Historian celebrates ordinary women
Liz Rushen: the Fish Creek historian and author has a keen interest in the stories of Australia”s colonial women.
By Matt Dunn
FISH Creek historian and author Liz Rushen signed copies of her latest book, Fair Game, at Foster’s Little Bookshop on Saturday.
The book has been described as a history of the “brave young women who took up the opportunity find work and establish families when there was little hope of such for many of them doing so at home”.
Written with Perry McIntyre, Fair Game chronicles the journey of 400 women who came to Australia in 1832 aboard two ships, the Red Rover, which sailed from Cork to Hobart, and Princess Royal, which followed a passage from London to Sydney.
“By the 1830s they were short of women in the colonies and they had to work out a way to encourage women to come. So they sent out two pilot ships, one from Ireland, one from England.
But the problem with sending out shiploads of women, though, was that the women were not seen as respectable, because they came out without a man,” Liz said.
“In fact, it was only enterprising, courageous and adventurous women who wanted to come to the colonies then. They had to be healthy, they had to be between 15 and 30, and they had to be single or widowed.
“My argument is that it’s like any migrant today. People could see more opportunities somewhere else. These women were regarded as being prostitutes because they didn’t come out with a male. By and large they weren’t like that at all and were women from ordinary families wanting a better life.”
Liz said the research for Fair Game was often difficult, because “most of them married, most of them settled down”.
“That’s what makes them so hard to write about. It’s tricky finding people who just live a regular life. If people are in jail or in the newspapers it’s much easier to find them,” she said.
But Liz has negotiated this path before and is no stranger to painstaking research.
The newly appointed secretary of the Foster and District Historical Society has co-authored three other historical works dealing with the experience of women who came to the colonies by ship.
For Liz, the historical ‘road less travelled’ is more interesting than the main highway.
“History tends to focus on the great and glorious,” she said.
Her interest in the history of Australia’s intrepid colonial women began with a chance finding.
“I started on all this when we were living in England and I came across the records of what I thought were a couple of girls who had come to Australia, which ended up being these 3000 women who travelled here between 1833 and 1837,” she explained.
The discovery was the beginnings of Single and Free: female migration to Australia, 1833 – 1837, her first historical work on the subject of female migration to the colonies.
Liz is clearly enamoured with the women she has written about and there is little doubt they were a rare breed. After months aboard the ships the women embarked in a place that was alien and sometimes hostile.
Most had little money and the need to find work was paramount to their survival.
“They had to get a job first. The government didn’t give them any help at all in getting a job,” she said.
The British government paid the women’s fare out, but nothing else.
Liz said the women who boarded in Sydney faced additional problems, because most were Irish (with some speaking only Gaelic), while the colony’s population was predominantly English.
Passengers bound for Tasmania faced other problems.
The Princess Royal, the ship that went to Hobart, was nearly smashed to pieces on the rocks as it neared the coastline, but was saved by a settler who “lit fires to alert the captain”.
One of the women was murdered, however, days after coming ashore.
“All the women got off safely. None of the women died on the voyage. The voyages were very well conducted,” Liz said.
For the lonely men who waited all those long months for the ships to arrive, the safe passage of the women was undoubtedly received as good news. The women were depicted in Alfred Ducôte’s 1832 cartoon E-migration or A Flight of Fair Game, which is reproduced on the cover of the book and also helped inform the title.
Represented as colourful butterflies, the women willingly fly through the skies to the colonial shores. Men holding nets are eagerly waiting to trap them.
The book will also be available at newsXpress Leongatha.
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