it might take, varied considerably according to class, gender, age, and status. Cabin passengers with greater social status and wealth made up only about 10 per cent of total passenger numbers but were given priority in death as in life. Some historians, including Patrick O’Farrell, have argued that the physical proximity and shared trials on board ship encouraged the breakdown of the English social system at sea.10 But although social relationships might be renegotiated to some extent at sea, differences of passenger class corresponded strongly with differences of social class, which in turn related to religious differences.11 As Don Charlwood noted in 1981: ‘Life on board ship mirrored the class structure of Britain. The masses below deck represented the masses at home’, though there was a ‘pecking order’ within both cabin class and steerage.12 The social hierarchy was naturally somewhat different from that in Britain, since few aristocrats or gentry chose to emigrate, while the poorest were actively excluded. But a class hierarchy it remained, even though some passengers might try to stretch or dispute the boundaries. Most shipboard diaries reveal immense hierarchical divisions. First-class accommodation was vastly different from that elsewhere in the ship, in terms of space, privacy, ventilation, a good bed, and far more nutritious food,

18 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

including fresh milk, eggs and meat.13 While cabin passengers had relatively comfortable private accommodation, steerage immigrants were tightly packed into a large communal dormitory whose design was based on government experience in transporting convicts. Dr W. H. Leigh, surgeon on the South Australia in 1839, noted the ‘great cruelty’ of ‘cramming the unfortunate emigrants into unwholesome berths, like the unhappy Africans in a slave-ship’.14 On the worst voyages, life in steerage was not unlike life in a crowded British slum.15 An egalitarian spirit was even less evident in death than in life. Although all passengers might fear an untimely death at sea, the risks of mortality varied according to class, gender and age. The overall mortality in steerage was more than three times that for the cabin passengers en route to Queensland between 1860 and 1900; three times as many women died as did men, and the highest mortality rates of all were among the steerage infants. Death did not come equally to those at sea. All sea travellers experienced the alien environment, but they suffered differentially from its harsh treatment and its mortality.16 The lives of assisted immigrants had a lower priority and value than the higher-status cabin passengers, whose deaths might have serious consequences for the surgeon or captain. Cabin passengers had the means to purchase fresh and more nutritious food, and enjoyed better ventilation and space in private cabins, so they were likely to be healthier people with greater resistance to infectious diseases. Shipboard diaries included many descriptions of sea burials, but that of young Mrs Clark, a cabin passenger on the General Hewett who died of consumption in 1845, can stand for many of the privileged: This morning at 8 o’clock Mrs Clark was buried; all the passengers and crew attended the Funeral. The corpse after being sewn up in sail cloth, together with some iron shot, to make it sink, was placed on a board, which projected over the ship’s side; the Ensign was then wrapped round, & after the Captain had read the service for the burial of the dead, as far as ‘we therefore commit her body to the deep’, the board was tipped up by the boatswain, & the corpse fell into the sea.17

Burial services for signiﬁcant cabin passengers were like solemn theatrical events where the opening spectacle had more capacity to impress than repeat performances. An anonymous passenger on the Prince Albert in 1852 recorded the ﬁrst funeral of the voyage at great length—that of Mr Ross, the 21-year-old son-in-law of Captain Squire, a cabin passenger. Following Mr Ross’s death of apoplexy during the excitement of a boxing match, ‘a universal gloom hung over all, no amusements were entered into … everyone to bed earlier than usual’. Next day the dismal effects were aided by the weather: ‘the sea rolled and tossed in its fury as if it were anxious to have its dead given up to it’. The scene was ‘most impressive’ as the captain read the burial service, though the ‘voice of the tempest’ was so loud that the diarist could not distinguish a word. The second death of the voyage occurred two weeks later when a crew member fell overboard, hitting his head on the way down, but

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19

the captain decided it was too risky to send out a boat for a seaman who was probably already dead. The diarist commented: ‘Like the second visit to an execution the affair was nothing like as terrible and the impression made upon the spirits of the passengers but very slight compared with that of the former occasion for before night all was going on as if nothing had happened.’18 The life of the unfortunate crew member was of far less value than that of a naval captain’s son-in-law. Occasionally resentment at the class discrimination involved in death and burial at sea was expressed overtly in shipboard journals. Frederick Edelsten, travelling on the City of Adelaide in 1867, was an unsympathetic observer of the special privileges accorded to Mrs Obdahl, a cabin passenger. He ridiculed the efforts made to imitate death on land—which would never be made for those in steerage. Edelsten did not share the curiosity of all those who went to view the body, and noted the resentment of some passengers in steerage when told to respect her death by being quieter than usual. The greatest privilege she was accorded was the granting of her request to be buried in a cofﬁn; the malicious note is clear in the diarist’s observation that the cofﬁn refused to sink as it hit the water: ‘the lid burst open and it ﬂoated away’.19 In addition to the double standard existing between cabin and steerage passengers in life and at death, Irish Catholics were further discriminated against within steerage. The subdivision of steerage passengers into small groups known as ‘messes’ to organise provision of meals accentuated religious and cultural differences, as Andrew Hassam has observed: By taking care that Scots were not put in the same mess as the English, or that Irish Catholics and Cornish Methodists were kept apart, emigrant ofﬁcials made it more likely that members of a mess would get on with each other. But the wider implication is that the steerage accommodation was divided into sections by region or nationality.20

The doctor or captain who normally read the burial service was sometimes reluctant to do the same for Irish Catholics, who were likely themselves to object to a Protestant service which might consign their babies to limbo. Thomas Davies, a plumber on the Lord Raglan in 1854, commented on the unusual circumstance of a two-year-old child’s body which was ‘thrown overboard without the burial service being read over it’. Just before the service began, the baby’s father, a Roman Catholic, ‘ordered the sailor to drop it in, as he did not wish the Protestant service to be read over it’.21 Concern on this issue was common. When his baby died of diarrhoea on board the Samuel Plimsoll in 1879 an Irish Catholic father ‘sewed it up in a bag and threw it into the sea himself before they said anything to the Doctor’.22 Discrimination could also take place when dying Catholics needed to see a priest. Edward Stamp, who travelled on the Tasman in 1849, left a record in his diary of the death of a 15-year-old orphaned Irish Catholic named Jerry Connell, who had become a favourite with the immigrants. During the terminal stage of Jerry’s illness from brain fever, the surgeon asked the chaplain,

20 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

Revd W. Singleton, to visit the orphan. The chaplain was unwilling to comply, saying defensively, ‘he’s a Catholic, what good can I do him!!’ Pressure of immigrant opinion prevailed upon the chaplain to make one very short visit to Jerry’s deathbed. The diarist commented, ‘a strange parson truly, one that needs dragging you may say, to the bed of a dying orphan’. The decks of the Tasman were crowded with people who ‘seemed mortiﬁed’ at the slovenly manner in which the chaplain performed the funeral ceremony, as Stamp recorded: Many of the Emigrants loudly expressed their dissatisfaction at the manner in which the service was performed. Poor Jerry Connell was really buried with the burial of an ass. ‘This is the way in which we are to be buried, should we die on the passage to Australia’, was the murmur of one and all.23

Many Protestant immigrants viewed Irish Catholics as people who indulged in superstitious rituals; but Catholics were also seen as more devout, more emotional and more theatrical in their burial services than Protestants. Edward Hufton described in his diary on the Northbrook in 1879 the death of a 49-year-old Irishman, leaving a wife and ten young children. He had been prostrate in bed for six weeks, during which he often asked to see his two daughters in the single women’s area, but the doctor said it was against the rules. The Roman Catholic passengers ‘paid very great respect to him’, praying without cease from 11 p.m. for the ﬁve hours until he expired. Hufton was implicitly emphasising the contrast between this communal devotion and the Protestants’ quietism. The Irishman, who was not named, was buried only four and a half hours after his death, the service being read by one of the Irish Catholic passengers. Emotion was expressed more freely than was considered appropriate among Protestants: ‘the crying of his sons and the screaming of his daughters was heartaching to see’.24 Abijou Good on the Beejapore in 1863 recorded the burial of an Irish Catholic man as a ‘solemn and impressive sight’ with the priest standing in his white surplice in the blazing sunshine. The ship rang with the ‘crys & lamentations’ of his large family. The priest read the service in Latin despite the loud screams of anguish of the bereaved family and had to ask for silence if he was to pray for the body. Most Protestant immigrants were on deck, as if for a special theatrical show, and ‘the rigging resembled “trees crowded with crows” ’.25 The other two main forms of differential risk and possible discrimination, in addition to class and religion, were gender and age, applying chieﬂy to married women and children in steerage. The overall mortality rate for immigrant women over 21 was over four times that for men in 1837–39, with six adult men over 21 dying compared with twenty-seven women.26 On the sea route to Queensland from 1860 to 1900, the mortality rate for steerage married women was nearly double that of their husbands and four times the rate for single women. The actuary of the Scottish Equitable Life Assurance Society noted in 1875 that on government-assisted voyages between 1847 and 1861

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21

‘the extra risk attaching to the voyage is much greater for women than for men’.27 This signiﬁcant gender imbalance in mortality may be attributed to the poor nutrition of married women who gave priority to husbands and sick children in allocating food, and to the hazards of pregnancy, childbirth, and the exhaustion of nursing and childcare. The single women had the lowest mortality on the Queensland ships because they were carefully protected and controlled, physically and morally, as the steerage group most sought after in the new colony.28 The able-bodied men in steerage were also generally viewed as an asset to the new colonies. As Arthur Manning observed in 1839, ‘the great many women and children on board is rather against the ship’, since they meant that one woman and several children had to be maintained for the sake of only one man’s useful services.29 Examples abound of married women in steerage whose deaths at sea were accorded little respect. Stephen Brennand travelled third class in the single men’s quarters on the Harbinger in September 1883. He noted that a young married woman who had been conﬁned earlier in the week died of puerperal fever: ‘The funeral service was gone through so quickly that people on the forecastle head were not aware of the fact until it had actually taken place.’30 Abijou Good in April 1863 remarked on the death of a married woman from measles; her body was thrown overboard within an hour with no service and none of the passengers knew until informed later.31 Edwin Bird, a Somerset farmer on the Marco Polo in 1853, told the story of the inebriated ‘Black Cook Doctor Johnson’ who allegedly went into the wrong bed, sending a woman ‘quite insane through a fright’. Ten days later she was a ‘deal worse’, requiring three men to hold her down. Bird noted ‘its an awful sight’ after visiting her, and was not surprised at her inevitable death three days later, ‘a happy release for the Poor Creature and her friends’. The young woman’s ordeal may have included rape, though we are not told, but she was a nameless victim, ‘a Poor Creature’ compared with a man who was ill at the same time who was ‘a very nice young fellow’. The young woman’s indignities did not end with death: ‘The young woman was thrown overboard about an hour after her Decease. She did not sink through Carelessness in not putting in enough heavy stone. She was seen last ﬂoating on the Waves towards the Coast of Africa’, where it was feared a shark might swallow her.32 William Nichols on the James Gibb in 1849 recorded the death of an unnamed Scottish woman who was conﬁned on 26 May and died a week later after great suffering. She was buried four hours after death, ‘but little respect was paid to her’, so Nichols inserted his own poem in his diary as if to compensate. It represents an epitaph to many other married women buried at sea: Not a sigh was heard or a funeral note As the corpse to the waters we hurried Not a parent viewed the Farewell spot Over the grave where our sister was buried

22 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA No useless cofﬁn the corpse to enclose Is made on the Ocean to ﬂoat But a coarse canvass sheet with sand at the feet That hurries the corpse in the water to sleep.33

Deaths of infants and children at sea Substantial evidence shows that infants and young children were at the bottom of the immigrant hierarchy, with premature and stillborn infants in steerage lowest of all. During her voyage to Australia in 1841, Sarah Davenport endured a shipwreck and the death of her one-year-old from scalding, followed soon after by the loss of a premature infant: i had what was caled purmature labour and that babe was throne in the sea i was almost Dumb with grief i thought my tryals was heavey but i cryed unto God to help me for my chilldrens sake i had no one to comfort me in all my tryals for my husband seemed indifferend affter the ship wreck his kindness seemed to be all vanished.34

Infants who were born and died at sea were disregarded in the ﬁnal payments for the ship and the calculation of numbers of passengers, especially if births at sea roughly equalled deaths. Over one-third of infant deaths were caused by prematurity, since early labour was induced by seasickness and exhaustion. The remainder could be attributed to various causes, including malnutrition, convulsions, bronchitis, and enteric problems including diarrhoea.35 Mark Staniforth has calculated that 67 per cent of mortality on board government immigrant ships from 1837 to 1839 comprised infants and children up to seven years; of these 52 per cent were children under 3 years and 21 per cent infants up to a year. Three to four times as many children under 7 died as did adults, usually due to diarrhoea, measles, whooping cough or scarlet fever.36 The statistics on child mortality improved in the second half of the century, as shipboard regulations tightened. On Queensland immigrant ships between 1860 and 1900, 8 per cent of children under 5 died, but annual rates declined from 14.5 per cent in the 1860s to 1.1 per cent in the 1890s.37 Ralph Shlomowitz and John McDonald have estimated the extraordinarily high death risks for infants born at sea on the voyage to Australia. On a typical 3-and-a-half-month sailing voyage between 1838 and 1853 nearly one-quarter of such infants died; between 1854 and the 1880s one-seventh died; a steamship voyage of two months in the mid-1880s reduced the risk to one-twelfth dead. McDonald and Shlomowitz attribute the high infant death rates to a variety of causes including ‘infectious diseases sweeping through the conﬁned infant population on board, the difﬁculty of weaning during the voyage, increased diarrhoeal disease in the tropics, and stress and sea sickness suffered by pregnant and nursing women’. The decline in the infant death rate after 1854 was partly due to the regulations limiting the number of young children per family, as well as improved sanitation and parental hygiene.38

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23

The evidence from shipboard diaries strongly suggests that the younger the child, the less signiﬁcant was its death, with newborns and stillborns the least valued. Infant deaths were considered inevitable. This can be evaluated both in steerage diarists’ comments and in the manner and ritualisation of burial. A domestic servant in her early twenties informed her father of her safe arrival in Melbourne in 1848, commenting on the voyage in the William Stewart: ‘their was some Children died but none of the old people died it would have been a great deal worse if their had been but the Children were never much minded’. Three children had died of diarrhoea on the voyage, one infant and two aged one and a half years.39 William Shennan, a 24-year-old single blacksmith concluded his diary on the Crusader in 1870: ‘no Deaths but a few Children and they were nearly all in infantsey’.40 Andrew Turner’s diary on the Eastern Monarch to Townsville in 1883 was similarly dismissive of child deaths as he noted a funeral service for a child who had died of measles: ‘it cast a gloom over the ship for a short time but it was soon forgotten. Their is a good few cases of Measels aboard in the meantime but they are mostly all children.’41 Most passengers, as we have seen, were concerned that burial rituals should be taken seriously and carried out with dignity and some ceremony. But this general preference had little application to infants and very young steerage passengers. Edward Hufton, a married 23-year-old steelworker, was an assisted immigrant travelling on the Northbrook to Sydney in 1879. He was an intelligent and resourceful man who later became a lecture assistant in chemistry at Sydney University. There were twenty deaths out of nearly 500 passengers on the Northbrook, most being infants and children. Sometimes his diary entry on the burial ceremony was merely one line: ‘“we here commit its body to the deep” and overboard it went’. On 30 May Hufton noted the death of a child who was buried the same night at 8 p.m., followed soon afterwards by a concert held below. Hufton was defensive in his diary: ‘it will no doubt seem strange to you that we should have concerts and funerals in such a short space of time’. The ethics of this schedule evidently led to some debate on the ship, and the schoolmaster who organised the concert was ‘told by more tender-hearted people that it was a disgraceful proceeding all together’. Edward Hufton took the part of the schoolmaster and set out the argument for the defence in his journal: Here, the same as in a village, we each have our joys and sorrows. All the difference is this, what is done here is done under everybody’s nose, whereas in a village it is more private … Had it been a grown-up person, it would have been a very different thing. It would then have been postponed without the slightest doubt … Must the death of an infant blight the enjoyment of so many people? Besides, the programme was drawn up before it died.42

While the crew and passengers of the Northbrook rated children as less important than adults, at least they believed they deserved a burial service. But for many child deaths in steerage in other ships a burial service seems to

24 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

have been regarded as optional, or at best a ritual to be performed rapidly and sometimes secretly. A passenger called G. Annison, travelling from London to Port Phillip in 1853, recorded on 6 March the death of a 2-year-old child named only Wilson, ‘wasted away to a skeleton’; the next day at sunrise the child’s body was disposed of ‘without any burial service being read over it there was a deal of comment about it not being done’.43 J. P. Ricou, a steerage passenger on the Indus in 1872, noted on 16 April that a child born the previous day ‘was buried in the deep this morning before anybody was about’. By direct contrast, a young cabin passenger who died of consumption on 13 June was given a ‘most imposing’ funeral, with the burial service and prayers actually read by the captain of the ship, rather than the doctor.44

Privileged cabin passengers and child deaths Henry Lister and Charlie Higgins The stark contrast between the death and burial of children in steerage and those of cabin passengers is well illustrated by the death of a captain’s son on the barque Fortune sailing from London to Sydney in 1838. Joseph Fowles, who later became City Surveyor in Sydney, recorded in his diary the illness and death from croup of 2-year-old Henry Lister, the captain’s son. The ship’s captain was the supreme ﬁgure of authority on a ship, though his actual social status by birth was usually considerably lower than that of his cabin passengers. This account is revealing about the emotional responses of the captain and his wife. Richard Dana observed that ‘An overstrained sense of manliness is the characteristic of sea-faring men … A thin-skinned man could hardly live on shipboard.’45 Captain Lister evidently recognised the expectations of masculinity but could not always meet them when confronted by his own son’s death. When little Henry Lister was close to death on 14 June 1838, Fowles observed that his mother responded hysterically: ‘Mrs Lister was almost frantic throwing herself down upon the ﬂoor and crying violently refusing comfort’. The captain was ‘so much affected’ that to distract himself he cleared up the cabin, presumably to avoid expressing his emotions openly. When the child’s crisis had apparently passed the captain ‘seemed as frantic with joy as he had been with sorrow so nearly do the extremes of joy and grief approach’. But a week later Henry died as he could retain neither food nor medicine in his stomach, leaving both parents very distressed, though the captain ‘bore it with fortitude like a man’, supporting his wife with great kindness.46 The captain’s wife insisted on keeping her son’s body for an entire week on board ship, unlike the steerage babies who were often thrown overboard within an hour. She was anguished at the prospect of an alien sea burial, but unlike less privileged bereaved parents she could indulge her feelings. The use of a cofﬁn was another breach of normal maritime procedure at the mother’s request, instead of sewing up the body in sailcloth. The cofﬁn was made of Sydney cedar, lined with sheet lead covered with ﬂannel—making the cofﬁn a

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25

foot longer than the body to allow room for loose iron weights. The child’s body, dressed in a ﬂannel gown and lace christening cap, was placed in the cofﬁn which was covered by the Union Jack. The captain, the seamen, and the passengers attended the solemn burial service as the bell tolled, some even wearing whatever black mourning dress they could manage for the occasion. Joseph Fowles remarked on the captain’s restraint: ‘The Captain bore all without evincing any emotion—tho’ he felt it most acutely. I suppose he considers it would look unmanly before the men to shed tears—indeed I could not suppress mine.’47 Captain Lister struggled between his paternal instinct to express grief and his masculine duty as a ship’s master to be restrained. The death at sea of 5-year-old Charles Higgins of diphtheria in February 1870 further illustrates the efforts made by privileged cabin passengers to mitigate the terror of burial at sea. It was a tragic irony that a family that migrated from Ireland primarily for health reasons, following the consumptive death of Charlie’s brother a year earlier, should lose another son on the voyage. The mother, four sons, and two daughters travelled as cabin passengers in a small cargo ship with no steerage passengers and no doctor, leaving Revd John Higgins, the father, to follow later. Eighteen-year-old Henry Bournes Higgins (later Justice Higgins) recorded his brother’s illness in his journal, noting the captain’s special attention to his sick passenger, donating pearl barley water and a hen to make chicken broth, besides maintaining a ﬁre in the galley at nights.48 The grief-stricken mother saw burial at sea as the heathen antithesis of a good Christian death. Burial at sea was for her an utterly unnatural and unChristian form of disposal of the human body, lacking the familiar church ritual and community support and leaving no grave as a memorial. Henry felt the necessity to explain and excuse his mother’s hysterical grieving: ‘Mother was in a dreadful state after him. Frequently she would break out into spasms of weeping, really alarming, sometimes said she thought her mind was going with the shock … Mother asserted that she would be thrown overboard if Charlie’s body were thrown overboard, and insisted that the corpse should be carried to Melbourne.’ This demand was less astounding than it seems since the ship was known to be within three days of sighting Melbourne. The captain advised Henry that the quarantine laws forbade a dead body being taken ashore by relatives, so he would be severely reprimanded for retaining the body for so long and might even lose his commission. Henry at last persuaded his mother that immediate burial at sea was imperative but ‘her distress was so terrible’ that Henry remained with her all night to look after her.49 The sea burial took place the day after Charlie’s death. To appease the distraught mother the helpful captain offered to make a small cofﬁn for Charlie, rather than have the body wrapped in canvas. As many passengers as were able changed into black mourning clothes for the funeral, a sign of support which ‘tended to alleviate our distress’. The morning after the sea burial the ship sighted land. When the quarantine ofﬁcer came on board at the Heads of Port Phillip Bay, ‘everyone could be happy but us’ at reaching Melbourne,

