Australian ways of death: a social and cultural history, 1840-1918 9780195507546

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page v)
Introduction (page 1)
Part 1 Immigrant Deaths at Sea: The Transition from the Old World to the New
Chapter 1 The terror of 'a watery grave': The deaths of infants and children at sea, 1838-90 (page 15)
Chapter 2 Faith, fever, and consumption: Disease and adult deaths at sea (page 33)
Part II The Good Christian Death: Transmission from Europe to Australia
Chapter 3 The transmission of the European culture of the good Christian death (page 51)
Chapter 4 'Angels in heaven': The common tragedies of babies' and children's deaths (page 69)
Chapter 5 Medical and secular challenges to Christian ideals of death (page 88)
Chapter 6 Funerals and undertakers (page 108)
Chapter 7 Women, widowhood, and gendered mourning (page 129)
Chapter 8 Christian mourning ritual and heavenly consolations (page 144)
Chapter 9 Memory and mourning: Secular and material commemoration (page 161)
Chapter 10 Dr Springthorpe's memorialisation of his wife: Melbourne's Taj Mahal (page 177)
Part III Death and Destitution
Chapter 11 Sick and dying old people in 'benevolent' asylums (page 199)
Chapter 12 An asylum system 'degrading to the most inhuman race of savages': Revelations and reform in New South Wales (page 219)
Part IV Death in the Bush and the Great War
Chapter 13 Death and burial in the bush: A distinctive Australian culture of death (page 243)
Chapter 14 Male deaths in the bush: Frontier violence, old age, suicide, and accidents (page 263)
Chapter 15 Frontier struggles for survival: Stoical women and lost children (page 284)
Chapter 16 Epilogue: The Great War and silent grief (page 304)
Abbreviations (page 329)
Notes (page 330)
Select bibliography (page 362)
Index (page 371)

Citation preview

AUSTRALIAN

WAYS OF DEATH A Social and Cultural History 1840-1918

PAT JALLAND

UNIVERSITY PRESS

253 Normanby Road, South Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York

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Copyright © Pat Jalland 2002 First published 2002 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission. Enquiries to be made to Oxford University Press.

Copying for educational purposes Where copies of part or the whole of the book are made under Part VB of the Copyright Act, the law requires that prescribed procedures be followed. For information, contact the Copyright Agency Limited. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data: Jalland, Patricia. Australian ways of death: a social and cultural history 1840-1918 Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 19 550754 1. 1. Death—Social aspects—Australia. 2. Death—Causes— 2. Australia. 3. Bereavement—Psychological aspects. 4. Australia—Social life and customs. I. Title. 306.90994

Edited by Ruth Siems Indexed by Pam Crichton Text designed by Patrick Cannon Cover designed by Patrick Cannon Typeset by Promptset Pty Ltd Printed through Bookpac Production Services, Singapore

Acknowledgments Vv Introduction 1 Part I Immigrant Deaths at Sea: The Transition from the Old World to the New

Chapter 1 =‘ The terror of ‘a watery grave’: The deaths of infants

and children at sea, 1838-90 15

adult deaths at sea 33

Chapter 2 Faith, fever, and consumption: Disease and

Part II The Good Christian Death: Transmission from Europe to Australia

Chapter 3 =‘ The transmission of the European culture of the

good Christian death 51 Chapter 4 ‘Angels in heaven’: The common tragedies of babies’ and children’s deaths 69

of death 88

Chapter 5 Medical and secular challenges to Christian ideals

Chapter 6 —_- Funerals and undertakers 108 Chapter 7 Women, widowhood, and gendered mourning 129 Chapter 8 = Christian mourning ritual and heavenly consolations 144

lll

IV AUSTRALIAN WAYS OF DEATH

Chapter 9 Memory and mourning: Secular and material

commemoration 161

Chapter 10 Dr Springthorpe’s memorialisation of his wife:

Melbourne’s Taj Mahal 177

Part III Death and Destitution Chapter 11 Sick and dying old people in ‘benevolent’ asylums 199 Chapter 12 An asylum system ‘degrading to the most inhuman

New South Wales 219 race of savages’: Revelations and reform in

Part IV Death in the Bush and the Great War

culture of death 243

Chapter 13. Death and burial in the bush: A distinctive Australian

Chapter 14 Male deaths in the bush: Frontier violence, old age,

suicide, and accidents 263

lost children 284

Chapter 15 Frontier struggles for survival: Stoical women and

Notes 330 Select bibliography 362 Index 371

Chapter 16 Epilogue: The Great War and silent grief 304

Abbreviations 329

Acknowledgments

In loving memory of my father George Hoffman Case 1912-1999

The Australian Research Council awarded me a one-year ARC Large Grant while I was still at Murdoch University to fund research assistance for this

project in Sydney and Melbourne; I am most grateful to Ann Hone and Maureen Bark for their excellent and enthusiastic work in the State Library of Victoria and the Mitchell Library in Sydney. My warmest thanks go to Pam Crichton, who has been an outstanding and indispensable research assistant in Canberra at all stages of the project and has compiled a valuable index; also to Kay Nantes, who performed the keyboard work with wonderful efficiency. Marion Stell provided helpful research assistance at the start of the project, and Greg Bowen has offered practical assistance at various stages. I owe an immeasurable debt to four friends and colleagues who read the entire draft of the book with great wisdom and generosity, offering advice and encouragement throughout: Stephen Garton, John Hooper, Ken Inglis, and Barry Smith. Special thanks go also to Ann Curthoys, Tom Griffiths, and Bev Kingston who kindly read and commented on two or three chapters each. I benefited from valuable discussions, and in some cases the loan of useful books or illustrative material, from Geoffrey Bolton, Hilary Carey, Graeme Davison, David Fitzpatrick, Grace Karskens, Joan Kerr, Pat McCullough, Vv

VI AUSTRALIAN WAYS OF DEATH

Ann McGrath, Peter Read, Peter Rose, Tim Rowse, Rebe Taylor, Paul Turnbull, and Marivic Wyndham. John Thompson was particularly helpful with the Springthorpe chapter and offered expert advice on illustrations. I am grateful Heather Fawcett, Cathryn Game, and Ruth Siems at Oxford University Press for their efficiency and care. My thanks go also to the staff of the major libraries who facilitated research and offered useful advice on copyright permissions: especially the Australian War Memorial; the Battye Library, Library and Information Services of Western Australia; the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; the National Library of Australia; the Mortlock Library, State Library of South Australia; and the State Library of Victoria. Permissions for quotations from manuscript collections have been

kindly granted by John B. Currie, Jessie D. Clarke, Colin Angas, Joan Crommelin, and Geoff and Rod Ferguson. Copyright permissions for extracts from published works have been granted by: Hale & Iremonger (Marcus Clarke, Stories); Hesperion Press (N. K. Sligo, Mates and Gold); Ray Evans (‘The Hidden Colonists’, in Jill Roe (ed.), Social Policy in Australia); Ron Manners (W. G. Manners, So I Headed West); Elizabeth Webby (‘The Grave in the Bush’, in Dennis Haskell (ed.), Tilting at Matilda). I offer my apologies to any copyright owners I have been unable to identify or locate.

Introduction

Death and bereavement are universal and inevitable facts of life for human beings in all societies. A study of dying and responses to death takes us to the heart of the history of any culture and sharpens our understanding of our own experience. The French historian Michel Vovelle has observed that ‘death emerges as a reflection of society’ because the way we die also affects the way we live.! Despite the significance of death in human life, Ken Inglis and other scholars have observed ‘a modern distaste for the physical facts of mortality and a modern aversion to the darkness of mourning’.* Graeme Griffin, a theological scholar, and Des Tobin, a funeral director, expressed concern in 1982 about the Australian tendency to avoid the subject of death and to minimise the expression of grief.’ Only in the last twenty years has death again become a subject of public concern and discussion, stimulated by the hospice move-

ment and the AIDS epidemic, by debates about euthanasia, palliative care, and suicide rates, and by new developments in medical technology. Scholars in the social sciences and members of the caring professions have recently placed increasing emphasis on the need to study death and dying in contemporary society. However, historians in Australia have been slow to contribute to this important field. Historians of France were the first to study the history of death in systematic and imaginative ways—notably Michel Vovelle, Pierre Chaunu, John McManners and Philippe Ariés.* At the time I commenced my last book, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford, 1996), little recent scholarly work

had been published on the broader history of death in modern Britain; notable exceptions were the excellent books by Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987), and by Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (1990).° In the last ten years

greater scholarly interest in death in Britain has encouraged more diverse i

2 AUSTRALIAN WAYS OF DEATH

research and publications, as well as stimulating conferences and postgraduate work.® By comparison the history of death and bereavement in Australia is still underdeveloped.

This book, Australian Ways of Death, is a history of death, grief, and mourning that examines the evidence across the Australian colonies/states for the period from 1840 to 1918. I have taken 1840 as a starting point because

it broadly marks the beginning of mass immigration and the end of transportation to New South Wales. The early convict system has limited relevance in a study of death and mourning practices and attitudes in a free immigrant society.

Death in Australia has always been a diverse and individual experience and

no single model is appropriate. There were multiple modes of death in Australia between 1840 and 1918, with considerable overlap and fluidity between the different elements, not least between the urban and rural. In attempting to provide helpful models and define parameters for analysis in a

highly complex history of Australian ways of death, it is not possible to explore all the local and regional variations or all the individual exceptions. For example many people lived part of their lives in the bush and the remainder in country towns or cities. Before the 1870s, the urban middle classes included unbelievers, agnostics, and secularists, as well as Christians, and

many devout people sustained a Christian way of death beyond 1918. Unfortunate middle-class Christians, fallen on hard times, could find themselves destitute in old age, dying in a benevolent asylum with no religious rituals to console them. I hope that other scholars will pursue these regional, religious, and class variations further. I have placed considerable emphasis on the more neglected aspects of a vast subject, such as death at sea, death and the destitute, and death in the bush— because these themes are distinctively Australian and represent discontinuities with traditional European culture. I have devoted least attention to some well-

worked themes that have already attracted local and regional historians. Graeme Griffin and Des Tobin’s book In the Midst of Life. The Australian Response to Death is a useful study of cemeteries, headstones, the funeral service, and the undertaking business.’ Valuable studies have been published

by Robert Nicol on funerals and cemeteries in South Australia;® by Joy Damousi on wartime bereavement’ and by Simon Cooke on suicide and cremation.!° The most outstanding work on a related subject is Ken Inglis’s

prize-winning book Sacred Places. War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, which examines Australian commemoration of the dead.!! Allan Kellehear has recently edited a useful inter-disciplinary volume of essays on death and dying in Australia, though its main emphasis is on palliative care, nursing, and medicine since 1920.'7 I have largely omitted some important related subjects which have their own experts and publications, such as the history of epidemics, epidemiology, natural disasters, urban disease and sanitary reform, and the detailed history of individual diseases.

INTRODUCTION 3

Australian Ways of Death begins with the transmission and influence of European culture and ideals concerning death in the Australian colonies, espe-

cially among the middle and respectable working classes in the growing Australian cities. Between 1840 and 1918, fundamental changes in demographic and religious patterns profoundly altered death practices and attitudes in Australia, as well as in Britain and Ireland. From about 1880 to 1918 a significant demographic transition took place whereby the traditional pattern, marked by relatively high mortality, a short life expectancy and a high infant death rate, was replaced by a new pattern with a continuous decline in mortality, improved death rates for infants and children, and increased life expectancy at birth. The infant mortality rate fell from the 1880s, with a steep

decline after 1904, and by 1930 this rate had more than halved. The most obvious feature of this transformation was that old age replaced infancy as the most probable time of death. If the great demographic transition was one major motor of change in

death practices in the nineteenth century, the other was the decline in Christian faith. Several chapters explore the profound influence of Christian beliefs on people facing death up to the 1880s, in relation to deathbed scenes

and rituals, funeral practices, and the consolations of religious faith. The urban middle-class and respectable working classes attempted to recreate the European Christian ideal of the ‘good death’, both Protestant and Catholic,

which required spiritual preparation and submission to God’s will. Those who came to the Australian colonies in the great waves of immigration and the gold rushes from the 1840s to the 1880s often carried with them a rich Christian culture of death and mourning rituals, powerfully reinforced by the

Evangelical movement in Protestantism and the spiritual revival in Catholicism. The vast majority of the migrants from the 1840s were British and Irish,!’ many of whom brought strong religious convictions and customs

to the new land. For them, the language of the Bible, the prayer book and familiar hymns permeated the vernacular, especially in the context of death. But as Geoffrey Serle has so astutely observed, ‘Culture is a highly perish-

able growth which, transplanted, cannot bloom as before. Once the geographical break was made, in creative terms the tradition was broken or became very tenuous.’ Serle also notices the cultural time-lag, and the weakness of a derivative culture drawing little inspiration from its immediate envi-

ronment. Serle is not writing directly about the culture of death but his comments are illuminating. !*

Certainly the traditional Christian way of death declined more rapidly in the Australian colonies than in Britain and Ireland. This Christian culture was fragile in early colonial Australia because initially it lacked clergymen, church buildings and an institutionalised structure with traditional rituals and sup-

portive congregations. In the decade after 1855 an Irish migrant, Michael Normile, found religion in colonial Australia disorganised, indifference wide-

spread and Australians ‘wild and careless about religion’.!° The scattered

4 AUSTRALIAN WAYS OF DEATH

population in rural areas, the lack of clergy, and the high masculinity ratios ensured that traditions withered earlier than they might otherwise have done. Moreover, a substantial proportion of the immigrants to Australia came from those portions of the British working classes that had already abandoned church attendance, if not residual religious beliefs. Though the extent of churchgoing and faith in colonial Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century has probably been underestimated because it cannot be accurately calculated, ‘religion became at best a thing of the spirit, of the private man’ faster than in the mother country.!© The transplanted Catholic culture of death survived longer than the Protestant because it relied far more on a vital combination of formal traditional ritual and comforting sacraments together with private spiritual communication between priest and dying person. Moreover, Catholic Christianity was less vulnerable than individualistic Protestantism to the challenges of scientific rationalism, biblical criticism, and evolutionary theory from the 1870s. The derivative European culture of death was at its most fragile and least adaptable amongst the poorest sections of the colonial Australian community. Some commentators talk of a ‘denial’ of death in the twentieth century as if an

absence of rituals and a silence about death were entirely new features of modern society. But death was equally ignored in the nineteenth century in the case of the institutionalised destitute, especially if they were also old and frail

and former convicts or children of convicts. The late-nineteenth-century Australian ‘benevolent’ asylums were more akin to the often brutal early British workhouses of 1834 to 1870 than Australian authorities liked to admit, especially in their ill-treatment and neglect of sick and dying old people. Theories of social Darwinism and utilitarianism reinforced the stigmas against paupers, former convicts and sick old people perceived as useless to society. Within most asylums there was little or no concern for the rituals of dying or the dignified ending of life and inmates were condemned to obscurity in pauper graves. While the traditional Christian way of death was in decline in the colonial

Australian cities, a more robust culture of death developed quite independently in the bush and initially also at sea. Sea burials obliged many immigrants to confront the stark reality of the abrupt termination of their familiar British

and Irish death practices. Shipboard diaries show that while all immigrants experienced the harsh environment at sea, they suffered differentially from its treatment and consequential mortality, according to class, gender, and age. Corpses of infants and stillborn babies were sometimes thrown overboard with a sense of inevitability and an absence of religious ritual that anticipated the unforgiving conditions of early colonial settlement. Experiences of death in the Australian bush stimulated the more creative and enduring ways in which immigrants adapted to a new and initially hostile environment. The Australian tradition of simple bush burials in rural areas was necessary for early settlers living outside the reach of churches, parsons, and undertakers and it developed a ritual of its own, largely unaffected by British traditions. The bush culture of death derived from the land and

INTRODUCTION 5

from immigrants’ personal experiences and responses to the unique Australian environment. The bushman’s view of death has played a significant role in developing distinctively Australian secular ways of death which have been transmitted into the wider culture in the twentieth century. The bush was

largely incompatible with elaborate imported burial ritual designed to disguise the more unsavoury aspects of death. Bush deaths were natural deaths dictated by geography, landscape, isolation, climate, gender, and the lack of established cemeteries and churches. A common characteristic of the bush-

man’s approach to death, revealed in bush ballads and Henry Lawson’s stories, was a stoical acceptance of inevitable death without fuss, and a concern for human survival. Despite the lack of formal religious consolation and elaborate ritual, bushmen usually had a fundamental respect for the dead, and many sought hope in the beauty and regeneration of nature. The Great War of 1914-18 marked a turning-point in the history of death, grief and mourning in Australia. It shattered the traditional Christian culture of death as a dominant model in Australia, and also accelerated a pre-existing decline in Christian mourning rituals. Terrible mass slaughter of young men could not be accommodated within a traditional Christian middle-class model of domesticated family deaths—a model already in decline because of religious indifference and the challenges of science and secularism. As Dr Robert Scot Skirving observed in his anguish on his soldier-son’s death in 1915: ‘that gulf of sorrow, the Great War, separated us from all our past lives and emotions’, creating a changed world afterwards.!” The war reinforced the stoical and private responses to death and grief learned by bushmen and isolated settlers over many decades of adjustment to the Australian environment. The extremely high rate of Australian participation and mortality in the two world wars helps to explain the preoccupation with death in the inter-war years and also the long silence about death in the next half century. Medical science did not become a major force in changing death practices in Australia until the 1930s. Doctors could do little to cure disease before the discovery of the sulpha drugs, though they sometimes compensated by a good record of care and palliative management among wealthy urban patients. Not until the later nineteenth century was death perceived as caused by particular diseases rather than by the will of God. By contrast, developments in medical science in the later twentieth century enabled doctors to contemplate prolonging life, and death would increasingly be seen as medical failure.

Gendered differences in Australian ways of death are highly significant throughout this book, from mortality and death practices to emotional responses to bereavement. Colonial Australian masculinist images of death contrasted strongly with the European middle-class ideal of the peaceful domesticated deathbed scene, typically depicting a dying woman cared for by

attendant females. The dominant cultural images of death in colonial Australia were masculine and often violent, ranging from the idealised bush-

man and the heroic bushranger to the noble Anzac. Dead and dying bushrangers and their victims were memorialised in bush ballads and in

6 AUSTRALIAN WAYS OF DEATH

William Strutt’s painting Bushrangers on St Kilda Road. They were also prominently portrayed in the press from the 1860s to the 1880s.!° After being shot dead by a station hand near Wangaratta, Victoria, in the 1860s, Daniel

Morgan was propped up to be photographed with his eyes open and still holding his gun. Joe Byrne, one of Ned Kelly’s gang, was re-hung outside Benalla gaol in 1880 for the benefit of photographers.!? But European women

were almost entirely ignored in the heroic representations of death in the bush, except as supporting characters. Some gendered differences in death in colonial Australia were partly biological, in that women lived longer and some diseases were gender-specific or

gender-variable. Life expectancy at birth for females in Victoria and New South Wales between 1867 and 1882 was about three years longer than for males. Across all six Australian colonies/states from 1881 to 1910, life tables

show that this differential remained constant at 3.5 years’ advantage for females, though it later increased and almost doubled by 1972.?° Males and females died at different rates from various causes, commencing in the first seven years of life when male babies and young children were more

vulnerable to childhood diseases. But the most distinctive and significant gender-based deaths were those in childbirth for women and by violence and accidents for men. The complications of pregnancy, childbirth and puerperal fever were an important cause of death for women aged 15 to 45. Childbirth was the third most important cause of death in Victoria in 1870 at 7 per cent of total deaths in the age group 15 to 24; this rose to second ranking in the age group 25 to 44, after pulmonary tuberculosis, averaging 10 per cent.*! In the nineteenth century, women in their thirties had a substantial risk of dying from a combination of childbearing, overwork, exhaustion, and poor diet. In Victoria the number of deaths of mothers for every 1000 children born alive improved little from 1871 to 1905, ranging from 6.43 in 1871-80 to 6.09 in 1901-05. Even in 1920 puerperal causes of death for women aged 15 to 24 still held joint first place with tuberculosis—a mortality rate that only declined with the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s.?2 Despite the substantial death rate from childbirth during women’s fertile years of 15 to 44, there was still a greater male mortality at these same ages due to violence and accidents. Deaths from violence and accidents included suicide, drowning, fractures, industrial and transport accidents; such deaths were often linked with alcohol abuse, which was common in a society with a

high disproportion of males.’ It was no coincidence that the two colonies with the highest masculinity ratios—Queensland and Western Australia—also had the worst mortality from violence and accidents.** In general, men died from violence and accidents in colonial Australia three times more often than women between 1869 and 1903. In Victoria in 1870 ‘accident or negligence’,

the category used for violence, was the leading cause of male deaths, with 16 per cent of total deaths in the age group 15 to 24 and 13 per cent at ages 45 to 54; it came second only to tuberculosis at ages 25 to 44 with an average of 18 per cent of total deaths.*> Few females died from ‘accident or negligence’.

INTRODUCTION 7

In nineteenth-century Australia, women were far more active than men in performing the roles and rituals associated with death and grieving. These gendered differences in relation to death and mourning were even more pronounced in colonial Australia than in Britain. Nurses at the deathbed were

usually female because the care of sick and dying family members was regarded as a natural part of women’s nurturing role. Female family members, assisted by female servants, attended to the vital domestic rituals following a death, including the laying out of the body. The one exception was that funerals were organised by men, and women were often discouraged from attending, on the assumption that men could better contain their emotions.

Women were expected to play a more sustained and important role than . men in the process of mourning the dead. This is illustrated most vividly by the common practice of middle-class widowers returning quickly to their pro-

fessional work and seeking consolation in early re-marriage. By contrast, widows were expected to grieve quietly at home for many months, if not years, and follow complex mourning etiquette concerning their widow’s weeds and their very restricted social behaviour. Widows outnumbered widowers by a ratio of about 3:2 in New South Wales in 1888, a gap which widened with

age.*® Material and social prospects for widowed females were far more limited than for men, especially if they were poor and lacked family support.

There were also significant differences in the expression of feelings on bereavement in that men were generally expected to be more restrained in communicating their sorrow, and women more emotional. This seems to have been a response to powerful social conditioning regarding the required behaviour of men and women in their separate spheres, rather than the consequence of innate differences in grief patterns. Silent repression of sorrow by colonial men seems to have been most acute and painful on the loss of children, when some fathers had difficulty in communicating their grief to their wives. They were trying to meet cultural expectations of masculinity and to minimise their vulnerability in a tough pioneering environment. Stoical and silent responses to death were common in single men in the bush—behaviour powerfully reinforced for Anzac soldiers by the requirements of masculinity, honour, and survival in the Great War.

Migration splintered colonial families through geographic distance from birth families and broader kinship networks. Scattered migration patterns over a

vast continent meant that huge distances could separate families, not just across the globe but also across Australia. The first two generations of immigrants often felt torn between two countries and two cultures. Death and burial were crucial components of this ambivalence and disorientation. Those who had left parents behind in Britain and Ireland, as well as the graves of

beloved family members, felt especially torn, and more likely to feel that home still lay elsewhere, offering the prospect of ultimate burial at their side.

Geographical distance usually meant that colonists could not care for dying parents, nor say final farewells, nor attend their funerals. Letters took so long in transit both ways that they would sometimes never know when

8 AUSTRALIAN WAYS OF DEATH

those loved ones were sick and dying. Frances Mary Bowler noted in her diary in 1837: Most truly may this distant residence be denominated a kind of living death to all who live here, and have many dear ... relatives and friends so far off, that they may be numbered with the clods of the valley months before either party can know their loss. I have scarcely the courage to break the seals of letters from home, and however pleasant may be their contents, I cannot prevent the inward inquiry, Has sorrow, sickness, or perhaps death, visited any of that loved circle since this letter was penned?—and in an evening over the fire picturing to myself all who should assemble at home, I am fain to ask, are all there? None absent? Gone forever? These feelings will intrude at all times, in spite of my utmost endeavours not to meet trouble halfway.*7

Patrick O’Farrell has underlined the passionate desire of many Irish immi-

grants to be buried with their family in Ireland, rather than in a strange, distant land. But for most Irish immigrants, burial in Ireland could only be a dream and spiritual reunion in heaven the only possibility. When immigrants—Irish or British—became reconciled to the prospect of ultimate burial

in Australia, however, they often developed a sense of belonging to the Australian land. The grave in the Australian bush became an important cultural image in its own right, establishing a sense of national identity and individual belonging, as Charles Harpur recognised in his poetry.7® The death and burial of spouse and children in the new land usually confirmed this sense of identity with the land; a sad letter from Robert Gouger of Adelaide in 1857 reports the death of his wife and baby son within two days of each other. He describes his agony of mind at the double catastrophe, but concludes: As to me, Iam more a South Australian than ever. I shall never leave the remains of my dear and sainted wife; they are buried in an area of my own in the town No. 685 and there I shall spend, in all earthly probability, the remainder of my days.*?

The tyranny of distance was naturally greater in the earlier years of immigration, but it had an equally severe impact from 1914 to 1918 when about 60000 Australian soldiers died in the Great War, 12000 miles away from home. Their families had to grieve without a body to bury in Australia or the consolation of a funeral, and they could rarely afford to visit the graves in Europe. Even worse, some 25000 Australian soldiers had no known burial place in Europe because their bodies were never recovered.

The Aboriginal culture of death over forty thousand years and more, which was as rich and complex as the Europeans’, has already been the subject of

substantial anthropological scholarship. Since there were numerous Aboriginal groups, with more than 500 distinct languages, anthropologists

undertook intensive research journeys to isolated parts of the remote

INTRODUCTION 9

Australian outback for a year or more at a time to live among the people who

were the subjects of study. From the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, early anthropologists felt a keen sense of urgency to study what they saw as a primitive and ancient race which they believed to be on the verge of extinction. Social Darwinist theory of the ‘survival of the fittest’ races gave impetus to anthropological research for evidence of a backward race in remote parts of northern and central Australia least affected by European contact.”

The accounts of Aboriginal death and burial customs by three distinguished anthropologists, who drew on their own research in the outback as well as on a large anthropological literature, can point readers to a field of study complementary to this book. A. P. Elkin, Professor of Anthropology at

Sydney University, devoted a chapter of his 1938 book, The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand Them, to their social prescriptions at death and their complex burial rites. Elkin noted that Aboriginal people considered death ‘the most significant and important social event’ since it regularly weak-

ened each group and threatened its future social cohesion. Elkin compared

Aboriginal death culture with the Christian way of death in nineteenthcentury Britain—both rich and purposeful in helping survivors to reorient themselves and face the future: Amongst [the Aborigines] social and individual behaviour is standardised in the presence of a dying person and death; and mourning is a series of socially sanctioned and expected customs and rites which include not only expression of sorrow and grief, but also taboos, inquest, revenge and burial.>!

Elkin pointed to the common features in Aboriginal death scenes across Australia, with mourners watching close by or at a distance, according to relationship rules; they wailed, sang or chanted, mutilated themselves by scratching or cutting their bodies, and occasionally threw themselves on the dying person. Following death, this emotional expression of grief could intensify to a state of frenzy, sometimes including threats against the sorcerer considered responsible for the death. According to Elkin, these rituals helped to remove the soul from its worldly contacts and spiritualise it in the sacred totemic realm.°**

Burial rites among Aboriginal people in Australia varied widely in different regions, including interment, mummification, cremation, platform exposure and burial in hollow trees. More complex and prolonged rites were often reserved for the more important personages, such as the fully initiated men. An ‘inquest’ was usually held to identify the person responsible for the magic that caused the death; when the deceased was a person of importance, the ‘inquest’ might be followed up by a revenge expedition. Beliefs about the fate of the dead varied; in general, after the mourning and revenge rituals were completed, Aboriginal people were eager to sever connections with the spirit, to speed it on its way to its spirit-home, and to avoid any offence that might bring it back. This necessary dissociation from the body and spirit of the dead

10 AUSTRALIAN WAYS OF DEATH

required the deceased’s belongings to be purified and his camp and grave deserted, while the name of the dead person could not be mentioned for months or years.°? In 1964, two anthropologists in Western Australia, Ronald and Catherine Berndt, published The World of the First Australians: Aboriginal Traditional

Life Past and Present.** This book included a chapter on ‘Death and the Afterlife’ in traditional Aboriginal culture which drew on the research findings of many anthropologists, including Elkin, W. L. Warner, and Kenneth Maddock.*> The Berndts emphasised the fundamental association of death with rituals and religion even more strongly than Elkin. They observed that elaborate ceremonies and funerary art indicated a pervasive belief in an afterlife in the land of the Dead, where the spirit achieved some measure of immor-

tality, merging with the great ancestral beings in the sacred world of the

Dreaming. ‘All over Aboriginal Australia, the concept of the Eternal Dreaming is basic to people’s view of the world and of man’s relationship to his social and physical environment.’ The finality of death in a material sense was fully recognised, as was also some manner of spiritual continuation.*° It is revealing that European settlers in colonial Australia largely ignored the richness and complexity of Aboriginal death and burial customs, except when they were anxious to plunder Aboriginal burial places to collect skulls and skeletons for allegedly scientific purposes. Aboriginal human remains

were collected as vital relics of stone-age people before the race became extinct, including relics obtained from the very recently dead. When Lanclot [sic] Cockram, an Aboriginal farm worker, died on a farm at Yorkrakine in Western Australia in 1918, his body was ‘sent to the Pathological Department in Perth for preservation in the interests of science’.?” Cockram’s was not an isolated case. I found little evidence of genuine cross-cultural Aboriginal-European contact concerning death and mourning practices in colonial Australia, except where some Aboriginal people accommodated themselves to European ways of death. Occasionally, however, the historian gains a rare, tantalising glimpse of such contact. Paul Turnbull observes that Europeans could be profoundly distressed upon witnessing Aboriginal funerals, ‘not least because of the more open and unrestrained ways in which Indigenous communities mourned the dead’. The missionary Lancelot Threlkald depicted the funeral of a Lake Macquarie woman in 1825 as ‘truly horrid’; he was shocked by the sight of the bereaved mother who had gashed her head in her anguish and sat crooning over the bark-wrapped body.*® Another illustration of cross-cultural contact in grief occurred when Alfred

and Ellen Bussell, Western Australian pioneers, lost their 12-month-old son Jasper in 1864, having already suffered the deaths of two other infants. The Bussells lived an isolated life as the first European settlers at Margaret River, southwest of Perth, and Alfred was unable to talk about his intense grief at Jasper’s death with his wife. Ellen had no local support network of church, community, or nearby family to help her through this ‘dreadful time’ of silent

INTRODUCTION 11

grief, though she found her Christian faith consoling. But her husband made a remarkable reference in a letter to his brother to the support and sympathy Ellen received from the local Aboriginal people: Their grief was manifested in a wonderful manner, they sat beside and encircled the bereaved mother as she lent upon the fence, the big tears rolled down their black

faces, they sat a while in this way and then passed off in silence with heads cast down, it was very remarkable. Why did they feel, or seem to feel for an infant’s death in a white man’s house???”

The strongly emotional and shared communal response of the Aboriginal people contrasted with that of the baby’s father who sought to repress his intense feelings for his lost only son. Also unusual was the case, recorded by John Mulvaney, of Yuranigh, who

was honoured by memorials from mourners of both cultures. Yuranigh, a Wiradjuri from the Molong area earned the respect of Sir Thomas Mitchell when he guided the Queensland expedition of 1845. On Yuranigh’s death in 1850 his people honoured him by carving distinctive geometric designs into nearby trees—a traditional burial custom for distinguished men. Mitchell later added his own tribute with a traditional British engraved headstone and fenced grave—one of the few memorials erected by Europeans to honour Aborigines.*° Many Aboriginal people adapted in time to European ways of death and burial, especially if they worked for European settlers or became Christians. The reverse was exceptional and likely to draw censure. The 1878

request by a prominent Victorian pastoralist, Samuel Pratt Winter, ‘to be buried in the stones where the blacks are buried’ was seen as an insult to his own people, as we shall see.*! Relations between Europeans and Aboriginal people were not always characterised by violence and in some regions they probably lived fairly amicably much of the time. The above example from the Bussell family supports Ann

McGrath’s view that ‘interdependency and friendships occurred between Aboriginal women and white’, often flowing on from the European women’s role as employers. But as McGrath observes, the frontier was a highly flexible ‘meeting place of two very different worlds’, and all too often Europeans and Aborigines met in tragic conflict.4* I consider the debate about frontier mor-

tality in a later chapter dealing with death and the bush, emphasising the European silence about such massacres and the lingering guilt. The killings of Aboriginal people on the frontier were never compared to the noble deeds of the Anzacs at Gallipoli, where the soldiers fought courageously for chivalric virtues. The conflicts between armed Europeans and Aboriginal people were far too uneven for the frontier victories to be sources of colonial pride. The minds of the immigrants were largely closed to the depths and richness of Aboriginal cultures that had survived for more than 40 000 years in one of the

most challenging environments on earth. Death was the final frontier of incomprehension and exclusion between the two cultures.

.

PART I

Immigrant Deaths at Sea

The Transition from the Old World to the New

‘

Chapter I

7|J The Terror of a Watery Grave

The Deaths of Infants and Children at Sea, 18338-1890 The scale of migration from Britain to Australia was vastly increased by the discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851, reinforced by government schemes for assisted migration, chiefly by sailing ship up to 1880. The first two chapters look at aspects of death and burial at sea from 1838 to 1890 through analysis of 44 shipboard diaries.! The voyage to Australia allows us to examine a microcosm of the population of colonial Australia. We can study a cross-

section of the future Australian population of all classes and ages living together within a confined space. At sea, direct comparisons between cabin passengers and working people in steerage were unavoidable, generating envy, discrimination, and resentment, as well as some cooperation. The diaries reveal the surprising degree of cultural diversity and also the marked degree of reinforcement of British class distinctions. The little community on board the immigrant ship inevitably reflected the old world more than it could foreshadow the new.

Fear of death and burial at sea The sea voyage between Britain and Australia was a bridge between the old

world and the new—13000 nautical miles apart—a period of transition,

almost of limbo. This hazardous voyage was a trial run which tested endurance, courage, and adaptability—the qualities that would be vital when immigrants faced the harsh climate and environment of Australia. Death at sea was the first experience of death, burial, and bereavement in an alien and inhospitable land which abruptly challenged prevailing notions of the good

Christian death. The prospect of death at sea sent terror into the minds of many migrants to Australia in the nineteenth century (see plate 1). The voyage itself was imaginatively like a trip to Mars today—an adventure on a tiny 15

16 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

craft into the unknown for three to five months, a stressful rite of passage towards life in a new country, with small prospect of return. The attitudes to death among steerage passengers were often still influenced by a complex combination of superstition, folklore, and fundamentalist Christianity. Many working-class people in Britain had great fears of the anatomists destroying bodies of paupers and criminals in the 1830s. Many people of all classes later found cremation abhorrent and for the same reason —they still had a residual belief in the need for the resurrection of the physical body after death. Sea burial aroused similar concerns, as a fate that was swift, heathen, and unnatural, as well as peculiarly distressing. When a relative died in 1872, Eleanor, Lady Stephen, wife of the chief justice, observed from Sydney that ‘it would have added terribly to the distress if the death had occurred on board ship’.* Joseph Clifton in Perth in 1900 was most upset to learn of the death of a relative at sea: ‘It must have been a crushing blow to his poor wife. I think death and burial at sea must wrench the feelings of the mourners more severely than death on land.’ There was no cemetery plot at sea, no fixed place of burial as a lasting memorial, and no visits to the grave pending the resurrection. Deaths at sea were especially threatening because most people who had

considered the matter probably preferred to die a ‘good death’, variously defined, but at least surrounded by family, friends, and community at home, and to receive a Christian burial in the earth. Death at sea meant death in a hostile and unknown environment, often without family and close friends. Andrew Hamilton commented on the sudden death of a passenger on the Birmingham in 1852: ‘It is a sad sad thing, death at sea, no friend to perform an act of kindness—plenty of onlookers verily—crowds—but no kind and well-known voice to soothe the spirit on its entrance into the eternal world.” William Nichols, a labourer travelling on the James Gibb in 1849, made a

most unusual diary record of the final ramblings of a devout 23-year-old tailor, ‘an entire stranger to everyone on board’, who died from ‘an overflow

of blood to his brain’. A constant refrain in his extended prayers was his repeated request to God to ‘save him from a watery grave where there was none but the stranger to weep over him ... “Oh God, do not let the waters hurt me, spare me O God”.” Cabin passengers often tried to reconstruct at sea the conditions of a ‘good death’ back home, if at all possible. James White, a thoughtful, educated 16year-old student from Edinburgh, travelling to Australia on the Henry Fernie in 1862 to join his brother, was horrified yet fascinated by the death and sea burial of a consumptive girl precisely his own age. They were both in the second cabin, so James watched her wasting away. An hour after her death ‘we all went in to see the corpse which was tastefully decorated with all kinds of artificial roses’. But this attempt to imitate a traditional death at home failed for James. He was distressed when her body was consigned to the sea after the funeral service, since no one could identify ‘the watery grave’. Mourners on land could visit their loved ones’ graves in peaceful churchyards, soothed by the knowledge that the material body lay there. As James observed in his diary:

THE TERROR OF ‘A WATERY GRAVE’ 17

The green grave thus blends life and death, linking the seen with the unseen. But in

that seaburial there is such a sudden change from the body being with us to its being to us, nowhere. A momentary splash and the ship passes on, and leaves it in the boundless, unfathomable, mysterious sea.®

Another immigrant passenger, Francis Taylor, watched his first sea burial on board the Stag in March 1850 and could not repress macabre speculations about the corpse’s fate: ‘although it matters not what becomes of the perishable body, still a thrill of horror fills the heart at the thought of a human creature being undoubtedly devoured by some of the innumerable inhabitants of the Ocean’.’ Such anxieties were reinforced when passengers saw or heard of crew members being lost overboard, which occurred more frequently than the occasional loss of an immigrant, given their dangerous work. In November

1863, the Great Britain passed ‘a dead body floating on the surface of the water, the hands crippled up and the entrails all out, it may be the body of some poor sailor who has dropped from some yard arm’.® None of the passengers who stared at this terrible sight wished to share the poor man’s fate. In 1852 Edwin Pegler recorded a ‘shocking accident’ when a sailor fell overboard from the Prince Albert; he hit his head and was considered dead before

he hit the water, which was fortunate as an albatross settled on the corpse, doubtless to ‘pick him to pieces’ and remove his eyes.” That passengers chose to immigrate, despite their fear, was a measure of their desperation and determination to improve their lives, as well as their hopes for a new future.

Mortality differentials and discrimination at sea The fear of a ‘watery grave’ probably affected all passengers to some degree but the real risks of death, and the form it might take, varied considerably according to class, gender, age, and status. Cabin passengers with greater social status and wealth made up only about 10 per cent of total passenger numbers but were given priority in death as in life. Some historians, including Patrick O’Farrell, have argued that the physical proximity and shared trials on board ship encouraged the breakdown of the English social system

at sea.!° But although social relationships might be renegotiated to some extent at sea, differences of passenger class corresponded strongly with differences of social class, which in turn related to religious differences.!! As Don Charlwood noted in 1981: ‘Life on board ship mirrored the class structure of Britain. The masses below deck represented the masses at home’, though there was a ‘pecking order’ within both cabin class and steerage.!? The social hierarchy was naturally somewhat different from that in Britain,

since few aristocrats or gentry chose to emigrate, while the poorest were actively excluded. But a class hierarchy it remained, even though some passengers might try to stretch or dispute the boundaries. Most shipboard diaries reveal immense hierarchical divisions. First-class accommodation was vastly different from that elsewhere in the ship, in terms

of space, privacy, ventilation, a good bed, and far more nutritious food,

18 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

including fresh milk, eggs and meat.!? While cabin passengers had relatively comfortable private accommodation, steerage immigrants were tightly packed

into a large communal dormitory whose design was based on government experience in transporting convicts. Dr W. H. Leigh, surgeon on the South Australia in 1839, noted the ‘great cruelty’ of ‘cramming the unfortunate emigrants into unwholesome berths, like the unhappy Africans in a slave-ship’.!* On the worst voyages, life in steerage was not unlike life in a crowded British slum.!° An egalitarian spirit was even less evident in death than in life. Although all passengers might fear an untimely death at sea, the risks of mortality varied according to class, gender and age. The overall mortality in steerage was more than three times that for the cabin passengers en route to Queensland between 1860 and 1900; three times as many women died as did men, and the highest mortality rates of all were among the steerage infants. Death did

not come equally to those at sea. All sea travellers experienced the alien environment, but they suffered differentially from its harsh treatment and its mortality.!° The lives of assisted immigrants had a lower priority and value than the higher-status cabin passengers, whose deaths might have serious consequences for the surgeon or captain. Cabin passengers had the means to pur-

chase fresh and more nutritious food, and enjoyed better ventilation and Space in private cabins, so they were likely to be healthier people with greater resistance to infectious diseases.

Shipboard diaries included many descriptions of sea burials, but that of young Mrs Clark, a cabin passenger on the General Hewett who died of consumption in 1845, can stand for many of the privileged: This morning at 8 o’clock Mrs Clark was buried; all the passengers and crew attended the Funeral. The corpse after being sewn up in sail cloth, together with some iron shot, to make it sink, was placed on a board, which projected over the ship’s side; the Ensign was then wrapped round, & after the Captain had read the service for the burial of the dead, as far as ‘we therefore commit her body to the deep’, the board was tipped up by the boatswain, & the corpse fell into the sea.!”

Burial services for significant cabin passengers were like solemn theatrical events where the opening spectacle had more capacity to impress than repeat

performances. An anonymous passenger on the Prince Albert in 1852 recorded the first funeral of the voyage at great length—that of Mr Ross, the 21-year-old son-in-law of Captain Squire, a cabin passenger. Following Mr Ross’s death of apoplexy during the excitement of a boxing match, ‘a universal gloom hung over all, no amusements were entered into ... everyone to bed earlier than usual’. Next day the dismal effects were aided by the weather: ‘the sea rolled and tossed in its fury as if it were anxious to have its dead given up to it’. The scene was ‘most impressive’ as the captain read the burial service, though the ‘voice of the tempest’ was so loud that the diarist could not distinguish a word. The second death of the voyage occurred two weeks later when a crew member fell overboard, hitting his head on the way down, but

THE TERROR OF ‘A WATERY GRAVE’ 19

the captain decided it was too risky to send out a boat for a seaman who was probably already dead. The diarist commented: ‘Like the second visit to an execution the affair was nothing like as terrible and the impression made upon the spirits of the passengers but very slight compared with that of the

former occasion for before night all was going on as if nothing had happened.’!® The life of the unfortunate crew member was of far less value than that of a naval captain’s son-in-law. Occasionally resentment at the class discrimination involved in death and burial at sea was expressed overtly in shipboard journals. Frederick Edelsten, travelling on the City of Adelaide in 1867, was an unsympathetic observer of the special privileges accorded to Mrs Obdahl, a cabin passenger. He ridiculed the efforts made to imitate death on land—which would never be made for those in steerage. Edelsten did not share the curiosity of all those who went to view the body, and noted the resentment of some passengers in steerage

when told to respect her death by being quieter than usual. The greatest privilege she was accorded was the granting of her request to be buried in a coffin; the malicious note is clear in the diarist’s observation that the coffin refused to sink as it hit the water: ‘the lid burst open and it floated away’.!? In addition to the double standard existing between cabin and steerage passengers in life and at death, Irish Catholics were further discriminated against within steerage. The subdivision of steerage passengers into small groups known as ‘messes’ to organise provision of meals accentuated religious and cultural differences, as Andrew Hassam has observed: By taking care that Scots were not put in the same mess as the English, or that Irish Catholics and Cornish Methodists were kept apart, emigrant officials made it more likely that members of a mess would get on with each other. But the wider implication is that the steerage accommodation was divided into sections by region or nationality.2°

The doctor or captain who normally read the burial service was sometimes reluctant to do the same for Irish Catholics, who were likely themselves to object to a Protestant service which might consign their babies to limbo. Thomas Davies, a plumber on the Lord Raglan in 1854, commented on the unusual circumstance of a two-year-old child’s body which was ‘thrown over-

board without the burial service being read over it’. Just before the service began, the baby’s father, a Roman Catholic, ‘ordered the sailor to drop it in, as he did not wish the Protestant service to be read over it’.2! Concern on this issue was common. When his baby died of diarrhoea on board the Samuel Plimsoll in 1879 an Irish Catholic father ‘sewed it up in a bag and threw it into the sea himself before they said anything to the Doctor’.?2 Discrimination could also take place when dying Catholics needed to see a priest. Edward Stamp, who travelled on the Tasman in 1849, left a record in his diary of the death of a 15-year-old orphaned Irish Catholic named Jerry Connell, who had become a favourite with the immigrants. During the terminal stage of Jerry’s illness from brain fever, the surgeon asked the chaplain,

20 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

Revd W. Singleton, to visit the orphan. The chaplain was unwilling to comply, saying defensively, ‘he’s a Catholic, what good can I do him!!’ Pressure of immigrant opinion prevailed upon the chaplain to make one very short visit to Jerry’s deathbed. The diarist commented, ‘a strange parson truly, one that needs dragging you may say, to the bed of a dying orphan’. The decks of the Tasman were crowded with people who ‘seemed mortified’ at the slovenly manner in which the chaplain performed the funeral ceremony, as Stamp recorded: Many of the Emigrants loudly expressed their dissatisfaction at the manner in which the service was performed. Poor Jerry Connell was really buried with the burial of an ass. ‘This is the way in which we are to be buried, should we die on the passage to Australia’, was the murmur of one and all.?°

Many Protestant immigrants viewed Irish Catholics as people who indulged in superstitious rituals; but Catholics were also seen as more devout, more emotional and more theatrical in their burial services than Protestants. Edward Hufton described in his diary on the Northbrook in 1879 the death of a 49-year-old Irishman, leaving a wife and ten young children. He had been

prostrate in bed for six weeks, during which he often asked to see his two daughters in the single women’s area, but the doctor said it was against the rules. The Roman Catholic passengers ‘paid very great respect to him’, praying without cease from 11 p.m. for the five hours until he expired. Hufton was implicitly emphasising the contrast between this communal devotion and the Protestants’ quietism. The Irishman, who was not named, was buried only four and a half hours after his death, the service being read by one of the Irish Catholic passengers. Emotion was expressed more freely than was considered appropriate among Protestants: ‘the crying of his sons and the screaming of his daughters was heartaching to see’.*4

Abijou Good on the Beejapore in 1863 recorded the burial of an Irish Catholic man as a ‘solemn and impressive sight’ with the priest standing in his white surplice in the blazing sunshine. The ship rang with the ‘crys & lamentations’ of his large family. The priest read the service in Latin despite the loud screams of anguish of the bereaved family and had to ask for silence if he was

to pray for the body. Most Protestant immigrants were on deck, as if for a special theatrical show, and ‘the rigging resembled “trees crowded with crows” ’.*9

The other two main forms of differential risk and possible discrimination, in addition to class and religion, were gender and age, applying chiefly to married women and children in steerage. The overall mortality rate for immigrant

women over 21 was over four times that for men in 1837-39, with six adult men over 21 dying compared with twenty-seven women.*° On the sea route to Queensland from 1860 to 1900, the mortality rate for steerage married women was nearly double that of their husbands and four times the rate for single women. The actuary of the Scottish Equitable Life Assurance Society noted in 1875 that on government-assisted voyages between 1847 and 1861

THE TERROR OF ‘A WATERY GRAVE’ 21

‘the extra risk attaching to the voyage is much greater for women than for men’.*’ This significant gender imbalance in mortality may be attributed to the poor nutrition of married women who gave priority to husbands and sick children in allocating food, and to the hazards of pregnancy, childbirth, and the exhaustion of nursing and childcare. The single women had the lowest mortality on the Queensland ships because they were carefully protected and controlled, physically and morally, as the steerage group most sought after in the new colony.*® The able-bodied men in steerage were also generally viewed as an asset to the new colonies. As Arthur Manning observed in 1839, ‘the

great many women and children on board is rather against the ship’, since they meant that one woman and several children had to be maintained for the sake of only one man’s useful services.7” Examples abound of married women in steerage whose deaths at sea were accorded little respect. Stephen Brennand travelled third class in the single men’s quarters on the Harbinger in September 1883. He noted that a young married woman who had been confined earlier in the week died of puerperal fever: “The funeral service was gone through so quickly that people on the forecastle head were not aware of the fact until it had actually taken place.’ Abiyou Good in April 1863 remarked on the death of a married woman from measles; her body was thrown overboard within an hour with no service and none of the passengers knew until informed later.°! Edwin Bird, a Somerset farmer on the Marco Polo in 1853, told the story of the inebriated ‘Black Cook Doctor Johnson’ who allegedly went into the wrong bed, sending a woman ‘quite insane through a fright’. Ten days later she was a ‘deal worse’, requiring three men to hold her down. Bird noted ‘its an awful sight’ after visiting her, and was not surprised at her inevitable death three days later, ‘a happy release for the Poor Creature and her friends’. The young woman’s ordeal may have included rape, though we are not told, but she was a nameless victim, ‘a Poor Creature’ compared with a man who was ill at the same time who was ‘a very nice young fellow’. The young woman’s indignities did not end with death: ‘The young woman was thrown overboard about an hour after her Decease. She did not sink through Carelessness in not

putting in enough heavy stone. She was seen last floating on the Waves towards the Coast of Africa’, where it was feared a shark might swallow her.?4

William Nichols on the James Gibb in 1849 recorded the death of an unnamed Scottish woman who was confined on 26 May and died a week later after great suffering. She was buried four hours after death, ‘but little respect

was paid to her’, so Nichols inserted his own poem in his diary as if to compensate. It represents an epitaph to many other married women buried at sea: Not a sigh was heard or a funeral note As the corpse to the waters we hurried Not a parent viewed the Farewell spot Over the grave where our sister was buried

22 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA No useless coffin the corpse to enclose Is made on the Ocean to float But a coarse canvass sheet with sand at the feet That hurries the corpse in the water to sleep.°°

Deaths of infants and children at sea Substantial evidence shows that infants and young children were at the bottom of the immigrant hierarchy, with premature and stillborn infants in steerage lowest of all. During her voyage to Australia in 1841, Sarah Davenport endured a shipwreck and the death of her one-year-old from scalding, followed soon after by the loss of a premature infant: i had what was caled purmature labour and that babe was throne in the sea i was almost Dumb with grief i thought my tryals was heavey but i cryed unto God to help me for my chilldrens sake i had no one to comfort me in all my tryals for my husband seemed indifferend affter the ship wreck his kindness seemed to be all vanished.*4

Infants who were born and died at sea were disregarded in the final payments for the ship and the calculation of numbers of passengers, especially if births at sea roughly equalled deaths. Over one-third of infant deaths were caused by prematurity, since early labour was induced by seasickness and exhaustion. The remainder could be attributed to various causes, including malnutrition, convulsions, bronchitis, and enteric problems including diarrhoea.*> Mark Staniforth has calculated that 67 per cent of mortality on board government

immigrant ships from 1837 to 1839 comprised infants and children up to seven years; of these 52 per cent were children under 3 years and 21 per cent infants up to a year. Three to four times as many children under 7 died as did adults, usually due to diarrhoea, measles, whooping cough or scarlet fever.*° The statistics on child mortality improved in the second half of the century, as shipboard regulations tightened. On Queensland immigrant ships between 1860 and 1900, 8 per cent of children under 5 died, but annual rates declined from 14.5 per cent in the 1860s to 1.1 per cent in the 1890s.°’ Ralph Shlomowitz and John McDonald have estimated the extraordinarily

high death risks for infants born at sea on the voyage to Australia. On a typical 3-and-a-half-month sailing voyage between 1838 and 1853 nearly one-quarter of such infants died; between 1854 and the 1880s one-seventh died; a steamship voyage of two months in the mid-1880s reduced the risk to one-twelfth dead. McDonald and Shlomowitz attribute the high infant death rates to a variety of causes including ‘infectious diseases sweeping through the confined infant population on board, the difficulty of weaning during the voyage, increased diarrhoeal disease in the tropics, and stress and sea sickness suffered by pregnant and nursing women’. The decline in the infant death rate after 1854 was partly due to the regulations limiting the number of young children per family, as well as improved sanitation and parental hygiene.**

THE TERROR OF ‘A WATERY GRAVE’ 23

The evidence from shipboard diaries strongly suggests that the younger the child, the less significant was its death, with newborns and stillborns the least valued. Infant deaths were considered inevitable. This can be evaluated both in steerage diarists’ comments and in the manner and ritualisation of burial. A domestic servant in her early twenties informed her father of her safe arrival in Melbourne in 1848, commenting on the voyage in the William Stewart: ‘their was some Children died but none of the old people died it would have been a great deal worse if their had been but the Children were never much minded’. Three children had died of diarrhoea on the voyage, one infant and two aged one and a half years.°” William Shennan, a 24-year-old single black-

smith concluded his diary on the Crusader in 1870: ‘no Deaths but a few Children and they were nearly all in infantsey’.4° Andrew Turner’s diary on the Eastern Monarch to Townsville in 1883 was similarly dismissive of child deaths as he noted a funeral service for a child who had died of measles: ‘it cast a gloom over the ship for a short time but it was soon forgotten. Their is a good few cases of Measels aboard in the meantime but they are mostly all children.’*!

Most passengers, as we have seen, were concerned that burial rituals should be taken seriously and carried out with dignity and some ceremony. But this general preference had little application to infants and very young steerage passengers. Edward Hufton, a married 23-year-old steelworker, was an assisted immigrant travelling on the Northbrook to Sydney in 1879. He was an intelligent and resourceful man who later became a lecture assistant in chemistry at Sydney University. There were twenty deaths out of nearly 500 passengers on the Northbrook, most being infants and children. Sometimes his diary entry on the burial ceremony was merely one line: ‘“we here commit its body to the deep” and overboard it went’. On 30 May Hufton noted the death of a child who was buried the same night at 8 p.m., followed soon afterwards by a concert held below. Hufton was defensive in his diary: ‘it will no doubt seem strange to you that we should have concerts and funerals in such a short space of time’. The ethics of this schedule evidently led to some debate on the ship, and the schoolmaster who organised the concert was ‘told

by more tender-hearted people that it was a disgraceful proceeding all together’. Edward Hufton took the part of the schoolmaster and set out the argument for the defence in his journal: Here, the same as in a village, we each have our joys and sorrows. All the difference is this, what is done here is done under everybody’s nose, whereas in a village it is more private ... Had it been a grown-up person, it would have been a very different thing. It would then have been postponed without the slightest doubt ... Must the death of an infant blight the enjoyment of so many people? Besides, the programme was drawn up before it died.**

While the crew and passengers of the Northbrook rated children as less important than adults, at least they believed they deserved a burial service. But for many child deaths in steerage in other ships a burial service seems to

24 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

have been regarded as optional, or at best a ritual to be performed rapidly and sometimes secretly. A passenger called G. Annison, travelling from London to

Port Phillip in 1853, recorded on 6 March the death of a 2-year-old child named only Wilson, ‘wasted away to a skeleton’; the next day at sunrise the child’s body was disposed of ‘without any burial service being read over it there was a deal of comment about it not being done’.* J. P. Ricou, a steerage passenger on the Indus in 1872, noted on 16 April that a child born the previous day ‘was buried in the deep this morning before anybody was about’. By direct contrast, a young cabin passenger who died of consumption on 13 June was given a ‘most imposing’ funeral, with the burial service and prayers actually read by the captain of the ship, rather than the doctor.**

Privileged cabin passengers and child deaths Henry Lister and Charlie Higgins The stark contrast between the death and burial of children in steerage and those of cabin passengers is well illustrated by the death of a captain’s son on the barque Fortune sailing from London to Sydney in 1838. Joseph Fowles, who later became City Surveyor in Sydney, recorded in his diary the illness and death from croup of 2-year-old Henry Lister, the captain’s son. The ship’s captain was the supreme figure of authority on a ship, though his actual social status by birth was usually considerably lower than that of his cabin passengers. This account is revealing about the emotional responses of the captain and his wife. Richard Dana observed that ‘An overstrained sense of manliness is the characteristic of sea-faring men ... A thin-skinned man could hardly live

on shipboard.’*°? Captain Lister evidently recognised the expectations of masculinity but could not always meet them when confronted by his own son’s death.

When little Henry Lister was close to death on 14 June 1838, Fowles observed that his mother responded hysterically: ‘Mrs Lister was almost frantic throwing herself down upon the floor and crying violently refusing comfort’. The captain was ‘so much affected’ that to distract himself he cleared up the cabin, presumably to avoid expressing his emotions openly. When the child’s crisis had apparently passed the captain ‘seemed as frantic with joy as he had been with sorrow so nearly do the extremes of joy and grief approach’. But a week later Henry died as he could retain neither food nor medicine in his stomach, leaving both parents very distressed, though the captain ‘bore it with fortitude like a man’, supporting his wife with great kindness.*¢ The captain’s wife insisted on keeping her son’s body for an entire week on

board ship, unlike the steerage babies who were often thrown overboard within an hour. She was anguished at the prospect of an alien sea burial, but unlike less privileged bereaved parents she could indulge her feelings. The use of a coffin was another breach of normal maritime procedure at the mother’s request, instead of sewing up the body in sailcloth. The coffin was made of Sydney cedar, lined with sheet lead covered with flannel—making the coffin a

THE TERROR OF ‘A WATERY GRAVE’ 25

foot longer than the body to allow room for loose iron weights. The child’s body, dressed in a flannel gown and lace christening cap, was placed in the coffin which was covered by the Union Jack. The captain, the seamen, and the passengers attended the solemn burial service as the bell tolled, some even wearing whatever black mourning dress they could manage for the occasion. Joseph Fowles remarked on the captain’s restraint: “The Captain bore all without evincing any emotion—tho’ he felt it most acutely. I suppose he considers it would look unmanly before the men to shed tears—indeed I could not suppress mine.’*” Captain Lister struggled between his paternal instinct to express grief and his masculine duty as a ship’s master to be restrained. The death at sea of 5-year-old Charles Higgins of diphtheria in February 1870 further illustrates the efforts made by privileged cabin passengers to mitigate the terror of burial at sea. It was a tragic irony that a family that migrated from Ireland primarily for health reasons, following the consumptive death of Charlie’s brother a year earlier, should lose another son on the voyage. The mother, four sons, and two daughters travelled as cabin passengers in a small cargo ship with no steerage passengers and no doctor, leaving Revd John Higgins, the father, to follow later. Eighteen-year-old Henry Bournes Higgins (later Justice Higgins) recorded his brother’s illness in his journal, noting the captain’s special attention to his sick passenger, donating pearl barley water and a hen to make chicken broth, besides maintaining a fire in the galley at nights.*°

The grief-stricken mother saw burial at sea as the heathen antithesis of a good Christian death. Burial at sea was for her an utterly unnatural and unChristian form of disposal of the human body, lacking the familiar church ritual and community support and leaving no grave as a memorial. Henry felt the necessity to explain and excuse his mother’s hysterical grieving: ‘Mother was in a dreadful state after him. Frequently she would break out into spasms of weeping, really alarming, sometimes said she thought her mind was going with the shock ... Mother asserted that she would be thrown overboard if Charlie’s body were thrown overboard, and insisted that the corpse should be carried to Melbourne.’ This demand was less astounding than it seems since the ship was known to be within three days of sighting Melbourne. The captain advised Henry that the quarantine laws forbade a dead body being taken ashore by relatives, so he would be severely reprimanded for retaining the body for so long and might even lose his commission. Henry at last persuaded his mother that immediate burial at sea was imperative but ‘her distress was so terrible’ that Henry remained with her all night to look after her.*? The sea burial took place the day after Charlie’s death. To appease the distraught mother the helpful captain offered to make a small coffin for Charlie, rather than have the body wrapped in canvas. As many passengers as were able changed into black mourning clothes for the funeral, a sign of support which ‘tended to alleviate our distress’. The morning after the sea burial the ship sighted land. When the quarantine officer came on board at the Heads of Port Phillip Bay, ‘everyone could be happy but us’ at reaching Melbourne,

26 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

since the Higgins family experienced the only death on the ship.°° Anne Higgins’s grief at the loss of two sons within a year was exacerbated by distress at the circumstances of Charlie’s death. She came close to a crisis of faith, questioning God’s purpose in taking her innocent son’s young life just as they

reached Australia: ‘Oh! tis torturing me beyond endurance that the most beautiful body is where it is ... All is so dreadfully dark and mysterious, I feel as if I could not praise God.’>!

Child deaths in steerage The experiences of Ellen Moger (1839), Henry Knight (1852-53), and Abijou Good (1863) Cabin passengers often had the emotional reserves and material resources to show sympathy and give comfort both to those who were dying and to their children. But life and death were much harsher in steerage, where three times as many people died, with no space or time for deathbed scenes and the minimum of medicine and nutritious food required for terminal care. Steerage passengers were usually able to make a fuss of the first fellow passenger who died, and perhaps the second, but thereafter they had less sympathy to spare and real fear for the safety of their own families. The greater the mortality in steerage the more people seemed to turn inwards, to become more defensive in hoarding their limited emotional and physical resources for their own family’s survival. This was especially so on the nightmare voyages with numerous deaths from epidemics, when the tolling of the ship’s bell became commonplace and pathetic parcels were thrown overboard with little or no ceremony. In such extreme circumstances all that finally mattered was whether the family at risk was their own or not. If the dying children belonged to somebody else, then the sympathy and friendly support offered varied with their level of fear and the numbers of dead. The experiences of Ellen Moger, Henry Knight and Abijou Good should help us to understand the fear, fatalism, and profound grief which affected so many immigrants to colonial Australia on the loss of their children. We shall explore the loss of children at sea through the eyes, first, of a mother, then a father and finally a compassionate observer. Ellen Moger’s tragedy in 1839 was described in a disjointed letter to her parents in Hull nearly three months after three of her four children starved to death on the voyage to Adelaide. The letter was inordinately difficult to write ‘and frequently I feel as though I must throw away my pen’, because her grief was truly indescribable. Her letter contained a confused juxtaposition of routine daily events together with the stark but resigned statement of her tragedy. The young doctor was ‘careless and inattentive’ to passengers’ health in the first half of the voyage, until thirty deaths focused his concentration. Three of Ellen’s four children gradually wasted away until they were ‘sorrowful spectacles to behold ... for want of proper nourishment’. They were unable to eat any of the ship’s normal provisions and their ship carried no cows or special

THE TERROR OF ‘A WATERY GRAVE’ 27

soft food for babies and children; adults could survive on a diet of salted meat and hard biscuits, while children died. Ellen wrote that: Poor little Alfred was the first that died on the 30th of Oct, and on the 8th of Nov, dear Fanny went and three days after on the 11th, the dear babe was taken from me. I scarcely know how I sustained the shock, though I was certain they could not recover, yet when poor Fanny went it over-powered me and from the weakness of my frame, reduced me to such a low nervous state that, for many weeks, I was not expected to survive.>?

Ellen Moger was delirious or unconscious for most of the three weeks when she was bled, blistered and plastered, but she was aware that ‘the dear baby and Fanny were thrown overboard’; she insisted in her delirium that ‘the water could not retain them’ and they shared the berth with her still. She was also sure that her three children would not have died if they had been provided with proper nourishment. Ellen made no mention of religious consolation and little reference to her brewer husband. She claimed to be resigned to her new circumstances in Adelaide, which she considered neither beautiful nor salubrious, but hers was an inauspicious start to her new pioneer role.>°

Henry Knight, a gardener from England, kept a diary on board the Java from

London to Sydney in 1852 to 1853 as a warning to others against the ‘Horrors of Government Emigration’. At the time of his assisted passage to Australia, Henry had two children (George and Henry) by his first wife, and two (Charles and Susan) by his second wife Mary, the daughter of a black-

smith. The Java carried forty-four crew, two cabin passengers and 483 mainly English immigrants, on a seemingly interminable voyage of 184 days which saw fifty-two deaths and twenty-nine births.°* One-third of the 483 passengers were under 14, and thirteen of the twenty-nine children born during the passage died. The focus of Henry Knight’s diary was on the tragedy of his own family and the events leading to the deaths of his two children, Henry

aged 12 and Susan aged 4. The fifty-two people who died on the Java were mainly small children under 3 who succumbed to the effects of debility, exhaustion and malnutrition following an outbreak of diarrhoea. The most common recorded causes of death for young children and infants on the Java were marasmus, associated with infant malnutrition, scrofula, a wasting disease, and diarrhoea, while diphtheria, typhus, and ‘fever’ were also noted. The milk of nursing mothers dried up as a consequence of inadequate diet and

continuous seasickness; infants, young children and nursing mothers were bound to suffer hardship on ships’ rations allocated to meet the supposed minimum needs of adults. By 13 December 1852, three weeks after sailing, Henry Knight observed that the allowance of edible food was inadequate and that nothing extra had been allocated to his sick family from the surgery. He did not know how they would have managed without the arrowroot, tapioca and other provisions he brought from England.°° Four-year-old Susan was already very weak as ‘she

28 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

cannot eat enough of the food to keep up her strength a Child died’. The frequent juxtaposition of the details of his own children’s illnesses with the bare record of other children’s deaths highlighted his fears.°° He also complained frequently of the filth he had to endure when making gruel for his sick family. By 17 December he protested that none of his children could get enough to eat. A week later, 6-year-old Charles said he was sorry to have left Kent as ‘there was plenty of nice things to eat there here there is nothing I can eat’. Henry was extremely distressed and angry at this: ‘I was obliged to go to a private place in the Ship to give vent to my feeling’s seeing that I was deceived

by the Commissioners as to nourishment for Children.’ This was one of Henry’s rare emotional outbursts, bearing testimony to the powerful convention that working-class men should not express their emotions in public, or even in the presence of their own family, however great the provocation. The Knight family spent a miserable Christmas Day at sea, with Susan ‘fast dwindling’, Charles too weak to speak and Henry also sick. He noted that his wife daily asked the ship’s doctor for food and wine for the sick children, to

no avail, and also that another child had died, making a total of 15. By 28 December he complained, ‘O how hard to hear my Children ask for nourishment and have nothing for them that they can take.’ Two weeks later Henry and Susan were worse than ever and Susan was ‘actually starving’. At the critical point of imminent starvation the captain was persuaded to allocate limited emergency rations of small potatoes and porter to starving children. Henry had acute diarrhoea and Susan was feverish and vomiting. On 19 January 1853 the father sadly recorded: ‘Susan starving Henry a little better another child died today from starvation.’°® On 5 February 1853, 12-year-old Henry was the first to die, of diarrhoea

and starvation. Immigrants heard a groan in the closet, but as Henry had fastened himself in, it took over fifteen minutes to rescue him. No one suspected a Death had taken place untill the Door was opened but so it was poor fellow he was quite dead sitting on the seat & perhaps my Friends can better judge what my feelings were than I can express. I took George to see him after he had been carried into the Hospital which was the place where all the Dead were taken poor fellow he wept over him most bitterly nor was he the only one that wept for none of us expected all this.>?

