Secrets and Lies: the Radical Potential of Family History

I started to realize the benefits of combining the methodologies of academic social and cultural history with those of family history when I turned to the services of a genealogist to trace the children of a Second World War Mass Observation diarist. I wanted to edit and publish their mother’s diary. Within half a day, supplied only with their date of birth and an inaccurate date of birth for their mother, the genealogist had found them – twins, born 5 October 1941. Stunned to learn that he could discover their identity in such a short time, I acknowledged a new respect and gratitude for the skills of genealogists and the role which digital technology could play in the acquisition of historical knowledge.¹

The growth of family history from the 1970s has revolutionized access to historical sources within archival institutions and on the internet. In my research on illegitimacy I was interested to find that there were so many unknown bastards, in so many families. At the same time, as a historian of the family and of motherhood, I have been intrigued by the ways in which academic and family historians were categorized as different, our needs and requirements dichotomized by the cultural institutions within which we worked on some of the same sources and where we shared space.² When I moved to Australia in 2008 I learned that family history was especially popular amongst individuals coming to terms with their convict pasts.³ Family history has until recently received little serious attention from professional and academic historians in Australia, despite being one of the strongest cultural industries there for the past thirty years and stronger indeed than in any other country.⁴ Family secrets of illegitimacy and criminality coalesced in my new research project on the transnational history of motherhood in early colonial Australia and Britain 1750-1850. Convicts and ‘illegitimates’ are no longer expunged from people’s family stories and most individuals are willing to embrace ancestors who broke the rules which we have believed carried so much weight in the past. What doesn’t surprise me, but does others, is the large numbers of those who broke rules and who got away with it.

Family historians have been dismissed by professional and academic historians, in Australia and beyond, as ‘misty-eyed and syrupy’ and their findings and practices deemed irrelevant to the wider historical community.⁵ Some people have categorized them as conservative, with a big and a small c, for their supposedly nostalgic search for a golden age of the family. Noeline Kyle argues that genealogy provides families with a sense of identity in a period when many of them are undergoing transformation and disruption. It ‘was once a quest for social status and recognition, but in the 1990s [and beyond], as its base has broadened, it has become a search for identity’.⁶ Others have suggested that they search for their family trees to find ‘something solid in a shifting world’.⁷ I want to suggest that when it comes to broader questions of historical change and continuity the techniques and findings of family historians disrupt many of our assumptions about the past. The construction of a family tree, the discovery of manifold secrets and lies, throw into question the solidity not only of the history of family, class relationships and the power relations between men and women but also of the history of nation and empire. Each newly discovered document encourages the historian to add to or question the narrative so far. The ‘pioneer myths’ so beloved of a certain class of Australians, usually of European descent, have to be discarded when so many family trees provide evidence of convict and/or Aboriginal ancestry.⁸ Academic historians have complicated the picture of the settlement of Australia, providing evidence of the relations between white settlers (whether forced migrants or free) and indigenous peoples. But most Australians remain unaware of these discoveries and their implications; they are more likely to encounter history through genealogy. The history of early colonial Australia is unfashionable among Australian academic historians and students, while genealogists remain fervently and intensely interested in that period. It is for this reason that family history woven carefully with academic history has the potential to change the way in which Australians think and write about the past.⁹

Vicky Haskins (2006) has suggested that misogyny informs many criticisms of genealogy. However, the radical possibilities of family history have long been acknowledged by historians of women in Australia.¹⁰ Babette Smith, author of the very successful A Cargo of Women: Susannah Watson and the Convicts of the Princess Royal (1988), which reconstructed the biographies of 100 convict women transported to New South Wales in 1830, and of the successful but much more controversial Australia’s Birthstain: the Startling Legacy of the Convict Era (2008), began her historical career as a genealogist.¹¹ In the later work Smith claimed that family historians had a particular role to play in the revision of Australian history, questioning traditional and largely accepted historical narratives about Australia’s early colonial and convict past that strictly demarcated the experiences of convict and free and denigrated or ignored the role that convicts have played in Australian history. The long history of the denial of convict heritage began with convicts themselves, already often used to telling lies for their own ends. In a new world where they could start life afresh, they would conceal their true identities. A simple name change was often enough for this, but some grew skilled at creating new identities, moving on and changing nomenclature.¹²

The impact of the anti-transportation campaigns of the 1830s lasted well into the mid twentieth century.¹³ Until even the 1970s convict connections were seen as shameful and many Australian families worked hard to bury any evidence of them. This had important implications for the ways in which Australians thought about their nation’s past – the first sixty years or so of settlement tended to be ignored.¹⁴ The silence did not go unnoticed but few were able to challenge it effectively. The organizers of the nation’s 1938 sesquicentenary celebrations refused to acknowledge the contribution of convicts (as well as Aborigines) to Australia’s past, which led directly to the publication of Miles Franklin and Dymphna Cusack’s satirical Pioneers on Parade (1939).¹⁵ Smith argues that Australia’s ‘real’ history has only been revealed by genealogists, who discovered that their ancestors were rarely victims of a brutal disciplinary regime and were more resourceful and successful in early colonial Australia than we have been led to believe.¹⁶ This means, in the words of historian David Roberts, that ‘Convict heritage … which was once a source of anxiety and embarrassment, is now aired and celebrated as something truly distinctive’.¹⁷