26 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

since the Higgins family experienced the only death on the ship.50 Anne Higgins’s grief at the loss of two sons within a year was exacerbated by distress at the circumstances of Charlie’s death. She came close to a crisis of faith, questioning God’s purpose in taking her innocent son’s young life just as they reached Australia: ‘Oh! tis torturing me beyond endurance that the most beautiful body is where it is … All is so dreadfully dark and mysterious, I feel as if I could not praise God.’51

Child deaths in steerage The experiences of Ellen Moger (1839), Henry Knight (1852–53), and Abijou Good (1863) Cabin passengers often had the emotional reserves and material resources to show sympathy and give comfort both to those who were dying and to their children. But life and death were much harsher in steerage, where three times as many people died, with no space or time for deathbed scenes and the minimum of medicine and nutritious food required for terminal care. Steerage passengers were usually able to make a fuss of the ﬁrst fellow passenger who died, and perhaps the second, but thereafter they had less sympathy to spare and real fear for the safety of their own families. The greater the mortality in steerage the more people seemed to turn inwards, to become more defensive in hoarding their limited emotional and physical resources for their own family’s survival. This was especially so on the nightmare voyages with numerous deaths from epidemics, when the tolling of the ship’s bell became commonplace and pathetic parcels were thrown overboard with little or no ceremony. In such extreme circumstances all that ﬁnally mattered was whether the family at risk was their own or not. If the dying children belonged to somebody else, then the sympathy and friendly support offered varied with their level of fear and the numbers of dead. The experiences of Ellen Moger, Henry Knight and Abijou Good should help us to understand the fear, fatalism, and profound grief which affected so many immigrants to colonial Australia on the loss of their children. We shall explore the loss of children at sea through the eyes, ﬁrst, of a mother, then a father and ﬁnally a compassionate observer. Ellen Moger’s tragedy in 1839 was described in a disjointed letter to her parents in Hull nearly three months after three of her four children starved to death on the voyage to Adelaide. The letter was inordinately difﬁcult to write ‘and frequently I feel as though I must throw away my pen’, because her grief was truly indescribable. Her letter contained a confused juxtaposition of routine daily events together with the stark but resigned statement of her tragedy. The young doctor was ‘careless and inattentive’ to passengers’ health in the ﬁrst half of the voyage, until thirty deaths focused his concentration. Three of Ellen’s four children gradually wasted away until they were ‘sorrowful spectacles to behold … for want of proper nourishment’. They were unable to eat any of the ship’s normal provisions and their ship carried no cows or special

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27

soft food for babies and children; adults could survive on a diet of salted meat and hard biscuits, while children died. Ellen wrote that: Poor little Alfred was the ﬁrst that died on the 30th of Oct, and on the 8th of Nov, dear Fanny went and three days after on the 11th, the dear babe was taken from me. I scarcely know how I sustained the shock, though I was certain they could not recover, yet when poor Fanny went it over-powered me and from the weakness of my frame, reduced me to such a low nervous state that, for many weeks, I was not expected to survive.52

Ellen Moger was delirious or unconscious for most of the three weeks when she was bled, blistered and plastered, but she was aware that ‘the dear baby and Fanny were thrown overboard’; she insisted in her delirium that ‘the water could not retain them’ and they shared the berth with her still. She was also sure that her three children would not have died if they had been provided with proper nourishment. Ellen made no mention of religious consolation and little reference to her brewer husband. She claimed to be resigned to her new circumstances in Adelaide, which she considered neither beautiful nor salubrious, but hers was an inauspicious start to her new pioneer role.53 Henry Knight, a gardener from England, kept a diary on board the Java from London to Sydney in 1852 to 1853 as a warning to others against the ‘Horrors of Government Emigration’. At the time of his assisted passage to Australia, Henry had two children (George and Henry) by his ﬁrst wife, and two (Charles and Susan) by his second wife Mary, the daughter of a blacksmith. The Java carried forty-four crew, two cabin passengers and 483 mainly English immigrants, on a seemingly interminable voyage of 184 days which saw ﬁfty-two deaths and twenty-nine births.54 One-third of the 483 passengers were under 14, and thirteen of the twenty-nine children born during the passage died. The focus of Henry Knight’s diary was on the tragedy of his own family and the events leading to the deaths of his two children, Henry aged 12 and Susan aged 4. The ﬁfty-two people who died on the Java were mainly small children under 3 who succumbed to the effects of debility, exhaustion and malnutrition following an outbreak of diarrhoea. The most common recorded causes of death for young children and infants on the Java were marasmus, associated with infant malnutrition, scrofula, a wasting disease, and diarrhoea, while diphtheria, typhus, and ‘fever’ were also noted. The milk of nursing mothers dried up as a consequence of inadequate diet and continuous seasickness; infants, young children and nursing mothers were bound to suffer hardship on ships’ rations allocated to meet the supposed minimum needs of adults. By 13 December 1852, three weeks after sailing, Henry Knight observed that the allowance of edible food was inadequate and that nothing extra had been allocated to his sick family from the surgery. He did not know how they would have managed without the arrowroot, tapioca and other provisions he brought from England.55 Four-year-old Susan was already very weak as ‘she

28 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

cannot eat enough of the food to keep up her strength a Child died’. The frequent juxtaposition of the details of his own children’s illnesses with the bare record of other children’s deaths highlighted his fears.56 He also complained frequently of the ﬁlth he had to endure when making gruel for his sick family. By 17 December he protested that none of his children could get enough to eat. A week later, 6-year-old Charles said he was sorry to have left Kent as ‘there was plenty of nice things to eat there here there is nothing I can eat’. Henry was extremely distressed and angry at this: ‘I was obliged to go to a private place in the Ship to give vent to my feeling’s seeing that I was deceived by the Commissioners as to nourishment for Children.’57 This was one of Henry’s rare emotional outbursts, bearing testimony to the powerful convention that working-class men should not express their emotions in public, or even in the presence of their own family, however great the provocation. The Knight family spent a miserable Christmas Day at sea, with Susan ‘fast dwindling’, Charles too weak to speak and Henry also sick. He noted that his wife daily asked the ship’s doctor for food and wine for the sick children, to no avail, and also that another child had died, making a total of 15. By 28 December he complained, ‘O how hard to hear my Children ask for nourishment and have nothing for them that they can take.’ Two weeks later Henry and Susan were worse than ever and Susan was ‘actually starving’. At the critical point of imminent starvation the captain was persuaded to allocate limited emergency rations of small potatoes and porter to starving children. Henry had acute diarrhoea and Susan was feverish and vomiting. On 19 January 1853 the father sadly recorded: ‘Susan starving Henry a little better another child died today from starvation.’58 On 5 February 1853, 12-year-old Henry was the ﬁrst to die, of diarrhoea and starvation. Immigrants heard a groan in the closet, but as Henry had fastened himself in, it took over ﬁfteen minutes to rescue him. No one suspected a Death had taken place untill the Door was opened but so it was poor fellow he was quite dead sitting on the seat & perhaps my Friends can better judge what my feelings were than I can express. I took George to see him after he had been carried into the Hospital which was the place where all the Dead were taken poor fellow he wept over him most bitterly nor was he the only one that wept for none of us expected all this.59

Again the working-class father explicitly avoided a direct expression of his own grief, while accepting that 14-year-old George and his wife should cry. He made no reference to religious faith or hopes of the hereafter. Like Ellen Moger, the Knight family was presumably among that half of the population of England and Wales which had not attended church on census Sunday two years earlier. Many immigrants had probably abandoned their Christian faith before leaving Britain. Only ten days after her brother’s death Susan’s condition deteriorated again when the doctor said the supply of wine was ﬁnished. Susan’s hands and face became swollen and she grew much weaker, but the father could not persuade the doctor to attend her or many other starving

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children. ‘Oh how hard to see her dwindling for the want of what I was told by the Commissioners we should have … I wish I had never came on Board this Vessel to see my Children starved [to death].’60 Henry Knight was extremely angry at this situation when the ship sailed into the harbour at Cape Town on 25 February 1853. When the Port Master came on board to inquire about illness and deaths, he declared he never before encountered a ship from England with as many as thirty deaths. He assumed the large number must be due to an epidemic of fever or smallpox, but the doctor corrected him: ‘Bowel disease said the Doctor instead of speaking the truth by saying they had died for want of nourishment.’ Knight seized his opportunity to protest to the Port Master: ‘myself & Mr Pool told him the Biscuits was bad he inspected them we told him the Children had died of starvation & we begged he would Intercede for us that if we were not treated differently we should loose all our Children before we reached Sydney.’61 The Port Master promised to pass these complaints to Mr James Rivers, the Immigration Agent at Cape Town with the responsibility to investigate such cases. The next day the Port Master and James Rivers toured the ship and heard complaints against the doctor and the captain, and of the inadequate food and bad biscuits, and lack of medical attention and comforts. But when Mr Rivers and two doctors formally investigated the passengers’ complaints, Henry Knight seems to have been carefully manoeuvred away from the action, presumably because he provided the leadership for the steerage protestors. Mr Rivers subsequently told Knight that if he had been present to press the case, the doctor would have been left at the Cape and the captain ﬁred; instead the captain pleaded ignorance and the doctor promised to provide better care. The captain was cleared of negligence to his passengers on condition that a list of medical comforts was placed on board to combat the unusual mortality among the children attributed to ‘want of proper nourishment’.62 Henry Knight’s anger at these developments may be imagined but his emotional resources were soon diverted to his own family by Susan’s death on 6 March 1853 from scrofula. He had recognised since 25 February that she was too weak to recover. By 5 March the little girl was considerably altered for the worse and the parents sat up with her all that night, anticipating the end at any moment. At 9 next morning: ‘my Dear little girl breathed her last’. The captain promised the grieving father to wait for the burial until next morning, but instead ‘committed my Child to the Deep’ at 10.30 p.m. without informing the parents, who were in bed. The disregard of both captain and doctor for the feelings of their steerage passengers was astonishing, though Henry Knight simply allowed his statement of facts to speak for themselves. He merely noted that his wife was ‘very poorly’ for the next six days, but on 12 March he again expressed his anger: I hope when the Commisioner’s send out another ship with Emigrants they will send out a proper portion of nourishment & A proper Superintendant one that has humanity about him these expressions are hurtful to the feeling’s especially to the Mother’s who are weeping over their dying Children.63

30 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

But neither the doctor nor the captain appeared to have learned from their lucky and ill-deserved escape at Cape Town. Henry Knight’s wife continued ‘very poorly very weak’ but was permitted no additional nourishment, though she was pregnant. Despite a particularly bad night on 26 March with great pain in the bowels, the doctor did not attend her, evidently not concerned to keep the promise made at the Cape to give better medical care. By 9 April Mary Knight was still very ill and her husband’s personal stock of provisions purchased at the Cape was nearly exhausted. He now feared for the lives of his wife and remaining two children, for he was convinced ‘she would I believe have been dead had it not been for the Flour wine beer Brandy & Biscuits I laid in at the Cape’. On 12 April the captain sought to put the immigrants on short rations of ﬂour because only eight days’ allowance remained. Knight was nominated by the immigrants to put their protest to the captain, who relented for three more days, but on 16 April no ﬂour was served: ‘the Emigrants agreed unanimously that as we was short of food to demand of the Captain exactly where we was’. By this time both Knight parents were ‘weak & poorly’. When they ﬁnally sailed through Sydney Heads ‘the thoughts of my Dear Children spoiled all’, after an interminable voyage of ﬁve months and ﬁfty-two deaths.64 Soon after their arrival in Sydney, Mary Knight gave birth to another daughter and subsequently six more, and both parents survived until their eighties. It is signiﬁcant that the Sydney Morning Herald reported the names of only the two cabin passengers who died and not those of the 50 steerage passengers65—another symbol of the vast gulf between the two classes in death as in life—and of the continuation of that gulf on land. In 1863 Abijou Good and his family sailed to Sydney on the Beejapore, a ship which already had a horriﬁc history. It was an unusually large 1347-ton wooden vessel which had an additional deck to carry more than a thousand passengers as part of an abortive experiment by the British Emigration Commission to reduce costs during the early gold rushes. On the Beejapore’s voyage to Sydney in 1852–53, overcrowding and inadequate ventilation had caused widespread sickness and the deaths of ﬁfty-ﬁve infants and young children, chieﬂy from measles and typhus fever, while a further sixty-two died at the quarantine station, mainly from typhus.66 Despite this history, the Beejapore still carried 720 passengers of all classes when the Good family travelled to Rockhampton ten years later. Abijou Good discovered that his own and another family, twelve people in all, had to share an area no larger than a small pantry, 9 feet long by 6 feet wide and 7 feet high, including four shelves for sleeping.67 The Good family was unfortunate in its ship’s surgeon as well as its vessel, which had an unusually incompetent and irresponsible doctor who failed to enforce vital sanitary and cleansing regulations. While there were distinct limits to curative medicine in the nineteenth century, the better governmentappointed ships’ surgeons were primarily appointed to enforce vital health, sanitary, and hygiene regulations intended to prevent the outbreak and spread of infectious diseases. Helen Woolcock concludes that Queensland immigrant

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ships gradually established a staff of reliable ships’ surgeons, mostly mature married men who supervised several voyages and produced satisfactory mortality rates by 1869.68 Robin Haines and Ralph Shlomowitz agree that the role of the surgeon was ‘more disciplinary than medical’ and that the majority were effective in reducing immigrants’ exposure to infectious diseases.69 By 30 April, 720 passengers had endured weeks of almost unbearable heat and ﬁlthy conditions, and the measles epidemic was taking a heavy toll of the children. Burials were carried out in secret in a vain effort to avoid alarming the passengers, to retain control of the ship, and to minimise the impact of the deaths. On 16 April at about 7.30 a.m. Good was surprised to see the sailmaker walk to the side of the vessel with a bundle in his arms which he threw overboard. Good asked several people what had been thrown away, but nobody seemed to know: ‘at last i was told it was a funeral, there were one hundred people at least on deck but scarcely one knew that it was a funeral This will give some idea of the manner in which protestants bury children at sea.’ On 20 April another child died at about 8 a.m. and two hours later Good again saw the sailmaker pass with a large bundle. He could see nothing of the funeral and no one on deck knew that a child was about to be buried. When he heard a dull splash he knew it was the child’s body ‘but there was neither priest nor mourners to be seen’.70 As Abijou Good noted in his diary on 30 April: In fact since the ﬁrst body was thrown overboard everything as been done to render the proceedings as quiet & as secret as possible … On the morning of the 28th a child eleven days old died about an hour after we were all sitting at breakfast when we saw the sail maker pass with a large bundle in his arms, it was taken on deck & thrown over board without even the parents being acquainted with what they were about to do.71

During May 1863 the death toll steadily increased, as Good recorded the lack of decent burial rituals and the discrimination between steerage and cabin passengers. On 16 May another child died at 6 a.m. and was thrown over at about 7 a.m.—‘there is not much ceremony here’. This contrasted with the next entry on the death of a child which died on the night of 16 May but was not thrown overboard until 8 a.m. next morning ‘as it belonged to a cabin passenger’. The bodies of steerage children were thrown overboard as quickly as possible, while the cabin passengers’ corpses were retained for a more respectable twelve hours or so. On 20 May 1863 Abijou Good recorded the absence of ceremony and respect for a steerage child’s burial more fully, carefully following the entire proceedings with growing anger. About an hour after a child’s death from measles, the sailmaker entered the hospital berth where the child lay, still in the clothes in which it died, for nobody had bothered to wash or lay out the little body. The sailmaker spread on the ﬂoor an old biscuit bag, not even a blanket, and rolled the child in it, still in soiled clothes, added two pieces of coal to sink the bundle, and tied it up with old rope. Abijou Good followed

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the sailmaker as he took his bundle onto the poop deck, where he threw it over the rail into the sea ‘without prayers nor rites of any kind performed— so you see it will not do to go to sea to have a fuss made with you’. He could see the captain and the sailor on the poop but their presence was unconnected to the pathetic end of the infant.72 Much of Good’s anger was directed at the ship’s surgeon who was supposed to care for sick patients and conduct burial services, but ‘he is not up to much either as a docter or a pasenger’. Good dismissed him on one occasion as no more use than an ‘old washerwoman’ and on another as ‘a respectable blackguard’. The captain seemed to Good to be trying to compensate for his doctor’s incompetence by taking over some of his duties. It was the captain rather than the doctor who came round the ship each morning to discover who was ill; the captain even told Good he could have done better for the passengers without the doctor, to whom he gave medical directions, including medicine to be administered in each case. On 21 May two grieving parents who had lost a child from measles the day before suffered a second death ‘intirely through the neglect of the docter’ according to the vigilant diarist. The second dead child was ‘rolled and sewn up’ like its sibling, and thrown overboard within an hour. But on this occasion the doctor read prayers, perhaps to atone for his neglect or because the sorrowing parents had lost two children in two days. But by 22 May the doctor’s behaviour had reverted to normal when ‘death the King of terrors’ paid an even closer visit, taking a child from the family which shared the Goods’ berth. Good blamed the doctor yet again for his neglect, ‘he never having given it any thing of any kind’, and the little body was thrown overboard within an hour; this time no prayers were said as the doctor was ‘to lasy to leave his cabin’.73 Three more children were thrown overboard on 28 May with no prayers, the last only twenty minutes after death, before the body was cold. Throughout June 1863 Abijou Good continued his record of children’s deaths, all thrown into the sea soon afterwards, with ‘no prayers’. When the ship reached Queensland Good reckoned there had been thirty-eight deaths in all, most of them children: ‘it is a fearfull thing to have to record the deaths of so many human beings’. They sighted Queensland on 22 June and the capture of a ‘beautifull Australian butterﬂy’ on deck was a symbol of hope for the regeneration of life on land after the havoc of so much death at sea.74 As Ellen Moger informed her parents in 1840 following the loss of two of her own children at sea, ‘the mind, I assure you, soon becomes hardened and callous on board a ship’.75 She recognised that immigrants did not allow themselves to feel too much for the deaths of people outside their own family circle. They had to develop tough exteriors to cope with the trials and tribulations of life and death on board. An analogy exists here with the experience of death in wartime. As the immigrant ship was the bridge between two worlds and two lives, it inadvertently educated the immigrant for the hardships ahead in the alien bush and the new cities.