Again the working-class father explicitly avoided a direct expression of his own grief, while accepting that 14-year-old George and his wife should cry. He made no reference to religious faith or hopes of the hereafter. Like Ellen Moger, the Knight family was presumably among that half of the population of England and Wales which had not attended church on census Sunday two years earlier. Many immigrants had probably abandoned their Christian faith before leaving Britain. Only ten days after her brother’s death Susan’s condition deteriorated again when the doctor said the supply of wine was finished. Susan’s hands and face became swollen and she grew much weaker, but the father could not persuade the doctor to attend her or many other starving

THE TERROR OF ‘A WATERY GRAVE’ 29

children. ‘Oh how hard to see her dwindling for the want of what I was told by the Commissioners we should have ... I wish I had never came on Board this Vessel to see my Children starved [to death].’©° Henry Knight was extremely angry at this situation when the ship sailed into the harbour at Cape Town on 25 February 1853. When the Port Master

came on board to inquire about illness and deaths, he declared he never before encountered a ship from England with as many as thirty deaths. He assumed the large number must be due to an epidemic of fever or smallpox, but the doctor corrected him: ‘Bowel disease said the Doctor instead of speaking the truth by saying they had died for want of nourishment.’ Knight seized his opportunity to protest to the Port Master: ‘myself & Mr Pool told him the Biscuits was bad he inspected them we told him the Children had died of starvation & we begged he would Intercede for us that if we were not treated differently we should loose all our Children before we reached Sydney.’°! The Port Master promised to pass these complaints to Mr James Rivers, the Immigration Agent at Cape Town with the responsibility to investigate such

cases. The next day the Port Master and James Rivers toured the ship and heard complaints against the doctor and the captain, and of the inadequate food and bad biscuits, and lack of medical attention and comforts. But when Mr Rivers and two doctors formally investigated the passengers’ complaints, Henry Knight seems to have been carefully manoeuvred away from the action, presumably because he provided the leadership for the steerage protestors. Mr Rivers subsequently told Knight that if he had been present to press the case, the doctor would have been left at the Cape and the captain fired; instead the captain pleaded ignorance and the doctor promised to provide better care. The captain was cleared of negligence to his passengers on condition that a list

of medical comforts was placed on board to combat the unusual mortality among the children attributed to ‘want of proper nourishment’.° Henry Knight’s anger at these developments may be imagined but his emotional resources were soon diverted to his own family by Susan’s death on 6 March 1853 from scrofula. He had recognised since 25 February that she was too weak to recover. By 5 March the little girl was considerably altered for the worse and the parents sat up with her all that night, anticipating the end at any moment. At 9 next morning: ‘my Dear little girl breathed her last’. The captain promised the grieving father to wait for the burial until next morning, but instead ‘committed my Child to the Deep’ at 10.30 p.m. without informing the parents, who were in bed. The disregard of both captain and doctor for the feelings of their steerage passengers was astonishing, though Henry Knight simply allowed his statement of facts to speak for themselves. He merely noted that his wife was ‘very poorly’ for the next six days, but on 12 March he again expressed his anger: I hope when the Commisioner’s send out another ship with Emigrants they will send out a proper portion of nourishment & A proper Superintendant one that has humanity about him these expressions are hurtful to the feeling’s especially to the Mother’s who are weeping over their dying Children.®

30 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

But neither the doctor nor the captain appeared to have learned from their lucky and ill-deserved escape at Cape Town. Henry Knight’s wife continued ‘very poorly very weak’ but was permitted no additional nourishment, though she was pregnant. Despite a particularly bad night on 26 March with great pain in the bowels, the doctor did not attend her, evidently not concerned to keep the promise made at the Cape to give better medical care. By 9 April Mary Knight was still very ill and her husband’s personal stock of provisions purchased at the Cape was nearly exhausted. He now feared for the lives of

his wife and remaining two children, for he was convinced ‘she would I believe have been dead had it not been for the Flour wine beer Brandy & Biscuits I laid in at the Cape’. On 12 April the captain sought to put the immigrants on short rations of flour because only eight days’ allowance remained. Knight was nominated by the immigrants to put their protest to the captain, who relented for three more days, but on 16 April no flour was served: ‘the Emigrants agreed unanimously that as we was short of food to demand of the Captain exactly where we was’. By this time both Knight parents were ‘weak & poorly’. When they finally sailed through Sydney Heads ‘the thoughts of

my Dear Children spoiled all’, after an interminable voyage of five months and fifty-two deaths.®* Soon after their arrival in Sydney, Mary Knight gave birth to another daughter and subsequently six more, and both parents survived until their eighties. It is significant that the Sydney Morning Herald reported the names of only the two cabin passengers who died and not those of the 50 steerage passengers®°°—another symbol of the vast gulf between the two classes in death as in life—and of the continuation of that gulf on land. In 1863 Abijou Good and his family sailed to Sydney on the Beejapore, a ship

which already had a horrific history. It was an unusually large 1347-ton wooden vessel which had an additional deck to carry more than a thousand passengers as part of an abortive experiment by the British Emigration Commission to reduce costs during the early gold rushes. On the Beejapore’s voyage to Sydney in 1852-53, overcrowding and inadequate ventilation had

caused widespread sickness and the deaths of fifty-five infants and young children, chiefly from measles and typhus fever, while a further sixty-two died

at the quarantine station, mainly from typhus.®® Despite this history, the Beejapore still carried 720 passengers of all classes when the Good family travelled to Rockhampton ten years later. Abijou Good discovered that his own and another family, twelve people in all, had to share an area no larger than a small pantry, 9 feet long by 6 feet wide and 7 feet high, including four shelves for sleeping.°” The Good family was unfortunate in its ship’s surgeon as well as its vessel,

which had an unusually incompetent and irresponsible doctor who failed to enforce vital sanitary and cleansing regulations. While there were distinct limits to curative medicine in the nineteenth century, the better governmentappointed ships’ surgeons were primarily appointed to enforce vital health, sanitary, and hygiene regulations intended to prevent the outbreak and spread of infectious diseases. Helen Woolcock concludes that Queensland immigrant

THE TERROR OF ‘A WATERY GRAVE’ 31

ships gradually established a staff of reliable ships’ surgeons, mostly mature married men who supervised several voyages and produced satisfactory mortality rates by 1869.°° Robin Haines and Ralph Shlomowitz agree that the role of the surgeon was ‘more disciplinary than medical’ and that the majority were effective in reducing immigrants’ exposure to infectious diseases.°? By 30 April, 720 passengers had endured weeks of almost unbearable heat and filthy conditions, and the measles epidemic was taking a heavy toll of the children. Burials were carried out in secret in a vain effort to avoid alarming the passengers, to retain control of the ship, and to minimise the impact of the deaths. On 16 April at about 7.30 a.m. Good was surprised to see the sailmaker walk to the side of the vessel with a bundle in his arms which he threw

overboard. Good asked several people what had been thrown away, but nobody seemed to know: ‘at last i was told it was a funeral, there were one hundred people at least on deck but scarcely one knew that it was a funeral This will give some idea of the manner in which protestants bury children at

sea.” On 20 April another child died at about 8 a.m. and two hours later Good again saw the sailmaker pass with a large bundle. He could see nothing of the funeral and no one on deck knew that a child was about to be buried. When he heard a dull splash he knew it was the child’s body ‘but there was neither priest nor mourners to be seen’.’? As Abijou Good noted in his diary on 30 April: In fact since the first body was thrown overboard everything as been done to render the proceedings as quiet & as secret as possible ... On the morning of the 28th a child eleven days old died about an hour after we were all sitting at breakfast when we saw the sail maker pass with a large bundle in his arms, it was taken on deck & thrown over board without even the parents being acquainted with what they were about to do.’!

During May 1863 the death toll steadily increased, as Good recorded the

lack of decent burial rituals and the discrimination between steerage and cabin passengers. On 16 May another child died at 6 a.m. and was thrown over at about 7 a.m.—‘there is not much ceremony here’. This contrasted with the next entry on the death of a child which died on the night of 16 May but was not thrown overboard until 8 a.m. next morning ‘as it belonged to a cabin passenger’. The bodies of steerage children were thrown overboard as quickly as possible, while the cabin passengers’ corpses were retained for a more respectable twelve hours or so.

On 20 May 1863 Abijou Good recorded the absence of ceremony and respect for a steerage child’s burial more fully, carefully following the entire proceedings with growing anger. About an hour after a child’s death from measles, the sailmaker entered the hospital berth where the child lay, still in the clothes in which it died, for nobody had bothered to wash or lay out the little body. The sailmaker spread on the floor an old biscuit bag, not even a blanket, and rolled the child in it, still in soiled clothes, added two pieces of coal to sink the bundle, and tied it up with old rope. Abijou Good followed

32 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

the sailmaker as he took his bundle onto the poop deck, where he threw it over the rail into the sea ‘without prayers nor rites of any kind performed— so you see it will not do to go to sea to have a fuss made with you’. He could see the captain and the sailor on the poop but their presence was unconnected to the pathetic end of the infant.” Much of Good’s anger was directed at the ship’s surgeon who was supposed to care for sick patients and conduct burial services, but ‘he is not up to much either as a docter or a pasenger’. Good dismissed him on one occa-

sion as no more use than an ‘old washerwoman’ and on another as ‘a respectable blackguard’. The captain seemed to Good to be trying to compensate for his doctor’s incompetence by taking over some of his duties. It was the captain rather than the doctor who came round the ship each morning to

discover who was ill; the captain even told Good he could have done better for the passengers without the doctor, to whom he gave medical directions, including medicine to be administered in each case. On 21 May two grieving parents who had lost a child from measles the day before suffered a second death ‘intirely through the neglect of the docter’ according to the vigilant diarist. The second dead child was ‘rolled and sewn up’ like its sibling, and thrown overboard within an hour. But on this occasion the doctor read prayers, perhaps to atone for his neglect or because the sorrowing parents had lost two children in two days. But by 22 May the doctor’s behaviour had reverted to normal when ‘death the King of terrors’ paid an even closer visit, taking a child from the family which shared the Goods’ berth. Good blamed the doctor yet again for his neglect, ‘he never having given it any thing of any kind’, and the little body was thrown overboard within an hour; this time no prayers were said as the doctor was ‘to lasy to leave his cabin’.”? Three more children were thrown overboard on 28 May with no prayers, the last only twenty minutes after death, before the body was cold. Throughout June 1863 Abijou Good continued his record of children’s deaths, all thrown into the sea soon afterwards, with ‘no prayers’. When the ship reached Queensland Good reckoned there had been thirty-eight deaths in all, most of them children: ‘it is a fearfull thing to have to record the deaths of so many human beings’. They sighted Queensland on 22 June and the capture of a ‘beautifull Australian butterfly’ on deck was a symbol of hope for the regeneration of life on land after the havoc of so much death at sea.” As Ellen Moger informed her parents in 1840 following the loss of two of her own children at sea, ‘the mind, I assure you, soon becomes hardened and callous on board a ship’.” She recognised that immigrants did not allow themselves to feel too much for the deaths of people outside their own family circle. They had to develop tough exteriors to cope with the trials and tribulations of life and death on board. An analogy exists here with the experience of death in wartime. As the immigrant ship was the bridge between two worlds and two lives, it inadvertently educated the immigrant for the hardships ahead in the alien bush and the new cities.

Chapter 2

Faith, Fever, and Consumption Disease and Adult Deaths at Sea

Religion and the good Christian death at sea The confinement of all immigrants in an enclosed space on board ship allows some insight into the role of religion in death. It is always difficult for a historian to evaluate faith, since it does not necessarily equate with attendance at religious services or with census information. We have already seen that religious affiliations were emphasised on board ship by the custom of organising steerage ‘mess’ groups according to region or nationality, which often corresponded to religious denomination. Woolcock has used the 1881 census statistics for Queensland to provide an estimate of nominal religious affiliation among immigrants: of the 90.5 per cent who were Christian, 38 per cent

were Anglican, 28 per cent were Roman Catholic, 11.5 per cent were Presbyterian, and 22.5 per cent other Protestant denominations.! People from the same region and religion tended to immigrate together, which accentuated

these patterns. The Church of England service was supposed to be read publicly each Sunday, usually on deck, but attendance was not compulsory because there were so many immigrants of other denominations. If it was wet, the religious hierarchy became clear, since the Anglican service was often held

in the first cabin, the Presbyterian in the second and the Catholic service in steerage.

Shipboard diaries suggest that those immigrants who showed the most piety, in death as in life, were the middle-class cabin passengers and the Irish Catholics in steerage, besides some of the single women in steerage. Protestant

devotions were encouraged at embarkation in Liverpool by the Liverpool

Seamen’s and Emigrants’ Friend Society, whose members distributed Evangelical tracts. They also conducted divine services for the vulnerable 33

34 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

departing immigrants with appropriate themes, dwelling on their potential perils ‘as strangers in a strange land, and as intending voyagers over the mighty deep, where danger in a thousand trying forms might await them’.? Storms at sea, epidemic fevers and possible shipwrecks were calculated to evoke the need for some sort of spiritual consolation in many who were otherwise indifferent.

Revd E. M. Lawrence was a particularly zealous clergyman on the Daylight in 1875. He kept a ‘Religious Instruction Diary’ listing the divine services and religious instruction classes held and all spiritual services ren-

dered at times of death. On 17 June 1875 he baptised and subsequently buried the infant daughter of J. B. Davy. A week later he spoke and prayed with the parents of a dying 2-year-old child in her final hours, and buried her twelve hours later. For a week late in July he regularly visited an 8-year-old boy called John Turton and spent time preparing the boy and his parents for his death on 28 July. His diary notes special prayers delivered for the boy and ‘sat up with J. H. Turton’. On 5 August he noted the death of Levi Batty: ‘was with him at the time’. Next day after the burial service, he organised a collection among the immigrants, the crew, and the cabin passengers which raised £10.18.8 to help the widow.? There are many examples of religious piety and devotion in shipboard journals, especially before the 1880s. William Nichols in 1849 cited the death of the pious Evangelical tailor aged 23 who ‘arose upon his knees’ in his final hour to beg God for mercy: ‘ “O Lord I have been as faithful unto thee as I could be on this wicked earth ... make me one of thy faithful” ... Without either sigh or a groan, with all pleasure unimaginable [he] resigned his soul to his maker.’* Cases abound of psalms, prayers and hymns bringing comfort to those who were dying and to their mourners. Thomas Davies, a Christian plumber on the Lord Raglan in 1854, observed that Mrs Mathews, one of the immigrants, was reading the Bible to a dying old man ‘which seems to console him greatly’. Two days later the old man’s five children were taking turns to read him prayers, ‘it was heart-rending ... he died whilst they were being read and died with the greatest ease’.. J. M. Parrington on the Storm King in

1869 was one of many shipboard diarists to insert into his journal death entries some of the traditional Christian consolations. On the death of a oneyear-old child he observed that ‘it made us remember too that we should have to die’ and would need to make appropriate spiritual preparation.°® However, many immigrants were indifferent to religion and even actively

resistant to organised worship. As early as 1853 Joseph Tarry on the Ghenghis Khan observed that ‘we were surrounded with Papists and unbelievers’ between decks.’ Diaries reveal that many people in steerage rejected religious consolation, even when faced with death. The level of religious enthusiasm at sea is indicated by the frequent cancellation of divine services for reasons varying from plain indifference to stormy weather or sectarian rivalry. Ship’s surgeons’ reports sometimes complained of poor attendance at religious services, which on some ships were held primarily on occasions of storms and burials. If the ship had no Anglican clergyman then the Master or

FAITH, FEVER, AND CONSUMPTION 35

the surgeon was expected to read the service; Dr Martin Lightoller, surgeon on the Scottish Bard in 1878, was not unusual in his reluctance to act as religious guardian: ‘I would have given something to have got out of doing it.”® Francis Taylor in 1850 was ever conscious that many of his fellow passengers on the Stag did not share his own devout faith. He was affronted by the lack of faith of the majority of his fellow passengers: I am ashamed to say we have some on board who even whilst the very last words are pronounced over the body of a fellow creature previous to its commital to the Waves are using the most profane language singing the most indecent songs in various parts of the Vessel. This matters not to the poor unseen Child just sunk, but it is hoped they will alter their ways, or God may summon them unaware to the same Fate.”

On 7 June 1850, Taylor outlined another page of his journal with a black border for his account of their seventh death at sea. The bell which tolled for this infant should remind all passengers of the ‘neverending eternity which awaits us, either in the everlasting happiness or Misery ... but Alas! How few seem to reflect that the next [bell] may be for them. The launching of a human body into eternity ... appears by many to be totally unheeded.’!°

Patrick O’Farrell’s reading of shipboard journals and letters home to Ireland from Irish migrants to Australia led him to conclude that ‘the ship was

the colony in advance and in miniature’, which anticipated the erosion of organised religion in secularised Australia. O’Farrell uses the diary of William Bates, a young Evangelical Presbyterian minister from County Tyrone travelling to Melbourne on the Minehaha in 1858, to illustrate his point. Many of Bates’s fellow immigrants, especially the young men, displayed a ‘larrikin irreligion’, treating religion as an irrelevant joke and its ministers as wowsers to be ridiculed. Bates regretted in his diary: ‘Our young men seem all to be indifferent to religion. Private prayer is, I doubt, very uncommon.’ The young men ‘crowned the sabbath evening’s impiety’ by locking a clergyman in the watercloset; and next day pelted him with rotten cabbages. Bates later noted ‘there is not a single truly pious person in the ship, the great majority decidedly irre-

ligious’. O’Farrell concluded that ‘the colony’s prefigured irreligious ethos had triumphed at sea, long before the colony had been reached’. Internalised private faith might survive the unpredictability of the perilous voyage but the fabric of institutionalised religion was weakened. '!

Typhus fever and Arthur Manning’s faith, 1839-40 Little was known about infectious diseases in the nineteenth century and it was only recognised in 1909 that typhus was communicated by the bite of an infected body louse. Until its gradual decline after 1870, along with other epidemic diseases, typhus fever was endemic in Victorian Britain; its epidemics were linked with poverty, famine and war, and also with institutions such as gaols and workhouses. From the Australian perspective, typhus was almost

36 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

entirely a disease of overcrowded ships and gaols—a disease which was rarely

introduced to the shore population. ‘Ship fever’ as it was often called, was known to be associated with poverty, overcrowding, personal uncleanliness, undernourishment and filthy ill-ventilated conditions, but the causal interaction of these relationships was unknown. Doctors emphasised the role of environmental pollution which appeared to be effectively treated by public health reform and improved sanitation (though for reasons misunderstood); even after germ theory was discovered, most ships’ surgeons remained convinced sanitarians. !4 Typhus fever was responsible for high levels of mortality on early convict

ships until naval surgeons were appointed to maintain strict conditions of cleanliness on board. Two hundred and sixty-one of the 930 male convicts on the Second Fleet died mainly from typhus and scurvy, as also did 10 per cent of the Third Fleet’s convicts. The mortality from typhus was actually higher on early immigrant ships than on the later convict ships because it was impos-

sible to regulate free passengers to the same degree as convicts. The Lady MacNagbhten’s voyage in 1836-37 was terrible, with 54 dead from typhus out of 412 Irish immigrants. Poor and malnourished immigrants on this ship had no medical examination before embarkation and were then subjected to gross overcrowding and insufficient medicines, with no proper regulation of cleanliness, order and ventilation. The young and inexperienced ship’s surgeon, Dr Hawkins, who became a victim of the disease, was also a convenient scapegoat for a board of inquiry into the high mortality. The bounty ship New York Packet was inaccurately reported on arrival in Sydney in 1841 to be free from disease except for ‘influenza’, yet typhus rapidly spread through the quaran-

tine station, infecting 80 and killing 9. It was evidently present but undiagnosed on the high seas.!° Of the 814 immigrants on the ill-fated Ticonderoga to Melbourne in 1852, 96 died from typhus at sea and 80 more at the quarantine station. The health officer’s report in Melbourne condemned the massive overcrowding, lack of ventilation, and the accumulation of ‘dirt and filth of the most loathsome description’ on the ‘floating pest-house’.!4 Helen Woolcock has observed that adult immigrants on the Queensland route fell victim to the ‘filth-related’ fevers, consumption, and accidents, whereas the children died from epidemic and diarrhoeal diseases. Miasmatic diseases, chiefly typhus and typhoid, fell from 27 per cent of total mortality in the 1860s to 12 per cent twenty years later, to none by the turn of the century, with the decline in major epidemic diseases, sanitary reform and healthier, cleaner immigrants.'> Typhus, typhoid and other fevers hit young adults of 15 to 29 years the hardest. In the earlier years of immigration, typhus was the most common cause of quarantine, but from 1880 smallpox replaced it. Six British ships were detained in quarantine with typhus in the 1860s, four in the 1870s and none thereafter. The common terror of typhus fever at sea is vividly illustrated in the diary

of Arthur Manning, travelling as a cabin passenger on the Earl Grey to Sydney with his wife Fanny in 1839-40. Arthur Manning was returning to Sydney to join his family who arrived there in 1829, Arthur having pre-

FAITH, FEVER, AND CONSUMPTION 37

sumably returned to England for his education. His father, John Edye Manning, was a registrar of the Supreme Court and his brother, William Montagu Manning, was already making a name for himself as a barrister and

politician, becoming solicitor-general in 1844. Although still only 20, Manning was self-righteous and self-assured beyond his years, and a devout Evangelical Anglican keen to save the souls of sinners. This ship suffered nine deaths in all, most identified as caused by typhus, but still a lower mortality rate than the famous ‘plague ships’ such as the Ticonderoga. As a privileged cabin passenger, with superior food, space, ventilation, and accommodation,

Arthur Manning was less vulnerable than most. But Manning’s fear was enhanced by his hypochondriacal tendencies and his early recognition that the ship’s doctor, Richard Dunn, would be no help in a fever epidemic. Manning observed: Dunn is a delicate person, and has long complained. In fact, he told me some days ago, he only rose from his bed on shore, to which he had been confined six months, to take charge of our Emigrants, in the hope that the voyage would invigorate his constitution. He has neither strength, nerve nor nous for his situation ... From his looks I should say he has consumption, and that his years on earth would not be many. !®

Dunn was one of that group of near-desperate consumptives who hoped the extended sea voyage would prolong their lives; as ship’s surgeons, they were hardly likely to inspire confidence. His fellow passengers assumed that he attained his position because he was the captain’s nephew. Lewis Whittaker, another cabin passenger who was also a doctor, confided in Manning that Dunn was ‘a gone man’ who was not expected to survive until Sydney.!7 The twin themes of faith and fever echo through Manning’s diary. On 12 November 1839 he reported the death of the ship’s steward from ‘this terrible Fever’, but the matter was hushed up for ‘fear of alarming the people’. Twelve days later Manning’s panic at the prospect of the dreaded fever was manifest: Fever has broken out amongst the Emigrants! Yes, here we are alone, on the wide ocean, far from friends and assistance, and unable to escape, and surrounded by that most direful of all scourges “‘Typhus Fever!’ I shudder at the thought, for if it once take firm hold of the ship, God only knows how many now on board will live

to arrive in Sydney, and relate the sad fate of their companions. One man was buried yesterday, and two women are now in the hospital, dangerously ill of the Fever. !®

Manning’s diary revealed a considerable understanding of the confused medical knowledge of the causes and transmission of typhus fever in 1839. He expressed no surprise at the outbreak of fever, since the ship’s surgeon failed utterly to manage and regulate the immigrants in a badly overcrowded ship. But the chief problem was Dunn’s lack of authority to enforce any rules he thought essential for passengers’ health:

38 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

Irregularity and disorder of every description prevail among these dirty beings. Cleanliness, we know, is a great preservative of health and preventive of contagion, and is more than ever necessary on board ship, where so many people are huddled together two in a bed, and more than a hundred in one division of the vessel! ... These rascals would and do live in filth and foul air, rather than take the trouble to get rid of it by assisting each other to keep their place clean and well ventilated. No

wonder that fever has made its appearance in our crowded and filthy habitation. Mr Dunn has not the confidence of any of us as a medical man, and we all dread the spreading of the contagion.!7”

There was some inconsistency in Manning’s ruminations on the causes of typhus fever. On the one hand he blamed the surgeon’s deficiencies and the steerage migrants’ filth and disorder. But on the other hand, ‘we are all in the hands of the Allmighty; and if it be His good will to take many of our number out of this world and its miseries, all we can do will be of no avail’. Their only hope was to prepare for ‘eternal bliss beyond the grave’.*° But submission to the will of God was not assisted by the neglect of Revd Simpson, the Anglican clergyman, who never visited the sick or dying during the fever outbreak for fear of carrying contagion to his ten children.! Manning’s worst fears were realised on 9 December 1839 when typhus fever spread from steerage and crew to the cabin passengers, notably Miss

Davies, a female companion, and Mr Dunn, the consumptive surgeon. Manning dreaded the prospect of fever spreading to himself and his wife: ‘At last we have it in the midst of us, where will it stop! who goes next? ... God spare me such a loss [as my wife], or permit me to follow my beloved wife to the regions of bliss!’ But his belief in illness as the will of God was again weakened by his conviction that moral faults contributed to the fate of the two latest sufferers. Miss Davies ‘takes no exercise, and eats too heartily’, while Mr Dunn’s constitution was ‘ruined by folly’ and constant dissipation. Manning was relieved to learn on 11 December that the two invalids were recovering: ‘As danger recedes, I smile at my fears.’ But he remained anxious about the dissolute ship’s surgeon: I fear Dunn rises but little more of a Christian than he was before his illness, although he knows he was on the brink of the grave. How awful is his state! No justification for wilful blindness can save him, and he must inevitably go [to] that place where fire is never quenched ...*?

By contrast, the illness and death of the pious young cabin passenger Miss Waugh, on 22 December, was both edifying and unthreatening for the watchful young Evangelical. ‘It is not Typhus Fever, so we do not dread infection.

How selfish is human nature!’ Despite the Waugh family’s loss, Manning stressed their spiritual gain of a good Christian death, even though they were Presbyterians with ‘peculiar’ rituals:

FAITH, FEVER, AND CONSUMPTION 39

She seems to have been well prepared for her awful change, having long kept her ‘house in order’ in the full expectation of a speedy dissolution ... Her imprisoned spirit has taken its flight to regions of bliss, where it already joins in the songs of everlasting adoration and praise at the Redeemer’s feet. Death has been to her ‘a gain’.

Manning viewed heaven as the traditional, restful place of psalm-singing saints engaged in the eternal worship of God. He hoped that the three deaths so far reminded all passengers constantly that ‘the hand of Death cannot be arrested. ... It is equally necessary to be prepared for a watery grave as for an earthen one.’*4

But Manning’s spiritual contemplation of death, heaven, and judgment did

not prevent his keen eyes from observing with interest the more corporeal aspects of Miss Waugh’s death and burial. He noted that the captain had ordered the carpenter to make a coffin at the wish of the elderly bereaved parents, instead of the usual blanket and canvas shroud. But after Miss Waugh was placed in her specially made coffin it was discovered with shock that she was ‘quite warm, and therefore could not be dead!’ She was speedily removed from her coffin while the doctors checked that there was no sign of life before she was finally ‘nailed down’. This episode is a reminder that the common fear of burial alive applied as much at sea as for an earth burial. All the cabin passengers dressed in black for a Presbyterian form of the funeral service read by the uncouth Independent missionary Dr Ross. The bereaved father and son showed considerable emotion at the service, but Mrs Waugh gave vent to her

‘sobs and lamentations’ in the privacy of the cabin. This burial ceremony again demonstrated to Manning the folly of allowing coffins at sea, as ‘it floated on the water, quite upright!’, though thankfully the bereaved family did not perceive the blunder. Fortunately the carpenter deliberately made several holes in the wood, so the coffin slowly disappeared as it filled with water.

Manning noticed, like so many other immigrants, that ‘there seems to be something additionally dreadful in losing a relative at sea, where she is cast into the deep, and no grave is left to mark the spot of her last resting place’, where the grieving family could subsequently visit to meditate and pray.*° The awful ‘calamity’ of fever afflicted Manning more personally when his wife Fanny caught ‘remittant fever’ on 7 January 1840: ‘I cannot bear to see dear, dear Fanny suffering—and oh! how dreadful! should she be taken from me, a prey to that fever which is raging so fearfully among us! I could not long survive her, should it please God to make me a widower.’ Fortunately Fanny was much better by 12 January, and though the relapsing fever recurred at intervals during the remainder of the voyage, later attacks were less alarming.*° It was inevitable that some confusion occurred when the term ‘fever’

was loosely used to cover several diseases including typhus and typhoid, which were not officially regarded as distinct until 1869.*” But given the terror of typhus, some immigrants inevitably attempted their own diagnoses,

40 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

and false rumours could spread rapidly through a ship which contained genuine typhus cases. Manning described the second mate’s illness as ‘fever but not absolute Typhus’. Even Dr Lewis Whittaker, the medical man, had ‘symptoms of the Fever about him, but hopes to get rid of them by taking them briskly in hand’.*? On 30 January, Dr Ross was ‘said to have typhus fever but in truth has a cold’ and was fast recovering. As Manning admitted, ‘On board ship every little ailment is magnified into fever.’ He recognised that fear of fever gave ‘reality to the chimeras and fictions of fancy’.*? But it was a different matter when Manning believed he himself had at last contracted typhus fever at the end of the voyage. He spent 20 February 1840 in bed ‘with the full persuasion that Typhus Fever had taken hold of me’. He believed he had the symptoms severely and remained very ill for four hours, after which Dr Whittaker’s remedies began to relieve his head and stomach. Next morning he attributed his recovery to Whittaker’s prompt treatment and ‘the simple circumstance of the wind changing and becoming beautifully fair!’ So easily could a hypochondriac come to believe in climate as a cure for supposed typhus fever, when he probably had an ailment such as food poisoning. When the ship arrived in Sydney on 25 February 1840 its occupants expected

to be placed in quarantine but were declared free of fever and allowed to disembark.*?

There presumably Arthur Manning and his wife joined his father’s family in New South Wales. No record survives of Arthur’s life there in the 1840s and possibly his fortunes suffered with his father’s financial reverses as a victim of the Depression. Manning reappeared in the records in the 1850s as a commissioner of Crown lands in New South Wales and in the 1860s as a principal undersecretary at the Colonial Secretary’s Department in Queensland.

At some point Fanny died and Manning married again to rear two sons and five daughters, all Australian born. His career appears to have reached an untimely end in 1868 when he was assaulted with a tomahawk by a suspended public servant with a grievance who was punished with penal servitude for life. Manning retired on a substantial pension soon after, and we can only speculate that colleagues were relieved to be rid of his sharp tongue and supercilious manner.

The ocean as a health resort for consumptives Tuberculosis was a major killer disease in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, with a higher mortality rate than cholera and smallpox combined. The bacillus was identified by Robert Koch in 1882 but no secure remedy was

available until the advent of streptomycin in 1943. The death rates from tuberculosis in Britain began to fall very gradually from about 1850 along with those of all infectious diseases. Pulmonary tuberculosis, known as phthisis or consumption, was a destructive disease emanating from mass poverty, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions. Medical science could do relatively little before 1943 and the real improvements in the late nineteenth

FAITH, FEVER, AND CONSUMPTION 41

century came from sanitary and public health reform, better nutrition, and rising living standards.*! It may be assumed that Aboriginal people were not infected with tubercu-

losis before the arrival of Europeans. Significantly, the history of European mortality in Australia began with the consumptive death of a sailor, Forby Sutherland, from the Endeavour crew during Captain Cook’s first voyage. The death rate from pulmonary tuberculosis rose steadily from 1862 to 1884 in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, due to an increased mortality among young adults, but gradually declined thereafter?” Australian death rates were still rising while those in Britain were already falling, adding to confusion about causes and prevention of the disease. Tuberculosis was a major killer in colonial Australia, especially for young adults of both sexes: ‘mortality from this disease was consistently high during the last half of the nineteenth century, whereas the impact of other major infectious diseases was only felt during epidemics’.** Consumption was the worst of the top seven killer diseases in Victoria and New South Wales between 1880 and 1900, causing 7-10 per cent of total deaths.°* Before 1862, and for some time after, many ignorant optimists believed

that Australia had substantial immunity from tuberculosis, based on its allegedly warm, dry climate. Dr Dougan Bird was an influential exponent of

this argument with his 1863 guidebook for intending immigrants, On Australasian Climates and Their Influence in the Arrest and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption, which attracted favourable notices in the British medical journal, the Lancet and the British and Australian press at large. His enthusiasm for the cause was enhanced by his personal experience as a consumptive who travelled to Australia for his health in 1860 to such excellent effect that all symptoms disappeared within three months of arrival. He believed that the dry, sunny and stimulating climate of Victoria, in particular, increased immunity against consumption, where the ‘dull, dark, damp’ climate of England promised only an early death. Dr Bird noted: ‘There is perhaps no climate in the world so generally suitable to consumptive cases at all seasons of the year as Melbourne.’ He even argued that all European races required ‘a renewal of type’ by ‘transplantation of the masses’ to a highly salubrious climate.°> Dr John Singleton, over a decade later, shared Bird’s view that ‘Victoria is not excelled ... for salubrity by any other country’.*® Others, like William Dovey, believed the case for Victoria was overstated and argued instead for ‘New South Wales as a health resort’ for invalids since it was cooler in summer and warmer in winter, with ‘an atmosphere of extreme purity’.?”

An increasing number of colonial doctors took a different view of the beneficent effects of the Australian climate for invalids. Clutterbuck in 1849 was convinced that consumption consigned many immigrants to Victoria to a premature grave: ‘to imagine, as many do, that emigration to this Colony

tends either to prevent the development of this complaint, or to arrest its progress, is a fatal delusion.’ Even London fog and English cold were ‘less

42 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

baneful an influence’ than Australia’s intense summer heat and extreme variations in temperature.°*® But Bird’s influence was stronger than that of his opponents because he had more authority in Britain. Bird’s most significant critic was Dr William Thomson of Melbourne who

arrived independently at the germ theory of tuberculosis in 1882 and was convinced even earlier that the illness was contagious.*? He attacked the theory that locally born Australians possessed a natural immunity to tuberculosis, as well as the alternative argument that blamed its increase from 1862

on the influx of consumptives from abroad. After an exhaustive statistical analysis of the relationship between climate and consumption in Victoria in 1877, Thomson concluded that climate had no power to prevent or cure pulmonary tuberculosis. Foreign consumptives accounted for only about 4 per cent of the 1088 such deaths in Victoria in 1877, compared with 96 per cent who contracted the disease within Australia. He took some satisfaction in providing the Victorian statistics for the steady growth of fatal consumption among Australians locally born from 5.47 per cent in 1865-70 to 23.34 per cent in 1877—a nearly five-fold increase ‘in the latest fashionable health resort’.10

A significant aspect of this debate about consumption and climate related to the claim that the sea voyage en route to Australia was itself also ‘a health paradise’. By 1860 increasing numbers of wealthy English consumptives made the round trip to Australia and their ranks were swelled by more invalids of the middle and artisan classes a decade later. The Lancet pronounced in 1863 that consumptives were often ‘marvellously restored’ by the sea trip to Australia and a year or two living in the mild climate.*! Dr Dougan Bird argued in 1863: “There are but few cases of consumption in any stage to which a long voyage in a comfortable ship will not be strikingly beneficial’. The sea air was supposed to check early consumption through the ‘medicated atmosphere’ of oxygen, bromine and iodine in tubercular lungs, though these theories were

unsubstantiated by clinical evidence. Bird conceded that the benefits for invalids had been reduced on some of the overcrowded ships of the 1850s, while some consumptives dreaded the discomforts of narrow cabins and confined air. But he argued that travelling first class in the better ships was in 1863 ‘as comfortable as in your own home’.** Dr William Thomson in 1864 condemned the ‘absurdity and incongruity’ of these remarks: ‘We need only

remind [Dr Bird] of how small a number of the masses, who have to be removed to “regenerate tuberculosed England” could command a first-class cabin. Perhaps the “Great Eastern” would provide the ships to deport the invalids of large working class British communities to the Australian “pesthouse and sanatorium for a ‘tuberculosed race’ ”.’* Other authors of guidebooks for British immigrants shared Thomson’s scepticism about the supposed therapeutic benefits of the sea voyage. Revd James Ballantyne accepted in 1871 that a sea voyage to Victoria in the early stages of consumption might be beneficial, if undertaken in circumstances of

comfort and through mild latitudes. But the great mistake was the ‘fatal experiment’ of sending patients to sea as a last resort once the case was

FAITH, FEVER, AND CONSUMPTION 43

hopeless: “They came only to die ... Surely it is better that they should die at home, with family and friends around them.’ To send consumptive patients in an advanced state of the malady on a long sea voyage, in which comforts may be comparatively scanty, and the ministrations of kindness comparatively few, and to a strange land, where friends may be rare, if indeed there be any at all, and where the gentle and soothing attentions of a loving solicitude may be altogether wanting, is not a wise thing—nay, may be positively cruel.**

More than ten years later, the surgeon Dr Francis Workman strongly condemned ‘the ocean as a health resort’, observing that ‘A ship is a most wretched place to die in’, leaving the victims no choice after embarkation between ‘Australia or death’.*° Some died during the voyage and many more in their first six months in Australia. The pessimists were justified by the statistics which showed that mortality

from consumption was high on immigrant vessels. Dr William Thomson observed that the reported figure for consumptive deaths on the voyage to Melbourne in 1871-74 was 50 passenger deaths out of 105, but he considered the true statistic closer to 70—certainly well over half.4® Woolcock found

that tubercular diseases accounted for 9 per cent of total deaths on the Queensland immigrant ships from 1860 to 1900, and as much as 20 per cent

of the mortality among single men and 17 per cent among married men. Indeed tubercular diseases constituted 20 per cent of the deaths of those in the prime of life in the 15 to 29 year age group. Woolcock concluded that ‘complaints about Australia being the dumping ground for consumptives seem to have been justified’.*7

But public and medical opinion in Britain still accepted the myth of the therapeutic benefits of the sea voyage to Australia for some years after Koch’s discovery in 1882. Bird’s ‘tale of the marvellous’, his ‘Eutopia realised’ had far

more impact in Britain than the views of Australian medical critics such as Thomson.*® Potential immigrants did not know or care that Bird’s statistics were inaccurate, but preferred to accept the favourable public image of the Australian climate as being good for the health. Cabin passengers were exempt from medical inspections at embarkation, while the overall mortality statistics suggest the inadequacy of the selection process among prospective steerage passengers; moreover, the possibility of tuberculosis must have been either ignored or gone undetected in numerous examinations. It is astonishing that ‘desperate cases’ of pulmonary tuberculosis were allowed to take such long and exhausting ocean voyages, especially when the disease ranked as a major cause of death for young adult

immigrants at sea. Despite some medical speculation before 1882 as to whether consumption was ‘contagious’, the general belief in the infectivity of the disease was slow to develop. Immigrants with consumption were not isolated, so that some must have passed the disease on to fellow passengers. There were even cases of ship’s surgeons such as Richard Dunn who took the job to improve their health; they not only knew they had consumption,

44 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

but their disease was so advanced that they died at sea. Dr Mark died of tuberculosis in 1878 on his second voyage to Queensland as naval doctor-in-

charge of passengers, and two more consumptive ship’s doctors on the Queensland route died shortly after arrival.4? A ‘doctor’s diary during a voyage to New South Wales’ in 1836 by Daniel Fowles even noted that he had left his wife and children behind, with the intention of returning to them in a year with his health restored; if he had stayed in England he did not expect to live a year.°°

Many advanced consumptives taking the sea cure inevitably died on the passage to Australia, since the long-term stress, inadequate nutrition, overcrowding, and climatic variations were likely to hasten death. The diaries of fellow passengers mentioned these tubercular deaths with none of the fear of infection they betrayed in cases of fever. Mary Maclean on the Africana on 4 February 1866 noticed the death from consumption of a young Irishman of 27, Thomas Ryan, who ‘was ailing Since he Came on Board’; two weeks later a young man of 17 died of consumption. And though she considered such deaths ‘a Solm thing’ they were also ‘Soon forgotten indeed I am Surprised how littel Notice we take of things’.°! John Carter on the General Hewett in 1845 commented that Mrs Clark, one of the cabin passengers, died of consumption: ‘she came on board ill, & although at one time we were in hopes she would get better, & live out the voyage, such hopes, as is nearly always the case with consumption, were disappointed; & she continued slowly getting worse until her death.” Her husband and young son accompanied her but Carter alluded to the need for a female nurse in the case of terminal illnesses; ‘if it had not been for the kindness of Mrs Miller, she would have had no female to nurse her, & of course in her state, one must have been greatly needed’.°* This is a tribute to the generosity of the unknown Mrs Miller, who presumably had not intended to become a nurse in a terminal case on her sea voyage. It also reflects the thoughtlessness of Mr Clark, who must have antici-

pated the possibility of his wife’s death but did not offer his own nursing services.

James White from the Henry Fernie commented in 1862 on the death of a 16-year-old English girl in the second cabin, who was ‘far gone in consumption ... being recommended to try the climate of Australia as a last experiment’. Unfortunately she was only able to ‘inhale a little fresh air’ on deck on one occasion. She lingered on through the hot weather in the confinement of the second cabin, becoming gradually weaker, until she was finally taken to the hospital to die.°? Presumably her mother nursed the girl while she endured months of a grim illness in the second cabin, and the ship’s doctor had to cope at the end. The only diarist to comment negatively on the practice of permitting and even encouraging advanced consumptive patients to make the sea voyage was Margaret Walpole, an apparently well-educated nurse, married to the ship’s

surgeon on the SS Pathan in 1883. The diary shows her to be immensely capable and emotionally supportive of sick passengers; babies died in her

FAITH, FEVER, AND CONSUMPTION 45

arms and the captain asked her to break the sad news to the bereaved. Her verdict on arrival in Melbourne seems just: George [her husband, Dr Walpole, the ship’s surgeon] and I took a poor consumptive patient to the Hospital today and got him admitted. He was too ill to go further. How wrong it seems to advise these poor creatures to come out to Australia for their health when their only means of travelling is on one of these emigrant ships where they get no comforts and little attention, and then when they arrive here without friends and without money, what is there before them. Many of them are thrown immediately on the charity of an Australian public and die in a strange land friendless and alone.>*

This bleak verdict was also the view of Isaac Baker Brown, a surgeonsuperintendent in the emigration service, who was horrified to see in the hospitals of Melbourne and Adelaide in the early 1860s ‘almost every other

bed in the medical wards tenanted by a patient more or less advanced in consumption’.*°

The death of a young tubercular tourist Harry Harvey, 1868 We happen to know a good deal about the misfortunes of one small group of young male consumptives sent to Australia for their health. Harry Harvey Jnr of Barnsley, suffering from ‘some internal weakness of chest’, and his friend

Ben Beddow, sailed for Australia as cabin passengers in the Norfolk in October 1867. On board they met two friends, Mr Howarth and Mr Boden ‘also coming out here for our health—as we were all young, and all coming out for the same purpose we naturally chummed’ (as Mr J. E. Howarth subsequently explained to Harry’s father). Harry and Ben were probably not much more than 18 years, Harry having fairly recently left Windsor Grove School.°* Harry wrote to his parents from the Norfolk on 29 December: ‘the majority of our cuddy passengers are like myself going for health, two of them

are taking this voyage as a last extremity, and are in a very bad state; there are some 6 or 7 about my age and older, so that we are not without our com-

panions.’ Harry enjoyed the voyage but he reported that Ben had not improved, especially as the hot weather made him ‘feel very ill’.°”

The four young men ‘went about together a great deal’ on arrival in Australia, all intending to spend several months travelling for their health before taking the return passage home. They went to Tasmania, where Harry met his former tutor, Mr Joseph Bell, with three of Harry’s former school fel-

lows. Mr Joseph Bell and his pupils remained for three months in Hobart Town while Harry and his three companions explored the Western district of Victoria and Sydney staying mainly in hotels, so the whole trip was expensive.® On 9 April, Harry and Ben left their two companions in Sydney to

46 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

embark for Melbourne by steamer. But ‘they had a fearfully rough passage from Sydney which occupied 4 days the sea flooding the saloon and cabins, and the bedding and their clothing getting wet’. They believed they merely had bad colds, so continued their travels for another week or more, by which time Ben Beddow was feeling very ill.°” The remainder of the sad story was told by Mrs Eliza Kennison, Ben’s aunt

in Melbourne, and Mr J. E. Howarth, in letters to the boys’ parents in England. By Saturday 25 April Ben Beddow showed signs of fever, described variously as either smallpox or scarlet fever; a local doctor was consulted for the first time, and he advised Ben’s ‘immediate removal’ from the boys’ base at Tankards Hotel ‘lest it should be attended with risk’. Ben was by then semiconscious and could do nothing for himself, so Mrs Kennison engaged a nurse

and took a room for him in the Glenmore Hotel opposite her own house, which had no spare room. Ben was ‘threatened with ulceration of the bowels, and was in a frightful state of delirium’, leading the two doctors to diagnose

both boys as suffering from typhoid or ‘colonial’ fever. The doctor still thought Harry’s attack was mild, but deemed it safer to remove him also to a

separate room at the Glenmore Hotel, where Mrs Kennison cooked ‘and attended to both assiduously’. The Kennisons’ family doctor and a physician both called on the two boys frequently, sometimes as often as two or three times a day. By 2 May the doctors almost despaired of Beddow’s recovery. But from 2 May Harry Harvey quickly changed for the worse, becoming delirious, talking incessantly and unable to eat—‘very thin and sunken his

face was, his fine eyes bright and restless ... he seemed to be going just as Beddow did.’ But Harry’s decline was sudden and attention had been focused on Beddow, so the end was the more unexpected on 5 May. Mr Howarth was ‘greatly shocked’ to learn from the nurse that morning that when the crisis came in the night, Harry ‘rapidly and quietly sunk and died’, in the presence

of Mrs Kennison and the nurse. The two doctors thought some ‘internal weakness of chest’ caused the sudden collapse of his strength and that the air passages of the lungs had been blocked with mucus so ‘no pure blood’ could flow to the brain. Though the verdict on the death certificate was ‘colonial typhoid fever’, all involved, including the doctors, evidently believed consumption was responsible for his susceptibility and exhaustion.°!

Harry’s death was far removed from any resemblance to the good Christian death. He died in a distant country with none of his family or even his close friends around his death bed. He was delirious or unconscious for the last few days and was unlikely to have prepared spiritually for a death that came earlier than even a consumptive might have anticipated. His former teacher, Mr Joseph Bell, understood something of this as he tried to place the kindest gloss on Harry’s death, in an undated letter to Harry’s father: He has passed away, and under very painful circumstances; no friends around but Messrs Howarth & Boden, and Mrs Kennison. But if friends had been there, he was delirious, and little of pleasant memory is left in such cases. Everything was done I believe, that could have been done for him. He had a quiet clean room, and

FAITH, FEVER, AND CONSUMPTION 47 hospital nurses, & 2 doctors of known repute in the city. So we must in the absence of any dying testimony, which is sometimes so much prized, look on the tenor of our dear lad’s life, for hope that He who watches carefully the good seed sown in child-hood’s years ... has now removed him to grace His garden on high.

Mr Bell had only recently returned to Melbourne from Tasmania; learning of Harry’s death fortuitously on the morning it happened, he went to see ‘his remains laid out’ to verify it. Mr Bell was especially concerned about his for-

mer pupil’s lack of spiritual preparation as he was evidently devout and remembered Harry as ‘my most regular companion at the Fulshaw Chapel’.°”

Mr Howarth’s letter of 19 May 1868 to the bereaved father placed the emphasis on the tragedy of distance where Mr Bell had stressed the absence of family and friends: ‘the sad, sad fact remains that he is gone from earth and

that 16,000 miles away from his home and relations, and that his mortal remains find rest in the land of strangers’. Mr Howarth must also have been aware that distance would keep the news of his son’s death from Mr Harvey for many more months. He explained that he, Mr Kennison and Mr Bell made the best possible arrangements for the funeral: ‘if not followed to his last resting-place by those who loved him best, and knew him most, at least he

was by friends who mourned him with sincere tears’. Harry Harvey was buried in the Congregational section of the Melbourne Cemetery. Ben Beddow was definitely recovering and would take back to England some of Harry’s hair, his death certificate, his luggage and the parchment deed of his grave.°3 Mrs Kennison’s letter requested her relative, Ben Beddow, to go to Barnsley to break the tragic news to Harry’s father ‘in the kindest manner possible’ before the letters arrived from Mr Howarth and Mr Bell. Ben would also explain the financial circumstances to his father: “This will be a terribly expensive affair; we have taken everything upon our own responsibility, supposing Mr Harvey will not decline to bear the expense.’°* This is a reminder that Ben and Harry were at least fortunate in that their families’ wealth provided them with the best possible nursing and medical care and accommodation. And if they fell seriously ill so far from their families and closest friends, they still had the kindly care and support of relatively new friends like Mr Howarth, their shipmate, and Ben’s aunt in the distant country. As Mr Howarth’s sensitive letter to Harry’s father explained, he had become very attached to Harry on their travels, and mourned his loss almost as a brother. They were far luckier than those many consumptives with no money, no friends, and no choice but to end their lives in the new country in the asylums for the destitute, and their sad fate is examined in a later chapter. The history of these immigrant deaths at sea is a history of frustrated hopes and many needless tragedies in an alien environment. Death at sea could not readily be reconciled with the religious aspirations or rituals of most of the immigrants. Life on board a small ship made the traditional good Christian death impossible for the great majority of terminal passengers. It is no acci-

dent that the numerous shipboard diaries concentrate on sea burials and

48 IMMIGRANT DEATHS AT SEA

events after death, with little or no reference to the deathbed scenes which so dominate accounts of death in Victorian Britain. Death at sea could not even be ritualised by a proper burial—the sea could not be domesticated as a landscaped cemetery. Deaths from infectious and epidemic diseases were always a lurking possibility in the claustrophobic conditions of life at sea. ‘Ship fever’ was the great dread of all passengers, rich and poor. Ironically, the most dangerous germ killer of nineteenth-century Britain—tuberculosis—travelled companionably

and without causing fear on the immigrant ships. Tubercular travellers responded to the positive messages of nineteenth-century doctors and other tourist agents, seeking improved health on the sea voyage, and even a cure in the new colony. Their fellow travellers shared their quarters and their germs, and some would later die from that infectious passage. For those immigrants who survived the sea journey, and most did, there were psychological scars from the voyage, and often a subtle undermining of Christian values and rituals. There was a second alien environment to confront at the end of the passage—an Australian natural environment which had evolved in radically different ways from the British and European landscapes. That alien world was as difficult to humanise as the great oceans had been. The Australian bush presented different appearances from the European countryside and different rules and values applied. Death in the bush came with few Christian comforts or rituals, and often without a cemetery plot as a last burial place. The lonely graves of the Australian outback were to be as remote and feared as the burial sites at sea.

PART Il

The Good Christian Death Transmission from Europe to Australia

Chapter 3

The Transmission of the European Culture of the Good Christian Death Evangelical Protestantism and the ‘good death’ The Evangelical Protestant model of the good Christian death that developed

much earlier in Britain had considerable influence in colonial Australia, though less than in Britain. Christianity in Britain played a powerful role in the lives of most middle- and upper-class Victorians and many respectable working-class people, for whom church attendance was usually more than

just a matter of convention; half the population of England and Wales attended church in 1851. From the late eighteenth century, the Evangelical

movement strengthened Protestantism in Britain through its role in the development of Methodism, while it also invigorated the Church of England and some nonconformist sects. Large parts of the population were affected

by the Evangelical impulses of seriousness, piety, discipline, and duty. Evangelicalism reached the peak of its social and spiritual dynamism and influence in the 1850s, starting to decline from the 1870s. Evangelicalism has been called ‘the religion of the heart’, encouraging the bereaved to express the intensity of their grief on the deaths of loved ones by weeping together.! The Evangelical movement had immense influence on deathbed behaviour through its revival of the Christian ideal of the ‘good death’, which can be traced back to the medieval tradition of the ars moriendi, the Christian art of dying well. Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying was the most famous Anglican contribution to the devotional tradition of the ars moriendi. It was first published in 1651, reprinted numerous times and was

still a standard reference book in nineteenth-century Christian homes in Australia as well as Britain. Taylor emphasised the need to prepare for a holy death by strict piety and daily prayer, and devotional exercises throughout

D1

52 THE GOOD CHRISTIAN DEATH

life, not only before impending death: ‘He that would die well must always look for death, every day knocking at the gates of the grave.” Jeremy Taylor’s ideal of the good Christian death was still powerful in the nineteenth century among the British middle and upper classes; it was disseminated for popular moral instruction by Evangelical tracts, journals, and

sermons, which in turn influenced the depiction of deathbed scenes in Victorian art and fiction. The good death required piety and life-long preparation, as well as fortitude in the face of physical suffering. It should take place in a good Christian home, surrounded by a loving family, with the dying person making explicit farewells to family members, comforted by the assurance of a future family reunion in heaven. There should be time, and physical and mental capacity, for the completion of temporal and spiritual business. The dying person should be conscious and lucid until the end, resigned to God’s will, able to beg forgiveness for past sins and to prove worthy of salvation. The rapturous triumphalism of the Evangelical model at its most extreme included uplifting last words and joyful signs of grace. The last words of the dying were particularly significant for Evangelicals, who believed that conduct in the final hours was a vital revelation of fitness for salvation. The faithful were supposed to be supremely aware of their proximity to divine judgment, which might occasionally inspire words of sublime wisdom, or at least a testimony to their penitence and hope of salvation. Numerous Evangelical tracts supplied advice and examples of the elevated last words of selected saints and devout clergymen. But edifying deathbed declarations were rare outside the published didactic deathbed literature, as were good Christian deaths, and the very few examples came from the most devout families. Dying people were often unable to communicate or were unconscious in the final stages, while fever and delirium from common infectious diseases prevented

clarity of thought and expression. Dr Roberta Jull expressed great disappointment in Perth in 1917 in her ‘religious notes’ on her husband’s death from cerebral haemorrhage: ‘The greatest sorrow of all is that we had no part-

ing words. I feared emotional strain for him while there was hope of life. When that was gone, so was consciousness.” British and Irish migrants introduced this traditional ideal of the good Christian death to the Australian colonies, where it was powerful among the middle and upper classes up to at least the 1870s, and influential also among the respectable working classes, though less well documented. But such an ideal could usually only be realised, if at all, among the comfortable classes who had the necessary space, time, wealth, servants, and family support. The Evangelical model in Australia was reinforced by clergymen, though it was never as strong as in Britain. Among educated Australian churchgoing people

the sermon continued to be an important vehicle of spiritual and moral

instruction which rivalled newspapers in influence up to the 1880s. Evangelical funeral sermons of Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Congregationalists, in particular, were often published to provide edifying examples of the good deaths of pious Christians, and to urge sinners to repent

THE TRANSMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN CULTURE 53

before it was too late. In the early 1860s, Revd John Eggleston of the Pitt Street Congregational Church in Sydney was accustomed to pray: ‘Help us to live a dying life so that we may die a living death.’* Baptist funeral sermons tended to be overtly histrionic, as in the Adelaide sermon in 1876 on the death of Mrs J. Langdon Parsons, the wife of a Baptist minister. Mrs Parsons died

of diphtheria at the age of 30, but hers was an allegedly joyful Christian death: ‘Her mental faculties, her memory, were in fullest and clearest exercise up to the very last; hence with her spiritual powers intensified and purified,

she was enabled to catch the radiance of the dawning glory. Hers was a glorious departure—a true rapture—calm, intelligent, and beatific.’ The sorrow of her loving family was suppressed in her final twenty-four hours as they observed with joy her rapture and ‘present bliss’. Among her final words were: ‘I am not afraid to die. 1am so happy ... Oh! It is so beautiful to die ... Yes, I am going to Jesus, and we shall all meet there.” Deathbed scenes in published sermons and religious tracts were highly selective in their presentation, emphasis, and omissions. Evangelical deathbed scenes could be reconstructed to fit the required model, as Geoffrey Best observes: In the descriptions of deathbed scenes there was of course much art; art certainly in the narrator, fashioning the incident to fit the model he had in mind; art perhaps also in the subjects of the stories, who knew well enough the model to which they were meant to approximate and who presumably took pains not to disappoint their loved ones by failing to produce it.®

A number of Victorian Christians observed that deathbed scenes in their own experience were often very different from the triumphal accounts published for didactic purposes, containing little exultation and even less rapture. There were many classic expositions of the good Christian death by devout clergymen, usually revised after the event for public edification. The account

of his first wife’s death in 1849 by Revd William Schofield, a Wesleyan Methodist missionary, can stand for many of the genre, which tended to be sentimental and even melodramatic. Schofield was the first missionary chaplain at Macquarie Harbour in Van Diemen’s Land in 1827. He subsequently ‘ministered faithfully’ in New South Wales, while his entrepreneurial skills meanwhile developed a personal estate of £50 000. Martha Schofield, the first of his three wives, died on 30 April 1849, leaving no children. Precisely one month later, her husband submitted his five page ‘sketch’ of her death to the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine for publication.’ By her husband’s account, 34-year-old Martha Schofield had been the subject of divine influence from early childhood in England and was always a ‘steady, pious unassuming’ member of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. For the last fifteen months of her life in Windsor, New South Wales, she suffered greatly from ‘one of those very painful afflictions’ (probably cancer). But Revd Schofield’s emphasis in 1849 was firmly on his wife’s triumph over phys-

ical tribulation, with no reference to doctors or medicines, since pain was

54 THE GOOD CHRISTIAN DEATH

considered a test of faith and a punishment for sin. Yet God was evidently merciful: “He did not allow Satan to frequently tempt her ... It be her duty to receive the chastisements of her Heavenly Father without a murmur ... If at any time the pain was so acute as to make her cry out, she would mourn over it as if she had dishonoured God, but obtained relief by being directed to Him [God].’® Revd Schofield explained how his wife’s ‘desire of holiness of heart’

triumphed over extreme pain, taking her to ‘a more delightful union with God’. She meditated and prayed every day, quoting scripture abundantly, including the description of the heavenly state in the book of Revelation. Her husband was almost constantly with her in the final twenty-four hours, when she displayed ‘the most perfect composure and resignation’, speaking of her funeral, burial, and impending death. At last, after a ‘momentary struggle’, she finally lost consciousness ‘and quietly fell asleep in Jesus’.” This testimony was deliberately produced and doubtless heavily edited for

public edification, and without alternative sources it is impossible to get closer to the reality of Martha’s death. The account tells us much about the spiritual values and expectations of the good Christian death, but unbelievers would have experienced and interpreted it quite differently, dwelling rather on its physical aspects. By contrast, family diaries and letters written at the actual time of terminal illnesses and not intended for public edification are examined later, to provide different perspectives on the Christian model, as well as alternative historical representations.

The Protestant idealisation of the consumptive death As we have seen, pulmonary tuberculosis was a consistent major killer disease in colonial Australia from 1860, and was still the most destructive of the top

seven killer diseases in New South Wales and Victoria between 1880 and 1900.!° It was a dreadful, debilitating disease which could neither be cured nor prevented until streptomycin was isolated in 1943. Paradoxically, tuberculosis was sometimes romanticised in middle- and upper-class Britain by artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Millais who tended to depict consumptives as young, beautiful, innocent, and usually female. Moreover, consumptive deaths of young people were idealised by Evangelical clergymen and Christian doctors as a blessing in disguise which allowed time and men-

tal clarity for spiritual preparation and the purification of the soul through suffering. For example, in the 1850s Dr Samuel Beckett, a devout young English surgeon, drew on his experience of hundreds of deathbeds to demonstrate the impact of particular diseases on the dying process. He concluded that slow consumption was a far better way for the Christian to die than fever, sudden accident, or insanity; it was ‘delightful to witness the calm, heavenly, and truly edifying bearing and conversation of a pious young person slowly wearing away under pulmonary consumption’.!!

Young people in Christian congregations in Australia who were dying slowly of tuberculosis were offered pious exhortations to prepare for ‘the great change’ from this material life. On learning in 1872 that her 15-year-old

THE TRANSMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN CULTURE 55

son, Edmund Cooke, was about to die from consumption, his mother told her friend Revd Dr F. T. Cusack Russell that she could bear the worst if she were assured that her son’s soul was prepared. Revd Russell, a Church of England clergyman who was himself to die four years later, accordingly wrote a long letter on 20 August 1872, offering young Edmund Cooke advice on ‘timely

preparation for the great change ... Sickness seems sent that our thoughts should be detached from the things temporal and lifted up to the Eternal.’ Revd Russell offered Edmund the edifying example of a beautiful young wife who had responded to his news that she was dying of tuberculosis in 1866 with pious resignation: ‘When at last death came she declared that she had the fullness of joy ... With a face radiant as tho’ already she possessed the beatific vision [she] entered upon her rest.’ !¢ Revd Russell appealed to Edmund Cooke to die like that young woman

and rid himself of all fear of death: ‘admit [Christ] into your heart’. He advised the young man to prepare rigorously for his coming death by maintaining a strict schedule of piety, so that ‘you may find that for you to die is gain’. Edmund should examine his conscience closely every day, in prayer and

contemplation, ‘taking the Commandments and Beatitudes as a standard rule’. He should study the Bible every morning and evening, receive Holy Communion regularly, and read pious books daily. From the wide range of devotional literature available, Russell recommended Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s book of 1651, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, as especially appropriate. Edmund Cooke may have been well prepared already or he may have heeded the clergyman’s advice. Certainly he seemed to be resigned and spiritually at peace ten days later when he wrote a letter remarkable for a 15-yearold boy to reassure his uncle, Trevor Winter: I am dying but I am quite happy. My only thought is those who will be left behind to mourn for me—so many many loving dear friends. But it is God’s will they should stay a little longer and those who truly trust in Jesus and repent earnestly of their sins will soon join me. Oh dear Uncle do pray earnestly for Jesus’ loving aid. Prayer may be made at any time as we ride or walk along ... I have [been] bad and wicked in my life but I trust in Him who loved us so that he died for us.!2

Nineteenth-century children and young people did not respond to death in the same way that children do today, since their attitudes were inevitably con-

ditioned by those of their parents. Children, like adults, learned to regard death as a fact of life, often conditioned by deaths of siblings. Children’s understanding of death in devout Christian families came from family discussions of Bible stories, and familiarity with the themes of many hymns which frequently mentioned death. Victorian children’s literature on the subject of death was used not only to edify and control behaviour, but also to prepare children for the reality of death as an inevitable part of life. Moreover, devout families used the language of religion naturally in daily conversation and further reduced children’s fears of death by their emphasis on a future family reunion in a heaven which was far happier than earthly life.

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The didactic use of consumptive deathbeds in Australia is illustrated by two brief accounts written by Evangelical Protestants, which were deliberately intended to edify a public audience. Many of the religious tracts published in Australia were written by immigrant clergymen who would have been familiar with the British Evangelical publications. First was the triumphant Wesleyan Methodist tract written by D. A. Manton in Hobart Town in 1849 on the consumptive death of Samuel Newham, aged 51, a former convict turned shepherd who was later converted to Methodism. Through abject penitence and self-abasement, his consistent and fervent piety led to ‘rapturous Joy’. Life or death was equally welcome when tuberculosis was diagnosed, for ‘he could not have lived with death and heaven more constantly in view’.

Newham testified to the value of Christianity at the hour of death, despite severe suffering, and prayed for all converted sinners. His last words were ‘Lord receive my soul to glory’, as he died a ‘triumphant death’ with a ‘spotless Christian reputation’.'* A second example of rapturous triumphalism at a consumptive woman’s death was ‘Joy Triumphant: or, Memoir of Mrs. M—’, by the Presbyterian minister Revd Robert Hamilton, published in Melbourne in 1874. Mrs M—

died of tuberculosis at the age of 31 in 1873 in Collingwood, having been converted by a missionary six months before her death. According to Revd Hamilton, her last few days on earth were a scene of ‘constant triumph’, despite suffering and exhaustion. Her last reported words were, ‘We will meet

again where there will be no parting.’ Revd Hamilton assured readers that Mrs M—’s ‘extraordinary rapture’ was caused by her assurance that she was about to enter ‘into the inconceivable joys of heaven: “Oh, I want to meet you in glory”.’!> This is one of the more obviously stage-managed and heavily edited death scenes, especially as the sufferer remained conveniently anonymous. Compared with such didactic tracts as Revd Hamilton’s ‘Joy Triumphant’, Thomas Anne Cole’s diary account of her son’s death in 1879 was restrained.

Private diaries and middle-class family correspondence surrounding a death

were often heavily influenced by Evangelical Protestantism in colonial Australia, but they were not usually deliberately edited and reconstructed for publication. Evangelical diaries revived the Puritan custom of testifying before God to a worthy spiritual life. Many Evangelicals extended this habit into a detailed accounting before God for family deaths as well as lives. These nar-

ratives in diary form were usually written not just for God but also for the writer and the immediate family; unlike the published tracts they could be surprisingly frank about unpleasant medical symptoms and deathbed behaviour inappropriate to a good Evangelical. Such accounts were usually written close to the time of death, and are therefore more valuable than edited published accounts as sources for death scenes, attitudes, and behaviour. As Paul

Fussell points out, “The further personal written materials move from the form of the daily diary, the closer they approach the figurative and the fictional.’!¢

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Farquhar Cole took advantage of his prolonged illness from tuberculosis in 1878 to 1879 at the age of 28 to manage and prepare for the good Christian death, warmly supported by his mother, Thomas Anne. She was married to

Captain George Ward Cole, sixteen years her senior and a prominent Melbourne businessman and long-time member of the Victorian Legislative Council. Of their six children, George died of typhoid at the age of 9 in 1852, one daughter died in infancy, and William died in 1866 at the age of 17, while the two unmarried daughters, Margaret and Agnes, survived both parents.!” Thomas Anne Cole’s detailed diary from 1867 to 1882 included accounts of the deaths of her husband, George, from heart disease and their last surviving son, Farquhar, both in 1879. Thomas Anne had four indoor servants and her two unmarried daughters to help her nurse the two invalids at their beachfront home in Brighton, so the material conditions for the good Christian

death were excellent. The deaths of George Ward Cole on 26 April and Farquhar on 6 May 1879 entirely dominated the Cole household for many months. Farquhar’s illness had forced him to give up his legal career when his disease was diagnosed more than two years before his death.