Historians based in Tasmania have embraced the methodologies of family historians in their quest to reconstruct the early colonial period on the island. Here at least, many historians agree that family historians are no longer condescended to.¹⁸ Of the 150,000 people transported to Australia between 1788 and 1853, almost half were sent to Van Dieman’s Land, which in 1856 changed its name to Tasmania to rid itself of convict identity as quickly as possible. Van Dieman’s Land had a far larger proportion of ex-convicts to hide than New South Wales. They, as well as the colonial authorities, worked to bury Tasmania’s convict roots. As ex-prisoners established successful and crime-free lives in the colony the pioneer myth supplanted the truth about the penal origins of the island. After transportation ended, many ex-convicts left Tasmania for the goldfields of Victoria while those who stayed simply buried their pasts with silence and subterfuge. Lucy Frost has suggested that, despite Tasmania’s small settler population,¹⁹ the secrets and lies of convictism, settler violence towards indigenous people, theft and murder remained hidden, so that until recently the convict past was successfully expunged from cultural memory. This meant that although by the late twentieth century three-quarters of the population were descended from convicts, most Tasmanians remained ignorant of their convict heritage.²⁰ Only once Tasmania’s archivists squared up successfully to the policy-makers, in 1977 following the 1960s decline in the stigma of convictism as family historians revealed the extent of convict heritage, was the ‘convict cringe’ successfully challenged with the granting of open access to convict records.²¹ Frost recognizes her debt to shared scholarship with family historians as they meet in the middle – she working forwards from early convict sources and they working backwards to construct their family trees. Women who had fallen out of historical sight as they left the convict system, moved, married and changed their names were no longer lost, and technology allowed her to find and knot her narrative threads.²²

Convict scholars, blessed with a multiplicity of sources, readily acknowledge the utility of genealogical methods and the value of the voluntary work of genealogists. Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, also based in Tasmania, is leading a large international team of scholars (members are based in Melbourne, Flinders, University of New England, Oxford and Australian National University) who are reconstructing Tasmania’s early colonial history. This is part of the Founders and Survivors Project, which aims to enlist the unpaid and enthusiastic efforts of genealogists, and will eventually, it is hoped, ‘follow convict founders and their descendants over five generations and build a unique portrait of modern Australian society in the making’.²³ It is interesting to note that convict scholars are often also British. It is possible (as perhaps Babette Smith would argue) that the convict stain has until recently prevented Australian historians from sufficiently engaging with their early colonial past. But other factors are also at work. For example the influence and legacy of individual academics play a part in the genesis of research questions and the discovery of appropriate sources, and scholars working in the historiographical tradition of E. P. Thompson, or informed (though not necessarily dominated) by a Foucauldian focus on crime and punishment, are more likely to explore the transnational journeys of criminals and settlers. Recently too the research possibilities offered by innovative technology have given fresh momentum to such interests.²⁴

Elsewhere in Australia, Portia Robinson and Grace Karskens enriched their work on late eighteenth and early nineteenth Australian lives by using the techniques of family history.²⁵ Recent sophisticated and nuanced work by historians of gender and race in Australia has also recognized the value of genealogy. As Vicky Haskins and Cassandra Pybus argue, this focus on everyday lives, although it has the seductive quality of old-fashioned historical detective work (laborious but ultimately valuable hours spent in the archives, scanning those reels of microfilm), is indispensable for the investigation of larger questions such as the complex construction of power relations in the past and their transnational characteristics.²⁶

My research on motherhood, which questions people’s assumptions about the structure and experience of the so-called ‘traditional family’ in the past, focuses on women’s mental and historical landscapes – their ‘lived histories’.²⁷ I explore women’s experiences of childbirth and motherhood, the economic, social and cultural contexts of their lives, their needs as well as their desires, the ways in which they managed their personal lives, their relationships with members of their family, their mothers, fathers, husbands, de facto partners, siblings and children as well as their friends and wider communities. I am also interested in the ways in which elite mothers involved themselves in philanthropic endeavours servicing poor mothers and how the colonial state managed mothers differently.²⁸ I believe that historians can and should try (while acknowledging the limits of their sources) to study the ‘experience’ of as well as ideas about the family in the past.²⁹ People and place, as well as ideas about those people and places, must be central to our analysis. This approach has at its heart the determination to show how social practice diverged from prescriptive representations of motherhood and the family. I try to acknowledge the complexity of power relations in the past and highlight the contestation of power and discourse by focusing on the relationships between masters, mistresses, servants, mothers, fathers and children. I want to suggest that welcoming and acknowledging the value of family histories enables me to do this more effectively