Chapter 2

Faith, Fever, and Consumption Disease and Adult Deaths at Sea

Religion and the good Christian death at sea The conﬁnement of all immigrants in an enclosed space on board ship allows some insight into the role of religion in death. It is always difﬁcult for a historian to evaluate faith, since it does not necessarily equate with attendance at religious services or with census information. We have already seen that religious afﬁliations were emphasised on board ship by the custom of organising steerage ‘mess’ groups according to region or nationality, which often corresponded to religious denomination. Woolcock has used the 1881 census statistics for Queensland to provide an estimate of nominal religious afﬁliation among immigrants: of the 90.5 per cent who were Christian, 38 per cent were Anglican, 28 per cent were Roman Catholic, 11.5 per cent were Presbyterian, and 22.5 per cent other Protestant denominations.1 People from the same region and religion tended to immigrate together, which accentuated these patterns. The Church of England service was supposed to be read publicly each Sunday, usually on deck, but attendance was not compulsory because there were so many immigrants of other denominations. If it was wet, the religious hierarchy became clear, since the Anglican service was often held in the ﬁrst cabin, the Presbyterian in the second and the Catholic service in steerage. Shipboard diaries suggest that those immigrants who showed the most piety, in death as in life, were the middle-class cabin passengers and the Irish Catholics in steerage, besides some of the single women in steerage. Protestant devotions were encouraged at embarkation in Liverpool by the Liverpool Seamen’s and Emigrants’ Friend Society, whose members distributed Evangelical tracts. They also conducted divine services for the vulnerable

33

34 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

departing immigrants with appropriate themes, dwelling on their potential perils ‘as strangers in a strange land, and as intending voyagers over the mighty deep, where danger in a thousand trying forms might await them’.2 Storms at sea, epidemic fevers and possible shipwrecks were calculated to evoke the need for some sort of spiritual consolation in many who were otherwise indifferent. Revd E. M. Lawrence was a particularly zealous clergyman on the Daylight in 1875. He kept a ‘Religious Instruction Diary’ listing the divine services and religious instruction classes held and all spiritual services rendered at times of death. On 17 June 1875 he baptised and subsequently buried the infant daughter of J. B. Davy. A week later he spoke and prayed with the parents of a dying 2-year-old child in her ﬁnal hours, and buried her twelve hours later. For a week late in July he regularly visited an 8-year-old boy called John Turton and spent time preparing the boy and his parents for his death on 28 July. His diary notes special prayers delivered for the boy and ‘sat up with J. H. Turton’. On 5 August he noted the death of Levi Batty: ‘was with him at the time’. Next day after the burial service, he organised a collection among the immigrants, the crew, and the cabin passengers which raised £10.18.8 to help the widow.3 There are many examples of religious piety and devotion in shipboard journals, especially before the 1880s. William Nichols in 1849 cited the death of the pious Evangelical tailor aged 23 who ‘arose upon his knees’ in his ﬁnal hour to beg God for mercy: ‘ “O Lord I have been as faithful unto thee as I could be on this wicked earth … make me one of thy faithful” … Without either sigh or a groan, with all pleasure unimaginable [he] resigned his soul to his maker.’4 Cases abound of psalms, prayers and hymns bringing comfort to those who were dying and to their mourners. Thomas Davies, a Christian plumber on the Lord Raglan in 1854, observed that Mrs Mathews, one of the immigrants, was reading the Bible to a dying old man ‘which seems to console him greatly’. Two days later the old man’s ﬁve children were taking turns to read him prayers, ‘it was heart-rending … he died whilst they were being read and died with the greatest ease’.5 J. M. Parrington on the Storm King in 1869 was one of many shipboard diarists to insert into his journal death entries some of the traditional Christian consolations. On the death of a oneyear-old child he observed that ‘it made us remember too that we should have to die’ and would need to make appropriate spiritual preparation.6 However, many immigrants were indifferent to religion and even actively resistant to organised worship. As early as 1853 Joseph Tarry on the Ghenghis Khan observed that ‘we were surrounded with Papists and unbelievers’ between decks.7 Diaries reveal that many people in steerage rejected religious consolation, even when faced with death. The level of religious enthusiasm at sea is indicated by the frequent cancellation of divine services for reasons varying from plain indifference to stormy weather or sectarian rivalry. Ship’s surgeons’ reports sometimes complained of poor attendance at religious services, which on some ships were held primarily on occasions of storms and burials. If the ship had no Anglican clergyman then the Master or

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the surgeon was expected to read the service; Dr Martin Lightoller, surgeon on the Scottish Bard in 1878, was not unusual in his reluctance to act as religious guardian: ‘I would have given something to have got out of doing it.’8 Francis Taylor in 1850 was ever conscious that many of his fellow passengers on the Stag did not share his own devout faith. He was affronted by the lack of faith of the majority of his fellow passengers: I am ashamed to say we have some on board who even whilst the very last words are pronounced over the body of a fellow creature previous to its commital to the Waves are using the most profane language singing the most indecent songs in various parts of the Vessel. This matters not to the poor unseen Child just sunk, but it is hoped they will alter their ways, or God may summon them unaware to the same Fate.9

On 7 June 1850, Taylor outlined another page of his journal with a black border for his account of their seventh death at sea. The bell which tolled for this infant should remind all passengers of the ‘neverending eternity which awaits us, either in the everlasting happiness or Misery … but Alas! How few seem to reﬂect that the next [bell] may be for them. The launching of a human body into eternity … appears by many to be totally unheeded.’10 Patrick O’Farrell’s reading of shipboard journals and letters home to Ireland from Irish migrants to Australia led him to conclude that ‘the ship was the colony in advance and in miniature’, which anticipated the erosion of organised religion in secularised Australia. O’Farrell uses the diary of William Bates, a young Evangelical Presbyterian minister from County Tyrone travelling to Melbourne on the Minehaha in 1858, to illustrate his point. Many of Bates’s fellow immigrants, especially the young men, displayed a ‘larrikin irreligion’, treating religion as an irrelevant joke and its ministers as wowsers to be ridiculed. Bates regretted in his diary: ‘Our young men seem all to be indifferent to religion. Private prayer is, I doubt, very uncommon.’ The young men ‘crowned the sabbath evening’s impiety’ by locking a clergyman in the watercloset; and next day pelted him with rotten cabbages. Bates later noted ‘there is not a single truly pious person in the ship, the great majority decidedly irreligious’. O’Farrell concluded that ‘the colony’s preﬁgured irreligious ethos had triumphed at sea, long before the colony had been reached’. Internalised private faith might survive the unpredictability of the perilous voyage but the fabric of institutionalised religion was weakened.11

Typhus fever and Arthur Manning’s faith, 1839–40 Little was known about infectious diseases in the nineteenth century and it was only recognised in 1909 that typhus was communicated by the bite of an infected body louse. Until its gradual decline after 1870, along with other epidemic diseases, typhus fever was endemic in Victorian Britain; its epidemics were linked with poverty, famine and war, and also with institutions such as gaols and workhouses. From the Australian perspective, typhus was almost

36 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

entirely a disease of overcrowded ships and gaols—a disease which was rarely introduced to the shore population. ‘Ship fever’ as it was often called, was known to be associated with poverty, overcrowding, personal uncleanliness, undernourishment and ﬁlthy ill-ventilated conditions, but the causal interaction of these relationships was unknown. Doctors emphasised the role of environmental pollution which appeared to be effectively treated by public health reform and improved sanitation (though for reasons misunderstood); even after germ theory was discovered, most ships’ surgeons remained convinced sanitarians.12 Typhus fever was responsible for high levels of mortality on early convict ships until naval surgeons were appointed to maintain strict conditions of cleanliness on board. Two hundred and sixty-one of the 930 male convicts on the Second Fleet died mainly from typhus and scurvy, as also did 10 per cent of the Third Fleet’s convicts. The mortality from typhus was actually higher on early immigrant ships than on the later convict ships because it was impossible to regulate free passengers to the same degree as convicts. The Lady MacNaghten’s voyage in 1836–37 was terrible, with 54 dead from typhus out of 412 Irish immigrants. Poor and malnourished immigrants on this ship had no medical examination before embarkation and were then subjected to gross overcrowding and insufﬁcient medicines, with no proper regulation of cleanliness, order and ventilation. The young and inexperienced ship’s surgeon, Dr Hawkins, who became a victim of the disease, was also a convenient scapegoat for a board of inquiry into the high mortality. The bounty ship New York Packet was inaccurately reported on arrival in Sydney in 1841 to be free from disease except for ‘inﬂuenza’, yet typhus rapidly spread through the quarantine station, infecting 80 and killing 9. It was evidently present but undiagnosed on the high seas.13 Of the 814 immigrants on the ill-fated Ticonderoga to Melbourne in 1852, 96 died from typhus at sea and 80 more at the quarantine station. The health ofﬁcer’s report in Melbourne condemned the massive overcrowding, lack of ventilation, and the accumulation of ‘dirt and ﬁlth of the most loathsome description’ on the ‘ﬂoating pest-house’.14 Helen Woolcock has observed that adult immigrants on the Queensland route fell victim to the ‘ﬁlth-related’ fevers, consumption, and accidents, whereas the children died from epidemic and diarrhoeal diseases. Miasmatic diseases, chieﬂy typhus and typhoid, fell from 27 per cent of total mortality in the 1860s to 12 per cent twenty years later, to none by the turn of the century, with the decline in major epidemic diseases, sanitary reform and healthier, cleaner immigrants.15 Typhus, typhoid and other fevers hit young adults of 15 to 29 years the hardest. In the earlier years of immigration, typhus was the most common cause of quarantine, but from 1880 smallpox replaced it. Six British ships were detained in quarantine with typhus in the 1860s, four in the 1870s and none thereafter. The common terror of typhus fever at sea is vividly illustrated in the diary of Arthur Manning, travelling as a cabin passenger on the Earl Grey to Sydney with his wife Fanny in 1839–40. Arthur Manning was returning to Sydney to join his family who arrived there in 1829, Arthur having pre-

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sumably returned to England for his education. His father, John Edye Manning, was a registrar of the Supreme Court and his brother, William Montagu Manning, was already making a name for himself as a barrister and politician, becoming solicitor-general in 1844. Although still only 20, Manning was self-righteous and self-assured beyond his years, and a devout Evangelical Anglican keen to save the souls of sinners. This ship suffered nine deaths in all, most identiﬁed as caused by typhus, but still a lower mortality rate than the famous ‘plague ships’ such as the Ticonderoga. As a privileged cabin passenger, with superior food, space, ventilation, and accommodation, Arthur Manning was less vulnerable than most. But Manning’s fear was enhanced by his hypochondriacal tendencies and his early recognition that the ship’s doctor, Richard Dunn, would be no help in a fever epidemic. Manning observed: Dunn is a delicate person, and has long complained. In fact, he told me some days ago, he only rose from his bed on shore, to which he had been conﬁned six months, to take charge of our Emigrants, in the hope that the voyage would invigorate his constitution. He has neither strength, nerve nor nous for his situation … From his looks I should say he has consumption, and that his years on earth would not be many.16

Dunn was one of that group of near-desperate consumptives who hoped the extended sea voyage would prolong their lives; as ship’s surgeons, they were hardly likely to inspire conﬁdence. His fellow passengers assumed that he attained his position because he was the captain’s nephew. Lewis Whittaker, another cabin passenger who was also a doctor, conﬁded in Manning that Dunn was ‘a gone man’ who was not expected to survive until Sydney.17 The twin themes of faith and fever echo through Manning’s diary. On 12 November 1839 he reported the death of the ship’s steward from ‘this terrible Fever’, but the matter was hushed up for ‘fear of alarming the people’. Twelve days later Manning’s panic at the prospect of the dreaded fever was manifest: Fever has broken out amongst the Emigrants! Yes, here we are alone, on the wide ocean, far from friends and assistance, and unable to escape, and surrounded by that most direful of all scourges ‘Typhus Fever!’ I shudder at the thought, for if it once take ﬁrm hold of the ship, God only knows how many now on board will live to arrive in Sydney, and relate the sad fate of their companions. One man was buried yesterday, and two women are now in the hospital, dangerously ill of the Fever.18

Manning’s diary revealed a considerable understanding of the confused medical knowledge of the causes and transmission of typhus fever in 1839. He expressed no surprise at the outbreak of fever, since the ship’s surgeon failed utterly to manage and regulate the immigrants in a badly overcrowded ship. But the chief problem was Dunn’s lack of authority to enforce any rules he thought essential for passengers’ health:

38 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA Irregularity and disorder of every description prevail among these dirty beings. Cleanliness, we know, is a great preservative of health and preventive of contagion, and is more than ever necessary on board ship, where so many people are huddled together two in a bed, and more than a hundred in one division of the vessel! … These rascals would and do live in ﬁlth and foul air, rather than take the trouble to get rid of it by assisting each other to keep their place clean and well ventilated. No wonder that fever has made its appearance in our crowded and ﬁlthy habitation. Mr Dunn has not the conﬁdence of any of us as a medical man, and we all dread the spreading of the contagion.19

There was some inconsistency in Manning’s ruminations on the causes of typhus fever. On the one hand he blamed the surgeon’s deﬁciencies and the steerage migrants’ ﬁlth and disorder. But on the other hand, ‘we are all in the hands of the Allmighty; and if it be His good will to take many of our number out of this world and its miseries, all we can do will be of no avail’. Their only hope was to prepare for ‘eternal bliss beyond the grave’.20 But submission to the will of God was not assisted by the neglect of Revd Simpson, the Anglican clergyman, who never visited the sick or dying during the fever outbreak for fear of carrying contagion to his ten children.21 Manning’s worst fears were realised on 9 December 1839 when typhus fever spread from steerage and crew to the cabin passengers, notably Miss Davies, a female companion, and Mr Dunn, the consumptive surgeon. Manning dreaded the prospect of fever spreading to himself and his wife: ‘At last we have it in the midst of us, where will it stop! who goes next? … God spare me such a loss [as my wife], or permit me to follow my beloved wife to the regions of bliss!’ But his belief in illness as the will of God was again weakened by his conviction that moral faults contributed to the fate of the two latest sufferers. Miss Davies ‘takes no exercise, and eats too heartily’, while Mr Dunn’s constitution was ‘ruined by folly’ and constant dissipation.22 Manning was relieved to learn on 11 December that the two invalids were recovering: ‘As danger recedes, I smile at my fears.’ But he remained anxious about the dissolute ship’s surgeon: I fear Dunn rises but little more of a Christian than he was before his illness, although he knows he was on the brink of the grave. How awful is his state! No justiﬁcation for wilful blindness can save him, and he must inevitably go [to] that place where ﬁre is never quenched …23

By contrast, the illness and death of the pious young cabin passenger Miss Waugh, on 22 December, was both edifying and unthreatening for the watchful young Evangelical. ‘It is not Typhus Fever, so we do not dread infection. How selﬁsh is human nature!’ Despite the Waugh family’s loss, Manning stressed their spiritual gain of a good Christian death, even though they were Presbyterians with ‘peculiar’ rituals:

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She seems to have been well prepared for her awful change, having long kept her ‘house in order’ in the full expectation of a speedy dissolution … Her imprisoned spirit has taken its ﬂight to regions of bliss, where it already joins in the songs of everlasting adoration and praise at the Redeemer’s feet. Death has been to her ‘a gain’.

Manning viewed heaven as the traditional, restful place of psalm-singing saints engaged in the eternal worship of God. He hoped that the three deaths so far reminded all passengers constantly that ‘the hand of Death cannot be arrested. … It is equally necessary to be prepared for a watery grave as for an earthen one.’24 But Manning’s spiritual contemplation of death, heaven, and judgment did not prevent his keen eyes from observing with interest the more corporeal aspects of Miss Waugh’s death and burial. He noted that the captain had ordered the carpenter to make a cofﬁn at the wish of the elderly bereaved parents, instead of the usual blanket and canvas shroud. But after Miss Waugh was placed in her specially made cofﬁn it was discovered with shock that she was ‘quite warm, and therefore could not be dead!’ She was speedily removed from her cofﬁn while the doctors checked that there was no sign of life before she was ﬁnally ‘nailed down’. This episode is a reminder that the common fear of burial alive applied as much at sea as for an earth burial. All the cabin passengers dressed in black for a Presbyterian form of the funeral service read by the uncouth Independent missionary Dr Ross. The bereaved father and son showed considerable emotion at the service, but Mrs Waugh gave vent to her ‘sobs and lamentations’ in the privacy of the cabin. This burial ceremony again demonstrated to Manning the folly of allowing cofﬁns at sea, as ‘it ﬂoated on the water, quite upright!’, though thankfully the bereaved family did not perceive the blunder. Fortunately the carpenter deliberately made several holes in the wood, so the cofﬁn slowly disappeared as it ﬁlled with water. Manning noticed, like so many other immigrants, that ‘there seems to be something additionally dreadful in losing a relative at sea, where she is cast into the deep, and no grave is left to mark the spot of her last resting place’, where the grieving family could subsequently visit to meditate and pray.25 The awful ‘calamity’ of fever afﬂicted Manning more personally when his wife Fanny caught ‘remittant fever’ on 7 January 1840: ‘I cannot bear to see dear, dear Fanny suffering—and oh! how dreadful! should she be taken from me, a prey to that fever which is raging so fearfully among us! I could not long survive her, should it please God to make me a widower.’ Fortunately Fanny was much better by 12 January, and though the relapsing fever recurred at intervals during the remainder of the voyage, later attacks were less alarming.26 It was inevitable that some confusion occurred when the term ‘fever’ was loosely used to cover several diseases including typhus and typhoid, which were not ofﬁcially regarded as distinct until 1869.27 But given the terror of typhus, some immigrants inevitably attempted their own diagnoses,

40 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

and false rumours could spread rapidly through a ship which contained genuine typhus cases. Manning described the second mate’s illness as ‘fever but not absolute Typhus’. Even Dr Lewis Whittaker, the medical man, had ‘symptoms of the Fever about him, but hopes to get rid of them by taking them briskly in hand’.28 On 30 January, Dr Ross was ‘said to have typhus fever but in truth has a cold’ and was fast recovering. As Manning admitted, ‘On board ship every little ailment is magniﬁed into fever.’ He recognised that fear of fever gave ‘reality to the chimeras and ﬁctions of fancy’.29 But it was a different matter when Manning believed he himself had at last contracted typhus fever at the end of the voyage. He spent 20 February 1840 in bed ‘with the full persuasion that Typhus Fever had taken hold of me’. He believed he had the symptoms severely and remained very ill for four hours, after which Dr Whittaker’s remedies began to relieve his head and stomach. Next morning he attributed his recovery to Whittaker’s prompt treatment and ‘the simple circumstance of the wind changing and becoming beautifully fair!’ So easily could a hypochondriac come to believe in climate as a cure for supposed typhus fever, when he probably had an ailment such as food poisoning. When the ship arrived in Sydney on 25 February 1840 its occupants expected to be placed in quarantine but were declared free of fever and allowed to disembark.30 There presumably Arthur Manning and his wife joined his father’s family in New South Wales. No record survives of Arthur’s life there in the 1840s and possibly his fortunes suffered with his father’s ﬁnancial reverses as a victim of the Depression. Manning reappeared in the records in the 1850s as a commissioner of Crown lands in New South Wales and in the 1860s as a principal undersecretary at the Colonial Secretary’s Department in Queensland. At some point Fanny died and Manning married again to rear two sons and ﬁve daughters, all Australian born. His career appears to have reached an untimely end in 1868 when he was assaulted with a tomahawk by a suspended public servant with a grievance who was punished with penal servitude for life. Manning retired on a substantial pension soon after, and we can only speculate that colleagues were relieved to be rid of his sharp tongue and supercilious manner.