In Thomas Anne’s diary the physical and the medical aspects of the two deaths took priority over the spiritual, at least in sheer volume and in time. The mother or one of the daughters sat with one or other of the invalids throughout most nights. The rituals of feeding the sick men were important to the three women, who thereby felt useful and involved. On one of his better days, Farquhar managed to eat a breakfast of bread and milk, followed by rice and milk at 11 a.m., then a little fish for lunch, and blancmange at 3 p.m. Dr Robertson called to see the two invalids daily, and was even willing to take prescriptions to the chemist in town.!® No doubt these extra kindnesses and his all-night visits were reflected in his bill.

But there was also a genuine spiritual dimension to Thomas Anne’s accounts of her two invalids’ deaths, albeit less detailed and in minor key. Every day she organised morning and evening prayers for the family and the servants, and sometimes also read sermons aloud. She believed that illness and death were God’s will and therefore never expected much of the doctors. Since the doctors could do nothing to cure and little to comfort sufferers from either heart disease or tuberculosis, this fatalistic, religious perspective was understandable. On 16 April 1879, the anniversary of the birthday of her first-born son, George, who died in 1852, she noted: ‘a very promising boy but he was

wanted by my father in heaven ... A day I never forget.’ Then her mind returned to the impending death of her husband: ‘Both he and my dear son are in God’s hands. I desire to submit to his will but O what trials I fear are before me.’ The day before her husband’s death, Farquhar coughed up more blood and she commented: ‘he is doomed to leave us but I feel sure God will take him when he goes’.!”

The religious references in Thomas Anne’s diary were minimal and restrained when compared with those in many Evangelical death sermons and tracts, but they seemed no less sincere. The spiritual dimension to her diary

58 THE GOOD CHRISTIAN DEATH

account reached its first climax with the death of George Cole on 26 April 1879, aged about 84. Thomas Anne noticed ‘a change in his countenance’ which prompted her to inquire of him in characteristic Evangelical mode about the state of his soul—to which he responded, ‘Yes. I believe in Jesus Christ.” Where dying Evangelicals were physically incapable of sustaining a coherent testimony to their spiritual state, a catechetical exchange or series of questions was permissible as an affirmation of faith. Some time later Thomas Anne returned from Farquhar’s room: Just in time to see [George] draw his last breath but so gently that it seemed as if he had only fallen asleep and so he did I believe in Jesus ... It was consolation that since God had pleased to remove him I have nothing to wish for and there he lay like a noble marble statue ... the sweetest smile on his countenance.

Next day when family and friends viewed the body they were struck by its ‘marvellous beauty’.*° The process of dying was almost never described as beautiful outside triumphal tracts, but beauty was sometimes attributed to the facial expression of corpses in the ‘smile of death’, which was thought by some to suggest that the soul had sighted the glory of heaven. The contraction of the facial muscles after death was thus interpreted as a sign of salvation. Just over a week after her husband’s death, Thomas Anne had to face the second ordeal of Farquhar’s death on 6 May 1879. She noted on 5 May that the anniversary of her beloved son William’s death in 1866 could well be that

of Farquhar also. That same day Farquhar had a particularly distressing haemorrhage, ‘coughing up a great deal of blood’. On the night before his death, Margaret kept vigil all night in his room, with her mother and Dr Robertson in adjoining rooms, since the doctor stayed all night. During the night Margaret noticed a change in Farquhar’s condition and, fearing he was dying, called Agnes and her mother. When Thomas Anne arrived, ‘his face was perfectly radiant’ as he took his sisters’ hands and thanked them for their unbounded kindness to him. This was the Evangelical ‘rapture’ so often mentioned in tracts and sermons, at the prospect of soon joining God in heaven. ‘Then we all sat expecting the end was not far off, then he seemed worse’. The dying man announced, ‘I have arranged and planned it all,’ assuring them that he was spiritually prepared for death. Revd Taylor’s arrival and prayers were no doubt valued, but not essential, as a priest’s would have been to a dying Catholic. Finally Farquhar murmured, ‘I am dead to you. I have reached the haven of rest,’ before he died gently in the presence of the three women and Mr James Graham, a family friend. Thomas Anne concluded that day’s entry: ‘God willed it so which is all we can say and his will be done altho’ I should be more than mortal did I not feel at losing such a son!’ She was certain that Farquhar had gone to join his father: ‘now united in heaven ... God grant that my dear daughters and I may be well prepared and ready when our heavenly father sees fit to take us.’2! There was no question of prayers for Farquhar’s

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soul to assist his purification and passage through purgatory, as in a Catholic family.

Farquhar Cole’s death only has real meaning if understood in the context of his own determined aspiration for a good Christian death and future life. It was vital for him to reassure his mother and sisters that he had ‘planned it all’, meaning that he was spiritually prepared to meet his God in heaven, since he had used his two years’ warning to good effect. If Thomas Anne’s account

is read without that nineteenth-century Evangelical understanding of Farquhar’s ‘radiant’ face, it makes little sense. Farquhar Cole’s death came closer to the ideal than most deaths, except those which were severely edited for publication. Many vital features of the good Evangelical death were pres-

ent, besides the more obvious spiritual elements of Christian preparation, contrition and resignation. Thomas Anne Cole well understood the crucial importance of family solidarity and support in facilitating the good Christian death, and she and her daughters played their part to the utmost.

The transmission of the good Protestant death across the world The Bussells in England and Western Australia John Garrett Bussell and his family in Western Australia left behind them in England a large extended family, who corresponded with each other continuously to maintain and strengthen family ties, despite the vast distances. More archival evidence has survived for several different branches of the Bussell family in both England and Australia than for most other English settlers in Australia. This collection in the Battye Library in Perth offers a rich source for exploring the transmission to Australia of the English cultural heritage of the ideal Christian death. The Western Australian Bussell model of the good Christian death was a decidedly Anglican version. Their father had been an Anglican clergyman, and John Garrett Bussell, the eldest brother, was persuaded by his mother to rescue his family from genteel poverty in England by investing in the Swan River Colony, instead of following his father into the church. The Bussell archive in Perth includes a regular correspondence on the eagerly sought ‘particulars’ of death scenes, transmitted backwards and for-

wards between England and Australia, reinforcing the original Christian ideals. More family copies were transcribed and circulated of the letter describing Fred Vines’ death at sea in 1868 (to be examined later) than any other in the Bussell family archive, since this was the only unquestionably good Christian death. Several contemporary copies of this letter survive in the Bussell archive in different handwriting, including one copied by a Bussell cousin in England, attesting to the common middle-class practice of circulating copies of deathbed accounts around relatives. The letter on Fred Vines’ death was originally written at sea by his wife Emily (née Bussell) on ‘thick

60 THE GOOD CHRISTIAN DEATH

paper and scraps’; it was faithfully copied out several times on thin paper by Fred’s mother in Reading, England, to send on to Fred’s brothers and other Vines relatives in India, who were expected, in turn, to ‘read and pass on’ to others. This process of copying and passing on such deathbed accounts took place at both the British and Australian ends of the correspondence, testifying to the concern and care taken to transmit the culture of death between family members across the oceans.** The transmission of the cultural heritage of the good death is illustrated by the correspondence between Thomas Arthur Bussell’s family in England and his cousin John Garrett Bussell’s family in Western Australia, from 1869 to 1876. This period has been selected in part to portray the founding family of Busselton thirty years after they immigrated, with their links with English relatives still powerful. Moreover, during this period of eight years, Thomas Bussell in England lost all three sons (Charles in 1869, Arthur in 1872, and William in 1876) as well as his wife, Fanny Emily Cotton Bussell, in 1874. Four deaths in eight years provoked a welter of correspondence containing precious ‘particulars’, treasured memories and sympathy.*°

Three months after the death of 15-year-old Charles in 1869, Fanny Bussell, Charles’ mother, welcomed the arrival of a letter from her cousin and

friend, another Fanny Bussell, in Western Australia: ‘our loss has reached them ... The sorrow is, as she says, a life long sorrow—None but a parent can estimate its intensity.’** The next son, 22-year-old Arthur, died in March 1872 of a long and painful bronchial illness. Lengthy condolence letters have survived from three Australian female Bussells on Arthur Bussell’s death—from John Garrett Bussell’s wife, Charlotte, his sister, Mary Taylor, and his daughter, Emily Vines. It seems to have been more common for female relatives to send condolence letters, especially on the death of children and young people. Charlotte stressed that it was vital to strengthen family links between such a large and scattered family at a time of death.*° An important aspect of this

emphasis on family unity and support at death was the warmly expressed hope that the bereaved family in England would soon join the Bussells in Australia—‘It would do wonders for all of you.’*°

These condolence letters demonstrate that the first two generations of Bussells in Western Australia had little need of instruction from the English

Bussells on the lessons of the deathbed and the spiritual consolations of Christianity—though reinforcement was valuable and welcome. John Bussell’s daughter, Emily Vines, had been widowed only four years earlier, so she drew on her own experience in advising Fanny that the First Epistle of St

John had given her the greatest comfort when Fred died: ‘thro’ Him we are able to triumph over death when we know that those we have loved and lost have been amongst the true followers of Christ.’ Emily and her mother, Charlotte, were sure that Charles and Arthur were now ‘with the angels’ in that ‘happy home, where “there shall be no more death”’.*” Mary Taylor, John Bussell’s sister in Albany, also placed her emphasis on the consolatory prospect of a family reunion with Arthur in heaven, though her language was more formulaic: Arthur was removed from ‘the evil to come’ in this world to

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a heavenly home of ‘life and light’ where they would all share ‘their neverending joys’.7°

For obvious reasons, bad deaths tended to be passed over rapidly and some were probably removed from family records intended for posterity. But where a devout Christian and beloved family member had endured a sudden or distressing death the family sometimes felt obliged to explain any extenuating circumstances to their relatives. Unfortunate deaths of pious Christians could be accommodated in the light of a life of Christian devotion, while expressions of regret at the occasional bad death served by default to reinforce the ideal. The sudden death from a stroke in 1874 of Fanny, 65-year-old wife of Thomas Arthur Bussell, called for such mitigating particulars, especially as ‘dear loving, kind, tenderhearted Aunt Fanny’ was beloved by all. Frances Ardagh, her niece, reported the death to her aunt, Charlotte Bussell in Aus-

tralia, knowing that the Australian cousins would ‘be anxious to know the last end of her you loved so much’.*? On 20 April 1874 Fanny Bussell got up as usual, but said she was experiencing difficulty in speaking and then looked distressed at her clumsy attempts to pour out a cup of cocoa. Three doctors tried all possible means to restore her, ‘but it was only as it were to prolong

her dying. The right side was quite useless and she never spoke again.’ A sudden stroke deprived the family of an appropriate Christian deathbed scene, except for Thomas’s ‘beautiful’ resignation to God’s will and his fervent

prayers at his wife’s bedside. Fanny lingered for six days, and though the doctors said she was not conscious, the family occasionally felt less certain, as

she often grasped their hands. Frances Ardagh regretted ‘it was a sad sad death to witness, for there seemed to be such a terrible struggle for mastery’.°° The only surviving Australian response to Frances Ardagh’s sad news is a letter from John Garrett Bussell in Busselton to ‘my very dear cousin Tom’.

John Bussell began his letter on 18 July 1874, three months after Fanny’s death, by expressing a reservation common to correspondents so far removed in time and place from the actual death: ‘I hardly know whether it is cruel or

kind to write with the certainty of renewing grief, which time, by the long period that must have elapsed before this reaches you, must have mollified.’ John reported that the news of Fanny’s death was a terrible shock to his sister, Fanny, while his wife, Charlotte, received the news with a scream of sorrow—Fanny was ‘so beloved’ and would be ‘so perpetually remembered’. But John Bussell finished on a note of the resignation of an elderly man: ‘time passes on, at three score and ten, speaking of myself one cannot expect otherwise than that our contemporaries should one by one fall off.’>! John Bussell followed his friends to the grave only fifteen months later, after an attack of influenza. His death was so sudden and unexpected that Charlotte was away from home and must have been left with regrets, as her sister-in-law, Mary Taylor, noted: ‘[She] had not even the mournful satisfaction of tending upon him to the last. How often it must recur to her that on others devolved the wife’s tender watching and care.’** Yet again, the female role of nurse and emotional support at the deathbed was assumed, as was the wife’s strong wish to fulfil that role. Even more than the nursing, Charlotte may have missed the

62 THE GOOD CHRISTIAN DEATH

chance of final farewells and the good Christian death that her devout husband surely hoped for. The Bussell links between Australia and Europe were again reinforced when Charlotte and her daughter, Caroline, moved back to Europe after John’s death, dividing their time between Paris and London. The decimation of Thomas Bussell’s branch of the family in England continued. The third of Francie Bussell’s brothers, William, followed his two younger brothers and his mother to the grave in 1876, when he and his wife Louise were drowned at sea after a shipwreck. Francie Bussell, his 28-year-old sister, received this tragic news with remarkable Christian resignation: ‘My father and I all left. God’s mercy has been very great over us all this year past. Heavy trial and difficulty sent, but through it all God’s loving guiding hand most plainly seen. Never overwhelming sorrow.’>? Francie Bussell remained

with her father for some years in her childhood home in England, but after his death in 1892 she responded at last to the frequent appeals of the Western Australian Bussells to join them, sixty years after the first Bussell migration.

‘How beautiful it is to see a Christian die’ Fred Vines, 1868 The death of Dr Frederick Castell Vines, husband of Emily Bussell, a member of the pioneer family’s second generation, serves to illustrate the model of the good Christian death most widely admired and disseminated among the scattered Bussell family. As a doctor, Fred Vines was fortunate to belong to the professional middle class, with the means to pay his family’s return passage to

England and back, joining a tiny privileged group of immigrants who saw their homeland and parents once more. He was also quite extraordinary in having the courage and capacity to transform his own death at sea, despite all

the odds, into one of the very few recorded examples at sea of an ideal Christian death. But it is essential to stress that only privileged cabin passen-

gers were in a position to use their status and resources to construct death scenes which imitated the Christian ideal on land. It is ironic that the only good Christian death described in ideal terms with complete conviction in the Australian branch of the Bussell family should be a death at sea, where so few deaths approximated the ideal. It is less surprising that this particular death was caused by tuberculosis, which so often lent

itself to idealised representation, as we have seen. Dr Fred Vines died in November 1868, only four years after his marriage to Emily Bussell, daughter of John Garrett Bussell. Fred Vines died on board the St Vincent, en route back to Australia with his wife and two young children, after a visit to his family in Reading, England. The purpose of the family trip was in part to allow Fred’s parents to see their son again and meet his wife and their grandchildren. But it had a secondary purpose in that Fred had been diagnosed as consumptive and the sea voyage was considered therapeutic. No doubt, also, the impending deaths of both Fred and his ageing parents rendered the voyage more urgent.

THE TRANSMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN CULTURE 63

Emily Bussell, aged 27, wrote a detailed account of her beloved husband’s

death as a letter in diary form to her mother, Charlotte Bussell, at Cattle

Chosen, Busselton—a letter begun at sea and completed on reaching Adelaide. Emily informed her mother and extended family of readers across the globe that ‘Our darling Fred is gone to his Home. Now do not mourn! for if you had but seen his death, you would be comforted.’ She then described his good Christian death, which he had mentally prepared for since he first learned his fate. The end was signalled on 1 November 1868 when Fred Vines coughed up more blood than ever before in a ‘fatal stream’ during a bitterly cold night. Emily jumped out of her bunk to bring a basin of cold water and to staunch the flow. Next day Fred was too ill to leave his bunk and the haemorrhage returned, so Emily sought help from the captain who staunched the flow again with the help of the ‘lead mixture’. They were fortunate in being

favoured cabin passengers, as the captain and several fellow passengers helped Emily care for her dying husband and the two children. Three male passengers took turns in keeping watch by Fred’s sickbed, including Mr Whitfield who was ‘like a brother, his kindness and tenderness to Fred I shall never forget’. Mrs Serle and Mary, her servant, looked after the children while Emily nursed her husband. The bleeding came on three or four times each day, with recurrent fever ‘and his heart was very troublesome’. Yet Emily had no regrets about her marriage: ‘It was night and day work for me, and how as I

bathed my darling’s hot forehead, did I thank God, who had put it into [Fred’s] heart to take me.’ Fred Vines made his will, which was witnessed by the captain and Mr Whitfield, and he read from his Bible and prayer book.**

Emily’s representation of the important deathbed scene on 9 November 1868 was surprisingly close to the ideal, despite the inappropriate surroundings of the ship: Dear Fred put his arms round my neck and said ‘Emily my dear one I must die’. I said ‘my darling I know it and am willing, quite willing’. His face beamed with the light of Heaven, and he sang just to himself ‘the Lord is my shepherd’ all through, and then he said ‘Yes! Yes! Jesus Christ the corner stone.’ Then he said ‘Send for all, I should like to say goodbye’ and one by one came, and there was not a dry eye, as they looked in his bright face & shook his hand, for all have learnt to love him on board. Then little Mary was brought, and he kissed her fondly, told her to mind and say her prayers, and be a good girl to Mama, and then dear baby came ... Then he told me how happy he felt in leaving the children with me, and that I should not be unhappy, and I shall not be.*°

When Fred asked about Emily’s plans for the future, he approved her wish to

return to her parents at Cattle Chosen in Busselton. As Fred slept, Emily wrote to her family that she felt happy: ‘for the Lord is with me, close at hand ... It is in love He has sent this heavy affliction. I hope none of you will mourn—he was so fit to die. And have I not the children and my own dear home to go to.’*®

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Fred Vines died peacefully on 11 November 1868: ‘I noticed a great change, I fancied he was going very soon ... And there was my darling turning to marble—no death struggle, he raised his eyes and said “I am coming” and he was gone and beautiful he looked as I took his cold hand.’ They buried

Fred at sea that afternoon. As Emily told her parents, ‘I have been truly blessed to have felt “Our Father” so near, to be able to give my most fondly loved one up, without one sigh or wish to detain him.’ She and Mr Whitfield would never forget ‘how beautiful it is to see a Christian die’.>’ It was not surprising that after such an ordeal Emily Vines collapsed on arrival at Adelaide, from shock, grief and exhaustion. Relatives in Adelaide nursed her back to health, though she almost died. Only in March 1869 was her mother able to report from Cattle Chosen in Busselton: ‘Now we have our Emily and her sweet babes safe and well under our own roof again.’ Emily remained with her family at Cattle Chosen for 42 years, until her death in 1911 at the age of 70. A month after Emily’s return, her mother noted, ‘Our precious Emily is such a comfort to us in her old home where she goes on now as if she had never left it. She is always busy.’°? But Emily confessed to her cousin, Fanny Bussell in England, that she could not always keep her spirits high and maintain her front of ‘sweet resignation’: I am quite well now but I shall be glad when a year or two is over. It is not right to wish the time away but sometimes all seems like a dream and I feel I have lost my guide and helper ... I never wish my darling Fred back for it was only a life of suffering. But sometimes it seems more than I can bear for tho’ I have firm Faith in our Heavenly Father He hides his face sometimes.*?

Thirteen years later, however, Emily was thoroughly reconciled to widowhood: ‘Indeed I have so much to make me happy so many dear ones around

that my heart overflows with thankfulness.’*° No other death in the Australian Bussell family matched the heroic death at sea of the consumptive Fred Vines, supported so admirably by his sacrificial wife. Emily’s account of Fred’s courageous death became the family’s model Christian death which was so lovingly copied, circulated to other Bussells in Australia, England and India, and retained for posterity.

The good Evangelical Protestant death was not exclusive to the middle class and the gentry, and certainly influenced many artisans and respectable

working-class people up to the 1880s, but archival examples are rare. However, one moving illustration was the death from liver disease in 1862 of

Fanny Wingate, a farmer’s wife from the Gawler River area in South Australia. William Wingate, a farmer, described her death to his brother and sister, explaining that she had been ill for twelve months, though the disease had first occurred four years earlier. This disease, like tuberculosis, allowed ample time for preparation. Though confined to bed for four months, Fanny never complained, because of ‘the Love of Christ shed abroad in her heart ... If ever you saw a person dy happy her did.’ William kept his vigil by her bed, day and night, except when he asked Mrs Sparshott, a friendly neighbour, or

THE TRANSMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN CULTURE 65

one of their daughters, to replace him. On several occasions William thought she was about to die: ‘I cald all the family, as I thought to see her dy, but her revived severell times.’ The timing of the final scene could never be planned, and when the end came William was having his dinner when his little daughter called him back to his wife’s deathbed: I whent & lifted her up & her revived a little. I spoke to her and she answered as usal. She said we speak of the realms of the blest that country so bright & so fair ... and then her swetly fell asleep in Jesus. What a blessed thing a Christian dy in the Lord my dear brother & sister though I have lost her for a time thanks be to God I noo where she is Iam sure while her body lys in stone Hill Chappel yard her soul is at rest in Christ ... I shall one day see her again in heaven where parting shall be no more.*!

But this idealised Christian death, with its conviction of a heavenly reunion, was probably more fragile among rural farmers than among the wealthier urban elite. It was more likely to disappear within a generation in families living tough, isolated lives; this is suggested by a letter written almost twenty years later in 1882, still from the Gawler River, by William’s daughter, Eliza, informing William’s brother of his death. It was a terse, formal sec-

ular letter to an uncle she had never met, advising that William’s mind had been failing for three years, and he recently caught ‘a bad throat’ from his grandchildren: ‘and him being weak and old it had more effect on him and took him off very quick’.** If William Wingate retained his faith that he would meet his beloved Fanny in heaven, his daughter gave no hint that he died a Christian death.

The good death of an Irish Catholic Denis O’Leary, 1886 The European Catholic ideal of the good death was clearly defined in the

medieval ars moriendi and in modern scholarly works such as John McManners’ Death and the Enlightenment, which examines eighteenthcentury France. Catholics and Protestants shared the belief that the ideal Christian death required sacrificial living, with a regular routine of prayer and meditation to ensure the soul was prepared for death. But there were significant differences in their views of the role of ritual and of the priest, and the nature of the afterlife. The attainment of the good Christian death was perhaps somewhat easier

for Catholics than for Protestants. From the fourteenth century, Catholics believed in purgatory as an intermediate state between hell and heaven, which

gave more hope of ultimate salvation to the vast majority of sinful human beings than the two stark alternatives of hell and heaven. Moreover, the Catholic Church from its earliest days had taught that the faithful who had led good lives, despite occasional sin, could still be purified through the

66 THE GOOD CHRISTIAN DEATH

prayers of intercession and good works of others after their own death, thereby reducing their time in purgatory. Catholic teaching on prayers for the dead

and purgatory became a prime target of the Protestant challenge at the Reformation, which rejected both concepts.*%

At Catholic deathbeds the role of the priest and a clearly defined ritual made a sudden or delirious death less threatening than for Protestants. Pious and penitent behaviour at the deathbed itself and protestations of faith to the family as mediators were less significant. The familiar sacraments could be deeply comforting at a time of physical and mental anguish. The combined contributions of priest and sacraments also ensured that the Catholic version of the good Christian death was more robust and probably more enduring than the Protestant. It was less dependent on the faith and participation of other members of the family since the priest, rather than the family, acted as mediator with God; it was somewhat less fragile in a new world far removed from the traditional certainties of the organised churches and church communities in Ireland and Britain. The ceremonies of the Catholic Church at the deathbed were more formally ritualised and presided over by the priest, who administered confession and absolution, followed by the last Eucharist and extreme unction. By contrast, for Protestants the last rites were simplified or disappeared entirely after the Reformation and the family took on the role of the priest. Descriptions of the deaths of pious Catholics were usually less idealised, less detailed, and more restrained than those of enthusiastic Evangelicals, lacking the rapturous exaltation and expressing more honest gloom at the impact of death on the survivors. David Fitzpatrick observes that ‘the only accounts of conspicuous spirituality on the part of Irish Catholics were equivocal, suggesting a distaste for excessive zeal’.4* Faith and spiritual preparation were largely a private

matter for discussion between priest and dying person, facilitated by the sacraments, with little pressure to affirm their faith to family and community

or to manufacture joy. The features of a good Catholic death included the confession of sins and sincere contrition, earnest piety, upright character and resignation to God’s will, surrounded by the priest and a loving family. Records of deathbeds among the working classes are rare for Catholics as for Protestants. Even David Fitzpatrick’s splendid Oceans of Consolation, with its meticulous records of correspondence between Irish working-class people in Ireland and Australia, contains little on the deaths of Irish Catholics in Australia. Although Michael Hogan, a former convict and a Melbourne labourer, lost his wife and two of his seven children within a few years, he merely informed his brother in Ireland in 1853: ‘I am Sorry to Inform you that

I Buried the two oldest of my children ... May God be with Them.’ Three years later his wife’s death was announced to his brother in even fewer words:

‘I have to inform you that I buried my wife ... may the Lord have mercy on

her soul.’ Philip Mahony, another Irish Catholic in Melbourne, lost his ‘dearly beloved’ 19-year-old son to consumption in 1890, followed by his daughter’s death in 1899; the double tragedy probably devastated the parents and undermined their marriage. But Mahony’s grief on his son’s death was

THE TRANSMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN CULTURE 67

conveyed in few words: ‘We feel sad and lonley after him, my life is a misery to me and to his Poor mother.’*? The only detailed middle-class Catholic deathbed account I have found in

the archives was that of Denis O’Leary, born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1842, the son of a wealthy Catholic landowner and a grand nephew of Daniel O’Connell, the famous Irish Liberator. After a Jesuit education he moved to Benalla, Victoria, where he became a successful barrister. In 1873 he married Fanny Rowe, daughter of J. P. Rowe, a prominent Victorian squatter and a strict Catholic, and they had seven children. The exertions of the last of three failed attempts to win election to the Victorian parliament in 1886 precipitated Denis O’Leary’s physical collapse from Bright’s disease of the kidneys at the age of 44. Fanny O’Leary insisted that her husband go to Melbourne to consult the best doctor, Sir Thomas Fitzgerald. Husband and wife stayed with Fanny’s mother, Mary Rowe, in Melbourne, while Fanny’s sister, Cecil Rowe, went to Benalla to look after Fanny’s six children. When visitors enquired

after Denis, he was too ill to see them, so they promised instead to offer prayers for him—another departure from Protestant practice.*® Years later, Fanny recalled the crisis in Denis’s illness: ‘After Dr Fitzgerald told Denis he must die and very soon, I was aghast, staggered.’ Immediately Denis asked for Father Murphy who anointed the dying man and adminis-

tered the sacrament of extreme unction, leaving Denis ‘much easier in his mind. Oh! What a religious man he was when told it was impossible for him to live.’ From 3 June 1886, Denis O’Leary was unconscious and delirious much of the time, but he was so restless and weak that it was impossible to tell how badly he suffered. Mary Rowe recognised in her diary that now only God could heal her son-in-law: ‘God help him and grant that he may not suffer much.’ On 6 June Fanny wrote to her sister, Cecil, caring for her children at Benalla: ‘It is too terrible and the slow progress from day to day is awful. But please Almighty God he will be spared yet ... Kiss my darlings for me and tell Arthur and Amy and Maurice to pray to the Sacred Heart to spare their

Father to them.’ Next day Fanny wrote to her 11-year-old son, Arthur, at Benalla, telling him to offer his first Holy Communion for his father’s recovery. She warned the little boy that his father was so seriously ill that he could only be spared now ‘with the help and will of our divine Lord: God listens to the sincere prayers of His little children.’*” From 6 June onwards, Denis was unconscious most of the time but this Catholic family was spared the anxiety of many Protestant families who worried about dying confessions of faith and contrite last words. ‘Good Father Murphy’ visited Denis regularly to minister to his spiritual needs as far as the dying man’s mental state allowed. In the final few days Mary Rowe noted in her diary merely ‘we are all troubled’, while her daughter Fanny struggled to resign herself to ‘so little hope’. Mary was saddened by the prolonged agony of her 44-year-old son-in-law: ‘It is a great trial for us all to see it.’ Provided dying Catholics were sure of their faith, aided by the sacraments and their priests, a lingering death held far less value for spiritual preparation and witness than for Evangelical Protestants. Denis O’Leary died at last on 14 June

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1886. His breathing was alarming, so Mary sent for Father Murphy, who stayed all morning even though the dying man seemed unconscious. Mary concluded her diary entry: ‘God in his mercy comfort his poor wife. He died at 6 in evening. The doctor got Fanny out of the room.”*® Mary Rowe’s diary account was resigned, realistic, and private, not intended to edify or idealise, with no reported last words and family farewells around the deathbed; there was no rhetoric about family reunions in heaven or dying with rapture on his face.

The O’Leary family in Victoria had the duty of reporting the ‘particulars’ of Denis’s deathbed to his parents in Ireland. Fanny’s account placed the

emphasis on her belief that her husband was a deeply religious man who made his peace with God through his priest, while understating Denis’s prolonged suffering and unconsciousness. Mr McCarthy O’Leary, Denis’s father, replied from Ireland that the only real solace was spiritual: ‘I confidently trust he is now receiving a happier reward and that his holy and pious end has entitled him to it.’ Fanny’s representation of Denis’s death for her father-inlaw glossed over the more unpleasant suffering to depict a ‘holy and pious

end’ which was not untrue and was what the grieving parents needed to hear.*?

In conclusion, taking the Bussells as an example of the transmission of the Christian culture of death between England and Australia, it seems that it survived strongly over two generations from the 1830s to the 1880s. The regular and intense exchange of ‘particulars’ of family deaths between Bussells on opposite sides of the world helped to reinforce the Christian way of death. And perhaps some Christian colonists, such as Fanny Bussell, tried particularly hard to follow the ideal in an effort to maintain a fragile culture in a remote colony. Commonsense suggests that it was much harder to sustain the customs, rituals and language of death in isolated settlements of a distant colony than in middle-class England. Few such condolence and deathbed letters survive in the Bussell archive or in others beyond the 1880s, when the Christian culture of death was increasingly undermined by secular and scientific challenges. The Protestant version of the good death was probably more fragile than the Catholic, because the former was more individualistic and dependent on family support and reinforcement which could not be guaranteed in future generations, especially when links with relatives in England weakened. The example of the Wingate family in South Australia demonstrated that a culture of death which was not replenished within the new country can easily die in one generation.

Chapter 4

‘Angels in Heaven’ The Common Tragedies of Babies’ and Children’s Deaths Colonial parents often had to suffer the deaths of their babies and children under 5, and these common tragedies sharply distanced the experience of colonial families from those living now. Today, parents expect their children

to survive to adulthood, but in the 1880s about 90 per cent might live to twelve months, 82 per cent to 5 years, and only 78 per cent became adults.! Such high mortality was chiefly due to the diarrhoeal and intestinal diseases, and the infectious diseases, such as scarlet fever and whooping cough. During the first great demographic transition that was shared by European countries between 1870 and 1920 the declines in overall mortality were greatest in infancy and childhood. About half of deaths from all causes in Victoria since the 1850s occurred at under 5 years, but that high proportion fell to about 22 per cent by 1911.7 The infant mortality rate fell from the 1880s, with a steep decline after 1904, so that by 1930 the rate had more than halved. J. H. L. Cumpston demonstrated that before 1890 the infant mortality rate was very high in all colonies, varying between 110 and 130 deaths of infants below one year for every one thousand registered births. Between 1890 and 1926 rates declined from 110 to 55, but the dramatic and sustained fall took place after 1904.°

The marked decline in infant mortality from 1904 was largely due to a reduction in intestinal infections and diarrhoeal diseases which had started more slowly around 1895. From the early 1850s to the 1880s, atrophy and debility in infants and infant diarrhoea had been high on the lists of the top seven causes of all deaths at all ages.* It was no accident that two of the child

deaths considered in this chapter were due to infant diarrhoea and gastroenteritis. An important additional contributory factor to the mortality decline was reduced family size, since ‘smaller completed families allowed better nur-

turing’, as E B. Smith notes. The average completed size of the Australian family fell from six children in the 1870s to 2.4 children by the 1930s.° 69

70 THE GOOD CHRISTIAN DEATH

Statistics for most colonies except Victoria and New South Wales are poor before 1870. Margaret Anderson’s family reconstitution work for Western Australia between 1842 and 1849 is therefore all the more illuminating on

the impact of child mortality. The ninety families fully reconstituted were unusually large with a mean family size of 9.5, and infant mortality was lower than in the total population of the colony, possibly due to significant underregistration. Even so, Anderson concludes that 60 per cent of sample families lost one child, and 32 per cent lost two children or more; 63 per cent of these children died in infancy. Margaret Anderson’s research into early Western

Australian families also confirmed the argument that family size had an important impact on child mortality. Fifty-two per cent of families with eight or more children lost one or two children, and 21 per cent lost three or more.®

Many middle-class parents in nineteenth-century Australia had a deep

Christian faith which was tested to the utmost by the death of a child. Religious consolation literature, funeral sermons, and condolence letters reveal how the churches explained the Christian meaning of such deaths and the chief forms of consolation they offered. The Evangelical funeral sermon was used as a lesson to parents and children on the need for a pious spiritual life in preparation for the good Christian death. For example, Revd Richard Hill’s sermon at St James’s Church, Sydney, in 1834, on the death of 13-yearold Eliza Reynolds emphasised the theme of repentance. Revd Hill told the story of a disobedient child who later reformed in time to redeem herself before she was fatally burned after her clothes caught fire. The didactic purpose was explicit and opportunistic: ‘Such dying scenes [as Eliza’s] are rare, and too profitable to be neglected.’ Appropriate deathbed scenes were used to show people how to die well and to warn them to repent in time: ‘Eliza will not have died in vain ... if the burning of ber body should save your soul from the fire of Hell.’” The death of a child was often interpreted by Christian ministers as a message from God in the form of a spiritual trial to purify the parents’ souls and teach survivors the lesson of submission to God’s will. The first Anglican Bishop of Western Australia, Mathew Hale, used this tough argument in his address to the boys of Bishop’s School on the death of his eldest son, aged 10, who drowned while bathing in 1862: If it makes us all more serious, more watchful, more earnest in our prayers, more diligent in our preparations to meet death, then I say it will be best for us that the affliction has come to us ... That which has happened to him, dear boys, may happen to any one of you, you know not how soon. Then ... live, I pray and entreat you, every day and all day long, in the fear of God.®

This stern Anglican bishop explained the sacrifice of his son’s life as a divine revelation and a spiritual opportunity for those who survived. Jane Dickson’s moving poem on the death of her infant son in West Maitland in 1843 emphasised her patient submission to the will of God:

‘ANGELS IN HEAVEN’ 71

Why should I grieve for that which is not mine, Why should I mourn for what was lent, but, for a time. He was not mine, God gave and took away, It was his will, then what have I to say?’

Bishop Hale and Jane Dickson were both able to accept the death of a child as God’s will because of a deep faith. However, some Christian parents interpreted the death of their child as God’s punishment for their own sins, since

they invariably considered the child innocent. While many devout parents struggled for submission to divine judgment, others rebelled at its illogicality and cruelty, including Sir Alexander Stuart on the death of his little daughter in 1860: It seemed as if the Reaper had indeed come in cruelty and in wrath to take her away ... | feel that I am apt to indulge in a bitter spirit of repining against the doings of the Almighty, rather than in humility to bow the head to the terrible stroke. I know

this is wrong, but I find the feeling continually usurping in my heart the place which ought to be held by a patient submission to the will [of God] ... When I cast a retrospective glance over my past life I can acknowledge the justice of the fearful

sentence. For I know that my sins have been so many and so grievous ... but I feel inclined to say with Cain my punishment is greater than I can bear ... The innate evil of my heart inclines rather to charge the Almighty with harshness in snatching the precious treasure from us, than view it as a token of living chastisement.

Whereas Alex Stuart dwelt on their ‘fond hopes dashed ruthlessly to pieces’, his wife Chrissy was able to view their daughter’s death with ‘pious resignation’, rejoicing that she was now ‘a bright inhabitant of glory’.!° This gendered difference in response to the loss of a child was also apparent in mid-

Victorian Christians in Britain, such as Archibald and Catharine Tait and Edward and Mary Benson. Tait and Benson were both devout churchmen who recognised that their wives coped with the ordeal of their children’s deaths in a greater spirit of acceptance. Their wives had been trained from childhood in the virtue of submission to God’s will and, as women, they had learned the additional virtues of patience, obedience and humility.!! Sir Alexander Stuart’s response was probably not uncommon among Christian men, and may help to explain why men left the church in larger numbers than women during the next century. To understand why so many women and some men did eventually acquiesce in ‘the justice of the fearful sentence’, we need to understand their view

of the Christian consolations on the loss of a child. They believed that a benevolent God had removed their children prematurely from a world of pain, sin, and temptation to a happier world with God. An elegy for the infant Mary Ann Burdekin, who died about 1844, underlined this blessing:

72 THE GOOD CHRISTIAN DEATH

Full well he knew that on Earth are Dangers, Sorrow, Toil and Strain Thy sweet innocence he so lov’d, that he fix’d thee ever fair Claim’d thee his own dear Child to dwell forever with him above.!2

Bishop Mathew Hale in his 1862 school address elaborated harshly on this particular manifestation of God’s mercy, suggesting that his own son was weak and wayward enough to be peculiarly vulnerable to ‘the world’s snares and temptations’. His son was ‘deficient in those sterner features of natural character’, so a merciful God had ‘early removed him from temptation— taken him from the evil to come’.!* This sentiment became a formulaic part of condolence correspondence in the next half century, long after writers had

ceased to understand its biblical foundations. Harry Johnston in 1890 responded to a condolence letter on his daughter’s sudden death: ‘I feel that it is for her good to be taken young and spared the weariness of this sorrowful world’; but he sounded less convinced than Bishop Hale that this really alleviated the pain of the ‘crushing blow’.!4

Pious letter writers stressed the consolation of the child’s happiness in heaven, as an angel with God. In 1870 Patrick Taylor wrote to his brother-inlaw on the death of his son, ‘to rejoice with you, that you are not left without a blessed hope that your child has safely reached a far better, even a heavenly country ... This hope when well founded converts the season of sorrow into a time of thanksgiving.’'’ This language of victory and joy was redolent of an earlier time of enthusiastic Evangelicalism and might have seemed inappropriate in 1870 to those less pious than Patrick Taylor. Up to the 1870s, greater Christian emphasis was usually placed on the children meeting God and the angels in heaven, rather than on detailed images of heavenly reunions with family members ‘gone before’, as in Mrs F M. Monk’s condolence letter on the death of a friend’s daughter in 1871: For her, it is a bright, and happy change; often have we called her an angel upon earth, but we know that she is now one in Heaven, picture the sweet, loving face, with silvery wings flitting about amongst the angelic throng. She was too good for this loathsome life, and her Heavenly Father in His love has taken her to him.

Amid this romantic rhetoric about heaven there was only one brief reference to ‘the looking forward to meeting them again in that bright land’.'® There was also a popular belief that all babies were free of sin and would go to heaven, illustrated by Fanny Barton’s consoling assurance on the death of her sister’s baby in 1876: ‘Heaven would not be Heaven were it not peopled

partly with innocent little babies.’!” From the 1870s, as Christian faith gradually diminished, hopes of heavenly reunion assumed greater importance in the minds of those left behind, as we shall see later in the chapter. But the

‘ANGELS IN HEAVEN’ 73

death of a child remained very difficult to rationalise in any terms, Christian or otherwise.

It used to be assumed that high infant mortality before the twentieth century encouraged parents to limit their emotional investment in young children. Historians such as Lawrence Stone and Philippe Ariés reinforced this

assumption, which has influenced academics in other disciplines. Colin Murray Parkes, a psychiatrist, has observed that parents in earlier centuries expected to lose several young children and ‘accepted their losses more readily than we do today’.!®

However, in 1983 Linda Pollock effectively rejected the view that high child mortality rates inevitably meant reduced parental affection. She found no substantial increase in levels of affection between parents and children in England and America between 1500 and 1900. Instead, she argued that relations between parents and children had changed remarkably little through the centuries, so that most parents through the ages grieved at the deaths of their

children. My own research into family archives for nineteenth-century Australia and Britain entirely supports Pollock’s conclusions. There is little evidence that parents in the early nineteenth century invested less affection in their children and felt less distress at their deaths than parents a century later, despite differing expectations of their survival.!? Colonial parents did not feel that several remaining children would compensate for the loss of any one,

however alarming the child mortality statistics. Most Australian parents grieved at the deaths of their children. Like parents elsewhere, they had dif-

ferent ways of expressing their sorrow and dealing with it, according to gender, class, wealth, family size, and the cause of death.

A German Lutheran mother endures the deaths of seven children Anna Ey, 1867-1913 The first of four case studies of children’s deaths explores the painful experi-

ences of Anna Ey, wife of a German Lutheran pastor in Hahndorf, South Australia. The other three examine detailed texts on the deaths of one child only in each family, although many unfortunate families had to face two or more children’s deaths. Anna Ey’s trials help us to understand the impact of the loss of six of her thirteen children in childhood, and a seventh at the age of thirty-four. The other three case studies consider the experiences of British immigrants, which were more common, whereas Anna Ey’s illuminates those of the tiny German immigrant community in South Australia, albeit in less detail. (In 1846 about 7 per cent of the South Australian population was German, compared with 53 per cent English, and 8 per cent Irish.*°) Like the Ey family, many German migrants in South Australia settled in self-

supporting communities in the Barossa Valley and the Adelaide Hills, attracted initially by the colony’s religious tolerance. Anna Ey was born in

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1839, daughter of a Lutheran parish pastor in Germany, who died at sea while immigrating with his family to South Australia in 1847. The widow and three children struggled to make a living, and later Anna at age 21 married

Pastor J. M. R. Ey of Hahndorf, later resident pastor at Carlsruhe and Lobethale.*!

Anna Ey’s memoir offers the remarkable story of her devout and stoical Lutheran Protestant responses to the deaths of seven beloved children, as well as her parents, husband, siblings, and grandchildren. Her children died of common childhood infections, enteric diseases, and accidents—one of diphtheria, two of dysentery, one of bronchitis, one of whooping cough, one of tuberculosis, and one of accidental burns—a catalogue of major nineteenthcentury causes of infant and child mortality. Her summary accounts of these

tragedies were very different from dramatic and emotional Evangelical deathbed scenes—hers were economical, restrained and resigned to the will of God. Her son Hugo died of diphtheria in 1867; she recognised his symptoms

instantly and knew there was no hope, as the doctor later confirmed. Anna briefly mentioned her son’s two restless nights before his death, and her broth-

er’s sermon on the seemingly inappropriate text, “The Lord hath done all things well.’*2

Seven years later she lost her 16-month-old son, Paul Theodor, to dysentery after nine terrible days and nights. She wrote in her memoir, ‘Even today, after twenty-eight years, it still hurts me when I remember that dreadful suffering.’ The boy’s father read the burial service, when Anna was too numb to cry, though she wept at last at the subsequent funeral of another woman’s child, who also died in the local dysentery outbreak.*? Only a year later in 1875, she lost her S-month-old baby Ernst August, again to dysentery, and he was buried by his father beside his little brother. The parents had looked on the baby as compensation for the dead Theodor, and it was harder to lose this third son. But as good Lutherans they could not dwell on their sorrow, for they had to prepare for the next Synod to be held in Carlsruhe.** Three years later, in 1878, another baby, Sophia, died of bronchitis at 15 weeks. Anna commented only that ‘the Lord called her home ... out of this world of sorrow’. In 1883 all her children had whooping cough and little Paul died at 12 months, after a terrible struggle. At the burial the pastor preached on the text, ‘Thy will be done’. When her daughter-in-law Pauline died of tuberculosis in 1889, Anna promised at Pauline’s deathbed to bring up her two sons with her own children. Meanwhile, Anna’s husband had a series of strokes and died at the age of 56 in 1893 after seven months’ suffering with dropsy. Anna was left ‘a widow with a broken heart’. Her sister’s advice after the funeral was to have a good weep at her husband’s grave whenever she was sad, and pray to the Lord, but when she came home ‘find plenty of work to do, the more the better’. Afterwards, Anna was exhausted from nursing and

grief, and fell into a deep depression aggravated by a badly broken arm. Though she had apparently accepted all the children’s deaths with stoical resignation and revealed little emotion in her memoir, her husband’s death was too much: ‘My mind was so depressed. I saw only the anger of God, and

‘ANGELS IN HEAVEN’ 75

could not comfort myself in His grace.’ At least she did not have to worry about accommodation on her husband’s death, for she received his full salary for a year and lived on in the parsonage for two years. From then on she kept the family by her work as a midwife and nurse, as well as taking in sewing.*>

But when Anna’s brother, Pastor Oster, aged 67, died four years after her husband, she was devastated, as if all the sorrow of her previous repressed losses had accumulated inside and finally burst out. Or perhaps it was more difficult to maintain a stoical resignation without her husband’s strong support. When Anna saw her brother in his coffin, ‘I was overwhelmed with grief

and allowed my stubborn and despairing heart to give way. I screamed and said, “The dear Lord robs me of all that I love”.’ But she was shocked at her own words, knowing she ‘deserved more punishment for my murmuring’. She

determined, with God’s help, to try harder to ‘be still’. But just over a year

later she suffered a more terrible blow when her 12-year-old daughter Dorothea (Dorchen) died from burns after her clothes caught alight at the kitchen fire: I cannot describe how I felt, especially since the father was not there, as he had been when the other children died, and we could comfort and strengthen each other. It

would not have taken much for me to lose faith altogether. But the Lord in His mercy helped me to find comfort in His Word. The 23"4 Psalm, which my Dorchen loved to pray, was especially comforting ... I felt utterly broken in spirit, and also in bodily strength.*°

Anna Ey was nearly 60 on Dorchen’s death in 1898, but she still had to endure the deaths of two more children before her own. She lived comfortably with her daughter Emma who survived her, and reminded herself that ‘people can get accustomed to much, and the Christian tries to resign himself to God’s ways’. In 1904, Anna’s son Rudolph, another pastor, aged 34, died of tuberculosis of the throat, after being discharged from a sanatorium as incurable. Rudolph’s condition deteriorated rapidly at home as it became increasingly difficult for him to swallow. His last words included ‘God’s will be done. Now you must bury me too.’ His mother and wife read psalms and sang hymns for him, ‘and yet how hard it is to sing when one’s heart is breaking’. The mother promised at her son’s deathbed that ‘we shall be still, and submit ourselves under the mighty Hand of God’. Anna finished the main volume of her memoir: ‘Yet, with what bitter sorrow one gazes after them into the quiet grave, where one has to see one after the other lowered, whom one has loved so dearly here. For the true children of God the hope of a re-union

casts its Heavenly Light into the dark grave. They say farewell to meet again.’*” This reference to hope for a heavenly family reunion was the only such mention in Anna’s memoir, and then only in extreme old age on the death of her pious pastor son who could be presumed worthy of salvation.

This is a stark Lutheran contrast with the frequent emphasis on heavenly reunions in British Evangelical accounts.

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A short addition to Anna Ey’s memoir chiefly recorded the deaths and illnesses of more members of her large extended family, closing with her daughter Anna Heidrich in 1913, mentioned with no details in her final paragraph. Anna herself died in 1917 at the age of 77, and was buried beside her husband, having endured the deaths of seven children with remarkable resigna-

tion to God’s will, except for occasional outbursts of protest in her later years.“> Anna Ey’s memoir paints a vivid portrait of a large family with a strong, devout, puritanical faith which changed little in its restrained pious responses to death between the death of Hugo in 1867, that of Rudolph in 1904, and almost certainly that of Anna Heidrich in 1913. It is significant that the contribution of doctors at these deathbeds was almost never mentioned,

since ‘the mighty Hand of God’ was the determining force, even into the twentieth century.

The Christian ideal The deaths of Edward Suttor 1850 and Baby Drew 1866 We must assume there were few ‘good Christian deaths’ of babies and young children in nineteenth-century Australia, for such deaths tested the Christian ideal to the utmost. Infants and very young children often died swiftly and unpleasantly from infectious and intestinal diseases accompanied by distressing combinations of fever, pain, sickness, and diarrhoea, as we saw with Anna Ey’s family. Many also died suddenly from a variety of accidents, including drowning in family wells, rivers, and oceans. A traditional ritualised death was out of the question in such cases, for death often happened too quickly and young children were unable to play their idealised part in the final scene. Even the few parents, like Anna Ey, who wrote memoirs or kept diaries, rarely offered detailed accounts of such harrowing events. However, two surviving records of the deaths of babies and young children contain enough elements of the traditional Christian ideal to merit close read-

ing and analysis. Both reports came from prosperous Anglican families in New South Wales and Queensland. Charlotte Suttor, daughter of a Sydney accountant and wife of a wealthy New South Wales pastoralist and politician, William Suttor, had fourteen children. Her experience of the deaths of two children bears some resemblance to those of the Tait and Horsley families in England, who each lost five children to the ravages of scarlet fever in the 1850s. Her diary entries for 1848 to 1850 are also similar in their intense and thoroughly sincere piety, powerfully influenced by the Evangelical movement. Like many mid-Victorian British Evangelicals, Charlotte Suttor was deeply concerned about the state of her soul at death and tried hard to prepare daily

for ‘that awful Eternity ... so that I shall reap everlasting life in Heaven’. Illnesses of friends and neighbours warned her not to ‘defer seeking salvation until too late’, especially as she could not know whether her mental powers would be preserved, or whether her death would be sudden.*? Good deaths, like that in 1849 of ‘poor little Mrs Edwards’, who was ‘calm and composed

‘ANGELS IN HEAVEN’ 77

meeting her end as becomes a Christian’, reminded Charlotte ‘to make a daily preparation for that event which must come to all’. She was convinced that

‘through faith in my blessed Saviour’ she might ‘overcome Death and the world’, but she must live a holy life to earn such salvation.*° She prayed regularly for forgiveness for her sins, and read psalms and hymns to keep her mind from worldly matters.

The deaths of babies and children of neighbours and tenants reminded Charlotte Suttor vividly of the loss in 1838 of her 2-year-old son Edwin, of which no account appears to survive. On the death of a friend’s child in May 1849 she reflected in her diary that the survivors should not wish to recall the ‘dear innocent little being’ from ‘immortal happiness’, though they often did so.?! In January 1850, Charlotte went to see the little corpse of a neighbour’s child: ‘it was a sweet looking child, it reminded me so much of my dear lost Edwin, but how wrong to say lost, found their resting place in the bosom of their Saviour’.°* Indeed in 1850 the deaths in the neighbourhood from dysentery and scarlet fever increased in number and came steadily closer to home, all faithfully reported in Charlotte’s diary. On 16 January she visited Mary

Moriarty who was most distressed at the death of her eldest girl of 7 from scarlet fever: ‘how the grief of one mother touches the heart of another ... God grant that we may be spared a similar affliction.’ Three days later, the youngest Moriarty child also died and another was dangerously ill with an ulcerated sore throat.*? By the end of January, Charlotte was alarmed as she had not experienced so many deaths on the estate before, but she was relieved that the fever had not spread to her own family. When scarlet fever killed Charlotte’s beloved 4-year-old-son Edward on 8 July 1850, the attack was so rapid and unexpected that Charlotte herself was away from home. She had left home believing her son was out of danger and only learned the news of his death two days afterwards. She was frantic with remorse, shock, and grief: Oh God have mercy upon me and give me strength to bear thy Will. Can I believe that one child is gone, oh how could I leave him when I knew he had been so ill. We must instantly return although only to see his corpse, and my younger two supposed to be dying. I feel I scarcely know what I am about. Enable me Oh Lord ... [to] turn to the Lord my God in my distress.4

The Suttors reached their ‘melancholy home’ next evening as Charlotte reported: ‘I return after a few days and find him a corpse’, which deprived her of a final farewell and a last kiss to ‘little warm lips’. She contemplated the reason for this ‘severe stroke of his Will? and deduced that it must be a punishment from God for the sins of the parents: We have had more than a share of good in this world, we were perhaps getting too much engrossed with the concerns of this life, and what we set our hearts upon most, our darling children, the Lord sees fit to remove one, that we may set our affections upon nothing in this life, oh my Saviour lead our thoughts to thee.*5

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Charlotte Suttor reflected on these issues in her diary on 12 and 13 July before the coffin was closed. There were consolations of faith, as well as trials. Even the belief that the death of a child was punishment for the parents’ sins could be rationalised: ‘may thy chastisements be for our good not to harden us, but to draw us nearer to thee’. Easier to comprehend was the familiar argument of hymns and Evangelical tracts that ‘“God’s mercy [is] sparing him a life of sin and sorrow in this world’. Charlotte found this explanation of her son’s death much more convincing as she looked at his ‘sweet, placid face’ for the last time.*°

Above all, the prospect of immortality was the only meaningful consolation to a grieving Christian parent—as Charlotte put it, ‘I feel assured that my darling child is now an angel before the throne of God with countless others gone before.’ As the coffin was fastened down, Charlotte noted ‘the remains [are] gone where they will await the sound of the last trumpet when all the dead shall rise, oh may it prove a joyful resurrection to us all.’>” Though she was able to repeat this theological tenet, it was infinitely more comforting to remember ‘my darling little Teddy ... as he is now, an angel in heaven, and not resile that he has gone before.’ It was this belief in Edward as an angel in heaven that reconciled her two weeks later, undeterred by the doctrinal conflict between the concept of the body sleeping until the final resurrection and that of immediate transition to an angelic state.

The struggle for submission to God’s will was painful for a bereaved mother, especially as she took her ‘last look at the cold clay’ of her beloved son, having missed his death. Charlotte felt guilt and sadness for her absence, and regret at the lost farewell, but did not blame God: ‘If it had been God’s will I should have felt happiness to have had the last word, look and sigh of my darling, but as God willed it otherwise, it must have been best to be as it is.”?? She felt heartbroken as she took ‘my last kiss of his cold, cold forehead’, remembering the warm body she left behind a few days earlier. She might order her thoughts in the abstract according to familiar theological doctrines, but it was altogether different to accept Edward’s loss emotionally when looking at his body and remembering the physical relationship with her child: ‘Who can describe a mother’s feelings in seeing her darling little ones taken to the cold dark Grave. Our mortal feelings recoil from it and bitter, bitter would be our feelings indeed, had we no hope beyond this world life.’*° She repeatedly prayed, ‘May he give me a sincere resignation to his divine will.’ Like Catharine Tait in England, Charlotte’s struggle for submission was brief and she attained a remarkable degree of resignation to God’s will by the time her son’s body was removed from the house—no doubt the product of her years of spiritual preparation for death. Two days after her return home, Charlotte Suttor reached a necessary and practical conclusion to her anguished reflections on Edward’s death: ‘The living demand my care and it would be selfish in me to indulge in a sorrow that would unfit me for my duties.’*! She had five remaining children to care for and was six months pregnant. Her 7-year-old son George had been ‘almost at

‘ANGELS IN HEAVEN’ 79

the point of death’ when she returned home at Edward’s death. Charlotte Suttor pleaded with God for the lives of her remaining five children: ‘Oh God

in thy mercy spare my other child, but if it please thee to take him, enable me to say and feel thy Will be done.’4* George gradually recovered, but two

visiting relatives caught the fever in ‘this house of suffering’. By 20 July Charlotte felt very weak and ill because of her pregnancy and ‘the constant distress of mind’, and six days later she fainted by the bedside of one of her patients. By 4 August they were all recovered and 7-year-old George was finally told of his brother’s death: ‘he was very much distressed and cried very much indeed, poor little fellow it is his first grief’. Charlotte concluded in her journal: ‘How many blessings I have, let me not in the loss of one be unmindful of those I have left to me.” On 11 August her brother-in-law, Mr William Lisle, came to their home to preach ‘a most beautiful and appropriate sermon’

on the text, ‘Jesus Christ who hath abolished death’-—an empty metaphor which apparently carried comfort.*? Charlotte Suttor’s diary is revealing about the process of parental grief for her sons but silent on the ‘particulars’ of their deaths. By contrast, the death of Mrs Gertrude Drew’s baby in Brisbane in 1866 provides a rare detailed description of a baby’s death in another pious household. This is an idealised account of a baby’s death written by a visiting family friend, Blanche Mitchell, daughter of Sir Thomas Mitchell, the surveyor-general and explorer of New South Wales. Blanche, the youngest of eleven children, had been raised in lux-

ury in a happy upper-class home until her beloved father’s death in 1855 severely reduced the family’s wealth and living standards. Blanche Mitchell was diagnosed as consumptive in December 1865 and died unmarried in September 1869 at the age of 26, spending her final months as an invalid. She was familiar with death already, as her father died in 1855, her sister Emily died in England in 1860, and another sister Camilla died in

childbirth in 1863. Blanche used her detailed diary as a confessional that helped to order the events of a life which were frequently outside her own control. She was imaginative, intelligent, and well read, with a gift for writing fluent and vivid prose. Her diary illustrates the combined influences of Anglican Christianity and the British cultural heritage, as well as her tendency to dramatise her experiences. Blanche Mitchell found herself in an unusual situation in September and

October 1866, during a visit to the Queensland family of William George Drew, a politician. She was presumably sent to Brisbane to stay with family friends for her health, but the circumstances were scarcely conducive to convalescence since she witnessed the deaths of Mrs Drew’s elderly mother and infant daughter within the space of three weeks. Blanche had always delighted in family rituals and she dwelt intensely on those associated with death, confessing that the death of the baby had a ‘strange fascination for me’. She was evidently very fond of the Drew family and sincerely saddened by these two deaths. But her diary account also has the rather detached air of the self-

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conscious observer acutely aware of her own mortality; she had already been thinking deeply about the implications for her own impending death during the earlier death of the baby’s grandmother.

The unnamed baby girl, a few months old, became ill suddenly on 26 September 1866 with constant diarrhoea and sickness diagnosed by the two doctors as ‘a great epidemic at present amongst children ... a sort of cholera’. The following day the family was seriously alarmed, and waited eagerly for

the doctor’s arrival; unfortunately they called in a new doctor, Dr O’Dougherty, who declined to prescribe for the child since professional etiquette defined that as the role of the family’s regular doctor. The family had lost faith in Dr Bell after his poor care of Mrs Drew’s dying mother, but reluctantly agreed to a joint consultation between the two doctors, who were far from hopeful and again mentioned cholera. The mother, Mrs Drew, never left the sickroom, giving the baby regular spoonfuls of milk and honey, which were instantly thrown up. Mrs Drew was finally prevailed upon to go to bed after midnight, leaving the nurse, Mary, to sit up with the baby.** About one o’clock next day, 28 September 1866, Dr Bell informed the nurse (rather than the parents) that the baby could not recover, and that the diet of milk and honey was to be combined with poultices on the stomach. Blanche could see a terrible change for the worse, ‘and I could see no life in that awful look that had fallen upon the countenance’. Now the mother had lost hope, she could no longer bear to be in the room with her dying baby, instead pacing up and down the passage outside, crying bitterly, while the baby lay in the nurse’s arms. This was a departure from the ideal model of a

nineteenth-century mother at her baby’s deathbed, both in the lack of restraint while her child was dying and in her willingness to surrender the baby to a nurse, however devoted. Meanwhile Blanche sat and helped Mary, the nurse, and observed the scene in silent sympathy, noting the baby’s wide open eyes ‘gazing upon each of our faces, her little tongue moving in and out as if she felt her mouth dry’.*

As death drew closer, Blanche speculated in her diary about the baby’s experience of dying and its transition to heaven: But now a sudden shadow had fallen upon the baby countenance, the dark nameless something that fills one with mystery and awe. Slowly it crept all over the

waxen features, the mouth became smaller and smaller, the nose long and pinched—the face assumed an almost old sensible look, the eyes a stern serious expression, unmercifully serious ... In that heavenly look we thought, did the mind see anything of that future world into which it was hastening—for though the baby mind could have no perception having no knowledge whilst on earth, yet the soul escaping from the bond of flesh was even as the oldest among us ... Could the baby soul behold what the soul of an adult can? Did that upward look gaze upon heavenly angels holding out their arms to receive the precious infant?*¢

This is a revealing passage about Blanche Mitchell’s religious views. While lacking the intense devotional piety of Charlotte Suttor, Blanche had a strong

‘ANGELS IN HEAVEN’ 8l

Christian belief in an afterlife complete with heavenly angels, but uncomplicated by doctrines of original sin, atonement, parental guilt, and judgment. Blanche’s simple romanticised view of heaven helped to calm her own fears about her uncertain future as a consumptive. She also dramatised death as ‘a dark nameless something that fills one with mystery and awe’ and produced a relatively rapid physical change. When Mr Drew called in his wife to take a final farewell of their dying child, she kissed her many times, crying, ‘Must I lose you too, my darling— must I see you die also?’ Finally the mother acquiesced in the inevitable, ‘Let her go, let her go to her God—her Saviour, why should we wish to keep her here on earth?’ Both parents knelt together in silent prayer, punctuated by further kisses on the ‘marble brow’. Then Mrs Drew again left the room, as she could not bear to watch the ‘last struggle’, again unusual behaviour by a mother at her child’s deathbed, if judged against the ideal model. Mrs Drew

and Blanche Mitchell seem to have expected physical signs of a sudden ‘change’ at an earlier stage of the dying process, as well as a distressing ‘struggle’ at the end, as visible signs of the process of death which might be more readily ritualised. Blanche was surprised that death came so peacefully without these obvious signs: The little head only turned wearily—the eyes wandering and with the strange serious look gazed into our faces, the cherub mouth opened wide and the lips did not close again—so peaceably and gently the darling baby passed away—there were only three quick short panting breaths and all was over. So quietly was it that I could not believe she was dead.

To be certain about the child’s death they passed their hands before her eyes, but the pupils never moved, and they placed a glass before the open mouth, but the surface of the glass remained unclouded.*’ Mr Drew kissed the infant’s brow, tried to close the eyes and left the room to the female attendants for the ritual of preparing the body. Blanche idealised

the beauty and the innocence of the corpse, ‘the rosy little smiling infant, untouched by care or sorrow, called away to become an angel in its Father’s Kingdom’. They placed the baby in the crib, but again struggled to close the eyes properly. Meanwhile a neighbour, Mrs Rogers, came in to help and declared the child was not dead as it was still warm, so they rushed to place a hot bottle at the feet, but in vain. ‘Death was in that cold placid face, in the fixed rigid features and the soul was now tar far away or perhaps hovering round us.’ The baby was washed and dressed, and placed in the bed where her grandmother died three weeks earlier—the symbolism was not lost on Blanche of the juxtaposition of the deaths of the very old and very young. For the third time a vain effort was made to close the baby’s eyes properly—this time with shillings. These vivid details suggest Blanche’s frustration that the ritual of death was not carried out in a more experienced manner. Blanche

was acutely sensitive to the atmosphere and occasion engendered by the death: ‘very mournfully and melancholy all moved about the house, hushed

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was each voice, stilled every movement and people moved along restlessly, aimlessly.’*®

For a while the parents returned to see their infant: ‘Poor Mrs Drew was quieter now and able to look at her baby calmly and quietly’, while her hus-

band made the funeral arrangements with the undertaker. But Blanche Mitchell spent far longer than the parents that evening keeping watch by the ‘angel form, for it had a strange fascination for me’. She thought about the traditional consolation on the deaths of children, that the baby had gone to a better life where ‘God shall wipe away all tears’. Blanche felt intensely sad and could not refrain from crying on and off for many hours, affected also by the mother’s acute grief. Finally Minnie Rogers insisted that Blanche leave the corpse and move into the parlour to sit in ‘dreary grief’, again capturing the uncertain, unhappy, restless mood of the household. The funeral was held on 29 September 1866, the day after the baby’s death. Blanche woke to a hushed house where the ‘presence of death still hovered’ with ‘the solemn flapping of the mysterious angel’s wings’. The baby looked more beautiful than ever, wearing the same peaceable look, with rosebuds strewn over the bed. Mrs Drew seemed comforted now that the baby’s suf-

fering was over, though she may have endured this second trauma more calmly because the double deaths left her in deep shock. Blanche left the griev-

ing parents together to talk and read prayers and hymns. Early in the afternoon they all went to say their final farewell to the baby lying in the white coffin strewn with flowers, ‘a marble image of beauty’, amid the hum of suppressed sobbing.*?”

Mr Drew left in the coach for the funeral with several of the older children

and Mary, the devoted nurse, who behaved ‘almost like a mother to [the baby] in her constant unwearying attendance’. It was ironic that the real mother was not expected to attend the funeral because ladies were considered incapable of suppressing their tears at funerals—in this case with some justification. Instead it was seen as appropriate for the proxy-mother, the workingclass nurse, to attend. At Minnie Rogers’ instigation the three women who remained behind—Mrs Drew, Blanche and Minnie—followed Mrs Drew into her room, and performed their own version of the burial service kneeling by the bed. This seems to have developed as a distinctively Australian custom. It

was common for British women of the upper and upper middle classes to remain at home during the funeral and burial up to the 1870s, but I have seen

no British evidence of the women at home conducting their own service. Minnie read the service while Blanche gave the responses; they found it solemn, moving and comforting, and remained for some time in silent prayer. Not surprisingly Blanche’s health was adversely affected by the trauma and excitement. Her cough was very bad throughout the day of the funeral, which was bitterly cold, and she was afflicted by ‘a terrible fit of both wheezing and coughing with pain in the side again and I felt so disappointed to think that I was no better after all my trouble to get well.’°° Blanche Mitchell died of consumption exactly three years later at the age of 26.

