Kerry Heckenberg - COnnecting REpositories · 2016. 8. 13. · Kerry Heckenberg 40 Queensland Review 27 July 1863 in the town of Ashton-under-Lyne. She was a servant with a rural

Out of the Frying Pan: Voyaging to Queensland in 1863 on Board the Fiery Star

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Out of the Frying Pan: Voyaging to Queensland in 1863

on Board the Fiery Star

Kerry Heckenberg

Introduction This article had its genesis in a family photograph of my paternal grandmother’s parents, Rowland and Rebecca Walton (see Figure 1).1 I knew little about them apart from their English origins, but their appearance was intriguing: definitely stalwart pioneers, but what kind of pioneers? Popular cultural knowledge in Australia provides one central image of the pioneer, summed up concisely by Katharine Susannah Prichard: ‘It will be a nation of pioneers, with all the adventurous, toiling strain of the men and women who came over the sea and conquered the wilderness.’2 Prichard’s notion was directly inspired by a painting, The Pioneer (1904) by Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917), described by Tim Bonyhady as ‘one of the most influential paintings of the emigrant experience in Australia’.3 Utilising a triptych format, it recounts (in the words of a contemporary reviewer) ‘its own legend of the useful toil, the homely joys, and destiny obscure of the pioneer, who does not live, as the rude cross in the third panel indicates, to see the growth or share in the prosperity of the fine city seen in the background of the panel’.4

Another significant emigration image is The Last of England (1855) by Ford Madox Brown (1821–93). While McCubbin tells the story of a working-class family, in Brown’s picture the focus is on a middle-class couple as they set sail for Australia, exploring their emotional reaction to the trauma of emigration and the difficulties of shipboard life. The artist described them as ‘high enough, through education and refinement, to appreciate all they are now giving up, and yet depressed enough in means, to have to put up with the discomforts and humiliations incident to a vessel “all one class”’.5 Richard Redgrave (1804–88) presents another class-based scenario in The Emigrant’s Last Sight of Home (1858), distinguishing between the working man’s carefree gesture in farewelling neighbours in his picturesque valley and the reactions of his wife, who seems anxious and uncertain about what lies ahead for the family.6

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How do such pictures relate to the realities of emigration experiences of working-class people in the nineteenth century? Patricia Macdonald argues that emigration was a pictorial theme that ‘could show an epic side to modern life’, but ‘unpleasant facts’ were usually not included. Women were usually depicted as ‘passive’, ‘nurturing’ and emotional: ‘All the anguish and anxiety of departure is shown by females, while their menfolk take on the heroic, stalwart and optimistic roles.’7 In other words, despite the ennobling effect of the use of religious formats such as the triptych or the circular tondo, cultural stereotypes often prevailed, obscuring actual experiences and attitudes.

The desire for better living and working conditions informed most decisions to emigrate, but did working-class people lack the sensibility to appreciate what they were giving up, as Brown and Redgrave seem to suggest? Did the path to success inevitably involve conquering the wilderness? Were the lives of pioneers generally subsumed by struggle with rewards being reaped by subsequent generations, as McCubbin indicates? The ‘Pioneer Legend’ has been extensively critiqued and analysed,8 but in this article it is the starting point for a more considered analysis of the interactions between individuals and momentous historical and social developments.

Figure 1: Rowland and Rebecca Walton (with grandson), ca 1927Source: Kerry Heckenberg


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This article presents case studies of two families – my ancestors, the Waltons, and another working-class family, the Hanlons – who migrated to Queensland in 1863 on board the clipper Fiery Star because of the impact of the Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861–65. The arguments and images used to attract people to the new colony of Queensland are of interest, along with the events of the voyage. The writers of the ship’s newsletter, The Fiery Star Gazette, were able to consider the long, monotonous trip (caused by an absence of strong winds) in a positive light when they suggested to disembarking passengers: ‘May the calm and prosperous passage … enjoyed in the Fiery Star, be an emblem of [your] future voyage through life.’9 But was this the experience of all passengers? What were the outcomes of their various ventures?

An investigation of the experiences of working-class people will help to fill a gap, since these experiences have not been recorded to the same extent as those of the middle and upper classes. Although some diaries of shipboard life written by working-class people survive, they are outnumbered by the diaries of those who were wealthier and better educated. Often the latter were published, making them a valuable and accessible source for researchers. Another popular genre for recording experiences of travel and colonisation was the memoir, but again such works were written predominantly by the upper classes. A memoir written in Brisbane in the 1870s by Mary McConnel, wife of a successful pastoralist, demonstrates the cosmopolitan character of such families. McConnel notes that ‘there was a good deal of coming and going between the dear old country and the new’ as couples honeymooned in Europe or children returned to England for their education.10 In contrast, it is often claimed that the working classes seem to have had little control over their destiny: Helen Woolcock, for example, suggests that ‘ordinary men often appeared as pawns in the hands of the powerful’.11 My study contests this notion, since my two case studies demonstrate working-class agency, energy and mobility. While diaries and letters of the working class have become available in recent scholarship,12 building up a wider picture of emigration and its outcomes still needs more detailed empirical research of the kind undertaken in this investigation.