The ocean as a health resort for consumptives Tuberculosis was a major killer disease in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, with a higher mortality rate than cholera and smallpox combined. The bacillus was identiﬁed by Robert Koch in 1882 but no secure remedy was available until the advent of streptomycin in 1943. The death rates from tuberculosis in Britain began to fall very gradually from about 1850 along with those of all infectious diseases. Pulmonary tuberculosis, known as phthisis or consumption, was a destructive disease emanating from mass poverty, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions. Medical science could do relatively little before 1943 and the real improvements in the late nineteenth

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century came from sanitary and public health reform, better nutrition, and rising living standards.31 It may be assumed that Aboriginal people were not infected with tuberculosis before the arrival of Europeans. Signiﬁcantly, the history of European mortality in Australia began with the consumptive death of a sailor, Forby Sutherland, from the Endeavour crew during Captain Cook’s ﬁrst voyage. The death rate from pulmonary tuberculosis rose steadily from 1862 to 1884 in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, due to an increased mortality among young adults, but gradually declined thereafter.32 Australian death rates were still rising while those in Britain were already falling, adding to confusion about causes and prevention of the disease. Tuberculosis was a major killer in colonial Australia, especially for young adults of both sexes: ‘mortality from this disease was consistently high during the last half of the nineteenth century, whereas the impact of other major infectious diseases was only felt during epidemics’.33 Consumption was the worst of the top seven killer diseases in Victoria and New South Wales between 1880 and 1900, causing 7–10 per cent of total deaths.34 Before 1862, and for some time after, many ignorant optimists believed that Australia had substantial immunity from tuberculosis, based on its allegedly warm, dry climate. Dr Dougan Bird was an inﬂuential exponent of this argument with his 1863 guidebook for intending immigrants, On Australasian Climates and Their Inﬂuence in the Arrest and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption, which attracted favourable notices in the British medical journal, the Lancet and the British and Australian press at large. His enthusiasm for the cause was enhanced by his personal experience as a consumptive who travelled to Australia for his health in 1860 to such excellent effect that all symptoms disappeared within three months of arrival. He believed that the dry, sunny and stimulating climate of Victoria, in particular, increased immunity against consumption, where the ‘dull, dark, damp’ climate of England promised only an early death. Dr Bird noted: ‘There is perhaps no climate in the world so generally suitable to consumptive cases at all seasons of the year as Melbourne.’ He even argued that all European races required ‘a renewal of type’ by ‘transplantation of the masses’ to a highly salubrious climate.35 Dr John Singleton, over a decade later, shared Bird’s view that ‘Victoria is not excelled … for salubrity by any other country’.36 Others, like William Dovey, believed the case for Victoria was overstated and argued instead for ‘New South Wales as a health resort’ for invalids since it was cooler in summer and warmer in winter, with ‘an atmosphere of extreme purity’.37 An increasing number of colonial doctors took a different view of the beneﬁcent effects of the Australian climate for invalids. Clutterbuck in 1849 was convinced that consumption consigned many immigrants to Victoria to a premature grave: ‘to imagine, as many do, that emigration to this Colony tends either to prevent the development of this complaint, or to arrest its progress, is a fatal delusion.’ Even London fog and English cold were ‘less

42 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

baneful an inﬂuence’ than Australia’s intense summer heat and extreme variations in temperature.38 But Bird’s inﬂuence was stronger than that of his opponents because he had more authority in Britain. Bird’s most signiﬁcant critic was Dr William Thomson of Melbourne who arrived independently at the germ theory of tuberculosis in 1882 and was convinced even earlier that the illness was contagious.39 He attacked the theory that locally born Australians possessed a natural immunity to tuberculosis, as well as the alternative argument that blamed its increase from 1862 on the inﬂux of consumptives from abroad. After an exhaustive statistical analysis of the relationship between climate and consumption in Victoria in 1877, Thomson concluded that climate had no power to prevent or cure pulmonary tuberculosis. Foreign consumptives accounted for only about 4 per cent of the 1088 such deaths in Victoria in 1877, compared with 96 per cent who contracted the disease within Australia. He took some satisfaction in providing the Victorian statistics for the steady growth of fatal consumption among Australians locally born from 5.47 per cent in 1865–70 to 23.34 per cent in 1877—a nearly ﬁve-fold increase ‘in the latest fashionable health resort’.40 A signiﬁcant aspect of this debate about consumption and climate related to the claim that the sea voyage en route to Australia was itself also ‘a health paradise’. By 1860 increasing numbers of wealthy English consumptives made the round trip to Australia and their ranks were swelled by more invalids of the middle and artisan classes a decade later. The Lancet pronounced in 1863 that consumptives were often ‘marvellously restored’ by the sea trip to Australia and a year or two living in the mild climate.41 Dr Dougan Bird argued in 1863: ‘There are but few cases of consumption in any stage to which a long voyage in a comfortable ship will not be strikingly beneﬁcial’. The sea air was supposed to check early consumption through the ‘medicated atmosphere’ of oxygen, bromine and iodine in tubercular lungs, though these theories were unsubstantiated by clinical evidence. Bird conceded that the beneﬁts for invalids had been reduced on some of the overcrowded ships of the 1850s, while some consumptives dreaded the discomforts of narrow cabins and conﬁned air. But he argued that travelling ﬁrst class in the better ships was in 1863 ‘as comfortable as in your own home’.42 Dr William Thomson in 1864 condemned the ‘absurdity and incongruity’ of these remarks: ‘We need only remind [Dr Bird] of how small a number of the masses, who have to be removed to “regenerate tuberculosed England” could command a ﬁrst-class cabin. Perhaps the “Great Eastern” would provide the ships to deport the invalids of large working class British communities to the Australian “pesthouse and sanatorium for a ‘tuberculosed race’ ”.’43 Other authors of guidebooks for British immigrants shared Thomson’s scepticism about the supposed therapeutic beneﬁts of the sea voyage. Revd James Ballantyne accepted in 1871 that a sea voyage to Victoria in the early stages of consumption might be beneﬁcial, if undertaken in circumstances of comfort and through mild latitudes. But the great mistake was the ‘fatal experiment’ of sending patients to sea as a last resort once the case was

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hopeless: ‘They came only to die … Surely it is better that they should die at home, with family and friends around them.’ To send consumptive patients in an advanced state of the malady on a long sea voyage, in which comforts may be comparatively scanty, and the ministrations of kindness comparatively few, and to a strange land, where friends may be rare, if indeed there be any at all, and where the gentle and soothing attentions of a loving solicitude may be altogether wanting, is not a wise thing—nay, may be positively cruel.44

More than ten years later, the surgeon Dr Francis Workman strongly condemned ‘the ocean as a health resort’, observing that ‘A ship is a most wretched place to die in’, leaving the victims no choice after embarkation between ‘Australia or death’.45 Some died during the voyage and many more in their ﬁrst six months in Australia. The pessimists were justiﬁed by the statistics which showed that mortality from consumption was high on immigrant vessels. Dr William Thomson observed that the reported ﬁgure for consumptive deaths on the voyage to Melbourne in 1871–74 was 50 passenger deaths out of 105, but he considered the true statistic closer to 70—certainly well over half.46 Woolcock found that tubercular diseases accounted for 9 per cent of total deaths on the Queensland immigrant ships from 1860 to 1900, and as much as 20 per cent of the mortality among single men and 17 per cent among married men. Indeed tubercular diseases constituted 20 per cent of the deaths of those in the prime of life in the 15 to 29 year age group. Woolcock concluded that ‘complaints about Australia being the dumping ground for consumptives seem to have been justiﬁed’.47 But public and medical opinion in Britain still accepted the myth of the therapeutic beneﬁts of the sea voyage to Australia for some years after Koch’s discovery in 1882. Bird’s ‘tale of the marvellous’, his ‘Eutopia realised’ had far more impact in Britain than the views of Australian medical critics such as Thomson.48 Potential immigrants did not know or care that Bird’s statistics were inaccurate, but preferred to accept the favourable public image of the Australian climate as being good for the health. Cabin passengers were exempt from medical inspections at embarkation, while the overall mortality statistics suggest the inadequacy of the selection process among prospective steerage passengers; moreover, the possibility of tuberculosis must have been either ignored or gone undetected in numerous examinations. It is astonishing that ‘desperate cases’ of pulmonary tuberculosis were allowed to take such long and exhausting ocean voyages, especially when the disease ranked as a major cause of death for young adult immigrants at sea. Despite some medical speculation before 1882 as to whether consumption was ‘contagious’, the general belief in the infectivity of the disease was slow to develop. Immigrants with consumption were not isolated, so that some must have passed the disease on to fellow passengers. There were even cases of ship’s surgeons such as Richard Dunn who took the job to improve their health; they not only knew they had consumption,

44 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

but their disease was so advanced that they died at sea. Dr Mark died of tuberculosis in 1878 on his second voyage to Queensland as naval doctor-incharge of passengers, and two more consumptive ship’s doctors on the Queensland route died shortly after arrival.49 A ‘doctor’s diary during a voyage to New South Wales’ in 1836 by Daniel Fowles even noted that he had left his wife and children behind, with the intention of returning to them in a year with his health restored; if he had stayed in England he did not expect to live a year.50 Many advanced consumptives taking the sea cure inevitably died on the passage to Australia, since the long-term stress, inadequate nutrition, overcrowding, and climatic variations were likely to hasten death. The diaries of fellow passengers mentioned these tubercular deaths with none of the fear of infection they betrayed in cases of fever. Mary Maclean on the Africana on 4 February 1866 noticed the death from consumption of a young Irishman of 27, Thomas Ryan, who ‘was ailing Since he Came on Board’; two weeks later a young man of 17 died of consumption. And though she considered such deaths ‘a Solm thing’ they were also ‘Soon forgotten indeed I am Surprised how littel Notice we take of things’.51 John Carter on the General Hewett in 1845 commented that Mrs Clark, one of the cabin passengers, died of consumption: ‘she came on board ill, & although at one time we were in hopes she would get better, & live out the voyage, such hopes, as is nearly always the case with consumption, were disappointed; & she continued slowly getting worse until her death.’ Her husband and young son accompanied her but Carter alluded to the need for a female nurse in the case of terminal illnesses; ‘if it had not been for the kindness of Mrs Miller, she would have had no female to nurse her, & of course in her state, one must have been greatly needed’.52 This is a tribute to the generosity of the unknown Mrs Miller, who presumably had not intended to become a nurse in a terminal case on her sea voyage. It also reﬂects the thoughtlessness of Mr Clark, who must have anticipated the possibility of his wife’s death but did not offer his own nursing services. James White from the Henry Fernie commented in 1862 on the death of a 16-year-old English girl in the second cabin, who was ‘far gone in consumption … being recommended to try the climate of Australia as a last experiment’. Unfortunately she was only able to ‘inhale a little fresh air’ on deck on one occasion. She lingered on through the hot weather in the conﬁnement of the second cabin, becoming gradually weaker, until she was ﬁnally taken to the hospital to die.53 Presumably her mother nursed the girl while she endured months of a grim illness in the second cabin, and the ship’s doctor had to cope at the end. The only diarist to comment negatively on the practice of permitting and even encouraging advanced consumptive patients to make the sea voyage was Margaret Walpole, an apparently well-educated nurse, married to the ship’s surgeon on the SS Pathan in 1883. The diary shows her to be immensely capable and emotionally supportive of sick passengers; babies died in her

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arms and the captain asked her to break the sad news to the bereaved. Her verdict on arrival in Melbourne seems just: George [her husband, Dr Walpole, the ship’s surgeon] and I took a poor consumptive patient to the Hospital today and got him admitted. He was too ill to go further. How wrong it seems to advise these poor creatures to come out to Australia for their health when their only means of travelling is on one of these emigrant ships where they get no comforts and little attention, and then when they arrive here without friends and without money, what is there before them. Many of them are thrown immediately on the charity of an Australian public and die in a strange land friendless and alone.54

This bleak verdict was also the view of Isaac Baker Brown, a surgeonsuperintendent in the emigration service, who was horriﬁed to see in the hospitals of Melbourne and Adelaide in the early 1860s ‘almost every other bed in the medical wards tenanted by a patient more or less advanced in consumption’.55

The death of a young tubercular tourist Harry Harvey, 1868 We happen to know a good deal about the misfortunes of one small group of young male consumptives sent to Australia for their health. Harry Harvey Jnr of Barnsley, suffering from ‘some internal weakness of chest’, and his friend Ben Beddow, sailed for Australia as cabin passengers in the Norfolk in October 1867. On board they met two friends, Mr Howarth and Mr Boden ‘also coming out here for our health—as we were all young, and all coming out for the same purpose we naturally chummed’ (as Mr J. E. Howarth subsequently explained to Harry’s father). Harry and Ben were probably not much more than 18 years, Harry having fairly recently left Windsor Grove School.56 Harry wrote to his parents from the Norfolk on 29 December: ‘the majority of our cuddy passengers are like myself going for health, two of them are taking this voyage as a last extremity, and are in a very bad state; there are some 6 or 7 about my age and older, so that we are not without our companions.’ Harry enjoyed the voyage but he reported that Ben had not improved, especially as the hot weather made him ‘feel very ill’.57 The four young men ‘went about together a great deal’ on arrival in Australia, all intending to spend several months travelling for their health before taking the return passage home. They went to Tasmania, where Harry met his former tutor, Mr Joseph Bell, with three of Harry’s former school fellows. Mr Joseph Bell and his pupils remained for three months in Hobart Town while Harry and his three companions explored the Western district of Victoria and Sydney staying mainly in hotels, so the whole trip was expensive.58 On 9 April, Harry and Ben left their two companions in Sydney to

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embark for Melbourne by steamer. But ‘they had a fearfully rough passage from Sydney which occupied 4 days the sea ﬂooding the saloon and cabins, and the bedding and their clothing getting wet’. They believed they merely had bad colds, so continued their travels for another week or more, by which time Ben Beddow was feeling very ill.59 The remainder of the sad story was told by Mrs Eliza Kennison, Ben’s aunt in Melbourne, and Mr J. E. Howarth, in letters to the boys’ parents in England. By Saturday 25 April Ben Beddow showed signs of fever, described variously as either smallpox or scarlet fever; a local doctor was consulted for the ﬁrst time, and he advised Ben’s ‘immediate removal’ from the boys’ base at Tankards Hotel ‘lest it should be attended with risk’. Ben was by then semiconscious and could do nothing for himself, so Mrs Kennison engaged a nurse and took a room for him in the Glenmore Hotel opposite her own house, which had no spare room. Ben was ‘threatened with ulceration of the bowels, and was in a frightful state of delirium’, leading the two doctors to diagnose both boys as suffering from typhoid or ‘colonial’ fever. The doctor still thought Harry’s attack was mild, but deemed it safer to remove him also to a separate room at the Glenmore Hotel, where Mrs Kennison cooked ‘and attended to both assiduously’. The Kennisons’ family doctor and a physician both called on the two boys frequently, sometimes as often as two or three times a day. By 2 May the doctors almost despaired of Beddow’s recovery.60 But from 2 May Harry Harvey quickly changed for the worse, becoming delirious, talking incessantly and unable to eat—‘very thin and sunken his face was, his ﬁne eyes bright and restless … he seemed to be going just as Beddow did.’ But Harry’s decline was sudden and attention had been focused on Beddow, so the end was the more unexpected on 5 May. Mr Howarth was ‘greatly shocked’ to learn from the nurse that morning that when the crisis came in the night, Harry ‘rapidly and quietly sunk and died’, in the presence of Mrs Kennison and the nurse. The two doctors thought some ‘internal weakness of chest’ caused the sudden collapse of his strength and that the air passages of the lungs had been blocked with mucus so ‘no pure blood’ could ﬂow to the brain. Though the verdict on the death certiﬁcate was ‘colonial typhoid fever’, all involved, including the doctors, evidently believed consumption was responsible for his susceptibility and exhaustion.61 Harry’s death was far removed from any resemblance to the good Christian death. He died in a distant country with none of his family or even his close friends around his death bed. He was delirious or unconscious for the last few days and was unlikely to have prepared spiritually for a death that came earlier than even a consumptive might have anticipated. His former teacher, Mr Joseph Bell, understood something of this as he tried to place the kindest gloss on Harry’s death, in an undated letter to Harry’s father: He has passed away, and under very painful circumstances; no friends around but Messrs Howarth & Boden, and Mrs Kennison. But if friends had been there, he was delirious, and little of pleasant memory is left in such cases. Everything was done I believe, that could have been done for him. He had a quiet clean room, and

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hospital nurses, & 2 doctors of known repute in the city. So we must in the absence of any dying testimony, which is sometimes so much prized, look on the tenor of our dear lad’s life, for hope that He who watches carefully the good seed sown in child-hood’s years … has now removed him to grace His garden on high.

Mr Bell had only recently returned to Melbourne from Tasmania; learning of Harry’s death fortuitously on the morning it happened, he went to see ‘his remains laid out’ to verify it. Mr Bell was especially concerned about his former pupil’s lack of spiritual preparation as he was evidently devout and remembered Harry as ‘my most regular companion at the Fulshaw Chapel’.62 Mr Howarth’s letter of 19 May 1868 to the bereaved father placed the emphasis on the tragedy of distance where Mr Bell had stressed the absence of family and friends: ‘the sad, sad fact remains that he is gone from earth and that 16,000 miles away from his home and relations, and that his mortal remains ﬁnd rest in the land of strangers’. Mr Howarth must also have been aware that distance would keep the news of his son’s death from Mr Harvey for many more months. He explained that he, Mr Kennison and Mr Bell made the best possible arrangements for the funeral: ‘if not followed to his last resting-place by those who loved him best, and knew him most, at least he was by friends who mourned him with sincere tears’. Harry Harvey was buried in the Congregational section of the Melbourne Cemetery. Ben Beddow was deﬁnitely recovering and would take back to England some of Harry’s hair, his death certiﬁcate, his luggage and the parchment deed of his grave.63 Mrs Kennison’s letter requested her relative, Ben Beddow, to go to Barnsley to break the tragic news to Harry’s father ‘in the kindest manner possible’ before the letters arrived from Mr Howarth and Mr Bell. Ben would also explain the ﬁnancial circumstances to his father: ‘This will be a terribly expensive affair; we have taken everything upon our own responsibility, supposing Mr Harvey will not decline to bear the expense.’64 This is a reminder that Ben and Harry were at least fortunate in that their families’ wealth provided them with the best possible nursing and medical care and accommodation. And if they fell seriously ill so far from their families and closest friends, they still had the kindly care and support of relatively new friends like Mr Howarth, their shipmate, and Ben’s aunt in the distant country. As Mr Howarth’s sensitive letter to Harry’s father explained, he had become very attached to Harry on their travels, and mourned his loss almost as a brother. They were far luckier than those many consumptives with no money, no friends, and no choice but to end their lives in the new country in the asylums for the destitute, and their sad fate is examined in a later chapter. The history of these immigrant deaths at sea is a history of frustrated hopes and many needless tragedies in an alien environment. Death at sea could not readily be reconciled with the religious aspirations or rituals of most of the immigrants. Life on board a small ship made the traditional good Christian death impossible for the great majority of terminal passengers. It is no accident that the numerous shipboard diaries concentrate on sea burials and

48 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

events after death, with little or no reference to the deathbed scenes which so dominate accounts of death in Victorian Britain. Death at sea could not even be ritualised by a proper burial—the sea could not be domesticated as a landscaped cemetery. Deaths from infectious and epidemic diseases were always a lurking possibility in the claustrophobic conditions of life at sea. ‘Ship fever’ was the great dread of all passengers, rich and poor. Ironically, the most dangerous germ killer of nineteenth-century Britain—tuberculosis—travelled companionably and without causing fear on the immigrant ships. Tubercular travellers responded to the positive messages of nineteenth-century doctors and other tourist agents, seeking improved health on the sea voyage, and even a cure in the new colony. Their fellow travellers shared their quarters and their germs, and some would later die from that infectious passage. For those immigrants who survived the sea journey, and most did, there were psychological scars from the voyage, and often a subtle undermining of Christian values and rituals. There was a second alien environment to confront at the end of the passage—an Australian natural environment which had evolved in radically different ways from the British and European landscapes. That alien world was as difﬁcult to humanise as the great oceans had been. The Australian bush presented different appearances from the European countryside and different rules and values applied. Death in the bush came with few Christian comforts or rituals, and often without a cemetery plot as a last burial place. The lonely graves of the Australian outback were to be as remote and feared as the burial sites at sea.

