¹ Van Diemen's Land was established as a separate colony in 1825; Port Phillip was settled from 1834 and became the colony of Victoria in 1851; South Australian colonization began in 1836; the original settlement at Moreton Bay in 1824 eventually evolved as the colony of Queensland in 1859; and the slower settlement of Western Australia began in 1829.

² See Butlin, N. G.. Investment in Australian Economic Development, 1861–1900 (Cambridge, 1964). pp. 5, 404Google Scholar.

³ A Letter to the Right Honourable R. W. Horton on the Subject of Emigration and Colonization, by “One of the Multitude” (London, 1830), p. 7Google Scholar.

⁴ “Minutes of Evidence taken before the Committee on Immigration,” Legislative Council, New South Wales, Sydney, June 16, 1835, p. 304Google Scholar.

⁵ Cited in Richards, Eric, “A Voice from Below: Benjamin Boyce in South Australia.” Labour History, no. 27 (1974), pp. 61–72Google Scholar.

⁶ Letters of Hugh Watson to his parents, September 9, 1839, December 18, 1842, Mortlock Library of South Australiana (hereafter MLSA), Adelaide, D6075 (2).

⁷ Adelaide Register (May 8, 1926).

⁸ Letter of James Solly, July 1, 1849. Mitchell Library (hereafter ML). Sydney, M.L. Doc. 1733.

⁹ Holograph letter of William and Betsy Slocombe, May 12, 1841, ML. Ae 35/1.

¹⁰ Public Record Office of South Australia (hereafter PROSA). Adelaide, GRG 24/1/1840, 48 1a.

¹¹ Letters of Charles Sydney Fuller, ML. MSS 2196.

¹² Letters of Benjamin Amis, National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA), Canberra. MS 1228.

¹³ Reminiscences of William Clayton, 1833–1933, MLSA, D 6424 (2).

¹⁴ Amis.

¹⁵ See. e.g., Tranter, N. L., Population and Society, 1750–1940 (London, 1985), p. 141Google Scholar: Handlin, O.. The Uprooted (Cambridge. Mass., 1951)Google Scholar. passim; and the discussion in Baines, Dudley. Emigration from Europe, 1815–1930 (London, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ See, e.g., Erickson, Charlotte, “Emigration from the British Isles to the U.S.A. in 1831,” Population Studies 35 (1981): 175–97CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Vugt, William E. Van, “Prosperity and Industrial Emigration from Britain during the early 1850s.” Journal of Social History 22 (1988): 339–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ See Nicholas, Stephen, ed.. Convict Workers (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ The passage to Australia was more than £30 per head compared with £5 to British North America in the mid-1820s. In later decades, fares fell considerably, as did the differential between Australia and North America. But the passage to Australia remained beyond the reach of the vast majority of working people in Britain, and certainly beyond the unemployed and the disadvantaged. On the early fares, see Madgwick, R. B., Immigration into Eastern Australia, 1788–1851 (Sydney, 1937), p. 60Google Scholar; and Johnston, H. J. M., British Emigration Policy, 1815–1830: “Shovelling out paupers” (Oxford, 1972), chap. 1Google Scholar.

¹⁹ The sensitivity of emigration to the costs of the passage is well attested. See. e.g., Dunkley, Peter. “Emigration and the State, 1803–1842: The Nineteenth Century Revolution in Government Reconsidered,” Historical Journal 223 (1980): 356Google Scholar; and Arnold, Rollo. The Farthest Promised Land (Wellington. 1981), p. 9Google Scholar.

²⁰ Borric, W. D. (“The Population,” in Australian Society, ed. Hancock, Keith [Cambridge, 1989], pp. 120–21)Google Scholar estimates that Australia received 1.61 million migrants in the nineteenth century, of whom 732.000 were assisted. In the decade of the gold rushes, there were 671.000 immigrants, of whom only 230.000 were assisted. The proportions of the assisted before and after the gold rushes were, therefore, considerably higher.