‘ANGELS IN HEAVEN’ 83

The baby’s death witnessed by Blanche Mitchell in 1866 was not the perfect Christian death, as few ever could be in reality, and she portrayed it in sentimental and dramatic terms. It was certainly a baby’s death surrounded by a loving family and by deeply felt Christian faith and ritual. Blanche’s representation of this death was closer to the ideal than many baby’s deaths and demonstrated the continuing power of Christian consolation in the affluent classes in the Australian colonies, at least up to the 1860s.

The impact of secularism and improved medical care The death of Dora Hindson, 1890 An immense cultural gulf exists between the deaths of Edward Suttor and baby Drew in 1850 and 1866 respectively, and that of Dora Hindson in Victoria in 1890. The first two representations of children’s deaths were both deeply religious, though with varying degrees of piety, sharing the same certainty that the dead children were angels in heaven who had left a world of sin and sorrow for a happier life with God. The account of Dora Hindson’s death in 1890, by contrast, was almost entirely secular, with no reference to angels or heaven and few ‘particulars’ of the deathbed scene. This deep divide within a period of forty years is partly explained by the religious transformation in the intervening period—the impact of biblical criticism and evolutionary theory, and the increase in disillusionment with orthodox Christianity. A second factor is the improvement by 1890 in the knowledge and authority of

the better doctors who attended the wealthy urban elite—a development examined further in the next chapter. The 1890 record of Dora Hindson’s death made little reference to religion, but placed a good deal of weight on medicine. The 1850 and 1866 narratives used the diary form which was the familiar genre for Evangelicals and other

pious Protestants accounting to God for a worthy life and a good death. However, Dora Hindson’s death has to be pieced together from the copious correspondence between various members of the family, which has the advantage of providing several different perspectives on the same event, but lacks

the detailed continuity and atmosphere of the earlier accounts. Dora Hindson’s death in 1890 might well be seen as a transitional death between the traditional and the modern. Alice Hindson was the daughter of Francis Henty, a wealthy Victorian pastoralist and merchant with a family wool station of 14000 acres. Alice married John Hindson, and they had two boys and five girls at the time of 7-month-old Dora’s death. Dora’s story is mainly told in letters between the three Henty sisters, Alice Hindson, Caroline MacLeod and Louisa Henty. Dora was very ill and feverish on 14 December 1890, but appeared to be well again five days later when the family moved for their Christmas holiday to a resort at Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula. By 27 December the baby was seriously ill with gastroenteritis and matters were complicated by the geo-

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graphical isolation of Sorrento, which delayed mail and obliged family and medical support to slow down to the timetable of the steamers. Baby Dora was unfortunate to die from gastroenteritis in 1890, only about five years before the start of the decline in infant mortality from this killer disease. Alice Hindson and her sister Louisa Henty did all the nursing of Dora, including the night watches, while the father was busy with his work and rarely on the scene. The baby vomited frequently and the two women gave her lime water and brandy, raw beef juice, and cold water. Their regular doctors were unable to reach them at Sorrento, so John Hindson had to scour the country to find another doctor willing to attend them. No medicines seemed to relieve the baby’s distress and they feared they would lose her several times

before the arrival of Dr Wilkinson. The doctor just managed to catch the returning steamer after his first visit but agreed to stay the night if needed next time. Louisa reported that Dr Wilkinson ‘thinks badly’ of the baby’s chances but had not given up hope; he supervised the baby’s diet and medicine him-

self, providing a detailed memorandum of food, liquid, and medicine to be administered each half hour ‘and sees to it himself’. ‘The sickness was dreadful and constant diarrhoea’, but Dr Wilkinson’s regime relieved both these symptoms.°! Both women were thankful that Dr Wilkinson agreed to stay overnight on what turned out to be Dora’s final night. They agreed he was kind-hearted, thoughtful, and took great interest in the case, and they were reassured by his expertise with babies, which derived from his experience in the Children’s Hospital. Neither they nor Dr Wilkinson expected a cure, merely that he would provide reassurance that they were doing everything possible to relieve the symptoms. He seems to have been one of the better doc-

tors for terminal care, akin to the more caring consultants attending elite London families. Baby Dora died at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning 29 December 1890, exactly

the time they had nearly lost her the previous night. Dr Wilkinson said the action of the heart was ceasing due to extreme exhaustion. Alice was determined to be with her baby at that crucial time, when Dora could not swallow and seemed to pant. The two women found it pitiful to see her suffer and to hear her pathetic little cries. But towards the end the doctor told Alice to lie down on the bed and take Dora in her arms, where they both slept briefly— a comfort to Alice in retrospect. When Dr Wilkinson woke her to say the baby’s breathing had changed for the worse, Alice sat on the side of the bed with Dora on her knee as the doctor tried to give her beef juice and brandy.°* Then Louisa bathed her forehead with perfume. Finally the doctor called John Hindson, the father, to say he could do no more. Alice described the final minutes: “The darling put back her head two or three times as if for breath and each time seemed to look straight into my eyes. Then all was over. God took her to Himself. Oh my darling I have loved you far too well.’°* The behaviour of both mother and doctor at this baby’s death contrasted sharply with that at baby Drew’s deathbed, suggesting that a medical and pragmatic perspective may have had advantages over the idealised spiritual model.

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Blanche Mitchell and Charlotte Suttor had attributed the deaths of baby Drew and Edward Suttor to the will of God. They saw no point in agonising about the role of the doctor and the effectiveness of particular medicines. But Alice Hindson saw Dora’s situation quite differently in 1890. God and His will were scarcely mentioned in copious correspondence and not at all in the letters written while Dora was ill and dying. The only two references to religion were brief and written after the baby’s death. On 30 December Alice told her sister Caroline MacLeod that she could now think of Dora as ‘safe in the arms of Jesus’. On 12 January 1891 Louisa Henty sought consolation in the belief that “God knows best and has taken her for his own wise purpose’. But these were conventional rationalisations—in the second case two weeks after the event.°*

By contrast, the anxiety of the two sisters was focused on the issue of whether Dora received the best nursing and medical treatment. Alice Hindson agonised over the quality of her own nursing as well as Dr Wilkinson’s medical treatment. Alice asked her sister, Caroline MacLeod, if Louisa’s letters said that she ‘really and truly thinks all was done that could be. Now one has so

much time to think it is only natural to think what might have been under other circumstances.’>> Alice worried about whether Dora would have lived had they not been on holiday in Sorrento and been able to secure their regular doctors. The day after the baby died, Alice consulted her normal doctor,

Dr Alsop, and her uncle, Dr Vernon Laurence, who had talked with Dr Wilkinson. She was vastly relieved that they all agreed that Dora’s medical treatment was appropriate, and that no one was to blame. Had Dora been ill at home as usual with Dr Alsop, or if they had consulted fifty doctors, the outcome would most likely have been the same.°° While they were standing by Dora’s coffin, Dr Wilkinson had assured Alice that ‘I did all I knew. We are only mortals after all.’ Uncle Vernon Laurence and Dr Wilkinson further reassured Alice that trained nurses could not have nursed Dora better than Alice and Louisa did.>’

The Henty family correspondence on Dora’s death reveals the shift from the religious ideal of death in 1850 and 1866 to the early days of a new medical model of death in 1890 within a wealthy family able to pay for the best doctors. This can be related more directly to the decline of the religious view which assumed death to be God’s will, than to the discovery of any new medical cures for disease. Growing uncertainty about the Christian faith in the late

nineteenth century coincided with a revised view of disease, as death was increasingly attributed to specific diseases rather than divine intervention. The good Dr Wilkinson made the necessary arrangements with the under-

taker in Queenscliff on his return from Sorrento on the day of the baby’s death. Priddle the undertaker then went to Sorrento by steamer with ‘the little coffin very pale grey and silver and we thought as nice as if it had been done in town. The dear wee thing looked so pretty and did not change much even to the last sight of her in the last bed. We put some flowers round her.’ The family was concerned that both the baby corpse and the coffin should

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look pretty, reminding us that many families took memorial photographs to commemorate this last idealised viewing of the dead child (see plate 2). The mother thought her baby in the coffin looked just as she had when very ill, with her eyes partly open and her lovely hair spread round on the pillow, her little hands folded on her breast. Dora was wearing a frilled English night gown and Alice herself put on the little booties she had made.>® These descriptions of the dead baby in 1890 make no reference to Dora as an angel in heaven, but depict her instead as looking ill rather than dead, beautiful, and even ‘life-like’. The emphasis had shifted from the prospective next world back to earth in the interval since 1850 and 1866. One comment by Louisa Henty gives some insight into the atmosphere in the‘household at Sorrento just as the coffin was removed—a strange comparison with those earlier mourning households of 1850 and 1866. The Hindson children were very sad and not talking much: ‘I think the endeavour to be cheerful is trying for them’—it was remarkable that such an effort was even encouraged. The three youngest children did not understand much in any case, though young John Hindson asked if he could look at the baby and was evidently allowed to do so.>?

The grieving parents, Alice and John Hindson, accompanied the undertaker and the little coffin in the steamer Ozone. Louisa noted that ‘Alice kept up well’ to the point of departure, when Louisa and the children waved the mourning party off from the beach. Alice’s letter to her other sister, Caroline

MacLeod, took up the story from there. They had a sad journey from Sorrento but everyone was kind. Dr Wilkinson joined the steamer at Queenscliff, and helped John Hindson and Priddle the undertaker to carry the

coffin, which was put into a waggonette at Flinders Street station for their journey home to the suburb of Canterbury. The following morning, 30 December at 8 a.m., the parents chose a spot for the grave at Kew Cemetery. They were disappointed not to obtain a good site near the grave of Alice’s father, Francis Henty, who died in 1889, but chose instead a ‘very pretty’ spot near the iron side gate.°" A close friend, possibly a cousin, Janet Lee Archer, attended the funeral that same afternoon: The little leaden coffin was enclosed in a white one with silver bars ... and silver handles and the lid had a shield shaped silver plate with name age and death on and at back end of it little silver plates engraved with baskets of flowers ... the little pet looked lovely. Her eyes wide open and quite life like and so peaceful.

Unlike Mrs Drew in 1866, the mother not only attended the funeral but “bore all wonderfully well’—reminding us that earlier practices were now more relaxed and that grieving mothers were allowed to participate in the public mourning provided they controlled their private grief.°! Even so, the service itself was still a masculine affair, attended only by the mother and eight men, including the father, the undertaker, the minister, and two doctors, while other female relatives came out to see Alice afterwards at her home.

‘ANGELS IN HEAVEN’ 87

John Hindson returned to work soon after the funeral, apparently suppressing his sorrow, whereas his wife and sister-in-law Louisa continued to grieve far more openly. Neither woman was feeling at all well and both had trouble sleeping, often waking at the hour of Dora’s death and hearing her pitiful little cries in their overcharged imagination. Janet Archer thought Alice looked worn out, restless and ‘weird looking’ on 17 January 1891 after her great shock, and they should be careful not to leave her alone.™ Alice immersed herself in comforting memories of her darling baby in the first months of bereavement. She asked Louisa to send Caroline a baby’s curl, because physical remembrances were the most powerful: ‘I knew you would like to have it—it went to my heart to cut her lovely hair but I did wish so to keep the top knot I was so proud of and so fond of doing. I passed her little comb thro’ each curl and they twisted round my finger as I cut them. I do so long for my darling.’®? On 9 January 1891 Alice expressed her gratitude that she had ‘a great many friends—if kindly expressed sympathy goes for anything’.°* But ten days later, and still isolated with Louisa and the children, she began to worry that those outside the immediate family had already forgotten her dead baby. Alice was pleased that her young daughter Louie ‘spoke so sweetly to me about dear wee Dora the other day. When I showed her some ribbons and a curl—by others one would almost fear she was forgotten—

perhaps I am wrong and I hope so.’ Alice was grateful to May Henty for keeping fresh ‘my sweet one’s little grave’ by visiting three times and covering it with flowers.®° The memory of the loved one was always a vital consolation, but the physical memory was especially important in the case of a baby. Memory became far more significant as a consoling force when religious con-

solations began to lose their power. A month after her baby’s death Alice confessed to Caroline that she felt as weak as if she had suffered a major illness.°°

These case studies of babies’ deaths in more prosperous families demonstrate the decline of the Protestant ideal of the good death and of Christian expressions of consolation between 1850 and 1910. This zealous aspiration for the good Christian death was intense up to the 1870s, but was considerably reduced by the end of the century as secularism increased, and as the medical approach to death became more influential among the affluent. However, it is vital to note that there were multiple modes of death among the comfortable classes from the 1880s; moreover, the good Christian death was experienced differently by Roman Catholics, and also by particular Protestant

sects such as German Lutherans. Case studies attempt to represent broad trends, but they necessarily oversimplify. Moreover, Christian faith survived not just beyond the 1880s but also after 1910, when scepticism was far from universal.

Chapter 5

Medical and Secular Challenges to Christian Ideals of Death Changing perceptions of bad deaths For nineteenth-century Christians, the belief in the immortality of the soul and reunion in heaven made the ‘good Christian death’ theoretically possible. Moreover, the inability of the medical profession to cure disease reinforced belief in death as determined by the will of God. Bad deaths could be seen as the fate of unrepentant or unprepared sinners who were doomed to the eternal punishment of hell. Above all, suicide was the negation of the good death, condemned for centuries by the churches as an offence against God. Christians saw sudden deaths as potential bad deaths because they allowed

no time for spiritual preparation and contrition. Countless Evangelical sermons warned sinners to prepare for death early and throughout life since sudden death could strike at any time.! Lenox Bussell in Western Australia was shocked in 1835 at the sudden death of a young father: ‘No one knows how near we are to death. I hope his sins will be forgiven him for I fear he has many. It is a shocking thing to be so suddenly taken off before we can offer any repentance to our Heavenly Father.’* Accidents were a common cause of sudden death in the colonies, striking fear in the hearts of Christians such as Charlotte Suttor in New South Wales in 1850: ‘Last night ... a man named Mullins was killed upon the spot by the upsetting of a cart. How dreadful to be hurried into Eternity in a moment of un-preparation for such a state.”

A sudden death from a stroke could have a terrible impact on the survivors, especially if they were Christians who were already doubting their faith, as was not uncommon from the 1870s. Alfred Bussell in 1877 described

the death of his wife, Ellen, who had borne twelve children during their twenty-seven year marriage: 88

MEDICAL AND SECULAR CHALLENGES 89

Ellen’s death was sudden and dreadful, it admitted of no communion with her fam-

ily whatever, the power of her large brain was crushed at once, and if at far off intervals a little glimmering of light came upon her sense no backward glance was given to her, no remorse, no regret, no fear in the past, only sorrow in the parting. ‘I die, die, die! And J do not wish to die, to leave my darlings and daddy too.’ Thus

the last night wore itself away in agony untold I fear, at last the morning came when, as if she recognized poor Charlie (who died with us long years ago you know), she exclaimed, ‘Charlie! Charlie! It is nice to die I am tired.’ Then died, she never spoke again.4

Like most bad deaths, Ellen’s was described starkly, underlining its effect on the shocked husband. Alfred was left wishing he knew for certain that ‘my Ellen saw dead Charlie’, his brother who had died twenty years earlier at the age of 46. But he would never be sure and he would never again have peace of mind and spirit. He kept asking himself, ‘Did she see my Brother’s spirit ...

And whither? where are the spirits of the dead? The dead of Mycenae, the dead of Pompeii ... Have they remained in long and terrible inactivity? We shall never know, and there is no rent in the weird mantle of death.’ His wife’s sudden death in such ‘great anguish’ deprived him of the traditional Christian

certainties and consolations: ‘I have had such terrible losses ... I am all alone.” Between about 1840 and 1914, the definition of bad and good deaths was practically reversed as a consequence of declining religious beliefs, advances in medical science, and demographic changes. The emphasis shifted from the spiritual to the physical ordeal. The focus of family accounts of deathbed scenes from the 1870s—where they existed at all—moved away from a pious concern with the spiritual state of the sufferer’s soul to an increased anxiety to reduce the physical suffering of dying people; the human desire to die without pain transcended the Christian aspiration to use the ordeal to purify their

faith. Instead of detailed ‘particulars’ of the Christian triumph over tribulation, grieving relatives preferred brief reassurance that the end was painless, fast, peaceful, or a merciful release. An agnostic family in 1914 might well have defined a bad death in terms that would have signified a good death to a Christian family in 1840. Whereas sudden death was dreaded in the first half of the century, it was

more often welcomed by 1900 because it could mean freedom from prolonged suffering and it also meant that the dying person was unaware of imminent death. This is illustrated by the death of Eleanor Lady Stephen in 1886 from heart disease at the age of 76. Her husband, Sir Alfred Stephen, Chief Justice of New South Wales, commented that she had no particular disease and kept all her faculties to the end, declining suddenly in two days from ‘a failure of all the vital powers, especially the heart and brain’. He told his friend Lord Carrington that the family was spared the trauma of witnessing protracted pain and knew she suffered none: ‘How thankful I am, that it was unexpected by Eleanor herself;—for she was spared the sad knowledge,—and

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the agony of parting—and the last scene.’ Sir Alfred was a prominent

1920: .

Anglican layman but even he avoided a Christian deathbed scene in 1886. Dr Robert Scot Skirving reflected on death in his memoirs in the light of the numerous deaths he had witnessed as a doctor between about 1885 and

[Deaths] are, as a rule, fairly commonplace events, far different from the dramatic scenes described by novelists and certain religious writers. Many people die as indifferently as they were born, and it is as well that it should be so ... Rarely . indeed have I seen any violent emotion shown in the last pitiful hours of existence. Physical weakness has mercifully numbed the ability to feel and remember. Some, most happy, die in their sleep; nor are they who die suddenly always to be pitied. In most cases no great harm results from a death without antecedent suffering and delay.

Ill-health, pain, loneliness, and bereavement in Skirving’s view made people weary of life and ‘ready to meet death with indifference and fortitude’. He criticised the Evangelical focus on deathbed utterances and significant spiritual scenes as inappropriate because it wrongly assumed cerebral powers were normal when people were dying.’

Interpretations of Nellie Stephen’s death from typhoid fever in 1861 Sudden deaths from rapid infectious diseases, so common in the nineteenth century, were perceived as bad deaths for Christians because they allowed neither time nor mental clarity to make final peace with God. Fever of all kinds struck terror in the families of the afflicted because it prevented meaningful spiritual preparation, repentance, and family farewells. Dr Samuel Beckett commented in the 1850s, ‘The whole class of fevers ... so completely

prostrate the powers of life, as to paralyze, almost at the onset, alike the powers of emotion, will and expression.” Typhoid epidemics were a major scourge of most Australian cities from the 1850s and outbreaks continued intermittently until about 1910, when the disease receded because of sanitary reforms, improved sewage systems, and water supplies. Typhoid had a particularly high mortality rate in South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania, and also periodically in New South Wales, and on the goldfields of Victoria and Western Australia. Typhoid fever mortality rates in Victoria in the 1880s were about six times worse than the London rates, and in Melbourne in the early 1890s they were over three times those in London. Doctors could do little or nothing to reduce the mortality, and their long cold water-bath treatment to lower the fever may well have raised it. As F. B. Smith notes, ‘their administration of heroic quantities of turpentine, eucalyptus, digitalis, calomel, ether, and alcohol can hardly have helped a patient in collapse from diarrhoea, headache, and exhaustion.’?

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It would be almost impossible for the most loving family under the best material conditions to construct an idealised Christian deathbed scene out of a dreadful death from typhoid, as the Stephen family discovered. The death of Eleanor (‘Nellie’) Stephen of typhoid at the age of 21 in 1861 was described in some detail in her mother’s diary and is a revealing case study of nineteenth-century interpretations of death. Lady Stephen, Sir Alfred’s second wife, was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman and a woman of genuine piety, unfailing goodness, and devotion to her large family of seven stepchildren and eight of her own children. On the same day, in February 1861, she suffered the double deaths of her first-born child, Nellie, and her mother, Mrs Bedford. Sir Alfred Stephen was away in England for a year throughout Lady Stephen’s ordeal. The diary did not explicitly define Nellie’s fever, but typhoid seems highly likely from the symptoms. There is a major difference between Evangelical deathbed tracts which focused on spiritual meanings and private family accounts written closer to the time, where the primary focus in the personal narratives is on the physical and medical details. Family memorials were often more confused, because they were usually written day by day under acute stress, and were not selective or idealised. The spiritual and physical features tended to be uneasily juxtaposed in the diary texts, and the religious message of triumph over tribulation was usually missing.!? The intense emotional trauma of coping with the death of a loved one usually also gives the private family account a disarming transparency. Though the physical and spiritual meanings are intertwined in this way in Lady Stephen’s diary account, it is more revealing to examine them independently, starting with a medical reading. Nellie’s terminal illness lasted from 26 January to 7 February 1861, starting with mild fever, which made her ‘very poorly’ after two days of intensely hot weather. A week later Nellie’s weakness and delirium intensified to the point of danger. During that first week she was nursed and treated by her family, on one occasion with a vapour bath, and on another with a large mustard poultice. Dr Boyd, the family doctor, saw her on Saturday 2 February when he allowed her sisters to sit with her. But next day Lady Stephen was alarmed by ‘a change in our dear Patient— she seemed to be in a strange state of something like insensibility—with her eyes open, and fixed’. From this time her sisters were rarely allowed into Nellie’s room, to avoid further infection, and a nurse was employed. Dr Boyd

called in another doctor, Dr Roberts, for a second opinion, but despite a prolonged consultation, the physicians prescribed only ‘a large quantity of nourishment and a tonic’. At this point, however, Dr Boyd first considered removing the patient’s hair to lower the head temperature—an action interpreted by families as an alarming sign of imminent death.!! For the next three days the family waited on the prognoses of the two doc-

tors who came three times each day, with a third consultant, Dr Nathan, called in during the last two days. The doctors merely described the symptoms: ‘they thought her pulse quicker, and the delirium certainly increased’.

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Their comments tended on the optimistic side until it was obvious to all that the disease was terminal. On 4 February they considered her in danger but the case was not yet hopeless. On S February they pronounced Nellie ‘no better, and no worse’, though they removed all her hair. On 6 February the three doctors ‘seemed still to think there was hope of recovery’, but when Dr Boyd came next day Lady Stephen ‘saw at once that he thought my poor darling was sinking’, as he ‘looked very sorrowful’. Later that morning all three doctors assembled in the sick room, ‘but merely looked on for a few minutes in silence, saying little—and proposing nothing’. Their silence spoke volumes and half an hour later Nellie died. All the watching at the sickbed and the nursing had been carried out by the mother and Nellie’s sisters, and the paid female nurse. Lady Stephen was understandably ‘worn out with fatigue and anxiety’ by the end. Nellie’s father was away, and the eight brothers made

their only major appearances at the final family assembly around the deathbed, and for the burial. !¢ Had there been an earnest clergyman in the Stephen family, eager to reconstruct Nellie’s death for public edification, Lady Stephen’s diary would only have permitted a spiritual reading by judicious selection. Typhoid fever, by its very nature, did not lend itself to a good Christian death of pious preparation and contrition for past sins, since that required a calm, rational mind. Even at her best, in the early days of her illness, Nellie was intermittently delirious

and her weakness made her irritable. The distress of her attendants was enhanced by Nellie’s continual efforts to get out of bed, and her singing ‘Home, Sweet Home’ and other songs in her delirium.!* Only briefly on 3 and

5 February was Nellie in the least capable of the effort required for a good Christian death. On the morning of 3 February, Nellie told her mother that ‘God’s will is the best’; she reassured Lady Stephen that she had always prayed twice daily, ‘that whatever happened to us, we might be a happy united family in Heaven’. She then asked her mother to repeat some biblical

texts and prayers, but later that day, and the next, the high fever and delirium returned. On 5 February, after her hair was removed, her mother and sister Caroline sat with her through the night: ‘she spoke a great deal as if she thought she was dying. She seemed to speak to everyone of her brothers and sisters. Her words were exhortations to them to live to God, and to remember her.’ She asked for forgiveness of her sins—if ever she had been naughty

or rude—and spoke of ‘being saved’. On the final morning, about a dozen members of the family assembled round Nellie’s bed, while Mr Walsh read the Commendatory prayer as Nellie quietly ceased breathing.'* Even so close to death, Nellie Stephen remembered something of the requirements of the good Christian death, though scarcely enough to provide the basis for an Evangelical tract or didactic sermon. A modern observer of Nellie Stephen’s deathbed would have noticed little of the two very brief spiritual passages, and been far more impressed by other features, including the chaos, the despair, and the exhaustion. The general sense of disorder was reinforced by the intense heat. Nor was it improved for Lady Stephen by the need to procure a more satisfactory nurse for Nellie only

MEDICAL AND SECULAR CHALLENGES 93

the day before she died. The confusion and lack of control was vastly increased because Lady Stephen was obliged to cope with the deaths of her mother and daughter within an hour of each other, while her husband was away in England. Lady Stephen’s mother, Mrs Bedford, wanted to join the large family around Nellie’s deathbed on 7 February, but her daughter persuaded the old lady to stay in bed, because the doctor had ordered her to be kept quiet and avoid distress. While Lady Stephen remained with her daughter’s body, her other children informed her mother of Nellie’s death, causing ‘one of her spasms of pain’. The doctor refused to allow Lady Stephen into her dying mother’s room. The old lady spoke a few words of ‘faith and praise and blessing’, and died within an hour of her grand-daughter.!> Even this brief

one-hour deathbed scene was interrupted to place energising mustard poultices on Mrs Bedford’s chest and back, and to offer ether and brandy. The scene of bustle and agitation at the old lady’s deathbed must have been reinforced by the presence of six family members and Dr Boyd, all having just left

that earlier death scene. Afterwards the family took last looks at the two corpses ‘again and again’, though Lady Stephen was so shocked that she hardly knew how the day passed.!®

The slow medicalisation of death The only medical treatment offered to Nellie Stephen was an increase or reduction of food, fluids, tonics, and alcohol, according to the degree of stimulation considered appropriate, and the use of opiates for sleep.!” This medical supervision and treatment was characteristic for a wealthy family in the

nineteenth-century. The doctors knew they could not cure this particular fever; in fact medical science could cure few diseases before the miracle drugs of the 1930s and 1940s—the sulphonamides. They were helpless to cure, but they were paid to offer comfort and reassurance to the dying person and her family, and to treat the symptoms as best they could. Moreover, some of these doctors were themselves Christians and believed the will of God determined the time of death. Nellie herself was usually pleased to see Dr Boyd, when she

was able to recognise him. For families who could afford such doctors, the best of them probably offered the most caring terminal nursing available at the time, since good palliative care is essentially the effective treatment of symptoms. Moreover, well-fed, washed, and financially comfortable patients were more likely to survive infections and accidents than poorer ones. The Christian view of the good death was reinforced by the sheer inability

of doctors to cure diseases, and so good Christians assumed death was divinely ordained. But increasing doubts about Christian faith in the later nineteenth century coincided with a revised view of disease, which attributed death to specific diseases rather than to God’s will. If death was God’s will, then there was still a very definite limit to the doctor’s power, but if the natu-

ral effects of disease were the cause, then the doctor’s role was greater. However, up to the late nineteenth century therapeutic medicine still had a

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very limited power to cure disease because the causes of disease remained obscure.

Moreover, the status and qualifications of the medical profession in Australia were low and did not improve substantially until after 1900, as T. S. Pensabene has shown for Victoria. Only 23 per cent of the medical force

in Victoria (454 out of 1972 men) were certified practitioners, while the remainder were quacks, herbalists, chemists, and midwives, resulting in a great variety of medical theories and treatment, some of it gentle and helpful.

Many quacks probably did little damage, especially homoeopathic practitioners. The high cost of medical treatment by a registered practitioner meant that doctors were often called out only in emergencies, especially in more isolated rural areas, and often when patients were already dying.!®

Self-treatment continued to be very common and certainly the cheapest. Eighteen-year-old Henry Bournes Higgins travelled as an immigrant from Ireland with his family in 1870 in a small cargo ship which carried no doctor. When his 5-year-old brother was dying with diphtheria, his mother expected clever young Henry to prescribe the most appropriate medicines. He ‘rummaged all over the “Stepping Stone”, his medical companion’ and tried mercury, ipepacuanha, and belladonna. Subsequently Henry discovered that the captain’s Homoeopathic Vade Mecum was more useful than his own medical guide: he prescribed mercury every hour or so and ‘alternated China with Arsen according to the directions in the book’.!? The doctrines of homoeopathy became popular in Australia and numerous immigrants must have treated themselves with the help of such medical companions. Many used old folk remedies, while others just let nature take its course. But even the registered and qualified medical practitioners had a poor reputation, often justified, as there were no established cures for the major diseases and no body of systematic medical knowledge on causes and treatment of diseases. In 1858 the Age charged: “The skilled use of therapeutics is not possessed even by the worthiest and most distinguished of the profession, the most discriminating physician plods his way in doubt and uncertainty ... Scientific arguments are really limited to diagnosis, and [that] the rest is merely chaotic confusion.’*° The absence of an agreed body of medical knowledge of causes of disease and treatment produced a wide variety of theories that were applied by trial and error. Debate and confusion over the causes of disease continued for decades as the contagionists fought it out with the miasmatists. Not knowing either cause or cure for diseases meant that a range of symptoms was treated instead. Numerous cartoons in the press questioned doctors’ skills and their inability to agree with each other—such as the depiction of doctors by the Age in 1858 as ‘the blind leading the blind’,7! and in the Melbourne Punch cartoon of 1884 ‘While Doctors Differ’ (see plate 3). Bushmen and diggers seem to have been especially sceptical about doctors’ skills and Henry Lawson’s stories indicate a mistrust of doctors. Certainly there were more quacks and unqualified doctors in the bush and the goldfields than in the urban areas, and they often lived too far away to help in an emergency. Some were unqualified, some were consumptive, and some were often

MEDICAL AND SECULAR CHALLENGES 95

drunk. W. G. Manners, a prospector in Ballarat, Broken Hill and Kalgoorlie, berated the medical profession in his goldfields memoir for neglect and incompetence, denouncing their ‘diagnosis by elimination’: A doctor does not know what your complaint is, but imagines it might be so and so. Then he prescribes some drug which would have a certain effect under these circumstances. If such an effect does not take place he tries some other drug to produce some other effect. And so he goes on eliminating certain diseases until he arrives at what he considers the right diagnosis; if the poor patient has the good fortune or rather the iron constitution to live through the process, he or she has a chance to recover by natural recuperation and in spite of the treatment ... Their aim was money without service.7”

To discover more about the quality of medical treatment of terminal patients, I examined evidence for the wealthy elite in the colonial cities who could afford the best doctors and consultants. The professional and upper middle classes in late Victorian Britain saw the most distinguished physicians as experts who played a significant role at the deathbed in controlling pain and discomfort, even though they could not cure diseases. Dr William Munk wrote an influential text in 1887 called Euthanasia explaining the value of effective palliative management and good family care of the dying in the home. Such prominent consultants stayed in Britain, especially in London, where their clientele was more numerous and wealthy than in Australia. At their best such physicians provided excellent terminal nursing care to upper middle class families at considerable cost.”? Even among the social elite in the cities, few doctors in Australia seem to have matched the best in London. The verdict on these Australian medical practitioners is mixed, as in the case of Nellie Stephen. Sir Thomas Mitchell’s daughter, Blanche, consulted such doctors regularly before her death from consumption in 1869. Nine months after her own fatal diagnosis in December 1865 she spent several weeks with family friends, the Helys, in Brisbane, and during that time witnessed the deaths of her hostess’s mother and baby, as we have seen. Her detailed diary offers an intelligent and highly critical commentary on the role of the various doctors at these two deaths. When old Mrs Georgina Hely was dying, Blanche’s host Mr George Drew, a politician, sent

for two doctors, Dr O’Dougherty and Dr Bell, who saw Mrs Hely and announced that they had ‘great hopes, and said if she once rallied she would get well’. They recommended more stimulants, including stronger brandy. In the light of her own experience, Blanche was sceptical: ‘[The doctors] went away apparently in very good spirits, but Doctors always are. Tis nothing but an every day business to them, to which their hearts are well hardened.’ Mrs Hely rallied sufficiently to eat three eggs beaten up with brandy, but this effort was followed by a relapse from which she never recovered. Later in the day Mrs Drew sent for the two doctors again, but only Dr O’Dougherty arrived

initially, and Blanche watched his face as he talked, ‘Doctors faces are as impenetrable as their hearts and I could read no sign.’ After looking at the old

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lady the doctor solemnly told the Drews that Mrs Hely only had a few hours left, so hope was surrendered to God’s will. Dr Bell finally arrived very late: ‘a most unfeeling man ... his only care seemed to be about his horse.’ Both doctors left soon afterwards, before Mrs Hely died.**

Most doctors who had sufficient reputation in the cities to attend the wealthy gentry and professional middle classes made more effort to reassure families than Drs O’Dougherty and Bell. Generally they offered hope for as long as possible, or at least until the family realised that death was close. The Bussell family in Western Australia understood the reasons for this approach from their knowledge of the consumptive death of their cousin Capel Carter in London in 1837. Capel was unaware she was near death and her doctor was unwilling to undeceive her. He argued that to inform her abruptly of her imminent death ‘would be immediate death’; if her attendants spoke the truth, they would hasten her death.*? Doctors were well aware of the influence of: the mind over the body, especially the power of hope in encouraging recuperation. Since they often could not be certain of their prognosis or its timing, it was sensible to adopt the most favourable view of the outcome and advise of impending death only when they were certain. Nineteenth-century doctors did not perceive death as their own failure since they admitted the limitations of medical science and their inability to cure many conditions. On the death

of Major Wentworth in 1861 of dropsy, Dr Gavin Casey argued that the patient had the best professional skill in the colony: “The cause of death was formidable organic disease which it is not probable any medical skill could have arrested at his age.’ *° In other cases, however, the knowledge that they could not cure allowed the better doctors to focus on helpful palliative care of potentially terminal symptoms, supported by good professional nursing. Some families persevered with expensive medical attendance because the doctors’ support and reassurance outweighed the evident ineffectiveness of their medical skills. However, wealthy families with social status could be

selective about the particular doctors chosen. In 1850 Charlotte Suttor endured an outbreak of scarlet fever among several of her children, which killed one of her sons, Edward. On 14 July Dr Busby and Dr McHattie offered hopes of the recovery of his brother George, but four days later Charlotte confided in her diary that ‘I have not the trust I ought to have.’ Her scepticism led her to call in a third doctor as a consultant: ‘It is a great comfort Dr. Kerr being here, he is most kind and attentive.’ Dr Kerr spent considerable time with the family over the next four weeks, so she attributed the recovery of the rest of her children to his attendance, which she found more congenial and reassuring.*’ When Denis O’Leary, a Benalla barrister, became seriously ill with kidney disease in 1886, his wife Fanny insisted they move to stay with her mother in

Melbourne so they could consult the best doctor, Sir Thomas Fitzgerald. Despite his eminence, Sir Thomas was baffled by the disease at first, and diag-

nosed it only when it had reached a dangerous stage. Three doctors visited frequently during O’Leary’s five-week illness in Melbourne, but their consultations offered only a cautious optimism reinforced by prescriptions of good

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nourishment and port wine. On 24 May 1886 Sir Thomas Fitzgerald admitted that he was starting to abandon hope, leaving Fanny heartbroken. However, Sir Thomas gave the family three weeks’ warning of impending death, sufficient to allow Denis to see his priest to prepare himself spiritually before he became delirious. Dr O’Sullivan, one of the three doctors, offered to attend Denis every day as he was now retired, and could come more frequently than the other two. Though there was obviously nothing these doctors could do to cure Denis, their visits brought comfort to the fearful wife, who became angry and upset if they were unable to call. Dr O’Sullivan was kind and attentive, looking grave while at the same time offering a little hope. Denis O’Leary finally died on 14 June 1886.78 Doctors tended to give better palliative care to patients suffering from iden-

tifiable diseases like tuberculosis which developed slowly. They were less skilled with sudden illnesses with a fast onset and an uncertain diagnosis and prognosis, especially fevers, as in the case of Nellie Stephen. In such cases they had to rely on their previous experience and trial and error, while adopting a confident manner to instil trust in their empirical treatment. The psychologi-

cal value of the attentive reassurance of a supposed expert, combined with alleviation of some distressing symptoms, helps to explain why some families were so grateful for their doctor’s visits to a terminal patient. Dr William Munk’s advice on treatment of the terminally ill in his influential 1887 British text Euthanasia remained the authoritative text on medical care of the dying for the next thirty years. Munk defined ‘euthanasia’ in the classical sense of ‘a calm and easy death’ rather than in the modern sense of mercy killing. Surviving records suggest that Munk’s advice on diet, alcohol, and opiates reflected general medical practice among the best doctors in Australia as well as England.*? Munk believed that alcohol had special value in the treatment of the dying, as it stimulated the failing heart and helped the digestive process. He recommended that it be given in small quantities at frequent intervals—brandy, sherry, port and champagne were all considered useful. Food had to be carefully administered since too much caused discomfort when the stomach had lost its digestive powers. He also recommended lighter bedclothes, the admission of more fresh air to overheated rooms, and limiting the noise and number of attendants in the sickroom.*” The sudden death of young Blanche (Sissy) Chenery in Victoria in 1882 of an unidentified fever—probably typhoid—provides a detailed illustration of the kind of treatment prescribed when the cause was not identified and death was not anticipated. Sissy Chenery was very much alone in her illness since her mother was dead and her father nearly died from the same disease, so she

was reliant on helpful family friends and neighbours such as Georgiana Macartney. Sissy’s father’s illness was initially the focus of attention, with the

consequence that Sissy was already exhausted from nursing her sick father and was not treated early. Georgiana’s response to Sissy’s pain and vomiting was to apply a mustard blister to her stomach, a common treatment which was used to raise blisters as a counter irritant, though this gave little relief to Sissy. When Dr Ford arrived next morning he told Georgiana to give a dose

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of castor oil as a purgative—widely prescribed by colonial doctors for many ailments. The doctor also asked Georgiana to apply a linseed poultice all over Sissy’s stomach, but the pain continued. Dr Ford’s next remedy was a small dose of brandy and water containing five drops of laudanum, but this caused severe retching which continued until she died.*! Dr Ford insisted until almost the end that Sissy would recover, but two

days later she was clearly sinking fast. Georgiana kept giving her sips of brandy and water or port to improve her strength, but the retching continued every few minutes. Eventually the doctor recommended champagne which seemed initially to revive her, but the sickness returned and she became delirious, struggling to get out of bed and talking incessantly. When they saw the

end was near, her younger siblings were brought in to sit crying while Georgiana knelt in prayer by Sissy’s bed. Even at that late stage they applied mustard blisters to the soles of her unnaturally cold feet and her stomach, to no avail, as they ‘watched her poor face gradually change to the set look of death’. Georgiana and another neighbour, Mrs Player, comforted the children, and tenderly washed Sissy’s body and laid her out. Georgiana noted that ‘all was done for her that could have been done’.** Doctors were probably most helpful in supplying opiates and recommendations on dosage to patients who were dying from painful illnesses such as cancer. Dr William Munk devoted a substantial section of his book to advice on the alleviation of pain, noting that when death approached, doctors must concentrate on relief of pain and discomfort, dismissing all thought of cure. He stated that opium was essential in relieving pain. It was widely used in the nineteenth century, when no other effective painkillers were available except for neat brandy or whisky (aspirin was not introduced until 1899). Munk advised that the correct dose of opium should be measured by the relief provided—adequate doses should be administered freely since small doses would be ineffective. He believed opium allowed patients to die with greater calm, courage, and energy. The Lancet argued in 1888 that it was a neglect of medical duty ‘to withhold the inestimable boon afforded by opium in full doses’ when people were dying. Medical authorities generally agreed that addiction should not be a concern when a painful disease was terminal, though they advised against indiscriminate opium abuse.°? In Australia, patent remedies based on opium included Holloway’s Pills,

Holloway’s ointment and chlorodyne. More important was laudanum or tincture of opium, which was a combination of opium, distilled water, and alcohol. A more effective hypodermic injection of morphine—the alkaloid isolated from opium—was used for painful diseases from the 1860s, allowing more precise management of doses.** Before the 1880s about 30000 pounds of opium was legally imported each year into New South Wales and 50000 pounds into Victoria, and an additional quantity was grown locally.°*> The Bussell family archives in Western Australia provide valuable infor-

mation on the use of opiates in terminal illnesses. Fanny Bussell in 1845 described her mother’s painful death from cancer, noting the essential administration of opiates twice daily. However, the dose was clearly inadequate to

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control the ‘dreaded pain’, which returned early each morning. Frances’s last night was a ‘fearful agonizing night’ with pains continuing to the very end.*® Ten years later, Fanny’s husband, Henry Sutherland, died of throat and lung cancer in Perth. When his pain became much worse on his last evening, Fanny felt free to increase the dose of opiates: ‘I begged him to ... take a dose of morphine stronger than usual for his largest dose all through his illness was 15 drops.’ A few hours later he was dead.*” When Fanny Sutherland herself died

twenty-six years later in 1881, a surviving doctor’s account in the estate papers reveals that she was given a substantial amount of laudanum over a six-month period, suggesting that Fanny may also have died from cancer, like her mother, and that her doses of laudanum were probably greater. Twelve ounces of laudanum were delivered at a cost of 10s 6d on 13 and 20 January,

23 March, and 4 and 11 April. In addition, a whole case of laudanum was

delivered by carriage in March at a cost of £4 1s Od and on 5 June at £4 3s 6d.°® Another archival reference to the use of opiates was on the death of Samuel P. Winter in 1878, apparently from stomach cancer. Dr McCrae was present during his final hours when he administered laudanum to soothe Samuel and send him to sleep.*? Laudanum was also widely used in benevolent asylums for those suffering painful deaths, though its administration was not always wise or efficient. T. S. Pensabene has charted the transformation of the professional image and social status of the doctor from the 1890s as new theories of the causes of disease led to more effective treatment with new drugs, antitoxins and vaccines. A new body of scientifically based systematic knowledge was matched by improved technology. Antiseptic techniques were applied more vigorously in hospitals in the 1890s, so that hospital infection ceased to be a major concern and the competence of doctors improved with better training in the new scientific knowledge. After 1900 an increasing proportion of the population sought medical care from doctors and hospitals.*° However, the extent of the change in the medicalisation of death among the majority of the population and outside the major cities before 1900 should not be overstated. The families in colonial Australia who could afford eminent medical men were a tiny minority of the population. Very few families had the wealth and self-confidence to discriminate between the best physicians in town, as did the Henty and Hindson families in Melbourne. The two

daughters of Francis Henty, Alice Hindson and Caroline MacLeod, were anxious in 1913 about Caroline’s illness. Alice advised her sister to seek further medical advice from a ‘tip top Melbourne man’. Though she did not wish to disparage the skills of country doctors, the city expert who was obviously ‘in constant touch with the profession and daily intercourse at the Hospital must have more experience than the general practitioner can, however large his practice may be’. She recommended that Caroline send for the best Melbourne man, naming the four leading physicians in this particular field.4! Such knowledge and the means to apply it were exceptional in colo-

nial Australia, but they were a bridge to twentieth-century experiences of death among the wider community.

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Death and doubt—the challenge to faith Ada Cambridge Christian orthodoxy was challenged in the 1870s and 1880s by a complex combination of theoretical arguments drawn from textual criticism of the Bible, geological discoveries, and evolutionary theories following Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Jill Roe has demonstrated the circulation of such ideas in Melbourne between 1876 and 1886 in the Victorian Review and the

Melbourne Review, reflecting a broader climate of spiritual doubt.*? Attendance at church services and maintenance of family rituals were affected in the late nineteenth century, as religious indifference increased among the working classes, and intellectuals more often questioned their faith. Hilary M. Carey has convincingly argued that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw ‘serious decline for most religious denominations ... working people left the churches, thus hastening the secularization of Australian society’.43 The impact of secularism on death practices and rituals is explored more fully in the five later chapters on death in the bush and among the destitute. Here the focus is only on the effects of religious doubt and unbelief on a minority of intellectuals who lived mainly in rural towns and cities. Few unbelievers recorded detailed accounts of deathbed scenes. For them, death did not signify a joyful expectation of heavenly reunions, but rather the annihilation of the deceased, and grief without consolation for the survivors. Secular approaches to death and deathbeds can be documented through the lives and literary work of two distinguished female authors whose own faith was tested by death and who thought deeply about its meaning. Ada Cambridge’s experiences of death poignantly illustrate this process of increasing spiritual uncertainty with its effects on attitudes and behaviour relating to death. Ada Cambridge was a prominent novelist and poet who was born in England in 1844, the daughter of a ‘gentleman farmer’, and came to Australia in 1870 with her Anglican clergyman husband. Ada experienced two sets of family deaths which both contributed to the transformation of her religious beliefs. In 1860, when Ada was 16, she lost both her brothers in England within several months of each other, possibly from tuberculosis. Her memoir of her early life, The Retrospect, gives few details, but underlines the depth of her grief, especially at the death of her beloved elder brother. Her adolescent response to bereavement was to seek refuge in her writing and also in a transition to a passionate High Church piety, attending church twice daily and considering becoming a nun. Instead she subsequently embarked on a new adventure at the age of 26 as a ‘missionary wife’ in the ‘mysterious bush’ in Australia. Her initial dismay at the seemingly dull and lifeless bush turned

later to a love of the different sort of beauty of the new landscape and a delight in the freedom of its wide open spaces.** At age 30 in 1874, Ada Cambridge’s life in Australia was transformed by

the death of her 10-month-old baby daughter from whooping cough. Until this crisis she had enjoyed the demanding life of a busy rural clergyman’s wife,

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actively involved in her husband’s country churches. Ada had taken maximum precautions against the whooping cough epidemic, presumably by attempting to isolate her two children, but the baby eventually caught it from her brother, who recovered. Little Edith’s case was unusual, for two weeks or

so of coughing were followed by strange fainting fits, leading to a terrible shrieking and final exhaustion, none of which the helpless old German doctor could explain or treat. After about six dreadful fits, the baby had no more for three weeks, allowing the parents to hope. Then Edith suddenly had another strange fit from which she could not recover; they tried to pour brandy down her throat ‘where not a drop would go, until she grew quite cold and rigid in our arms’. George Cambridge buried his little daughter next day in the cemetery at Yackandandah.* The death of her baby in 1874 was a shattering blow to Ada Cambridge which initiated a long spiritual voyage away from orthodox Christianity with its comforting structures and traditional creeds. In her grief at this ‘almost insupportable bereavement’ Ada felt angry when well-meaning Christian friends tried to explain her baby’s death as ‘the will of God’. The intensity of her sorrow was expressed in a sad poem called “The Empty Place’ which she published in the Australasian a year later to describe ‘that dull, soundless ache of loss, Which lonely mourners bear’: O little garments in the drawer, With such precision spread! ...

O mother’s arms and tender hands, That have no babe to hold! — We know full well the worth and wealth Of which we are bereft; But where are words where with to tell The emptiness that’s left? — 4°

Ada’s deep depression and poor health dictated the Cambridges’ move to Ballan only four months after the baby’s death, to escape ‘from the house whose every nook and corner was haunted by such agonising visions of what had been’. They moved to a parish so far from Yackandandah that they had to sell the contents of their house and start entirely afresh.*” As on the death of her two brothers years earlier, Ada sought refuge in writing, with ‘Up the Murray’ for the Australasian. But this time she turned away from religion in her grief instead of towards it, echoing the broader spirit of religious doubt developing in colonial Victoria. The first family tragedy was soon followed by a second, ‘so much more terrible than the first’. Less than two years after baby Edith’s death, Ada’s 5-year-old son died within six days of contracting scarlet fever. The shock was intensified because the death of a healthy 5-year-old was so unexpected; also, as Ada sadly noted in her memoir, ‘every year and day your child is with you

adds that much more of strength and depth to the love whose roots are the very substance of the mother’s heart’. Two years earlier she had thought it

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‘supremely dreadful’ to lose her baby ‘at a stroke’, but now discovered it was far more bitter to watch helplessly while a courageous child of 5 suffered from the worst form of scarlet fever. The little boy fought the disease with ‘brave and patient temper, rallied and relapsed, got dropsy, and died by inches—conscious, nearly to the last, and only concerned for his mother’s tears’. He was buried on the day of his death in the Ballan cemetery. Only two weeks later Ada bore another daughter ‘to save my life’, and within a year the little family again moved from scenes ‘forever associated with sorrows that do not bear thinking of?.*°

Grief and despair dominated Ada Cambridge for many years as she struggled to come to terms with the loss of her two children within two years, and the consequent loss of her faith in institutional Christianity. She still saw herself as an exile, separated from her family and friends in England, while so many house moves made stability in Australia tenuous. The decline in her health was accelerated at various times by a carriage accident and a near fatal

miscarriage which left her an invalid for years. Invalidism at least had the advantage of justifying her retreat into successful full-time writing which provided emotional escape as well as income. An essay in the Atlantic Monthly in 1911 called ‘The Lonely Seas’ poignantly charted Ada’s long spiritual struggle to move from emotional despair and intellectual confusion to a profound

spiritual peace. She abandoned the external supports and consolations of Christian orthodoxy, ‘with its complicated dogmas and impossible demands’, while retaining a central belief in God and a ‘religious spirit’. But the religious transition cost more than twenty ‘agonizing years’, made more painful by the spiritual alienation from a clergyman husband she still loved.*? Ada Cambridge’s spiritual crisis was partly an intellectual response to the theoretical debates inspired by biblical criticism, Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Darwin’s Origin of Species. Ada recorded in “The Lonely Seas’ her shattered reaction years earlier when ‘a venerable archdeacon’ friend innocently enlightened her about the challenge of textual criticism of the Bible: ‘““to doubt the Bible” is to pull the corner-stone from under everything. To me it was an experience too dreadful for words’, which led her to read widely to

‘dispel or substantiate that doubt’. But the deaths of her three children (including an adult son lost to typhoid in 1902) played a dominant role in her spiritual journey, combined with the prospect of her own death, ‘stepping into the eternal dark without the eternal hope to cling to’. A well-meaning friend had warned her that ‘in the hour of death, if not before, you will come back’

to the established church. Ada had the opportunity to test this prediction when she knew she was close to death after her miscarriage: ‘And yet I never bothered myself for a moment about my soul and the future state ... all my concern was to keep my exhausted body going.’ Even more significant, her clergyman husband who kept vigil by her deathbed also gave priority to her mortal life, feeding her life-saving drops of brandy and water when he ‘might have prayed my life away’. Finally she rejected the Christian view that ‘we live in vain unless we live forever’ in the ‘bliss and glory of the future state’.~° By 1911 she had reached a similar intellectual position to the English freethinker

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Harriet Martineau who, before she died in 1876, expected no future other than annihilation, waiting ‘without fear or hope or ignorant prejudice, for the expiration of life’.>! Ada concluded that ‘one can float into the night, if without hope, without a thought of fear. If I perish, I perish—that is all.’>? Ada Cambridge’s spiritual journey can stand for that of many other edu-

cated Christians in late nineteenth-century Australia, though not all began their lives with her devotional piety nor experienced such prolonged intensity of spiritual struggle. Some moved more easily to indifference or to a more secular form of nebulous undogmatic Christianity which made few demands, while others experimented with spiritualism, rationalism, or theosophy.

Secular deaths Mary Richardson Henry Handel Richardson, the novelist, was born Ethel (Ettie) Richardson in Melbourne in 1870 to Walter and Mary Richardson who had immigrated to the Victorian goldfields. When Walter Richardson failed to make his fortune

he worked instead as a country doctor, but his practice deteriorated along with his mental and physical health. He was diagnosed with general paralysis of the insane (tertiary syphilis) and spent time in asylums before returning

to his family to die when Ethel was nine. Henry Handel Richardson was profoundly affected by the deaths of both parents, leaving her with a deep preoccupation with death which was central to her trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917-29). Her novels contain long death scenes, as Dorothy Green observes: ‘It is the process of dying that is dwelt on with a wealth of circumstantial detail, a process that is usually a painful one ... Richardson, like Tolstoy, deliberately contemplated the subject in all its physical horror in order to rid herself of morbid fears of it.”>° In 1889, Mary Richardson took both her daughters, Ethel and Lilian, to Leipzig to study music, but Ethel abandoned her studies in December 1895 to

marry John George Robertson, a German scholar, whose family was not informed of the union. Ethel believed this sudden marriage flouted convention

and contravened the will of God, who punished her less than a year later in November 1896 by her beloved mother’s death. This was an appalling blow to both sisters, especially as their mother had sacrificed so much for them. Ethel left an unfinished diary account of her mother’s agonising death in Munich from cancer of the colon—an entirely secular death, with no reference to religion, and no discussion of the meaning of death. Its focus was on

the physical suffering and medical alleviation of pain, and was a world removed from joyful Evangelical deathbed scenes. When Mary Richardson

endured pain so intense she was shrieking and writhing with agony, Dr Heymann diagnosed the problem as ‘inflammation’. He ordered administra-

tion of an opiate accompanied by champagne every half hour to combat Mary’s severe weakness. Mary attempted to tell the doctor in broken German that ‘life was not worth living’.°* Ethel Richardson could not at first believe

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her 57-year-old mother’s illness could be really serious, especially as Mary had

been strong and energetic and always scorned illness as unworthy. Dr Heymann confessed to Ethel that he was puzzled but feared a bowel blockage, and asked permission to call in a specialist, Dr Theilhaven, who merely ordered an oil enema to deal with a long-standing blockage. Several times the two doctors injected enemas of two litres of water which made Mary shriek with agony but had little effect.°° Even at this stage Mary Richardson insisted she would never recover, ‘and yet how she clung to hope’. Two Catholic nuns were hired to take over the night work from an exhausted Ethel, but Mary did not like them or their strident voices. Ethel learned during her mother’s illness how callous the outside

world could be to suffering and death when they were not personally involved: ‘These strangers had no memories, and it is the memories that make death so hard.’ The incessant medical routine exhausted and upset the dying woman, for she was given teaspoons of food or champagne every half hour

despite ugly ulcers in her mouth and throat. Ethel regretted ‘to think that death in itself is not enough, but that it must be preceded by such ignominious suffering’. Mary’s entire system seemed in revolt and her digestive facul-

ties were failing. At last the doctor formally advised that there was no hope and they must be prepared. Ethel was angry that the doctor and the nurses were not more truthful when they first realised the disease was terminal. ‘We could not think she would die ... How can we mortals be so blind?’ Ethel could no longer evade or deny it. ‘Mother died for me then. I went through all the anguish that the mourner usually feels beside a corpse.’*° From this point Ethel thought the doctors seemed to suspect cancer: “The first bitterness of death passed for me in this week; when the end came I could only be thankful both for her sake and ours’. Mary was receiving strong mor-

phine injections every night for the pain, but looked increasingly weak and haggard and could not sleep or eat. On the final day Ethel asked her mother if she had any messages for those who loved her, but her dying words were little consolation: ‘I am too ill to think of anyone.’ When asked if she thought of her two daughters, she replied ‘only a very little’. Ethel was anxious to speak of her sister Lil, ‘yet not for anything could I have mentioned death to her’. And there the account ended, with the final act of dying unrecorded and no response noted by the grieving daughter.°’ Ethel Richardson’s account of her mother’s death is unlike any other deathbed narrative I have examined for nineteenth-century Australia. It is bleaker than most, with no hint of any consoling force or alleviating factors and certainly no mention of the resurrection of the soul. It was unfinished, so we do not learn how the author coped with the climax of death nor what she thought it meant. And the articulate, loving daughter was unable even to communicate with her mother about the fact of imminent death, though they both knew it was so. As Colm Kiernan notes, “The sadness of her mother’s death and her guilty conscience about it never left Henry Richardson; they concentrated her vision on the great themes of failure and of death, which were to receive so brilliant

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an artistic treatment in The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.’>® The intense preoccupation aroused by her mother’s death stimulated several explorations of death in Ethel’s writing; two especially were modelled on that of her mother, but they offered different endings. Ethel’s secretary, Olga Roncoroni, later commented that Ethel’s mother’s death had a profound effect on her, inspir-

ing the bitter short story ‘Death’, first published in the English Review in 1911. Ethel had confided in Olga Roncoroni that she was ‘shattered and angered’ that her courageous mother had to die at only 57 in such a slow, agonising manner, and she seemed to work through this anger in the ‘Death’ essay.” This essay was a profoundly pessimistic reading of the process of dying and the meaning of death, with no mitigation—as if this was to be her conclusion to the unfinished account of her mother’s death. Dorothy Green saw ‘Mary Christina’s’ death as based on Ethel’s mother’s death and reconstructed from the unfinished account written immediately after the event: ‘It is a very powerful evocation of the physical sensations of dying, partly derived from imagination working on observation of her mother’s experience.’©” In Ethel Richardson’s story, Mary Christina, at the age of 60, knew that she was about to die but found that it was ‘no such easy matter’ to die and ‘untiring were the endeavours to ward off the inevitable’. Having earlier regarded

illness as a moral failing, she now uttered ‘shrill, shameless cries’, and her

chief concern was to repel the ‘griping, gutting pain’, which regularly recurred. She lay terrified and defenceless, as the savage pain tore at her shuddering flesh, leaving her sick and faint with anguish, while her attendants did nothing to prevent it. She fought desperately for eight interminable days with her attention entirely focused on herself and her suffering body, now indifferent to the beloved children who had been the centre of her life. But after eight days, human endurance reached its limits and Mary Christina ceased to resist

so desperately, and began to sink into a tranquil, twilight state, on the borderland between sleeping and waking. In this benign state confused pictures of her former life passed before her, but she surveyed it all without emotion, coming to the bleak understanding that they were all delusive dreams and nothing had been permanent, even love, joy, and pain. Having attained this ultimate wisdom, the dying woman asked only for rest without hope—‘not immortality: no fresh existence, to be endured and fought out in some new shadowland, among unquiet spirits—just deep rest with the heavy brown earth above her. She wanted ‘only sleep; the sleep of nothingness: an eternal forgetting’. Then she let death’s torpor take over, with a stronger sensation of sinking as if revolving in a whirlpool towards ‘the horrors of the dark’, and her heartbeat at last ceased. Afterwards the Catholic nurse ‘made fervent intercession with the other Mary—the Gracious Namesake of this poor soul that had gone unblessed into the darkness’.*! This is a deeply pessimistic view

of life and death, allowing no lasting meaning for life and a total denial of any kind of spiritual existence after death, or even the wish for such hope. This nihilist conclusion is similar to Henry Lawson’s position in his story “The Bush Undertaker’, where the old shepherd buried his mate Brummy:

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‘It’s all over now; nothin’ matters now—nothin’ didn’t ever matter, nor—nor

don’t.’

By contrast, the death of John Turnham, Mahony’s brother-in-law in The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, though also inspired by Mary Richardson’s death, left some room for a more optimistic conclusion. In the novel, John Turnham, brother of Mahony’s wife Mary, dies of liver cancer in the 1860s.

Before his friend’s death, Mahony had already turned to spiritualism: ‘Without faith in a life to come, how endure, stoically, the ills that have confronted us? ... Science had nothing soul-satisfying to offer in [its] place.’ He had begun to see death as ‘the great awakening’. By contrast John Turnham was the complete materialist, without religious faith or spiritual needs and repressive of his emotions. He took the six-month sentence of death from cancer ‘like a man ... without flinching’. Turnham despised weakness and decay, but for six months ‘kept his own counsel’ while enduring great mental and physical suffering. He prepared for his departure alone, while also moving from doctor to doctor in futile hope of reprieve. At last, defeated, indifferent and drug-sodden, he severed all links with the world, and visitors ceased to call. He decreed that his death was his own affair and the cause of his illness was not to be announced to the world, as if he was ashamed of his cancer. Turnham’s dying was prolonged and he lay exhausted and inert, keeping his thoughts to himself. Richard Mahony decided not to torment his friend with talk of imminent death or queries about his immortal soul, though he would have provided religious consolation had John shown any interest.®°? Despite Turnham’s unrepentant materialism, a possibility of redemption was permitted in the narrative. The afternoon before his death an extraordinary development took place, akin to the scenes of ecstatic joy in Evangelical deathbed scenes in religious tracts. Turnham tried to raise himself, thinking he saw his dead wife, and his face was ‘transfigured—lit by an expression of rapturous joy’. Such a scene was rare outside sermons and tracts, and for a secular John Turnham it seems unlikely, though he dearly loved his beautiful wife. But the author sought to add a tentative spiritual dimension with the suggestion that even an unrepentant unbeliever was not deprived of hope hereafter. The description of Turnham’s dying face reinforces the sense of optimism at the end. As he was dying, Mahony said loudly, ‘Have no fear of death, John!’, and Turnham heard and understood, his broken eyes meeting Mahony’s. But in those eyes was not a hint of the old Turnham—they were now the eyes of a man about to be refined and become ‘wise with an ageless wisdom’. And as they closed forever, a smile seemed to appear on the sleeping face, giving a positive answer to Mahony’s injunction—‘that something makes the faces of the dead good to see’. Afterwards Mahony thought of the soul winging its way to freedom and concluded that John had made a ‘brave

end’—it was a secular death open to spiritual interpretation.°* The Way Home, the second volume of the Richard Mahony trilogy, was published in 1925 and the more positive conclusion to Turnham’s death reflected Henry Handel Richardson’s own belief in later life that death was ‘not as an ending, but as a new beginning’.® Like her father, she became a committed spiritual-

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ist and a keen member of the Society for Psychical Research, with a strong conviction of a continued existence beyond the grave—though she belonged to no-.church or sect. The good Christian death was increasingly undermined as an ideal by the strengthening of secular approaches to death in the later nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. The growing secularisation of the meaning of life inevitably transformed the meaning of death; and experiences of the painful deaths of loved ones could accelerate the decline of religious beliefs. Colonial doctors were severely limited by the absence of the capacity to cure most serious conditions, though honest doctors could buttress stoicism in the face of pain by helpful palliative relief of symptoms. Infectious fevers highlighted the limits of medical knowledge and treatment and largely prevented the realisation of an idealised Christian deathbed scene; these were bad deaths from both Christian and medical points of view. As the primary social value became a painless and rapid death, the focus on the physical ordeal of death substantially displaced the spiritual experience of the good Christian death by the early twentieth century. The medicalisation of death would accelerate after the discovery of the wonder drugs in the 1930s which at last gave doctors powers over life and sometimes death.

Chapter 6

Funerals and Undertakers

Victorian funeral extravagance and reform The British model We cannot adequately understand the Australian colonial experience of death without defining precisely which features were distinctively Australian and which were transmitted from Britain. It is not easy to identify cross-cultural differences in death practices, and it is essential first to delineate the similari-

ties. This chapter begins with a brief account of Victorian British funeral extravagance and reform in order to place the colonial Australian inheritance in clearer perspective. Many writers have condemned the ostentatious displays of grief and the vulgar ‘madness’ of Victorian funerals, as if these were a continuing feature of the entire Victorian period from 1837 to 1901.! There is no doubt that the

early Victorian middle and upper classes spent substantial amounts on impressive funerals; extravagance and social emulation were not uncommon in the mourning rituals of the expanding middle class. However, this criticism needs to be assessed against a broader time-span. Sumptuous aristocratic funerals can be traced back through the centuries, and from the late seven-

teenth century the vogue spread downwards to the growing ranks of the middle class. Extravagance was well entrenched long before Queen Victoria

ascended the throne, though the number of middle-class families able to afford more expensive funerals increased. The Duke of Wellington’s funeral in 1852 was the high point of Victorian

extravagance, with a triumphal funeral car which alone cost £11000 (examined later in this chapter). The Duke of Northumberland’s funeral 108

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procession to Westminster Abbey in 1865 included numerous mutes on horse-

back, two pages, each with a plume of black feathers, a horseman carrying the ducal coronet on a crimson velvet cushion, a hearse and six horses accompanied by twelve pages, and fifteen mourning-coaches.* These public ceremonies were extraordinary state occasions on the deaths of famous aristocrats, for whom the ostentatious ceremonial ritual still carried a modicum of meaning. But most people in England, even in the 1830s, were probably ignorant of the fact that such traditional funerals were based on the heraldic array of a baronial funeral, with its customary cast of attendants. Thus the man carrying a plume of feathers represented an esquire bearing the shield and helmet of the deceased, the men with wands were the gentlemen-ushers, and the two mutes standing at the doors were supposed to be the castle porters with their staves. A London undertaker in 1837 confessed his ignorance of the symbolic significance of the funeral drama and thought his clients were equally unaware of the incongruity for which they paid.» How much more anachronistic were plumes of feathers, mutes, and gentlemen-ushers with wands in colonial Australia!