PART II

The Good Christian Death Transmission from Europe to Australia

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Chapter 3

The Transmission of the European Culture of the Good Christian Death Evangelical Protestantism and the ‘good death’ The Evangelical Protestant model of the good Christian death that developed much earlier in Britain had considerable inﬂuence in colonial Australia, though less than in Britain. Christianity in Britain played a powerful role in the lives of most middle- and upper-class Victorians and many respectable working-class people, for whom church attendance was usually more than just a matter of convention; half the population of England and Wales attended church in 1851. From the late eighteenth century, the Evangelical movement strengthened Protestantism in Britain through its role in the development of Methodism, while it also invigorated the Church of England and some nonconformist sects. Large parts of the population were affected by the Evangelical impulses of seriousness, piety, discipline, and duty. Evangelicalism reached the peak of its social and spiritual dynamism and inﬂuence in the 1850s, starting to decline from the 1870s. Evangelicalism has been called ‘the religion of the heart’, encouraging the bereaved to express the intensity of their grief on the deaths of loved ones by weeping together.1 The Evangelical movement had immense inﬂuence on deathbed behaviour through its revival of the Christian ideal of the ‘good death’, which can be traced back to the medieval tradition of the ars moriendi, the Christian art of dying well. Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying was the most famous Anglican contribution to the devotional tradition of the ars moriendi. It was ﬁrst published in 1651, reprinted numerous times and was still a standard reference book in nineteenth-century Christian homes in Australia as well as Britain. Taylor emphasised the need to prepare for a holy death by strict piety and daily prayer, and devotional exercises throughout

51

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life, not only before impending death: ‘He that would die well must always look for death, every day knocking at the gates of the grave.’2 Jeremy Taylor’s ideal of the good Christian death was still powerful in the nineteenth century among the British middle and upper classes; it was disseminated for popular moral instruction by Evangelical tracts, journals, and sermons, which in turn inﬂuenced the depiction of deathbed scenes in Victorian art and ﬁction. The good death required piety and life-long preparation, as well as fortitude in the face of physical suffering. It should take place in a good Christian home, surrounded by a loving family, with the dying person making explicit farewells to family members, comforted by the assurance of a future family reunion in heaven. There should be time, and physical and mental capacity, for the completion of temporal and spiritual business. The dying person should be conscious and lucid until the end, resigned to God’s will, able to beg forgiveness for past sins and to prove worthy of salvation. The rapturous triumphalism of the Evangelical model at its most extreme included uplifting last words and joyful signs of grace. The last words of the dying were particularly signiﬁcant for Evangelicals, who believed that conduct in the ﬁnal hours was a vital revelation of ﬁtness for salvation. The faithful were supposed to be supremely aware of their proximity to divine judgment, which might occasionally inspire words of sublime wisdom, or at least a testimony to their penitence and hope of salvation. Numerous Evangelical tracts supplied advice and examples of the elevated last words of selected saints and devout clergymen. But edifying deathbed declarations were rare outside the published didactic deathbed literature, as were good Christian deaths, and the very few examples came from the most devout families. Dying people were often unable to communicate or were unconscious in the ﬁnal stages, while fever and delirium from common infectious diseases prevented clarity of thought and expression. Dr Roberta Jull expressed great disappointment in Perth in 1917 in her ‘religious notes’ on her husband’s death from cerebral haemorrhage: ‘The greatest sorrow of all is that we had no parting words. I feared emotional strain for him while there was hope of life. When that was gone, so was consciousness.’3 British and Irish migrants introduced this traditional ideal of the good Christian death to the Australian colonies, where it was powerful among the middle and upper classes up to at least the 1870s, and inﬂuential also among the respectable working classes, though less well documented. But such an ideal could usually only be realised, if at all, among the comfortable classes who had the necessary space, time, wealth, servants, and family support. The Evangelical model in Australia was reinforced by clergymen, though it was never as strong as in Britain. Among educated Australian churchgoing people the sermon continued to be an important vehicle of spiritual and moral instruction which rivalled newspapers in influence up to the 1880s. Evangelical funeral sermons of Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Congregationalists, in particular, were often published to provide edifying examples of the good deaths of pious Christians, and to urge sinners to repent

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before it was too late. In the early 1860s, Revd John Eggleston of the Pitt Street Congregational Church in Sydney was accustomed to pray: ‘Help us to live a dying life so that we may die a living death.’4 Baptist funeral sermons tended to be overtly histrionic, as in the Adelaide sermon in 1876 on the death of Mrs J. Langdon Parsons, the wife of a Baptist minister. Mrs Parsons died of diphtheria at the age of 30, but hers was an allegedly joyful Christian death: ‘Her mental faculties, her memory, were in fullest and clearest exercise up to the very last; hence with her spiritual powers intensiﬁed and puriﬁed, she was enabled to catch the radiance of the dawning glory. Hers was a glorious departure—a true rapture—calm, intelligent, and beatiﬁc.’ The sorrow of her loving family was suppressed in her ﬁnal twenty-four hours as they observed with joy her rapture and ‘present bliss’. Among her ﬁnal words were: ‘I am not afraid to die. I am so happy … Oh! It is so beautiful to die … Yes, I am going to Jesus, and we shall all meet there.’5 Deathbed scenes in published sermons and religious tracts were highly selective in their presentation, emphasis, and omissions. Evangelical deathbed scenes could be reconstructed to ﬁt the required model, as Geoffrey Best observes: In the descriptions of deathbed scenes there was of course much art; art certainly in the narrator, fashioning the incident to ﬁt the model he had in mind; art perhaps also in the subjects of the stories, who knew well enough the model to which they were meant to approximate and who presumably took pains not to disappoint their loved ones by failing to produce it.6

A number of Victorian Christians observed that deathbed scenes in their own experience were often very different from the triumphal accounts published for didactic purposes, containing little exultation and even less rapture. There were many classic expositions of the good Christian death by devout clergymen, usually revised after the event for public ediﬁcation. The account of his ﬁrst wife’s death in 1849 by Revd William Schoﬁeld, a Wesleyan Methodist missionary, can stand for many of the genre, which tended to be sentimental and even melodramatic. Schoﬁeld was the ﬁrst missionary chaplain at Macquarie Harbour in Van Diemen’s Land in 1827. He subsequently ‘ministered faithfully’ in New South Wales, while his entrepreneurial skills meanwhile developed a personal estate of £50 000. Martha Schoﬁeld, the ﬁrst of his three wives, died on 30 April 1849, leaving no children. Precisely one month later, her husband submitted his ﬁve page ‘sketch’ of her death to the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine for publication.7 By her husband’s account, 34-year-old Martha Schoﬁeld had been the subject of divine inﬂuence from early childhood in England and was always a ‘steady, pious unassuming’ member of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. For the last ﬁfteen months of her life in Windsor, New South Wales, she suffered greatly from ‘one of those very painful afﬂictions’ (probably cancer). But Revd Schoﬁeld’s emphasis in 1849 was ﬁrmly on his wife’s triumph over physical tribulation, with no reference to doctors or medicines, since pain was

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considered a test of faith and a punishment for sin. Yet God was evidently merciful: ‘He did not allow Satan to frequently tempt her … It be her duty to receive the chastisements of her Heavenly Father without a murmur … If at any time the pain was so acute as to make her cry out, she would mourn over it as if she had dishonoured God, but obtained relief by being directed to Him [God].’8 Revd Schoﬁeld explained how his wife’s ‘desire of holiness of heart’ triumphed over extreme pain, taking her to ‘a more delightful union with God’. She meditated and prayed every day, quoting scripture abundantly, including the description of the heavenly state in the book of Revelation. Her husband was almost constantly with her in the ﬁnal twenty-four hours, when she displayed ‘the most perfect composure and resignation’, speaking of her funeral, burial, and impending death. At last, after a ‘momentary struggle’, she ﬁnally lost consciousness ‘and quietly fell asleep in Jesus’.9 This testimony was deliberately produced and doubtless heavily edited for public ediﬁcation, and without alternative sources it is impossible to get closer to the reality of Martha’s death. The account tells us much about the spiritual values and expectations of the good Christian death, but unbelievers would have experienced and interpreted it quite differently, dwelling rather on its physical aspects. By contrast, family diaries and letters written at the actual time of terminal illnesses and not intended for public ediﬁcation are examined later, to provide different perspectives on the Christian model, as well as alternative historical representations.

The Protestant idealisation of the consumptive death As we have seen, pulmonary tuberculosis was a consistent major killer disease in colonial Australia from 1860, and was still the most destructive of the top seven killer diseases in New South Wales and Victoria between 1880 and 1900.10 It was a dreadful, debilitating disease which could neither be cured nor prevented until streptomycin was isolated in 1943. Paradoxically, tuberculosis was sometimes romanticised in middle- and upper-class Britain by artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Millais who tended to depict consumptives as young, beautiful, innocent, and usually female. Moreover, consumptive deaths of young people were idealised by Evangelical clergymen and Christian doctors as a blessing in disguise which allowed time and mental clarity for spiritual preparation and the puriﬁcation of the soul through suffering. For example, in the 1850s Dr Samuel Beckett, a devout young English surgeon, drew on his experience of hundreds of deathbeds to demonstrate the impact of particular diseases on the dying process. He concluded that slow consumption was a far better way for the Christian to die than fever, sudden accident, or insanity; it was ‘delightful to witness the calm, heavenly, and truly edifying bearing and conversation of a pious young person slowly wearing away under pulmonary consumption’.11 Young people in Christian congregations in Australia who were dying slowly of tuberculosis were offered pious exhortations to prepare for ‘the great change’ from this material life. On learning in 1872 that her 15-year-old

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son, Edmund Cooke, was about to die from consumption, his mother told her friend Revd Dr F. T. Cusack Russell that she could bear the worst if she were assured that her son’s soul was prepared. Revd Russell, a Church of England clergyman who was himself to die four years later, accordingly wrote a long letter on 20 August 1872, offering young Edmund Cooke advice on ‘timely preparation for the great change … Sickness seems sent that our thoughts should be detached from the things temporal and lifted up to the Eternal.’ Revd Russell offered Edmund the edifying example of a beautiful young wife who had responded to his news that she was dying of tuberculosis in 1866 with pious resignation: ‘When at last death came she declared that she had the fullness of joy … With a face radiant as tho’ already she possessed the beatiﬁc vision [she] entered upon her rest.’12 Revd Russell appealed to Edmund Cooke to die like that young woman and rid himself of all fear of death: ‘admit [Christ] into your heart’. He advised the young man to prepare rigorously for his coming death by maintaining a strict schedule of piety, so that ‘you may ﬁnd that for you to die is gain’. Edmund should examine his conscience closely every day, in prayer and contemplation, ‘taking the Commandments and Beatitudes as a standard rule’. He should study the Bible every morning and evening, receive Holy Communion regularly, and read pious books daily. From the wide range of devotional literature available, Russell recommended Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s book of 1651, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, as especially appropriate. Edmund Cooke may have been well prepared already or he may have heeded the clergyman’s advice. Certainly he seemed to be resigned and spiritually at peace ten days later when he wrote a letter remarkable for a 15-yearold boy to reassure his uncle, Trevor Winter: I am dying but I am quite happy. My only thought is those who will be left behind to mourn for me—so many many loving dear friends. But it is God’s will they should stay a little longer and those who truly trust in Jesus and repent earnestly of their sins will soon join me. Oh dear Uncle do pray earnestly for Jesus’ loving aid. Prayer may be made at any time as we ride or walk along … I have [been] bad and wicked in my life but I trust in Him who loved us so that he died for us.13

Nineteenth-century children and young people did not respond to death in the same way that children do today, since their attitudes were inevitably conditioned by those of their parents. Children, like adults, learned to regard death as a fact of life, often conditioned by deaths of siblings. Children’s understanding of death in devout Christian families came from family discussions of Bible stories, and familiarity with the themes of many hymns which frequently mentioned death. Victorian children’s literature on the subject of death was used not only to edify and control behaviour, but also to prepare children for the reality of death as an inevitable part of life. Moreover, devout families used the language of religion naturally in daily conversation and further reduced children’s fears of death by their emphasis on a future family reunion in a heaven which was far happier than earthly life.

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The didactic use of consumptive deathbeds in Australia is illustrated by two brief accounts written by Evangelical Protestants, which were deliberately intended to edify a public audience. Many of the religious tracts published in Australia were written by immigrant clergymen who would have been familiar with the British Evangelical publications. First was the triumphant Wesleyan Methodist tract written by D. A. Manton in Hobart Town in 1849 on the consumptive death of Samuel Newham, aged 51, a former convict turned shepherd who was later converted to Methodism. Through abject penitence and self-abasement, his consistent and fervent piety led to ‘rapturous joy’. Life or death was equally welcome when tuberculosis was diagnosed, for ‘he could not have lived with death and heaven more constantly in view’. Newham testiﬁed to the value of Christianity at the hour of death, despite severe suffering, and prayed for all converted sinners. His last words were ‘Lord receive my soul to glory’, as he died a ‘triumphant death’ with a ‘spotless Christian reputation’.14 A second example of rapturous triumphalism at a consumptive woman’s death was ‘Joy Triumphant: or, Memoir of Mrs. M—’, by the Presbyterian minister Revd Robert Hamilton, published in Melbourne in 1874. Mrs M— died of tuberculosis at the age of 31 in 1873 in Collingwood, having been converted by a missionary six months before her death. According to Revd Hamilton, her last few days on earth were a scene of ‘constant triumph’, despite suffering and exhaustion. Her last reported words were, ‘We will meet again where there will be no parting.’ Revd Hamilton assured readers that Mrs M—’s ‘extraordinary rapture’ was caused by her assurance that she was about to enter ‘into the inconceivable joys of heaven: “Oh, I want to meet you in glory”.’15 This is one of the more obviously stage-managed and heavily edited death scenes, especially as the sufferer remained conveniently anonymous. Compared with such didactic tracts as Revd Hamilton’s ‘Joy Triumphant’, Thomas Anne Cole’s diary account of her son’s death in 1879 was restrained. Private diaries and middle-class family correspondence surrounding a death were often heavily inﬂuenced by Evangelical Protestantism in colonial Australia, but they were not usually deliberately edited and reconstructed for publication. Evangelical diaries revived the Puritan custom of testifying before God to a worthy spiritual life. Many Evangelicals extended this habit into a detailed accounting before God for family deaths as well as lives. These narratives in diary form were usually written not just for God but also for the writer and the immediate family; unlike the published tracts they could be surprisingly frank about unpleasant medical symptoms and deathbed behaviour inappropriate to a good Evangelical. Such accounts were usually written close to the time of death, and are therefore more valuable than edited published accounts as sources for death scenes, attitudes, and behaviour. As Paul Fussell points out, ‘The further personal written materials move from the form of the daily diary, the closer they approach the ﬁgurative and the ﬁctional.’16

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Farquhar Cole took advantage of his prolonged illness from tuberculosis in 1878 to 1879 at the age of 28 to manage and prepare for the good Christian death, warmly supported by his mother, Thomas Anne. She was married to Captain George Ward Cole, sixteen years her senior and a prominent Melbourne businessman and long-time member of the Victorian Legislative Council. Of their six children, George died of typhoid at the age of 9 in 1852, one daughter died in infancy, and William died in 1866 at the age of 17, while the two unmarried daughters, Margaret and Agnes, survived both parents.17 Thomas Anne Cole’s detailed diary from 1867 to 1882 included accounts of the deaths of her husband, George, from heart disease and their last surviving son, Farquhar, both in 1879. Thomas Anne had four indoor servants and her two unmarried daughters to help her nurse the two invalids at their beachfront home in Brighton, so the material conditions for the good Christian death were excellent. The deaths of George Ward Cole on 26 April and Farquhar on 6 May 1879 entirely dominated the Cole household for many months. Farquhar’s illness had forced him to give up his legal career when his disease was diagnosed more than two years before his death. In Thomas Anne’s diary the physical and the medical aspects of the two deaths took priority over the spiritual, at least in sheer volume and in time. The mother or one of the daughters sat with one or other of the invalids throughout most nights. The rituals of feeding the sick men were important to the three women, who thereby felt useful and involved. On one of his better days, Farquhar managed to eat a breakfast of bread and milk, followed by rice and milk at 11 a.m., then a little ﬁsh for lunch, and blancmange at 3 p.m. Dr Robertson called to see the two invalids daily, and was even willing to take prescriptions to the chemist in town.18 No doubt these extra kindnesses and his all-night visits were reﬂected in his bill. But there was also a genuine spiritual dimension to Thomas Anne’s accounts of her two invalids’ deaths, albeit less detailed and in minor key. Every day she organised morning and evening prayers for the family and the servants, and sometimes also read sermons aloud. She believed that illness and death were God’s will and therefore never expected much of the doctors. Since the doctors could do nothing to cure and little to comfort sufferers from either heart disease or tuberculosis, this fatalistic, religious perspective was understandable. On 16 April 1879, the anniversary of the birthday of her ﬁrst-born son, George, who died in 1852, she noted: ‘a very promising boy but he was wanted by my father in heaven … A day I never forget.’ Then her mind returned to the impending death of her husband: ‘Both he and my dear son are in God’s hands. I desire to submit to his will but O what trials I fear are before me.’ The day before her husband’s death, Farquhar coughed up more blood and she commented: ‘he is doomed to leave us but I feel sure God will take him when he goes’.19 The religious references in Thomas Anne’s diary were minimal and restrained when compared with those in many Evangelical death sermons and tracts, but they seemed no less sincere. The spiritual dimension to her diary

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account reached its ﬁrst climax with the death of George Cole on 26 April 1879, aged about 84. Thomas Anne noticed ‘a change in his countenance’ which prompted her to inquire of him in characteristic Evangelical mode about the state of his soul—to which he responded, ‘Yes. I believe in Jesus Christ.’ Where dying Evangelicals were physically incapable of sustaining a coherent testimony to their spiritual state, a catechetical exchange or series of questions was permissible as an afﬁrmation of faith. Some time later Thomas Anne returned from Farquhar’s room: Just in time to see [George] draw his last breath but so gently that it seemed as if he had only fallen asleep and so he did I believe in Jesus … It was consolation that since God had pleased to remove him I have nothing to wish for and there he lay like a noble marble statue … the sweetest smile on his countenance.

Next day when family and friends viewed the body they were struck by its ‘marvellous beauty’.20 The process of dying was almost never described as beautiful outside triumphal tracts, but beauty was sometimes attributed to the facial expression of corpses in the ‘smile of death’, which was thought by some to suggest that the soul had sighted the glory of heaven. The contraction of the facial muscles after death was thus interpreted as a sign of salvation. Just over a week after her husband’s death, Thomas Anne had to face the second ordeal of Farquhar’s death on 6 May 1879. She noted on 5 May that the anniversary of her beloved son William’s death in 1866 could well be that of Farquhar also. That same day Farquhar had a particularly distressing haemorrhage, ‘coughing up a great deal of blood’. On the night before his death, Margaret kept vigil all night in his room, with her mother and Dr Robertson in adjoining rooms, since the doctor stayed all night. During the night Margaret noticed a change in Farquhar’s condition and, fearing he was dying, called Agnes and her mother. When Thomas Anne arrived, ‘his face was perfectly radiant’ as he took his sisters’ hands and thanked them for their unbounded kindness to him. This was the Evangelical ‘rapture’ so often mentioned in tracts and sermons, at the prospect of soon joining God in heaven. ‘Then we all sat expecting the end was not far off, then he seemed worse’. The dying man announced, ‘I have arranged and planned it all,’ assuring them that he was spiritually prepared for death. Revd Taylor’s arrival and prayers were no doubt valued, but not essential, as a priest’s would have been to a dying Catholic. Finally Farquhar murmured, ‘I am dead to you. I have reached the haven of rest,’ before he died gently in the presence of the three women and Mr James Graham, a family friend. Thomas Anne concluded that day’s entry: ‘God willed it so which is all we can say and his will be done altho’ I should be more than mortal did I not feel at losing such a son!’ She was certain that Farquhar had gone to join his father: ‘now united in heaven … God grant that my dear daughters and I may be well prepared and ready when our heavenly father sees ﬁt to take us.’21 There was no question of prayers for Farquhar’s

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soul to assist his puriﬁcation and passage through purgatory, as in a Catholic family. Farquhar Cole’s death only has real meaning if understood in the context of his own determined aspiration for a good Christian death and future life. It was vital for him to reassure his mother and sisters that he had ‘planned it all’, meaning that he was spiritually prepared to meet his God in heaven, since he had used his two years’ warning to good effect. If Thomas Anne’s account is read without that nineteenth-century Evangelical understanding of Farquhar’s ‘radiant’ face, it makes little sense. Farquhar Cole’s death came closer to the ideal than most deaths, except those which were severely edited for publication. Many vital features of the good Evangelical death were present, besides the more obvious spiritual elements of Christian preparation, contrition and resignation. Thomas Anne Cole well understood the crucial importance of family solidarity and support in facilitating the good Christian death, and she and her daughters played their part to the utmost.

