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  Over the ensuing fifteen years, three programs were introduced in the hope that they would increase the flow of migrants to Australia from Britain. These were assisted passages, a bounty system, and various charitable schemes that sought to relieve overcrowding and other problems in Britain while assisting the struggling colonies. All three did deliver positive results, but none was as effective as had been hoped.

  The government recognised that many would-be emigrants from Great Britain and Europe, particularly families, could not afford the cost of relocation, so in 1830 the assisted passage scheme was introduced. This was financed by the sale of government-owned land in New South Wales. It was a concept that was sufficiently successful for it to remain in place for twenty years – a period during which 187,000 new settlers were brought to Australia, most of them under an assisted passage.

  The bounty system, introduced in 1835, was structured around an incentive program for shipping agents: they were paid a reward by the New South Wales colonial government for each commercially skilled young couple, or single woman, they secured as emigrants. Unfortunately, though, the scheme was full of loopholes that made it easy for money-hungry agents and ship owners to grossly overload their ships and maximise their profits. In time, few people wanted to emigrate under those circumstances, and this led the program to be abandoned after just six years of operation.

  Then there were the schemes set up, often by private groups, to provide relief to specific communities suffering various forms of hardship. The ‘Earl Grey Scheme’ – named after its creator, the British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies – brought 4000 young women out to Australia from Irish workhouses, in an effort to improve the gender imbalance. However, the new arrivals were frowned upon as being poor workers of low moral character, and the scheme only lasted from 1848 to 1850.

  Much better received was a scheme to assist 5000 crofters – poor tenant farmers – affected by the Highland Clearances in the western Scottish Highlands and Hebrides Islands.

  The clearances occurred during a dark period in Scottish history in which wealthy landholders evicted their struggling farmer tenants, their wives and children using the most violent of methods. Their aim was to convert their extensive land holdings into sheep-grazing properties, which would be far more financially rewarding than the virtual subsistence farming then being undertaken.

  Too often the evictions came at short notice from the aristocratic land owners and were nothing short of inhumane. Perhaps the most ruthless participants in these mass evictions in the first half of the nineteenth century were the First Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. They forcibly removed thousands of crofters from their land so it could become a thriving wool- and meat-producing property. While the callous expulsions were occurring, the duchess took time to write a letter to a friend in England in which she described the starving crofters and their families on the Sutherland estate as follows: ‘Scotch people are of happier constitution and do not fatten like the larger breed of animals.’

  If the crofters and their families refused to leave the land then the landlords went to any length to remove them, including the use of fire. Local stonemason Donald McLeod detailed the horror of such an event:

  The consternation and confusion were extreme. Little or no time was given for the removal of persons or property; the people striving to remove the sick and the helpless before the fire should reach them; next, struggling to save the most valuable of their effects. The cries of the women and children, the roaring of the affrighted cattle, hunted at the same time by the yelling dogs of the shepherds amid the smoke and fire, altogether presented a scene that completely baffles description – it required to be seen to be believed. A dense cloud of smoke enveloped the whole country by day, and even extended far out to sea. At night an awfully grand but terrific scene presented itself – all the houses in an extensive district in flames at once. I myself ascended a height about eleven o’clock in the evening, and counted two hundred and fifty blazing houses, many of the owners of which I personally knew, but whose present condition – whether in or out of the flames – I could not tell. The conflagration lasted six days, till the whole of the dwellings were reduced to ashes or smoking ruins.

  In the isolated western Highlands and islands, tenants were evicted to coastal towns, where their plight added to the woes of an already overpopulated region, especially with little church and community assistance available. Their miserable existence forced them to rely on potatoes as a large part of their diet, so when the crop was affected by a severe blight in 1846, the impact was devastating.

  Grave community concerns led to the formation of a charitable organisation, the Skye Emigration Society (SES), in 1851, which aimed to provide a solution via migration. Yet it soon became very evident to society members that the situation was only destined to deteriorate, as the majority of locals did not want to leave. This left the SES with no option but to take a firm stance. Consequently, it released a statement that spelled out the facts of life for all to contemplate:

  . . . you are to consider what you are to do hereafter without this assistance, for every one of you must know that such relief is not to be expected again . . . But, whether you desire it or not, it cannot be looked for. Destitution . . . will be regarded in a different light, and those who wilfully neglect any means of escape that are offered to them, and choose to remain in circumstances [from] which destitution is inseparable, will obtain very little sympathy or assistance.

  In short, the society would not accept any further responsibility for those who did not agree to being resettled via migration. The government did send some food supplies – mainly oatmeal – to ports on Scotland’s west coast, but that just prolonged the agony rather than provided a solution.

  It wasn’t until the Assistant Secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury in London, Sir Charles Trevelyan, intervened that real progress was achieved. He saw the emergency food deliveries as a ‘useless palliative’, and stated, ‘This community is tortured and preyed upon . . . and the “patient” and “loyal” Highlander being tamed by the mistaken kindness of his friends into a Professional Mendicant.’