²¹ The terms “poor,” “paupers,” and “the destitute” were often given varyingly negative connotations in the nineteenth century. Under-Secretary Hay tried valiantly to bring terminological clarity to the question in January 1831. but without much success. See Madgwick, p. 91. Particularly confusing was the tendency to regard as a “pauper" or “destitute” any immigrant “whose passage was financially assisted by state or private charity.” See N. L. Tranter, p. 134. It was, indeed, common to regard all assisted emigrants as “Poor Persons”: see James Stephen to J. S. Lefebvre, July 4, 1834, quoted by Main, J. M.. “The Foundations of South Australia,” in The Flinders History of South Australia: Political History, ed. Jaensch, D. (Adelaide, 1987), p. 9Google Scholar. On the technical difficulties, see McClymer, John F., “The Historian and the Poverty Line.” Historical Methods 18 (1985): 105–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On changing meanings more generally, see Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The Idea of Poverty (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; and Sen, Amartya, Poverty and Famine (Oxford, 1981), chap. 2Google Scholar.

²² Notably that of Erickson.

²³ See n. 15 above.

²⁴ From the beginning, of course, a few skilled immigrants had been recruited to the colonies, and some of the richer capitalist settlers brought retinues of servants with them, for whose passages they presumably paid. Families of military personnel also settled in the colony. See the case of Macleod of Talisker cited in Richards, Eric. “Australia and the Scottish Connection, 1788–1914,” in The Scots Abroad, ed. Cage, R. A. (London, 1985), pp. 119–20Google Scholar. Immigrant numbers are given in Madgwick. p. 65; and in Coghlan, T. A., Life and Industry in Australia, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1918), 1:216Google Scholar.

²⁵ See, e.g., Legislative Council, New South Wales, “Committee of Inquiry into Immigration” (n. 4 above), evidence of Thomas Ryder and Richard Jones, pp. 305–8.

²⁶ Fay, C. R., Huskisson and His Age (London, 1951), pp. 65–67. 125Google Scholar.

²⁷ Himmelfarb, p. 5.

²⁸ See Johnston (n. 18 above), p. 111; and Kittrell, Edward R., “The Development of the Theory of Colonization in English Classical Political Economy,” in Great Britain and the Colonies. 1815–1865, ed. Shaw, A. G. L. (London, 1970), pp. 46–76, esp. pp. 52–55Google Scholar. Wilmot Horton's legislation also opened the possibility of linking land sales to emigration, though this was not central in his thinking at the time; see Johnston, p. 164. Mostly British opinion discounted the idea of the colonies paying for their own immigrants. But W. C. Wentworth and Edward Eager, as well as Robert Gourlay and Robert Torrens, had anticipated some of these ideas. See McLachlan, Noel, “Edward Eagar, 1787–1866: A Colonial Spokesman in Sydney and London,” Historical Studies 10 (1961–1963): 443Google Scholar; and Johnston, p. 111.

²⁹ The Poor Law Report of 1834 described emigration as “one of the most innocent palliatives of the evils of the present system” and gave examples of the reduction in poor rates achieved by parochial boards sponsoring emigration. The report said, however, that “Those persons are generally most forward to emigrate who are least corrupted by the abuses of the system of relief. Those are most willing to remain a burthen to their parishes who are most thoroughly profligate and useless.” See The Poor Law Report of 1834, ed. Checkland, S. G. and Checkland, E. O. A. (Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 487–88Google Scholar. This proposition is at least partially confirmed in the work of Anne Digby on East Anglian parish emigration in the 1830s in “The Labour Market and the Continuity of Social Policy after 1834: The Case of the Eastern Counties,” Economic History Review, ser. 2, 28 (1975): 10–13Google Scholar.

³⁰ See, e.g., Governor's Despatches to Colonial Office. February 3, 1835, ML. A1213. expressing the view that “A good deal of disappointment has arisen both on the part of the Emigrants and the Colonists from a want of correct understanding in England as to the persons on request here.”

³¹ Coghlan, 2:590. 923.

³² See R. C. O., Matthews, A Study in Trade Cycle History (Cambridge, 1954). chap. 12Google Scholar; and Gayer, Arthur D.. W. W., Rostow, and A. J., Schwartz, The Growth and Fluctuation of the British Economy, 1790–1850, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1953). vol. 1, chap. 5Google Scholar.