The transmission of the good Protestant death across the world The Bussells in England and Western Australia John Garrett Bussell and his family in Western Australia left behind them in England a large extended family, who corresponded with each other continuously to maintain and strengthen family ties, despite the vast distances. More archival evidence has survived for several different branches of the Bussell family in both England and Australia than for most other English settlers in Australia. This collection in the Battye Library in Perth offers a rich source for exploring the transmission to Australia of the English cultural heritage of the ideal Christian death. The Western Australian Bussell model of the good Christian death was a decidedly Anglican version. Their father had been an Anglican clergyman, and John Garrett Bussell, the eldest brother, was persuaded by his mother to rescue his family from genteel poverty in England by investing in the Swan River Colony, instead of following his father into the church. The Bussell archive in Perth includes a regular correspondence on the eagerly sought ‘particulars’ of death scenes, transmitted backwards and forwards between England and Australia, reinforcing the original Christian ideals. More family copies were transcribed and circulated of the letter describing Fred Vines’ death at sea in 1868 (to be examined later) than any other in the Bussell family archive, since this was the only unquestionably good Christian death. Several contemporary copies of this letter survive in the Bussell archive in different handwriting, including one copied by a Bussell cousin in England, attesting to the common middle-class practice of circulating copies of deathbed accounts around relatives. The letter on Fred Vines’ death was originally written at sea by his wife Emily (née Bussell) on ‘thick

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paper and scraps’; it was faithfully copied out several times on thin paper by Fred’s mother in Reading, England, to send on to Fred’s brothers and other Vines relatives in India, who were expected, in turn, to ‘read and pass on’ to others. This process of copying and passing on such deathbed accounts took place at both the British and Australian ends of the correspondence, testifying to the concern and care taken to transmit the culture of death between family members across the oceans.22 The transmission of the cultural heritage of the good death is illustrated by the correspondence between Thomas Arthur Bussell’s family in England and his cousin John Garrett Bussell’s family in Western Australia, from 1869 to 1876. This period has been selected in part to portray the founding family of Busselton thirty years after they immigrated, with their links with English relatives still powerful. Moreover, during this period of eight years, Thomas Bussell in England lost all three sons (Charles in 1869, Arthur in 1872, and William in 1876) as well as his wife, Fanny Emily Cotton Bussell, in 1874. Four deaths in eight years provoked a welter of correspondence containing precious ‘particulars’, treasured memories and sympathy.23 Three months after the death of 15-year-old Charles in 1869, Fanny Bussell, Charles’ mother, welcomed the arrival of a letter from her cousin and friend, another Fanny Bussell, in Western Australia: ‘our loss has reached them … The sorrow is, as she says, a life long sorrow—None but a parent can estimate its intensity.’24 The next son, 22-year-old Arthur, died in March 1872 of a long and painful bronchial illness. Lengthy condolence letters have survived from three Australian female Bussells on Arthur Bussell’s death—from John Garrett Bussell’s wife, Charlotte, his sister, Mary Taylor, and his daughter, Emily Vines. It seems to have been more common for female relatives to send condolence letters, especially on the death of children and young people. Charlotte stressed that it was vital to strengthen family links between such a large and scattered family at a time of death.25 An important aspect of this emphasis on family unity and support at death was the warmly expressed hope that the bereaved family in England would soon join the Bussells in Australia—‘It would do wonders for all of you.’26 These condolence letters demonstrate that the ﬁrst two generations of Bussells in Western Australia had little need of instruction from the English Bussells on the lessons of the deathbed and the spiritual consolations of Christianity—though reinforcement was valuable and welcome. John Bussell’s daughter, Emily Vines, had been widowed only four years earlier, so she drew on her own experience in advising Fanny that the First Epistle of St John had given her the greatest comfort when Fred died: ‘thro’ Him we are able to triumph over death when we know that those we have loved and lost have been amongst the true followers of Christ.’ Emily and her mother, Charlotte, were sure that Charles and Arthur were now ‘with the angels’ in that ‘happy home, where “there shall be no more death”’.27 Mary Taylor, John Bussell’s sister in Albany, also placed her emphasis on the consolatory prospect of a family reunion with Arthur in heaven, though her language was more formulaic: Arthur was removed from ‘the evil to come’ in this world to

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a heavenly home of ‘life and light’ where they would all share ‘their neverending joys’.28 For obvious reasons, bad deaths tended to be passed over rapidly and some were probably removed from family records intended for posterity. But where a devout Christian and beloved family member had endured a sudden or distressing death the family sometimes felt obliged to explain any extenuating circumstances to their relatives. Unfortunate deaths of pious Christians could be accommodated in the light of a life of Christian devotion, while expressions of regret at the occasional bad death served by default to reinforce the ideal. The sudden death from a stroke in 1874 of Fanny, 65-year-old wife of Thomas Arthur Bussell, called for such mitigating particulars, especially as ‘dear loving, kind, tenderhearted Aunt Fanny’ was beloved by all. Frances Ardagh, her niece, reported the death to her aunt, Charlotte Bussell in Australia, knowing that the Australian cousins would ‘be anxious to know the last end of her you loved so much’.29 On 20 April 1874 Fanny Bussell got up as usual, but said she was experiencing difﬁculty in speaking and then looked distressed at her clumsy attempts to pour out a cup of cocoa. Three doctors tried all possible means to restore her, ‘but it was only as it were to prolong her dying. The right side was quite useless and she never spoke again.’ A sudden stroke deprived the family of an appropriate Christian deathbed scene, except for Thomas’s ‘beautiful’ resignation to God’s will and his fervent prayers at his wife’s bedside. Fanny lingered for six days, and though the doctors said she was not conscious, the family occasionally felt less certain, as she often grasped their hands. Frances Ardagh regretted ‘it was a sad sad death to witness, for there seemed to be such a terrible struggle for mastery’.30 The only surviving Australian response to Frances Ardagh’s sad news is a letter from John Garrett Bussell in Busselton to ‘my very dear cousin Tom’. John Bussell began his letter on 18 July 1874, three months after Fanny’s death, by expressing a reservation common to correspondents so far removed in time and place from the actual death: ‘I hardly know whether it is cruel or kind to write with the certainty of renewing grief, which time, by the long period that must have elapsed before this reaches you, must have molliﬁed.’ John reported that the news of Fanny’s death was a terrible shock to his sister, Fanny, while his wife, Charlotte, received the news with a scream of sorrow—Fanny was ‘so beloved’ and would be ‘so perpetually remembered’. But John Bussell ﬁnished on a note of the resignation of an elderly man: ‘time passes on, at three score and ten, speaking of myself one cannot expect otherwise than that our contemporaries should one by one fall off.’31 John Bussell followed his friends to the grave only ﬁfteen months later, after an attack of inﬂuenza. His death was so sudden and unexpected that Charlotte was away from home and must have been left with regrets, as her sister-in-law, Mary Taylor, noted: ‘[She] had not even the mournful satisfaction of tending upon him to the last. How often it must recur to her that on others devolved the wife’s tender watching and care.’32 Yet again, the female role of nurse and emotional support at the deathbed was assumed, as was the wife’s strong wish to fulﬁl that role. Even more than the nursing, Charlotte may have missed the

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chance of ﬁnal farewells and the good Christian death that her devout husband surely hoped for. The Bussell links between Australia and Europe were again reinforced when Charlotte and her daughter, Caroline, moved back to Europe after John’s death, dividing their time between Paris and London. The decimation of Thomas Bussell’s branch of the family in England continued. The third of Francie Bussell’s brothers, William, followed his two younger brothers and his mother to the grave in 1876, when he and his wife Louise were drowned at sea after a shipwreck. Francie Bussell, his 28-year-old sister, received this tragic news with remarkable Christian resignation: ‘My father and I all left. God’s mercy has been very great over us all this year past. Heavy trial and difﬁculty sent, but through it all God’s loving guiding hand most plainly seen. Never overwhelming sorrow.’33 Francie Bussell remained with her father for some years in her childhood home in England, but after his death in 1892 she responded at last to the frequent appeals of the Western Australian Bussells to join them, sixty years after the ﬁrst Bussell migration.

‘How beautiful it is to see a Christian die’ Fred Vines, 1868 The death of Dr Frederick Castell Vines, husband of Emily Bussell, a member of the pioneer family’s second generation, serves to illustrate the model of the good Christian death most widely admired and disseminated among the scattered Bussell family. As a doctor, Fred Vines was fortunate to belong to the professional middle class, with the means to pay his family’s return passage to England and back, joining a tiny privileged group of immigrants who saw their homeland and parents once more. He was also quite extraordinary in having the courage and capacity to transform his own death at sea, despite all the odds, into one of the very few recorded examples at sea of an ideal Christian death. But it is essential to stress that only privileged cabin passengers were in a position to use their status and resources to construct death scenes which imitated the Christian ideal on land. It is ironic that the only good Christian death described in ideal terms with complete conviction in the Australian branch of the Bussell family should be a death at sea, where so few deaths approximated the ideal. It is less surprising that this particular death was caused by tuberculosis, which so often lent itself to idealised representation, as we have seen. Dr Fred Vines died in November 1868, only four years after his marriage to Emily Bussell, daughter of John Garrett Bussell. Fred Vines died on board the St Vincent, en route back to Australia with his wife and two young children, after a visit to his family in Reading, England. The purpose of the family trip was in part to allow Fred’s parents to see their son again and meet his wife and their grandchildren. But it had a secondary purpose in that Fred had been diagnosed as consumptive and the sea voyage was considered therapeutic. No doubt, also, the impending deaths of both Fred and his ageing parents rendered the voyage more urgent.

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Emily Bussell, aged 27, wrote a detailed account of her beloved husband’s death as a letter in diary form to her mother, Charlotte Bussell, at Cattle Chosen, Busselton—a letter begun at sea and completed on reaching Adelaide. Emily informed her mother and extended family of readers across the globe that ‘Our darling Fred is gone to his Home. Now do not mourn! for if you had but seen his death, you would be comforted.’ She then described his good Christian death, which he had mentally prepared for since he ﬁrst learned his fate. The end was signalled on 1 November 1868 when Fred Vines coughed up more blood than ever before in a ‘fatal stream’ during a bitterly cold night. Emily jumped out of her bunk to bring a basin of cold water and to staunch the ﬂow. Next day Fred was too ill to leave his bunk and the haemorrhage returned, so Emily sought help from the captain who staunched the ﬂow again with the help of the ‘lead mixture’. They were fortunate in being favoured cabin passengers, as the captain and several fellow passengers helped Emily care for her dying husband and the two children. Three male passengers took turns in keeping watch by Fred’s sickbed, including Mr Whitﬁeld who was ‘like a brother, his kindness and tenderness to Fred I shall never forget’. Mrs Serle and Mary, her servant, looked after the children while Emily nursed her husband. The bleeding came on three or four times each day, with recurrent fever ‘and his heart was very troublesome’. Yet Emily had no regrets about her marriage: ‘It was night and day work for me, and how as I bathed my darling’s hot forehead, did I thank God, who had put it into [Fred’s] heart to take me.’ Fred Vines made his will, which was witnessed by the captain and Mr Whitﬁeld, and he read from his Bible and prayer book.34 Emily’s representation of the important deathbed scene on 9 November 1868 was surprisingly close to the ideal, despite the inappropriate surroundings of the ship: Dear Fred put his arms round my neck and said ‘Emily my dear one I must die’. I said ‘my darling I know it and am willing, quite willing’. His face beamed with the light of Heaven, and he sang just to himself ‘the Lord is my shepherd’ all through, and then he said ‘Yes! Yes! Jesus Christ the corner stone.’ Then he said ‘Send for all, I should like to say goodbye’ and one by one came, and there was not a dry eye, as they looked in his bright face & shook his hand, for all have learnt to love him on board. Then little Mary was brought, and he kissed her fondly, told her to mind and say her prayers, and be a good girl to Mama, and then dear baby came …Then he told me how happy he felt in leaving the children with me, and that I should not be unhappy, and I shall not be.35

When Fred asked about Emily’s plans for the future, he approved her wish to return to her parents at Cattle Chosen in Busselton. As Fred slept, Emily wrote to her family that she felt happy: ‘for the Lord is with me, close at hand … It is in love He has sent this heavy afﬂiction. I hope none of you will mourn—he was so ﬁt to die. And have I not the children and my own dear home to go to.’36

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Fred Vines died peacefully on 11 November 1868: ‘I noticed a great change, I fancied he was going very soon … And there was my darling turning to marble—no death struggle, he raised his eyes and said “I am coming” and he was gone and beautiful he looked as I took his cold hand.’ They buried Fred at sea that afternoon. As Emily told her parents, ‘I have been truly blessed to have felt “Our Father” so near, to be able to give my most fondly loved one up, without one sigh or wish to detain him.’ She and Mr Whitﬁeld would never forget ‘how beautiful it is to see a Christian die’.37 It was not surprising that after such an ordeal Emily Vines collapsed on arrival at Adelaide, from shock, grief and exhaustion. Relatives in Adelaide nursed her back to health, though she almost died. Only in March 1869 was her mother able to report from Cattle Chosen in Busselton: ‘Now we have our Emily and her sweet babes safe and well under our own roof again.’ Emily remained with her family at Cattle Chosen for 42 years, until her death in 1911 at the age of 70. A month after Emily’s return, her mother noted, ‘Our precious Emily is such a comfort to us in her old home where she goes on now as if she had never left it. She is always busy.’38 But Emily confessed to her cousin, Fanny Bussell in England, that she could not always keep her spirits high and maintain her front of ‘sweet resignation’: I am quite well now but I shall be glad when a year or two is over. It is not right to wish the time away but sometimes all seems like a dream and I feel I have lost my guide and helper … I never wish my darling Fred back for it was only a life of suffering. But sometimes it seems more than I can bear for tho’ I have ﬁrm Faith in our Heavenly Father He hides his face sometimes.39

Thirteen years later, however, Emily was thoroughly reconciled to widowhood: ‘Indeed I have so much to make me happy so many dear ones around that my heart overﬂows with thankfulness.’40 No other death in the Australian Bussell family matched the heroic death at sea of the consumptive Fred Vines, supported so admirably by his sacriﬁcial wife. Emily’s account of Fred’s courageous death became the family’s model Christian death which was so lovingly copied, circulated to other Bussells in Australia, England and India, and retained for posterity. The good Evangelical Protestant death was not exclusive to the middle class and the gentry, and certainly inﬂuenced many artisans and respectable working-class people up to the 1880s, but archival examples are rare. However, one moving illustration was the death from liver disease in 1862 of Fanny Wingate, a farmer’s wife from the Gawler River area in South Australia. William Wingate, a farmer, described her death to his brother and sister, explaining that she had been ill for twelve months, though the disease had ﬁrst occurred four years earlier. This disease, like tuberculosis, allowed ample time for preparation. Though conﬁned to bed for four months, Fanny never complained, because of ‘the Love of Christ shed abroad in her heart … If ever you saw a person dy happy her did.’ William kept his vigil by her bed, day and night, except when he asked Mrs Sparshott, a friendly neighbour, or

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one of their daughters, to replace him. On several occasions William thought she was about to die: ‘I cald all the family, as I thought to see her dy, but her revived severell times.’ The timing of the ﬁnal scene could never be planned, and when the end came William was having his dinner when his little daughter called him back to his wife’s deathbed: I whent & lifted her up & her revived a little. I spoke to her and she answered as usal. She said we speak of the realms of the blest that country so bright & so fair … and then her swetly fell asleep in Jesus. What a blessed thing a Christian dy in the Lord my dear brother & sister though I have lost her for a time thanks be to God I noo where she is I am sure while her body lys in stone Hill Chappel yard her soul is at rest in Christ … I shall one day see her again in heaven where parting shall be no more.41

But this idealised Christian death, with its conviction of a heavenly reunion, was probably more fragile among rural farmers than among the wealthier urban elite. It was more likely to disappear within a generation in families living tough, isolated lives; this is suggested by a letter written almost twenty years later in 1882, still from the Gawler River, by William’s daughter, Eliza, informing William’s brother of his death. It was a terse, formal secular letter to an uncle she had never met, advising that William’s mind had been failing for three years, and he recently caught ‘a bad throat’ from his grandchildren: ‘and him being weak and old it had more effect on him and took him off very quick’.42 If William Wingate retained his faith that he would meet his beloved Fanny in heaven, his daughter gave no hint that he died a Christian death.

The good death of an Irish Catholic Denis O’Leary, 1886 The European Catholic ideal of the good death was clearly deﬁned in the medieval ars moriendi and in modern scholarly works such as John McManners’ Death and the Enlightenment, which examines eighteenthcentury France. Catholics and Protestants shared the belief that the ideal Christian death required sacriﬁcial living, with a regular routine of prayer and meditation to ensure the soul was prepared for death. But there were signiﬁcant differences in their views of the role of ritual and of the priest, and the nature of the afterlife. The attainment of the good Christian death was perhaps somewhat easier for Catholics than for Protestants. From the fourteenth century, Catholics believed in purgatory as an intermediate state between hell and heaven, which gave more hope of ultimate salvation to the vast majority of sinful human beings than the two stark alternatives of hell and heaven. Moreover, the Catholic Church from its earliest days had taught that the faithful who had led good lives, despite occasional sin, could still be puriﬁed through the

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prayers of intercession and good works of others after their own death, thereby reducing their time in purgatory. Catholic teaching on prayers for the dead and purgatory became a prime target of the Protestant challenge at the Reformation, which rejected both concepts.43 At Catholic deathbeds the role of the priest and a clearly deﬁned ritual made a sudden or delirious death less threatening than for Protestants. Pious and penitent behaviour at the deathbed itself and protestations of faith to the family as mediators were less signiﬁcant. The familiar sacraments could be deeply comforting at a time of physical and mental anguish. The combined contributions of priest and sacraments also ensured that the Catholic version of the good Christian death was more robust and probably more enduring than the Protestant. It was less dependent on the faith and participation of other members of the family since the priest, rather than the family, acted as mediator with God; it was somewhat less fragile in a new world far removed from the traditional certainties of the organised churches and church communities in Ireland and Britain. The ceremonies of the Catholic Church at the deathbed were more formally ritualised and presided over by the priest, who administered confession and absolution, followed by the last Eucharist and extreme unction. By contrast, for Protestants the last rites were simpliﬁed or disappeared entirely after the Reformation and the family took on the role of the priest. Descriptions of the deaths of pious Catholics were usually less idealised, less detailed, and more restrained than those of enthusiastic Evangelicals, lacking the rapturous exaltation and expressing more honest gloom at the impact of death on the survivors. David Fitzpatrick observes that ‘the only accounts of conspicuous spirituality on the part of Irish Catholics were equivocal, suggesting a distaste for excessive zeal’.44 Faith and spiritual preparation were largely a private matter for discussion between priest and dying person, facilitated by the sacraments, with little pressure to afﬁrm their faith to family and community or to manufacture joy. The features of a good Catholic death included the confession of sins and sincere contrition, earnest piety, upright character and resignation to God’s will, surrounded by the priest and a loving family. Records of deathbeds among the working classes are rare for Catholics as for Protestants. Even David Fitzpatrick’s splendid Oceans of Consolation, with its meticulous records of correspondence between Irish working-class people in Ireland and Australia, contains little on the deaths of Irish Catholics in Australia. Although Michael Hogan, a former convict and a Melbourne labourer, lost his wife and two of his seven children within a few years, he merely informed his brother in Ireland in 1853: ‘I am Sorry to Inform you that I Buried the two oldest of my children … May God be with Them.’ Three years later his wife’s death was announced to his brother in even fewer words: ‘I have to inform you that I buried my wife … may the Lord have mercy on her soul.’ Philip Mahony, another Irish Catholic in Melbourne, lost his ‘dearly beloved’ 19-year-old son to consumption in 1890, followed by his daughter’s death in 1899; the double tragedy probably devastated the parents and undermined their marriage. But Mahony’s grief on his son’s death was

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conveyed in few words: ‘We feel sad and lonley after him, my life is a misery to me and to his Poor mother.’45 The only detailed middle-class Catholic deathbed account I have found in the archives was that of Denis O’Leary, born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1842, the son of a wealthy Catholic landowner and a grand nephew of Daniel O’Connell, the famous Irish Liberator. After a Jesuit education he moved to Benalla, Victoria, where he became a successful barrister. In 1873 he married Fanny Rowe, daughter of J. P. Rowe, a prominent Victorian squatter and a strict Catholic, and they had seven children. The exertions of the last of three failed attempts to win election to the Victorian parliament in 1886 precipitated Denis O’Leary’s physical collapse from Bright’s disease of the kidneys at the age of 44. Fanny O’Leary insisted that her husband go to Melbourne to consult the best doctor, Sir Thomas Fitzgerald. Husband and wife stayed with Fanny’s mother, Mary Rowe, in Melbourne, while Fanny’s sister, Cecil Rowe, went to Benalla to look after Fanny’s six children. When visitors enquired after Denis, he was too ill to see them, so they promised instead to offer prayers for him—another departure from Protestant practice.46 Years later, Fanny recalled the crisis in Denis’s illness: ‘After Dr Fitzgerald told Denis he must die and very soon, I was aghast, staggered.’ Immediately Denis asked for Father Murphy who anointed the dying man and administered the sacrament of extreme unction, leaving Denis ‘much easier in his mind. Oh! What a religious man he was when told it was impossible for him to live.’ From 3 June 1886, Denis O’Leary was unconscious and delirious much of the time, but he was so restless and weak that it was impossible to tell how badly he suffered. Mary Rowe recognised in her diary that now only God could heal her son-in-law: ‘God help him and grant that he may not suffer much.’ On 6 June Fanny wrote to her sister, Cecil, caring for her children at Benalla: ‘It is too terrible and the slow progress from day to day is awful. But please Almighty God he will be spared yet … Kiss my darlings for me and tell Arthur and Amy and Maurice to pray to the Sacred Heart to spare their Father to them.’ Next day Fanny wrote to her 11-year-old son, Arthur, at Benalla, telling him to offer his ﬁrst Holy Communion for his father’s recovery. She warned the little boy that his father was so seriously ill that he could only be spared now ‘with the help and will of our divine Lord: God listens to the sincere prayers of His little children.’47 From 6 June onwards, Denis was unconscious most of the time but this Catholic family was spared the anxiety of many Protestant families who worried about dying confessions of faith and contrite last words. ‘Good Father Murphy’ visited Denis regularly to minister to his spiritual needs as far as the dying man’s mental state allowed. In the ﬁnal few days Mary Rowe noted in her diary merely ‘we are all troubled’, while her daughter Fanny struggled to resign herself to ‘so little hope’. Mary was saddened by the prolonged agony of her 44-year-old son-in-law: ‘It is a great trial for us all to see it.’ Provided dying Catholics were sure of their faith, aided by the sacraments and their priests, a lingering death held far less value for spiritual preparation and witness than for Evangelical Protestants. Denis O’Leary died at last on 14 June