In my first few months in Australia besides reading early colonial diaries, memoirs, letters and autobiographies I appealed to the expertise of members of the Society of Australian Genealogists (SAG) in their newsletter Descent. I was conscious of the need for historians to look beyond the library and archival offices and hoped for some live correspondents, family histories, memories, papers and objects.³⁰ So far twelve individuals have contacted me and shared with me the family trees of their early colonial ancestors. My blending of traditional social and cultural historiographical methods with an appeal for the help of family historians, who use a paper trail of birth, death, marriage, legal and civil records to reconstruct their ancestor’s lives, has made me concentrate on the experiences of women of different classes and to look to the links between them. It has allowed me to explore a broader cross-section of class experience (in as much as historians can do so) as well as the structural aspects of motherhood during this period. It also lets me draw on family historians’ emotional engagement with the past.³¹ Such joint interests should bring together historians from above as well as below, inside and outside the academy. Family historians believe that they are filling in the gaps left by ‘official’ history and that they are challenging the elitism of the academy but they still need academics to help them to interpret their data. Academics can add context, complexity and ambiguity to the histories of their families, encouraging them to question the characterization of individuals as either weak or powerful, successful or not.

This technique has also allowed me to return to something that I began to explore shortly after finishing my PhD but left behind when I began work on the twentieth century – the cross-class and interdependent relationships between mistresses and their servants. Significantly, it is to the institution of domestic service that historians in both Britain and Australia have turned to explore the significance and meanings of cross-class and in the Australian context, as Vicky Haskins has shown, inter-racial relationships.³²

Until the twentieth century most women worked as domestic servants in an employment structured by gender, class and race.³³ Eighteenth and nineteenth-century advice literature encouraged mistresses and servants to be friends and numerous historical sources suggests that many were. In my earlier research on eighteenth-century London I found that when a domestic servant gave birth to an illegitimate child the employer’s reaction might be pragmatic rather than judgemental. Many mistresses would tolerate an illegitimate pregnancy in their household but they were less likely to allow the rearing of a bastard child under their roof. Nevertheless servants who gave birth to illegitimate children were not necessarily ostracized from their employment and friendship networks. The mistress of her household played a crucial role in the lives of young domestic servants and friendships and mutual dependence were common. Servants needed work and mistresses needed their labour for the household to function effectively. A focus on the domestic thus enables us to link the worlds of rich and poor and to explore some of the meanings of cross-class relationships. In the British context Alison Light has moved from her work on Virginia Woolf and her servants to begin writing on the history of the English poor through the lens of the history of her own family.³⁴ Grace Karskens has suggested that ‘the great lesson of early Sydney is that it was not made by those in authority, the wealthy and powerful alone … The country was replete with lighter signatures’.³⁵ The same, of course, could be said of most places and times. It is little wonder, however, that it is scholars of the poor and the dispossessed who have most eagerly embraced family history in recent years.

The quest to discover the past of one’s ancestors has been strongest amongst the Aboriginal communities of Australia. This is the legacy of land removal, of death by the spread of European diseases, of the thousands of children (the ‘Stolen Generations’) who were institutionalized or adopted and of a community which continues to have a shockingly and largely ignored mortality rate so that the oral histories of generations, despite being intrinsic to Aboriginal culture, are usually cut short at a desperately young age. Aborigines have used the radical possibilities of family history to reconstruct their identity and to challenge national histories of Australia that ignore the construction of the nation through racist policies and brutal violence.³⁶ The personal is crucial to the ways in which Aborigines need to link with and think about their pasts.³⁷ The creation of collective family trees amongst Aborigines means that written as well as oral evidence about the past, which traces the links between white and indigenous families through licit and illicit sexual relations, both enriches Aboriginal understanding about past lives, but also forces white Australians to acknowledge their Aboriginal ancestors and the over-determined history of white settlers with the ‘First Australians’. Dark-skinned Aboriginal relatives no longer have to be cut out of family photos or disguised as descendants of gypsies and Polynesian princesses (though of course many still are).³⁸ Technology has also allowed Aboriginal people to investigate their family trees and to learn about Aboriginal history more widely without entering the libraries and archives that many associate with the sources of their oppression. Maria Nugent has suggested that Aboriginal family history is always about more than the history of an individual family: their family histories engage with historical narratives at local, national and global levels.³⁹ But this is true too for most Australians – the children of immigrant parents.⁴⁰ Indeed, it is true too of all family histories, every one of which has the potential to be part of local, national, global, class and gender history.

But the usefulness of family historical stories to wider political and cultural historical narratives has remained implicit. I want to argue for an explicit engagement with the needs, wants and methodologies of family historians. This will unite many different strands of Australia’s history and break down the divisions between compartmentalized histories of the early colonial period, each with their own separate focus – on pioneers, convicts, emancipists, bushmen, free settlers, or the governors and their world.⁴¹ Working through the material backwards (as genealogists do) and forwards (like most academics), while using as wide a range of sources as possible, enables us to address identity history and to unite it with the history of nation and empire.