Funeral extravagance began long before the Victorians, who themselves inaugurated significant funeral reforms. Edwin Chadwick’s 1843 Report on the Practice of Interment in Towns made a powerful case for the reform of funeral ceremonies, concluding that over £4 million was ‘annually thrown into the grave at the expense of the living’. Average funeral expenses of the aristocracy in London in 1843 varied from £500 to £1500, while an ‘ordi-

nary’ middle-class funeral would cost from £50 to £70, equivalent to a labourer’s yearly wages. Undertakers with a direct financial interest in the outcome advised families of ‘customary’ requirements, keeping their prices high and arousing the anger of the public.*

Funeral reform involved a major attack on the perceived greed of undertakers who were exploiting the bereaved at their most vulnerable, especially the working class people who feared a pauper’s burial. The undertaking trade may have started in England as far back as 1689 when coffin maker William Russell obtained the blessing of the College of Arms to provide clients with all the heraldic ritual and accoutrements for a funeral. In the next two centuries, undertakers increasingly seized control of funerals from executors and families, centralising the labour of the various artisans previously involved. Trades such as carpentry, wreath making, metal working, and drapery all specialised in the production of funeral commodities and were gradually taken over by the ‘expert’ undertakers. They initially organised middle-class funerals, imitating procedures developed by the heralds.° Charles Dickens’s satire in such novels as Martin Chuzzlewit and Great Expectations was most powerful in its critique of squalid lower-middle-class or working-class funerals in families lacking the funds to imitate their betters in style. The press and influential periodicals such as the Quarterly Review took up the cry for reform. A Punch cartoon of 1850 depicts “The StarvedOut Undertakers’ with their hatchment coat of arms depicting mugs of beer

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and the inscription: ‘We have been reduced by common-sense’.® The Chadwick Report in 1843 marked the start of the move among the middle and upper classes to simpler and less expensive private funerals. This process was aided by the creation of new suburban cemeteries to replace the noxious,

overcrowded, and insanitary churchyards so deplored by Chadwick. The Metropolitan Interment Act of 1850 was a landmark in funeral and burial reform, closing urban churchyards and stimulating the development of public cemeteries. Ostentatious aristocratic funerals in the 1850s and 1860s were

widely criticised in the press—the procession of mutes on horseback condemned as ‘unmeaning traditional adjuncts of death ... as senseless now [1865] as they were 200 years ago’.’ By the 1870s, the extravagant mourning procedures were being relaxed and many more people were asking for modest funerals. Cassell’s Household Guide of 1869-71 outlined a hierarchy of eight classes of funerals offered by

a large London undertaking firm with prices ranging from £3 5s to £53. Substantial progress in reform had thus already been achieved before 1875,

when two funeral and mourning reform associations were established to simplify mourning ritual and reduce expenses. Undertakers were obliged to reduce their costly funeral paraphernalia and offer cheaper funerals from 1843, while the middle classes increasingly expressed in their wills a desire to be buried simply and at limited expense. By 1894 the Lancet rejoiced that funeral reform had succeeded in significantly reducing the cost of funerals: ‘the expenditure of £10 to £15 will allow of everything being completed in

good taste and reverence, but without any excess.’® Undertakers further responded to pressure for funeral reform by forming protective associations, notably the British Undertakers Association in 1905. Ironically, however, while the middle and upper classes simplified their funerals, the working

classes were more reluctant to surrender their cheaper versions of the respectable Victorian funeral, accessible through weekly payments to burial clubs.

Transmission of the Victorian culture of death to Australia The state funerals of Wellington and Burke and Wills When analysing the process of cross-cultural transmission of death practices it is instructive to make a direct comparison of two of the most significant

state funerals in Britain and colonial Australia—those of the Duke of Wellington in 1852 in London, and Burke and Wills in Melbourne a decade later. But first it must be noted that in Australia, as in Britain, some of the most extravagant funerals took place much earlier in the century. At the start of the nineteenth century Charles James Fox was accorded a state funeral at Westminster Abbey to impress the nation at a cost of over £2840. The bill included £485 18s for a large open hearse ‘richly decorated with black velvet draperies ... the canopy surmounted with a mass of very rich ostrich plumes

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and drawn by six horses with ostrich feathers and velvet covering’.? Fox’s funeral seems to have been a model for those of Wellington and Burke and Wills half a century later.

In Australia, earlier examples of extravagant funerals were those of Lieutenant-Governor David Collins of Tasmania in 1810 and Thomas Burdekin in 1844, both attested by their funeral bills. The total bill to the public for Governor Collins’s funeral was £507 8s 3d, which was so excessive for colonial Australia that Governor Lachlan Macquarie initially refused payment. The bill included £192 12s for 107 yards of black cloth for the pall and mourning dress; £3 18s for thirty-nine yards of black hat ribbon; £47 Ss for four dozen black gowns for servants, with an extra £7 10s for their stockings;

£6 15s for fifty-four black silk handkerchiefs; and £8 for sixteen pairs of men’s gloves.!°

More than thirty years later, the funeral of Thomas Burdekin, a Sydney merchant, at St James’s Church in 1844 was considerably more modest at only £61 4s, while yet managing to include most of the trappings of mourning considered necessary. The bill from William Beaver, undertaker, included

a strong cedar coffin, a ‘superfine shroud and cap’, and ‘a State Coffin covered with velvet and richly mounted with Gilt furniture with an engraved

brass plate’. The hearse was drawn by four horses caparisoned with black ostrich plumes and velvet covering. The confusion about the origin of mutes as castle porters was demonstrated by the provision of ‘2 porters with mutes in full dress’-—the mutes usually wore frock coats and top hats, and carried wands, which were batons draped in black cloth. The family was required to hire six truncheons, to be carried by porters and mutes, as well as numerous hatbands, gloves, and scarves. There was a hierarchy of funeral extravagance, and though Burdekin’s funeral in 1844 might appear excessive and archaic by the standards of the twentieth century, it seemed modest compared with that of Collins in 1810."!

The most extravagant of the colonial Australian funerals were usually those of British officials in Australia whose families were anxious to demonstrate their success in a foreign land, and to assert their high status in colonial

society. It was therefore most important that they should imitate British heraldic mourning ceremonial as closely as possible. The need for this direct replication was explicitly recognised by the Australian press in the Sydney Morning Herald account on 5 November 1853 of the funeral of Sir Everard Home, commander of HMS Calliope. It was a matter of great satisfaction to see how heartily the colonial community ‘respects the long-accustomed pomp and ceremony of British customs. The funeral of yesterday was as a whole fraught with instruction to the colony ... To recognise worth, morally, intellectually, or socially, is a forward step in the path of imitation of the glorious institutions of the mother country.’ !? The most striking example of this cultural imitation can be illustrated by

comparing the funeral of the renowned British military hero the Duke of Wellington, in 1852, with that a decade later for Australia’s explorer heroes Burke and Wills. The Duke of Wellington was the famous victor at the battle

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of Waterloo in 1815 and his achievements earned him the finest Victorian funeral of all, to honour his memory and impress the nation. This was a ‘funeral pageant of extraordinary beauty’, profoundly influenced by a strange

mixture of fantasy, paganism, and imperial military tradition—with no expense spared.!? Wellington’s body, encased in four coffins of lead, oak,

mahogany and pine—one inside the other—had to wait two months for Parliament’s formal approval of a public state funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral. Ten thousand people viewed the coffin at Walmer Castle, but that was nothing compared to the ‘multitude’ which jostled to see ‘the dazzling brilliancy of the catafalque’ at the formal lying-in-state at Chelsea Hospital. The centrepiece of the funeral was the fantastic triumphal funeral car which carried the coffin, at the vast cost of £11 000.'* A crowd of about one and a half million people watched the procession of the gigantic bronze car, 27 feet long and 10 tons in weight, drawn by twelve fine black horses, caparisoned with black plumes and embroidered velvet hangings. Above the whole car was a superb silver and gold canopy, woven at Spitalfields from Indian material, giving the car an exotic appearance, with rich cords and tassels. On the sides of the car were trophies of arms and victories, surmounted by the Duke’s coronets. The sumptuous velvet pall over the bier was powdered with silver embroidery, bordered with laurels in silver. All materials employed in this splendid car were genuine and original, elaborated ‘with skill and artistic feeling ... no tinsel or gimcrack was to be permitted’.!> (See plate 4.) The funeral of Burke and Wills in Melbourne in 1863 was closely modelled on Wellington’s, at least superficially; both the similarities and differences are illuminating. Where Wellington’s funeral honoured the victor of the battle of Waterloo, which ended the Napoleonic wars, Burke and Wills’ funeral, the first state funeral in Australia, marked the failure of a disastrous expedition in 1860 to cross the continent from south to north. Britain’s military heroes usually triumphed, whereas Australia’s most famous explorers perished on their journey at the moment of success. As Ken Inglis remarked: ‘The story sounded from start to finish like an epic contrived by an author with a pro-

foundly bleak vision of the universe.’!© In both cases the state funerals required changes to original burial decisions—but that for Burke and Wills was far more profound and controversial. In Wellington’s case, the decision

to bury him in state at St Paul’s rather than Walmer Castle involved two ceremonies instead of one and a delay of two months. But Burke and Wills had already received bush burials, which seemed to many people the most appropriate resting places for explorers who died in their quest for glory. A search party led by Alfred Howitt of the Royal Society of Victoria found Burke and Wills dead; Howitt wrapped the bones of each in a Union Jack, placed them each in a grave, and read over them the words, ‘I am the resur-

rection and the life’. These were archetypal bush burials, and as Howitt noted, ‘no less than 5 artists have commenced grand historical pictures of me burying Burke’.!” Indeed, Burke and Wills’ funeral provides the most extreme example of the great dichotomy between Australian bush burial and the traditional elaborate

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Victorian urban funeral; these two explorers received both the uniquely Australian bush burial and the distinctively aristocratic English state funeral. As Tim Bonyhady has shown, a debate ensued between those who sought ‘a great national burial ground, a colonial Westminster Abbey’ for Burke and

Wills, and those who ‘argued that it would be “sacrilege” to remove the explorers’ bones from places they had “sanctified by their deaths”.’ A Bendigo poet protested: No need of vain pompous pageant to brighten The halo encircling the names of the dead, More fitting by far that the graves in the North, Should be left in memorial of the men and the deed.!®

The Argus considered the transfer of the remains to Melbourne ‘a monstrous piece of false sentiment’ in ‘wretched taste’: “They could not have lain better,

in a fitter or more solemn tomb, than under the canopy of heaven, in the desert where the betrayed heroes lay down and died. A simple mound of stones was all the monument they required.’!” But the lonely bush burials were considered inadequate and inappropriate by those who insisted on an utterly British State funeral, which required that the sacred bones be dug up and placed on display in Melbourne.

Burke and Wills’ lying-in-state in the Hall of the Royal Society in Melbourne took place over fifteen days, attracting about 7000 people on most days and reaching a total attendance of 100000 out of the city’s population

of 120000—perhaps ten times more than the audience for Wellington at Walmer but ten times less than the ‘multitude’ at Chelsea Hospital—and yet comparable by colonial standards (see plate 6). The funeral procession on 21 January 1863 was the largest in the colony so far and was given a martial air by the 115 soldiers of the Castlemaine Light Dragoons and the regimental band who led the way. The funeral car was the piéce de résistance, and was closely modelled on Wellington’s. It was 15 feet long, 8 feet broad and 22 feet high, with bronzed wheels, and drawn by six black horses, caparisoned with black ostrich plumes and velvet covering (see plate 5). The two coffins sat above the car, covered with a black pall fringed with silver lace, and surmounted by a canopy with more plumes of feathers at the top of each supporting column. According to the Argus, an ‘unprecedented’ crowd of about 40.000 came to watch the funeral, compared with an estimated one and a half million for Wellington’s funeral.7° But where Wellington’s funeral was generally applauded, Burke and Wills’ funeral was received with much criticism, not least from those who would have left the bones in the bush where the explorers died. Where ‘no tinsel or gimcrack’ was permitted in creating Wellington’s fantastic funeral car, the materials employed in Burke and Wills’ car were showy but flimsy rather than ‘genuine and original’. The Argus noted that ‘in point of material and orna-

mentation it was but a poor reflex of that magnificent work of art’. John Daley, the undertaker, charged only £665 for organising the entire funeral,

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compared with a cost of £11000 for Wellington’s funeral car alone. It was remarkable that the Exploration Committee made Wellington’s funeral their model, yet tried to achieve the same extravagant spectacle on the cheap. The entire pageant was deemed vulgar, absurd, and ostentatious by some critics, who condemned ‘the sickening mockery of royal and aristocratic usages’, reserved in England for great military heroes like Wellington (see plate 7).*!

Funeral reform Imitation of the elaborate British culture of death was powerful among the urban middle classes and the respectable working classes who subscribed to funeral benefits funds. Two separate traditions of funerals and burials had developed among Europeans in Australia quite independently. The Australian tradition of simple bush burials in rural areas is explored later; they were necessary for early settlers and for people living outside the reach of parsons, churches, and undertakers, and they developed a ritual of their own, largely unaffected by British traditions. By contrast, in towns and cities of these British colonies it seemed both natural and necessary for status and respectability to follow the customs and practices of the mother country, with some variations according to class, wealth, social position, and religious affiliation. Indeed, as in the case of Sir Everard Home, major efforts were made to replicate ‘the long-accustomed pomp and ceremony of British customs’; imitation was to be applauded, not criticised, even if it was a poor copy of an inappropriate model, as in the case of Burke and Wills’ funeral car. The funeral reform movement was well under way by 1850 in Britain where the need for reform was more urgent, and it had a major influence in colonial Australia in the next half century (see plate 8). Most private funerals conducted in Australia from the 1850s were less extravagant and expensive than those in Britain. Though funeral reform associations were established in the 1870s in New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, like the two funeral reform associations initiated in Britain in 1875 they were merely following a reforming trend which had already seen considerable progress. So it is not surprising to find that the funeral reform association created in Sydney in 1875 by Thomas Mort lost its vigour only three years later on its founder’s death. Similarly, in South Australia the reform association was started in 1874 by Revd Alexander Russell, Dean of Adelaide Cathedral, to reduce costs and simplify funerals, but little was achieved by 1876 when the reform committee was undermined by internal dissension.**

Many well-to-do middle and professional class people responded to the appeals of the funeral and mourning reform associations formed in various colonies in 1874 to 1875. The associations suggested that people should leave explicit instructions, either in their will or in a separate document, regarding their wish for a modest funeral. James Henty, Victorian merchant and pastoralist, who died in 1882, left a memorandum for his executors in 1879 about his tombstone in Melbourne’s Kew Cemetery: ‘Whatever is erected should be in stone, solid, substantial and plain, but not expensive, with such

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inscription as my Executors may deem proper but not laudatory.’ He left additional instructions for his funeral which ‘should be plain and inexpensive without display beyond what is decently necessary’.*? Hugh George, printer

and newspaper manager, died in Melbourne aged 64 in 1886, having left instructions for his funeral, as quoted by the Sydney Mail: ‘It seems funny, does it not, writing directions for one’s own funeral? But I am con-

vinced that this is the right way to effect the funeral reform that is so much needed ... On the occasion of the death of the breadwinner of the household the calamity is sufficiently heavy without adding to it by the observance of the absurd, expensive, and barbarous usages that I here utterly condemn and prohibit the practice of in my case.’*4

But despite his powerful advocacy of funeral reform, Hugh George’s instructions could not prevent the formation of a procession at his own funeral of 109 vehicles following the hearse. Revd Charles Badham, a professor of classics at Sydney University, had requested no ‘idle pomp or pageantry’ at his funeral, which was fulfilled in 1884 by a plain hearse without any carving, tassels or plumes.2° Similarly the Revd Dr John Dunmore Lang’s wishes for a plain cedar coffin and no eulogy

were respected at his funeral in 1878.*° The funeral sermon for Mrs J. Langdon Parsons, wife of a Baptist minister in Adelaide in 1876, noted that at the funeral ‘there was an entire absence of the habilaments of mourning— the paraphernalia of funeral customs was dispensed with’, as she wished.*’ The Anglican Bishop Field Goe of Melbourne stipulated in 1901 that at his wife’s funeral there should be no pall bearers and the coffin, made of English oak, should rest on a plain hearse.*®

Others found it more difficult to carry out instructions for simplicity because they were reluctant to veto lengthy funeral processions which demonstrated affection and honour for the deceased, as well as the family’s status. On the death in 1879 of her husband, George Ward Cole, a Melbourne merchant and politician, Thomas Anne noted in her diary that George ‘had a dislike to hearses and all their trappings’ and wished only to have a Union Jack over him. “Truly show was not what the family wished.’ Yet she seemed not displeased with the two pages of names she later added to her diary of those

who attended his funeral—‘a procession from the Fish market to the Globe hotel’.2? The much beloved Archbishop John Polding of Sydney wanted his funeral arrangements in 1877 as quiet as possible, with no attempt at mere show, but it was not practicable to avoid a funeral cortége three miles long.°° However, two highly unusual burial requests, which were both regarded as eccentric, showed that reform had strictly defined limits in Australia. The first was a direct replica of a British burial reform initiative by Sir Francis Seymour

Haden, a prominent English physician who established the Earth to Earth Society in 1875 to promote the reform of earth burial for sanitary reasons, in Opposition to the Cremation Society. Haden condemned the widespread use in Britain of imperishable wood and lead coffins, brick graves, and solid

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vaults which prevented decomposition; he advocated instead speedy burial in

perishable ‘earth to earth’ coffins made of lightweight material, such as wicker, which allowed access by earth and air.*! Many members of British middle- and upper-class families responded sympathetically to Haden’s suggestions, and left instructions for their own burial along these lines. But the response to such burial reform in urban Australia was more critical, and the determination of one old lady, Mrs G. H. Poole, to be buried in a wicker basket was derided by the Melbourne Herald in 1875. Mrs Poole,

knowing she was slowly dying of breast cancer, left instructions for her brother, Philip Chauncy: ‘I desire that no lid be put on my coffin in the grave, but pure earth be thrown on the body wrapped in a sheet only.’ She had seen illustrations of Haden’s wicker coffin in The Times and the Illustrated London News and was keen to adopt it. Soon afterwards she gave precise instructions to a Melbourne basket maker to create a ‘mortuary cradle’, a term she preferred to ‘coffin’. While it was still in the basket weaver’s shop, Mrs Poole responded vigorously in September 1875 to the Melbourne Herala’s ridicule: You judge me to be eccentric, merely I suppose, because I happen to be the first old colonist who is so very unconservative and open to conviction as to adopt a very sensible and sanitary measure, which is advocated in Europe by many unprejudiced people ... I believe, sir, that this step towards the right progress must not be called eccentric, whosoever may adopt it. My friends, as far as I have heard, favor it ... It cannot be denied that this is a sensible mode of interment, and realises the idea of ‘earth to earth’, without loss of time in the operation, without the horror of slow, confined decomposition. But this view of it is secondary to the health of the living, and the facts attested by those who ought to know, prove that air for some distance round cemeteries is vitiated and impure, and sickness is caused by it.

Mrs Poole kept the mortuary cradle by her bedside during her prolonged illness and was buried in it in April 1876. The cradle of open basket-work was decorated with flowers, as she requested, and the earth was placed inside before it was lowered into the grave.** _ The second unusual burial request was distinctively Australian, and highly controversial, as it was a rejection of a traditional British burial by a member

of the gentry in favour of a simple bush burial alongside the Aboriginal people. The enigmatic and solitary Samuel Pratt Winter, pastoralist of Murndal, Victoria, died in 1878 having left instructions, as an agnostic, that no tombstone or memorial was to rest over him, merely a cairn of stones. He instructed his brother Trevor: ‘On no account bury me in any cemetery, and [if] my body is taken to Murndal [the family station] I would like to be buried in the stones where the blacks are buried.’ The local press condemned him for the insult to his class and his people in refusing them the right to honour him in what they considered a respectable and appropriate manner. Trevor partly gave in to the shocked reaction and had his brother buried, as a compromise, beneath the pine trees on the hill overlooking Murndal, marked only by a simple tablet and railing.°*°

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The cremation campaign was an interesting aspect of the funeral reform movement which I will pass over briefly, for several reasons. Its story has already been well told by Simon Cooke for New South Wales and by Robert Nicol for South Australia. Moreover, the arguments employed in the debate about cremation were just as closely modelled on those in Britain as were the funeral practices they condemned. Thirdly, the practical outcomes of the cremation campaign were extremely limited in the period covered by this book. Although South Australia led the way with legislation permitting cremation in 1891 and in opening the first crematorium in 1903, only 386 cremations took place in the first twenty-seven years—an average of fourteen a year. Implementation of legislation also proved difficult and prolonged in other states, where crematoria were not established until 1927 in Victoria, 1925 in New South Wales, 1934 in Brisbane, 1936 in Hobart and 1937 in Perth.°* I focus here briefly on just two aspects of the cremation story which have particular significance for the argument and time frame of this chapter. First, the cremation debate was modelled remarkably closely on that in Britain; indeed the campaign leader in Sydney, Dr John M. Creed, MLC, had been a medical student and clinical clerk in London to Sir Henry Thompson, surgeon and president of the British Cremation Society. Thompson opened the debate in Britain with a powerful article in the Contemporary Review in January 1874, putting the sanitary and utilitarian case for cremation. Creed’s case was closely based on that of Thompson, emphasising the public health argument. He argued in the Legislative Council of New South Wales in June 1886 that burial involved the preservation of the germs of numerous terrible diseases: ‘it is safe to believe that thousands of cases of illness and death are occasioned by the disinterment of human remains’. He dwelt at some length on the stages

of decomposition involved in earth burial, ‘rendering the body a mass of foetid corruption, a source of danger to those left behind, and a loathsome object to the survivors’.°° Such images of decaying corpses contrasted markedly with romantic Christian images of the sleeping dead waiting for the

resurrection. By contrast, cremation was presented as hygienic, safe, and simple. Other arguments were employed, but the sanitary case was the most significant and powerful, especially as shortage of land was a less compelling point in Australia than in England. It was no coincidence that Dr Creed introduced his bill in Australia only a year after the first cremation was carried out in England, and two years after a British legal judgment that burning a corpse

was not a crime; nor that Creed relied on detailed arguments from Thompson, Sir John Simon, and other leaders of the British public health cause.

My second point is that cremation was very slow to become accepted in Australia, as also in Britain, and for similar reasons. Despite the initial enthusiasm in Adelaide, only fifty cremations took place in the first ten years after 1903. In the 1880s in New South Wales Creed was twice unable to get his bill through the conservative Assembly, which only allowed the passage of such legislation in 1925. Robert Nicol has argued that “The hostility to cremation was often deep seated and widespread. Beyond the professional and social

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elite, [cremation] remained largely unacceptable until well into the twentieth century.’°* The prolonged opposition to cremation was largely based on the influence of centuries of Christian burial tradition, with its doctrine that ‘our

bodies shall rise again in an incorruptible state’. Many Christian clergy viewed cremation as a heathen and unnatural practice which would undermine popular faith in the resurrection of the body, still closely linked in the popular imagination to the immortality of the soul. Despite the decline in institutional Protestantism, a diffuse residual religious sentiment led to strong hostility to cremation for many years. This opposition was even more pervasive in Australia than in Britain because so many Australian Catholics were influenced by the 1886 decree from the Holy Office in Rome condemning cremation. Christian hostility to cremation was reinforced by the insistence of Catholics, Presbyterians, and other nonconformist Protestant sects on the reality of a fiery hell. As a Bulletin cartoon pointed out, the fires of the crematorium seemed to some sinners uncomfortably like a premature visit to a miniature hell (see plate 9).3”

Funerals and undertakers The undertaking business was reaching maturity at the same time in the Australian colonies as in Britain, so that undertakers played a crucial role in most urban funerals after 1850. The undertakers were themselves largely responsible for a direct imitation of British funeral practices, which had their origin in the heraldic array of an aristocratic funeral (see plate 10). Some

undertakers came directly to the Australian colonies as immigrants from Britain, bringing their skills and their funeral customs with them, especially in the years of heavy immigration after the middle of the century. Others began as carpenters, joiners, or builders and developed undertaking as an additional line that could become profitable in the colonies and was always in demand. In the middle of the nineteenth century there were few professional undertakers, but a growing number of mixed businesses developed in later decades.

Several prominent Melbourne undertaking firms were established in the 1850s, including a number of former cabinet-makers. In New South Wales the

first successful family business was inaugurated by Charles Kinsela at Liverpool in 1830, and became one of the eight full-time firms in central Sydney by 1859. The eight firms expanded to thirty by the 1880s, when a few established firms obtained a large share of the market, dominated by Wood Coffill, who conducted half the metropolitan Sydney funerals by 1913.°° Griffin and Tobin have observed that ‘ordinary’ funerals could be obtained at around £4 10s from the 1850s to the 1890s. This compared with an ‘ordi-

nary’ middle-class funeral in London at between £50 to £70 in the 1840s, when the cheapest working-class funeral usually cost at least £6. The range of prices and services available from Australian undertakers was broad if eco-

nomical, and the cheapest funeral could still be respectable. In 1858 two Adelaide undertakers were quoting figures between £4 and £4 10s for funerals at the West Terrace Cemetery, ‘coffin covered, lined and trimmed, with

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inscription plate, hearse and plumes, coachman, with hatband, cemetery fee etc’. The Melbourne firm of W. G. Raven in 1866 charged £4 10s for the funeral of Edward Smith, which included a ‘plain coffin, one horse hearse, one horse mourning coach, pall, hatbands and attendance’.*” Colonial funerals could cost far more if the family wanted a higher quality coffin, and extra horses and mourning coaches. Families could economise by

providing their own coaches, and by obtaining only the coffin, pall, and attendants from the undertaker, as the Bussell family seems to have done on the death of Fanny Sutherland in July 1881. George H. Knaptin, undertaker of Busselton, Western Australia, provided a genteel funeral at a modest cost of £5 Ss for a ‘moulded polished stuffed and lined coffin’, with pall and attendance; the remaining £1 9s was paid chiefly for church, chaplain and sexton’s fees.7?

The records of two undertakers, Joseph Medcalf of Redfern, Sydney, and Claude Trevelion of Norwood, Adelaide, can be examined as case studies for the period of undertaking expansion from 1880 to 1900, to see how such early businesses were established and developed, and to discover the range of costs and services available. Joseph Medcalf seems to have started his firm in

1881 by providing mainly infants’ and children’s funerals and cheaper funerals with basic coffins for the working classes. Eleven out of the twenty funerals in 1881 were for infants of one year or less, where a hearse was not

usually needed and the smallest babies could be carried, like 6-day-old Charles Reed, at a cost of only £1 5s. Only four of the twenty funerals were for adults, whose more expensive funerals ranged from £2 15s for a coffin only for 50-year-old John Kirby, to £8 10s for a hearse and two coaches for 44-year-old Catherine Griffith. A hearse and one coach cost the other two

adults £5 10s and £6, priced according to the quality of the coffin. The average cost of those twenty funerals was between £2 and £3.*! By 1886, Joseph Medcalf’s firm had picked up considerable business, with about 50 per cent still devoted to infants and children under 2, while 40 per cent now catered for adults over 30 years, with about 10 per cent in between. Of the 135 funerals in 1886, thirteen were for stillborns, requiring certificates from midwives and obtaining the cheapest funerals at a cost varying from 8s to 14s, up to £1 Ss. Since there were no legal requirements for cemetery burial of stillborns, those who were not buried in their own gardens were disposed of informally in the cemetery—either way they usually received little or no ceremony. All the stillborns and fifteen infants were carried, thus dispensing with the need for a hearse or horse, while the tiny coffins could be made of the cheapest wood. In most cases, graves were reopened to admit infants

and stillborns, further reducing costs. The cheapest adult funerals in 1886 were for women. Bessie Sparkes, age 33, was buried with a hearse and one coach costing £4 7s 6d and the minimal chaplain’s, sexton’s, and cemetery fees of £7. Likewise, Maria Rae, aged 25 years, was buried with a hearse and coffin, but no coaches, at a cost of £4 11s; fees were an additional £6 1s, while

the ground fees of £1 1s had been paid in advance by the unfortunate deceased.**

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Joseph Medcalf’s business moved upmarket suddenly in March 1886, when he began to take a far larger proportion of adult funerals. Up to 10 March, eighteen out of twenty-two funerals were for stillborns, infants, and small children, but thereafter the majority of his funerals were for adults, automatically increasing funeral costs. In addition, his firm began to provide more horses and coaches, and fully mounted hearses, sometimes with cedar polished coffins. Another new feature was the use of the train to transport coffins at around £1 3s, while one 58-year-old man’s coffin had to be transported to Newcastle in a packing case. The other novel feature was the charge for press advertisements for all but the cheapest funerals, at a cost of 3s 6d

for one advertisement, rising to 20s for six. Occasionally a charge for a wreath was included at 16s 6d; a shroud was included in the cost on only one occasion, while white coffins with silver-blue coaches were offered for children. Business proved sufficiently profitable between 1881 and March 1886 to enable Medcalf’s firm to hire extra horses, hearse, and coaches, with more elaborate decoration, including black plumes and feathers for both hearses and horses. By 1891 the Day Books included fully silver mounted polished oak coffins and in 1900 polished cedar caskets, sometimes with masonic silver mountings—but prices were rarely noted in the records after November 1886. Medcalf’s records made no reference to mutes, hat bands, scarves, and gloves, reflecting the impact of the reform movement by the 1880s.*9 Medcalf’s most expensive funerals in 1886 cost over £30, including fees and charges. Elizabeth Mackay’s funeral cost the grand total of £43, including £15 16s for the funeral, £19 10s for fees and charges, and £8 15s for the ground at the Wesleyan Necropolis. Elizabeth Lance, aged 84, was buried in a polished cedar coffin at a total cost of £28 5s. Charges were only cited for two months of 1891, but the funeral of William Stuart, aged nearly 3 years, is worth noting, at a cost of nearly £34 without ground fees; a polished cedar coffin and two fully silver mounted coaches were most unusual for a child in Medcalf’s records.*4

Claude Trevelion also began his Day Books as an undertaker in 1881, operating a successful funeral parlour at Magill Road, Norwood, in Adelaide.

Funerals for babies and children also formed a substantial component of Trevelion’s early work, though not such a high proportion as for Medcalf in the early years. Out of fifty funerals in 1887, seventeen were for children and thirty-three for adults; of seventy-one funerals in 1897, twenty-three were for children and forty-eight for adults. But the proportion of children’s funerals

dropped sharply in 1907 from about one-third to only 7.6 per cent—with only seven children’s funerals against ninety-two for adults. The cost of children’s funerals was much lower than that for adults but Trevelion’s prices were not as low as Medcalt’s. A child’s coffin, with one coach and the charge for conducting the funeral, cost £3 10s in 1882, and totalled £4 6s 6d—with 16s 6d for the grave. Children’s coffins alone, depending on size, ranged from

15s to £1 12s.4 The most expensive adult funeral in Trevelion’s Day Books was that for Thomas Pegler at £41 14s 6d, comprising £26 10s for a polished oak coffin,

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a glass hearse, three coaches, advertising and conducting, together with a ground fee of £15 4s 6d—which was exceedingly high—at North Road Cemetery. The funeral of Frederick Hannaford, aged 68 years, in 1898, was the only one to include embalming, at £8 10s.4° The new embalming process was rare and very expensive, and was intended to arrest the process of decay temporarily by replacing the body’s natural fluids with a preservative like formalin. It was usually undertaken only when the funeral had to be delayed or the body had to be transported, and the full process, which involved removing all internal organs, was delayed until the twentieth century.*’ Other costs for Hannaford’s funeral were itemised: including a shroud at 10s; £10 10s for the best cedar polished coffin with silver mounting; a hearse and waggonette at £8 10s; advertising twice in four newspapers at £1, and conducting the funeral also at £1. Fees for the minister and a grave would have to be added to the £30 total. One funeral in 1887 included a German coffin with hearse and four coaches at £14 10s. Horses usually cost 13s each, and one coach cost £1, but all prices varied according to the trappings.*® The comments of a South Australian Parliamentary Select Committee in 1898 on undertakers’ fees are useful. Mr Alfred Binks, Mayor of Kensington and Norwood, thought ‘competition is too keen for [undertakers] to charge excessively’, so fees usually started at £5. John Knabe, undertaker, put ordinary charges for funerals rather higher, at about £7 minimum, presumably his own charges without fees. Revd William Marsh, Anglican rector of St Luke’s Church, Adelaide, had attended 137 funerals in two years, including eighty without fees for poor people. He always asked in advance how much the family expected to pay the undertaker: ‘it is only fair that I should try to guide affairs in that direction and in most cases I find the undertaker carrying out the work at moderate cost’—otherwise he would not volunteer his own services free. Despite the differences in cost, none of these responses was extravagant.*” As Griffin and Tobin point out, it was significant that the rates for funerals had altered little in a century.°° Many new undertaking firms were established in the 1880s and 1890s

since no particular qualifications were needed, and competition became

intense. Seventeen established firms founded the Victorian Master Undertakers Association in 1890 to protect themselves against new and inexperienced rivals offering cheaper funerals. The association set minimum hiring charges for hearses, horses, palls, and plumes, requiring that its members only hire from other members. In 1920, the association fixed minimum prices for Victorian funerals: £6 10s would secure a cheap ordinary funeral with a hearse and pair and a plain black coffin, with an additional £3 for one carriage or £5 for two. The price increased mainly for better quality coffins, so that a polished oak coffin, hearse and pair cost upwards of £20. Any black-

leg member taking cheaper funerals was threatened with expulsion and a heavy fine. The Undertakers’ Assistants Union of Victoria formed in 1890 in

response to the employers’ union, and by 1916 amalgamated with the Undertakers’ Assistants and Cemetery Employees’ Union of Australia. Around 1920 they established their own minimum rates for piecework,

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according to whether coffins were handmade or machine made. For example,

best oak coffins were £25 made by hand or £22 6s by machine; common coffins cost either £3 6s or £2 6s.>! There were other aspects of commercialisation of the disposal of the dead

which were directly addressed by British and European experience. Tombstone design became increasingly standardised across Australia from the 1850s; a few large firms in the big cities supplied stones across Australia in a variety of designs based on English templates. As Griffin and Tobin empha-

sise: “There are no distinctively Australian gravestones. Almost without exception, the styles of markers, the symbols carved or embellished upon them, and the sentiments expressed in their inscriptions, are all thoroughly derivative of the graveyards of Great Britain and Europe.”°* From 1870, the size and cost of tombstones decreased, as larger columns, Christian crosses, statues, and elaborate monuments were generally replaced by more neutral short, thick stones in granite or marble. By 1900, stones were widely distributed as shaped blanks, with inscriptions and designs usually chosen by the bereaved families from a pattern catalogue of designs and epitaphs—though some continued to compose their own. The standardisation of both epitaphs and stones largely eliminated differ-

ences between colonies, as well as between Australia and Britain. Thus archival evidence of the Clifton family in Perth, choosing both tombstone and epitaphs from a catalogue, can stand also for other families in other colonies. In March 1898, Christina Clifton received the catalogue and photographs of

tombstones from her son, Cecil, to choose the most appropriate for her deceased husband, Robert, who had died a year earlier. Her daughters liked the tombstone in the shape of the cross, but Robert would have considered that a Catholic form, and preferred a plain white marble slab: I know that dear Father did not care for a Cross on a tomb, so I should like a plain durable slab rounded at the top like the one marked [31] the price of which was marked £3.10.0 ... I know he would have liked everything as simple and plain as possible. I am willing to spend £10 or £12 if necessary for the expenses.

The Clifton family chose two conventional epitaphs, ‘In Loving Memory’, and ‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord’, together with a revised verse of a hymn: On the Resurrection morning All the graves their dead restore; Father, sister, child and mother, Meet once more.*?

Sarah Tarlow argues that the number of tombstones with inscriptions from the Bible, hymns, or poetry increased during the nineteenth century in Britain,

most implying the hope of an afterlife or reunion in heaven, and many expressing remembrance, affection, and sorrow. Metaphors were common,

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especially that of sleep, which had the advantage from the 1880s of ambiguity, in that it could mean either the Christian sleep before judgment and resurrection, or just the peaceful rest of annihilation.*4 An enterprising example of commercial endeavour at funerals in Sydney around 1890 appears in the memoir My Life Story by Sir Joynton Smith, millionaire businessman and subsequently Lord Mayor of Sydney. Smith read in

a newspaper that a stenographer in Germany was making money from recording and selling funeral tributes to relatives. He purchased the franchise in a one-man business from an English firm which specialised in reporting notable funerals—so this was yet another English import. Smith obtained for £50 a lithograph stone of an illuminated card ‘designed to assuage the most poignant grief’, with the inscription ‘So loved, so mourned’, surrounded by

forget-me-nots. He ordered a hundred cards at one shilling each, and purchased some tasteful frames at four shillings each. Then Joynton Smith regularly attended funerals of the wealthy, dressed in a silk hat and long frockcoat, solemnly taking the names of mourners in the cabs and at the graveside, letting them assume he was a press reporter. Returning to his lodgings afterwards, he composed suitably mournful accounts, including the list of mourners and the tributes paid to the departed, employing what he called ‘the hackneyed phrases’ of sorrow. On the morning after the funeral he called at the houses of the chief mourners to display his framed memorial card at thirty shillings, and received only two or three refusals in twelve months of business.

He made about £25 a week by attending three funerals a day, but sold his interest in the business after a year because it was exhausting and nerveracking.°>

Death and funeral notices tended to be extremely brief, factual, and formal in the newspapers examined from 1841 to 1921, and quite different from In Memoriam notices, which are examined later. The death notices in the Sydney Morning Herald ranged from a very occasional notice in 1841, to an average of one a day in 1851, four a day in 1861, and from six to nine between 1871 and 1901. Only in 1911 did the numbers increase to about eighteen and up to thirty-eight in 1921. They all gave the same brief factual details of time, place, age, relationship of deceased to others, and sometimes the cause of death. At most a brief phrase might be included, such as ‘at rest’ or ‘deeply regretted’. The form of death notices changed little over time until the 1990s, when they became more personalised in some newspapers, notably the West Australian. Between 1851 and 1921, most funeral notices were very short, generally stating that a particular funeral would move in the afternoon from the residence of the deceased to the cemetery. But even the highly conservative form of death and funeral notices began to show signs of change between 1901 and 1921, in response to undertakers’ initiatives in increasing their own services. Occasional notices from 1901 specified that the funeral would move from a particular undertaker’s funeral

parlour to the cemetery, rather than from the home of the deceased. For example, Wood Funeral Directors announced in January 1911 that Mrs Harriet Taylor’s funeral would leave from their George Street Mortuary

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Chapel for the Presbyterian Cemetery Necropolis. Funeral directors such as Charles Kinsela and C. Field increasingly advised after 1901 that funerals

would move from their respective funeral parlours to Rookwood and Waverley cemeteries. The crematorium was scarcely ever mentioned in the various newspapers up to 1921, though many more bodies were cremated by the 1940s.

Funerals provided by friendly societies and masonic lodges The transmission of the British culture of death was also evident in the spread of working-class mutual aid associations known as friendly societies whereby members paid a fixed amount regularly during their working lives to ensure a decent funeral. Friendly societies, or burial clubs as they were often known, made ‘decent’ burials available to the poorer working classes in the second

half of the century, helping to combat their fear of pauper burials. The Bulletin noted in 1896 that in Australia ‘the ordinary friendly society is really

little more than a sick and funeral club ... The system, of course, is an offshoot from the long-established English system.’ In Australia there was considerable overlap in function with the masonic lodges which were technically friendly societies but with greater prestige, tradition, and broader functions.°® Although the concept was the same in the two countries, there were differences. Many of the earlier British societies were suspected of fraud organised by local undertakers who were also secretaries or treasurers of the societies.>’ There seems to have been no hint of undertakers using Australian friendly societies for extortion, which may explain why they became so much more

popular in the colonies, so that the majority of male manual workers were members by the 1870s. The Age noted in 1896 that one-quarter of the population of the colonies was connected with these societies, since the membership of 246 000 heads of families meant that one million could participate in the benefits.*°

The various masonic lodges were also offshoots of the English, Irish, and Scottish lodges which based their practice on traditions developed from the Middle Ages. Freemasonry was not in itself a religion, but its members were required to believe in God, though they were free to worship according to their own particular denominations. They believed in a ‘brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God’, and upheld a system of morality which included working for the welfare of humanity. Their meetings and ceremonies followed formal symbolic lodge procedures, and they displayed their elaborate regalia and banners at funerals and civic processions. The first Australian masonic lodge was established in 1820 in New South Wales, where thirteen lodges formed the Grand Lodge in 1877. Victoria established its Grand Lodge in 1883, and the other colonies followed in the next twenty years. An essential part of masonic practice was the provision of death benefits for members and their wives, and a masonic funeral in distinguished cases. Grand lodges

could order a period of mourning on the death of eminent Freemasons,

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observed through all its Lodges. Freemasons did their best to secure a respectable turnout at funerals of their members; indeed the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows insisted that all members attend their brethren’s funerals or pay fines of 2s 6d. Masonic funerals with brethren in full regalia and the conduct of appro-

priate ceremonies at the graveside were common on the deaths of eminent members. The funeral of Richard Heales, MLA, a prominent politician, illustrates the combination of Christian and masonic ceremony, and the elaborate

funerals which could be held for notable Masons and popular public men. Heales’ funeral in 1864 was the largest in Melbourne since that of Burke and Wills. The hearse was drawn by four black horses in ‘mournful caparisons’, preceded by five mutes and followed by four mourning coaches, each drawn by two black-plumed horses. The coffin was covered by a black velvet pall fringed with white silk. Meanwhile the two hundred or so members of the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows had assembled in their Swanston Street hall where the Noble Grand Master of the No. 1 Melbourne Loyal Australia Felix Lodge read the funeral service. Wearing their sashes and aprons covered with crepe or bordered with black, the Oddfellows then took

the lead in the public portion of the funeral procession when the hearse arrived. The cortége comprised nearly 220 carriages and the entire procession

extended about two miles. Finally, at the cemetery the Church of England service was read before the coffin was lowered into the grave, when the Oddfellows service was read at the grave by the Noble Grand Master.°” Masonic ritual at funerals had achieved substantial respectability by the 1890s despite the opposition of the Catholic clergy and some high Anglican

clergy who believed that Masonic ritual at funerals was un-Christian. The 1897 funeral in Melbourne of Sir William Clarke, landowner and philanthropist, was paradoxically obliged to combine Masonic ceremonial ritual with the deceased’s request for ‘as little ostentation as is possible with a public funeral’. Thus there was no band or solemn music on the march, and the

six horses and the hearse were not draped in black nor did-they carry plumes—and of course the mutes were banished. A new element was also provided by the two floral cars heaped with fresh floral tributes from friends. Yet the coffin was borne into St Paul’s Cathedral for the Anglican funeral service between a double rank of members of the Grand Lodge of Freemasons, hand-

somely draped in full regalia. After the service no fewer than five hundred Freemasons with full insignia joined the procession immediately behind the military officers—an imposing spectacle of ‘gigantic magnitude’, according to the Age. At the cemetery, Masonic officers of the Grand Lodge surrounded the

grave for the Anglican burial service and a short Masonic’service was held after the lowering of the coffin, while the tylers stood by with drawn swords. Finally the brethren passed in procession around the grave, dropping in sprigs of acacia.°" The 1881 Royal Commission Report on Friendly Societies in New South Wales and the 1886-87 annual reports for Victoria provide substantial information on funeral benefits in the two colonies. The New South Wales report

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noted that the intention of the funeral benefit was to enable the family of the deceased member to afford a burial ‘with all the ceremonies required by the usages of society or the dictates of his religious profession’.®! This is a significant indication that friendly societies were not aiming at meagre funerals and were far removed from pauper funerals. They enabled workers to afford more expensive funerals than they could otherwise achieve and were taking as a guide the ceremonies required by ‘the usages of society’ and individual religious denominations. Ironically, while the wealthier middle classes were reducing their funeral expenditure, friendly societies enabled the working classes to develop their own imitations of the respectable Victorian funeral. Average funeral benefits for New South Wales friendly societies were estimated by the 1881 report as £20 to £40 on the death of a member and half of this on the death of a member’s wife. An example can be offered from one of the largest lodges in the Sydney district; the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows in Sydney, with 6906 members, offered funeral benefits of £20 on the death of a member and £15 on the death of a member’s wife,

with contributions of 2s 4d per fortnight. Some societies had adopted a graduated scale of fees, varying from 2s 6d for members under 20 to £4 for those aged 40 years who were most vulnerable to ill-health and death.® The annual reports of the Victorian government statistician for 1886 to 1887 show that many societies there, as in New South Wales, graduated the scale of contributions according to age. They gave benefits on average of £20 for the death of a member and £10 for members’ wives. There were fifteen friendly societies in Victoria with a total membership of 78 656, and 790

members’ deaths in 1887. The Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows was by far the largest in Victoria (as also in Queensland), with 18 684 members; it boasted £4903 19s in funeral benefits, with funerals of

212 members and 99 members’ wives charged to the fund in 1887.° Its Registration Book from 1884 to 1904 for the Myrtleford Lodge in the Ovens-

Murray District indicated that the most common occupations were miners and farmers, with others including carpenters, blacksmiths, builders, labourers, publicans, and graziers; by 1912, farmers were the dominant group, and no miners were among the admissions. The age on admission ranged mainly from the late teens to 29, with moderate numbers in their thirties, very few in their forties and none above that. No woman joined directly until 1938, and men left either at death or because they were in arrears.® The Ancient Order of Foresters was the smallest lodge in Victoria, with only 105 members and one death in 1887. Court Perseverance in Digby met

fortnightly and, among other business, adjudicated over applications for death and sickness benefits. In 1876, for instance, Brother Barker made his mark on the application form to attest his claim for £10 for his wife’s funeral, the only one that year. Of the fifty-six financial members in 1877, seventeen were under 30, seventeen under 40, eighteen under 50 and only four over 50. There were no funeral claims between 1877 and 1879. Several illiterate and semi-literate members had trouble with the various forms and the death and doctor’s certificates needed. In September 1884, the deputy-registrar informed

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Martin Gill that the burial certificate of his late wife, Sophia, had not been returned: ‘further delay will be attended with unpleasant consequences’, presumably including the loss of his funeral benefit. Delay certainly made him wait two months more for the lodge to pay his £10 Os 6d. By 1903 the benefit paid on a member’s death was £20 and £10 on his wife’s death. More emphasis was also placed on the need to obtain the lodge’s court surgeon’s certificates of the good health of the member and his wife on initiation, with

the warning in 1911 that no wife over 45 could be registered. By then, funeral society death benefits operated like life assurance policies, payable at death, and their members were ‘selected lives’ due to the restrictions on age

and health, so their mortality rates were lower than those of the general population.® The rates of funeral benefits varied greatly between ‘ordinary’ friendly societies and the more prestigious Masonic Lodges. This was most clearly stated in the 1924-25 Royal Commission on Insurance for Australia. The amount of ‘ordinary’ funeral benefit provided in friendly societies varied from a minimum of £20 to a maximum ‘in a few instances’ of £100 on the death of a male member, but the average ordinary funeral benefit was about £35. The maxi-

mum amounts payable also varied significantly between states, with New South Wales and Queensland at £200, Victoria and Tasmania at £100, while Western Australia alone paid the extravagant sum of £300.°° The maximum figures in a few exceptional cases were presumably the amounts paid for funerals of Grand Masters of Lodges who were usually justices, governors, influential businessmen or even archbishops.

Freemasonry brought its own consolations, beyond material considerations, when one of its most distinguished members lost his wife in 1914. Sir

Samuel James Way, Chief Justice and Lieutenant-Governor of South Australia, was installed as Grand Master at the inauguration of the Grand Lodge of South Australia in 1884, and continued in the position for many years. Two weeks after his wife’s death in May 1914 he wrote to the Grand

Master: ‘Happily we freemasons are supported in the most distressing bereavements by confident expectation that, if true to the guidance of the Volume of the Sacred Law, we shall hereafter be united with those temporarily taken from us when we meet in the Grand Lodge above.’®” Following

Way’s state funeral in 1916, many South Australian lodges conducted a ‘Lodge of Sorrow’ in his honour. Thus the public history of death in Australian cities and towns, as reflected

in funerals and in the practices of undertakers, maintained the process of direct inheritance from Britain. While the spiritual dimensions of the good Christian death were steadily eroded in the harsh new colonial environments,

the social imperative of a respectable funeral was shared among colonial Australians of all classes. The increasing commercialisation, simplification, and standardisation of funerals by colonial undertakers in the towns and emerging cities provided a secure foundation for a public commemoration of death which achieved successful transplantation to the Australian colonies.

Australian funerals were never as extravagant as those in Britain, and the

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funeral and mourning reform associations encouraged cheaper and more modest funerals and burials from the 1870s. This long process of funeral reform was accelerated by the Great War when the 60 000 Australian soldiers who were killed had to be buried thousands of miles from home. Every second Australian family was bereaved by the war but they had to grieve without funerals and burials, and most could never afford to visit the graves in Europe. Individual displays of funeral pageantry for civilians seemed inappropriate in the context of the tragic fate of the war dead. As Brian Lewis, a schoolboy in Melbourne during the war, noted in his memoir, those brave young soldiers would not have grand funerals: ‘We lost interest in other people’s funerals and they would never be the same again.”®®

Chapter 7

Women, Widowhood, and Gendered Mourning The relationship between death and gender is one of the least explored aspects

of the history of death. Women were considerably more active than men in the nineteenth century in performing the roles and rituals required in the process of death and mourning, including caring for the dying and acting as chief mourners. These gendered differences in relation to death and mourning were even more pronounced in colonial Australia than in Britain. There was a clear gendered division of labour at the deathbed since nurses were almost always female; women were culturally conditioned to accept the legitimacy of ‘separate spheres’ which ordained that women’s natural nurturing role as good wives and mothers included the devoted care of sick and dying family members. Nursing duties were regarded as an intrinsic part of women’s work, just as much as domestic service. The consequences could be unexpected. Despite concepts of the supposed natural delicacy of middle-class ladies, they were in practice likely to be more familiar than men with the unpleasant real-

ities of the physical deterioration of dying bodies and the laying out of corpses.

Women’s roles in death and mourning rituals After the family member’s death, the senior male in the family usually organised the funeral, while the women attended to the important domestic rituals.

The laying out and dressing of the body was the most urgent task and was usually performed in wealthier middle-class families by the nurse attending the dying patient or by female family servants. In working-class families and those who could afford neither nurses nor servants, the women would attend to the laying out, or the local midwife might be called in to help. The religious

view of laying out was that it was a sacred ritual and that special prayers 129

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should be held at its commencement. Nurses were taught to perform this last service for Christians with care and reverence, and in silence. Undertakers did not take over this function until the twentieth century. The viewing of the

body was regarded as vitally important to allow family members to say farewell and come to terms with the finality of the death. The women tried to disguise the processes of decomposition in a hot climate by such measures as burning candles, using charcoal to absorb unpleasant fumes, and leaving the lid off the coffin until the funeral. Funerals in colonial Australia, especially in cities, were usually male ceremonies, particularly where Freemasons were involved, since the men in the family both organised and participated at the funeral. Women were discouraged from attending funerals chiefly because of the assumptions that displays of grief should be kept private and that men were better able to contain their emotions and sustain the dignity of the funeral. This practice followed English custom closely, but it did vary to some extent in Australia according to class and religious denomination. The exclusion of women began in Britain among the aristocracy, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was still more rigidly observed among the gentry and middle classes in Australia—though it was relaxed from the 1880s. Presbyterian, Catholic, and Anglican women were the most likely to be confined to the home during the funeral. Sometimes the women remaining at home performed their own version of the funeral service, as did Mrs Gertrude Drew, Blanche Mitchell, and Minnie Rogers on the death of Mrs Drew’s baby in Brisbane in 1866. This seems to have been a cus-

tom developed in Australia, with no comparable evidence for Britain. Towards the end of the century it was more likely that mothers would attend their babies’ funerals—thus Alice Hindson attended the funeral of her baby in

1890, whereas Mrs Drew in 1866 and Ada Cambridge in 1874 did not. Methodists and other nonconformist women were more likely to attend the

service in the church, though they rarely went to the cemetery as it was assumed they would not be able to control their sorrow there. Female mourners rarely protested and many seemed relieved to stay at home, especially as

they were probably exhausted from their nursing and preparations for the funeral. The conventions of mourning dress, inherited from Britain, imposed a bur-

den on female family members, even when they could afford to hire dress-

makers or buy their clothes from mourning shops modelled on those in London. Rules governing the time required for wearing mourning dress were based on traditional views of the time needed to work through grief, and ultimately on British royal court procedure. Widows were expected to wear full

black mourning for two years—deepest black paramatta and crape for the first year of deep mourning, followed by six months of dull black silk, replaced by half-mourning colours of grey or lavender for the last six months.

Crape was a harsh black silk fabric with a crimped appearance, and paramatta combined silk with cotton or wool. The wearing of mourning dress implied social isolation, so that a widow could not enter public places or accept formal invitations in the first year of mourning. By contrast, male

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mourners merely had to wear black mourning cloaks before 1850, and thereafter add black gloves and hatbands to their usual sombre suits. The mourning period of a parent for a child was twelve months, reduced to six for a sib-

ling. Formal mourning dress for women served a less useful purpose than most other mourning rituals and could lead to extremes of social emulation and conspicuous consumption among the wealthy. However, the conventions were always more relaxed in colonial Australia, even before the 1870s, when

the funeral and mourning reform associations encouraged simplicity and moderation. But while mourning dress conventions were scarcely observed in

rural areas, they could be pushed to fashionable extremes in the salons of Sydney and Melbourne. Women were responsible for making or buying mourning dress immediately after a family death; it was considered bad luck to retain old mourning clothes, though many poorer families inevitably did so. In fact women complained more often about the problems of producing and paying for mourning dress at such short notice before a funeral than about the actual wearing of the uncomfortable garments. In the earlier years of colonial settlement it

was sometimes considered necessary for relatives to send mourning dress from England. For example, in 1847 Mrs Fleming, a Methodist widow in Exeter, England, aged 73, had long anticipated her own death: therefore she ‘actually transmitted suits of woe to her children and grandchild in this colony [South Australia], accompanied by her dying blessing.’! A thoughtful well-wisher sent the newly impoverished widow of Revd J. S. Price in Perth a most practical gift with her condolence letter in 1878: ‘I send you a piece of crape which I thought might be useful.’

For many women, it was a matter of urgently making mourning dress before the funeral or finding a servant, relative, or dressmaker to make it up at very short notice. On the death of her son in 1850, Charlotte Suttor, wife of wealthy squatter William Suttor, was ‘too much distressed’ to make her mourning clothes herself and asked a Mrs Cox (presumably a dressmaker) to make them up for her. Four days later she commented on the significance of wearing mourning dress: ‘I put on my mourning today with what a sorrowful feeling, it is a badge to remind us of God’s just chastisements and that every morning when we put it on we may remember his mercies as well as his reproval.’’ This was a characteristic comment on mourning dress by a devout

Christian woman in mid-century, not protesting against the practice, but treating it as an integral part of the religious ritual. And it did have some value in identifying mourners and reminding other people for long periods that the wearer was grieving, and might welcome sympathy and support.

On the death of Mrs Gertrude Drew’s mother, Mrs Hely, in Brisbane in 1866, their visitor Blanche Mitchell reported that neighbours Mrs Rogers and

her daughter Minnie would make up the mourning clothes. It had to be arranged immediately, as Mrs Drew insisted on attending the funeral next day. Blanche Mitchell had brought her black silk dress from Sydney, prepared

for all eventualities, and merely added some black net provided by Minnie Rogers. Next day Mrs Drew came to breakfast dressed in deep mourning: ‘an

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entire crape skirt over black silk. All were in black and all looked so mournful.” Meanwhile all the women were working hard to finish the children’s black dresses.* Lower down the class scale, Ann Catherine Currie, a farmer’s wife in Victoria, in 1879 demonstrated the reciprocity which often operated on neighbours’ deaths. When a close neighbour, Frank McPherson, died suddenly in 1879, his widow was not surprisingly ‘not at all well’; Kate Currie spent all the next day at Mrs McPherson’s house ‘making a Black dress’, presumably either for the widow or her daughter. Kate Currie would expect Mrs McPherson to return the favour.° The complex mourning dress code was applied most rigorously to widows, but it affected all women far more strictly than it did men. From the 1820s, the family firm of Courtaulds in London established a virtual monopoly of the manufacture of crape and shops devoted entirely to mourning were flourishing by 1850. The London General Mourning Warehouse in Regent Street in 1849 sold ‘every article (of the very best description) requisite for a complete

outfit of Mourning’. The Warehouse kept widows’ and family mourning ready made, so a list of family requirements and sizes would ensure all garments were sent out to homes immediately. Similar mourning shops were established in the larger cities in Australia, though on a smaller and less luxurious scale, despite the unsuitability of the climate. From the 1850s, women who could afford to do so usually purchased their family’s mourning from special shops (see plate 11). Jane Macartney on 12 May 1864 sadly noted in her diary the death of her ‘precious Mother’. Despite a heavy heart and a bad headache it was necessary for her to purchase mourning dress in Melbourne next day, while the following day her daughters took their turn in town arranging for their mourning dress.® Similarly, on 1 April 1878 Lady Stephen, wife of Sir Alfred, recorded in her diary the sudden death of Emilie Consett Stephen, so next day the female family members went into Sydney to buy mourning dress; Lady Stephen purchased her costume at Reynold’s, the only shop she tried, though the younger women sampled various shops before making their choice. On Sunday 7 April, the day after the funeral, an interesting diary entry regretted that all the family went to church in the morning, ‘except Mary whose mourning was not ready’.’ Middle-class mothers were also required to ensure that their children were attired in appropriate black mourning clothes. Etiquette rules stated that children should wear all-black clothes for a year after the death of a parent or sibling, with girls’ dresses imitating the formal lines of women’s deep mourning. On the death of Clara Henty on 24 May 1861, Mary Ann Henty wrote to her schoolboy son, Laurence, at Melbourne Grammar School about his mourning clothes, as he was to spend his holidays with his uncle in Launceston: ‘Now about your clothes. Your black suit you must now take into more general wear than hitherto, get yourself black gloves and ask your Aunt Stephen to have a band put on your hat.’ His mother considered his last suit of clothes dark enough for everyday school wear, though he might need another black waistcoat, and a black hat for best.®

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Objections to the wearing of mourning dress appear in archival letters from 1880. On the death of Louisa Clifton in Western Australia in 1880, her sister-in-law, Christina Clifton, found the mourning dress ritual a nuisance at such a traumatic time: ‘having to make mourning dresses is a great harassment just now, both for want of time and means to buy what is required. I wish ladies could adopt wearing only a little black as gentlemen do.”? The timing of this protest was significant since the funeral and mourning reform associations had in the 1870s attacked the extravagance of mourning dress as well as funerals. Over the next two decades, reform efforts in both Australia and Britain helped to reduce the time women spent in deep mourning, to simplify the costume, and to relax the formerly rigid rules. Many men increasingly signalled mourning merely by a black armband. Looking back from 1942, Helen McCrae recalled her mixed feelings on first wearing mourning at the age of 16 in 1890 on the death of Georgiana McCrae. On the one hand she remembered feeling proud to wear mourning for the first time, especially as it made her feel ‘everyone was looking at me sympathetically’. But with the benefit of hindsight, ‘I was really most dreadfully uncomfortable with crepe scraping the skin off my chin, and round my wrists, and the horrible smell of crepe nearly made me sick.’!° Increasingly from the 1880s even women mourners merely

added a touch of black, or compromised by recycling black dresses from former days of mourning, perhaps with fresh black trimming or a new black bonnet.

Widows and widowhood The outlook for widows in nineteenth-century Australia was as bleak as in Britain, especially given the lack of old-age pensions and limited access for women to insurance and friendly society benefits (see plate 12). Widows outnumbered widowers by a ratio of about 3:2 in New South Wales in 1888, and the gap between the two widened with age.!! Widowhood could be a traumatic experience, especially if strong family support was not forthcoming. Widowed families were a substantial proportion of the poor receiving assistance from charities such as the Melbourne Ladies Benevolent Society and the

New South Wales Benevolent Society.!'* Newspapers such as the South Australian Register testified to the plight of destitute widows; in March 1847 friends were encouraged to subscribe to help the family of William Hele, aged 42, an Adelaide builder, who left a widow with six children, with very limi-

ted means. The Perth Gazette in 1852 thanked ‘charitable persons’ in the community, including perfect strangers, for contributions to help a widowed woman; an auction was also organised to realise generous prices for the ‘few articles of furniture of a widow lady recently bereaved’.!°

Psychologists such as Beverley Raphael and Colin Murray Parkes have examined the process of grieving among randomly selected groups of widows. They observe major stages of grief, starting with a first stage of acute anguish

at the moment of death, followed by a defensive shock and numbness. The

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next phase is usually characterised by severe anxiety, restlessness, and acute ‘pangs of grief’, followed by a third stage of apathy and depression, before making efforts to reorganise life and face the future. The immediate respon-

ses to a spouse’s death vary greatly, but my study of grief and mourning among middle- and upper-class widows in Britain from about 1850 to 1914

demonstrated many of the features noted by Parkes and Raphael. Most experienced an initial stage of numbness, shock, and disbelief, followed after

the funeral by the intense psychological pangs of acute grief in the early months. Blanche Balfour was plunged into extreme grief as she lay ‘ill and distraught’ for several weeks. Agnes Greig also experienced despair and desolation, so that she often broke down at night, was utterly disorganised, and unable to sleep or concentrate. These nineteenth-century British widows usually suffered a profound sense of the total disintegration of their lives, because in most cases they had been dependent on the money, social status,

and professional careers of their husbands, so they were often left with reduced financial means and the loss of their houses. '* Women were expected to play a more significant and sustained role in the process of mourning the dead than men—as seen most clearly in the practice of middle-class widowers returning rapidly to their professional work, while widows mourned at home for many months, or even years. Widowers could seek solace in early remarriage, as did Sir Alfred Stephen on the death of his first wife, Virginia, from puerperal fever following the premature birth of her

ninth child in thirteen years in 1837. On her deathbed she asked her dear friend Eleanor Bedford to take on Alfred and the children if she died. It is likely that Virginia also advised her husband to marry Eleanor, which he did only eighteen months later. Fifty years later when Eleanor died in her turn, Sir

Alfred Stephen told his daughter, ‘I have taken part—purposely—in Legislative and some other public duties’, to help distract from his sorrow. Widowed men seem to have strongly disliked living alone; four years after his

wife’s death in 1876, Alfred Bussell of Western Australia feared loneliness once his last child left the home: ‘I shall be left alone at length, I believe, the ill that I have always dreaded. It was a fearful dispensation that left me alone for the finish.’!° Sir Samuel Way, Lieutenant Governor and Chief Justice of South Australia, also sought immediate refuge in work on the death of his beloved wife on 14 May 1914. Lady Way died very suddenly of uraemia, and though her death was a ‘terrible blow’ and Sir Samuel was aged 78, he announced soon afterwards that ‘I intend to go on with my work.’ On 10 June he admitted, ‘There is no doubt that relief as well as distraction from grief is obtained in congenial work.’ In concentrating on a current legal case he found ‘not merely dis-

traction, but temporary relief from my sorrow’. Indeed he informed Lady Bosanquet on 24 June, ‘I “buried my dead out of sight” for a whole fortnight while preparing the Wallaroo judgement.’ The arrival of another forty-eight condolence letters, however, ‘reopened the fountain of tears’. On completing his judicial task it was a sad pleasure to ‘let grief be her own mistress still’.!¢

It should be added that Sir Samuel was comforted throughout by a deep

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Methodist faith in reunion in heaven, and that he was still further distracted by the amputation of his cancerous arm in September. Other professional widowers found similar relief in work. By contrast, widows in deep mourning dress could be isolated at home for months to work through their grief, which may have been a sterner option in the short term, but was arguably a more effective way to resolve grief in the longer term. This gendered difference in mourning is well illustrated from the

diary of Jane Macartney in Melbourne in 1863 to 1864. Jane Macartney reported on 1 August 1863 that Charles Griffith, her husband’s cousin, had died from consumption. Two days later his widow Jane, a close friend, came to Jane Macartney’s house in ‘agonizing grief’, berating herself because she had been ignorant of Charles’s danger and feeling she had attended him inadequately. Jane Griffith stayed for the next seventeen days with her cousin-inlaw, who provided loving support through the agony of the early stages of intense grief. Jane Macartney slept with her friend every night because her anguish was so extreme and her insomnia so debilitating that they sometimes gained no rest at all.!”

Jane Griffith’s grief involved ‘searching’ for her lost husband, so she needed to talk endlessly about her memories of their lost life together, punctuated by expressions of regret and guilt. Nineteenth-century women such as Jane Macartney had enough experience of death to understand the need for such repetitive revival of memories, and Jane had the time and the temperament to respond generously. Thus on 8 August 1863 she listened patiently to Jane Griffith’s ‘sad remembering night and day’, still reproaching herself ‘so dreadfully’ for not having recognised that Charles’s condition was terminal. Jane Macartney also offered spiritual comfort throughout the seventeen days: ‘May the Lord in His mercy grant consolation to the poor widow—and bless my humble efforts to direct her to the only source of happiness and comfort.’ Given Jane Griffith’s stricken and sleepless condition, it was sensible to take advantage of the opportunity to rest in bed for the first week of acute grief, since Jane Macartney and her sister-in-law, Mary Chomley, were there to support her. The widow left her bed for the first time on 8 August and ventured out two days later, but found it ‘most trying’. Jane Griffith finally packed to move on to stay with other relatives, the A’Becketts and the Chomleys, who would in turn support her through the early months of grief.!® The emotional problems of loneliness and dependency could sometimes outweigh the financial burdens for middle-class widows. Fanny Bussell of Western Australia at age 44 married Henry Sutherland, but was left dependent on his hostile family when he died from cancer in 1855. Her step-son Robert resented the stipulation in his father’s will that he make up Fanny’s income to £100 p.a. for life if she should leave the Sutherland home. Fanny felt isolated against her two adult step-daughters, particularly the manipula-

tive Susan. Three days after Henry Sutherland’s death, Fanny found the prospect of widowhood quite awful. She was alone in the world, ‘with a sense of desolateness which defies description. How this dreadful vacuum is now to

be filled I know not ... The blank in my affections and my occupations, the

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want of objects for my future existence are such only as a widow of a second marriage can appreciate.’ Three weeks later Fanny confessed to her brother John Bussell and his wife, Charlotte, that her fears were justified. She was treated with contempt, neglect, and hostility by her step-daughter Susan: ‘I would do anything to secure a home independent of Susan. It is either complete abasement to her, or a perpetual conflict.’ Susan had unbounded influence over Robert and Annie, and spent considerable time with Annie in her room, excluding Fanny completely: ‘my days pass in almost unbroken isolation’. Fanny had to cope with ‘systematic insolence’ from Susan, who was attempting to control the household: ‘I shrink from the dreariness of a long life with no companion but the cold hard cruel Girl who seems my allotted portion.’ Fanny’s only option was ‘the power of withdrawing should [Susan]

become unbearable’, so that ultimately she was obliged to rejoin her own Bussell family at Cattle Chosen in Busselton, no doubt at some cost to her step-son Robert.!?”