Out of the Frying Pan: LancashireThe Lancashire Cotton Famine of the early 1860s began when blockage of Confederate ports by the North during the American Civil War resulted in a shortage of raw cotton for processing by the many mills of Manchester and the surrounding region. Over-production by mill owners in the late 1850s exacerbated problems in the cotton industry, leading to widespread unemployment or under-employment in Lancashire.13 Rowland Robert Walton was born in 1838 in Glossop, an interesting example of a town that grew rapidly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a former cottage industry was transformed by mechanisation and the development of the factory system of production. His parents were cotton weavers, and he entered the cotton industry as a child, becoming a weaver himself.14 Just before his departure for Queensland, he married Rebecca Kinder (born 1837) on

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27 July 1863 in the town of Ashton-under-Lyne. She was a servant with a rural background, growing up on a farm near Edale in the Peak District. With Rebecca’s out-of-wedlock son, five-year-old James, the couple then set off for London, where they were among the 324 passengers who departed from Gravesend on board the Fiery Star on 11 August.

The Waltons were Nonconformists with a strong religious identity. H.J. Perkins has argued that the local mill-owners were central in the development and social organisation of Glossop:

Each of them, it is said with pardonable exaggeration, built a mill, a church, and a school. They were, almost without exception, strongly sectarian in outlook, and their competitive championship of different churches was the one rivalry around which every other revolved.15

My other case study family had a different cultural and religious background, but they are otherwise similar. However, the differences would probably have had more impact on their emigrant experiences and social interactions than their similarities.16

Both Thomas (ca 1833–96) and Annie Hanlon (born Annie Mary Winterburn) (ca 1836/40–91) were also in their twenties when they decided to migrate to Queensland.17 Irish-born and probably Catholic, Thomas was another worker from Lancashire. With his English wife, whom he married in Manchester in 1861, and Lancashire-born one-year-old son, William Egan (1862–1941), he boarded the Fiery Star in Queenstown (now known as Cobh) as part of a contingent of 230 who left from this port. Presumably the family had travelled to Ireland to farewell relatives and friends before emigrating. Another son, Louis (1863–1938), was born during the voyage.18 In Figure 2, the two sons are pictured in a newspaper report of a reunion of passengers and their descendents held at W.E. Hanlon’s home in Brisbane in 1932. By this stage, these early settlers were being celebrated as ‘pioneers’, with a group identity conferred by the fact of having been passengers on a particular ship.19

Although both Thomas Hanlon and Rowland Walton were part of the cotton manufacturing workforce, the occupation of each is given as ‘labourer’ in the passenger list. Neither is included with other cotton operatives and their families who were part of the cohort of passengers, so they were not among the most destitute unemployed cotton workers.20 Indeed, Walton managed to pay intermediate class fares for the family. However, his hometown at the time, Stalybridge, was badly affected by the cotton famine,21 and employment prospects in the region were bleak: in February 1863, The Times reported that ‘not more than one-half the cotton workmen can hope to resume their ordinary employment with a period considerably exceeding the present year’. The newspaper also relayed a plea for ‘private individuals’ to help by ‘undertaking some work of convenience or ornament which, but for the motive now presented to them, they might postpone’.22 As well, the Illustrated London News ran a series of articles detailing the plight of the unemployed workers and the various schemes that were instituted in order to help them. In Glossop,


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the patriarchal character of the relief can be seen in the schools set up for the children and young adults, where attendance was a condition of relief, and in the tea parties and brass-band concerts provided, not to mention the public readings of the Pickwick Papers by Lord Edward Howard [the local aristocrat].23

While the images illustrating the articles (e.g. Figure 3) show the workers as meek and subservient, and as deserving aid recipients, Lancashire was actually very unsettled. Rioting occurred in Stalybridge in March 1863 as a result of discontent with the payment of relief in the form of vouchers rather than money.24 The Times reported: ‘From the outbreak of this popular indignation to the arrival of the military mob law may be said to have reigned, and the town was in the hands of this most disgraceful mob of excited beings.’25 Most of those arrested were Irish. Windows of businesses belonging to members of the Relief Committee were broken, and clothing was looted. It is not surprising, therefore, that leaving was an attractive prospect, but what prompted my subjects to become part of the very small number who migrated to Queensland at this time? Of the 223,758 people who emigrated from Britain in 1863, 8 per cent went to the North American colonies, 65.6 per cent went to the United States and 23.7 per cent came to Australia and New Zealand, but only 3 per cent of the total came to Queensland – just 13 per cent of immigrants to Australia and New Zealand.26

Figure 2: ‘Fiery Star Passengers’ Reunion’Source: Brisbane Courier, 15 January 1932: 14.