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1886. His breathing was alarming, so Mary sent for Father Murphy, who stayed all morning even though the dying man seemed unconscious. Mary concluded her diary entry: ‘God in his mercy comfort his poor wife. He died at 6 in evening. The doctor got Fanny out of the room.’48 Mary Rowe’s diary account was resigned, realistic, and private, not intended to edify or idealise, with no reported last words and family farewells around the deathbed; there was no rhetoric about family reunions in heaven or dying with rapture on his face. The O’Leary family in Victoria had the duty of reporting the ‘particulars’ of Denis’s deathbed to his parents in Ireland. Fanny’s account placed the emphasis on her belief that her husband was a deeply religious man who made his peace with God through his priest, while understating Denis’s prolonged suffering and unconsciousness. Mr McCarthy O’Leary, Denis’s father, replied from Ireland that the only real solace was spiritual: ‘I conﬁdently trust he is now receiving a happier reward and that his holy and pious end has entitled him to it.’ Fanny’s representation of Denis’s death for her father-inlaw glossed over the more unpleasant suffering to depict a ‘holy and pious end’ which was not untrue and was what the grieving parents needed to hear.49 In conclusion, taking the Bussells as an example of the transmission of the Christian culture of death between England and Australia, it seems that it survived strongly over two generations from the 1830s to the 1880s. The regular and intense exchange of ‘particulars’ of family deaths between Bussells on opposite sides of the world helped to reinforce the Christian way of death. And perhaps some Christian colonists, such as Fanny Bussell, tried particularly hard to follow the ideal in an effort to maintain a fragile culture in a remote colony. Commonsense suggests that it was much harder to sustain the customs, rituals and language of death in isolated settlements of a distant colony than in middle-class England. Few such condolence and deathbed letters survive in the Bussell archive or in others beyond the 1880s, when the Christian culture of death was increasingly undermined by secular and scientiﬁc challenges. The Protestant version of the good death was probably more fragile than the Catholic, because the former was more individualistic and dependent on family support and reinforcement which could not be guaranteed in future generations, especially when links with relatives in England weakened. The example of the Wingate family in South Australia demonstrated that a culture of death which was not replenished within the new country can easily die in one generation.

Chapter 4

‘Angels in Heaven’ The Common Tragedies of Babies’ and Children’s Deaths Colonial parents often had to suffer the deaths of their babies and children under 5, and these common tragedies sharply distanced the experience of colonial families from those living now. Today, parents expect their children to survive to adulthood, but in the 1880s about 90 per cent might live to twelve months, 82 per cent to 5 years, and only 78 per cent became adults.1 Such high mortality was chieﬂy due to the diarrhoeal and intestinal diseases, and the infectious diseases, such as scarlet fever and whooping cough. During the ﬁrst great demographic transition that was shared by European countries between 1870 and 1920 the declines in overall mortality were greatest in infancy and childhood. About half of deaths from all causes in Victoria since the 1850s occurred at under 5 years, but that high proportion fell to about 22 per cent by 1911.2 The infant mortality rate fell from the 1880s, with a steep decline after 1904, so that by 1930 the rate had more than halved. J. H. L. Cumpston demonstrated that before 1890 the infant mortality rate was very high in all colonies, varying between 110 and 130 deaths of infants below one year for every one thousand registered births. Between 1890 and 1926 rates declined from 110 to 55, but the dramatic and sustained fall took place after 1904.3 The marked decline in infant mortality from 1904 was largely due to a reduction in intestinal infections and diarrhoeal diseases which had started more slowly around 1895. From the early 1850s to the 1880s, atrophy and debility in infants and infant diarrhoea had been high on the lists of the top seven causes of all deaths at all ages.4 It was no accident that two of the child deaths considered in this chapter were due to infant diarrhoea and gastroenteritis. An important additional contributory factor to the mortality decline was reduced family size, since ‘smaller completed families allowed better nurturing’, as F. B. Smith notes. The average completed size of the Australian family fell from six children in the 1870s to 2.4 children by the 1930s.5 69

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Statistics for most colonies except Victoria and New South Wales are poor before 1870. Margaret Anderson’s family reconstitution work for Western Australia between 1842 and 1849 is therefore all the more illuminating on the impact of child mortality. The ninety families fully reconstituted were unusually large with a mean family size of 9.5, and infant mortality was lower than in the total population of the colony, possibly due to signiﬁcant underregistration. Even so, Anderson concludes that 60 per cent of sample families lost one child, and 32 per cent lost two children or more; 63 per cent of these children died in infancy. Margaret Anderson’s research into early Western Australian families also conﬁrmed the argument that family size had an important impact on child mortality. Fifty-two per cent of families with eight or more children lost one or two children, and 21 per cent lost three or more.6 Many middle-class parents in nineteenth-century Australia had a deep Christian faith which was tested to the utmost by the death of a child. Religious consolation literature, funeral sermons, and condolence letters reveal how the churches explained the Christian meaning of such deaths and the chief forms of consolation they offered. The Evangelical funeral sermon was used as a lesson to parents and children on the need for a pious spiritual life in preparation for the good Christian death. For example, Revd Richard Hill’s sermon at St James’s Church, Sydney, in 1834, on the death of 13-yearold Eliza Reynolds emphasised the theme of repentance. Revd Hill told the story of a disobedient child who later reformed in time to redeem herself before she was fatally burned after her clothes caught ﬁre. The didactic purpose was explicit and opportunistic: ‘Such dying scenes [as Eliza’s] are rare, and too proﬁtable to be neglected.’ Appropriate deathbed scenes were used to show people how to die well and to warn them to repent in time: ‘Eliza will not have died in vain … if the burning of her body should save your soul from the ﬁre of Hell.’7 The death of a child was often interpreted by Christian ministers as a message from God in the form of a spiritual trial to purify the parents’ souls and teach survivors the lesson of submission to God’s will. The ﬁrst Anglican Bishop of Western Australia, Mathew Hale, used this tough argument in his address to the boys of Bishop’s School on the death of his eldest son, aged 10, who drowned while bathing in 1862: If it makes us all more serious, more watchful, more earnest in our prayers, more diligent in our preparations to meet death, then I say it will be best for us that the afﬂiction has come to us … That which has happened to him, dear boys, may happen to any one of you, you know not how soon. Then … live, I pray and entreat you, every day and all day long, in the fear of God.8

This stern Anglican bishop explained the sacriﬁce of his son’s life as a divine revelation and a spiritual opportunity for those who survived. Jane Dickson’s moving poem on the death of her infant son in West Maitland in 1843 emphasised her patient submission to the will of God:

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Why should I grieve for that which is not mine, Why should I mourn for what was lent, but, for a time. He was not mine, God gave and took away, It was his will, then what have I to say?9

Bishop Hale and Jane Dickson were both able to accept the death of a child as God’s will because of a deep faith. However, some Christian parents interpreted the death of their child as God’s punishment for their own sins, since they invariably considered the child innocent. While many devout parents struggled for submission to divine judgment, others rebelled at its illogicality and cruelty, including Sir Alexander Stuart on the death of his little daughter in 1860: It seemed as if the Reaper had indeed come in cruelty and in wrath to take her away … I feel that I am apt to indulge in a bitter spirit of repining against the doings of the Almighty, rather than in humility to bow the head to the terrible stroke. I know this is wrong, but I ﬁnd the feeling continually usurping in my heart the place which ought to be held by a patient submission to the will [of God] … When I cast a retrospective glance over my past life I can acknowledge the justice of the fearful sentence. For I know that my sins have been so many and so grievous … but I feel inclined to say with Cain my punishment is greater than I can bear … The innate evil of my heart inclines rather to charge the Almighty with harshness in snatching the precious treasure from us, than view it as a token of living chastisement.

Whereas Alex Stuart dwelt on their ‘fond hopes dashed ruthlessly to pieces’, his wife Chrissy was able to view their daughter’s death with ‘pious resignation’, rejoicing that she was now ‘a bright inhabitant of glory’.10 This gendered difference in response to the loss of a child was also apparent in midVictorian Christians in Britain, such as Archibald and Catharine Tait and Edward and Mary Benson. Tait and Benson were both devout churchmen who recognised that their wives coped with the ordeal of their children’s deaths in a greater spirit of acceptance. Their wives had been trained from childhood in the virtue of submission to God’s will and, as women, they had learned the additional virtues of patience, obedience and humility.11 Sir Alexander Stuart’s response was probably not uncommon among Christian men, and may help to explain why men left the church in larger numbers than women during the next century. To understand why so many women and some men did eventually acquiesce in ‘the justice of the fearful sentence’, we need to understand their view of the Christian consolations on the loss of a child. They believed that a benevolent God had removed their children prematurely from a world of pain, sin, and temptation to a happier world with God. An elegy for the infant Mary Ann Burdekin, who died about 1844, underlined this blessing:

72 THE GOOD CHRISTIAN DEATH Full well he knew that on Earth are Dangers, Sorrow, Toil and Strain Thy sweet innocence he so lov’d, that he ﬁx’d thee ever fair Claim’d thee his own dear Child to dwell forever with him above.12

Bishop Mathew Hale in his 1862 school address elaborated harshly on this particular manifestation of God’s mercy, suggesting that his own son was weak and wayward enough to be peculiarly vulnerable to ‘the world’s snares and temptations’. His son was ‘deﬁcient in those sterner features of natural character’, so a merciful God had ‘early removed him from temptation— taken him from the evil to come’.13 This sentiment became a formulaic part of condolence correspondence in the next half century, long after writers had ceased to understand its biblical foundations. Harry Johnston in 1890 responded to a condolence letter on his daughter’s sudden death: ‘I feel that it is for her good to be taken young and spared the weariness of this sorrowful world’; but he sounded less convinced than Bishop Hale that this really alleviated the pain of the ‘crushing blow’.14 Pious letter writers stressed the consolation of the child’s happiness in heaven, as an angel with God. In 1870 Patrick Taylor wrote to his brother-inlaw on the death of his son, ‘to rejoice with you, that you are not left without a blessed hope that your child has safely reached a far better, even a heavenly country … This hope when well founded converts the season of sorrow into a time of thanksgiving.’15 This language of victory and joy was redolent of an earlier time of enthusiastic Evangelicalism and might have seemed inappropriate in 1870 to those less pious than Patrick Taylor. Up to the 1870s, greater Christian emphasis was usually placed on the children meeting God and the angels in heaven, rather than on detailed images of heavenly reunions with family members ‘gone before’, as in Mrs F. M. Monk’s condolence letter on the death of a friend’s daughter in 1871: For her, it is a bright, and happy change; often have we called her an angel upon earth, but we know that she is now one in Heaven, picture the sweet, loving face, with silvery wings ﬂitting about amongst the angelic throng. She was too good for this loathsome life, and her Heavenly Father in His love has taken her to him.

Amid this romantic rhetoric about heaven there was only one brief reference to ‘the looking forward to meeting them again in that bright land’.16 There was also a popular belief that all babies were free of sin and would go to heaven, illustrated by Fanny Barton’s consoling assurance on the death of her sister’s baby in 1876: ‘Heaven would not be Heaven were it not peopled partly with innocent little babies.’17 From the 1870s, as Christian faith gradually diminished, hopes of heavenly reunion assumed greater importance in the minds of those left behind, as we shall see later in the chapter. But the

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death of a child remained very difﬁcult to rationalise in any terms, Christian or otherwise. It used to be assumed that high infant mortality before the twentieth century encouraged parents to limit their emotional investment in young children. Historians such as Lawrence Stone and Philippe Ariès reinforced this assumption, which has inﬂuenced academics in other disciplines. Colin Murray Parkes, a psychiatrist, has observed that parents in earlier centuries expected to lose several young children and ‘accepted their losses more readily than we do today’.18 However, in 1983 Linda Pollock effectively rejected the view that high child mortality rates inevitably meant reduced parental affection. She found no substantial increase in levels of affection between parents and children in England and America between 1500 and 1900. Instead, she argued that relations between parents and children had changed remarkably little through the centuries, so that most parents through the ages grieved at the deaths of their children. My own research into family archives for nineteenth-century Australia and Britain entirely supports Pollock’s conclusions. There is little evidence that parents in the early nineteenth century invested less affection in their children and felt less distress at their deaths than parents a century later, despite differing expectations of their survival.19 Colonial parents did not feel that several remaining children would compensate for the loss of any one, however alarming the child mortality statistics. Most Australian parents grieved at the deaths of their children. Like parents elsewhere, they had different ways of expressing their sorrow and dealing with it, according to gender, class, wealth, family size, and the cause of death.

A German Lutheran mother endures the deaths of seven children Anna Ey, 1867–1913 The ﬁrst of four case studies of children’s deaths explores the painful experiences of Anna Ey, wife of a German Lutheran pastor in Hahndorf, South Australia. The other three examine detailed texts on the deaths of one child only in each family, although many unfortunate families had to face two or more children’s deaths. Anna Ey’s trials help us to understand the impact of the loss of six of her thirteen children in childhood, and a seventh at the age of thirty-four. The other three case studies consider the experiences of British immigrants, which were more common, whereas Anna Ey’s illuminates those of the tiny German immigrant community in South Australia, albeit in less detail. (In 1846 about 7 per cent of the South Australian population was German, compared with 53 per cent English, and 8 per cent Irish.20 ) Like the Ey family, many German migrants in South Australia settled in selfsupporting communities in the Barossa Valley and the Adelaide Hills, attracted initially by the colony’s religious tolerance. Anna Ey was born in

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1839, daughter of a Lutheran parish pastor in Germany, who died at sea while immigrating with his family to South Australia in 1847. The widow and three children struggled to make a living, and later Anna at age 21 married Pastor J. M. R. Ey of Hahndorf, later resident pastor at Carlsruhe and Lobethale.21 Anna Ey’s memoir offers the remarkable story of her devout and stoical Lutheran Protestant responses to the deaths of seven beloved children, as well as her parents, husband, siblings, and grandchildren. Her children died of common childhood infections, enteric diseases, and accidents—one of diphtheria, two of dysentery, one of bronchitis, one of whooping cough, one of tuberculosis, and one of accidental burns—a catalogue of major nineteenthcentury causes of infant and child mortality. Her summary accounts of these tragedies were very different from dramatic and emotional Evangelical deathbed scenes—hers were economical, restrained and resigned to the will of God. Her son Hugo died of diphtheria in 1867; she recognised his symptoms instantly and knew there was no hope, as the doctor later conﬁrmed. Anna brieﬂy mentioned her son’s two restless nights before his death, and her brother’s sermon on the seemingly inappropriate text, ‘The Lord hath done all things well.’22 Seven years later she lost her 16-month-old son, Paul Theodor, to dysentery after nine terrible days and nights. She wrote in her memoir, ‘Even today, after twenty-eight years, it still hurts me when I remember that dreadful suffering.’ The boy’s father read the burial service, when Anna was too numb to cry, though she wept at last at the subsequent funeral of another woman’s child, who also died in the local dysentery outbreak.23 Only a year later in 1875, she lost her 5-month-old baby Ernst August, again to dysentery, and he was buried by his father beside his little brother. The parents had looked on the baby as compensation for the dead Theodor, and it was harder to lose this third son. But as good Lutherans they could not dwell on their sorrow, for they had to prepare for the next Synod to be held in Carlsruhe.24 Three years later, in 1878, another baby, Sophia, died of bronchitis at 15 weeks. Anna commented only that ‘the Lord called her home … out of this world of sorrow’. In 1883 all her children had whooping cough and little Paul died at 12 months, after a terrible struggle. At the burial the pastor preached on the text, ‘Thy will be done’. When her daughter-in-law Pauline died of tuberculosis in 1889, Anna promised at Pauline’s deathbed to bring up her two sons with her own children. Meanwhile, Anna’s husband had a series of strokes and died at the age of 56 in 1893 after seven months’ suffering with dropsy. Anna was left ‘a widow with a broken heart’. Her sister’s advice after the funeral was to have a good weep at her husband’s grave whenever she was sad, and pray to the Lord, but when she came home ‘ﬁnd plenty of work to do, the more the better’. Afterwards, Anna was exhausted from nursing and grief, and fell into a deep depression aggravated by a badly broken arm. Though she had apparently accepted all the children’s deaths with stoical resignation and revealed little emotion in her memoir, her husband’s death was too much: ‘My mind was so depressed. I saw only the anger of God, and

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could not comfort myself in His grace.’ At least she did not have to worry about accommodation on her husband’s death, for she received his full salary for a year and lived on in the parsonage for two years. From then on she kept the family by her work as a midwife and nurse, as well as taking in sewing.25 But when Anna’s brother, Pastor Oster, aged 67, died four years after her husband, she was devastated, as if all the sorrow of her previous repressed losses had accumulated inside and ﬁnally burst out. Or perhaps it was more difﬁcult to maintain a stoical resignation without her husband’s strong support. When Anna saw her brother in his cofﬁn, ‘I was overwhelmed with grief and allowed my stubborn and despairing heart to give way. I screamed and said, “The dear Lord robs me of all that I love”.’ But she was shocked at her own words, knowing she ‘deserved more punishment for my murmuring’. She determined, with God’s help, to try harder to ‘be still’. But just over a year later she suffered a more terrible blow when her 12-year-old daughter Dorothea (Dorchen) died from burns after her clothes caught alight at the kitchen ﬁre: I cannot describe how I felt, especially since the father was not there, as he had been when the other children died, and we could comfort and strengthen each other. It would not have taken much for me to lose faith altogether. But the Lord in His mercy helped me to ﬁnd comfort in His Word. The 23rd Psalm, which my Dorchen loved to pray, was especially comforting … I felt utterly broken in spirit, and also in bodily strength.26

Anna Ey was nearly 60 on Dorchen’s death in 1898, but she still had to endure the deaths of two more children before her own. She lived comfortably with her daughter Emma who survived her, and reminded herself that ‘people can get accustomed to much, and the Christian tries to resign himself to God’s ways’. In 1904, Anna’s son Rudolph, another pastor, aged 34, died of tuberculosis of the throat, after being discharged from a sanatorium as incurable. Rudolph’s condition deteriorated rapidly at home as it became increasingly difﬁcult for him to swallow. His last words included ‘God’s will be done. Now you must bury me too.’ His mother and wife read psalms and sang hymns for him, ‘and yet how hard it is to sing when one’s heart is breaking’. The mother promised at her son’s deathbed that ‘we shall be still, and submit ourselves under the mighty Hand of God’. Anna ﬁnished the main volume of her memoir: ‘Yet, with what bitter sorrow one gazes after them into the quiet grave, where one has to see one after the other lowered, whom one has loved so dearly here. For the true children of God the hope of a re-union casts its Heavenly Light into the dark grave. They say farewell to meet again.’27 This reference to hope for a heavenly family reunion was the only such mention in Anna’s memoir, and then only in extreme old age on the death of her pious pastor son who could be presumed worthy of salvation. This is a stark Lutheran contrast with the frequent emphasis on heavenly reunions in British Evangelical accounts.

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A short addition to Anna Ey’s memoir chieﬂy recorded the deaths and illnesses of more members of her large extended family, closing with her daughter Anna Heidrich in 1913, mentioned with no details in her ﬁnal paragraph. Anna herself died in 1917 at the age of 77, and was buried beside her husband, having endured the deaths of seven children with remarkable resignation to God’s will, except for occasional outbursts of protest in her later years.28 Anna Ey’s memoir paints a vivid portrait of a large family with a strong, devout, puritanical faith which changed little in its restrained pious responses to death between the death of Hugo in 1867, that of Rudolph in 1904, and almost certainly that of Anna Heidrich in 1913. It is signiﬁcant that the contribution of doctors at these deathbeds was almost never mentioned, since ‘the mighty Hand of God’ was the determining force, even into the twentieth century.