The University of New England (UNE) in rural New South Wales has long fostered the links between academics and family historians. Alan Atkinson and Norma Townsend worked hard to forge alliances between the two groups and graduates of UNE’s Diploma in Local and Applied History have sometimes followed this route into academic history.⁴² Indeed Atkinson’s wonderful Camden, Farm and Village Life in Early New South Wales (1998) draws on the technique of family reconstitution (itself dependent upon genealogical material) familiar to those of us schooled in the demographic histories from the Cambridge Group for the Study of Population and Social Structure. Publications produced by CAMPOP were also largely dependent upon the voluntary work of genealogists. The recent republication of Camden owes something no doubt to the recognition that, in Atkinson’s words: ‘Family historians … are part of a great movement in the reinterpretation of the Australian past’, and to reassessment of the significance of local historical issues.⁴³

The well-regarded work of Perry McIntyre and Liz Rushen is one of UNE’s several success stories. McIntyre, building on her research as a genealogist and postgraduate, and Rushen, who followed a more formal academic route at Monash, have co-authored two successful books on immigration to early nineteenth-century Australia. Significantly, the books that sell best on early colonial Australian history have been written, mostly, by genealogists. Perry McIntyre has worked since the late 1970s as a genealogist and historical consultant and has taken numerous family historians on research trips to Ireland as part of her work with the Society of Australian Genealogists (SAG), helping to satisfy the appetite for ancestral tourism.⁴⁴ In some ways this work marks the coming of age of family history and its professionalization but the flexibility of its practice also allows historians to work without becoming university academics. Diplomas in Family Historical Studies have been available in Australia since 1974. Professional organizations such as SAG also encourage family historians to be consistent in the manner in which they conduct their research and to standardize their recorded discoveries so that more people can access and use it.⁴⁵

The shifts in Australian genealogical research from a focus on heraldry, lineage and the pioneer to investigation of convicts, women and Aboriginal families have paralleled the shift in academic historiography since the 1970s from the political history of elites towards social, cultural and identity history. The family history movement has in turn become more democratic, moving away from an emphasis on the colonial ruling class, land and pioneer settlers to explore and even celebrate the lows of the ‘rogue nation’.⁴⁶ It has also led to the democratization of cultural institutions. Libraries which once demanded that clients be ‘professionals’ now embrace the ‘amateur’ visitors seeking access to the valuable materials in their vaults.⁴⁷ From 1960 and until the early 1990s the Mitchell Library requested that SAG deal with requests for information put to them by family historians.⁴⁸ A reader’s ticket was necessary in order to access the documents held by them and they actively excluded family historians from requesting information and documents.⁴⁹ The family history boom in Australia exceeded that of Britain and the US, genealogical societies increased in size ten times from the late 1970s. Women were and remain the majority of its practitioners although the cohort has become younger and is developing more of a gender mix. More men have become involved in family history, particularly when it is combined with military history. We nonetheless have little concrete information about the make-up and motivations of genealogists, though a student at UNE is currently analysing a survey of 3,000 family historians.⁵⁰ It is also significant that family historians, often working in a voluntary capacity, have undertaken enormous collaborative projects to preserve and enable access to Australian primary sources by microfiching, filming, and digitizing material from archives and libraries around the world so as to share their resources with as wide a community as possible. Family historians since the establishment of SAG in the early 1930s have been concerned to preserve Australian primary sources and improve access to them.⁵¹ Family history is a sociable enterprise and practitioners are often committed to the widespread dissemination of their findings.⁵² Ancestry.com and Find My Past are enormous virtual communities dedicated to the sharing of genealogical research.⁵³ These bodies are working in partnership with cultural institutions to make historical documents more accessible online. The State Records of New South Wales have utilized volunteers to index material and to provide metadata for digital images, and are in consultation with the online business, Ancestry.⁵⁴ At the London Metropolitan Archives volunteers in association with Ancestry have been indexing the probate records of the Consistory Court of London. Family historians have also assisted in the Black and Asian Londoners Project, systematically searching parish registers to extract any relevant references. These undertakings assist family historians as well as professional/academic historians in their research. Many individuals spend a lifetime constructing their family history and rely on sharing information to make their task more enjoyable and less onerous.⁵⁵

With archivists in Sydney as well as London I have discussed the impact of the popularity of family history on archive services and their management. As we have seen, archive services in Australia might have been better placed to meet the needs of family historians today if government bodies hadn’t been so keen to brush the convict past of the nation under the carpet.⁵⁶ Lucy Frost has noted the irony that the value of convict sources has now gained global recognition, given that for many years, until the 1980s, they were so underrated. Where such material had not been destroyed, it was deteriorating in poor storage conditions; and access, severely limited, was granted only if you knew the right questions to ask.⁵⁷ Archivists have noted the chaos that resulted around the world when demand for their services increased enormously after the publication of Alex Haley’s Roots in the late seventies. In Australia, family history became increasingly popular in the run-up to the Bicentenary celebrations in 1988.⁵⁸ From the 1980s on, the collaborative efforts of different institutions achieved better access to archives and libraries. The effects of the digital revolution were also increasingly visible, as the production of digital finding aids and online indexes brought more and more records within general reach. The State Library has recently been addressing the needs and demands of an increasingly confident group of family historians, with the production of online service guides. It is clear, however, that many family historians want to acquire more knowledge of traditional historical techniques and the requisite research skills.⁵⁹