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Figure 3: ‘St Paul’s Industrial Schools, Stalybridge:School for adults’ (left) and ‘The shoemaking class’ (right)Source: The Illustrated London News, 10 January 1863: 56.

The Lure of QueenslandAlthough Queensland had only been declared an independent colony in 1859, and a minority of emigrants entertained the idea that it might be a promising destination, it was heavily promoted to intending migrants from Lancashire. It was considered that there was a peculiarly apposite fit between the English cotton-processing region and Queensland, the colony touted as the future cotton field in books and pamphlets produced between 1847 and 1863 by clergyman and immigration promoter John Dunmore Lang (1799–1878), Queensland’s first Agent-General in Britain Henry Jordan (1818–90) and Congregational minister and journalist George Wight (1817–1900).27 Working in the hot and humid conditions of cotton mills was considered good preparation for growing the plant in hot, humid Queensland.28

Lang was also driven by the notion of free Protestant families working their own small farms in contrast to vast plantations utilising a slave workforce found in other countries where cotton was grown. In his second book, Lang writes persuasively about the sort of accommodation that could be expected: a simple slab-house adorned with vines and surrounded by a lush garden with artfully placed ‘orange-trees, fig-trees, olives, and pomegranates, interspersed with patches of bamboos, bananas, and pine-apples’.29 This must have been a tempting prospect if the bleak images of cotton workers’ homes published in the Illustrated London News (Figure 4) are accurate.


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Figure 4: ‘Dwellings of Manchester operatives’Source: The Illustrated London News, 29 November 1862: 585.

Particularly important was the work of Jordan in Britain, where he travelled widely. In 1862 and 1863, he reported the delivery of 34 lectures about Queensland in 21 different places, spread over Ireland, Wales, Scotland and seven of the English counties.30 He also publicised or supported the infant colony in newspaper articles and letters.31 In addition, special societies such as the Lancashire and Queensland Cotton Growing Co-operative Society were formed to promote emigration to Queensland by unemployed cotton operatives,32 and the Hanlons emigrated under the auspices of one of them. Perhaps most significant was the generous land grant scheme provided by the Queensland government that Jordan publicised in the Manchester Guardian in 1862–63. Both the Waltons and the Hanlons were able to use this scheme to either offset the cost of their passage or obtain land for farming.33

The Voyage on the Fiery StarThe ship that carried the two families to Queensland was launched in New York in 1851 under the name Comet, and was re-named Fiery Star when purchased by the Black Ball line, a company that was formed in 1852 by Thomas Miller Mackay, a shipwright, and James Baine, a shipowner from Liverpool. In the 1860s, they obtained an exclusive agreement with the Queensland government to bring immigrants to Queensland on board their clippers, impressive ships as

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Clem Lack suggests: ‘With their slim, symmetrical lines, their tapering spars, and storeyed yards of billowing canvas, they were the most beautiful things ever made by Man.’34 However, problems with the land order system led to adjustments in 1864. Shipboard conditions were also criticised, with some Black Ball ships recording a high death rate.35

The Fiery Star sailed to Queensland twice with William Hunter Yule as captain, in 1863 and 1864, but it met an untimely end when it caught fire and sank on the return voyage in 1865. Those who abandoned ship were lost, while those who stayed with the burning vessel were rescued.36 While such a distressing outcome was avoided in 1863, passengers still encountered difficulties. Minor illnesses occurred, but this was inevitable with such large numbers, and exacerbated by the long duration of the voyage.37 The major problem was overcrowding. According to the regulations, the maximum number of passengers was 470, but 554 emigrants were noted on arrival.38 Although the saloon passengers praised the captain and surgeon wholeheartedly in testimonials that were published in the local newspaper, others were very unhappy.39

A major cause of discontent was the sale of alcohol from a storeroom in the single females’ quarters, encouraging harassment of these women by inebriated men. First cabin passenger Robert Blurgon Beaumont was particularly disorderly and unseemly in his behaviour. Intermediate passengers, including the Walton family, signed a petition detailing their dissatisfaction with this situation, also noting that married men were unable to protect their wives and children from drunken ‘persons’ on the ‘several occasions’ they ‘were ordered off the Poop’. Of most concern was the relocation of Intermediate accommodation from an area on the deck to an area between decks that was part of a passageway for steerage passengers. The passage of goods to and from the storeroom resulted in continual disturbance, and great inconvenience in dining due to a lack of sufficient space – in other words, they experienced the ‘discomforts and humiliations’ mentioned by Brown in relation to his middle-class couple. In particular, the petitioners wrote, ‘we were obliged to endure all sorts of annoyances from the Steerage Compartment such as loud talking, cursing, swearing continually jarring from 4 o’clock in the morning till 11 at night’.40 Relief must have been the chief sentiment of all when the ship finally moored in Moreton Bay, and the passengers were able to make their way up the river to the ‘large and straggling’ township of Brisbane.41