The experience of Julia Suttor demonstrates the vulnerability of widows, even those from rich families. John Suttor had been a wealthy grazier and politician in New South Wales, but he failed to settle his affairs effectively before he died in 1886, leaving legal problems in proving his will which took many years to resolve. Meanwhile Julia, aged 56, was left with limited means, dependent on her nine children; without a home of her own she was obliged to move from relative to relative. The non-settlement of the will appeared to prolong the mourning process for her, leaving her feeling deeply insecure. In

June 1887 she noted in her diary, ‘It is thirteen months today since my dear Husband died and my affairs not settled yet nor likely to be for some time to come.’ She repeated over and over in her diary how sad and lonely she felt without her beloved husband: ‘As far as sorrow and trouble go I think I have had my share. God only knows what I have gone through since his death. Whenever will my troubles end. I fear not in this world.’ Her diary ended four years after her bereavement with her affairs still unsettled. Yet she was a relatively fortunate widow with a large family of brothers, sisters, children and grandchildren, and an active life as a philanthropist and hostess, even if she lacked a home of her own and real financial independence.*° Widowhood often carried a more direct loss of financial security and decline in social status. On the death of her 44-year-old husband, Denis O’Leary, in May 1886 in Melbourne, Fanny O’Leary was initially ‘much afflicted. Her grief at times fearful’, as her mother, Mary Rowe, observed in her diary. Fanny was also deeply anxious about the future, as she admitted in her memoir years later: ‘with my little flock of seven it was a great undertaking alone’. But her mother sensibly encouraged her grief-stricken daughter to let her sorrow have its way in those early days. Four days after her bereavement Fanny became more resigned to her loss, though she could not bear to see the room in Melbourne where Denis died, and dreaded the prospect of her return to their family home in Benalla where everything would remind her of Denis. Fanny admitted later that ‘I do not know how I got through those bitter days ... but God helped me to have courage for what was coming.’ She

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was determined to keep going for the sake of the baby she carried and her other six children.*! Fanny O’Leary’s new baby brought some consolation in September 1886, as did the love and support of her large extended family. Certainly a family of seven children meant that she had little time to indulge her grief openly. She experienced substantial financial difficulties on the loss of her husband’s legal salary. A month after his death her husband’s friends contributed £237 to the ‘McCarthy O’Leary Memorial’ in Denis’s memory, to help the widowed family. Her father-in-law in Ireland sent quarterly cheques of £40 each to aid her, regretting that ‘the ruinous state of Ireland’ eroded his own financial capacity. Fanny later believed she made a mistake in allowing her own Rowe family to persuade her to move from Benalla to Melbourne to be near them, especially as high rents in Melbourne forced her to move house twice. When her fatherin-law’s cheques ceased on his death in 1896, she attempted in vain to make

an income by taking paying guests in Melbourne. In desperation, she then encouraged her sons Arthur and Donogh to move first to England and then to India, to earn a better living as lawyers. At the age of 63, Fanny was stunned when her son Donogh was accidentally drowned in India in 1906, and she was ‘never the same’ after that blow.7 Yet there is a more positive side to the history of Australian middle-class widows which distinguishes them from many of their British cousins. One widow, Maria Windeyer, can stand for many who were fiercely independent, resourceful, and determined—to a degree unusual in the British middle-class widows examined in my earlier study.**> Maria Windeyer of Tomago in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, was a most independent and courageous widow. Her husband Richard Windeyer, a lawyer and politician, was ruined in the 1840s depression and died in 1847 of a long illness, which was probably consumption. Maria was widowed at the age of 52 and left impoverished, as Richard had even been forced to assign his estate of Tomago. However, she had a 13-year-old son, the future Chief Justice, and was determined to regain and rebuild Tomago for both their sakes.** Richard Windeyer died in Tasmania in 1847 but, instead of lingering there to mourn, Maria returned to New South Wales only a week after his funeral to sort out her affairs. A fascinating correspondence between Maria Windeyer

and her brother-in-law, William Henty, in Tasmania tells the story of her struggle to become a capable business woman and rescue her son’s inheritance. Richard had established a vineyard at Tomago as a hobby but his widow was determined to make it profitable, averting the immediate prospect of insolvency, which was not yet ‘quite desperate’. Despite his doubts about

the wine industry, Henty was confident Maria had sound judgment and a clear head, advising her to get a good lawyer and persuade the mortgagees to ‘do a good deal for a widow ... Your position as a widow will give you great

advantage ... Creditors are expected to be liberal with a widow.’ Seven months after Maria’s bereavement, William Henty reported to her father in London: ‘Maria is thrown very much on her own resources and obliged to speculate, for the purchase of Tomago is a problematical good.’ Yet Maria’s

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determination and resourcefulness persuaded her father in London to back her in buying Tomago at auction. Seven years later her wine from Tomago won a certificate of merit in Paris and she was able to educate her son out of the proceeds of the farm and vineyards.*? Other nineteenth-century widows, such as Eliza Shaw of Western Australia, shared similar qualities of independence, resourcefulness, and determination.°

Gendered differences in parental responses to children’s deaths Parents in colonial Australia usually responded to the deaths of their children with sorrow and shock, but they were often geographically isolated and had

to continue working and caring for their remaining family in harsh conditions, with modest resources and support. The consequence was sometimes repression of grief, by men particularly, to minimise their vulnerability, to survive in a hostile environment, and to meet cultural expectations of masculinity. Some women may have had little choice but to follow suit. Silent repression of sorrow by fathers seems to have been most acute on the loss of children: some colonial fathers sometimes seem to have experienced difficulty in communicating their grief to their spouses and in articulating and sharing

intense feeling. Such responses in Australian immigrants may well have reflected the behaviour of many British and Irish working-class men in the United Kingdom, with their strong views on the required characteristics of virile masculinity, which were powerfully reinforced in the male-dominated Australian bush.

The first example of gendered differences in grieving is the parental responses to the deaths of two young boys who drowned, to illustrate the point that child mortality rates from drowning in colonial Australia were significantly higher than for other accidental deaths. For example, in Victoria, drowning was the most important accidental cause of death for male children aged 0 to 4 in 1869-73, accounting for 29 per cent of all deaths by accident. Drowning was also the chief cause of accidental death of boys aged 5 to 14 between 1869 and 1903, declining only slightly from 47 per cent of accidental deaths in 1869 to 40 per cent in 1903. The statistics were similar for boys in New South Wales, and though the figures for girls in both colonies were

marginally better, they were still relatively high. The mortality rates from drowning were even higher in Western Australia and Queensland because they urbanised later, and a higher proportion of children lived along the vast coastlines.*7

These statistics demonstrate that parents in the Australian colonies were justified in their extreme fear of the danger of drowning for their infants and young children, especially as many could not swim. Deaths of children by accidental drowning usually left one or other parent, or both, feeling guilty

and deeply depressed at their own responsibility in not preventing the tragedies, in addition to the impact of normal grief. Given the statistics, this burden on parents was very heavy in colonial Australia, and more so in the

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bush than the city. Accidents such as drowning probably shocked parents more than deaths from many diseases, because accidents were sudden and uncontrollable—they could not be turned into peaceful domesticated deaths by any feat of the imagination. Fathers and mothers reacted in complex and individual ways to these tragic deaths, but gendered differences in the expression of sorrow seem to have been common. Two pioneer settlers in rural Western Australia, Eliza and Will Shaw, suffered severely when two young sons drowned in 1830 on their Swan River property. Eliza Cooper married Will Shaw, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars who had no financial means other than his limited pension. She was a courageous and intelligent woman who came from England in 1829 with a large family and eventually lived to her eighties, surviving her husband Will and five of her nine children. They were allocated a grant of land on the Upper Swan River, thirty-six miles from Fremantle. While Will was building a shelter for the family on their land and clearing the property, Eliza contracted dysentery, so she and her three youngest children stayed temporarily with neighbours.*° On 8 December 1830, Will Shaw pitched a tent on the Shaws’ block, where he left the two younger boys, Frederick aged 3, and William aged 8, with the

servant girl, while he and his eldest son felled trees. Will and Nat Shaw returned two hours later to find the servant awakening from sleep and the two young boys missing. It was later supposed that the boys, who could not swim, were either fishing or drawing water in the river when Frederick was ‘frightened into the water by the Leicester ram’. As Eliza explained, ‘Poor William must have jumped in to save him and both were lost, but God only knows.’ The military were called out to look for them and found both bodies in the river. ‘It was not long before with my own eyes I saw them both—just one

fleeting glance before I was led away.’ The soldiers of the 63rd Regiment showed great sympathy for the parents and buried the two boys ‘in a most romantic, and beautiful spot, commanding a noble and extensive view’.?? It was more than a year before Eliza could manage to describe that day’s ‘terrible happening’ to her family in England, since she was too depressed to write earlier. Grief affected the two parents differently. Will Shaw was the more severely

afflicted by guilt and sorrow because he was the parent responsible for the boys at the time of their death. Perhaps also his faith was not so strong as his wife’s, and he was less resilient and more sensitive. Eliza’s response a year after the tragedy was to look forward rather than back and to accept the will of God: ‘Thank God it is past and I am become resigned to the Divine Will.’ Eliza was reassured by her Anglican beliefs in immortality: ‘Surely, surely they are gone to Heaven!’*® Eliza also found consolation in speaking frequently of her memories of the two boys, recalling numerous episodes of their lives.

By contrast, the tragedy transformed Will Shaw from a cheerful extrovert to a depressed and brooding man subject to occasional irrational and impetuous behaviour. As Eliza put it, ‘he is reduced by sorrow, anxiety and hard work almost to a shadow’. She recounted Will’s immediate response to the accident: ‘[the military] showed the deepest sympathy for poor Shaw and only

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with the greatest difficulty prevented him from throwing himself into the river.

The moment little Frederick was taken out he fell senseless for some time.’ Will tried several times in the months that followed to write to inform their English friends of the tragedy, but each time broke down in tears and had to walk into the woods or the fields to compose himself. Even a year after the accident he still could not write. Will Shaw was never able to mention his lost sons again, and nobody spoke of them to him because they feared the extreme impact. He was more withdrawn and restrained in his relationship with his other children, ‘fearing perhaps to indulge a love that could result in such suffering’. He sought refuge in excessive physical labour that drove him to utter exhaustion and a kind of oblivion.*! Will Shaw stipulated in his will that he would like to be buried beside his boys, but never spoke of them again. His feelings seemed to be too intense to allow verbal expression. A later example from rural Western Australia is also revealing about varying parental responses in dealing with grief. Alfred Pickmore Bussell arrived in Western Australia in 1830, married Ellen Heppingstone, nearly twenty years his junior in 1850, and had fifteen children. Three of these children were born and died at Ellensbrook, their first family home at Margaret River in the southwest, where they were the first settlers, inevitably living an isolated and lonely life. Two children died as infants, but the death of 12-month-old Jasper (from an unspecified illness) in 1868 was the most acute blow, leading Ellen eventually to insist on moving house to escape the unhappy memories, charging that ‘boys and pigs die at Ellensbrook’.** An instructive insight into their different responses to Jasper’s death survives in a letter from 50-year-old Alfred to his brother, John Garrett Bussell, in May 1864, acknowledging John’s letter of condolence. Alfred’s grief for his only son was expressed tersely but poignantly: ‘His death was terrible to me,

unexpected and admonitory. My little man! ... Oh John it was a dreadful time, my Ellen was frantic.’ Though Alfred felt his grief intensely, he preferred not to talk about it but to seek refuge in constant occupation and useful activity to divert the mind from sorrow: I saw that change, entire change was necessary and so with my usual promptitude I started with a party of 5 for the Donnelly ... Ellen stood the journey wonderfully, the cares and fatigues of the march diverted the attention from the absorbing thought and through God, religion and philosophy have restored tranquility.

The Bussells left their five daughters in the care of a neighbour for several weeks. The break seemed to have a salutary effect on Ellen, who had used the time in part to reflect on the consolations of her religion: in Alfred’s view ‘Ellen was getting more reconciled and seemed better dayly’. The only reference to religious consolation here is in relation to Ellen, who also received some emotional support from the local Aboriginal people as noted earlier. Alfred’s attempt to repress his own sorrow through physical exertion and a move away from the location of death failed to have the required effect. On their return home he confided in his brother, John, ‘my wicked tired,

WOMEN, WIDOWHOOD, AND GENDERED MOURNING 14l

murmuring spirit could improvise no consolatory thought and David’s wail for Absalom even now was gushing at the heart’.*? The evidence so far has been drawn from pioneer settlers in rural Western Australia in 1830 and 1868. The final two sets of evidence suggest that different gendered responses to babies’ deaths can also be found many years later in the eastern cities. It is instructive to examine the gendered roles of the parents at Dora Hindson’s death from gastroenteritis in 1890 at Sorrento in Victoria during a family holiday. All the nursing was carried out by the baby’s mother, Alice, and her sister Louisa, with no references to the father except at the very end, chiefly because John Hindson was busy at work in Melbourne. Louisa Henty wrote of her brother-in-law on 29 December, the day of the 7-

month-old baby’s death: ‘John too is terribly cut up, in fact quite dazed. He seemed hardly to know what he was doing on Monday [28 December|—he did not realize how ill the dear was and almost laughed at me for my fear.’*4 The next day at the funeral John’s wife commented, ‘John’s distress was very very great. He did not seem to have taken in how very ill she was or rather he was too hopeful when ever she seemed a shade better.’>° It seems likely that John Hindson was under pressure from his work in Melbourne during this crucial week, which may explain his absence during the baby’s illness, since they probably arranged that he continued working while the two sisters took the children on holiday. Louisa was concerned that Alice might not be able to return to Sorrento after the funeral: ‘if John finds it necessary to go to the Factory she will remain with him for she said she would not leave him alone’.°° However, two weeks after the baby’s death Louisa Henty observed, with an undertone of criticism, that John was in Melbourne, rather than in Sorrento with his family: ‘he seems quite well now—he was upset too for a while’.*’ John probably felt a culturally learned sense of masculine obligation to return to work rapidly and to appear to be ‘quite well now’ only two weeks after his child died. The father seems to have been genuinely grieving but was apparently unable to share it with his wife.

Separate spheres and a gendered division of labour operated in death as in life, but clearly both partners suffered from this. The two Henty sisters, Alice

and Louisa, would not have been surprised at John’s apparent emotional detachment at death because it was characteristic of the Henty men, judging by the family papers. Francis Henty and his male relatives were preoccupied with business and estate affairs, mentioning death only in passing. It was the women who attended and nursed the dying, and memorialised it in writing, while the men’s prescribed duty was to organise and attend funerals. A large gender gap in expectations about grief and mourning was revealed by the common comment in the colonies that only mothers, and especially bereaved mothers, could really understand the loss of a baby. This is most clearly demonstrated in the forty-two condolence letters on the death of 5month-old Harry Keall in Perth in 1910 from an unidentified wasting disease. Most of the letters were from women and almost all were addressed to Arum Keall, the mother—a member of the pioneer Clifton family—rather than to both parents or to her lawyer husband, Gerald. About a quarter of the corre-

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spondents were men, but these included formal letters from solicitors as well as those from male relatives. None of the letters from men contained any religious consolation and all were short. Several were stilted and clumsy, and even inappropriate. Three of the male writers (and only one of the women) emphasised that the baby’s death was ‘for the best’ given his weak constitution and probability of a life of suffering. Several men urged the mother to ‘bear up’ and look for a silver lining, including Arum’s 28-year-old brother Astley: I’m so sorry for you both but at the same time dear old girl its for the best isn’t it. I think it would have been worse for all if the poor little chap had gone on. The chances were too many against him. I do hope old girl you are not fretting too much ... Be the same old Briton you always have been Poll. With much love.*®

By contrast, eight mothers wrote intensely emotional letters expressing a deep sympathy which came from sharing the grief of having lost their own children. Mary Whitely understood Arum’s trial only too well, having lost ‘four of our own sweet pets’. Many evidently held Ethel Burt’s view that ‘only those who are mothers can understand what you are going through’.*? One of the eleven male writers, having lost his own baby, agreed with this opinion in the only letter addressed directly to the bereaved father: ‘perhaps the poor

mother feels [the keen sense of loss] in a more intense form than a man does’.*° Ellie Le Souef expressed most movingly the shared grief of bereaved mothers: You have this terrible lonely heartache into which not even your husband can enter—(only a mother who has given a precious baby back to God can enter into your heartache) ... My heart yearns over you in your hour of sorrow. I know it all, just what you are going through and in spirit I am living the time with you. Oh! Those long long hours that will not end, and that awful ache of the mother heart, and the shrinking from facing the future with the precious little life gone out of it! What can I say to you?*!

The female writers emphasised the loss of the close physical and emotional bond between mother and baby, and expressed themselves empathetically. One female friend wrote: ‘I don’t think there can be any sorrow quite like yours—and it must be like losing a part of yourself that nothing on earth can make you forget.’44 As Katie Clifton observed: ‘The dear little things wind themselves so much round our hearts and it is so hard to let them go.’*? This widespread view that only mothers, and especially bereaved mothers, could truly understand and empathise with another bereaved mother, might help to explain the apparent exclusion of fathers such as John Hindson from an important part of the process of mourning. It was evidently considered appropriate for women to write the condolence letters on the death of a child and to address them directly to the mother rather than the father. The baby’s father was not expected to share his wife’s grief in the same way—and that

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minority of men who did put pen to paper certainly had enough trouble expressing their feelings of sympathy to reinforce this view. Cultural expectations about grief responses could help to shape behaviour.

In the century before 1914, women were usually more active than men both in coping with death and grief, and in writing about their sorrow and memorialising the death of a loved one. Experts on grief and mourning conclude from their research that the psychological and emotional responses to the loss of a loved one are broadly the same for women and men: that they experience similar feelings of shock, sorrow, or panic, varying in intensity, order, and time in different individuals.44 The Australian colonial evidence broadly concurs with that of the nineteenth-century British middle class and with the views of the experts. There is little evidence of pronounced innate differences in the grief patterns for men and women, and far more evidence of powerful social conditioning regarding the required characteristics of men and women in their separate spheres. Most actual feelings expressed about grief seem to have been similar for men and women, varying according to the period, religious beliefs, particular circumstances, and the degree of control considered appropriate. However, there was a significant difference in the expression of feelings in that men were in general expected to be more restrained in communicating their sorrow, and women more emotional. This seems to have been a matter of social control and cultural training rather than a consequence of innately different basic feelings according to gender. This cultural difference is captured well by Ted Murray-Prior when he expressed his shock and grief on the death of his sister’s child in 1876 with the qualification: ‘I am a bad hand at condoling or comforting not because I don’t feel for those in trouble but it seems quite out of my line’.4° Women were the chief mourners in colonial Australia; mourning ritual and the offering of condolence and comfort were

their province. The individual histories of men’s experiences of grieving remain largely hidden from history.

Chapter 8

Christian Mourning Ritual and Heavenly Consolations The British and Irish rituals that followed the good Christian death were transmitted in similar forms to colonial Australia, together with the assurance

of heavenly consolations for true believers and hell for sinners. Important mourning rituals included visiting the graves of family members and writing condolence letters which often affirmed the promise of heavenly reunions. In contrast with Britain, colonial Australian clergymen continued to emphasise the fires of hell rather than the bliss of heaven, but their parishioners naturally focused on Christian hope when offering condolence. However, increasingly from the 1880s a substantial minority of condolence letters were secularised, losing the Christian language of comfort, and withdrawing to the rhetorical emphasis on memory and the alleged value of time in alleviating grief. Visiting the graves of beloved family members was an important source of consolation and a vital part of the process of mourning for many bereaved. Graves served several purposes, as sites for remembrance, for meditation, and for Christian devotional ritual. They helped to associate the deceased with a

particular place, which evoked a sense of closeness to the dead, and thus became shrines which kept alive the memory of the loved one. Tombstones were carefully chosen to mark the burial place and provide a defined site for future commemoration. Visits to the grave were usually more frequent in the first year of bereavement, and the memory of the loved one was often most movingly recalled on the subsequent anniversaries of the death. Given the importance of the grave as a shrine, families often sought to maintain the physical site as a place of beauty, replacing flowers, planting shrubs, and avoiding future neglect. Hence families were anxious to buy grave plots in perpetuity and opposed closure of old graveyards, especially if bodies were to be moved. 144

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Grave visiting became more common in the second half of the nineteenth century with the creation of pleasant landscaped cemeteries which served as sites for commemoration with meaning for both Christians and unbelievers. From about 1875 cemeteries such as Rookwood in Sydney gained a reputation for beauty and tranquillity to rival Kensal Green in London and Peére Lachaise in Paris (see plate 13). The continued popular appeal of grave visiting in such picturesque grounds was expressed in the ‘In Memoriam’ notice placed by the Roberts family in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1921 for their son Percy, accidentally killed three years earlier at the age of 20: Sad and lonely do we wander To thy grave not far away

Where they laid our darling son ... . Each Sunday finds us at his grave To calm our lonely hours And unto him I always bring A bunch of fresh-picked flowers. It is only a grave but it needs our care For our dear Percy is sleeping there.!

Grave visiting and Catholic ritual The Rowe and O’Leary families, 1878-1921 The correspondence and diaries of the women in the Rowe and O’Leary families are very revealing about death rituals and grave visiting in an impoverished Anglo-Irish Catholic gentry family from 1878 to 1921. Catholic death ritual drew on a long history of the cult of the dead since the Middle Ages,

and its legacy was a prescribed, familiar ritual presided over by the priest, which did not have to be reinvented by individuals in succeeding generations. In the O’Leary family the faith and rituals of Catholicism were more influen-

tial than the power of memory, but both played their part. The familiar Catholic ritual was extremely comforting in helping to alleviate the initial shock and grief, and then for many years allowing the family to believe they could assist the progress of their loved ones through purgatory. In this sense,

Catholic ritual was psychologically more helpful than Protestant ritual, because it offered relatives a practical role in helping loved ones who could no longer influence their own fate. The families of J. P. Rowe and Denis O’Leary were devout Catholics whose lives, especially in older age, revolved around regular visits to their church

and to the graves of their loved ones. Mary Rowe lost her husband, J. P. Rowe, a successful Victorian squatter, on 16 May 1878. Three months after his death Mary Rowe and her daughter Janey went shopping in Melbourne to order two memorials to J. P. Rowe. The larger memorial for the grave was a sculptured marble Celtic cross on a bluestone pedestal, standing seven feet

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high and costing the considerable sum of £64 10s. The total bill came to £95 13s Sd for the two crosses, together with five days’ labour, engraving and

other expenses.2 The commemorative influence of these two crosses over future generations was illustrated sixty-two years later when Mary Rowe’s daughter, Fanny O’Leary, asked a friend to check the condition of the crosses, and take a small photograph showing that they were in good order.* The widow annually commemorated the anniversary of her husband’s death on 16 May 1878, noting sadly in May 1882, ‘I miss him indeed every day, every hour, God comfort me!’ In 1883 she stated in her diary: ‘This is the anniversary of my good husband’s death—five long years since he was taken from us. Jane and Cecil went to Holy Communion and I only to Mass to offer up my

poor prayers for his dear soul!’ On the 1885 anniversary she went early to confession and Holy Communion, ‘and spoke to the Priest about prayers for my dear husband—at the next Mass for the Dead’. By 1906, twenty-eight years after his death, Mary was still attending mass and Holy Communion each year on the anniversary of his death and their wedding anniversary, followed by visits to his grave.*

On 14 June 1886, Mary Rowe’s daughter Fanny O’Leary suffered the death of her husband, Denis, a Benalla lawyer and grand nephew of Daniel O’Connell, at the age of 44. Small black-edged memorial cards adorned with a cross requested that family and close friends ‘of your charity’ pray for the soul of Denis O’Leary, who died ‘fortified by all the Rites of the Church’.’ The prayers of family and friends for the repose of Denis’s soul helped Fanny, as did her visits to his grave. She told her eldest son, Arthur, that he must never forget his father and pray for his soul every day and visit his grave as often as possible. Fanny’s grief for Denis took years to resolve, if it ever did, and all

she could say three years after his death was that she was ‘not quite so unhappy’.® Every year Fanny noted in her diary that she visited Denis’s grave on the anniversary of his death to leave flowers in his memory, as on the fortieth

anniversary in 1928: ‘My sad anniversary when everything went out of my life.’’

Fanny O’Leary was also ‘broken hearted’ in 1906 at the sudden death of her son Donogh, aged 22, by accidental drowning in India. M. W. Curtin, a Jesuit priest from Xavier College, Melbourne, reassured her that he offered at her request ‘a good many prayers for the repose of your dear child’s soul’. The

priest consoled her that, as a good Catholic mother who had met so many trials with fortitude, she would meet all her loved ones under happier circumstances hereafter.® Again, a small memorial card decorated with a cross was sent to family and friends requesting prayers for Donogh’s soul.” Fanny remembered the anniversaries of Donogh’s birthday and death each year in her diary, and visited his grave with flowers, even in 1924 when it was very hot and she was exhausted.!9

Mary Rowe, the matriarch of the family, died in November 1914 at the great age of 95, after a long illness following thirty-six tough years of widowhood. Her daughter, Cecil Rowe, the middle-aged spinster who had been her chief carer for many years, had inherited her mother’s piety and attended early

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mass almost every morning at 7 a.m.'' On 20 November 1914, Father McKenna administered Holy Communion to Mary Rowe and anointed her and she died three days later. Her two daughters and the nurse prepared her body for burial. No details are given of the deathbed. Next day the entire fam-

ily gathered for the burial, when many promises of masses were received. Cecil Rowe and her sisters attended Mass and Holy Communion on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday following their mother’s death; on the Friday they went to the cemetery where Fanny O’Leary was also remembering her wedding day in 1873. Cecil meanwhile attended efficiently to all the duties accompanying a family death—sorting through her mother’s papers, learning how to deal with her mother’s will, the distribution of her property and the auction of her furniture.'* In a sense, these administrative responsibilities were a practical component of the ritual of death in the weeks immediately following, helping to concentrate the mind, despite the shock and numbness, and to postpone the impact of acute grief. In 1914 the deaths of two generations of the family, of Fanny O’Leary’s aged mother and her husband, were remembered simultaneously in grave visiting and church ceremonies. In 1919-20 the ritual was extended yet again to include a third generation—Fanny’s two daughters, Florence Brennan and Amy O’Leary, as well as her sister, Janey Dunsmore. Janey, aged 63, was the first of the three to die, but her death caused the least response as she had been

suffering from mental illness requiring intermittent institutionalisation for some years. Janey was usually referred to as ‘poor Janey’ and her death was overshadowed by the continuing illness of her niece, Amy O’Leary, aged 42, suffering from pleurisy. Only Janey’s husband, Alex Dunsmore, was present at her death and lonely funeral, though her sisters Cecil and Fanny shared with him the prior watch over the coffin. Fanny noted in her diary, ‘we feel broken hearted’. Meanwhile, Amy’s life was in danger several times in her last eighteen months, so Father Claffey came to the house frequently to administer Holy Communion and talk with her, while the doctor attended even more often, to no avail.!° Amidst all the concern for Amy O’Leary, her sister, Florence Brennan, aged 37, died very suddenly on 1 September 1920, following an unexpected operation. Her mother, Fanny O’Leary, was devastated, especially as she was so unprepared for this daughter’s death: ‘I am stunned and heart broken.’ Next morning the family attended mass before the funeral service, and fortunately

Amy was well enough to bear the ordeal. On Friday 3 September Fanny simply recorded ‘letters in heaps and all stunned’—the staccato effect reflect-

ing their shock. Fanny and her son-in-law, Tom Brennan, went to see Florence’s grave: ‘alas!! It is too awful.’ By Sunday, as the shock wore off, Amy was ‘wild with grief’? at her sister’s death—her trauma undoubtedly heightened by her knowledge of her own approaching death. For the grieving

mother, the next month was shared between the ritual of mourning for Florence, selling ‘dear Florence’s things’, and worrying about Amy’s ill-health.

Father O’Keefe celebrated mass for Florence, and Fanny and Florence’s husband paid regular visits to Florence’s grave, carrying flowers. !4

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Attention was yet again suddenly shifted from the dead to the dying in mid-

October 1920. Six weeks after her sister’s death, Amy was again exhausted and seriously ill with pleurisy, the doctors trying an anti-toxin one week, but retreating to the traditional leeches the next. From 17 December 1920 Fanny reported her daughter’s condition as ‘desperately ill’ and ‘delirious’, until she finally died peacefully early on Christmas Eve, having seen Father Claffey for

some time the day before. Her mother was alone with her through the final night, when she saw a change in her condition for the worse and called the family for the ninety minutes’ death vigil. As with earlier deaths in this devout Catholic family, no diary particulars were given of the deathbed scene or the

spiritual state of the sufferer, who resolved it with her God and her priest. Amy was buried later that same day as it was so hot, but the stunned mother could write no more. Fanny O’Leary went to mass followed by a visit to Amy’s grave on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, but was ‘overwhelmed with misery’. The following days were punctuated by visitors, letters, and the busi-

ness of death, though Fanny tried to beat off her ‘terrible depression’ by scrubbing the balcony and undertaking other tough household chores.!° Fanny O’Leary’s diary for 1921 was inevitably a record of intense grief for her two daughters, both taken from her in the prime of life. Fanny tended to alternate between grave visits, so that on 4 June she visited Amy’s grave at St Kilda with her sister Cecil, followed by confession, and next day she went with her youngest daughter, Dolores, first to Holy Communion, and then to Florence’s grave at Box Hill. The cemetery visits, twice a week in the first year,

were often coupled with church ceremonies, and Fanny was usually accompanied by Dolores, Cecil, or both. Fanny’s diary entries were brief and factual

with few emotional comments, though she described herself as ‘terribly stricken’ on 15 January. Otherwise she allowed herself only to write, as after visiting Florence’s grave on 8 October, ‘Oh, My dear Florence ... its too sad’. On Florence’s and Amy’s birthdays their mother went to church as well as to the cemeteries, and she noted the erection of their two tombstones. On the anniversary of Florence’s death on 1 September, the family went to church to hear two masses said for her soul, followed by a visit to her grave at Box Hill. Similarly on Amy’s anniversary in December the whole family went to mass and took lovely flowers to the cemetery. !®

Yet in all this grave visiting, Fanny O’Leary did not neglect the anniversaries of other loved ones, including her sister Janey, her mother Mary Rowe, her son Donogh, and her husband Denis. She also introduced younger generations of her family to the ritual of church ceremonies to pray for the dead, and grave visiting to remember them; her grand-daughter, Margaret, the daughter of Lenore Ryan, was taken to visit her two aunts’ graves at the early age of 7. Fanny and her family evidently gained additional comfort from photographs of Amy and Florence, which were specially reproduced, framed and circulated to a wider circle of relatives and friends. '’ The round of grave visiting continued in subsequent years, with the addition of sister Cecil’s grave

in 1925, and brother-in-law Alex Dunsmore’s in 1924, while Fanny herself survived into her nineties like her mother.

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Condolence letters and Christian consolations Condolence letters played a significant role in mourning ritual in colonial Australia by rallying the support and sympathy of extended family, friends,

and community around a bereaved family—reinforcing the role of the funeral. Since colonial families were likely to be scattered and displaced from their original families and communities in Europe, these functions assumed greater importance. Bereaved families usually found condolence letters therapeutic and comforting, despite the additional burden of having to compose appropriate replies. On the death of her young son in 1850, Charlotte Suttor, wife of New South Wales pastoralist William Suttor, noted in her diary: ‘I read this morning several kind and sympathising notes from my friends. Surely it is one of the many blessings God gives us in this world to have kind hearts mourn when we mourn.”!® Three weeks after her husband’s death in Western

Australia in 1855, Fanny Sutherland expressed gratitude for ‘the kind and sympathising letters which now form my greatest pleasure’.'? On his wife’s death in 1886, Sir Alfred Stephen, Chief Justice of New South Wales, was genuinely grateful for the numerous kind letters and personally attended to the replies: ‘this day Alice takes to the post 218 notes of thanks for our many kind-hearted inquirers’.?° Friends and relatives of the bereaved often took time and trouble writing letters to express their sympathy and support, and to offer Christian consolations. Letter writing was still an art among the colonial middle classes which merited time especially set aside, with condolence letters assigned priority against other correspondence. Most condolence letters up to the 1880s used a religious discourse drawn from familiar biblical passages, popular hymns,

devotional texts, and the prayer book. Some letters may appear to modern readers to be artificial or formulaic, but to their contemporaries they often gave genuine comfort. The best condolence letters conveyed religious conviction and sometimes intense emotion in eloquent biblical prose; the most help-

ful were often simple letters written from the heart, by friends or relatives who knew and loved the deceased.

Many mourners offered the promise of solace based on the confident mutual Christian faith of writers and recipients. As Eliza Brown in Western Australia told her father in England on the death of her son in 1844: ‘Though the sympathy of friends is very pleasing it is religious consolation that is most available in the present instance and from which all our comfort is derived.’7! Spiritual comfort was widely offered up until the 1880s with an assurance that the familiar pieties would be soothing and would also offer hope for the future. Fewer correspondents in colonial Australia used black-edged notepaper than in Britain, especially that with deep borders, and they used it for shorter periods because of the extra expense and the inclination to less formality. Some light is thrown on mourning etiquette by a letter from Christina Clifton in Western Australia to her son Cecil in 1880 on the death of her sister-in-law. Christina thanked her son for the useful present of black-edged notepaper, as

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she would otherwise have avoided the extra expense. However, Christina and

her husband did not care for the conspicuous long cross on the envelopes, which ‘could only be intended for Roman Catholics’. Cecil wisely offered to exchange the envelopes for plain white, ‘as there is no reason for us to use deep bordered black ones’.*? Three large collections of nineteenth-century condolence letters are examined here, recognising that the contexts of the particular family and manner

of death are vital in interpreting such letters. The three families were all Anglican—scarcely surprising among the few wealthy colonial families who were able to keep such archives, and they had a keen sense of social standing and family continuity. Within each collection, I have selected the more personal letters from friends and family, eliminating official condolence letters and those from well-wishers who scarcely knew the family. Religious condolences dominated the earliest collection of letters on the death of Rachel Blomfield in Sydney in 1870, aged 43, of ulceration of the

bowels, after many years of ill-health. Her husband, Revd John Roe Blomfield, was a devout Anglican clergyman, who began his life as an Evangelical and endured the tragedies of the deaths of three wives within eight years.*? This collection of condolence letters from 1870 was fairly representative of such correspondence in pious Christian families over the previous half century. All three collections include significant numbers of Christian consolations, but those for Rachel Blomfield in 1870 were almost entirely Christian in con-

tent. The Blomfield correspondence was the most eloquent and used the Christian discourse of consolation fluently and naturally. Christian writers, such as Edward Rogers, reminded Revd John Blomfield that his wife’s death

was the will of God: ‘It is indeed a bitter cup; but it cometh from a loving Father’s hand.’2* But the corollary for Christians was that God would provide the strength and comfort to enable the bereaved to bear this heavy burden. As Flora Windeyer suggested to the grieving widower: ‘God is very merciful and withdrawing one blessing He will vouchsafe a nearer sense of His presence and of His Love than you had before.’*> The supreme consolation for Christians lay in the belief in the immortality

of the soul, which offered the hope that contrite Christians would leave the suffering and sin of this earth to join their God in heaven. Edward B. Clarke, Rachel’s brother-in-law, suggested a formulaic biblical view of her heavenly destination: Think of her as having passed the waves of this troublesome world, as delivered out of its miseries and as now safely landed on that shore where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest ... She has departed this life in his faith and ... she sleeps in Jesus until the Resurrection morning, when her incorruptible glorious, spiritual body shall rise, together with those whom she loves in Christ, to meet the Lord.7°

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The writers on the death of Rachel Blomfield had far more to say about Rachel’s prospects of meeting the Lord in heaven than about family reunions hereafter, which were scarcely mentioned. That deeply pious family would not have presumed its members to be worthy of heaven, since for them salvation

depended upon divine judgment and individual faith. The emphasis of the Blomfield correspondence was on the need for spiritual preparation in cases of early or sudden death like Rachel’s: ‘What a warning to us all. May God prepare us all for our bitter end.’*’ Whereas the first collection of letters marked the death of a devout middleaged mother, the last two memorialise the deaths of a 14-year-old boy in New South Wales in 1898, and a 5-month-old baby in Perth in 1910. These two sets of letters were both about equally divided between writers who empha-

sised Christian consolations and writers who did not mention religion at all.

The second collection related to the death from a bicycle accident in 1898

of Jack Carruthers, 14-year-old son of Joseph Carruthers, Premier of New South Wales. It was more difficult to be quite so confident of a heavenly future for a 14-year-old boy, who was too old to have the baby’s assurance of innocence and too young to be well prepared spiritually. Only five of the fourteen Christian writers on the death of Jack Carruthers in 1898 attempted to offer some reassuring reference to his heavenly future. Usually these involved taking refuge in familiar biblical pieties, suggesting that Jack was ‘taken away

from the evil to come by Divine mercy’, or that he was now ‘at rest and at peace for ever’. While the Blomfield letters in 1870 were silent on heavenly reunions, the two later collections suggest that the anticipation of happy family reunions in heaven became the primary consolation for many on the death of a loved one. These references became more explicit and less conditional, simply assuming that Christian families would meet again in the next life, without the earlier need to justify salvation by contrition and pious behaviour in this life. On the death of Jack Carruthers, Mr Fowler of Camperdown consoled the grieving father that before long the bereaved family would ‘ascend in essence to a joyful and happy meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again’.*® The third collection of condolence letters was for S5-month-old Harry Keall, used in the last chapter to illuminate gendered differences in grieving.

Harry Keall died in Perth in 1910, towards the end of the period of high infant mortality and thus at a transitional time when the traditional forms of consolation were losing their influence. This was the last generation of parents who had themselves suffered from high infant mortality who could con-

sole and empathise with other bereaved parents. Arum Keall, the baby’s mother, was an Anglican, while her husband Gerald Keall, a solicitor, was probably an agnostic. On the death of Arum Keall’s baby in 1910, only six correspondents out of forty-two mentioned heaven, however obliquely. Ellie Le Souef sent the only detailed comment: ‘Your dear little precious baby has

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gone from your loving care, but has gone to the tender care and keeping of the Greater Love, and will grow in beauty, loveliness and holiness without the handicap of sin that we all have in this life.” This consolation suggested that dead babies were spared the suffering of a sinful world and were permitted to retain the relative innocence of newborn babies.*? Three other women friends of the mother noted merely that the baby had been spared much sorrow, and

was ‘an angel in heaven’, safe and happy ‘in our true home’ with God.°9 Condolence letter writers in 1910 found far more difficulty in describing the joys of heaven than in 1870, even for a sinless baby, reflecting the decline in both religious beliefs and biblical knowledge.

The supreme consolation of the prospect of a happy family reunion in heaven remained the same for the six writers who advanced this ideal on baby Keall’s death in 1910. Aunt Annie Morton expressed this most directly: ‘This life would be a poor thing if we could not rest in the hope of some time in the future meeting those again that we have loved so dearly here.’?! May Nicolay of Geraldton shared this belief in reunion in the afterlife: ‘I know you know you have not lost him, one day we shall all be united with those whom we have loved, and have gone before.’** These Christians of 1910 expressed none of the anxiety of Charlotte Suttor or the Blomfields that they must be spiritu-

ally worthy of their salvation, for they assumed an automatic transition to heaven for Christians in their own family, especially for babies. However, Ethel Burt revealed her awareness that these Christian hopes of heaven were not universally held in 1910; ‘You still have [Harry] among the Angels. Mr Keall mustn’t think this is nonsense. I know it is true.’*? Although half the condolence letters on the death of baby Harry Keall in 1910 contained Christian consolations, they tended to be briefer and more

conventionally formulaic than those of 1870 and 1898. These later letters suggest a significant decline in Christian faith, often expressing no more than a residual Christianity; but some also remind us that Christian forms of consolation, however nebulous, lingered long after church attendance may have ended.

Hell and heaven There was a highly significant omission in all these Christian consolation letters, since hell was usually absent, though they mentioned heaven frequently. By contrast, Australian clergymen and theologians placed more emphasis on

the torments of hell than the joys of heaven. Many Christians feared bad deaths and sudden deaths because they believed the unrepentant or unprepared sinner was judged at the moment of death and was thus doomed to the eternal punishment of hellfire. Protestant theology was more severe than that of Roman Catholics, since at the Reformation it rejected the Catholic doctrine of purgatory whereby the prayers of the living could slowly purify repentant sinners after death. Protestants had but two stark alternatives: God’s judgment at death determined whether souls were worthy to ascend to heaven, or were condemned by their sinful lives to burn in hell forever. The doctrines of

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judgment and hell provided preachers and theologians with abundant material for terrifying sermons on the horrors of eternal torment and the urgent need for repentance.

Hell and judgment were transformed in the minds of many liberal Protestants in Britain between 1850 and 1920. From the seventeenth century some theologians saw the concept of everlasting torment as incompatible with a just and loving God, and the doctrine of hell was slowly eroded. More progressive nineteenth-century British Protestants increasingly believed in some sort of intermediate state, where spiritual progress was possible before the last judgment (rather like the Catholic purgatory), and they interpreted hell as meaning the absence of God. Thus, after 1850 theological debate in Britain focused rather on the nature of heaven, since hell was already in retreat. By contrast, clerical controversy in Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century focused on the nature of hell rather than heaven, since hell was still a terrifying and powerful force for many. It is instructive that the debate about the nature and meaning of hell continued for decades longer in colonial Australia than in Britain. One reason for this difference is that ideas took time to move between the two countries. Another reason was the strength of the

Catholic Church: about 28.7 per cent of the Christian population in New South Wales in 1881 was Catholic, and about 24 per cent of that in Victoria, according to the 1881 census.** The Catholic Church, unlike some Protestant sects, relied on its great authority, as promulgated in the Syllabus of Errors, to remain impervious to the challenges of science, biblical criticism, and free thought. Catholic bishops and priests continued to insist that punishment in hell was eternal and its fires would burn bodies.*° A Bulletin satirist in 1914 attacked the insidious influence of Catholic teaching on hell, even for lapsed Catholics who remembered only too well that ‘Heaven was narrow but Hell was wide’: Now when I was a small, religious lad, *Twas a very tremendous respect I had For saints and Devil and red Hell-fire; To save my soul was my one desire; I ran to Mass and I said my prayers, Pve shaken it off, but ve shaken well Those hopes of high Heaven and fears of Hell; But the child retains what the child has learnt, And into my being Belief was burnt; So I think sometimes—and it makes me mad— That in me still lives that Devil-scared lad. And when I am dying at home in bed, Will I suddenly find my courage fled, And old Fear o’ the Fire come back to reign In Reason’s place in my fevered brain? Will I hear that lad, ere my breath has ceased. Cry: ‘Send for the priest! Ah, send for the priest!’*®

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The historian Kathleen Fitzpatrick later recalled her terror as a child at a convent school, which sent her to a mission conducted by the Redemptorist Fathers; they were ‘shock troops’ trained to save souls ‘by making eternal punishment so real to sinners that they could feel the heat from the fires of Hell burning their cheeks’. Their vivid, pitiless details of the horrors of eternal torment ‘terrified me out of my wits’, particularly as she was unable to distinguish mortal sins from the venial kind which allow detention in purgatory rather than hell.?’” Even in 1969, a Gallup poll in Australia showed that 64 per cent of Catholic respondents still believed in hell, as compared with 26 per cent of Anglicans and 17 per cent of Presbyterians.*°

Like the Catholic Church, most Wesleyans in Australia remained unaffected by the new spirit of inquiry: ‘their belief in the literal reading of the

Bible and the inevitability of eternal punishment for sinners was hardly shaken’. Justice Henry Higgins, son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister, wrote of the effect of Wesleyan teaching on his own intellectual transition: The doctrines current as to hell—doctrines which seemed to have become current

in all the Christian churches as to the eternal torture of the wicked, of those, indeed, who had not ‘accepted Christ’—had from childhood, oppressed me like a nightmare. It was the eternal, never-ending pain, the hopelessness of any limit to the pain even after thousands and millions of millions of years, that affected my mind the most ... It was the horror of what was in store for the majority of our race, that haunted me.°?

Most Presbyterian clergy were rigid Calvinists who took as hard a line on hell as the Methodists and Catholics. Revd Alexander Campbell in Adelaide, in an ‘Essay on Life and Death’ in 1870, attacked the doctrine of the intermediate state, insisting that hell was ‘the ultimate prison of wicked men, in which they are to be “tormented day and night forever”.’ Death for the sinner literally meant indefinite punishment in ‘the eternal fire’.*? Revd Robert Hamilton delivered a funeral sermon in 1870 with the same unequivocal message at St Enoch’s United Presbyterian Church in Melbourne. He argued that there was no scriptural warrant to regard the death of sinners as merely annihilation, since the language of the Bible was explicit. The wicked were cast into ‘the fire that never shall be quenched’ to receive everlasting punishment, ‘filling [the soul] with horror, suffering, and anguish’ far greater than the excruciating mental and spiritual distress known to human experience.*! Most Presbyterians, Methodists, and hardline Evangelicals of other Protestant sects continued to hold such views well beyond the 1890s. On the other side of this controversy were liberal Anglicans, Unitarians, and the more progressive minority of the other sects, who were striving to abolish or at least moderate the terrible doctrine of hell. These progressives included a minority of Presbyterians in Victoria, led by the controversial Dr Charles Strong, who split their Church in the 1880s and 1890s on the ques-

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tion of the infallibility of the scriptures. Indeed, as Hugh Jackson observes, in the 1880s and in Melbourne especially ‘there was an unprecedented public debate about science and the Bible, about the atonement, about the status of creeds’.42 Revd H. N. Wollaston, Anglican incumbent of Trinity Church, East

Melbourne, preached three sermons on ‘The Immortality of Man and His Future Punishment’ in the 1880s. Wollaston published these sermons in pamphlet form to enter an earnest public protest against ‘the pagan, unchristian, and God-dishonouring theory’ of ‘an eternal life of pain and agony in hellfire, as the future lot of the ungodly’. In his view, the doctrine of endless torment and ceaseless physical agony in hell was ‘terrible and revolting’, and would encourage people to leave the Church. Instead, Wollaston followed Archbishop Whately’s Revelations Concerning a Future State, published in 1829, in suggesting that everlasting punishment meant simply extinction or perpetual banishment from the presence of God, since the ‘fires of hell’ were metaphorical.*?

Revd George Walters of the Hyde Park Unitarian Church, Sydney, expressed similar views in 1892 in a pamphlet on ‘Is There a Hell? If So— Where?’ He regretted that many Protestant clergy in Sydney endorsed the extreme doctrine of an eternal fiery hell, with the body forever unconsumed in flames, which was bound to cause people to sink into despair or leave the church. To believe in everlasting torment was a ‘disgusting dogma’ and the ‘worst possible kind of atheism’, which transformed God into ‘a hideous demon’. Walters believed there was no doctrine of hell in the orthodox sense in the Old Testament, while the New Testament was contradictory, and the Book of Revelation highly figurative. It was better to accept as commonsense

that hell existed within human nature and our sins were punished in this world.** Thus, for liberal Protestants, hell either became a nebulous concept or it disappeared entirely. But as the Melbourne Age pointed out in 1897, the Presbyterian Assembly was not in the least affected by liberal Protestants’ efforts to modify the doctrine of hell. The Assembly simply continued its ‘plain dealing in hell and damnation’ in its warnings against increasing agnosticism. The Age protested

that it was a very severe view of predestination which allowed such a tiny minority of Protestants into heaven and damned to hellfire all the other religions, not to mention the growing numbers of unbelievers.*° As late as 1921 the Anglican Archbishop of Perth still found it necessary to insist that the old ‘terror’ teaching of hell should be abandoned and a more truly Christian teaching should replace it, offering hope of ‘progress and purgation’ after death. He expressed his belief in the intermediate state between death and resurrection, where souls would not just be sleeping but would be put to work by God. He argued that, although prayer for the dead had been banished from Protestant practice for hundreds of years, it was recently being

revived as a natural instinct in response to the Great War. He was recommending essentially that Protestants adopt their version of the Catholic

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dogma of purgatory—as liberal Protestants in England had urged on the Church for decades. But he drew the line at invocatory prayers to the saints as if they were divine.*°

Although the Australian theological debate about the infallibility of the Bible and the nature of the afterlife focused on hell, it is worth exploring briefly the more muted discussion of the nature of heaven. In the main it seemed to perpetuate the traditional view of heaven as a static, peaceful place of eternal worship of God—often described as ‘unspeakable bliss’. This is well illustrated by the funeral sermon delivered by Revd S. Simm in Newcastle in 1877 on the death of Flora Windeyer, wife of Archibald Windeyer, son of the pastoralist. Simm described heaven as ‘the home of the weary. The rest of the afflicted’, where Christians would ‘join in everlasting praises’ of ‘the Lord sitting upon a throne’. Unfortunately, ‘the scene there is beyond the grasp of our comprehension’, except that it was a place without illness, sorrow, hunger or

thirst.*” This traditional restful and passive concept of a psalm-singing heaven exercised immense influence on popular ideas because it featured prominently in favourite Evangelical hymns. The traditional view of heaven as worship in the presence of God held that continuing marriage in the next life was not possible and earthly loves were irrelevant; moreover, there was even doubt as to whether souls would retain

their identity and earthly memory, allowing them to recognise their loved ones. However, an anthology by Robert Bickersteth and other British theologians, entitled The Recognition of Friends in Heaven, in 1866, concluded that those who were saved would have a continuing identity in the next life, which would allow them to recognise their families.*® This theological debate about identity and family recognition was reflected in the writings of several edu-

cated and thoughtful Australian Christians in the following years. On the death of Rachel Blomfield in 1870, Flora Windeyer expressed her strong view

that personal identity and recognition of beloved friends continued in the afterlife: ‘I firmly believe that all the ties of affection formed in this world will be strengthened in the other, provided only they have been formed in accordance with God’s Holy Will.’*?

Philip Chauncy, a district surveyor from Castlemaine, Victoria, wrote a detailed memorial on the death of his second wife, Susan, in 1867, including his own fairly sophisticated perspective on the afterlife, and the debate on recognition. He believed the scriptures taught that there was an intermediate state, but were vague about its nature, because such detailed knowledge would render human beings unfit for their present life. People had no idea, except from the Book of Revelation, about the condition of the soul after death. On the question of mutual recognition, Chauncy could not conceive that his long communication with his ‘sainted Susie’ would end, since their souls were so closely knit together: ‘If I feel any assurance of ever being with my Saviour and knowing him, I think I can feel assured that my communion with my beloved partner did not terminate with her existence in this life, but that we shall spend a joyful eternity together, and in the company of others whom we have loved on earth.’*°

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The concepts of heavenly love and marriage were increasingly condoned by liberal Protestant clergymen, accepting that personal recognition of family in heaven would be combined with a continued affection for those remaining on

earth. Several popular religious books encouraged this growing interest in happy homes in heaven, including Heaven our Home, published by Revd William Branks in 1861: ‘We have a home for eternity, and that home is heaven ... a home with a great and happy and loving family in it.”>! An even

more popular book was the 1868 novel by the American writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar, which ridiculed the traditional heaven of psalm-singing saints, presenting instead a superbly landscaped community of contented families.°* Among Evangelical Protestants, at a more popular level, religious enthusiasm often took heavenly family reunions for granted some years before liberal theologians followed suit. Isabella Wyly came to Adelaide in 1851 as an

apprentice draper from a Dublin Anglican background which she soon rejected in favour of a more zealous Wesleyanism, shared with the employer who became her husband. Her family accepted numerous deaths in the 1850s in the secure knowledge that they would all ‘meet in the next [world] where all trouble shall be at an end, around the throne of God in Heaven, there to reign with Him forever’. They would make ‘one unbroken family in Heaven’, where ‘parting is not known’.>? These optimistic perceptions of the afterlife were developed in a published sermon in 1895 on ‘The State of the Righteous after Death’ by Revd James White, a Presbyterian of Singleton, New South Wales, who argued that belief in a future state was universal. The righteous would retain the same personal

identity in the afterlife, where they would recognise each other and retain their senses, speech, intellect, and affections: “Io what purpose, but to enable

them to participate in the unspeakable and inconceivable beauties and delights of their surroundings ... That they love, that they may see and recognize their long-lost loved ones, may hear again their voice that was hushed, and touch again the hands that had vanished.’ Marriage would be unnecessary in heaven since all actions would be motivated by love—a proposition which might appease those concerned about meeting more than one spouse in heaven, but would upset many devoted married couples. No distinctions of rank would exist in heaven, where moral goodness was the only criterion.**

Australian Christians differed from those in Britain not only in their greater obsession with a fiery hell, but also in rejecting the idea of a more dynamic and progressive heaven. More liberal Protestants in England, such as

Revd James Baldwin Brown, a Congregationalist, ridiculed the passive heaven of eternal praise and rest for weary souls ‘mooning on the mount’. Baldwin Brown proposed instead a progressive concept of heaven as a place of dynamic progress and ‘fruitful sunlit activity’ where the Victorian work ethic could extend to the afterlife.°> But ideas of this nature were largely confined to progressive nonconformist clergymen in England and the United States, who preached to unenthusiastic congregations; a progressive heaven seems to have received little support in Australia.

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Certainly some Australians shared Baldwin Brown’s contempt for the traditional Anglican view of weary souls on a mount forever singing psalms and praising God. The Bulletin’s criticism in 1884 of the heaven depicted by Isaac Watts, John Wesley, and other pious poets was characteristically irreverent, while still capturing the feeling of the sceptics in the community: These singers of the harp and crown foreshow no higher hope than a mystic spiritual deathlessness—a state of winged and enduring ecstacy—an immortal intensity of bliss ... The seers of the Church sing of a shining eternity of Life in crystal mansions—of waltzing round the Lamb for ever on strictly temperance drinks ... No one would stay there who had been much about New South Wales ... They would choose rather annihilation than a beerless futurity.*°

Condolence letters had little of substance to offer on the nature of heaven other than conventional pieties and references from the Book of Revelation. More informative is a fascinating exchange of letters in 1899 between Herbert Brookes, businessman and pastoralist, and Alfred Deakin, later prime minister, on the death of Brookes’ beloved first wife, Jennie. Brookes wrote to Deakin from the depth of his despair, disillusioned by his vain efforts to find consolation in thoughts of reunion with Jennie in an afterlife: There in the open glare of the public-life of heaven where spirits are all poised in unclouded space, living in the spiritual ether without so much as a tiny atom to interpose to hide one soul or two souls from the host of saints and angels and the blessed dead—It has no attraction for me ... Can that other place ever compensate for the joys that might have been here?

Deakin responded to his deeply depressed friend with a brisk dismissal of Brookes’ view of God as ‘the Eternal Key hole Inquisitor’ presiding over a heaven on ‘a public electric lighted stage’. He reassured Brookes that if God existed, then heaven must be ‘beyond our best ideals’ and dreams, not below them, for God was neither ‘a Demon or a Fool’. Heaven must have its ‘recesses, its havens and its homes or it would not be Heaven. Each of us will have that Heaven which is such to him or that Hell which he deserves. We can have both or either here and now as well as anywhere’. As Deakin pointed out, his young friend was creating his own hell for himself on earth by his self-torture and fantastic fears, and must ‘take hold of yourself’.°’

Secular consolations Some critics of the traditional view of heaven and hell ultimately became agnostics or atheists, or turned to alternatives such as spiritualism. Still others, such as Henry Kendall, the poet, looked instead to a rather amorphous pantheism. Two years before he died in 1880, Kendall revealed himself

more fully than he usually did outside his poetry to another writer, N. W. Swan, who was also ‘a dreamer in Arcadia’:

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You ask me for my thoughts on the subject of the after life. I hardly know what to say. Faith is not in my possession; but hope is. I cannot see why man with all his trust, loves, aspirations, and abstract creations of supernatural beauty, should perish like a kitchen cabbage. It seems to me that Love calling to Life out of the shadows of Death is a sublime assurance of our immortality. ... [he business of singing hallelujahs, for ever and a day, round an old man on a damp cloud, is not consonant with my conception of the Ineffable Creator who

crowns the august mountains with eternal grandeur, and arrays the deep green noiseless valleys with eternal beauty.°8

Many other educated Australians were affected by religious doubt, biblical

criticism, and scientific progress. As we shall see later, some like Dr John Springthorpe became more liberal Christians; others such as Herbert Brookes travelled a similar course but eventually came close to agnosticism. In these cases family deaths profoundly affected their philosophy of life and altered

their thinking about death. Such was also the case with Dr Robert Scot Skirving, whose one-year-old son Robert died in Sydney in 1887 of summer diarrhoea while in the care of a nurse and an incompetent medical friend, and while his parents were on holiday in New Zealand. Skirving survived the guilt and grief by ‘just working hard at my profession’, while his wife Lucy could not bear to think about it. Two more sons were born and Skirving attained worldly success, but during the Great War they lost a second son, whose death reduced his father’s enthusiasm for life in general and altered his religious views. He became ‘a reverent agnostic’ on several Christian dogmas which had become untenable, including the concepts of heaven and immortality: ‘Why should there be a hereafter, evil or good? I think it much more likely

that, mercifully, we wholly die and somatic death is indeed the end of all things. Except for my son, Archie, I do not know that I very specially wish to foregather with anyone in the ‘Mansions of the Blest’, or that other place.’»? From the 1880s, an increasing number of condolence letters reflected the combined impact of science, secularism, and religious indifference, doubtless

reinforced by antipathy to a fiery Christian hell. The content, tone, and emphasis of such secular letters changed significantly from about 1880 since many writers experienced difficulty in offering adequate alternatives to reli-

gious consolation. Their letters were usually short and uncertain of the appropriate form, and sometimes they confessed to groping for words which

would not hurt. They had lost the familiar Christian language of comfort which once flowed so readily, but had not yet found adequate substitutes, and

often apologised for writing at all. Many secular condolence letters began with the formulaic disclaimer that ‘no words can fully express the meaning of such a loss’.° Joanna Barr-Smith wrote to Sir Henry Ayers, an Adelaide politician, on his daughter’s death in 1887: ‘I ought not to intrude on your grief. Silence always seems to me best when one is stricken very hard.’®! The only consolations offered by many non-Christians were the passage of time and the support of family and friends. Those writers who complained of the impotence of words to express their sorrow often offered the passage of

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time as the primary consolation. Christian writers earlier in the nineteenth century usually avoided such mention of time, because they recognised that few mourners wished to be advised that in time they would forget their loved

ones. But when Christian comfort was unavailable, time was frequently offered as a substitute. Several writers to Joseph Carruthers on the death of his son in 1898 suggested that ‘time the only healer [may] help you to forget’—another thought which became formulaic from this period.®* Other secular writers placed greater emphasis on the importance to the bereaved of the

support of loving relatives and friends. Two women writers on the death of Daniel Mackinnon in 1889 observed, ‘I know all your family will be helpful to each other.’°? Five writers to Arum Keall on her baby’s death in 1910 hoped it would bring comfort to know that ‘your friends and neighbours are feeling for you in your trouble’.

Condolence letters generally became much shorter between 1880 and 1910, including more platitudes, trite phrases, and clumsy offers of sympathy. Gendered differences were clear, since male writers seem to have experienced more difficulty in expressing their emotions in writing, when they could not take refuge in the language of religion. James W. Taylor’s exceedingly short note to Joseph Carruthers on Jack’s death in 1898 contained only three lines,

starting with the words: “The occasion is too sacred for words—if manly sympathy can assuage your awful grief, you have mine to the brimful.’® ‘Manly sympathy’ seemed to mean few words with little outward display of emotion. Many secular condolence letters must have been depressing for mourners to read, for they provided little or no positive consolation. Joanna Barr-Smith may well have been right to suggest that silence was best unless the writer could offer promises of heavenly reunion or practical support, or else turn to memory as the primary secular solace, which is the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 9

Memory and Mourning Secular and Material Commemoration

Memory was and still is a vital component in the dynamics of grief—important to both Christians and unbelievers, but more central for the latter. The Australian psychiatrist Beverley Raphael has underlined the mourner’s initial idealisation of the deceased, and intense absorption in memories of the past,

as part of a lengthy review of all aspects of the lost relationship, which becomes more realistic as it is gradually allowed to include negative memories. “The bereaved reviews, piece by piece, memories, thoughts, and feelings associated with the image of the dead partner. Sadness and other feelings rele-

vant to each of those memories are experienced intensely as each is faced, treasured, and reluctantly put aside. The process is inevitably painful, yet must progress.’! Letters and diaries of Australian colonists provide rich illustrations of the central significance of memory in the long process of grief resolution, and the vital role of family and friends in talking through their memories of the deceased. For example, on the death of her close friend Rachel Blomfield in 1870, Flora Windeyer shared with John Blomfield her own ‘sad experience’ of widowhood: ‘It seems impossible at first to believe that the separation has no end on this side of the grave. For weeks, almost for months, we are in expectation of a sound of the voice, of the footstep that we

know from all others. We sometimes fancy we can hear both. Flora Windeyer also described long and loving conversations with five different female friends of Rachel who had shared their memories with her, a process that had been comforting for all of them.’ Early settlers who were far from distant family and friends in Britain took special comfort in keeping alive the memory of their dead children. Eliza and Thomas Brown were middle-class English migrants to Western Australia who settled in the tiny town of York, where their 6-year-old son, Vernon, drowned in the river Avon in 1844. Eliza Brown found solace in writing long letters to her father in England about the details of the tragedy and the rituals and 1l6l

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consolations she considered helpful afterwards. She also found comfort in her Christian faith and in the sympathy and support from ‘all the neighbourhood’ around York, who related readily to a tragedy that could so easily afflict other families. Eliza talked through her memories of her son’s life and death with these sympathetic neighbours and with her remaining two children.*

Indeed, nearly a year after Vernon’s death Eliza Brown reported to her father on her youngest daughter: ‘The little Eliza has become the more

endeared to me from her sensibility in taking the tidings of poor dear Vernon’s fatal accident so much to heart.’> She also gained comfort from visits to Vernon’s grave, alone and with the children. She talked to them about their little brother around his grave, taking pleasure in creating their store of memories. Nearly seven years after the tragedy she wrote to her husband on ‘a very serious matter’ concerning their 4-year old daughter Matilda: On Sunday being too early for Church I took Matilda and the rest [of the children] to the 1° Vernon’s grave. Matilda had often been enquiring and had not the story only by heart but at heart about the ... fatal catastrophe ... I wish before leaving the District to have a railing round dear Vernon’s grave. I know you will not deny me.°®

Keepsakes, hair remembrances, and photographs Many Australian colonists found comfort in external symbols of remembrance, such as photographs or drawings of the deceased, and precious belongings and locks of hair. Psychologists explain this in terms of the importance of the physical memory of the loved one in the ‘searching’ period of the

grief process, once the shock of the death is starting to wear off.’ Colin Murray Parkes has described this phase of ‘yearning’ or searching for the dead loved one as characterised by intense pining, insomnia, and preoccupation with thoughts of the deceased.® During this initial period of intense grief, and often for long afterwards, mourners try to keep their loved one’s memory alive as long as possible through material memorials. Tangible reminders of the recently dead were even more important in colonial Australia than they had been in the home country. Vast distances separated mourners from their original families when elderly parents or other close relatives died; colonists had often not seen them for years and were unable to be present for the death or the funeral. Detailed ‘particulars’ of the death sent by relatives were considered a great comfort, as we have seen, but so also were material mementos of the loved one. Any precious possessions that had been used by the deceased and carried memories were treasured by the mourners. This is well illustrated by a letter from Fanny Bussell (later Sutherland) in Western Australia in June 1835 to her cousin Capel Carter in England, in response to Capel’s sad news that their brother, Dr William Marchant Bussell, had recently died in England. Capel had also warned the Bussell family that she and William’s widow, Caroline,

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were sending a box of ‘relics’ of William by the next ship. By the time the ship arrived, the first shock had subsided, but their miserable reception of this ship was different from their usual joyful welcome of ships carrying family letters and consignments. Tears were shed when they opened Capel’s box containing its ‘melancholy contents’ which seemed ‘to bear the impress of the icy hand

of death’. The family decided to delay proceedings until the evening, when William’s relics were again spread over the table. The ‘picture case’ containing William’s likenesses was opened and the contents read and discussed with more composure. Though it was distressing to see these material reminders of their dead brother for the first time, these ‘relics’ would become treasured keepsakes which brought comfort for years to come.” Such keepsakes assumed all the more importance if they were known to have been well-used or favourite possessions of the loved one. On the death of his wife Eleanor in 1886, Sir Alfred Stephen, Chief Justice of New South Wales, wrote to his daughter, Virginia, about the family’s agreement on keepsakes of Eleanor, carefully explaining the associations of each one: We have been arranging,—all four of our home girls being consulted,—as to a few keepsakes—recollections of dear Eleanor—to be sent to you and Jessie—and they will be despatched by an early opportunity (by steamship) as follows—To yourself the pearl spray, which was dear old Grandma Consett’s gift to your mother—Also her watch, given by me on our marriage—a seal-skin muff, a present to her from me a couple of years ago—and a miniature of Mrs Consett, with photographs of yourself and Alfred and your children.!°

The most utilitarian gifts were welcome provided they were well used by the deceased, so Agnes Bedford was pleased to receive her mother’s washstand and the seat in Lady Stephen’s dressing room.!! Such keepsakes spoke powerfully of relatives and friends since dead, and of the value such middle-class families placed on them, especially those which had originally been gifts. Among wealthy families, brooches, lockets, and memorial rings containing locks of the deceased’s hair were valued as a tangible reminder of the person in life. On the death of Capel Carter in 1837, Caroline Bussell described the deathbed scene, adding an unusual practical detail concerning a hair mem-

orial of Capel: ‘I have preserved a good deal of her hair for the dear Australians and yourselves. She had been laid in her coffin before I had cut it off and it was impossible to get at it without raising her up a little ... I found her hair had never been nicely combed up behind.’!* The Bussells in Western Australia were pleased to receive this hair memento and possibly Fanny and her sisters enclosed a lock of their beloved Capel’s hair in lockets. That was certainly the custom in the Bussell family in England a generation later, as

a letter from Fanny Bowker’s husband, Thomas Arthur Bussell, to their daughter Francie testifies—on the death of his 15-year-old son Charles in 1869. The parents gave Francie a special memorial gift on her birthday, three months after her brother’s death: ‘the little locket with your darling Brother’s

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hair is from us all, and will I know be valued by you ... At some future time possibly a photograph may be placed in the other side of the locket.’ The

parents were also having a photograph of Charles framed for his brother William.!? Such detailed accounts of customs relating to death and mourning

were frequently passed backwards and forwards in letters between the Bussells in England and Western Australia, and the customs were perpetuated in the colony.