³³ Legislative Council of New South Wales, “Final Report of the Committee for Immigration” (Sydney, 1835)Google Scholar, votes and proceedings, p. 410. About 3.000 single women figured prominently in the early flows of assisted immigrants, and many appear to have been from very poor backgrounds. The controversy over their selection and reception is considered in Hammerton, A. J., “Without Natural Protectors: Female Immigration to Australia, 1832–6,” Historical Studies 16 (1974–1975): 539–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ See Mills, R. C.. The Colonization of Australia, 1829–42 (London, 1915), p. 183Google Scholar.

³⁵ See Erickson, Charlotte. Emigration from Europe, 1815–1914 (1976), p. 127Google Scholar; and Johnston, p. 164: British Parliamentary Papers, Emigration, vol. 22, emigration series (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1969), p. 314Google Scholar. The counties represented were predominantly those of southeast England. The relative insignificance of pauper emigration is put in perspective by Wilmot Horton's earlier plans to spend £12 million on pauper emigration. At another time he contemplated the expenditure of £20 million of public funds to promote emigration from Ireland. See Johnston, p. 169. Note that the provisions of the New Poor Law did not affect Scotland. See also Armstrong, W. A., Farmworkers (London, 1988), pp. 69–85Google Scholar; and Oxley, Geoffrey W., Poor Relief in England and Wales, 1601–1834 (London, 1974), p. 119Google Scholar. The numbers of the parochial poor emigrating to Australia are discussed in Madgwick (n. 18 above), pp. 142–43, 215–17.

³⁶ Quoted in Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore (London, 1987), p. 558Google Scholar. Between 1848 and 1853 there were special arrangements for the emigration of assisted paupers from Irish and English workhouses and ragged schools. The total involved may have reached 9.000 out of the 34.100 assisted to New South Wales in those years. There were further special recruitments in the mid-1850s. See Madgwick, p. 216.

³⁷ Despatches of the governor of New South Wales, Sir Charles Fitzroy to John Pakington, 1852, ML, MSS A1261 No. 130.

³⁸ SirTrevelyan, Charles, Three Letters on the Devonshire Labourer (London, 1869), p. 13Google Scholar.

³⁹ Quoted by G. Higinbotham in the Legislative Council of Victoria, June 2, 1870, reproduced in Select Documents in Australian History, 1851–1900, by Clark, C. M. H. (Sydney, 1955), p. 247Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Legislative Council of New South Wales, “Final Report,” Committee on Immigration, May 27, 1842, p. 34Google Scholar. votes and proceedings (n. 33 above).

⁴¹ See Erickson, , Emigration from Europe, p. 160Google Scholar.

⁴² T. W. C. Murdoch to Herman Merivale, April 23, 1849, Colonial Office, 201/422, London.

⁴³ The obvious way to prime the flow of emigration was to make the passage entirely free and this was provided at various times and for specific categories of immigrant. But even so, the results could not be guaranteed. For example, efforts by New Zealand schemes to attract domestic servants on this basis were never entirely successful. See Macdonald, Charlotte, A Woman ofGood Character (Wellington, 1990), pp. 22–27Google Scholar. Note also the sad cases she cites of women being unable to raise the preemigration expenses and. for this reason, declining the opportunity to emigrate, pp. 53–57.

⁴⁴ Murdoch to Merivale, April 23, 1849. Colonial Office, 201/422, London. Note the case of Thomas Dobeson, who emigrated to Sydney in 1883 and required £7 to make up the passage money for himself, his wife, and child. He managed to offset £5 of this sum by teaching aboard the migrant ship on which they traveled. See Davison, Graeme and Constantine, Shirley, eds., Out of Work Again (Monash, 1990), p. 5Google Scholar. Wage rates in Britain, even within agriculture, varied greatly over time and between regions. Many agricultural laborers in southern England earned barely ten shillings per week in the 1840s. Australian rates for both men and women were substantially higher, and rural workers in Australia almost always received rations and usually also accommodation in addition to their wages. See Coghlan (n. 24 above), vol. I. chap. 3; vol. 2, chap. 7. For a rare direct comparison of living standards between the two countries, see Hunt, E. H., British Labour History, 1815–1914 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1981), p. 108Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ On the problems of rural emigration and its interpretation, see Armstrong, W. A., “The Flight from the Land,” in The Victorian Countryside, ed. Mingay, G. E., 2 vols. (London, 1980), 1:128–30Google Scholar; and Mingay, G. E., Rural Life in Victorian England (London, 1977), pp. 110–19Google Scholar. See also Hunt. pp. 153–57. Many of the issues are canvassed in Hunt, E. H., Regional Wage Variations in Britain, 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1973), chap. 7Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ British Parliamentary Papers, 1852, XVIIIGoogle Scholar, twelfth report of Emigration Commissioners for the year 1851, p. 161.