Into the Fire: QueenslandAfter overcoming the initial difficulties of finding accommodation,42 both couples set to work in Queensland. Was it an improvement on life in Lancashire or on board ship? While the Hanlons did attempt to grow cotton, the Waltons opted for a different course. They used their initial land orders (totalling £36) to purchase a 61 acre block for farming at Tingalpa (present-day Wynnum West), an area situated south of the mouth of the Brisbane River, and also produced three children over the next five years, thereby proving themselves to be exemplary immigrants.43 The first two – both boys – were born at Tingalpa in 1864 and 1866.44 Market


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gardening was the principal activity in the district, with farmers growing melons, potatoes, corn and peaches, although sugar cultivation was increasing by 1867.45 In December 1865, the Waltons received a second land order, valued at £24 (part of the land order system under which they had emigrated), and used it either to purchase more land or to offset any debt.46 The 1860s were characterised by difficulties, however, in the form of alternating drought and flood, severe fires in the centre of Brisbane and a serious economic recession from 1866–68.47 Tingalpa experienced especially bad conditions in 1867, leading to ‘the emasculation of the neighbourhood’.48 The Waltons were part of this exodus, selling their farm in July 1868 shortly after the birth of their next child – a daughter – at Indooroopilly.49

What can be deduced from these actions? Rebecca Walton’s rural background would presumably have been an excellent preparation for a self-sufficient life on a Queensland farm, despite differences in climate. On the other hand, adjusting to life as a farmer must have been more challenging for Rowland Walton. However, the birth of three healthy children suggests that a reasonably successful transition was accomplished despite the vicissitudes of drought, flood and financial recession. Furthermore, although cotton weaving might not have been the ideal preparation for life on the land in Queensland, it did encourage independence and the exercise of individual initiative. According to a contemporary commentator:

As a rule, we find a considerable amount of intelligence among our operative classes, certainly among the better orders of them. They live in crowds, and their minds are sharpened by attrition. Each individual, too, has to think and reason for himself in his daily duties.50

Willingness to move in response to changing work opportunities was another characteristic of cotton workers. Indeed, the sale of their land seems to have given the Waltons the means to quit the uncertainties of rural life in Queensland and they sailed for London on 6 August 1868 as Steerage passengers on board another Black Ball clipper, the Bayswater.51 One way or another, Queensland must have proved too hot for them, or the ties of home proved too compelling. After an absence of five years, they were able to return to Manchester as an established family group with four children, any shame attached to Rebecca’s illegitimate child forgotten.

The Waltons are part of a small and little-studied group of ‘return immigrants’ – ‘the least visible of Australian immigrants’ in the nineteenth century according to Eric Richards.52 In contrast, the Hanlons followed a different course, one that conforms more closely to popular expectations, though not exactly. Some of their experiences are recorded by their elder son, William, an amateur naturalist and historian who frequently contributed information to local newspapers. In one publication, he notes that his parents, as members of a cotton cooperative society, proceeded shortly after their arrival to their allotted block of land ‘on the north bank of the Logan River, about mid-way between the present hamlets of Waterford and Loganholme’.53 The struggle in the wilderness of these families began with the opening-up of ‘dense vine-matted scrublands’ and building of ‘axe-trimmed timber’ houses ‘with stringy bark roofs’ and bare ground underfoot. Having cleared

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some ground, they planted maize, but a promising crop was ravaged by bandicoots, scrub pademelons and white cockatoos. A more successful second crop was still insufficient to support them so the men had to find work elsewhere, leaving their wives to cope alone in ‘utter isolation, surrounded by the virgin bush, with all the eerie nocturnal voices’. Cotton-growing was never a realistic possibility, and the families left the cooperative estate by 1866.54 The Hanlons’ personal life was also marked by sadness, with a baby boy dying at birth in 1866. However, a healthy daughter was born the following year, and the family set out on a different path to prosperity in their new country.55

Like the Waltons, the Hanlons had received a second land order two years after their arrival.56 By 1869, the family was settled on the northern side of the Albert River at Yatala, operating the ferry there.57 In 1870, Hanlon was granted a licence to run the Ferry Hotel at Yatala (see Figure 5).58 Business must have prospered further, and Hanlon bought land at Southport in 1875 and built another hotel there in 1878.59 The two-storeyed Hanlon’s Family Hotel, later the Pacific Hotel (Figure 6), was much larger and more imposing, and the family also operated the post office there between 1879 and 1883.60 Thomas Hanlon was actively involved in local affairs, being a member of the Southport Divisional Board with a particular interest in horse racing.61 The local Member of Parliament, Thomas Plunkett (1840–1913), was a fellow Irishman and Fiery Star passenger in 1863.62 The hotel flourished during Southport’s heyday as the favoured resort of the colonial elite, but the area suffered a decline in the 1890s when the new Governor, Sir Henry Norman, opted for a hill station retreat in Toowoomba.63

Figure 5: William Boag (1838?–1878), Thomas Hanlon’s Ferry Hotel at Yatala, 1872Source: State Library of Queensland Image no. 190861.