Cultural institutions in Australia were determined to meet an anticipated increase in demand following the widespread publicity that accompanied the broadcast of the Australian version of Who do you think you are? on the SBS network in early 2008. (They had also learned something from the British experience.) This transmission did indeed have an effect. Numbers increased in some reading-rooms; relevant websites were visited far more frequently than before; and emailed requests for help rose. In early 2008 SAG welcomed 77% more new members than for the same period in 2007. Many were family historians who had started family trees but abandoned them when the task became too complicated or tiresome. They now returned to their trees re-energized by the programme and the possibilities promised by the technical revolution. The demand for web-based services was the most significant impact of the programme.⁶⁰ As Richard Evans has suggested, this popular demand for archives and libraries to provide better services to family historians, and the concomitant need for increased state funding, have the potential ‘to make a significant contribution to the revival of public history in Australia’.⁶¹

Many practitioners of family history argue that when the past has become personal you never lose sight of the individuals about whom you are writing.⁶² To this end, in the second part of this piece, returning to the subject of secrets and lies in early nineteenth-century Britain and Australia, I present the details of several complex and confusing life-stories. They illustrate the complexity of family life in early-colonial Australia and the need to draw upon as wide a range of sources as possible and to bring together the work of family historians and historians of the family.

Australian settlers, forced and not, were practised at disguising their identities. Plebeian Londoners too were adept at negotiating with charitable, parish and legal authorities and many did so by playing with their identity. Unmarried mothers would change their names to get admitted to the newly established lying-in hospitals in eighteenth-century London for the births of their children. Recalcitrant fathers achieved anonymity by moving to different parts of the metropolis, country and empire. Convicts played all sorts of tricks with their names, misspelling them, switching surnames with first names, or using middle names, in order to fool the convict system.⁶³ In Britain, historians of marriage find, both men and women might lie about their names, birthplaces or (before the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act) settlements in order to establish fresh relationships with new partners before formally ending established ones. These practices continued with a vengeance in Australia. Deception was used to mask criminality, bigamy and illegitimacy.

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The whaler Speedy which arrived in Sydney in April 1800 carried Anna Josepha King on her second journey to the colony, travelling from London to Port Jackson this time with her husband Philip Gidley King the newly-appointed Governor of the colony. (See family tree, Fig. 1, and family portrait, Fig. 2.) On the same ship was Amelia Goodwin, a convict from Greenwich sentenced to transportation for the theft of clothing and household goods. One of Amelia’s descendants, Joye Walsh from Roseville, has been accumulating the details of 10,000 descendants of Amelia and her soon-to-be lover James Rixon, and was eager to share her story with me.⁶⁴ Joye’s family, like many Australian families, had at first been keen to brush the ‘convict stain’ of their ancestors under the carpet. Her father had revelled in telling his children about the first Rixon to land in Australia – his role in commanding the convicts and how he had decided to settle in Australia and devote himself to improving their conditions. Joye’s father was later delighted to learn (though his own father might have been less pleased), that James Rixon was himself a convict and had little choice but to remain in the country. This strategy of substituting a military heritage for a convict one was often used prior to the 1960s.⁶⁵ Rixon was living and working in Derbyshire when he was convicted of theft in 1792. He reached Sydney in 1798 and after three years working as a convict obtained his Pardon and enlisted in the New South Wales Corps, a permanent regiment.⁶⁶ Joye’s father was descended from James’s son Benjamin, one of the first white triplets born in Australia: their births in 1806 had made the front page of the Sydney Gazette (the paper established by Governor King in March 1803).⁶⁷ Benjamin’s mother Amelia, married to John Goodwin, had been living and working in Greenwich, outside London, when in 1799 at the age of twenty-nine she was convicted of the theft of a large quantity of clothing and household items and transported to New South Wales on the Speedy.⁶⁸ Amelia’s journey took 143 days and only three of the female convicts aboard died on the journey.⁶⁹

Anna King’s journal of her voyage on the Speedy shows the compassion she felt towards the mostly English convict mothers and their children, the abandoned and neglected. This was in spite of being preoccupied by the problems resulting from her husband’s severe gout, by her anxiety about leaving her eldest children Phillip and Maria in England for the purposes of their education, and by her accompanying youngest child’s sea sickness. Her feelings towards convict women were, however, conflicted and on one occasion she labelled some of them ‘hardened depraved Creatures’. Nonetheless, she watched the movements of ‘our Ladies’ carefully, sympathized when they were drenched like ‘drowned rats’ in high seas, complained that ‘it is bad management to have their beds so near to the deck’ and wrote more of her concern for their sickness during the journey and rejoiced when they ‘are merry and happy’. She was quick to offer her services ‘I shall feel happy to protect a poor little orphan’, when a seven-month-old boy was left motherless following his protector’s death on board ship. She kept her word and later the grown boy described the King family’s care in a journal he wrote in 1835.⁷⁰ She also related the decline of one convict woman, Mrs Butler, who sank through physical and then mental illness to death and burial as they approached the Caribbean. Such deaths haunted ship-borne passengers. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century popular literature teemed with stories of ghosts on board ships and Anna King reported laconically that the convict women of the Speedy were terrified by reported appearances of Mrs Butler’s spirit.⁷¹ There is little doubt that Anna’s and Amelia’s paths would have crossed on the six-month journey to New South Wales, though Amelia is not mentioned in Anna’s diary.⁷²