⁴⁷ See Jones, E. L., Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1974), pp. 215–20Google Scholar. Gideon Lang, reporting the prospects for agricultural migration to New South Wales in 1861. pointed out that the cycles of the twice-annual hiring markets were rarely considered by the emigration agents, who consequently lost some of the best potential recruits: Correspondence of Sir Henry Parkes. Lang to Parkes, May 21, 1861, ML, A924.

⁴⁸ See Digby (n. 29 above), pp. 10–13.

⁴⁹ Both landlord and employer interference against the efforts of the recruiting agent was reported by G. F. Dashwood to Francis Dutton, November 18, 1859, Letterbook Relative to Emigration, Public Record Office of South Australia, Adelaide, GRG 35/41/1.

⁵⁰ On the relaxation of regulations in difficult recruitment times, e.g., in 1848–49 when emigrants from workhouses were taken, see Madgwick (n. 18 above), p. 153.

⁵¹ Murdoch to Merivale, April 23, 1849. Colonial Office, 201/422.

⁵² T. F. Elliot to Governor of New South Wales, September 28. 1839, ML. A1281.

⁵³ For some indication of the extent of emigration societies, see Shepperson, W. S., British Emigration to North America (Minneapolis, 1957), pp. 113, 210, 237–38Google Scholar; Gray, Malcolm, Scots on the Move (Edinburgh, 1990), p. 21Google Scholar; and Coghlan, 2:606, 923. Trade unions also organized emigration; see Leeson, R. A., Travelling Brothers (London, 1980), chap. 11Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ The number of Chinese entering Australia in the nineteenth century seems to have been in excess of 60,000, though their return rates were high. See Wang, Sing-wu, The Organization of Chinese Emigration, 1848–1888 (San Francisco, 1978), chap. 7Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ See Richards, Eric, “Immigrant Lives,” in The Flinders History of South Australia: Social History, ed. Richards, (Adelaide, 1986), pp. 148–52Google Scholar; and Crowley, F. K., “Working Class Conditions in Australia, 1788–1851” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Melbourne, 1949), pp. 338 ff.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Martin, A. W., Henry Parkes (Melbourne. 1980), esp. p. 23Google Scholar. More generally on the problem of poverty among emigrants, see Johnston (n. 18 above), p. 94. The sale of possessions before departure is referred to in Scrope, G. Poulett. Extracts from Letters from Poor Persons who emigrated last year to Canada and the United States (London, 1831), pp. 5–6Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Emigration from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (printed by Trelawney Saunders, London, 1852)Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Baker, Jacob to his Friends and Neighbours, published in Scotsman (September 1852)Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Baker's, letter was published in the Devizes Gazette (July 22, 1852)Google Scholar and also in Scotsman (September 15, 1852). The work of the association is recorded in the Wiltshire County Record Office, Trowbridge: Correspondence with Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, June 4, 1851, records of Wiltshire Emigration Association. Register of Applications, minutes. 1849–52. See also Baker, Mark, “Aspects of the Life of the Wiltshire Agricultural Labourer.” Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine 74, no. 5 (1981): 161–69Google Scholar; Baker, Mark. “From Wiltshire to Australia. 1851: The Story of an Emigration,” manuscript in Mitchell Library, Sydney, ML, 2333Google Scholar. “Some Early Wiltshire Emigrants to Australia,” Hatcher Review 2. no. 17 (1984): 329–34Google Scholar, and “A Migration of Wiltshire Agricultural Labourers to South Australia in 1851,” Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia 14 (1986): 67–82Google Scholar. See also Newman, Ruth, “The ‘Swing Riots’: Agricultural Revolt in 1830,” Hatcher Review 2, no. 18 (1984): 436–47Google Scholar.

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⁶¹ Webster, D. B., “A Migrant Lacemaker,” Descent 12 (September 1982): 119–28Google Scholar; Webster, D. B., ed., The Bunda Connection (Hackett, Australian Capital Territory, 1985)Google Scholar. On general background to the lacemakers' movements, see Lowe, David and Richards, Jack, City of Lace (Nottingham, 1982)Google Scholar; Church, R. A., Economic and Social Change in a Midland Town: Victorian Nottingham, 1815–1900 (1966), pp. 94, 324–25Google Scholar.