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Figure 6: Guy Hunt, Pacific Hotel, Marine Parade, Southport, ca 1890sSource: Gold Coast City Council Library,

Image no. LS-LSP-CD144-IMG0026 (LSP014917).

When the Fiery Star arrived in Brisbane in November 1863, the local newspaper reported that it

brings out as respectable a body of passengers as ever came to the colony. Most of the young men are from the higher and middles classes in England and Ireland, and bring with them what is so essential to success in a new country, viz – energy, enterprise, and capital.64

While this seems over-optimistic with regard to capital, in different ways these immigrants did indeed show ‘energy and enterprise’. The convivial Hanlons achieved spectacular success in a short time, but they died comparatively young: Annie in 1891 aged 51/55 and Thomas in 1896 aged 62 years. Membership on the board of the Southport Cemetery Trust no doubt ensured Thomas a prime position for his once-imposing monument there (it has been badly treated by vandals) (Figure 7),65 a marked contrast with the fate envisioned by McCubbin.

The Waltons continued more modestly, living in the Manchester area for around fifteen years with Rowland working as a railway signalman.66 They had four more children, one boy and three girls. Perhaps stimulated by the decision of the eldest son, who returned to Australia in 1882,67 the rest of the family took advantage of an assisted passage scheme to emigrate for a second time in 1885, this time (like James) to the colony of New South Wales.

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Figure 7: Tomb of Thomas and Annie Hanlon, Southport General CemeterySource: Kerry Heckenberg.

They arrived in Sydney on 24 March on the steamship Gulf of Mexico after 58 days, a much shorter and more ‘tempestuous’ trip than that experienced on the Fiery Star.68 When they finally disembarked after a period of quarantine due to the presence of scarlet fever, the various family members commenced the rest of their lives in Australia, with Rowland and Rebecca dying within a week of each other in Sydney in 1927, first Rowland aged 89 and then Rebecca aged 90.69 Although they never achieved great prosperity, their rich and varied past included extensive experience of ocean travel at a time when this was unusual for working-class people.

Conclusion

A picture – even a triptych such as that painted by McCubbin – can only tell part of any complex story, but my research underlines the narrowness of the portrait of the pioneer emigrant propounded in Australian mythology. The pioneers in this study – the Waltons and the Hanlons – did not simply cope with the adversities sent their way. Their various oceanic passages were a step towards personal transformation. In their decision to migrate, and their subsequent life choices, they reveal themselves to be canny agents of their own destiny who were resilient in the face of hardship, but also able to take advantage of opportunities that presented themselves in urban as well as rural areas.


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Notes

1 A version of this article was presented at ‘Oceanic Passages’, Centre for Colonialism and its Aftermath conference, University of Tasmania, held in Hobart, 23–25 June 2010.

2 Katharine Susannah Prichard, The Pioneers, rev. ed. (Adelaide: Rigby, 1963 [1915]), 256; quoted by Tim Bonyhady, ‘The Pioneer’, in Patricia Tryon Macdonald, Exiles and Emigrants: Epic Journeys to Australia in the Victorian Era (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2005), 123.

3 Bonyhady, ‘The Pioneer’, 120. The painting can be seen online by searching the website of the National Gallery of Victoria, www.ngv.vic.gov.au.

4 ‘Exhibition of Australian Art’, Argus, 22 April 1904: 7. For further discussion, see Jane Clark and Bridget Whitelaw, Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond, rev. ed. (Sydney: International Cultural Corporation of Australia, 1986), 148–49.

5 See Kenneth Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1998), 136. Also see Macdonald, Exiles and Emigrants, 26–27; Tim Barringer, ‘The Last of England’, in Macdonald, Exiles and Emigrants, 20–25; D.M.R. Bentley, ‘The Last of England, The Literature of Emigration, and “The Pathos of the Subject”’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 5 (1996): 35–44. Online image at www.preraphaelites.org/the-collection/1891P24/the-last-of-england.

6 See Macdonald, Exiles and Emigrants, 52-53. Search online at www.tate.org.uk/.7 Macdonald, ‘Introduction’, in Macdonald, Exiles and Emigrants, 10, 13; see 10–17.8 J.B. Hirst, ‘The Pioneer Legend’, in John Carroll (ed.), Intruders in the Bush: The Australian

Quest for Identity, 2nd ed. (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992), 14–37 [first published Historical Studies (October 1978)]. See also Graeme Davison, ‘Sydney and the Bush: An Urban Context for the Australian Legend’, in Carroll, Intruders in the Bush, 109–30 [first published Historical Studies (October 1978)]; and Frank Bongiorno and David Andrew Roberts (eds), Journal of Australian Colonial History, special edition, ‘Russel Ward: Reflections of a Legend’, 10 (2008): 2.