Ample evidence survives of similar hair memorial customs in other Australian families. The hair was sometimes woven into a basketweave pattern or set in an elaborate feather design and tied with fine gold thread, rather than being set in jewellery. After her 19-year-old son William Throsby died suddenly of scarlet fever in 1848 at Thomas Hassall’s home, Mrs Throsby wrote to thank the Hassall family for their care of her son. She was particularly grateful that the Hassalls sent her a lock of William’s hair.‘4 Among the

Winter Cooke family papers in the La Trobe Library, Melbourne, is an envelope containing two locks of hair, the earlier lock belonging to Benjamin P. Winter who died in 1844. A handwritten note states that the lock of hair was cut off by his cousin, Samuel Pratt Winter of Murndal, Victoria, who was the owner of the second piece of hair, light brown and peppered with grey,

which was cut off after his death on Christmas morning 1878.'° Dr John Springthorpe wore a ring containing a lock of hair of his beloved wife Annie as late as 1899.16 It was also common practice to offer gifts of bracelets, rings, or lockets of hair of the living, which would be even more prized as precious family keep-

sakes after their deaths. The exchange of knots or locks of hair, like photographs, became an accepted means of maintaining family solidarity among and between the scattered Irish migrants in Australia and Ireland. Catherine Brennan was one of many who sent a knot of her own hair from Ballyknock in Ireland to her 6-year-old nephew William in Australia in 1866.'” Before the days of photographs, few mourners possessed the skill of artist Georgiana McCrae to produce ‘likenesses’ of the dead. As Georgiana watched over her dying 3-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, in London in 1834, she made

a pencil sketch for remembrance, which she treasured later in her years in Australia.!® After the death of her husband, Dr Fred Vines, at sea in 1868, Emily and her children went to live with her Bussell family in Busselton, Western Australia. She was delighted in 1869 to receive ‘two perfect likenesses of [herself] and dearest Fred done by dear Aunty ... such a comfort to us to possess them’. They were hung in a prominent place in the drawing room to remind them continually of Fred. Emily herself wanted a few more small likenesses of Fred, while other members of the family and close friends had also requested them.!” The improvement in photography from 1859 made memorial portraits accessible to all, especially after the development of the dry plate in 1878. Cheap photographic ‘likenesses’, as they were called, provided a particularly tangible reminder of the loved one, which served as a vital means of main-

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taining contact and encouraging unity between families in Britain and the colonies. David Fitzpatrick’s Oceans of Consolation provides numerous examples of photographs being sent between Ireland and Australia—of both the dead and the living. This custom of sending photographs of the dead,

including children, seems to have been initially more common among Catholics, who received ample evidence from their families of its use in Ireland. Daniel and Mary Brennan in Ballyknock, County Down, Ulster, sent news in 1876 to their grand-daughter, Mary Brennan, in Australia of widow Kelly who had just lost her husband: ‘She sent his likeness in the coffin and has to send the picture of his tomb.’2° Such customs were often continued in Australia, and probably also encouraged their use among Protestants, since they fulfilled such a need. The practice of sending photos taken shortly before death, especially of elderly parents, was common among both Protestants and Catholics. Charles Foreman, an English migrant working on the gold diggings

in Mount Egerton, Victoria, in 1865, thanked his Protestant sister in Cranbrook, Kent, for sending out likenesses of both parents: ‘I cannot of course see any difference in Poor Father’s from the one I received before his death but in Mother the change is very marked.’?! Photographic likenesses of the recently dead were cherished by all classes in Australia, but more evidence has survived from the comfortable classes. Flora Windeyer, in a letter after Rachel Blomfield’s death in 1870, revealed her understanding of the importance of photographs in the mourning process. She thanked the widower, Revd John Blomfield, clergyman of All Saints Church Parramatta, for sending three photographs of Rachel: The one giving her side face is excellent and I have put it in a little oval frame like the one in which I have Mamma’s and they hang close together ... What a comfort it is to possess the image of those who are removed from our sight. We may raise an image of them in our minds but that has not the tangibility of one we can see with our bodily eyes. I know what a comfort it has been to me to have my dear husband’s image.”

The Henty family of Victoria, a prominent mercantile family, also valued portraits and photographs as memorials of their lost loved ones. Two years after the death of Edward Henty in August 1878, his brother Francis noted in his diary that ‘Dear Edward’s picture’ had arrived from England, and he was

subsequently pleased that Edward’s portrait was accepted ‘at the Picture Gallery’.23 James Henty, elder brother of Francis and Edward, died suddenly of apoplexy four years later in 1882 at the age of 82. As head of the family and a prominent politician, James Henty was conscious of his status and the need to memorialise it. He seemed to have a presentiment of his approaching

death, for his last visit outside the house was to the studio of Foster and Martin on Collins Street to be photographed.?*

Some photographic studios sought to capitalise on the popularity of photographs of the deceased. The Crown Studios in George Street, Sydney,

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advertised in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1901, below the funeral notices, under the heading ‘Deceased Friends’: ‘We are supplying a special class of Beautifully Enlarged Portraits from any Photographs sent to us—High Art Pictures finished in Monochrome— From 1901 photographs were even mentioned in the popu-

lar verse included in the In Memoriam columns of the Sydney Morning Herald; a frequently used line was adjusted slightly to read, ‘For my thoughts often rest where thy photo is seen’.*® Obviously, great value was placed by grieving relatives on precious possessions used by the recently dead, as tangible reminders. Such material symbols became all the more significant to families in England when informed of the sudden death of relatives on the other side of the world. Revd Jermyn Cooper and his daughter Margaret in Yorkshire were devastated at the news in 1898

that their son and brother had been lost in the bush near the Gascoyne Goldfield of Western Australia, and that his body had been recently discovered by a search party. Revd Cooper was more fortunate than most bereaved English relatives of deceased gold prospectors in that he had influential friends in the colony to press his case. He desperately requested more details, though Margaret feared ‘we shall never hear any more as no one can know of his last hours’.*”

The family’s need to grieve and commemorate Cooper’s death was the more acute because they were not present at his death or burial. The good offices of their friend Henry Prinsep enabled the Cooper family to send a heavy wooden cross from Yorkshire to the Gascoyne Goldfield; after a year in transit the cross was eventually erected over the grave, and a photograph was

sent to the family.*® Father and daughter wrote several times saying how much it would also mean to them to have their loved one’s precious belongings returned to them in Yorkshire. But in July 1898 Margaret was horrified to learn that her brother’s remaining possessions were of little value and had been auctioned to pay for his burial and the search for his body—a common police procedure when they assumed a deceased man had little money and no known relatives. Margaret thought at first there had been ‘some mistake’, and that only his furniture had been sold, and that his clothes, books, letters,

watch, and other personal items would be forwarded to the family in Yorkshire. If these had all been sold by mistake, she asked Prinsep to ensure they were bought back: ‘we long to get his things home’. Two months later the acting warden of the Gascoyne Goldfield reported that he had recovered most of the ‘small things’ that were sold ‘at poor Cooper’s sale’ and bought them back for £2, which was about the price paid. 7”? This underlined the contrast between two different cultures of death. The middle-class European tradition greatly valued personal material mementoes of the dead, especially when they died on the other side of the world. By contrast, the bush way of

death for those presumed destitute had to be more concerned with basic essentials of survival and recouping the costs of burial.

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Positivist concepts of memory and secularists’ consolations A number of Australian intellectuals, such as Charles Strong, Herbert Brookes, and Bernard O’Dowd, were influenced by positivist concepts of memory, derived from intellectuals in nineteenth-century France and Britain,

who drew on the secularising ideas of Enlightenment thinkers. Auguste Comte’s ‘Religion of Humanity’ held that the influence of the illustrious dead continued through their ‘subjective immortality’; their memory and virtues were recalled in ceremonies and statues designed to inspire future generations. Frederic Harrison in England argued in 1877 that the immortality of posthumous influence of the truly great, such as Newton, ‘rises into greater activity

and purer uses’. Harrison stated that everybody influenced other lives for good or ill: ‘The highest part of ourselves, the abiding part of us, passes into other lives’, creating ‘an immortality of influence, of spiritual worth’.°° This concept of social memory had little appeal in nineteenth-century Britain outside a small group of agnostics and intellectuals searching for a consoling force outside Christianity, but it did have some impact on the development of the concept of a civil religion during and after the Great War. There is even less evidence of positivist influence in the Australian colonies than in Britain, though several mourners referred to it on the death of Charles Henry Pearson, former professor of history at King’s College London, and later an influential Australian scholar and teacher. The son of an Anglican

clergyman, Pearson early demonstrated his unorthodoxy by adopting Christian Socialism at Oxford in the 1850s. Rather like Charles Darwin, he seems to have retained a broadly Christian faith in God, while burdened by doubt. In 1872 he sent a condolence letter to an old English academic friend, C. E. Norton, admitting his difficulties in offering real consolation: “The commonplaces of grief are doubly meaningless when one writes them from the other end of the world, and I am afraid my philosophy has only made me more and more sceptical as to any compensation hereafter for such losses here. Perhaps God is more merciful than we think.’3! Lady Loch, wife of the former governor of Victoria, wrote from London in 1894 to Mrs Pearson on her husband’s death: ‘How gratifying to see how his literary works are appreciated—in that way he will live and guide us still.” An Australian correspondent assured the widow that the loss of such a great scholar to such a young country could not be overestimated: ‘His name will live in the history of this colony as well as in the memory of those of his friends who knew his worth.’?? Positivist ideas of the posthumous influence of the great and the good also

had some impact on the ideas of Australian secularists. The radical poet Bernard O’Dowd experimented with secularism, spiritualism, and theosophy after abandoning his family’s Irish Catholic faith. During his secularist phase

he edited the Australasian Secular Association’s publication the Lyceum Tutor, in 1888. As O’Dowd stated in the Lyceum Tutor, most secularists were materialists and atheists, who worked to promote human improvement in this

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world rather than the next. He included in the Lyceum Tutor a section on suggested funeral ceremonies for freethinkers, while acknowledging that many

secularists objected to any form of service. When required to recommend some form of secular consolation in his ‘Burial Address’, he took the positivist position on the memory of the deceased: This loss of distinct individuality is death, all that was good in him or bad in him influences his race still ... We know of no life but this, and our dear friend to whom we now bid farewell, can never live as a distinct individual, he can only, in the words of noble George Eliot, ‘Live again in lives made better by his presence’ ... Then shall the memory of our lives be our noblest monuments, and the fond affection which shall linger after us, constitute a truer immortality than ought else can bestow.°?

J. S. Langley, a rationalist lecturer, compiled an elegy ‘At a Rationalist Graveside’ in the early 1920s, arguing that if death was annihilation, then that meant eternal sleep. Langley himself liked to think of his loved ones as having returned to earth, ‘as having become a part of the elemental wealth of

the world ... I will leave the dead where Nature leaves them ... Hope and work belong to the living; sleep and rest to the dead.’ Langley concluded on a strong positivist note: The reward of a useful and virtuous life is the conviction that our memory will be cherished by those who come after us, as we receive the memories of the great and good who have gone before. This is the immortality of the great ones of the world who have benefited their age and race by their noble deeds, their brilliant thoughts, their burning words. Their example is ever with us, and their influence hovers round the haunt of man and stimulates to the highest and happiest daring. Man has a heaven here on earth, created by the fireside, and built up by the love and respect of kindred and friends.**

Charles Strong, founder of the controversial Australian Church, shared the belief that one important aspect of immortality was the continuation of human influence on others—a view accepted subsequently by John Springthorpe and Herbert Brookes, both occasional attenders of Strong’s church.

Herbert Brookes and memory In 1899, after two blissful years of marriage, Herbert Brookes, at the age of

32, suffered the tragic death following surgery of his first wife, Jennie, daughter of Charles Strong. Brookes’ father was a Queensland pastoralist who made his fortune through mining, and Brookes followed his father as a pastoralist and successful businessman, while also becoming a philanthropist and serious intellectual. Six years after Jennie’s death he married Ivy Deakin, the daughter of another famous Australian, having been befriended by Alfred Deakin and his family at the depth of his grief for Jennie.

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Herbert Brookes held intense but unorthodox religious convictions, akin to the progressive and changing liberal theology of his father-in-law’s Australian Church, which rejected the infallibility of the scriptures, as well as other fundamental Christian doctrines. But as he grew older, Brookes became more of

an agnostic, open to the possibility of immortality, but waiting to be convinced, and placing more emphasis on memory, from a positivist intellectual perspective. Five weeks after Jennie’s death in 1899, he was broken-hearted as he wrote a love letter to his ‘Dear Angel Lover’ beyond the grave. This moving letter deserves quoting extensively to show the depth of his grief and the potential sources of consolation he hoped for on 11 May 1899: Dear Angel Lover I want to feel your continual presence uplifting me and prompting me to pure good deeds in thy dear name ... Oh lover ! Would that I was with you now ... You have passed to rest or to heaven the home of our loved ones ... You have conquered my fear of death and my hatred of the grave and the cemetery. You have taught me

to pray again ... You have proved to me dear angel lover that Love conquers all things that love is stronger than Death ... With the prime conviction that we two sometime somewhere will meet again ...

I am writing this letter to you dear lover and am going to have it sealed up in the tin box in which you placed a piece of our wedding cake and which was to have been sealed up and kept for our silver-wedding ... May we keep it in heaven dear lover! ... God help me to keep your memory clear pure unsullied unspotted. God help me to keep ... [my body] sacred to your memory.°°

Three themes dominate this letter—starting with Brookes’ pledge of eternal love and physical faithfulness to Jennie until they should both eventually meet in heaven. But Brookes’ belief in Christian immortality was, even then, far from certain, demonstrated by the telling phrase ‘you have passed to rest or to heaven’. He was not convinced that souls would go to heaven, even if they were as pure as Jennie. But at least she would have his love throughout his earthly life and they would finally ‘rest’ together in their grave. The other major theme concerned the significance of his memories of Jennie combined with the important commemorative role played by the grave, which he no longer hated since it was their site of mourning.

Many of the numerous letters of condolence from family and friends emphasised the consolations of memory over those of religion, notably those

from Jennie’s beloved aunt Louise Hylton-Bravo. A few days after his bereavement, Brookes evidently expressed to Louise his dismay that his sister, May, urged him to ‘cheer up and be brave’, and bury himself in his work, as if grieving was self-indulgence. May’s advice was, of course, that commonly

offered to grieving professional widowers. Louise Hylton-Bravo reassured him on 15 April: I cannot say to you, as many do, do not grieve, you must and you will—for although as time goes on you will be able to feel that though invisible she is near

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(she said so herself) yet just now your human heart aches and longs for a sight of the lovely body you loved, for her sweet ways and for the sound of her loving merry voice.*°

Jennie’s aunt reminded Brookes that Jennie had left ‘a pure and fragrant mem-

ory which will never grow dim in the heart of one who loved her so well’. Louise Hylton-Bravo’s letters also focused on the comfort she and Brookes both received from frequent visits to Jennie’s grave, to mourn and remember. On one occasion she asked Brookes to allow her to plant a few roses and a bouvardia around Jennie’s grave in the St Kilda Cemetery.*”

Grave visiting did not operate therapeutically in isolation for Louise Hylton-Bravo and Herbert Brookes’ family and friends, but in combination with other consolations of memory. Louise Hylton-Bravo’s wisdom and experience explained her understanding that mourners in the early stages of acute

anguish needed to keep talking repetitively over their memories. She expressed to Brookes a keen desire to ‘come and talk with you and see her picture’, so they could each share their memories: ‘I remember how she sat in the big chair near the fire, with her work on her lap.’ She knew also that Brookes was finding consolation in all his cherished mementos of his ‘dear little wife’. Even Jennie’s surgeon, who had looked on her as a friend, requested ‘a little memento’ of Jennie and invited Brookes to come to see him.>* Elma Bakewell, a close friend of Jennie’s who loved her, requested ‘a photograph of recent years and something that was hers, something prized by her

and unperishable’. She also appreciated her own need to talk about Jennie with those close to her, and wrote: ‘if you grow to feel, that to speak of dear old Jennie does not add to your suffering’, she would like Brookes to come to dinner.*”

The love, support and inspiration of the Deakin family finally rescued Herbert Brookes from despair and ‘soul paralysis’. In August 1899 Alfred Deakin offered Brookes ‘manly loving help ... meant intensely and meant well’. In September Brookes accepted the offer to call on the Deakins and speak with Alfred ‘as I can speak with no other man’. Deakin treated Brookes like a son and opened his home to the grieving man. But Deakin was anxious to see the younger man taking himself in hand and recovering his normal strength of purpose. Deakin believed Brookes’ ‘soul paralysis’ arose from undue emotional and mental repression, but he trusted that the Deakin family would help his recovery—as indeed it did.*° Deakin fully recognised the depth of Brookes’ ‘tenderness and fidelity’, and that his love for Jennie was ‘manifestly holy’, but urged him to be grateful that he had been so blessed by love.*! Brookes not only sought comfort with the Deakin family, but in that dreadful first year of bereavement also sought refuge in relentless work, as did

so many professional widowers. Early in 1900 he declined an offer to join Deakin on a trip to England, preferring not to travel ‘but just wear out with my nose to the grindstone the quicker the better’.*” The first anniversary of Jennie’s death was terrible for Brookes, as his Aunt

Janie in Dublin understood: ‘I know so well how you are living the last ter-

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rible hours all over again and I can only hope that strength may be given you to bear the agony.’ Jennie’s father, Charles Strong, also shared the despair of the anniversary of that ‘black day’: ‘I know what pain must be at your heart. Time, they say, softens but it may also let our grief sink in, in, deeper.’ Charles Strong concluded that they could only resign themselves to God’s will and ‘perhaps we should not weep so much’. But five months after the anniversary,

in August 1900, Brookes travelled to Dublin to spend time with his Aunt Janie. He wrote to Alfred Deakin that ‘things are a little clearer with me ... and faith is a little stronger’, while he was at last able to begin to enjoy again some little things of life like eating.*? Nearly five years later, Brookes recovered sufficiently to marry Deakin’s eldest daughter, Ivy, who brought him renewed love and companionship, as well as three children. Yet Brookes never forgot his first wife, and his second wife encouraged and shared in his remembering. Throughout his life he visited Jennie’s grave at least twice a year, on the anniversary of his first wedding and the anniversary of Jennie’s death, and always commented in his diary on the significance of these visits, even in old age. On 6 April 1934, the thirty-fifth anniversary of Jennie’s death, when he was 67, he visited her grave to make it ‘beautiful with flowers’, and meditated for some time at her grave, as well as at those of his

parents and Alfred Deakin. The following year on Jennie’s thirty-sixth anniversary, he stayed at home in the evening while Ivy and his daughter went to the theatre: ‘I stay at home and open black box. Look through some letters and old relics of the old days.’ He kept his first wife’s memory vividly alive. On the anniversary of their wedding in October 1937, he wrote a poem in his diary including the lines: Alone in memory’s room I bow And kiss the bloom The wondrous bloom of her God gave to me that vanished month.

Brookes went to place flowers on Jennie’s grave, which was well tended and ‘unforgotten’. He also put flowers on the graves of Alfred and Pattie Deakin ‘in memory of their goodness to me in those dark days so long ago’. Ivy often went with Brookes on the ‘sacred’ anniversary of his first marriage, to place flowers on ‘our grave’ and keep it in good order, as in October 1940, when he was 73 and Jennie had been dead for over forty-one years.** From 1924 onwards, Herbert Brookes kept notes concerning his instructions for his own small, private funeral service, though he did not die until 1963 when he was 93, leaving ample time to contemplate his own mortality. He had moved to some extent in the intervening years from an unorthodox liberal Christianity to an open-minded agnostic position which placed great emphasis on memory. He wrote that he felt the need to move away from the Christian legend of Christ’s resurrection ‘which may or may not be true’. He cherished the hope of future reunion ‘somehow somewhere beyond the grave’. He hoped that death was not the end and that personality would persist in an

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afterlife, enabling them to meet again those they loved on earth. ‘But if it is not to be then we can rest ... I go to my eternal rest and you have your mem-

ories. Let the joyous things I have contributed be recalled and forget the unpleasant.’*°

Brookes’ uncertainty about an afterlife was clear, and he was obviously moving close to the positivist ‘Religion of Humanity’ of Auguste Comte in France and Frederic Harrison in England. Brookes requested that a famous poem of George Eliot’s, which preached this philosophy of memory, should be read aloud at his funeral—possibly taking the idea from Bernard O’Dowd’s ‘Burial Address’:

Oh! May I join the choir invisible . Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man’s search To vaster issues. So to live is heaven: To make undying music in the world.

Passages from this poem were read in England at agnostic funerals, including George Eliot’s own.* Her verse remained in Brookes’ mind, and in 1937 at

the age of 70, anticipating mortality, he wrote: ‘Gradually the leaves are falling from the tree of our life and generation and soon Nature will have asserted herself and there will be none of us left and a new canopy will overarch the years to be ... It can’t be many years now before you and I go to join the choir invisible.’4”

In Memoriam press notices An Australian secular commemoration In Memoriam notices in the press were largely a secular form of commemoration, which began in Adelaide in 1883, in Sydney and Melbourne a year or so later, and developed more slowly in Perth from 1901. It is no accident that this secular form of memorialisation began in the decade of growing religious doubt, nor that it made a broad appeal to the working classes. It can be argued that the early process of secularisation in Australia, reinforced by the spiritual crisis of the 1880s, led to the introduction in the early 1880s of a unique form of public commemoration of the dead through the press, based on the consolations of memory. Thus middle-class and many respectable working-class Christians continued some decades longer with traditional private rituals of Christian mourning, linking the grieving family with relatives, friends and Christian community. But increasingly, many mourners who had lost contact with institutionalised religion and doubted or abandoned their

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faith turned to the popular and public form of memorialising their loved ones through public notices in the press.

It is also highly significant that, whereas most Australian funeral and mourning rituals were closely modelled on those in Britain, even including timing, In Memoriam press notices developed much earlier in Australia. Britain’s deep-rooted Christian culture of mourning was more resistant to the development of a new secular form based on memory. In Memoriam notices took a different form in England, only developing seriously over thirty years later as a response to soldiers’ deaths in the Great War. The English notices, moreover, remained fewer, simpler, and more formal than those in Australia. In the dates sampled for 1901, there were only between one and four daily In

Memoriam notices placed in The Times of London and the Manchester Guardian, compared with ten or twelve in the Sydney Morning Herald. In the sample taken from The Times for 1921, although there were eighteen daily In Memoriam entries, fifteen were still for men killed in action in the war, three or more years earlier, with only three for civilians. By contrast with England, in Australia In Memoriam notices began appearing in the Adelaide Advertiser in 1883, and the Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne Age and the Argus soon after. The West Australian was unusual in that there were very few In Memoriam notices until 1901, and the number increased only slowly from 1911. The main emphasis of these notices from

the start in all colonies was on consolations of memory, with subsidiary themes of grief and eulogy, while the references to religious comfort dimin-

ished rapidly after 1901. The highest numbers of In Memoriam notices appeared during the Second World War in memory of soldiers lost in battle, and verse became more common.

I analysed samples of In Memoriam notices chiefly from the Sydney Morning Herald from 1881 to 1921, while also checking for similarities with the Melbourne Age, and noting the Bulletin’s satire. For the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, one week every decade early in July from 1881

to 1921 was examined, with particular attention to Saturdays when more notices appeared. In Memoriam notices were chiefly popular in the major cities; the Geelong Advertiser inserted only one a day in 1901 and about six

daily by 1921, rising only to six or seven daily from 1941 to 1961. The Newcastle Morning Herald had only nine a day in 1901 and seventeen by 1941. In Memoriam notices first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1884 and in the Age in 1885, and it was interesting to look more closely at the first

three years while the custom was becoming established. On average about a quarter of the early notices in both newspapers included brief passing references to religion, such as ‘Sweet Jesus have mercy on her soul’ or “There is sweet rest in heaven’. Babies were usually memorialised with sentimental religious verse, which assumed they had gone to heaven, especially in the Age, which was more prone than the Herald to mediocre verse. For example, ‘dear little Josie’, aged 10 months, was memorialised in the Age in June 1886:

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A little bud, as white as snow, Was by an angel given; But fearing earth would spoil its bloom He planted it in heaven.*®

The Bulletin had a field day with the new form of memorial verse printed in the major Sydney and Melbourne newspapers for public consumption at a set fee per line. The Bulletin lampoons concentrated on the issues of 1884 to 1886, when the new custom first appeared, though they occasionally attacked particularly poor or silly verses in the next two decades. The Bulletin’s chief targets were the firms that composed ‘excruciating obituary verse’: ‘since this gruesome rhyme factory started, In Memoria have waxed longer and more incomprehensible’.4? The Bulletin particularly lampooned the verses for babies and children, employing the double arguments that the poetry was terrible and that the children were ‘all billed for Heaven’, as if they were advance agents for surviving relatives. Most of all, the Bulletin attacked the hypocrisy and the commercialism involved in the new ‘current universal Australian fashion of versifying’ over dead departed who were not necessarily much loved in life, by buying expensive verses from the ‘dirge-scribblers of the daily press’. As the Bulletin itself ‘versified’ in September 1882: If you’d be mourning for the lad, Weep by the grave of him who! Why rush in print?-—The circus ad. Most likely’s on the other side ...

The badge of grief—the grief that’s true A sad soul is, and streaming eyes; These signs of sorrow have, and you Will not require to advertise.°°

However, the Bulletin’s attack on memorial verse in the press was more muted by 1901-02 in commenting on a particular example of ‘chirpy and comforting’ verse on which it remarked, ‘How very Australian it is!’ This was correctly quoted by the Bulletin from the notice in the Age on 13 August 1902 for David Shelmerdine: Another year of time been spent Since Dad, on earth, went still; We feel he’s right, so feel content. From mother, Frank and Lil.°!

This type of platitude, written simply and from the heart by bereaved relatives became far more common, and even the Bulletin seemed to recognise that it

served a purpose. Sometimes mourners adapted the verse of the ‘dirge-

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scribblers’ of the press to suit their own circumstances, so that various versions existed of mediocre popular verses. An often-used verse in the Sydney Morning Herald included the lines: We do not forget thee, we loved you too dearly, To let your memory fade from life like a dream; The lips do not speak when the heart mourns sincerely, And the thoughts often rest where they seldom are seen.°*

Evidently many mourners shared the Bulletin’s view that the original last line was meaningless, while others wished to pay tribute to the memorial power of the photograph. From 1900 the last line was usually altered to read, ‘For my thoughts often rest where thy photo is seen.”*? Increasingly, mourners emphasised the consolations of memory rather than religion. In a sample of six sets of notices in the Sydney Morning Herald during 1885-86, one in seven included Christian references or verses; in twelve sets of daily notices in 1891, one in 8.5 notices was religious, and about the same proportion in 1901. These religious references became shorter and more conventional, except those for babies and children who continued to inspire sentimental religious verse. By 1921 even the Christian verse for babies and infants was often metaphorical. ‘Our baby sleeps with Jesus’, was common despite the Bulletin’s queries about the meaning of the phrase. Also popular were ‘Oh rest in the Lord’ and ‘The Lord gave and the Lord taketh away’, as were fond hopes of meeting ‘above’. Catholic notices preferred either ‘Sweet Jesus have mercy on her soul’ or ‘Of your charity pray for the repose of the soul of my dear mother, Catherine’.°4 The most common metaphor used was that of sleep or rest, which could be construed in religious or agnostic terms, or could be left ambiguous. It was a most useful metaphor from the 1880s for the uncertain, or for agnostics grieving for Christian believers, since it could signify either annihilation or heaven. Countless loved ones were described as ‘sleeping in Jesus’, while angels con-

veyed numerous beloved souls to heaven ‘to rest for ever there with the Saviour’. ‘Resting in peace with God’ and ‘grant unto her eternal rest’ were also popular Christian texts, which assumed the loved one was in heaven. From 1911, ‘at rest’ or ‘rest in peace’ were often used as the only text, which

could be interpreted either way; ‘fell asleep’ was increasingly used as a euphemism for death, instead of ‘fell asleep in Jesus’.°° By 1921 the Christian notices in the Sydney Morning Herald were largely replaced by a new type of commemoration, which frankly expressed anger,

guilt, and endless anguish—sentiments which Christians would usually refrain from uttering, at least in public. In each list of In Memoriams in the 1921 sample there was usually one message of intense regret at not being present at the loved one’s death, often a sudden or accidental death, like that of the 53-year-old husband who died in 1920:

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No-one he loved was by his side To hear his last faint sigh, Or whisper just one loving word Before he closed his eyes. We never knew the pain he bore, We never saw him die. We only knew he passed away, And never said good-bye.>*®

This verse had become one of the most common by 1921, with two such notices included in this same daily list for 10 January 1921, and one or more in other lists—many responding to the tragic deaths of their sons in the Great War. These contrasted sharply with the traditional Christian assurances that

God knew best and His will must be done; indeed some contain an illconcealed anger or reproach against a God perceived to be unjust. Another

new and common entry suggested that grief was often long-lasting, but friends ceased to console or understand: No one knows the silent heartache, Friends may think the wound has healed; But they cannot see the sorrow Deep within my heart concealed.°’

Instead of the note of Christian hope for reunion in heaven still expressed in 1884, by 1921 there were fewer positive messages and many more references to heartache borne in silence and regrets at the ‘pain in our hearts at not saying farewell’. The contrast over the forty years is very pronounced, suggesting that the dual impact of loss of religious faith and the Great War mass

deaths was profound. Even those mourners who chose a public form of commemoration that focused on memory were not entirely convinced or comforted by 1921.

Chapter 10

Dr Springthorpe’s Memorialisation of His Wife Melbourne’s Taj Mahal Dr Springthorpe and Queen Victoria Dr John Springthorpe’s extraordinarily detailed diaries of his prolonged mourning for his wife explain the process of memorialisation he developed, with its focus on his creation of a spectacular memorial tomb. John William Springthorpe (1855-1933) was a distinguished Melbourne physician who was educated at Wesley College, Melbourne, where he was a brilliant prizewinning student. His strong commitment to the Protestant work ethic is well illustrated by his curriculum vitae of public service, facilitated by his bound-

less energy and enthusiasm. He first worked as a medical officer at Beechworth Asylum for the Insane in Victoria, and in 1883 became patholo-

gist to the Alfred Hospital and out-patient physician to the Melbourne Hospital. Besides running his thriving Collins Street practice, he wrote numerous research articles for medical journals and published a textbook on Therapeutics, Dietetics, and Hygiene. Springthorpe was a short dynamic man of remarkable energy and broad-ranging interests, which extended far beyond medicine and included his collection of paintings and sculpture. He was influ-

ential in medical circles, becoming president of the Melbourne Medical Association in 1900, three years after his wife’s death. He established a training system in dentistry, and became first president in 1901 of the newly established Royal Victorian Trained Nurses Association, which he helped to found.

On 26 January 1887 Springthorpe married Annie Inglis, a beautiful 20year-old heiress (see plate 14). Annie died in childbirth exactly ten years later, after bearing four children, including Dorothy who died soon after birth in 1887. According to Springthorpe’s diaries they had an idyllic marriage based 177

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on separate spheres but allowing space for congenial companionship. But his ideal wife and perfect mother died on giving birth to the fourth child, Guy, on 23 January 1897, when Springthorpe was 42 years old. There are both similarities and differences between the mourning of Queen Victoria and that of Dr John Springthorpe. The case of John Springthorpe was not representative of widowers’ mourning experiences in Australia; it was quite as extraordinary as that of the Queen, but equally instructive. Her grief differed from his in several particulars. Queen Victoria’s practice of widowhood was neither widely admired nor highly respected, after her beloved hus-

band, Prince Albert, died suddenly of typhoid in 1861. Hers was a case of obsessive, pathological grief. She mourned Albert for nearly twenty years, rather than the two or three years which her subjects might have considered normal. Widowed at the age of 42, she withdrew from public life for nearly ten years, incapable of carrying out her royal duties, until a public campaign led to a slow resumption of her public duties in the 1870s. The Queen suffered for more than ten years from prolonged depression, intermittent desperation, chronic grief, persistent ill health, and obsessive preoccupation with her dead husband. Dr Springthorpe’s grief, by contrast, does not seem to have been pathological. Like many other busy professional men, he coped partly by returning to work soon after the funeral, and continuing with his successful medical

practice, his university lectures and his busy public schedule. In this he behaved much like widowed professional men in England, such as lawyer Alfred Lyttelton on the loss of his wife Laura in 1886, and like John Hindson in Victoria on the death of his baby in 1890. In the late nineteenth century a man was expected to deal with grief in a masculine way, by silently working through it and maintaining the stiff upper lip. By contrast, most middle- and upper-class women who could afford the luxury were allowed and even expected to grieve at home for many months, if not the entire official two years of mourning, wearing deep black widow’s weeds and eschewing most social invitations. But Queen Victoria and Dr Springthorpe were akin in their emotional and

psychological need for elaborate commemoration of their dead loved ones; and in possessing the wealth and status to enable them to indulge that need with extravagance and self-indulgence. They both understood only too well the significant role of visible symbols of remembrance in the grieving process. While most of their middle- and upper-class contemporaries perpetuated the memory of dead loved ones through photographs, hair lockets, mourning jewellery, and grave visiting, the Queen and Springthorpe extended the memorialising process as far as their ample means allowed. Victorians viewed most such memorials as therapeutic aids in the course of grieving, but many people today regard them as morbid and tasteless. For the Queen and Springthorpe, external symbols represented the physical memory of the deceased, which was especially important in the acute ‘searching’ period of grief. For both, the ‘searching’ process lasted an unusually long time. However, every individual grieves differently, and models of the stages of grief suggested by psycholo-

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gists can only be applied as broad guidelines with numerous exceptions; only for Victoria did the process seem to be pathological in the longer term. Like most mourners in the early stages of grief, Victoria and Springthorpe sought to keep their loved one’s memory alive as vividly as possible, but for

them, grave visiting, hair rings and likenesses proved to be inadequate. Victoria mourned Albert as if he might return from the dead at any moment, leaving his rooms as a shrine with their contents left as they were and his clothes carefully laid out each day. She had statues of Albert scattered across the globe, including one in King’s Park in Perth, and another in Sydney, while the greatest commemorative project was the massive Albert Memorial in London, designed by the architect George Gilbert Scott.! But Queen Victoria’s extravagant and prolonged commemoration of Albert did not seem to ease her grief significantly and certainly did not resolve it. By contrast, John Springthorpe’s elaborate process of creative memorialisation of his wife Annie seemed to act therapeutically to assist him in coming to terms with his great loss. By the time the spectacular Springthorpe memorial to Annie was unveiled in 1901, the Melbourne doctor had largely recovered from the depths of his acute grief after four years, instead of the Queen’s ten or twenty. The memorial to Annie at Kew was Springthorpe’s equivalent of the Queen’s Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, though Melbourne critics who considered the memorial extravagant compared it rather with the Taj Mahal, which was far larger in scale. Though the Springthorpe memorial drew its inspiration from many European artists, architects, and writers, both

classical and modern, it was also a product of an Australian city— ‘Marvellous Melbourne’—and of its particular intellectual and religious climate. Springthorpe, as a doctor, blamed himself, as well as the two specialists, for Annie’s sudden and unexpected death when she was only 30, leaving him with

three motherless children. Guilt and anger are natural human responses to sudden deaths in early adulthood and Springthorpe experienced his full share.

After two episodes of haemorrhaging in late pregnancy, two specialists diagnosed ‘placenta praevia’ but advised against intervention. Springthorpe reluctantly accepted this verdict from the best gynaecologist in Melbourne and a most experienced ‘midwifery man’, who had never previously lost a patient in Melbourne—but in vain. The two experts were obliged to undertake a caesarean after a bad haemorrhage in labour, and despite all efforts to save her life, Annie sank and died five hours later, though her baby, Guy, survived. But we can discount guilt as a serious explanation for the complex process

of memorialisation and the building of the elaborate tomb. For eighteen months after his wife’s death Dr Springthorpe blamed himself as a doctor and a husband: ‘Can you forgive the one who loved you best letting you thus die?’ Again and again he went over in his diary that last illness and his belief that they should somehow have prevented her death by earlier surgical intervention. He wanted someone to blame, but accepted it was neither God’s fault, nor Annie’s, so the failure must be the doctors’. Springthorpe was suffering all

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the horror of a sudden, unexpected death, with no opportunity to prepare, or say farewell: ‘the end came so suddenly that it was impossible’. His wife left him without ‘any final talk or such as our souls would have loved and sacredly deserved’.?

But most of this guilt and anger were understandably expressed in the first long diary entry after her death, on 26 February 1897, and the final such entry

came eighteen months later. This was a natural response to such a tragic death, especially from a medical husband. It does nothing to explain why Springthorpe should go to such extreme lengths to memorialise his wife. Nor did the gossips of Melbourne suggest any motive at all convincing with the taunt that he married his heiress for her money, and felt so guilty at her death that he spent all her inheritance on her tomb to prove that his love was gen-

uine.* There is no support for this in the detailed diaries, which show the strength of Springthorpe’s love. Certainly he spent over £10000 on the memorial, but he still managed to leave £8280 on his own death in 1933.

Reunion in heaven? Three major forces (both positive and negative) help to explain the building of the elaborate memorial tomb. The first possible avenue of explanation may be sought in Springthorpe’s religious beliefs, more particularly his views on immortality and heavenly reunion. He was a devout liberal Protestant—a nonconformist, but not an Evangelical. In addition to the guilt he felt as a doctor about the manner of Annie’s death, Springthorpe felt guilt about their differences over religion—‘regrets and grief that I kept you back in these sacred matters’. Annie would have formally joined Dr Llewelyn Bevan’s Congregational Church and taken the sacrament there had it not been for her

husband’s scruples on certain points, possibly including the sacrament. Springthorpe and his wife often attended either Dr Charles Strong’s controversial Australian Church or Dr Bevan’s Congregational Church, both liberal churches with a relative absence of creeds, but John’s reservations prevented them from formally joining either. Husband and wife worshipped God and read prayers together, but kept their religious beliefs to themselves. John came close to joining a church, but hesitated, and ‘like a true wife’, Annie would not do so without him. On her death he bitterly regretted his reserve on reli-

gious matters, because it was his fault that he and Annie lacked a perfect understanding on matters of faith at her death. However, as Springthorpe had only disagreed with Annie regarding ‘forms and details’, and had no doubt at all about his belief in God, he was able to take immediate action to right this wrong, if somewhat belatedly: To settle all this, the first thing I did on the morning after her death was to privately

take the sacrament from Dr Bevan ... and dedicate myself to God and her ... To think I even kept her pure soul from taking the sacrament herself! Let me set down here the vow that I have made. I have asked God to help me always to feel it. I have

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vowed to be ever faithful to her dear self in body and soul ... so that at the last in His own place time and way, we may be reunited in love for evermore.°

For a man who had been too reserved on religious matters to discuss them with his wife in ten years of marriage, it was a huge emotional commitment to take the sacrament and dedicate his life to his wife and his God in this way. His sacred vow to remain faithful to Annie helps also to explain the gap of almost twenty years before he married again in March 1916, in an age when wealthy middle-aged widowers commonly married younger women after two years or so of bereavement, to provide a mother for their children. Just over a year after Annie’s death, Springthorpe formally joined Bevan’s Congregational Church and agreed to participate publicly in one of its anniversaries.° Having made his formal commitment to the liberal Congregational Church and acknowledged his deep faith in God, it remained for him to resolve the most crucial and complex theological question of reunion in heaven. This issue needs to be read in the context of the debates within the Protestant denominations in the 1880s and 1890s about a literal interpretation of the Bible on heaven, hell and reunion, outlined above, with which Springthorpe would have been familiar. He had taken a firm line with Strong and Bevan against a literal interpretation of a fiery hell, but he was more perplexed about the precise nature and conditions of reunions of souls in heaven. His anxieties were vividly expressed in a diary entry of 16 June 1897, nearly six months after Annie’s death, when he was still hopeful about the possibility of reunion of something more tangible than pure souls: The creed enjoins belief in the resurrection of the body, but is it true? If so, to what

degree—Bound as I am now to matter, I can still imagine a state in which the material is absent, but it is cold and scarcely touches the heart. Perchance, however, one’s spirit will always bear some relation to matter and our aspirations and satisfactions remain the same in kind but far wider and deeper in degree. There is then something tangible, something to take hold of and understand. But—pure spirit— how does it see/hear/feel. How does it come in contact with those it loves? Can it feel the touch of the vanished hand? ... If so—our future joy—all being well—is again understandable and real. But if not then even more than under the other circumstances, we must leave all to Him who made us with our limitations.’

Despite Springthorpe’s association with Strong’s liberal Australian Church,

this long statement represented a fairly orthodox position on the Protestant belief about immortality and the future life. He gratefully accepted the liberal perspective on the debate on recognition in heaven, hoping that the spirit would always be related to matter, thus allowing for hope and affection in the next life. But he was troubled from the very start of his bereavement by the problem of understanding how ‘pure spirit’ could have affections and relate to loved ones. This first inner debate ended ineffectually with the escape clause that humans could not understand such divine concepts, which must

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be left to a far wiser God. His inner battle continued for years, never progressing far from this first exploration of the conundrum. Two months later, in August 1897, Springthorpe continued his wishful thinking, hoping, and dreaming of a future reunion with his beloved Annie, but his rational self threw up obstacles. He felt he was making some mental and emotional progress, despite the horror of the tragedy and the bitterness of his grief and loneliness. For years the prospect of death had been to him ‘a dreadful even hideous thought’, but he now regarded death ‘not as a cessation of being but an alteration’. A problem immediately arose as to the precise location of his beloved: ‘Infinity is so vast that, without some Guide, some affinity, there might be no re-union ... Near which of the Universe of stars is she to be found? How shall I find her? Where shall I seek her?’ But yet again Springthorpe was driven back to his faith in God, since the concept of immortality and its meaning, as explained in the scriptures, was far too indefinite.° Yet Springthorpe’s belief in a God of goodness, who could make reunion with Annie possible, returned him to the problem of the physical nature and conditions of immortality. ‘Who can tell where and what part will matter play? Personally, I feel matter holds me down, binds me in, makes me imperfect, and were I in Heaven, as I now am, I would be unfitted for such a Home.’ And so he came back to the prospect of a heaven inhabited only by the ‘All Spirit’, which challenged him with his own spiritual unfitness; he could only ask God to help him fulfil the necessary conditions for rejoining Annie. And yet the prospect of a reunion of pure souls raised another barrier: ‘When I

look upon her dear photographs and under stress of my present bodily limitations, what wonder if I sigh, even against sober reason, for a bodily resurrection, that once again I may see that true face, feel that tender hand and hear that loving voice.”?

As the months passed, Springthorpe sought to apply his considerable powers of scientific reasoning to these dilemmas. He recognised that he was seeking the impossible, to translate ‘the infinite into the finite, spirit into matter’, and inevitably in vain. The strength and certainty of his belief in the possibility of reunion with Annie wavered continually, as he agonised over its nature, location and conditions. In the first nine months of desolate grief, he was more hopeful and yet utterly confused. In the following eighteen months he tried to clarify the confusion. In July 1898, eighteen months after Annie’s death, Springthorpe recognised that at least he was certain of his dead wife’s immortality: ‘My sense of Her Continued Existence has grown stronger. | have never once thought of Her as non-existent—it is unthinkable.’!°

And yet, though Annie was immortal, she had failed to make herself known to him: ‘She has come no nearer, a few earth induced dreams—so few that I am surprised. That is all—no Vision—no suggestion from the Beyond— no miracle—no self deception ... I have not expected it—but I thank God I have faced the truth ... No Farewell! no Voice from Beyond. Simply an icy silence—and no more.”!! His scientific reason had never expected any such miracles or visions, but his Christian faith led him to believe in a God who

made possible immortality and reunion in the afterlife—so where was the

DR SPRINGTHORPE’S MEMORIALISATION OF HIS WIFE 183

physical evidence? The closest he came was in a semi-conscious state on waking from those few dreams of Annie which started five months after her death,

but gave him no reassurance. Such dreams are a fairly normal part of the process of grief, described by modern psychologists such as Colin Murray Parkes and Beverley Raphael. After the first stage of shock and numbness, bereaved spouses are likely to endure months of yearning and searching for the lost person, accompanied by intense pining, insomnia, dreams, and preoccupation with thoughts of the deceased. The early stages of grieving can also include hopes that the deceased may somehow be restored to life, and perhaps for Christians the hopes of anthropomorphic heavenly reunions are an acceptable substitute. Many a widow suffered from the illusion that she had seen her spouse in a favourite chair, or heard him call from the garden,

and characteristic searches for the lost partner included dreams.!? Springthorpe’s illusions, dreams and wishful thinking may have continued for

longer than usual, but every mourner has their own pattern, and the actual symptoms were well within the recognised features of the grief process. Springthorpe never seriously contemplated spiritualism as a way of contacting his beloved Annie—though his thoughts in the diary entry for 26 July 1898 might seem to suggest it. He was a devout Protestant and almost cer-

tainly perceived spiritualism as un-Christian. It is difficult to take his one direct reference to spiritualism seriously, in relation to the death of Annie’s cousin, Clara Rea on 19 June 1899, over two years after Annie’s death. He wondered whether Annie and Clara would meet in the ‘Somewhere Beyond’: I have often thought of talking earnestly with Her father (who also has a failing heart), with a view to his conveying some definite message, should he go first and comparatively soon ... But it has not gone beyond repeated thought, partly from the sacredness and solemnity of the matter and the idea, which as ever, keep me dumb—but more I think from a want of belief in any satisfactory accomplish-

ment.! Though Springthorpe was sure of Annie’s immortality, he was far from cer-

tain of the form it would take, and even more doubtful as to his own prospects of immortal life. On the second anniversary of Annie’s death in late

January 1899, he seemed to make a decisive move towards emancipation from profound grief. On driving home from a medical consultation, ‘suddenly the question put itself, “In your heart of hearts do you believe you will live

after death” and—to my horror—the instant reflex said “No”.’ On crossquestioning himself, he accepted that it was possible but conditional that they might be reunited after death, but it was the concept of unconditional immortality that had caused his instant negative response, reinforced by his doubts as to its physical basis and his own spiritual worthiness. Having advanced thus far in his internal catechism on Annie’s second anniversary, at times he still occasionally conceived reunion with Annie as certain, with only its form indeterminate. Soon afterwards he would respond, ‘Ah—that such a conviction were with me always, strengthening and purifying.’

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During the third and later years of his bereavement, he found it more difficult to conjure up the ‘essence’ of Annie, though occasionally ‘hope returns and she seems to come back again’. Far more often, now, he recorded, ‘No message from the Unseen—absolutely none. Ah! How the affections would welcome such a miracle ... and yet the reason, the cold dominant reason says “No—it is too much to ask or expect”.’ He became too vividly conscious that Annie was not likely to return to earth, and he was left alone to remember. ‘I am sick of the Shadows—of searching for you everywhere, yet finding you only in my own heart and brain.’!>

The process of private memorialisation Ultimately, the prospect of an undefined and highly conditional reunion with

Annie was elusive, unfulfilling, and outside Springthorpe’s control, so he turned simultaneously to the concept of memory in his quest for more satisfying ways of commemorating Annie and perpetuating her influence. In addition to hopes of reunion, the energetic and highly practical ‘Springy’ required some creative, tangible, and anthropomorphic memorialisation of his beloved

wife, entirely within his own control. He needed an elaborate and multilayered process of memorialisation that he could lovingly create, supervise and execute. This was not intended as a substitute for the hope of heavenly reunion with Annie but a necessary complement. These aspirations were most clearly expressed in a vital letter of 25 April 1899 to Herbert Brookes, who had recently lost his own young wife, and might benefit from the older man’s

experience of widowerhood. This letter deserves quoting almost in full as quintessential Springthorpe: There are two sides to the situation—the contemplative and the practical. The former includes all the pictures that memory recalls and the hopes that the future holds out. It has its place—one that no other can fill. But it is like feeding on the air to try to maintain the soul on them alone—and the present pain overweighs all else. So the other side—the practical—comes in and makes all less unendurable—and

builds for the future, as much as occupies the present. It is to do something connected with the Lost One in sympathy with Her—for Her—and for us two alone. In my case, I collected everything of hers that I could, placed all appropriately in albums, frames etc etc—memorialized all in every way I could—then I got a private diary, and wrote our joint history from first to last—note I wrote in it almost every story as if for Her eye and soul alone, as if communion still went on, though unseen and so far as Iam concerned unrecognised. Then I set about doing something for Her—in my case—for the children—and for Her own memory. I compiled an ‘in Memoriam’—and have planned a tomb that—without Her name on it will appeal

to all true lovers who see it for long to come. Ah I do, I try to think She shares in [?]—is glad when I do right—has a divine sorrow when I do wrong. Thus, not only Her influence continues, and the future has a smile at the end of it, but she seems to live on though at present removed from all recognition by the senses

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—an absence that will end in a meeting again—and one for which I continuously prepare.

Thus, over two years after bereavement, Springthorpe argued succinctly that his complex and multi-layered process of memorialisation brought consolation and strength which ‘helps the present as nothing else can. The only halfsatisfying thing for the present is thus to contrive to have Her half with you still.’ 16

This crucial letter goes far to explain the origins, importance, and value of several levels of memorialisation for Springthorpe; otherwise his behaviour can mistakenly be dismissed as eccentric, self-indulgent or even pathological. Springthorpe drew on several traditions that did not usually operate together —not only the Christian belief in immortality and reunion in heaven, already explored, but also the intellectual positivist tradition which emphasised the notion of the continuing influence of the dead individual on other people after death. As we have seen, the positivist tradition affected only a small minority of intellectuals, but that minority included Springthorpe, Charles Strong, and Herbert Brookes. The chief purpose of any kind of memorialisation was, in a

sense, positivist—namely to ensure that the dead beloved lived on in the minds and memories of the bereaved and, ideally, that the realm of that individual’s benevolent influence should be extended further into the community. Springthorpe’s April 1899 letter to Brookes is the clearest statement of positivist inspiration, but it took over two years for Springthorpe to develop his ideas on memory and influence to this sophisticated level. There are many diary references to Annie’s memory which draw on positivist ideas. Two will suffice. In Springthorpe’s ‘In Memoriam’ for Annie, inserted in the journal only a month after her death, he asserted his aim of persuading many people to recognise ‘the continuance of her gentle and ennobling influence’. The entire process of his memorialisation in its various forms was intended to disseminate Annie’s influence; an entry as late as 1908 renewed his vow made on many earlier occasions ‘ever to cherish you as the nearest, the Dearest, the Sweetest and Best, ever to radiate your pure influence so that at the last, God in His infinite mercy may reunite us to love for Evermore.’!’” This was one of many diary statements of the links between positivist memory and Christian hopes of immortal reunion. At times these two forces seemed to be in conflict, because the need for memorialisation appeared to imply that Christian faith and hope were not enough, but as Springthorpe worked through the process, they seemed in time to complement each other. The ‘private diary’ mentioned in Springthorpe’s letter to Brookes was in itself a fundamental component of Springthorpe’s whole process of memorialisation, because it was the site where he mentally worked through his grief and his memories and planned his practical commemoration. The daily diary

was essentially the first form of his memorialisation of Annie—it was a memorial in written form, almost as important as the tomb in stone. This remarkable diary of mourning and memory has close links to the Protestant memorials of death which were common among British educated middle- and

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upper-class families up to the 1880s, as we have seen. They were essentially journals that celebrated the devout life and good death of Christian relatives,

and described the detailed mourning process. In Springthorpe’s case, his unusual journals were far closer in form and purpose to that Evangelical memorial genre than to any normal daily diary, and were the more unusual in Australia. Springthorpe’s diaries have some affinity with the extraordinary death memorials written in the family of W. E. Gladstone, the great Liberal statesman of Victorian Britain, but I have so far seen nothing else in Australia

quite like either the Springthorpe or the Gladstone memorial form. Four substantial journal volumes discussed the death and memorialisation of Springthorpe’s wife in great detail. Springthorpe admitted in the first volume that he was always ‘somewhat introspective’ and had been a diary keeper in his youth; in particular he had kept a diary of his ‘inner life’ before his marriage to Annie in 1887. Since then he had neither needed nor kept any inner record, in part because Annie became his alter ego.'® But this new memorial diary was quite different in that several volumes were almost entirely devoted to mourning and memorialising Annie, starting

with a guilt-ridden account of her death, including his hopes of immortal reunion, his dreams of Annie, and his practical methods of reviving and disseminating her memory. Like the Gladstone memorials, it was initially intended primarily for the eyes of the writer (and his God), but possibly also for his three surviving children in later years: ‘I want to jot down here for my own gratification and possibly for the children’s reading some reminiscences of my own sweet.’ One of ‘the hardest crosses in her untimely removal’ was that Lance, Enid, and Guy would know so little of her unless he kept Annie constantly before their minds and preserved her in their young memories. So part of the earliest origins of the extensive memorialisation project was for the benefit of the children, but in time it grew far beyond that, without ever losing sight of it.!?

The first eighteen months of the diary are like those of other brokenhearted Victorian widowers who were Christian and middle class. In Britain, middle-class widows were more likely to pour out their grief through endless repetitive conversations with close family and intimate friends; professional middle-class widowers were more likely to use a private diary form, as did Dean Archibald Tait on the loss of his five daughters and W. E. Gladstone on

the death of his daughter Jessie. Springthorpe explored all the more traditional forms of memorialisation, starting with the diary account of Annie’s life

and death written a month after his bereavement. From the start there were three kinds of polarisation in his memorial ideas—between Christianity and memory as commemoration; between the practical and the contemplative, as explained to Brookes; and between the private and the public. All three were worked out in the diary over several years, but the divide between public and private emerged first, and caused the least anguish. The most private sites of Springthorpe’s grief and mourning were his diary, and ‘Camelot’, the Collins Street house he had so happily shared with Annie and the children. The diary started as a very private journal, ‘as if for her eye alone’, incidentally provid-

DR SPRINGTHORPE’S MEMORIALISATION OF HIS WIFE 187

ing therapy and helping him work through some aspects of his grief, by pouring it all out, with much repetition. Only gradually did he admit that his children might see these sacred records of grief. And Springthorpe ultimately went much further, in a 1906 diary entry nearly ten years after his bereave-

ment, directing the children to place the journals in the Public Library of Victoria, implicitly accepting that his own private grief was ended and could even be made public. The family house at 83 Collins Street became a shrine to Annie in the years immediately following her death—the most sacred site of her husband’s grief. The new baby, Guy, was looked after by his aunt at Kew, ‘where he is as well as can be under the fostering care of his aunt’; the two older children, Enid and Lance, were at Koonwarra with their grandmother, where he had rooms built for them, and visited them every second weekend. Meanwhile he worked hard at his medicine but even harder at his memorialisation, and in time saw more of his children, who became a comfort rather than a sad reminder of their mother. In February 1897, a month after Annie’s death, Springthorpe recorded the central significance of Camelot in the early months of his grief. He placed all books and magazines that Annie and he both read into a special library at Camelot: consecrated to her memory, and make our bedroom redolent of memories of her, its walls and surfaces covered with photographs, cards, paintings etc, fundamentally associated with her married life. For since she cannot be present in the body I must do the next best thing, surround myself with reminders and transform the house of desolation into the haunt of blessed memories ... I have kept—too soon to fade—the very blood stains on the matting, the loss of which cost her her dear life. Thus I can shut the door of the bedroom and in fancy go over some of the happy past and in my heart hold communion with my lost love. And the rest of the house will remain so long as possible, just as she left it.2°

Six and a half months into bereavement, Springthorpe admitted that most

of his thoughts since her death had focused on the past: ‘Scarcely a free moment that I am not thinking of her’. The names ‘Annie’ and ‘Camelot’ were both sacred and private, and not even used in writing to the children; he used Annie’s name only ‘in the endless callings when alone by myself’ at Camelot.

Thus the move from intensely private to public mourning was immense for Springthorpe, as his initial grief was shared with no one but his diary and Camelot. Indeed, the first intrusion of public ritual at death was the business of the funeral and the communication of his wife’s death to the outside world. Yet Annie was buried on her birthday, ‘quite privately’, with the Congregational minister, Dr Bevan, officiating. Before closing the coffin lid Dr Bevan christened little Guy, who was born as Annie died. The funeral service itself was ‘short but pathetic’, attended by fifteen men, oblivious of the incongruity that

so many men should farewell a woman who died in childbirth. In his own intense grief and shock, Springthorpe seemed surprised that several hundred

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telegrams, letters, and cards came pouring in, even though he appears not to have issued a funeral notice to the press. The piles of letters and cards seem to have jolted Springthorpe into a belated recognition that his wife’s death was supposed to be an occasion shared with many others, and in the next few weeks he answered them all personally. He also planned a memorial card to be sent to all condolence letter writers, to be ‘frequently looked at and always prized’; but the recipients were in the more private inner circles of family, friends, and medical colleagues, rather than the wider community. Springthorpe’s mourning continued to be private and contemplative with the creation of an elaborate ‘In Memoriam’ book, which was the second step in his memorialisation process, after Camelot. The volume was designed by distinguished Victorian artist John Longstaff, who had painted Annie’s por-

trait as a beautiful young girl, and was subsequently to participate in the design for her tomb. Indeed, the ‘In Memoriam’ book, like the diary, was the private memorial to Annie, whereas the great tomb became a supremely public memorial on which her name was not even explicitly mentioned. The book was started a month after Annie’s death, and was bound in a black morocco cover on which lay a photograph of Annie, and was privately distributed to

family and very close friends about six months after her death. It included poems, photographs, and idealised memories of Annie as ‘self-sacrificing, modest, tender and true, grateful, tactful and wise’. Springthorpe visualised this volume as an important method of ‘perpetuating Annie’s influence’, combining all the joint ‘relics’ of the married couple which Springthorpe could find for his ‘private album’. Thus all the first four months were devoted to Annie’s memory, except for Springthorpe’s ‘external business’. He described this precious private album as twenty-four pages of ‘love, longing, gratitude, regret’.*!

But the ‘In Memoriam’ volume did not help him in his agonising search for

the ‘essence’ of Annie. On 1 August 1897 Springthorpe noted that it was a tribute to offer Annie, but ‘compared with you! What a difference. What a coldness. We touch you not, though we would embrace your heart. And no response comes from the silent grave.’ Even the photographs seemed to show fixed eyes and ‘no living smile’. During the first year Springthorpe swung continually between near despair and hope in his quest for Annie, in both immortal and some more tangible form. He lamented that he rarely saw Annie, even

in his dreams, and described those dreams, starting five months after her death, in which Annie was still sleeping and waking beside him, and kissing him.?? In August 1897 he expressed his longing to see Annie again—‘but no! my senses will not cheat me even there’. The dreams became more frequent in the first half of the second year of mourning but merely intensified his sense

of loss on awakening. Many diary entries remembered the same day the previous year, recalling with longing their activities and pleasure: “There is

scarcely a place, circumstance or time in the last ten years that does not remind me of her.’*? Memory was powerful but in itself it was not enough.

As we have seen, for many people the grave of the loved one became a

DR SPRINGTHORPE’S MEMORIALISATION OF HIS WIFE 189

natural site of remembrance and contemplation. In the first six months of widowerhood, Springthorpe visited Annie’s grave weekly and lovingly attended to the flowers, as he noted on 11 August 1897: I who never cared to frequent grave yards know no dearer spot, and I who thought, poor fool, that such floral decorations were weak useless sentiment, I carry to my ‘God’s acre’ one or more wreaths of everlasting and sufficient flowers to fill three small vases ... and hope never to fail to do so ... whilst the white flowers grow up towards heaven, I stand thinking of her.*4

Camelot, however, remained the central site for memory to wander at will, and the diary entries to his cemetery visits were usually brief. And yet Annie’s

original grave—or its inadequacies for commemoration—had an unusual impact on Springthorpe, inspiring him to create a magnificent alternative

memorial in stone. | Thus the traditional forms of commemoration proved inadequate and

unsatisfying for Springthorpe over the longer term of his mourning. Eighteen months after Annie’s death he observed: “The sense of loss has grown, the hunger of the soul continues, there has not been a day in which my lost love has not occupied all my spare time. I love her better even than before.’ His efforts to recall her were unavailing, but he could not yet accept the truth and continued to call her back, as on 8 September 1898, ‘Can’t you come back? ... Have you gone “for all time”? It seems incredible.’ And a month later, ‘My heart is broken for HER. I do nothing, outside my work, but think, think of her.’ This seems to have been the closest Springthorpe came to despair, but it was not total and abject despair, as in Queen Victoria’s case, causing clinical depression and inability to work. His preoccupation with Annie took up only

his “spare time’, and he thought constantly of her ‘outside my work’; this 1898 volume of the diary also contains cuttings about his medical and university work and other external activities. His children were increasingly a comfort, so that he was even bringing them to Camelot occasionally on alternate weekends; but they ‘accentuate the aching void, they do not fill it’, so the ‘inner silence’ was untouched.*? More entries emphasised that he was keeping busy but feeling lonely all the time. His grief was genuine and intensely felt, but it was not pathological.

Public memorialisation Annie’s Taj Mahal During the first eighteen months of his grief, Springthorpe came to believe

that all the traditional modes of memorialising were contemplative and passive. They appealed to the contemplative side of his nature, but they left an ‘aching void’. He recognised that he needed some more creative, constructive, and anthropomorphic mode of memorial for Annie and for the active

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side of his own nature. Springthorpe explained ‘the value of such planning and memorializing’ in a diary entry on the day he first saw the beautiful site for Annie’s tomb, on 16 April 1899: The value of such planning and memorializing, not only for the work itself, and all that it has meant and will mean, but also for its associations, and its effect upon myself has been and is incalculable. The catastrophe almost threw me into the open

sea where there was neither safety nor comfort, nor anything but anxiety and regret—but the work with its contingent introspection, contemplation and projection into the infinite and eternal has built up a constancy and strength and hope that I would not give up for all that this world and that which is to come, can otherwise offer. Though it may seem egotistical and strange, it is a fact that through this work I feel stronger and better ... This personal effort after Reunion and general betterment will not end with the erection of the mausoleum. There is a lifelong task

in its care and attention, a something that will continue to bind me to Her it commemorates so long as I live ... There is a personal relationship that has changed only its form, not its essence at Death, and can find a not unworthy outlet even in Her absence. This would have been impossible or at least very much mutilated, had

the external work of Commemoration been something that did not altogether satisfy, but now I have the next best thing to Presence. I have Consolation in Absence and Hope in the future.*®

This vitally important diary entry has been quoted almost entirely because,

along with the letter of 25 April 1899 to Herbert Brookes, it provides a detailed explanation of Springthorpe’s motivation for building Annie’s memorial, and its justification. He was quite clear that at one level the building of the tomb represented a form of sublimation of his grief; in a sense it may be understood as a masculine response to intense grief, involving complex practical and artistic work, combined with elaborate planning. It recognised the perceived need of men for practical work, as also did the assumption that the

widower should return to work immediately after bereavement while the widow worked through her grief in seclusion at home. Springthorpe had obsessively pursued both the feminine contemplative grieving mode and the masculine active mode, and found the conjunction of the two most satisfying. As he observed, the building of the great mausoleum in itself combined ‘introspection, contemplation and projection into the infinite and eternal’. From April 1898, all aspects of commemoration of Annie Springthorpe gradually merged with the creation of her stone memorial, which effectively took over and almost attained a life of its own. But the original idea for the tomb was already formed in Springthorpe’s mind in February 1897 as Annie’s

body lay in the coffin in the drawing room for the three days before her funeral. The thought then first came into his head—‘put this in marble’. A week later he commissioned the renowned Anglo-Australian sculptor Bertram Mackennal to design a masterpiece—‘a piece of sculpture, all in white marble, a sarcophagus, richly traced, with certain inscriptions on the sides; on the top,

a sculptured figure, as much like Annie as she lay in the drawing room as

DR SPRINGTHORPE’S MEMORIALISATION OF HIS WIFE 191

possible’. Springthorpe described the real—as it was in the drawing room—

so that on it he might build the ideal. At the head of the sarcophagus he sought ‘a strong, but sympathetic Angel, typifying Immortal Love’, and at the foot, a beautiful kneeling female figure representing both human sorrow and love.*” This was a remarkable and ambitious project to commission only a week after his wife’s death. Initially it was one of several commemorative projects, which grew in size and cost as his enthusiasm for the tomb increased and the satisfaction derived from alternatives diminished. During the first year of mourning he rarely mentioned the tomb in his diary after the initial commission. In May 1897 he authorised Mackennal to spend £2250, though the cost eventually escalated as his ambition soared. I believe that the major stages of the tomb’s creation also marked the critical phases in Springthorpe’s journey of grief, each highlighted in the diary, as in April 1898: ‘Here sweetheart, thy perfect memory in stone ... Few have ever had a fairer, purer, truer, memorial. To thy sweetest memory we dedicate

it... To us, the shadow of thy sunshine, to innumerable others a glory, a reminder, and a lesson.’*® Ten days later, Springthorpe recorded his final choice for the numerous inscriptions for the tomb, after many revisions. The four inscriptions, ‘Peace, Life, Light, Love for evermore’, to be inserted high up on the pediments, were taken from the refrain of Ellerton’s hymn in Dr Charles Strong’s collection for the Australian Church. The four inscriptions for the grille were drawn from St John’s gospel, chapter fourteen, while other

sources for inscriptions included Browning’s poetry and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Virgin Mary’. Five months later Springthorpe experienced his first setback in the idyll of Annie’s tomb, when Mackennal replied that the proposed inscriptions were largely unnecessary and lacking in restraint. Springthorpe, feeling miserable and uncertain, composed a long letter of defence intended to convince the sculptor that ‘no error of taste is being committed’. He tried to override Mackennal’s objections with the argument that ‘the whole is more than a Tomb—it is the Real made Ideal—an apotheosis of love for all true lovers to the end of Time with its tale of loss, memory, separation and Reunion’.*? But Springthorpe’s lingering doubts on this score were reinforced by the Bulletin’s critique on the opening of the memorial in 1901. Meanwhile Harold Desbrowe Annear, one of Melbourne’s most celebrated

architects, was working on a model of the whole tomb, submitting initial drawings to show the temple and sarcophagus to scale. When the temple model arrived at Camelot in March 1899, Springthorpe carefully placed it in his bedroom where he studied the Parthenon-shaped temple from every point of view. He also commissioned William Robert Guilfoyle, the curator of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, to landscape the grounds of the temple, planting out Western Australian flowering red gums and planning the ‘Garden of

the Dead’. On 14 March he wrote to the trustees of the Boroondara

Cemetery, Kew, to reserve a site, eighty feet square, with a central area of twenty square feet for burial purposes and the erection of a temple. On the facing page of the diary entry the grandiose scale of his planning was illustrated ironically by a photograph of the Taj Mahal. When the tenders came in

192 THE GOOD CHRISTIAN DEATH

for the building of the mausoleum in April, he recognised that he would have

to raise £1700 in addition to the £2250 already authorised as payment to Mackennal, and concluded, “Thus—Annie—Dearest—I remember You’. One of the highlights of the project occurred in April 1899 when he was shown the proposed site for the mausoleum at the Boroondara Cemetery, with a glorious view of Heidelberg and Mount Macedon towards the horizon.?° The diary entries convey a mounting excitement, and a sense of achieve-

ment, as Springthorpe imagined the temple, tomb and garden of the dead completed in a harmonic unity. In April 1899 he was delighted to receive the ‘glorious’ photographs of the ‘divine love figure’ from Mackennal, and he

finally signed a contract with the builders for £1803. Two years and three months after Annie’s death, he had concluded the preliminaries of the memorialisation process, so the temple’s erection could at last begin. He rejoiced that the temple and mausoleum were still very close to his original conception, just after Annie’s burial, only ‘glorified, widened, and polished. To you

Dearest Self I dedicate it, with all the love and longing and hope that my nature can contain.”?! The turning of the first sod for the foundations forced Springthorpe to consider an unwelcome thought which he seems to have been pushing to the back

of his mind: the erection of the mausoleum meant that Annie’s body would have to be re-interred. He reassured himself: ‘It is necessary, otherwise it would not be done, but it can be carried out without any jarring of feeling.’ He could not repress the thought that he had the opportunity to gaze upon her ‘earthly form’ again, though he well knew what he would see. But he thrust the idea away, on the grounds that he no longer associated her spirit with her former physical body, any more than with her ‘dear remembered garments, ornaments’ or even her lock of hair in his ring. He determined to include the children in the reinterment ceremony, to provide another link ‘in the chain of memory and affection’. So on 19 July 1899, he made up bouquets

for the children to place on the coffin in the open vault while he read an appropriate service. If other people found this reinterment ceremony at all macabre, it appeared to affect him little; as he was leaving space in the tomb for the children, they needed to be associated with its erection.*” The diary entries for the next eighteen months were dominated by the final

stages of the erection of the tomb, which now became the only focus for Springthorpe’s process of commemoration. On 2 October 1899 he received from Mackennal two photographs of the memoriam sculpture for Annie’s grave: ‘So ends one quest, friend Mackennal. On a fitting sarcophagus, regal in design, lies the recumbent figure of my Love, with lilies on the breast, at Her feet Human grief bends low, with tear dried eye, and over Her head, a glorious Angel, sent by Divine Love—the Love that never dies.’ Springthorpe vividly recalled the original scene of his wife’s dead body in its coffin, and his appeal to Mackennal to put ‘the real’ in marble and so create the ideal. ‘And now it is done ... in a way that satisfies even me.’ But this juxtaposition of the real and the ideal carried its occasional dangers for Springthorpe’s fragile emotional state. The exhilaration of the tomb’s splendid solid creation was

DR SPRINGTHORPE’S MEMORIALISATION OF HIS WIFE 193

counterbalanced by the reality that he still could not see or touch his beloved

Annie in the flesh, and at times of loneliness and depression he felt this acutely: This memorial has its uses—for others and for me—but how it exposes the hollowness of the situation. Despite it all, you are not there ... Ah Sweetheart, the ‘In Memoriam’, the inscriptions, the Tomb, simply come in between you and me. They

are only something that I can touch—and pass on to you. You are not in them— but behind them all. In vain do I seek to touch, or see, or hear you in any of them. They are only reminders—and signs—not the real thing.*?