⁶² See also the case of some Brecon convicts in 1828, whose wives and families were to receive free passages to Australia “if their conduct has been good during the passage”: Col. T. Wood to J. Jones, June 5. 1828. Maybery Papers, MS 6502, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.

⁶³ See Buddee, Paul, Fate of the Artful Dodger (Perth, 1984)Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ On Chisholm, see Kiddle, Margaret, Caroline Chisholm (Melbourne, 1957)Google Scholar; and on Lang, see Baker, D. W. A., Days of Wrath (Melbourne, 1985)Google Scholar.

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⁶⁶ Trevelyan to Mackay, November 8, 1852, McNeill Papers, Scottish Record Office. Edinburgh, GD 371/233 and GD 371/231/1; Highland Emigration Society Papers, Scottish Record Office, HD 4/3, T. Fraser to C. Trevelyan, 14 July 1853; T. W. C. Murdoch to C. Trevelyan, 24 Oct 1853, 28 Oct 1853; C. Trevelyan to J. McNeill, 19 Feb 1854. More generally, see Richards, Eric, A History of the Highland Clearances, vol. 2Google Scholar, Emigration, Protest, Reasons (London, 1985), chap. 10Google Scholar.

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⁶⁸ There is a hazard in focusing on these types of migrant. Charlotte Erickson has given good warning in her remarks about “the hardy tradition of immigration historiography to cite groups in the population with particular problems and thereby to imply that these were the emigrants” (“Emigration from the British Isles to the U.S.A. in 1831” (n. 16 above), p. 177).

⁶⁹ See Richards, Eric, “Women in the British Economy since about 1700: An Interpretation,” History 59 (1974): 337–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In 1851 there were more than 2 million persons employed in agriculture, then still “the most important single industry.” By 1871 it had diminished, and there were then more in domestic service than in agriculture. See Deane, P. and Cole, W. A., British Economic Growth, 1688–1914 (Cambridge, 1962), p. 142Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ See Armstrong (n. 35 above), pp. 128–30.

⁷¹ British Parliamentary Papers, annual reports, Emigration Commissioners, appendix no. 6 (nos. 16–31). The quality of these data has not yet been tested against other sources in either Australia or North America. It should be noted that the years 1854–55 were within the period affected by the gold rushes and that 1865 was a relatively unexceptional year. The official statistics need to be read in the light of the fact that prospective emigrants were more likely to gain an assisted passage if they could designate themselves as agricultural laborers or domestic servants.

⁷² Fitzpatrick, David. “Irish Emigration in the Later 19th Century.” Irish Historical Studies. 22 (1980): 126–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁷⁴ Despatches of the secretary of state to the Governor of New South Wales, Thomas Rogers to Herman Merivale, August 9, 1855, ML. MS A1320.

⁷⁵ Erickson, Charlotte, “Who Were the English and Scottish Emigrants to the United States in the Late Nineteenth Century?” in Population and Social Change, ed. Glass, D. V. and Revelle, R. (London: Arnold, 1972). pp. 347–81Google Scholar. “Emigration from the British Isles to the U.S.A. in 1831,” Population Studies 35 (1981): 175–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “Emigration from the British Isles to the U.S.A. in 1841: Part I. Emigration from the British Isles,” Population Studies 42 (1989): 347–68Google Scholar, “Emigration from the British Isles to the U.S.A. in 1841. Part II: Who Were the English Emigrants?” Population Studies 44 (March 1990): 21–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baines, Dudley, Migration in the Mature Economy: Emigration and Internal Migration in England and Wales, 1861–1900 (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Baines points to a deepening of the migrant outflow, toward lower-paid workers, by the 1880s, but he is not sure when the trend was first established (p. 77).

⁷⁶ Madgwick (n. 18 above), p. 141.

⁷⁷ Schultz, R. J.. “Immigration into Eastern Australia, 1788–1851.” Historical Studies 14 (1970): 273–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his Ph.D. thesis. “The Assisted Immigrants, 1837–1850” (Australian National University, 1971), pp. 200–201Google Scholar.

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