9 The Fiery Star Gazette, 28 November 1863, unpaged, http://nla.gov.au/nla.aus-vn658255.10 [Mary McConnel], Memories of Days Long Gone By, 1905 (Brisbane?: Mary McConnel, 1905),

51.11 Helen R. Woolcock, Rights of Passage: Emigration to Australia in the Nineteenth Century

(London: Tavistock, 1986), xiv; see xiv–xv.12 Andrew Hassam, No Privacy for Writing: Shipboard Diaries 1852–1879 (Melbourne: Melbourne

University Press, 1995).13 John Watts, The Facts of the Cotton Famine (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1866); W.O. Henderson,

The Lancashire Cotton Famine, 1861–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1934); Norman Longmate, The Hungry Mills (London: Temple Smith, 1978).

14 Genealogical sources used in this article: www.lancashirebmd.org.uk; www.ancestrylibrary.com; Queensland Pioneers’ Index.

15 H.J. Perkin, ‘The Development of Modern Glossop’, in A.H. Birch, Small-Town Politics: A Study of Political Life in Glossop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 18.

16 See Andrew Hassam, ‘Our Floating Home’: Social Space and Group Identity on Board the Emigrant Ship (London: Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, 1992), 17.

17 Thomas’s father’s name was William and his mother was Theresa. Annie’s maiden name is variously listed as Winterburne or Winterburn and her second name is either Mary or Maria, while her parents were John and Annie Winterburn. Thomas was born in Dublin in 1836 according to W. Frederic Morrison, Aldine History of Queensland, Vol. 2 (Sydney: Aldine Publishing Company, 1888), ‘Appendix-Biographical Sketches: Southport, The Pacific Hotel’, unpaged. However, this entry is of questionable accuracy if the other information contained there is any indication. In particular, I have been unable to verify the military career in India

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and the Crimea described by Morrison. Thomas Hanlon’s age at death is recorded on his tombstone in Southport General Cemetery as 62 years in January 1896, suggesting a birth year around 1833. He was certainly born in Ireland. Annie Hanlon’s age is recorded as 51 on the tombstone, but 55 on her death record.

18 ‘Reunion After 68 Years. Fiery Star Passengers’, Brisbane Courier, 15 January 1932: 12; also Fiery Star Gazette, 19 September 1863: health officer, J.J. Luce, notes the birth of two ‘ocean sons’.

19 The phrase ‘63 pioneers’ is used by W.E. Hanlon in a letter quoted in a newspaper article: ‘Fiery Star Passengers’, Brisbane Courier, 5 January 1932: 8.

20 W.E. Hanlon, in ‘The Early Settlement of the Logan and Albert Districts’, Historical Society of Queensland Journal 2(5) (1935): 208, describes his father as a cotton worker, although no other corroborating evidence has been found in Census lists, etc.; Eileen B. Johnson, They Came Direct: ‘Fiery Star’ 1863 (Tinana, Qld: Eileen B. Johnson, 2005), 7 [Walton], 16. Note that the name Hanlon is incorrectly recorded as ‘Hanton’ and Annie is called Hannah; the recorded age of each (26) is also of questionable accuracy since this does not agree with information from other sources.

21 ‘A Manchester Man’, ‘Our Manufacturing Districts and Operative Classes’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 66: 393 (September 1862): 363–82, esp. 366–67.

22 ‘The Relief of Distress in Lancashire’, The Times, 25 February 1863: 11.23 Perkin, ‘Development of Modern Glossop’, 22–23.24 J.H. Bridges, ‘The Lancashire Crisis’, The Times, 14 March 1863: 14.25 ‘Riots at Staleybridge’, The Times, 23 March 1863: 12; also ‘Monthly Intelligence’, Gentleman’s

Magazine 214 (April 1863): 498.26 See www.theshipslist.com/Forms/EmigFromUK1815_1870.htm.27 John Dunmore Lang, Cooksland in North-Eastern Australia; The Future Cotton-Field of Great

Britain (London: Longmans, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847); Henry Jordan, Emigration to the New Colony of Australia: The Future Cotton Field of England (London: G. Street, 1860, 1863); John Dunmore Lang, Queensland, Australia: A Highly Eligible Field for Emigration, and the Future Cotton-Field of Great Britain (London: Edward Stanford, 1861); George Wight, Queensland: The Field for British Labour and Enterprise, and the Source of England’s Cotton Supply (London: G. Street, 1861) (further editions 1862, 1863). Also, John Lang, ‘Emigration of Lancashire Operatives’, The Times, 27 February 1863: 5.

28 Robert Longhurst, Queensland Cotton: Past and Present (Brisbane: Queensland Cotton Holdings, 1996), esp. 1–14; Patrick Hayes O’Connor, ‘Cotton: An Agricultural Staple for Queensland in the 1860s’, BA (Hons) thesis, University of Queensland, 1989.