After Amelia arrived in Sydney, she met James Rixon and for the next eleven years cohabited with him, giving birth to five sons. Perhaps because of her previous marriage she never married him, although cohabitation was common among London’s plebeians. The couple settled near the military barracks in Sydney where James worked making screws, sickles and reap-hooks; this was where William was born in October 1802. Benjamin and James were born in Windsor in January 1806 (the other triplet did not survive); Thomas arrived in August 1808 and Henry John in June 1810. Life was not particularly easy for the couple during this period and they were sometimes driven to appeal for government aid from the stores in Hawkesbury although they became more financially stable as time passed.⁷³ Amelia’s life was made immeasurably harder, however, when James died at the age of thirty-six in 1811, leaving her a widow with five young sons – the eldest eight and the youngest only ten months old. It is not surprising that she remarried a few years later. In December 1816 in Liverpool, as Emma Goodwin, she married Robert Burrows, himself a former convict who had arrived in the colony in 1799. Two months earlier she had given birth to his son, also named Robert.⁷⁴ Robert senior held land close to hers in Campbelltown, an area renowned for its ex-convict settlers.⁷⁵ No doubt they had met and courted as neighbours.⁷⁶

Before his death James Rixon had been granted forty acres by the Governor at Airds in Campbelltown, and Amelia inherited this land. She and her new husband settled at Aspinall’s Farm near Windsor. But in an unfortunate accident in January 1820 this spouse also died – he drowned in the creek on their property, entangled in weeds, while she watched helplessly. Amelia continued to live in the Campbelltown area. To begin with her sons Benjamin and Thomas, who worked as constables in the area, lived with her. She moved out of their shared home but remained in the neighbourhood until her own death in January 1834, in close proximity to her eldest son William and three of her grandchildren, fathered by Thomas.⁷⁷ Amelia’s family history demonstrates the fluid and flexible nature of family formation during this period. Such transient relationships were common amongst families of both early nineteenth-century Britain and Australia.

Flexible family structures, like illegitimate children, were a cross-class phenomenon, although then as now the authorities took note of them only if children became chargeable to the community. Anna King had to deal with the consequences of the birth of her husband’s not so secret illegitimate sons, Norfolk and Sydney, mothered by convict Ann Inett before their marriage and Anna King’s arrival in New South Wales. Inett had been thirty and working as a dressmaker in Worcestershire when she was sentenced to transportation for house-breaking in 1785. She set sail on the Lady Penrhyn towards the end of 1786 and spent much of the journey in an appalling state of sickness. She was one of six female and nine male convicts then chosen to be shipped to Norfolk Island to establish a sub-colony, and soon after her arrival was sharing Philip Gidley King’s hut as his official housekeeper. Their relationship became intimate and lasted for at least two years. They had two sons, the second born while King was back in England. King assumed guardianship of both on returning to Sydney with his new wife. Ann was thus free to marry a former convict, the superintendent of the Government mills, Richard John Robinson at Sydney Cove in 1792, with whom she became a fairly prosperous landowner and managed an inn before returning to England as an elderly woman, after thirty years in the colony.

Anna King married her cousin Philip in 1791. On arrival in Sydney later that year she took charge of his sons, Norfolk and Sydney, and cared for them much as her own. Children were commonly transferred between carers according to needs and requirements. Many early colonial elite families sent their children back to England to be cared for by grandparents and educated in England, before the establishment of suitable schools in the colony; parents of large families also used relatives in the colony to care for their children during periods of sickness or lying-in. Norfolk and Sydney were both educated in England, transferred for the time being to the care of their grandparents, and they then trained for careers in the navy.⁷⁸

In the years after her arrival in Sydney, Anna Josepha gave birth to five children: Phillip in 1791, Anna-Maria in 1793, Utricia in 1795, Elizabeth in 1797 and Mary in 1805. Anna, with her friend Elizabeth Paterson, was simultaneously praised as well as derided amongst the colonial elite as ‘Queen Josepha’ for her work in the Orphan Schools.⁷⁹ After returning to England with his family, Philip died in 1808 of gout without ensuring a pension for his widow (now forty-three) and family. Eventually her numerous petitions to the colonial office paid off and she was granted a life annuity of two hundred pounds. Pulled between settling in England or Australia, jostled by the demands of family and sentiment, her choice limited by economic necessity (it was far cheaper to live well in Australia) she opted in the end for New South Wales to be near her daughters, Anna Maria (known as Maria) who married Hannibal Macarthur and Mary who married Robert Lethbridge. She set off on the long journey back in 1832 after twenty-five years’ absence from the colony, accompanied by her son Phillip, who had sent his wife Harriet Lethbridge ahead. At the age of sixty-eight, she returned to end her days in Australia amongst her children’s growing brood. The tally of her grandchildren reached the dizzy heights of twenty-seven.⁸⁰