  He agreed that Scotland’s western Highlanders had to be relocated, a decision that led him to establish, in January 1852, the Highland and Island Emigration Society (HIES), along with one of the region’s high profile residents, Sir John McNeill, and the Chairman of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, Sir Thomas Murdoch. They based their operation in Skye, and the former SES became part of this larger organisation. Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, was named the society’s patron, and the Queen and other prominent individuals donated large amounts towards this worthy cause.

  The most vexing question facing the three committee members was where to send these poor, homeless and starving people. But the answer soon became apparent. Trevelyan announced ‘the necessity of adopting a final measure of relief for the Western Highlands and Islands by transferring the surplus of the population to Australia’.

  This was a win–win decision. With many farmers now abandoning the land and flocking to the goldfields, Australia desperately needed migrants with a rural background, and every one of these crofters had just that.

  It was May 1852 when the HIES published its rules relating to emigration to Australia:

  The Emigration will be conducted, as much as possible, by entire families, and in accordance with the rules of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners.

  Passages to Australia are provided by the Commissioners, from Colonial funds, for able-bodied men and women of good character . . . The emigrants will he required to repay to the Society the whole of the sums advanced to them, which will again be applied in the same manner as the original fund. The owners or trustees of the properties from which the emigrants depart will be expected to pay one-third of the sum disbursed on account of the emigrants by the Society.

  The program was so successful that today in one particular area – the Moidart region,
25 miles west of Fort William – there are fewer actual residents than there are descendants in Australia of the people who emigrated with the support of the HIES.

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  By the late 1840s, the various immigration schemes were beginning to make a difference to Australia’s population growth. Then in 1849, as we have seen, this growth hit a snag with the seemingly unstoppable exodus of thousands of fortune hunters headed to the Californian goldfields – but the decline was more than reversed when Australia’s own gold rush commenced just two years later. With new discoveries being declared almost every week and immigrants flooding to Australian shores, the colonial authorities could not have been happier with the decision to no longer suppress news of gold discoveries.

  However, woollen goods producers in England were soon expressing their concern about the consequences of the gold rush on their industry, and the probable interruption to the supply of wool from Australia. They feared that many sheep farmers and shearers would join the gold rush in preference to remaining on the land. The government in London immediately initiated a scheme designed to encourage rural workers in England to migrate to Australia and take up the slack. Yet it proved to be unsuccessful: almost every rural worker who travelled to Australia did so with the sole intent of looking for gold.

  By the late 1850s, though, the number of migrant ships coming to Australia was declining. The decrease was due mainly to a waning of the gold-rush euphoria. Some migrants were still arriving in Australia with the goldfields as their ultimate destination, but in nowhere near the numbers that had come when the news of the first gold finds had been trumpeted to the world.

  Fortunately, when the gold could no longer be found, a vast proportion of the foreign visitors elected to stay. Consequently, millions of Australians today can trace their family heritage back to those intoxicating days of gold fever and the clipper ships.

  It would be a similar scenario in New Zealand a decade later: a significant number of today’s New Zealanders have the roots of their family trees firmly embedded in the Otago gold rush of the early 1860s.

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  The western side of the continent would also receive its share of gold-rush frenzy, but not until 1885, when prospector Charles Hall discovered alluvial gold in the Kimberleys. The big discoveries – the finds that caused men to abandon their lifestyles in the east and head west as quickly as possible – did not come until gold was uncovered in large quantities in Coolgardie in 1892 and Kalgoorlie the following year. Like all the large discoveries that preceded them, these two finds transformed the colony and the lot of its people.

  This reversal of the colony’s fortunes was badly needed. Though the Swan River Colony – renamed Western Australia in 1832 – had been founded as a free settlement, over the following two decades its economy had stagnated so badly that the only solution lay in converting it to a penal settlement. Convict labour was free, and this asset would prove invaluable to the colony’s growth.

  Between 1850 and 1868, forty-three ships – some of them clippers – landed nearly 10,000 convicts in Fremantle. The last ship to bring England’s unwanted to Australia, the 875-ton Hougoumont, arrived off Fremantle on 9 January 1868, with 280 convicts and 108 passengers on her manifest.

  The final prisoner to be hustled onto the dock from Hougoumont that day was the last of more than 165,000 convicts transported to Australian between 1788 and 1868. In recent times it has been calculated that 2 million Britons and 4 million Australians can today lay claim to convict ancestry.

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  Incredibly, some 70,000 of those 165,000-plus male and female convicts found themselves in Van Diemen’s Land (renamed Tasmania in 1856), which never had the benefit of a gold rush to attract new settlers. Some of the felons were used as free labour in the colony’s coal mines, which began operation in 1805, and as timber-getters.