29 Lang, Queensland, Australia, 278. See also Rod Fisher, Boosting Brisbane: Imprinting the Colonial Capital of Queensland (Brisbane: Boolarong Press, 2009).

30 Clem Lack, ‘Colonial Representation in the Nineteenth Century. Part II: Some Queensland and Other Australian Agents-General’, Royal Historical Society of Queensland Journal, 8 (1965–66): 82.

31 W. Ross Johnston considers Jordan to be ‘a skilful propagandist, [who] used the available media to advantage’: ‘The Selling of Queensland: Henry Jordan and Welsh Emigration’, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 14(9) (1991): 382.

32 A.G. Davies, ‘Immigration and the Immigrant Ships (Moreton Bay)’, Historical Society of Queensland Journal, 2(6) (1935): 312.

33 Both families received land vouchers, which were issued in Brisbane on 26 November 1863. Information from Queensland State Archives, Microfilm Z2518 (Thomas Hanlon-Certificate No. 4503; Rowland and Rebecca Walton-Certificate No. 4572).

34 Lack, ‘Colonial Representation’, 106.35 Woolcock, Rights of Passage, 12; see 10–13, 26–27, 36–39, 70–72. On the Black Ball line

and its exclusive arrangement with the Queensland government after 1863, see also Davies,


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‘Immigration and the Immigrant Ships’, 310–11; Warwick Foote, ‘Queensland Immigration and the Black Ball Line’, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland 10(3) (1977–78): 21–49. New regulations were introduced by the Queensland government in 1861 and 1864 to combat charges of a faulty selection procedure and rorting of the system (it could be used as a way of obtaining a cheap passage to one of the more established Australian colonies). Furthermore, trafficking in Land Orders, and a lack of immigrants with capital, led to a reduction in colonial land revenue and detracted from the ability of the government to undertake important public works.

36 Davies, ‘Immigration and the Immigrant Ships’, 320–21.37 See Johnson, They Came Direct, 30–31.38 Johnson, They Came Direct, 5, 32–33 (final numbers comprised 30 Saloon passengers,

71 Second cabin, 42 Intermediate and 411 in Steerage).39 Johnson, They Came Direct, 37–49.40 Johnson, They Came Direct, 42–43.41 Richard Watt, ‘Second Cabin Passage’ [Part 6], Sea Breezes 22(128) (1956): 82–92 (quotation

p. 89). See also Fisher, Boosting Brisbane, 11–20.42 Watt, ‘Second Cabin Passage’, 89–90; Fisher, Boosting Brisbane, 20–22.43 Woolcock, Rights of Passage, xiv: ‘The new colony … wanted only those who shared colonial

expectations, could work hard and reproduce rapidly.’44 Rowland Walton purchased 61 acres in the Parish of Tingalpa (Portion 135) on 5 December

1863, paying £1 per acre: Queensland Government, Department of Environment and Resource Management, Folio 195, Vol. 31, D/G No. 7933. Birth details about the Walton children from the Queensland Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages: 1864/B2715 (Rowland Robert Walton), 1866/B5956 (Frank Walton). Place of birth is given on their birth certificates.

45 Regular reports in the Brisbane Courier, ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ in Tingalpa, detail conditions in the area between 1864 and 1868.

46 Information from Queensland State Archives, Microfilm Z2518: Record of Second Land Orders, Record No. 4492, issued on 29 November 1865; Microfilm 7069, No. 4492, ‘Received at Treasury’ on 4 December 1865 from LA Ipswich. See also ‘Immigration Regulations’, Queensland Government Gazette, 2(3) (12 January 1860): 15–17; ‘Immigration Regulations’, Supplement to the Queensland Government Gazette, 4(127) (16 November 1863): 989–91.

47 See Rod Fisher et al., Brisbane Timeline: Captain Cook to Citycat (Brisbane: Brisbane History Group, 1999).

48 ‘Tingalpa’, Brisbane Courier, 21 December 1867: 5; also 4 January 1868: 5.49 The sale was completed on 27 July 1868: Certificate of Title No. 17837, Vol. 33, Folio 87.

Elizabeth Sarah Walton was born 14 June 1868: see Queensland Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, 1868/B8611. The Waltons were staying or living in the Long Pocket area of Indooroopilly since the midwife was the wife of a local dairy farmer.

50 ‘A Manchester Man’, ‘Our Manufacturing Districts and Operative Classes’, 377.51 The Waltons were part of a small passenger contingent, with one Saloon passenger, four in

Second cabin and thirteen in Steerage (plus the new Walton baby): Brisbane Courier, 5 August 1868: 2. Fares were £30 saloon, £27 10s. second cabin, £18 10s steerage: Brisbane Courier, 4 July 1868: 1.

52 Eric Richards, ‘Return Migration and Migrant Strategies in Colonial Australia’, in David Fitzpatrick (ed.), Home or Away? Immigrants in Colonial Australia. Visible Immigrants: Three (Canberra: Australian National University, 1992), 64.