In Parramatta, outside Sydney, Anna Josepha laid the foundation stone of the ‘Vineyard’ (Fig. 4) and lived there with her daughter, in her own separate quarters with her own transport and staff, until her death in 1844.⁸¹ The Vineyard was Hannibal and Maria’s home throughout their lives, though Maria became sicker following the births of each of her eleven children and was periodically moved to Sydney to be closer to her doctor when her health took a particularly bad turn for the worse. Phillip and Harriet lived at ‘Rosehill cottage’, also in Parramatta. Harriet, who had moved far from her family in Cornwall, away from her mother to whom she was close and her many beautiful sisters (though armed with her mother’s copies of Ann Taylor’s didactic oeuvre), depended upon the help, company and advice offered by her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law during her husband’s lengthy absences surveying and exploring the coasts of Australia.⁸²

The documentary sources for these interlocking early colonial households are rich. Their members wrote diaries, letters and journals, which together with governmental and non-governmental archival sources and birth, death and marriage records, allow us to draw connections between them and to better understand the family dynamics. Harriet eventually gave birth to eight children and wrote of them and their cousins and friends, in enormous detail, in letters she sent to her husband during his long absences and after moving from Parramatta to the family estate Dunheved. This estate was built on land first granted to Anna Josepha King by her husband in reward for her work establishing and managing the Orphan School.⁸³ Harriet fretted about those around her and expressed much concern for her sister-in-law Mary Lethbridge (daughter of Philip Gidley King and Anna Josepha King), who after moving into Rosehill cottage endured numerous miscarriages and became increasingly jealous of Harriet’s rapidly increasing family, before eventually giving birth to her own eight children. Harriet attended Mary during her first labour and stayed with her for a few weeks following the birth of her tiny, premature daughter, named Anna Josepha, in late February 1828.⁸⁴ The baby survived for only a few sickly months before dying in June. During this difficult period the sisters-in-law competed to help Mary. Maria was fiercely jealous of Harriet’s time with her: they had ‘a paper war about it but as it was Mary’s wish Maria’s health being so precarious’, Harriet stayed with her and left her to the care of her wet nurse after a month.⁸⁵

Harriet managed her large family and estate, like most elite women, with the help of servants. ‘I cannot do without 3 women at present, on account of the washing. We wash everything at home, and what with the Dairy, poultry, Baking, making candles, & so on, we find plenty to do’, she wrote in 1827. The women, usually Irish, hailed mostly from the Female Factory at Parramatta, but there were also at least two Aboriginal servants, Tommy Dumaresq and his ‘wife’ Nanny, to whom her children grew close. Some of the servants stayed for years in her family, others were just passing through.⁸⁶ She found her unexpected pregnancies exhausting to manage especially on her journeys to and from Australia, with her older children to care for and anxious not to give birth at sea. Her first son, like all her sons to her distress, was sent to England for his education. (He eventually married his cousin Elizabeth, daughter of Hannibal and Maria.)⁸⁷ To her delight she found a highly recommended and extremely well educated governess for her sister-in-law Maria’s increasing colonial brood, Miss Charlotte Waring, thirty years old.⁸⁸ Her delight was short-lived, however: she saw Charlotte flirting, falling in love with and becoming engaged to a Mr Atkinson, after only a three-week long acquaintance, on their shared journey out to the colony on board the Cumberland in 1826. Harriet believed this match to be entirely inappropriate due to the social gulf between the two.⁸⁹ Like many nineteenth-century mistresses (indeed mistresses in all periods), Harriet often complained about her ‘servant problem’. When she reached Dunheved in 1827, soon after her second arrival in the colony and the birth of her seventh child Arthur, she was distraught to discover that Mrs Hayes, the wife of her overseer, who had been in charge, wanted to leave and set up independently as mistress of her own house (‘she should not like anyone over her’), on her own landholding with her husband. Harriet was concerned that the time required for nursing and caring for her newborn would prevent her from effectively learning how best to manage the estate without the couple. But she soon recovered her composure and discovered that she relished the challenge. She successfully deflected the further threat of losing her nanny to marriage. After talking at length with the nanny about whether her prospective marriage was right,

…she told me she did not feel any particular wish for the man, only her brother told her he was respectable and it was a good match for her. I am going to give her higher wages and she is not to be so exclusively with the children … I thought I had better offer Nanny anything to remain here.⁹⁰

Harriet continued to live a prosperous and eventful life, becoming increasingly devout in her husband’s absence, rather to his annoyance on his return to the colony after almost ten years. She came to avoid secular pleasures and she worried particularly about sojourns at the Vineyard with the more godless (at least in her definition) Hannibal and Maria Macarthur.⁹¹ She also enjoyed growing old amongst her enlarging family, and was present at many of their births.⁹² She was a widow for eighteen years following the sudden death of her husband in 1856.