The Christian ideal The deaths of Edward Suttor 1850 and Baby Drew 1866 We must assume there were few ‘good Christian deaths’ of babies and young children in nineteenth-century Australia, for such deaths tested the Christian ideal to the utmost. Infants and very young children often died swiftly and unpleasantly from infectious and intestinal diseases accompanied by distressing combinations of fever, pain, sickness, and diarrhoea, as we saw with Anna Ey’s family. Many also died suddenly from a variety of accidents, including drowning in family wells, rivers, and oceans. A traditional ritualised death was out of the question in such cases, for death often happened too quickly and young children were unable to play their idealised part in the ﬁnal scene. Even the few parents, like Anna Ey, who wrote memoirs or kept diaries, rarely offered detailed accounts of such harrowing events. However, two surviving records of the deaths of babies and young children contain enough elements of the traditional Christian ideal to merit close reading and analysis. Both reports came from prosperous Anglican families in New South Wales and Queensland. Charlotte Suttor, daughter of a Sydney accountant and wife of a wealthy New South Wales pastoralist and politician, William Suttor, had fourteen children. Her experience of the deaths of two children bears some resemblance to those of the Tait and Horsley families in England, who each lost ﬁve children to the ravages of scarlet fever in the 1850s. Her diary entries for 1848 to 1850 are also similar in their intense and thoroughly sincere piety, powerfully inﬂuenced by the Evangelical movement. Like many mid-Victorian British Evangelicals, Charlotte Suttor was deeply concerned about the state of her soul at death and tried hard to prepare daily for ‘that awful Eternity … so that I shall reap everlasting life in Heaven’. Illnesses of friends and neighbours warned her not to ‘defer seeking salvation until too late’, especially as she could not know whether her mental powers would be preserved, or whether her death would be sudden.29 Good deaths, like that in 1849 of ‘poor little Mrs Edwards’, who was ‘calm and composed

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meeting her end as becomes a Christian’, reminded Charlotte ‘to make a daily preparation for that event which must come to all’. She was convinced that ‘through faith in my blessed Saviour’ she might ‘overcome Death and the world’, but she must live a holy life to earn such salvation.30 She prayed regularly for forgiveness for her sins, and read psalms and hymns to keep her mind from worldly matters. The deaths of babies and children of neighbours and tenants reminded Charlotte Suttor vividly of the loss in 1838 of her 2-year-old son Edwin, of which no account appears to survive. On the death of a friend’s child in May 1849 she reﬂected in her diary that the survivors should not wish to recall the ‘dear innocent little being’ from ‘immortal happiness’, though they often did so.31 In January 1850, Charlotte went to see the little corpse of a neighbour’s child: ‘it was a sweet looking child, it reminded me so much of my dear lost Edwin, but how wrong to say lost, found their resting place in the bosom of their Saviour’.32 Indeed in 1850 the deaths in the neighbourhood from dysentery and scarlet fever increased in number and came steadily closer to home, all faithfully reported in Charlotte’s diary. On 16 January she visited Mary Moriarty who was most distressed at the death of her eldest girl of 7 from scarlet fever: ‘how the grief of one mother touches the heart of another … God grant that we may be spared a similar afﬂiction.’ Three days later, the youngest Moriarty child also died and another was dangerously ill with an ulcerated sore throat.33 By the end of January, Charlotte was alarmed as she had not experienced so many deaths on the estate before, but she was relieved that the fever had not spread to her own family. When scarlet fever killed Charlotte’s beloved 4-year-old-son Edward on 8 July 1850, the attack was so rapid and unexpected that Charlotte herself was away from home. She had left home believing her son was out of danger and only learned the news of his death two days afterwards. She was frantic with remorse, shock, and grief: Oh God have mercy upon me and give me strength to bear thy Will. Can I believe that one child is gone, oh how could I leave him when I knew he had been so ill. We must instantly return although only to see his corpse, and my younger two supposed to be dying. I feel I scarcely know what I am about. Enable me Oh Lord … [to] turn to the Lord my God in my distress.34

The Suttors reached their ‘melancholy home’ next evening as Charlotte reported: ‘I return after a few days and ﬁnd him a corpse’, which deprived her of a ﬁnal farewell and a last kiss to ‘little warm lips’. She contemplated the reason for this ‘severe stroke of his Will’ and deduced that it must be a punishment from God for the sins of the parents: We have had more than a share of good in this world, we were perhaps getting too much engrossed with the concerns of this life, and what we set our hearts upon most, our darling children, the Lord sees ﬁt to remove one, that we may set our affections upon nothing in this life, oh my Saviour lead our thoughts to thee.35

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Charlotte Suttor reﬂected on these issues in her diary on 12 and 13 July before the cofﬁn was closed. There were consolations of faith, as well as trials. Even the belief that the death of a child was punishment for the parents’ sins could be rationalised: ‘may thy chastisements be for our good not to harden us, but to draw us nearer to thee’. Easier to comprehend was the familiar argument of hymns and Evangelical tracts that ‘God’s mercy [is] sparing him a life of sin and sorrow in this world’. Charlotte found this explanation of her son’s death much more convincing as she looked at his ‘sweet, placid face’ for the last time.36 Above all, the prospect of immortality was the only meaningful consolation to a grieving Christian parent—as Charlotte put it, ‘I feel assured that my darling child is now an angel before the throne of God with countless others gone before.’ As the cofﬁn was fastened down, Charlotte noted ‘the remains [are] gone where they will await the sound of the last trumpet when all the dead shall rise, oh may it prove a joyful resurrection to us all.’37 Though she was able to repeat this theological tenet, it was inﬁnitely more comforting to remember ‘my darling little Teddy … as he is now, an angel in heaven, and not resile that he has gone before.’38 It was this belief in Edward as an angel in heaven that reconciled her two weeks later, undeterred by the doctrinal conﬂict between the concept of the body sleeping until the ﬁnal resurrection and that of immediate transition to an angelic state. The struggle for submission to God’s will was painful for a bereaved mother, especially as she took her ‘last look at the cold clay’ of her beloved son, having missed his death. Charlotte felt guilt and sadness for her absence, and regret at the lost farewell, but did not blame God: ‘If it had been God’s will I should have felt happiness to have had the last word, look and sigh of my darling, but as God willed it otherwise, it must have been best to be as it is.’39 She felt heartbroken as she took ‘my last kiss of his cold, cold forehead’, remembering the warm body she left behind a few days earlier. She might order her thoughts in the abstract according to familiar theological doctrines, but it was altogether different to accept Edward’s loss emotionally when looking at his body and remembering the physical relationship with her child: ‘Who can describe a mother’s feelings in seeing her darling little ones taken to the cold dark Grave. Our mortal feelings recoil from it and bitter, bitter would be our feelings indeed, had we no hope beyond this world life.’40 She repeatedly prayed, ‘May he give me a sincere resignation to his divine will.’ Like Catharine Tait in England, Charlotte’s struggle for submission was brief and she attained a remarkable degree of resignation to God’s will by the time her son’s body was removed from the house—no doubt the product of her years of spiritual preparation for death. Two days after her return home, Charlotte Suttor reached a necessary and practical conclusion to her anguished reﬂections on Edward’s death: ‘The living demand my care and it would be selﬁsh in me to indulge in a sorrow that would unﬁt me for my duties.’41 She had ﬁve remaining children to care for and was six months pregnant. Her 7-year-old son George had been ‘almost at

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the point of death’ when she returned home at Edward’s death. Charlotte Suttor pleaded with God for the lives of her remaining ﬁve children: ‘Oh God in thy mercy spare my other child, but if it please thee to take him, enable me to say and feel thy Will be done.’42 George gradually recovered, but two visiting relatives caught the fever in ‘this house of suffering’. By 20 July Charlotte felt very weak and ill because of her pregnancy and ‘the constant distress of mind’, and six days later she fainted by the bedside of one of her patients. By 4 August they were all recovered and 7-year-old George was ﬁnally told of his brother’s death: ‘he was very much distressed and cried very much indeed, poor little fellow it is his ﬁrst grief’. Charlotte concluded in her journal: ‘How many blessings I have, let me not in the loss of one be unmindful of those I have left to me.’ On 11 August her brother-in-law, Mr William Lisle, came to their home to preach ‘a most beautiful and appropriate sermon’ on the text, ‘Jesus Christ who hath abolished death’—an empty metaphor which apparently carried comfort.43 Charlotte Suttor’s diary is revealing about the process of parental grief for her sons but silent on the ‘particulars’ of their deaths. By contrast, the death of Mrs Gertrude Drew’s baby in Brisbane in 1866 provides a rare detailed description of a baby’s death in another pious household. This is an idealised account of a baby’s death written by a visiting family friend, Blanche Mitchell, daughter of Sir Thomas Mitchell, the surveyor-general and explorer of New South Wales. Blanche, the youngest of eleven children, had been raised in luxury in a happy upper-class home until her beloved father’s death in 1855 severely reduced the family’s wealth and living standards. Blanche Mitchell was diagnosed as consumptive in December 1865 and died unmarried in September 1869 at the age of 26, spending her ﬁnal months as an invalid. She was familiar with death already, as her father died in 1855, her sister Emily died in England in 1860, and another sister Camilla died in childbirth in 1863. Blanche used her detailed diary as a confessional that helped to order the events of a life which were frequently outside her own control. She was imaginative, intelligent, and well read, with a gift for writing ﬂuent and vivid prose. Her diary illustrates the combined inﬂuences of Anglican Christianity and the British cultural heritage, as well as her tendency to dramatise her experiences. Blanche Mitchell found herself in an unusual situation in September and October 1866, during a visit to the Queensland family of William George Drew, a politician. She was presumably sent to Brisbane to stay with family friends for her health, but the circumstances were scarcely conducive to convalescence since she witnessed the deaths of Mrs Drew’s elderly mother and infant daughter within the space of three weeks. Blanche had always delighted in family rituals and she dwelt intensely on those associated with death, confessing that the death of the baby had a ‘strange fascination for me’. She was evidently very fond of the Drew family and sincerely saddened by these two deaths. But her diary account also has the rather detached air of the self-

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conscious observer acutely aware of her own mortality; she had already been thinking deeply about the implications for her own impending death during the earlier death of the baby’s grandmother. The unnamed baby girl, a few months old, became ill suddenly on 26 September 1866 with constant diarrhoea and sickness diagnosed by the two doctors as ‘a great epidemic at present amongst children … a sort of cholera’. The following day the family was seriously alarmed, and waited eagerly for the doctor’s arrival; unfortunately they called in a new doctor, Dr O’Dougherty, who declined to prescribe for the child since professional etiquette deﬁned that as the role of the family’s regular doctor. The family had lost faith in Dr Bell after his poor care of Mrs Drew’s dying mother, but reluctantly agreed to a joint consultation between the two doctors, who were far from hopeful and again mentioned cholera. The mother, Mrs Drew, never left the sickroom, giving the baby regular spoonfuls of milk and honey, which were instantly thrown up. Mrs Drew was ﬁnally prevailed upon to go to bed after midnight, leaving the nurse, Mary, to sit up with the baby.44 About one o’clock next day, 28 September 1866, Dr Bell informed the nurse (rather than the parents) that the baby could not recover, and that the diet of milk and honey was to be combined with poultices on the stomach. Blanche could see a terrible change for the worse, ‘and I could see no life in that awful look that had fallen upon the countenance’. Now the mother had lost hope, she could no longer bear to be in the room with her dying baby, instead pacing up and down the passage outside, crying bitterly, while the baby lay in the nurse’s arms. This was a departure from the ideal model of a nineteenth-century mother at her baby’s deathbed, both in the lack of restraint while her child was dying and in her willingness to surrender the baby to a nurse, however devoted. Meanwhile Blanche sat and helped Mary, the nurse, and observed the scene in silent sympathy, noting the baby’s wide open eyes ‘gazing upon each of our faces, her little tongue moving in and out as if she felt her mouth dry’.45 As death drew closer, Blanche speculated in her diary about the baby’s experience of dying and its transition to heaven: But now a sudden shadow had fallen upon the baby countenance, the dark nameless something that ﬁlls one with mystery and awe. Slowly it crept all over the waxen features, the mouth became smaller and smaller, the nose long and pinched—the face assumed an almost old sensible look, the eyes a stern serious expression, unmercifully serious … In that heavenly look we thought, did the mind see anything of that future world into which it was hastening—for though the baby mind could have no perception having no knowledge whilst on earth, yet the soul escaping from the bond of ﬂesh was even as the oldest among us … Could the baby soul behold what the soul of an adult can? Did that upward look gaze upon heavenly angels holding out their arms to receive the precious infant?46

This is a revealing passage about Blanche Mitchell’s religious views. While lacking the intense devotional piety of Charlotte Suttor, Blanche had a strong

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Christian belief in an afterlife complete with heavenly angels, but uncomplicated by doctrines of original sin, atonement, parental guilt, and judgment. Blanche’s simple romanticised view of heaven helped to calm her own fears about her uncertain future as a consumptive. She also dramatised death as ‘a dark nameless something that ﬁlls one with mystery and awe’ and produced a relatively rapid physical change. When Mr Drew called in his wife to take a ﬁnal farewell of their dying child, she kissed her many times, crying, ‘Must I lose you too, my darling— must I see you die also?’ Finally the mother acquiesced in the inevitable, ‘Let her go, let her go to her God—her Saviour, why should we wish to keep her here on earth?’ Both parents knelt together in silent prayer, punctuated by further kisses on the ‘marble brow’. Then Mrs Drew again left the room, as she could not bear to watch the ‘last struggle’, again unusual behaviour by a mother at her child’s deathbed, if judged against the ideal model. Mrs Drew and Blanche Mitchell seem to have expected physical signs of a sudden ‘change’ at an earlier stage of the dying process, as well as a distressing ‘struggle’ at the end, as visible signs of the process of death which might be more readily ritualised. Blanche was surprised that death came so peacefully without these obvious signs: The little head only turned wearily—the eyes wandering and with the strange serious look gazed into our faces, the cherub mouth opened wide and the lips did not close again—so peaceably and gently the darling baby passed away—there were only three quick short panting breaths and all was over. So quietly was it that I could not believe she was dead.

To be certain about the child’s death they passed their hands before her eyes, but the pupils never moved, and they placed a glass before the open mouth, but the surface of the glass remained unclouded.47 Mr Drew kissed the infant’s brow, tried to close the eyes and left the room to the female attendants for the ritual of preparing the body. Blanche idealised the beauty and the innocence of the corpse, ‘the rosy little smiling infant, untouched by care or sorrow, called away to become an angel in its Father’s Kingdom’. They placed the baby in the crib, but again struggled to close the eyes properly. Meanwhile a neighbour, Mrs Rogers, came in to help and declared the child was not dead as it was still warm, so they rushed to place a hot bottle at the feet, but in vain. ‘Death was in that cold placid face, in the ﬁxed rigid features and the soul was now far far away or perhaps hovering round us.’ The baby was washed and dressed, and placed in the bed where her grandmother died three weeks earlier—the symbolism was not lost on Blanche of the juxtaposition of the deaths of the very old and very young. For the third time a vain effort was made to close the baby’s eyes properly—this time with shillings. These vivid details suggest Blanche’s frustration that the ritual of death was not carried out in a more experienced manner. Blanche was acutely sensitive to the atmosphere and occasion engendered by the death: ‘very mournfully and melancholy all moved about the house, hushed

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was each voice, stilled every movement and people moved along restlessly, aimlessly.’48 For a while the parents returned to see their infant: ‘Poor Mrs Drew was quieter now and able to look at her baby calmly and quietly’, while her husband made the funeral arrangements with the undertaker. But Blanche Mitchell spent far longer than the parents that evening keeping watch by the ‘angel form, for it had a strange fascination for me’. She thought about the traditional consolation on the deaths of children, that the baby had gone to a better life where ‘God shall wipe away all tears’. Blanche felt intensely sad and could not refrain from crying on and off for many hours, affected also by the mother’s acute grief. Finally Minnie Rogers insisted that Blanche leave the corpse and move into the parlour to sit in ‘dreary grief’, again capturing the uncertain, unhappy, restless mood of the household. The funeral was held on 29 September 1866, the day after the baby’s death. Blanche woke to a hushed house where the ‘presence of death still hovered’ with ‘the solemn ﬂapping of the mysterious angel’s wings’. The baby looked more beautiful than ever, wearing the same peaceable look, with rosebuds strewn over the bed. Mrs Drew seemed comforted now that the baby’s suffering was over, though she may have endured this second trauma more calmly because the double deaths left her in deep shock. Blanche left the grieving parents together to talk and read prayers and hymns. Early in the afternoon they all went to say their ﬁnal farewell to the baby lying in the white cofﬁn strewn with ﬂowers, ‘a marble image of beauty’, amid the hum of suppressed sobbing.49 Mr Drew left in the coach for the funeral with several of the older children and Mary, the devoted nurse, who behaved ‘almost like a mother to [the baby] in her constant unwearying attendance’. It was ironic that the real mother was not expected to attend the funeral because ladies were considered incapable of suppressing their tears at funerals—in this case with some justiﬁcation. Instead it was seen as appropriate for the proxy-mother, the workingclass nurse, to attend. At Minnie Rogers’ instigation the three women who remained behind—Mrs Drew, Blanche and Minnie—followed Mrs Drew into her room, and performed their own version of the burial service kneeling by the bed. This seems to have developed as a distinctively Australian custom. It was common for British women of the upper and upper middle classes to remain at home during the funeral and burial up to the 1870s, but I have seen no British evidence of the women at home conducting their own service. Minnie read the service while Blanche gave the responses; they found it solemn, moving and comforting, and remained for some time in silent prayer. Not surprisingly Blanche’s health was adversely affected by the trauma and excitement. Her cough was very bad throughout the day of the funeral, which was bitterly cold, and she was afﬂicted by ‘a terrible ﬁt of both wheezing and coughing with pain in the side again and I felt so disappointed to think that I was no better after all my trouble to get well.’50 Blanche Mitchell died of consumption exactly three years later at the age of 26.

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The baby’s death witnessed by Blanche Mitchell in 1866 was not the perfect Christian death, as few ever could be in reality, and she portrayed it in sentimental and dramatic terms. It was certainly a baby’s death surrounded by a loving family and by deeply felt Christian faith and ritual. Blanche’s representation of this death was closer to the ideal than many baby’s deaths and demonstrated the continuing power of Christian consolation in the afﬂuent classes in the Australian colonies, at least up to the 1860s.

The impact of secularism and improved medical care The death of Dora Hindson, 1890 An immense cultural gulf exists between the deaths of Edward Suttor and baby Drew in 1850 and 1866 respectively, and that of Dora Hindson in Victoria in 1890. The ﬁrst two representations of children’s deaths were both deeply religious, though with varying degrees of piety, sharing the same certainty that the dead children were angels in heaven who had left a world of sin and sorrow for a happier life with God. The account of Dora Hindson’s death in 1890, by contrast, was almost entirely secular, with no reference to angels or heaven and few ‘particulars’ of the deathbed scene. This deep divide within a period of forty years is partly explained by the religious transformation in the intervening period—the impact of biblical criticism and evolutionary theory, and the increase in disillusionment with orthodox Christianity. A second factor is the improvement by 1890 in the knowledge and authority of the better doctors who attended the wealthy urban elite—a development examined further in the next chapter. The 1890 record of Dora Hindson’s death made little reference to religion, but placed a good deal of weight on medicine. The 1850 and 1866 narratives used the diary form which was the familiar genre for Evangelicals and other pious Protestants accounting to God for a worthy life and a good death. However, Dora Hindson’s death has to be pieced together from the copious correspondence between various members of the family, which has the advantage of providing several different perspectives on the same event, but lacks the detailed continuity and atmosphere of the earlier accounts. Dora Hindson’s death in 1890 might well be seen as a transitional death between the traditional and the modern. Alice Hindson was the daughter of Francis Henty, a wealthy Victorian pastoralist and merchant with a family wool station of 14 000 acres. Alice married John Hindson, and they had two boys and ﬁve girls at the time of 7-month-old Dora’s death. Dora’s story is mainly told in letters between the three Henty sisters, Alice Hindson, Caroline MacLeod and Louisa Henty. Dora was very ill and feverish on 14 December 1890, but appeared to be well again ﬁve days later when the family moved for their Christ