53 Hanlon, ‘Early Settlement’, 208. Hanlon states here that his parents were ‘members of the self-styled “Manchester Cotton Company”’. However, his identification of the particular company is probably a mistake, since the Manchester Cotton Company lands were on the Nerang River. Rather, the Hanlons are more likely to have been part of the Lancashire Cooperative estate set up on the Logan River: see Robyn Buchanan, ‘The Short Reign of King Cotton’, in Logan-

Kerry Heckenberg

52

Queensland Review

Rich in History, Young in Spirit (1999), www.logan.qld.gov.au/lcc/logan/history/publications/richinhistory.htm; Longhurst, Queensland Cotton, 8; Michael Jones, Country of Five Rivers: Albert Shire 1788–1988 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988), 56–61. See also W.E. Hanlon, ‘Reminiscences’ [typewritten manuscript], 1940, Fryer Library, University of Queensland.

54 Hanlon, ‘Early Settlement’, 208–10.55 Information from Queensland Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages: 1866/2938 (Thomas

Michael Hanlon); 1867/6538 (Julia Mary Hanlon). Another baby (a daughter) died at birth on 10 April 1871: Queenslander, 22 April 1871: 1.

56 £24 was granted on 13 December 1865 and redeemed in June the following year: information from Queensland State Archives Microfilm Z2518: No. 4841.

57 Hanlon, ‘Reminiscences’, 2.58 See Dianne Byrne, A Travelling Photographer in Colonial Queensland: The Work of William

Boag (Brisbane: State Library of Queensland, 1994).59 On 6 November 1878, William Egan Hanlon advertised his forthcoming application for a

publican’s licence there: Brisbane Courier, 6 November 1878: 1.60 Hanlon, ‘Early Settlement’, 227.61 He was treasurer of the Southern Queensland Turf Club in 1875: ‘Beenleigh’, Queenslander,

6 November 1875: 6; the Southport Divisional Board noted its debt to Thomas Hanlon after his death: Brisbane Courier, 22 February 1896: 4.

62 Indeed, both were on stage for a ‘Lecture on New Australia’, with Thomas Hanlon presiding over the proceedings: Brisbane Courier, 1 November 1894: 6. Plunkett was another Steerage passenger on the Fiery Star. He received a land order after the voyage and went on to become a successful dairy farmer before becoming a politician: Queensland State Archives, Microfilm Z2518 (Certificate No. 4468); S.J. Routh, ‘Plunkett, Thomas Flood (1877–1957)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 16 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 13–14.

63 Robert Longhurst, Southport: Images of Yesteryear 1880–1955 (Gold Coast: Gold Coast City Council, 1994), 9–13.

64 ‘The Fiery Star’, Courier, 23 November 1863: 4 (the judgement is credited to ‘a saloon passenger’).

65 As recorded on the tombstone, Annie Hanlon died on 14 May 1891 while Thomas Hanlon died on 10 January 1896.

66 This occupation is recorded on the English Census records for 1871 and 1881.67 James Walton and his family voyaged as assisted immigrants to Sydney on board the Samuel

Plimsoll.68 ‘The SS Gulf of Mexico’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 March 1885: 5.69 Sydney Morning Herald, 26 August 1927: 9; 27 August 1927: 16.

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Queensland ReviewVolume 17 Issue 2 (2010)

Publisher: University of Queensland Press ; Griffith University, Faculty of Humanities,Queensland Studies CentreISSN: 1321-8166Publication Type: JournalSubjects: History; Social Sciences; Modern history; Social history & conditions; Politicalscience; Social policyCoverage: Volume 10, Issue 1 (May 2003) - onwards (Comprehensive)Peer Reviewed: Yes

Database: Humanities & Social Sciences Collection

Editorial

EditorialMcKay, Belinda

Articles

Ross Donald Laurie (1960-2010): An AppreciationEvans, Raymond

Brisbane's Radical Russian Community, 1911-1918Curtis, Louise

Out of the Frying Pan: Voyaging to Queensland in 1863 on Board the 'Fiery Star'Heckenberg, Kerry

Vida Lahey: Beyond 'Monday Morning'Cooke, Glenn R

Queensland Literary Culture in the Long Decade after Joh: Institutional Developmentand Narratives of ChangeGlover, Stuart

Living in the End Time: Ecstasy and Apocalypse in the Work of H.D. and JanetteTurner Hospital

'Skilful Handling and Scientific Treatment': The Charity Organisation Society ofBrisbane During the Great DepressionSingley, Blake

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Brisbane [Book Review]Buckridge, Patrick

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Kerry Heckenberg - COnnecting REpositories · 2016. 8. 13. · Kerry Heckenberg 40 Queensland Review 27 July 1863 in the town of Ashton-under-Lyne. She was a servant with a rural