Charlotte Waring delayed marriage to keep her contract to Maria, but she left the enormous Macarthur family after just seven months at the ‘Vineyard’. Harriet believed she had behaved appallingly and given ‘herself many airs’.⁹³ Charlotte had been born to a barrister and his wife in central London in 1796, but her mother died in childbirth when she was only twenty months old. She became widely recognized as a child prodigy. As an adult her gifts as a teacher enabled her to earn the high annual salary of one hundred pounds a year as a governess bound for New South Wales. As we have seen she left her post to marry James Atkinson, and with him she had four children: Charlotte in 1828, Emily in 1830, James in 1832 and Louisa in 1834 before her husband died that same year. Left with a large estate to manage in an area targeted by bushrangers and in need of protection, she thought she should marry again. She lived to regret this hasty second marriage to George Bruce Barton, a friend of her husband’s and her estate manager. She and the children were soon exposed to his alcoholism and domestic violence and marriage meant that she was no longer economically independent nor the owner of the estate passed on to her from her late husband. She escaped, with her babes, their pet koala, several servants (mostly convicts and one Aboriginal) and a friend from England, through the perilous mountainous Meryla Pass and over the Shoalhaven River to Budgong. There she taught her children and reared them on her own while she turned to writing in order to earn. On returning to Sydney she subsequently became embroiled in a lengthy and extremely messy legal battle to gain income from her late husband’s estate. After a long campaign she was successful,⁹⁴ though she was accused of cavorting with the convicts who helped to maintain her estate and of being an unfit mother, and threatened with the removal of her children.⁹⁵ Her efforts at writing, based on stories she told to her children, resulted in the 1841 publication of Australia’s first children’s book, A Mother’s Offering to her Children. The meanings of this text are a story for another day.

What emerges from the interlinking of these biographies, pieced together from genealogical material, diaries, letters and biographies (many collected, conserved and written by family descendants) of Anna Josepha King and Amelia Goodwin, following the peaks and troughs of the journeys from England to Australia and back again, is a multi-layered, interlocking and enormously complicated picture of family life in early colonial Australia. The evidence also demonstrates the easy transference of parental and familial responsibility according to duty and necessity. What we discover from this material is the messy detail of familial love and hate, some of the meanings of duty, obligation, responsibility, happiness and pleasure and how households functioned. The pressure of economic necessity was felt, albeit it to different degrees and with a variety of consequences, by the elite as well as the poor during this period; and women’s particular economic disadvantage, their financial dependence upon men, primary responsibility for childcare, and the effects of frequent and lengthy paternal absence was experienced by all. Power was constantly renegotiated between mistresses, masters and their servants, mothers, fathers, daughters and in-laws. Family life was of course structured by the formations of class, gender and race specific to early nineteenth-century Britain and Australia, but there are continuities of experience that capture the imaginations of their descendants as well as others. Their stories, like most family stories then as well as now, are shaped by secrets and lies but also transition, tragedy and adaptation. This story and the details of some of these women’s lives are, of course, not new but there are valuable political points to be made in telling them again and using a variety of methods in order to do so. Revisiting them returns us once again to the questions first posited in 1994, in the important volume Creating a Nation, but with a slightly different emphasis.⁹⁶ How do we construct our national histories? Who do we consider to be our audience and why? What might policy-makers today learn from these accounts of family life in the past? There is no doubt that family life was as complicated in the past as it is today. Despite significant social, economic, cultural and political change and a diversity of experience amongst families of different classes, races and regions there is much continuity in the lives of families in Australia since the early-colonial period. Relationships in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Australia and Britain were frequently transient and vulnerable to death, disease, poverty, bigamy, work commitments, criminal sentences, illness and migration. Fractured families were as common then as they are now amongst all social classes.

Enthusiasts of genealogy complain that traditional history has not told ‘their story’. This is the lesson academic historians should heed. Big pictures are constructed using lots of little people. Individuals need to be our focus and they need to emerge from varied social classes, genders and races and from within specific social, economic and cultural contexts. For me it is important that the outputs of my research are as broad-ranging as possible, that they are targeted at the professional as well as the amateur historian in books, articles and exhibitions. This is crucial, I think, if you’re passionate about the democratization of historical knowledge. If family historians want to understand history through the lives of their ancestors then social and cultural historians can help them to contextualize these stories but we also need to acknowledge the content of their contributions. For those of us who celebrate the transnational journeys of customs in common, worlds turned upside down and women on top and who spend our professional lives searching for histories of resistance and negotiation, it seems to me appropriate to reassess the condescension shown towards the motivations, methods and findings of family historians as some innovative Australian historians have begun to do.

Many people contributed at a number of stages to the writing of this article. I thank Leigh Boucher, Lucy Frost, Heather Garnsey at the Society of Australian Genealogists, Tim Hitchcock, Janice Howie at the State Library of New South Wales, Bridget Howlett at the London Metropolitan Archives, Perry McIntyre, Peter Sherlock, Babette Smith, Christine Yeats at the State Records of New South Wales and Joye Walsh.

NOTES AND REFERENCES