  After a large number of the island colony’s much-needed free settlers, particularly rural workers, responded to the news of the 1851 gold discoveries by quitting their jobs and heading to the mainland, the government took quick action. To counter the exodus, Van Diemen’s Land offered assisted passages and small parcels of farmland in the colony’s north and north-west.

  The majority who accepted this proposition first sailed to Melbourne aboard one of the Black Ball Line clippers that plied this route – like Lightning and James Baines – then transferred to a small steamer or sailing vessel that was heading across Bass Strait to Launceston, on Tasmania’s northern coast. Some clippers, like Commodore Perry, did sail directly to Launceston – as was reported on page two of the Launceston Examiner on 10 April 1855:

  This splendid ship, belonging to Messrs Baines and Co., commanded by Captain Mundle, arrived from Liverpool on Saturday last, after a passage of 85 days. She sailed from Liverpool on 11th January, with about 800 passengers for this port and Sydney.

  It was also reported that 350 of the 800 passengers were migrating to Van Diemen’s Land.

  That same year, a total of 5000 assisted immigrants arrived in Van Diemen’s Land, 858 of whom were Germans, but from that time on, the island colony became the poor cousin of the mainland colonies when it came to attracting migrants. In 1866, only 53 migrants arrived, while a mere 700 were welcomed between 1866 and 1882.

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  Of all the Australian colonies, it was Queensland – founded in 1859 – that best demonstrated how to attract desperately needed migrants without the benefit of a gold rush or the opportunity to draw on a convict labour force. It did so via a scheme implemented in the mid–1860s – one so successful that, apart from attracting immigrants on a large scale, it brought new life to the then waning migrant and passenger ship business out of England. Between 1861 and 1900, Queensland received more immigrants than any other Australian colony.

  Surprisingly, during the entire period of convict transportation to Australia, only two convict ships were directed to Moreton Bay, where Brisbane lies today. In November 1849 Mount Stewart Elphinstone arrived there carrying 225 male convicts, and five months later, Bangalore sailed into the Brisbane River and landed 292 male convicts.

  However, between 1824 and when these ships arrived, records reveal that 2240 convicts – both men and women – were ‘re-transported’ from New South Wales to Moreton Bay. The first convict settlement was established there in 1824 at Redcliffe, in the north-western sector of the bay, only to be relocated a few years later to a more secure site on the banks of the Brisbane River (now the centre of Brisbane). Those prisoners had been transferred north from Sydney for one reason: they were among the most dangerous offenders sent to Australia from England – so bad that they could not be trusted as workers outside the compound walls.

  In 1846, more than two decades after those first convicts were sent north from Sydney to Moreton Bay, a proposal was put forward by the New South Wales Government to establish a vast new colony, North Australia, encompassing all Australian territory north of 26 degrees latitude. The Letters of Patent were issued by Queen Victoria in May 1846 and the new colony was born.

  The Moreton Bay Courier, which began publication as a weekly newspaper that same year, told its readers where North Australia’s inhabitants would come from:

  All the liberated convicts in Van Diemen’s Land who may throw themselves for support on the Government of that Colony, and, in future, all the exiles from the mother country, are to be sent to this settlement on their arrival . . . land will be assigned to them to be cultivated, and it is expected that with little comparative aid from the Government, they will be able to maintain themselves.

  To obviate the objection that North Australia will be composed of males only, a portion, if not the whole, of the female convicts will be sent there direct from England, and also all the female convicts from Van Diemen’s Land, who may be unable to obtain employment. Married men, who have regained their freedom, will have their wives and children sent out to them.

  The story went on to warn that the proposal for the creation of North Australia was ‘
avowedly an experiment and one which must end in complete failure unless the plan be greatly modified’.

  This was an astute observation on the part of the editor, because on 6 March the following year Courier readers were being informed, ‘all is not well with North Australia’. The radical and costly plan was abandoned two months later. (The British Government had decided to revoke the Letters Patent in December 1846 but the news did not reach North Australia until May 1847.) The local parliamentary representative, Rev. Dunmore Lang, suggested the new colony be called Cooksland and extend further south into modern New South Wales, but at last the borders were agreed upon in their current form. It is thought that when Queen Victoria signed fresh Letters of Patent in 1859 to finally form the new colony in the north, the name Queensland was her suggestion.

  From the outset the dilemma for Queensland’s government was that the colony lacked inhabitants, especially those needed for the development of its extensive areas of farmland, in order to produce the one valuable export commodity of the time: wool. In short, Queensland had little to recommend it as a destination for migrants, and consequently was virtually unknown in the British Isles and Europe.

  This lack of awareness became the greatest challenge facing Queensland’s first governor, Sir George Bowen, and his administration; they had to find a way to change the colony’s profile so that it could emerge from obscurity and appeal to would-be emigrants looking for a new start in life. Eventually, after much debate and consideration, it was decided that the only way to succeed was simply to hand the problem to the colony’s first agent-general for immigration, Henry Jordan, and have him come up with a solution.