But such bleak realism assaulted Springthorpe less often and his mind usu-

ally focused more positively, even enthusiastically, on the creation of Mackennal’s masterpiece and the entire memorial. More often he hoped that Annie’s ‘Sweet Essence lives on somewhere, waiting and loving as before’. He was sufficiently recovered from the depths of despair to attend the Governor’s garden party for the first time in November 1899, nearly three years after bereavement. Much of his spare time was consumed by overseeing the most minute practical details of the tomb’s construction, even writing letters to the premier’s department claiming a refund on the customs duty on the marble columns for the temple. In mid-December he went to the wharf to witness the

arrival of his marble columns and stone gargoyles, the ‘externals’ as he labelled them, and a week later took his elder son, Lance, to inspect the columns at last placed inside the memorial’s enclosure. On visiting the cemetery with Lance, on the third anniversary of Annie’s death in January 1900, he was deeply disappointed to find none of the columns standing, as had been

promised, much less the whole temple erected, as he originally hoped. He could not resist wondering wistfully, ‘Were you there, Love, whilst we thus remembered you? Who can tell.’ His sense that the tomb and the diary moved

together in time and importance on the journey of memorialisation was underlined by his disappointment that the third volume of his memorial diary

could not conclude triumphantly with the temple completed according to plan.**

Springthorpe’s progress in this journey through grief is also indicated by the transformation and idealisation of his own more traumatic memories of Annie’s death three years earlier. On the third anniversary, he went for a memory-filled bicycle ride along familiar routes once travelled with Annie; then he progressed to the Kew cemetery to place roses and honeysuckle amidst the everlastings on her grave—his meticulous planning of his time, even at his wife’s grave, illustrated by his notation that he was there from 7.45 to 8.20. In his diary he also described his memory of her death: ‘it was a glorious end in many ways—it wanted only a few things to make it perfect as a Parting’. But this was far removed from the agony, at the time of the sudden, unnecessary death, with no preparation and no parting. Time, wishful thinking, and a softening of grief were combining to alter and even eliminate some unhappier memories.*° His occasional dreams of Annie over the years marked

194 THE GOOD CHRISTIAN DEATH

a growing detachment, even at the subconscious level; in June 1905 he had another rare ‘Blessed Dream’ which was very revealing—that he was waiting for Annie with her sister and mother, but she failed to arrive. “Then I thought I was to marry Her and yet I could only marry Her who was dead and how has she come back to life? ... And still she did not come. Nor did she until I awoke.’® Bertram Mackennal visited Melbourne with his wife for three months coin-

ciding with the fourth anniversary of Annie’s death in January 1901, when Springthorpe dearly hoped they would all witness the tomb’s completion. Unfortunately more delays were caused by the temporary loss of one packing case containing part of the statuary which was eventually found broken. Springthorpe relished the significance of the coincidence of the fourth anniver-

sary of Annie’s death on 23 January 1901, with that of Queen Victoria’s death, which put Melbourne in mourning for a week. Springthorpe noted wryly that their new red ensign was flown at half mast for the first time, not for Annie but ‘for the great Queen—on the anniversary day of your Death— My Queen.’ After finishing medical work at 4 p.m. he cycled to Heidelberg, as on previous anniversaries, ‘thinking of you Sweetheart, the old sad unsatisfied thoughts’, arriving at Annie’s tomb at Kew before dark: ‘8.30 came on—the hour of your departure—and Sweet, Sweet, Sweet, I lifted up my poor heart to You. I prayed God the old prayers to keep me strong and faith-

ful and at the last, to bring us together again ... All in your resting place seemed Sweet and sacred but silent—yet the very silence invited trust and faith and hope.”?”

As the public opening of the memorial tomb grew closer, Springthorpe worried whether his dream could ever achieve perfection in reality: Soon now Sweetheart, it will be all up—the Memory, the Message—representing such as I could memorialize told with the help of our best talent and affection. So little makes such a difference and so hard it is to strike the perfect note that it is impossible ... to be certain whether the resultant Temple Tomb will do what is intended and carry the message, the all round message, of heart and head, of ethic and aesthetic, of future as well as past and present—and like a Casket round a jewel, exhale your Sweet influence.*®

His fears were unfounded as the statuary was erected and he finally gazed with wonder at the angel and the recumbent figure of his wife, in the presence of the Mackennals, with whom he had established a close friendship. On 2 February 1901 he formally unveiled the statuary with Mrs Mackennal, ‘in all its purity and beauty ... Most I looked at the Sweet Pure Face—the sleeping figure—all ... that is left to sight of you ... a Resurrection of the Memory not of the Reality—under the Cathedral of the Sky’. After two delighted visits (once with his older children, Enid and Lance), he was utterly satisfied with the achievement: ‘it is simply perfect in Conception, execution, Holiness—all that I could ask or think ... I am entranced by the whole.’ He spent hours

DR SPRINGTHORPE’S MEMORIALISATION OF HIS WIFE 195

watching the central effigy and the attendant figures as they were transformed by the changing light cast by the remarkable rose glass ceiling, ‘drinking in beauty after beauty’ (see plate 15).°? John Springthorpe was delighted by almost all the glowing press reports of the spectacular memorial, which were carefully inserted in his journal. He particularly appreciated the Argus report of 13 February 1901 detailing the evolution of Mackennal’s ‘symbolical statuary group’: ‘Viewed as a whole, it is a warmly emotional rendering in marble of the feeling of human grief full of high imaginative power, yet at the same time moulded and restrained by the idealisation of Christianity.’*? Even the Bulletin, critical in other respects, was deeply impressed by ‘sculptor Mackennal’s transcendent genius ... The figures of the dead woman and the angel haunt the beholder. So perfect in every minute detail that the beholder is seduced into believing that he is looking at the just-dead, lying there cold and serene as the marble form.’ Punch

pronounced the temple tomb ‘the finest piece of memorial statuary in the southern hemisphere’ (see plate 16).*!

Despite the enthusiastic press and public response to the temple tomb, Springthorpe’s personal delight at his achievement was marred. Though the memorial tomb could magnificently sustain Annie’s memory, it could not restore her to life. With all its perfection, the tomb could only be ‘the best substitute for your Absence. But Sweet, not you—in no sense You.’ The tomb was ‘glorious, perhaps unique—but empty, though hopeful and suggestive—as a Memory.’*? At a less fundamental level, he was hurt by some muted criticism of the masterpiece, especially that of the Bulletin, despite its praise: “Turning

for a last look, the tremendous monument loads the emotions, insistent, almost blatant, and one thinks dully of the dead woman, ten feet below, on

whose brow it must press so heavily. Only its artistic beauty, only Mackennal’s consummate genius, could have saved it from descending to the level of a gorgeous advertisement.’*3 Springthorpe found such criticism disheartening, even from the Bulletin, which hit a sensitive spot: ‘Poor me and Great Mackennal ... yet—much of it all is still mine—in all but execution and they don’t know it. But Sweet—I don’t care ... what they say.’ Though he tried

to dismiss this criticism as the consequence of ‘spleen and ignorance’ he was still haunted by the fear that he might have misjudged and overdone the inscriptions. Overall he left it to History to judge—‘to later times and maturer thoughts’.*4 Springthorpe might have been reassured to know that the Argus obituary for himself in 1933 described the monument as one of Mackennal’s most important early commissions, while the Age obituary deemed the memorial ‘one of the most beautiful and most costly in the Commonwealth’.*>

John Springthorpe was less concerned by the charge that the splendid memorial was far too expensive at its final cost of about £5400, several times his original estimate. Even criticism of the vast expense by Annie’s father, Mr

Inglis, who was chiefly concerned ‘for the children’s sake’, did not daunt Springthorpe, who was merely irritated by this accusation from those who

196 THE GOOD CHRISTIAN DEATH

‘should know better’. It seems the Inglis family had never sympathised with Springthorpe’s memorial venture, whereas Springthorpe’s own parents were supportive and would never claim the money was wasted.*¢ During the long process of planning and erecting the tomb the more intense parts of Springthorpe’s grief seem to have been worked through, allowing him to move in four years from intensely private mourning to a very public ceremonial commemoration. His mourning continued intermittently and with less anguish through the pages of the diary, which gradually ceased to be primarily a mourning memorial. The diaries for 1903 to 1907 were shorter and far less introspective, devoting more space to his professional work, while that of 1907-08 had only forty leaves, containing little comment on Annie or the tomb. Springthorpe kept no diary at all for 1909 to 1914, and the diaries of 1914-22 took a different form, as records of his wartime experience and subsequently as travel journals. Springthorpe mourned his dead wife for at least ten years after a marriage lasting ten years (and he was well aware of this balance, reflected in the timing of the diaries). And he kept his vow to remain

faithful to Annie for another ten years, until he married Daisie Evelyn Johnstone, a nurse, in 1916, almost twenty years after Annie’s death. But the

erection of the tomb and the changing focus of the diaries provided the significant markers of the major stages of his grief over the first four years, which were also characterised by the slow transition from private to public mourning.

PART Ill

Death and Destitution

Chapter I1

Sick and Dying Old People in enevolent’ Asylums

4BJ

The derivative Christian culture of death was at its best among wealthy and devout middle-class families. By contrast, it was revealed at its most fragile and intolerant among the institutionalised destitute, who had to endure an

absence of ritual and a silence about death, as well as indifference or illtreatment at their deathbeds. There was little concern for the dignified ending of life in most asylums and none at all at pauper burials, especially as it was commonly assumed that paupers were unlikely to be Christians. The history of old age and institutionalised death in the Australian colonies is still rudimentary, and comparisons between these different colonial experiences of ageing and death are still imprecise. In the second half of the nineteenth century many old, sick, and incurable people spent their last months or years in ‘benevolent’ asylums. Treatment in these asylums varied considerably among colonies, and there were different patterns of change and causes of reform, so that each colony needs to be analysed independently. This chapter

first examines the demographic features of destitute asylums in several colonies and then explores colonial attitudes towards the infirm elderly and chronic incurables, with illustrations from the best and worst asylums. The next chapter focuses on the asylum system in New South Wales to identify policies, attitudes, and problems in more depth, and to analyse the dynamics of change and its timing.

The asylum systems were the most deplorable in Queensland and Tasmania, where the treatment of the old, the sick, and the dying was the most inhumane and horrific—and in Queensland, at least, had improved little, even by 1918. The neglect and ill-treatment of the old, the sick, and the dying was nearly as bad in New South Wales in the 1880s, with little change up to 1904; but thereafter two public campaigns, one humanitarian and one 199

200 DEATH AND DESTITUTION

medical, forced the government to reform a system that was wholly inappropriate for the frail elderly and the terminally ill.

The early institutionalisation of death in Australia There has been a general tendency to assume that the institutionalisation of death is a relatively recent twentieth-century phenomenon and that most people previously died at home. In their book on Australian responses to death, Griffin and Tobin observe: ‘Most Australians now die in a hospital, a nursing home or some other institution. This has been a development of the mid- and late-twentieth century.’! Such assumptions are historically misleading. The trend to the institutionalisation of death was well under way in the second half of the nineteenth century and had already accelerated by 1920. In New South Wales the percentage of deaths in public institutions rose from about 11 per cent in 1860 to 20.06 per cent in 1896, and 35.15 per cent by 1920*—considerably higher than in England and Wales. The removal of death from the home to the institution was a fundamental social change, which took place more rapidly in Australia’s first colony than in the mother

country. The statistics from both countries reflect a growing tolerance between 1850 and 1914 for large institutions as necessary places for the treatment of certain social and medical conditions—including prisons, hospitals, and benevolent and insane asylums.

In 1860, deaths in public institutions in New South Wales were evenly divided between benevolent asylums and hospitals, with 46 per cent of such deaths in each, and most of the remaining 7.7 per cent in lunatic asylums. The relatively small proportion of deaths in lunatic asylums remained between 7.4 and 9.2 per cent up to 1920. The proportion of deaths in hospitals increased from 46 per cent of total institutional deaths in 1860 to 64 per cent in 1880, and 77.5 per cent by 1920; as hospitals became more specialised and aseptic, their rate of use increased. The proportion of deaths in benevolent asylums

saw a corresponding decline, from 46 per cent in 1860 to 25.2 per cent in 1880, 29.4 per cent in 1900, 21.2 per cent in 1910 and 14.5 per cent in 1920.

Despite this decline in proportional terms as against hospitals, the actual numbers of deaths in benevolent asylums remained high, because the proportion of deaths in public institutions was increasing so fast.° The statistics for New South Wales provide the most detailed, reliable, and inclusive figures for deaths in public institutions, but a similar though slower

trend was developing in other colonies. The figures for the percentage of deaths across all public institutions are fairly similar for Victoria, where the

starting point in 1873 was 16.65 per cent, considerably higher than New South Wales’s 11.65 per cent for the same year. But Victoria stayed at about the same level up to 1891, by which time New South Wales caught up with 15.78 per cent in 1892. By 1900 the percentage of deaths in public institutions was higher in New South Wales at 24.47 per cent than Victoria with 21.04 per cent. In 1910 and 1920-21 New South Wales was at 28.6 per cent and 35.15 per cent compared with Victoria’s 26.61 per cent and 31 per cent.*

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Chapter 12

An Asylum System yDegrading | @ to the Most Inhuman Race ot Savages’ Revelations and Reform in New South Wales I have chosen to focus on deaths in benevolent asylums in New South Wales in this chapter for several reasons. The primary sources are more revealing

than those of other colonies about the terminal illnesses and deaths of

inmates, especially as New South Wales government inquiries were more detailed and numerous, and called a remarkable number of inmates as witnesses. Indeed the inquiry of 1886-87 allows us to recapture some of the helpless poor through the testimonies of about 160 witnesses, including numerous inmates. New South Wales sources (including newspapers) also explain more than those of other colonies about the dynamic of ultimate, if long-delayed, reform. Moreover, despite these advantages, surprisingly little has been writ-

ten by historians about New South Wales asylums, probably because the asylum records are themselves limited in scope and value.' New South Wales’s record on deaths in benevolent asylums stands somewhere between Victoria and South Australia at the more humane end of the spectrum, and Queensland and Tasmania at the more brutal end—but it was

closer to the latter than might have been expected. New South Wales and Victoria had similar numbers of inmates in benevolent asylums from 1861, with Victoria recording rather more inmates until 1881 (1767 compared with 1360), but fewer deaths (235 against 296). From 1891 New South Wales steadily increased its numbers in benevolent asylums, until by 1901 it had more than doubled Victoria’s totals of both inmates and deaths.* As New South Wales grew, the government took full control of the care and funding of the aged and destitute needing residence, except for a few 219

220 DEATH AND DESTITUTION

small private homes. Four government asylums for the destitute, old and infirm were established for men, at Liverpool (1862), Rookwood (1894), George Street Parramatta (1862) and Macquarie Street Parramatta (1884). Aged and infirm women were transferred from the original Sydney Asylum to Hyde Park Barracks in 1862 and to the Newington Asylum in 1884. The asylums were huge, overcrowded institutions, with the three largest accommo-

dating more than 800 inmates each, and the more able-bodied inmates expected to do all the work, even the nursing, as there were no trained or paid nurses until after 1887. A significant division of labour was generally followed between the benevolent asylums and the hospitals, whereby the hospitals provided emergency

and acute treatment facilities for respectable, economically employable patients who also responded to medical treatment, thus protecting their funds

and their death rates. The asylums acted as the chronic hospitals for the pauper incurables and elderly infirm. Thus, while the majority of asylum inmates were destitute elderly, there was always a minority of younger inmates forced into the institutions through mining accidents, consumption, blindness, paralysis, and similar incapacitating conditions. Implicit in this institutional division of labour was the assumption that the incurably ill and the elderly infirm were morally unworthy paupers who neither deserved nor required medical attention or the minimum hospital expenditure. The boundaries of the medical work between asylums and hospitals were contested, as hospitals and medical science evolved, and as the numbers in both types of institutions increased dramatically. A revealing letter from the Inspector of Public Charities to the Colonial Secretary’s Department objected in 1871 to government expenditure on pauper patients in the Sydney Infirmary, ‘a considerable proportion of which were incurable and confirmed cases of chronic disease’; these cases should have been admitted instead to benevolent asylums where they could be maintained at £12 per head per annum instead of £41.° The Public Charities Commission Report of 1873-74 concluded that onequarter of the infirmary’s beds were occupied by ‘malingerers and incurables’ who would be fit inmates of a benevolent asylum but were ‘quite out of place as pauper inmates of an expensive Infirmary’.* These comments revealed the

confusion and human injustice which constantly arose when the old, the chronically sick, and the terminally ill were subjected to the same penal and deterrent rules as an assumed group of able-bodied pauper ‘malingerers’. There was usually tension in the benevolent asylums between the aim to deter and reform the morally unworthy able-bodied poor, and the need to act as a humane refuge for the old, the sick, and the helpless. Conditions and treatment of New South Wales asylum inmates differed from time to time, sometimes according to the skill, knowledge, and humanity of the medical officers and matrons, and sometimes according to different asylum policies. However, the extreme stress on economy and less eligibility meant that bare minimum provision could easily become brutal negligence, as the margin for change was minimal. The various annual reports and royal commissions of inquiry into benevolent asylums provide the primary evidence

AN ASYLUM SYSTEM 221

about the treatment of inmates during terminal illness and at death. These inquiries usually examined complaints and abuses so they provide information on the more extreme treatment and behaviour, but they also often give the only evidence of inmates’ own views about what they regarded as abnormal and intolerable. Inmates complained only when abuses became unbearable since they were likely to be victimised as troublemakers or threatened with expulsion from the asylum. Given the extreme economies essential to maintain sick and incurable old people at £11 or £12 a year per head, a negligent or harsh doctor or matron could make all the difference between a barely tolerable situation and brutality. In 1887 the condition of the three asylums at Parramatta and Newington was so shocking that members of the Inquiry Board acknowledged that ‘neglect, oppression and cruelty have been suffered by the patients’. The atrocities, ill-treatment and neglect were condemned as ‘degrading to the most inhu-

man race of savages’. It was highly unusual for an inquiry board to take a stand so strongly opposed to the senior staff of the asylums, in favour of the numerous inmates who had made allegations not only to the governor and the Inquiry Board but also to the press. Such charges were usually dismissed for lack of evidence, as the product of inmates’ minds confused by disease and dementia. Elderly inmate witnesses were often discredited as perennial grumblers, fond of drink, or of light intellect, and their accusations disparaged as the invention of discontented inmates. Instead, on this occasion two out of three members of the board were so stunned by detailed and convincing evidence of outrageous abuses from so many witnesses that they followed up vigorously in repeated visits to the asylums over many months. All witnesses, including dozens of inmates, were questioned closely and the board was prepared to accuse the doctor and two matrons of lying as well as negligence and brutality.°

The 1886-87 Inquiry Board into government asylums reserved its strongest condemnation for Dr Charles Edward Rowling, MRCS, LRCP, medical superintendent of all three asylums from 1883, on a substantial salary of £650 per annum. Medical positions in such institutions tended to attract

bad doctors with no better options, but Rowling was an extreme case of medical abuse and exploitation, despite relatively high pay. The board concluded that Rowling’s attendance on the sick poor was ‘irregular, careless, perfunctory, and devoid of reasonable kindness’. Rowling neglected to visit the sick when sent for, and to examine new patients on admission, and he deprived terminally ill patients of necessary medical extras as a punishment. Medical ‘comforts’ were genuine ‘extras’ only when the patients were well enough to eat the rough house ration; but sick inmates without teeth required medical comforts as a basic diet. The Board believed the inmates’ overwhelming testimony and rejected Rowling’s defence on several counts. However, the Inquiry Board was convinced of equal dereliction of duty by the

matrons of two of the three asylums, since they appointed the ward attendants, and could not have been ignorant and uninvolved in so many abuses without systematic neglect of their duty.®

222 DEATH AND DESTITUTION

The 1887 Inquiry Board into government asylums condemned the asylum nursing system ‘in the very strongest terms’ as much as any individual. The system decreed that all nursing at the asylums be carried out by inmates who had some physical strength but no educational or nursing qualifications and often could not read or write. In the view of the board such inmates were ‘essentially unfit to discharge the thousand nameless offices of kindness, firmness, and sympathy in which the nursing of the chronic sick so largely consists’.’

‘Cruel suffering and hard-hearted indifference’ at the ‘poorhouse for old women’ at Newington The 1886-87 report There were 305 female inmates at Newington Asylum, with an average age of 59.5 years, and almost half (149) were in the hospital wards. Numerous complaints had reached the colonial secretary, provoking him to appoint a ladies’ committee of the Inquiry Board under Lady Martin to investigate the allegations of abuses. The 1887 Inquiry Board charged that at Newington Asylum, ‘neglect and cruelty were suffered by sick inmates at the hands of their ward attendants’, compounded by the negligence of the doctor and matron, including the allegation that consumptive and other terminal patients were starved to death by sheer neglect.

The board was especially distressed by the ‘harrowing tale’ of the respectable, decently reared, 29-year-old domestic servant Alice Mary Batho: ‘We admit that this humiliating picture of cruel suffering and hard-hearted indifference.is coldly true.’ Once the Prince Alfred Hospital had diagnosed Alice Batho as a chronic and incurable consumptive she was ‘turned out to die

in the streets or drift into an Asylum’.® Following her transfer to the Newington Asylum, Batho sent three moving and damning letters to her equally respectable friend Agnes Hewitt, and the board accepted their artless

truth, despite the efforts of the matron, Mrs Hicks, to show that they were forgeries. Alice’s third letter reported that she had become ‘very weak’ and could no longer walk by herself, as a consequence of the rough house ration which she could not digest: ‘They will not give what the doctor orders ... Iam nearly starving—I can’t get anything to eat, only the dry bread and hard meat and black tea. I never thought there was such an inhuman place. I feel that it is killing me. I never was so bad before.’ Alice’s piteous appeals caused her friend to remove her from Newington, but she died a few days afterwards.’ The tragedy of Alice Batho was the more deplorable because it was not an iso-

lated case, since three other consumptive women had all been essentially starved to death in the same manner as Batho.!? Other allegations against Newington were just as damaging, namely that sick inmates suffered neglect and cruelty at the hands of their ward attendants. Several cases came to light, but the worst was that of Anne Simpson,

AN ASYLUM SYSTEM 223

who could not read and had been labelled ‘the murderess’ by inmates of the

cancer and sore-leg ward which she managed as wardswoman for five months. Two inmates reported that Simpson beat many patients with a stick, including Biddy Maloney, who was beaten ‘black and blue’, though she suffered dropsy and could only crawl about on her hands and knees. She died two weeks after the beating, as a consequence.!! Inmates, board members, and philanthropic visitors alike testified to the dreadful conditions at Newington Asylum. John Roseby, inspector of public charities, visited Newington to examine the evidence for the aged women’s ‘bitter complaints and strong aversion’ to the place. He interviewed about fifty inmates, many aged between 70 and 90, and all very miserable, with no fires in the medical wards in cold weather.'* Roseby believed Newington compared very unfavourably with the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum, and declared that conditions at Newington should not be tolerated in a civilised Christian community. !?

The statistics justified the widespread complaints that asylum deaths substantially increased in the three months from March to May 1886, immediately after the move from Hyde Park to Newington. Conditions improved after the Inquiry Board began its investigations, so that deaths declined from an average of eleven per month to three. Mary Ann Kennedy, an inmate of both asylums for twenty-four years, complained they were ‘half starving’ and ‘died like sheep when we first came here’, with no fires and no proper nourishment. She had lain bedridden for ten years next to her friend Sarah Bath, who was paralysed and had a tumour in her stomach. When they both complained to the Ladies Inquiry Board about their ‘scandalous’ treatment, they were heartbroken to be suddenly separated by the matron as punishment. !* The conditions and treatment of the dying were deplorable, as many testified, including Alice Stephen, daughter of Sir Alfred Stephen and secretary to the Newington Ladies Board, in a letter to the colonial secretary on 4 August 1886. The previous day the Ladies Board visited the ‘so-called cancer hospi-

tal ’, containing twenty-two beds. Since there was no table and only one broken chair, the meat had to be cut up on the floor or in the tin serving dish on a bed. Only one bucket of coals was allowed every twenty-four hours in each cancer ward and no lights were provided at night.!° Francis Abigail, member of parliament, also wrote to the Colonial Secretary, complaining that these 300 aged women at Newington endured a dietary scale ‘less liberal than that given to the prisoners in the gaols’. He insisted that so-called ‘medical

comforts’ were vital ‘to smooth the last hours of the old women [which] should certainly not be made as hard as possible’.!® More specific allegations were offered about the treatment of dying women in their last days and hours, notably by Eliza Pottie, a Quaker evangelist and social reformer who became a most passionate and energetic member of the Ladies Board. Having visited Newington with the Ladies Board on 21 April

1886, she told the Inquiry Board that she saw patients who appeared to be ‘sinking from exhaustion’, even dying from starvation:

224 DEATH AND DESTITUTION

We went into the hospital, and we found some of the old women dying in bed ... I saw about three, with the sheets over their faces, apparently dying; one woman was apparently in the agony of death; I saw her; her eyes and mouth and nose were filled with flies. One of the ladies with me went over and brushed them away. She was trying to say ‘flies’, and that was all she could say. On the next visit I paid I found that she had died.

Eliza Pottie was one of many witnesses who protested that ‘the practice of leaving dead bodies in the ward is very trying to some of the other patients’. Screens were not often used when people died, or the screens were broken or too small, so that bodies were not properly concealed from other patients. When Catherine White died in the night in the Roman Catholic ward on 6 August her body was not effectively screened and was not removed until 3 p.m. next day. The sub-matron, Margaret Gorman, admitted that dead bodies and dying patients were never screened in the Roman Catholic ward and bodies were washed and laid out in view of other patients.!’ The late Mrs Crowther, in the next bed to Catherine White, had told Eliza Pottie that as she was close to death herself, it had ‘pained her very much’ to see the body washed and laid out next to her: ‘my nerves were in a troubled state on the Friday’.'® The doctor never saw the bodies after death unless a post-mortem was required. Mrs Mary Charlton, a philanthropic visitor to Newington, saw ‘a dead body lying between two living people’ with no screen around it for at least the five hours she was there; ‘I thought it a shame ... I thought they were cruelly treated’.'? In all this evidence no mention was made of visits to dying women by clergymen or priests, or of any religious rituals at the deathbed.

The board’s report placed great emphasis on the dangers of allowing untrained inmate wardswomen at Newington to administer lethal drugs. In the cancer ward, particularly, the wardswoman Anne Simpson controlled unlimited supplies of a solution of morphia equivalent to six grains. The asylum dispenser filled the bottle whenever the wardswoman applied for more, and it then stood on the mantelpiece in the cancer ward, labelled ‘pain-killer’, accessible to all who could walk. Under questioning, Dr Rowling admitted that six grains of morphia was dangerous, since one-third of it would probably kill debilitated people. The doctor further conceded that a patient suffering extreme pain from a terminal illness might be tempted to help herself to

the morphia, and take her own life. The Inquiry Board noted that some women had died of apoplexy in the cancer hospital, and that the symptoms of morphia poisoning closely resembled those of apoplexy, especially in worn old women. It was very dangerous to entrust large amounts of morphia to a cruel

woman such as Simpson, who readily filled Ellen Purnell’s little bottle on request, though Purnell herself had no painful disease requiring morphia. Indeed Purnell’s bottle contained three grains of morphia, which amounted to half the allowance for the ward. Purnell admitted she could have drunk it all at once had she chosen, but instead she gave it to others, including the patient Mary Murphy, ‘out of kindness’, without any order from the doctor. A final

twist to this sorry tale revealed that the morphia had been diluted and was

AN ASYLUM SYSTEM 225

only half the strength the doctor claimed. This meant that the morphia was less dangerous to inmates who might be tempted to take an overdose, but conversely that the doses given to cancer patients were too low to relieve pain.*° Moreover, the poisonous medicines that could destroy life stood ‘in confused array’ on mantelpieces and windowsills, all in similar bottles, and within reach of patients who could walk. The board found three cases of patients taking the wrong medicine or too large a dose of the prescribed medicine. If

death had resulted from an overdose of morphia or violence by a wardswoman, the Board was afraid that it might easily have been concealed by the officers of the asylum. One questionable death was registered as ‘natural causes’, without an inquest, on the instruction of Mrs Hicks, the matron; ‘clearly, the means of concealing the results of accident and crime are easily available to the officers of this Asylum’. Concealment of negligence was facilitated by Dr Rowling’s casual practice of signing death certificates with a rubber stamp imprinting his signature, and stamping large numbers of blank certificates in advance. Other people had access to these blank death certificates, and many had been completed by people other than Dr Rowling, including dispensers and ward attendants.*!

‘Gross brutality’ and medical negligence at the two Parramatta asylums for old men We move on next to the government asylum at Macquarie Street, Parramatta,

with 291 inmates including 77 in hospital wards, where the chief charges were cruelty and ‘gross brutalities’ by the inmate wardsmen. Again the matron was implicated—this time Mrs Cunningham—either by personal knowledge and tacit consent or by gross neglect of her responsibilities. The Macquarie Street component of the inquiry was notable for the courageous, articulate, and damning evidence given by ‘a helpless cripple’, Robert Baird, and two blind men, James Rooney, aged 24 years, who was totally paralysed, and William Roy who was partially paralysed. Rooney had been an inmate for two years and Roy for three, and both were probably destined to spend their lives in the asylum. Rooney told the board: ‘I sit in the one place from morning till night. I am paralysed as well as blind.’ He sat and he listened carefully, and he was brave as well as intelligent, sending his complaints to the

Sydney press and even to a politician. After protesting against the illtreatment of another patient, this paralysed blind man had been ejected from the hospital into the ward for the fit inmates, compelled to suffer ‘agony night and day’ with the pain and the severe cold of a winter outside in the yard.*4 The Macquarie Street abuses were also notable because most victims were identified as ‘imbeciles’, with senile dementia, paralysis, or limited mental capacities, and they were usually in ward three which contained the so-called ‘dirty cases’, where paralysed or demented old men were doubly incontinent. Some of these men were probably suffering from the final stages of syphilis, though this was not mentioned in official reports, and they were probably

perceived as fair game for brutal wardsmen because of the stigma still

226 DEATH AND DESTITUTION

attached to that ‘monster malady’. Wardsman Thomas Ashton’s abuse of patients in ward three began in 1884 but the ‘barbarous cruelty’ continued when Martin Bolton succeeded him in May 1885. As Rooney observed, threequarters of the inmates in the ward were ‘aged and stupid’: ‘it is always the

imbeciles who are so badly treated, because they cannot complain’. As one illustration, Rooney reported that there were nine ‘dirty cases’ in the ward in May 1885: ‘Bolton used to pull them out on to the floor every morning and

bring a bucket of cold water to each one and mop him with a mop. It was cold weather at the time. I knew seven to die in a fortnight. I believe they were hurried into eternity.” William Roy, the second blind and paralysed man, fully corroborated Rooney’s allegations about the seven deaths. ‘He mopped them down and used force—the same as you would clean a buggy. The men used to cry out unmercifully.’?3

The case of John Dowling was given prominence in the board’s report because it was typical, yet more protracted, since he survived longer than other victims. As the report summarised the ‘atrocity’ by Ashton: Here we have a helpless, paralyzed, and almost idiotic creature dragged out of bed on a cold winter morning, swilled over with water on the floor of the apartment;

the excrement, which in his helpless condition he had passed during the night, wiped from his buttocks with a mop—the mop used to clean out the room—and thrust into his face by his brutal tormenter.*4

The wardsman responsible for this repeated barbarity was Thomas Ashton, ‘a strong, healthy man’ whose ulcerated leg had soon healed, and as wardsman ‘he showed his cruelty to an extravagant degree’. As Rooney, Roy, Baird, and others testified, he took particular delight in punishing the bedridden Dowling for ‘messing his bed’, beating him forcefully and frequently. Though Rooney was blind he heard Dowling’s screams, Ashton’s threats and boasts, and the general commotion of numerous such incidents. Rooney tried to get some of the sighted men to complain of the ill-treatment but they were afraid of being evicted from the hospital ward or even the asylum. Robert Baird, ‘a helpless cripple’, who was subsequently evicted from the asylum for collecting evidence for the Inquiry Board and ‘fomenting a spirit of insubordination’, was a witness to the final stages of Dowling’s continual beatings. Baird on one occasion saw Thomas Ashton ‘deliberately hitting Dowling in the eyes, with his head against the wall’, so that next day his eyes were black and blue. On

the day before Dowling finally died, Ashton attacked him once more but allowed the feeble old man to collapse against the wall.” The doctor never saw the bodies of the victims or examined them for marks, as wardsman Ashton had the authority to obtain the key to the deadhouse. Rooney was especially irate about a man named Dempsey, with chronic diarrhoea, who was obliged to ‘remain in his filth’ for twenty-four hours, day after day; though he was a respectable man, he was allowed to become ‘one mass of corruption from bed sores’, until he died in ‘a state of

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putrefaction’. Rooney further alleged that several men died prematurely because they lacked proper nourishment since they were denied medical comforts. The doctor allowed medical extras only where a man could justify his

Own request, not permitting wardsmen to speak for him, even if he was demented or too ill to speak.*°

George Street Asylum, Parramatta, was somewhat less brutal than the other two asylums because the matron-superintendent, Mrs Dennis, was thought to be a good manager, but even her humanity was restricted by Dr Rowling’s neglect. The average age of the 402 male inmates was 63.4 and they included 118 in the hospital wards. There were no complaints here about brutality by hospital wardsmen, but there was a chorus of protest about the doctor’s harsh treatment.*’ The major abuses at George Street are encapsulated in the matron’s allegation that ‘When the men were dropping dead in the yard like sheep she called the doctor’s attention to that fact, but he had made no remedy’ (see plate 17). The charges of medical negligence in the case of William Emerson were thoroughly substantiated by several inquiry witnesses, including the matron and sub-matron, as well as Emerson’s dying declaration. Emerson was admitted to the asylum in November 1885, already well advanced in tuberculosis, but was relegated to the general dormitories and the ‘yard’ rather than the hospital, and treated as if he was not in need of special medical care. He remained outside in the yard each day for seven months, but in the final month of his life, as the cold weather made his condition far worse, he made several applications for admission to the hospital. He was fully aware that his consumption was now ‘very, very bad’ and required continued rest in bed, but all his applications were rejected.® Emerson’s story is best continued through the testimony of John Wait, the

cook, since on 22 June 1886 both men happened to be waiting at Dr Rowling’s surgery together. Wait, a former miner, played a role in the George Street investigation similar to that of Rooney at Macquarie Street; he was an

excellent witness and also a determined instigator of complaints to the authorities, including the newspapers and the governor, and acted as scribe for the complaints of illiterate inmates. Wait reported the exchange between Emerson and the doctor on 22 June 1886: The doctor said, ‘What is the matter with you?’ and he replied, ‘I am dying; I have no place to lie down, and I cannot sit down comfortably in the yard; I wish you would admit me into the hospital, if you please’. The doctor said, ‘No, I will not; you can go back to your yard, and die and be damned’.

Emerson was not allowed into the hospital until the following day, when the matron rather than the doctor admitted him, as he was spitting blood. After admission on 23 June Emerson made a dying declaration in writing to Revd

W. H. Kemmis, which was subsequently accepted by the Inquiry Board, despite the doctor’s flat denial of all allegations. The board concluded:

228 DEATH AND DESTITUTION

Your Board find it difficult to conceive any much greater hardship than that to which this man was mercilessly exposed. Although dying slowly, and in a quite usual way, of that distressing complaint consumption, he was forced to remain in the yard until within three days of his death: where he was kept on the rough food intended for merely aged or maimed, but comparatively healthy inmates, without shelter from the winter wind ... where there was for all practical purposes no fire, and no other source of heat at all.??

John Finnegan, an inmate for twenty-five years, wrote to Matron Dennis on 27 July 1885, making a series of additional detailed charges about the deaths of fellow Roman Catholics ‘sacrificed by the gross, willful neglect of Dr Rowling’. A long series of very sick men died outside in the yard or in the dormitory, having been refused admission to the hospital. Edward McEncroe was obliged to remain in the cold yard each day, though he had been ill for weeks previously with a severe cold and general debility. He died on 1 July 1885 as he was carried back from the yard into the dormitory ward. He was refused admission to the hospital four times, including the morning of his death, even though he told Dr Rowling he ‘would die before night’. McEncroe

had asked Holoway, an inmate of fourteen years, to bring the clergyman to see him as he was dying, but Holoway reluctantly explained the rule that inmates could only see the clergyman if they were already in the hospital.3° All the old men who died in the yard or dormitory in considerable numbers were thus deprived of the last rites if they were Catholic, or the prayers of a Protestant clergyman. However, George Street, Parramatta, was relatively enlightened in permitting clerical visits even in the hospital, a privilege seemingly rare or non-existent at Newington and Macquarie Street. John Finnegan’s list of Catholic victims continued with Edward McMahon,

who suffered in the yard along with Edward McEncroe, and ‘dropped dead under a table’ six days later in the open shed in the yard. He had been very ill for some time but several visits to the doctor had failed to secure hospital admission. ‘Another man, named Summerfield, also dropped dead at one of the tables at about the same time.’ As Finnegan protested: ‘Everyone could see

that these men were dying. The inmates were crying out about it, and said that it was a disgrace to civilisation that the men were allowed to die in the shed, perishing, as it were, from cold and exposure.’ In addition, Thomas Courday and John Rooney died at night in the dormitory wards, while many others died soon after long-delayed admission to the hospital.?! In case the Inquiry Board interpreted Finnegan’s evidence as a complaint of discrimination against Catholic inmates, he stated that ‘a still greater number

of Protestant fellow inmates [had] perished from want of proper medical treatment’.** Finnegan was merely drawing on his own experience. However,

victimisation was not limited to Christians of European descent. Thomas Edwards, an inmate of only eighteen months, had been appointed head wardsman, ‘to keep everything clean and in order’ in the whole asylum. He told the Inquiry Board that an Aboriginal man named George Harris had been ‘lying

about the yard suffering from a severe cold or consumption’. Finnegan

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testified that Harris was only just able to move about for several days, and had to be assisted to the closet. He appeared to be dying for some days. Harris was taken ill in the yard on 12 November 1885, and carried to the imbecile ward by Edwards and another wardsman, but was dead on arrival, when the doctor saw him for the first time.**> George Harris was the only Aboriginal inmate mentioned in all the asylum record sources investigated. Although George Street was less brutal than the two other asylums, simi-

lar complaints were made about lack of proper nourishment and medical extras, and also about discrimination in the imbecile ward against paralysed and ‘dirty’ patients. Several witnesses, including Finnegan, testified that they

had known patients ‘to die here without proper nourishment’. Henry Hamilton, the wardsman of the imbecile ward, took the unusual step for a privileged wardsman of lodging a formal complaint with the matron and also with the Inquiry Board: I have a formal complaint to make against the medical officer for want of attention and neglect to supply medical comforts to the patients. Many of the patients in my ward are suffering from diarrhoea and dysentery, and some of them are in what may be called the lower stages of debility. With one exception, I have received nothing in the shape of medical comforts or stimulants, or even proper nourishment, for the patients.>4

On one occasion the doctor failed to visit the ward for over five weeks, forcing Hamilton to visit the surgery to attempt to describe patients’ complaints for the doctor. Michael O’Neil died of dysentery: ‘he begged and prayed for nourishment, and could get none; he was ailing a long time’ before he died. Abernethy also died of dysentery and ‘downright starvation’ because he never received any nourishment. Hamilton believed that men suffering from dysen-

tery, diarrhoea, or debility needed arrowroot, a drop of port wine, and a couple of eggs but all they received as nourishment was the plain house ration.

Hamilton submitted a detailed account of all deaths in his ward, ‘but there was a general whitewashing, and the papers which I had kept were lost’.*° The Inquiry Board concluded their reports into all three asylums: Your Board have hitherto contented themselves with a bald statement of facts; they have carefully refrained from commenting upon the horrors and miseries and the amount of human suffering endured for years in these Institutions; although the

groans and cries of distress from the helpless creatures never appear to have reached official ears, or, if they did, those ears were so inured to agonizing appeals and so dulled to all sympathy with human suffering as to render the appeal unavailing. It is not now the purpose of your Board to dilate upon this subject; it is far too painful, and no pen is capable of exaggerating the horrible story of wretchedness and misery in a single detail. The evidence so simply yet pathetically given by those blind paralyzed witnesses, corroborated, as it is, over and over again by others,

cries for alteration and amendment, and the cry should not be allowed to pass unheeded.°°

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In view of such atrocities, the board concluded that immediate steps must be taken to end a system which ‘would be degrading to the most inhuman race of savages’. The main recommendation was that the chronic sick should no longer be treated in all benevolent asylums, but sent instead to a ‘Central Sick Asylum’ for the proper medical care of the destitute sick and infirm. It should be constructed on hospital lines with a small staff of trained nurses and cooks, so that inmates would never again be engaged in cooking and nursing.*’ This inquiry was well publicised, and though its call for reform had little immediate effect, it probably contributed to the growing public antipathy to the destitute asylums which strengthened the demand for old-age pensions in the next two decades.

The humanitarian campaign for asylum reform, 1887-1904 Despite the strength, credibility, and shocking allegations of the 1886-87 report into the New South Wales asylums the government failed utterly to change the system or even eradicate major abuses. Politicians saw little political capital in championing the cause of disfranchised elderly paupers, which would win few votes and cost money. And public opinion was not sufficiently

sympathetic to the humanitarian cause of people who were thrice stigmatised—as aged paupers still tainted by convictism, even in the later generations. Moreover, the report fell foul of party politics since George Dibbs had been premier when the inquiry was appointed in 1886, but his rival Sir Henry Parkes had replaced Dibbs by the time it reported in 1887. The only reforms were minor: the introduction of a small number of trained nurses and the long overdue dismissal of Dr Rowling. The only significant debate on the report in the New South Wales Assembly followed strict party lines. Dibbs made a powerful case for radical reform of

the asylums, emphasising his total belief in the truth of the allegations. But Parkes condemned the report, unfairly accusing board members of deliberately prolonging the inquiry to increase their fees. This tactic was a smokescreen to evade the real issue—Mrs Hicks, matron of Newington, was a relative of Thomas Garrett, minister for lands, who might bring down the

government if she was punished. So Parkes’ supporters argued that the notorious Matron Hicks was ‘humane and tender-hearted’, contrary to the allegedly unreliable evidence of numerous inmates.?® The Bulletin claimed, with some justice, that the report was being deliberately ‘burked’ because one or more of the compromised asylum officials was related to politicians in high places.°?

Denial and prevarication continued for over twenty years, despite persistent evidence of shocking abuses and despite promises of reform from Parkes, Dibbs and their successors. In 1896 the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works made proposals for asylum reorganisation, stimulated by concern about rising numbers and costs of infirm destitute inmates during the depression. The return of deaths for New South Wales asylums for 1895

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showed that 239 (or one-third) of the total 731 deaths were due to senile debility, while tuberculosis accounted for 102 deaths, followed by 62 from cardiac disease, and 52 each from cancer and paralysis. The committee proposed that 1400 chronically sick paupers, chiefly cases of cancer, consumption and senile decay, should be accommodated in hospitals on one large site at Campbelltown; the two dreadful asylums at Parramatta would be closed, while Liverpool and Rookwood would be expanded to house all the relatively able-bodied poor. But since the estimated cost of this progressive scheme for reorganisation and classification was £62 900 it was quietly forgotten.*° From 1896 the sensationalist newspaper Truth took up the cause of the destitute old men in ‘these horrible old barns’, as one of its regular campaigns on behalf of the weak and oppressed. The Truth campaigns on important social issues influenced working-class opinion and alerted some more progressive-minded men in politics and the press to significant social abuses. Truth claimed to be ‘deluged with correspondence’ between 1886 and 1903 in response to its denunciations of asylum conditions, especially at George Street, Parramatta, the oldest and now the worst. Truth’s editor, John Norton, pressed two fundamental points. First, publicly funded institutions had an obligation to take a humanitarian approach to their inmates, yet ‘the government ... still manage the asylums of free people on convict or gaol principles’. An editorial of 14 February 1897 protested that the inmates were not criminals to be ill-treated, bullied, and degraded: ‘Complaints are continually pouring into this office of the gratuitous insults, the official insolence and arbitrariness, the physical cruelties and the unnecessary economies inflicted upon the poor, dependent inmates.’*! Secondly, Truth recommended that Australia should follow the example of unspecified progressive nations which classified poor old people as their cases demanded, in homes for the aged or the dying, and special hospitals for consumptives, imbeciles, epileptics, paralytics, and other chronic cases. They should break up the existing ‘huge centres of rotting humanity’ and ‘distribute them with discrimination in smaller and better planned establishments’.*7 Truth focused its campaign on abuses at George Street, Parramatta, where the hospital was still an ill-ventilated, foul-smelling, five-storey warehouse, ‘a

den of misery, vermin and filth’. In 1900 Norton, now a member of the Legislative Assembly, made speeches and asked questions about the overcrowding and !ack of medical and nursing attendance at George Street, where one night-wardsman looked after 1100 old men. It was claimed that dying inmates were unable to obtain even a drink of water or send a last message to any friends.* In July 1903, the Truth campaign delivered a detailed onslaught by ‘a late inmate’ on the imbecile wards at George Street, Parramatta, where a hundred inmates ‘in every stage of physical and mental disease and decay’ were closely packed, some naked and others in straitjackets. The most helpless bedridden

cases were still victims of brutal wardsmen, as in 1887, and morphia was frequently used at night to deal with troublesome inmates. Nobody worried if the doses occasionally proved fatal, especially as inquests were rarely held

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on imbecile corpses. Truth pointed out that this dreadful state of affairs was the government’s fault, since a special new building for the George Street imbeciles and epileptics had been waiting unoccupied at Rookwood Asylum for the past year.*4 This blast from Truth had an unexpectedly immediate impact, and the first

consignment of imbeciles and epileptic men were hurriedly moved from

George Street to Rookwood on the afternoon the article appeared. Unfortunately the transfer was totally mismanaged, no doubt due in part to haste, so the new Rookwood ward became a scene of ‘disorder and violence’, with a particularly brutal night-wardsman assaulting vulnerable patients.*>

The consequence was a 1903-04 Royal Commission Report into the Rookwood Asylum, which was widely regarded as the least objectionable asylum and the easiest to cover up. Rookwood was the newest asylum, opened in 1893 with 202 inmates, increasing to 764 in 1899 and 1237 by 1903, to compensate for the reduction in size of the oldest asylums. None of the specific allegations were found to have much factual foundation, especially as few current inmates were willing to provide corroboration. The response to two allegations will serve to illustrate the rest. An inmate nightwardsman was accused of administering a morphia overdose to a consump-

tive inmate named Rafferty, aged 74, to stop his incessant coughing. The evidence of two former inmates was dismissed as unreliable hearsay and rumour, and evidence was presented that no inmate named Rafferty had ever been on the asylum’s books. Another case of alleged ill-treatment of a patient

was dismissed as without support, ‘beyond the imagination of an inmate whose mind was affected by the disease from which he was suffering’.*°

This total denial of allegations was nothing new, as it was common for commissions of inquiry to support asylum officials against inmates, who were frequently intimidated or punished if they gave evidence. More remarkable by

1903-04 was the inaccurate statement by the commission report that ‘the great majority of the 530 hospital inmates are chronic cases which require but

little medical attention’. The purpose of this misleading statement was to refute the call for a resident doctor for the 1240 Rookwood inmates, including 530 inmates in eight hospital wards. Despite the introduction of some trained day nurses, there were still far too few, and just one official night attendant supervised all eight hospital wards at night. Consequently, inmate night-watchmen attended to the needs of fifty patients in each ward and were remunerated only by tobacco. The commissioner recommended that official night attendants be increased from one to four, but inmate night-watchmen

were to continue since he was satisfied no serious abuses existed at

Rookwood.*’ Humanitarian pressure from Truth and from enlightened commissioners and philanthropic ladies in 1887 had failed to end the government’s reluc-

tance to spend money on sick and infirm old people, or to mobilise public opinion. But two other factors played a significant role in the ultimate reform and medical classification of the asylums between about 1909 and 1918. First, for years New South Wales governments were able to justify their procrasti-

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nation with the argument that the Old Age Pensions Act of 1900-01 would largely resolve the recurring problems of asylum mistreatment of debilitated and disabled old people. As the Australasian Medical Gazette reported in 1903 and 1904, when the old-age pensions bill was before the Assembly, members were told it ‘would practically ensure the closing’ of asylums.*® Though there was a slight decline in total numbers in most destitute asylums between 1902 and 1903, as some able-bodied old people attempted life on the outside on a tiny pension, many drifted back when they found they could not manage with minimal means and no medical assistance. The pension of 10 shillings per week was less than one-quarter of the lowest wage, with no additional medical help, and it was means-tested to reward ‘deserving persons ... of good moral character’ and sobriety, excluding about 30 per cent of claims

for pensions in 1901-02. Observers agreed that most ageing workers who received pensions ‘came from an entirely different class from the unfortunate asylum inmates’.*?

Instead of the asylums being emptied by pensions in the decade after 1901, their numbers declined only slightly, while the proportion of hospital patients

rose. The average number of deaths per year in benevolent asylums in the decade 1891-1900 was 859, and this increased to 982 in the decade from 1901 to 1910.°° The George Street Asylum, Parramatta, which was intended to be closed by 1903, still held nearly 900 patients, despite transfers to Rookwood, ‘and there is a constant inflow of incurables and chronic cases from the various hospitals’.°! The total numbers in the asylums had risen sharply from 2710 in 1892 to 4125 in 1900. This declined to 3525 in 1902 as a result of pensions, then returned to 4289 in 1904, and thereafter began a very gradual decline back to 3347 in 1911, which was about the 1895 level.

But as these numbers included a far higher proportion of hospital patients than in the 1890s, asylum costs increased. It took some years for officials to recognise that while they were now paying out £500 000 per annum in old age pensions, the costs of asylums for the aged and infirm were also continu-

ing to increase..* Over twenty years the humanitarian campaign left an indelible message that asylum conditions for the infirm elderly were intoler-

able and needed reform, but more selfish and utilitarian arguments were needed to stimulate government reform.

Destitute consumptives and the public health campaign The second trigger for asylum reform was a more politically effective agitation than Truth’s humanitarian crusade. This was a quite separate campaign led by members of the medical profession in the interests of public health, which held far more appeal to the public and the government. This crusade

was focused not on the infirm aged but on the consumptives, who were younger than most other asylum inmates and were represented as ‘breadwinners of families’ or potentially valuable citizens attacked in the prime of

life when still most useful to the state. The issue of utility was almost as

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crucial as the danger of contagion. Consumptives came from all classes of the community, including respectable middle-class people reduced to destitution by disease. Fear of the spread of tuberculosis from benevolent asylums into the wider community had a more practical effect in moving reluctant governments to undertake asylum reform. Even so, it took nearly a decade, allied to the anxiety about rising costs and numbers, and the belated recognition that old-age pensions would not solve the asylum problems. Destitute consumptives were so numerous that reorganisation of the whole system was required to isolate them, so that all the other inmates benefited incidentally. The public health case was made over seven years by a large group of concerned medical professionals, supported by many citizens and the Bulletin and Sydney Morning Herald. The campaign for the establishment of appropriate hospitals with proper treatment for advanced consumptives was opened by

Dr John Nash, MLC, in a parliamentary debate in August and September 1901. It was then pressed further at a large public meeting attended by over twenty doctors from the Sydney, Prince Alfred, and St Vincent’s hospitals, on 30 September 1901. The doctors emphasised the medical, scientific and eco-

nomic arguments for their campaign. As the Sydney Morning Herald explained, ‘This is the age of specialism’, which required specialised treatment

of particular categories of patients, according to the ‘enlightened system of modern science’. They all recognised that strong philanthropic grounds existed for their case, but the ‘masses remain ignorant or indifferent and the State holds itself aloof’. They must therefore appeal to more selfish, utili-

tarian, economic, and public health interests. Adequate provision for advanced consumptive patients would save community lives and appeal to self-preservation. Therefore the public must be educated and aroused about the proper treatment and isolation of consumptives, and pressure applied to the government for action.°° Dr Nash argued that the people of New South Wales had been slow to accept that tuberculosis was contagious, despite Koch’s discovery in 1882, as many still believed it to be hereditary. Since consumptives could not be admit-

ted to hospitals as regular patients because of contagion, the only place for them was the completely inappropriate benevolent asylum. Male consumptives were chiefly located at Liverpool asylum and females at Newington, but the real problem was Liverpool, which had begun as a military barracks. Although Liverpool had accommodation only for 670, in 1901 it held 210 extra patients who were ‘huddled’ together with no adequate separation of the sick from the aged. During the past five years, 826 consumptives had been admitted to Liverpool asylum; nearly half died in the asylum, mostly between the ages of 20 and 60. At any time more than a hundred consumptives were breeding this deadly organism at Liverpool, indiscriminately mixed among six

or seven hundred other paupers, who were suffering only from old age and senile decay, and who should not be subject to tubercular infection. Moreover,

the asylum was near the centre of the town, as well as on a main road and railway line. The asylum consumptives walked about Liverpool town and into

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its shops and public houses ‘expectorating in all sorts of places’ and spreading the disease ‘broadcast over the state’. The Bulletin, as was its style, reported the campaign against Liverpool asylum in more sensational terms: ‘The System is the murderer. The place, in spite of having so many phthisis, cancer, and other cases is not conducted as a hospital but as a poorhouse.’ The Liverpool ‘concentration camp’ was ‘a culture-broth for tubercle, into which human beings are thrown, alive and strong, and, after a couple of years’ misery, dragged out dead’. The Bulletin’s use of the term ‘concentration camp’ was significant, as it was coined at this time during the Boer War, which the Bulletin strongly opposed. The Bulletin claimed that the average life expectancy in the Liverpool consumptive wards was two to three years and that the asylum murdered 40 per cent of its consumptive patients per year°° (see plate 18).

Despite the reluctance of the New South Wales government to spend money on destitute consumptives, the public health campaign ultimately had a practical effect, though it took some years. The medical campaign in Sydney for a public hospital for advanced consumptives was reinforced by the sanatorium movement, as Robin Walker has shown, whereby the number of beds

in Australian sanatoriums increased from 150 in 1901 to 1703 in 1914. Several small private sanatoriums were established earlier, including Thirlmere in New South Wales, but the first two state sanatoriums were Greenvale in Victoria in 1905 and Waterfall in New South Wales in 1909.°°

The new Waterfall Hospital was built between 1907 and 1912 in the Illawarra hills, twenty miles from Sydney, and a thousand feet above sea level. By 1912 Waterfall had a resident matron and medical superintendent as well as two honorary physicians, and patients’ average stay there was about 160

days. Treatments used included ‘Marmorek’s Serum, Tuberal, Sea Water Plasma, Tubercle Vaccine, and the different tuberculins’ but ‘with varied success’. On 1 July 1911, 195 patients were still under treatment, while 108 had died in the previous year and 175 had been discharged. The 1912 parliamen-

tary report on asylums noted that the Waterfall death rate was not unduly high since most of the 295 admissions were advanced cases.°’

Asylum reorganisation and medical specialisation The opening of the specialised Waterfall Hospital in 1909 enabled many male

and female consumptive inmates to be removed from Newington and Liverpool, thus facilitating the long awaited reorganisation of the asylum sys-

tem. The two notorious asylums at Parramatta were not yet closed but reduced to a much smaller number of relatively healthy old men; George Street declined from 1146 inmates in 1899 to 191 in 1911 and Macquarie Street from 390 in 1900 to 196 in 1911.°® The process of medical specialisation continued, as most asylums in 1911-12 appointed honorary and visiting surgeons to supplement the work of the resident doctors, except at George Street, Parramatta, where hospital patients were no longer treated. Macquarie

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Street, Parramatta, became a temporary state asylum for 196 blind and senile men, but the ultimate intention remained to close down the unsuitable 1820 buildings. Rookwood, Liverpool, and Newington became the key institutions of the reorganised system, all granted the new title, ‘State Hospital and Asylum’, with Newington still admitting only women. Rookwood, as the largest hospital and asylum for men with 1300 inmates, in 1911-12 gained two resident medical officers, with six honorary specialists, including a throat and nose surgeon, two ophthalmic surgeons, a dermatologist and a neurologist. Out of 1300 inmates in June 1911, 605 (or nearly half) were patients in the hospital divisions which now included special ‘pavilions’ for the treatment of epilepsy,

skin disease, and even surgical cases, since operations could now be performed at Rookwood. Similar ‘progressive changes’ took place at Newington,

which had 309 hospital patients out of 769 total inmates. The costs per inmate per annum were now inevitably much higher than the £11 of the

1880s: Waterfall Hospital for Consumptives was most expensive at £39 19s 4d, while Liverpool and Rookwood were similar at £24 2s 6d and £23 6s 9d respectively; Macquarie Street cost £21 4s and George Street £19 11s 11d. It was remarkable that Newington, the only state hospital and asylum for women, cost less than all the others, at £18 5s 11d, even though it had 309 hospital patients where George Street had none at all.>°? The 1912 report on New South Wales asylums observed that the character of the institutions had changed considerably: ‘the more able-bodied are provided for under other methods, and the treatment of the sick is rapidly developing into a primary feature of administration ... The statistics indicate that in the near future these establishments will partake much more of the character of State hospitals than asylums for the aged.’®? By 1911 ‘senile decay’ was the largest single killer in the asylums, causing 274 (or more than a third) of 876 deaths in the year ending 30 June 1911. Pulmonary tuberculosis was second, at 173 out of 876 (nearly 20 per cent). Cardiac disease came next at 105, followed by cancer at 77.°! It is useful to compare these statistics with those for Victoria and New South Wales as a whole. Consumption was still the largest single cause of death from 1890 to 1900, but from 1905 to 1909, heart disease had displaced

it, with cancer as second in Victoria and third in New South Wales. Consumption moved down to third place in Victoria and fourth in New South Wales. ‘Senile decay’ was probably described in the year books as ‘old age’, which featured as fifth in Victoria from 1890 to 1898, and third in New South Wales in 1891.62 As E B. Smith observes: ‘The numbers of people at risk of death from heart disease and cancer increased both absolutely between 1881 and 1911 and as percentages of their respective colonial populations ... These increases in chronic terminal illness occurred within a general shrinkage of the death rate at all ages between 1891 and 1902-11.’ Many old people who died in 1910 from heart disease or cancer might have died at earlier ages in 1890 from tuberculosis, enteritis, or bronchitis.°*

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We can learn more about the increasing medical emphasis on cancer by looking at reports of 1912 and 1917 on the ‘State Hospital and Asylum for Men’ at Liverpool—that ‘concentration camp’ for consumptives little more than a decade earlier. The consumptive patients previously accommodated and treated so badly at Liverpool had all since moved to Waterfall. Liverpool held 604 inmates in June 1911, half of whom (305) were hospital patients; 161 patients died in the preceding year out of 1501 admitted. Original buildings had been renovated and a new hospital division built, with lawns and flower gardens. A special ward for the treatment of cancer in ‘post-operative’

and ‘inoperative’ stages was established, in an isolated position in the grounds, separated from the main institution and the town by the railway line. Here again we have more than a hint that cancer was a taboo disease which needed to be hidden away, though it was not considered infectious. By 1917 Liverpool Asylum’s daily average number of inmates was 532; the percentage of deaths during the year was 9.5 per cent and the average age at death was 65. The average cost per head had risen sharply from £24 2s 6d in

1911-12 to £35 17s 3d, not far short of the top figure for Waterfall of £39 19s 4d in 1911-12. Part of this extra cost was due to the equipment in the past year of a thirty-bed ward restricted to accident and general cases for males in the Liverpool district. Eighty-three operations were performed in 1917. Most serious accidents in Liverpool now came to the hospital, altering its nature to a general hospital and helping to change its reputation in the community from asylum to hospital. Liverpool was now the asylum specialising in cancer cases, so it was not surprising that 66 or 42 per cent of the 158 deaths in the previous year were due to cancer, compared to 38 or 24 per cent from heart disease. The cancer division had thirty-eight beds for men suffering from inoperable growths: ‘The outlook in each case admitted is hopeless, and treatment is directed towards the alleviation of pain, and towards making the remaining days as comfortable as possible.’ Liverpool also specialised in treatment of venereal disease in a lock ward of thirty-seven beds, where mostly young men were treated by injections of kharsivan and mercury. °° Thus the benevolent asylums in New South Wales had undergone a considerable transformation in the decade before 1917. These changes were paralleled by other reforms in both state policy and private philanthropic efforts.

In 1907 New South Wales introduced an invalid pension of ten shillings a week, less than a quarter of the basic wage—an inadequate rate which was continued by the Commonwealth invalid pensions in 1910.°° These were no more use to most infirm old people in the asylums than the old-age pensions had been, encouraging charitable organisations instead to provide six new church and charity homes for frail old people between 1901 and 1911.°” One particular class of charitable home deserves more attention here, namely that for destitute old people whose diseases were incurable. Victoria

was far in advance of New South Wales with its creation of the Austin Hospital for Incurables in 1881. As early as 1873 the Australasian Medical Journal had raised the cry for help for incurable patients who were too fre-

238 DEATH AND DESTITUTION

quently shunted between hospitals and benevolent asylums, both protesting

they were inappropriate, and neither giving real help or sympathy. The Journal observed that an incurables hospital would also aid medical science, allowing doctors to observe the progress of diseases in their terminal stages and also to further their understanding of palliative care to relieve pain in terminal cases.°® The Austin Hospital opened eight years later with the help of a generous patron, aiming to care for destitute incurable people ‘whose lives may be prolonged and sufferings mitigated by appropriate treatment in a well-appointed institution’. Of the seventy patients in the hospital in

1887, nearly half were cancer cases, and more funds had to be raised for extensions.°”

By contrast, the New South Wales Home for Incurables at Ryde was not established until twenty-five years later. In 1906 the state governor, Sir Harry Rawson, appealed for funds at a large public meeting in the Sydney town hall, explaining that New South Wales was far behind some other states which had

large modern institutions for incurable patients.’” By 1910 the Ryde Home for Incurables accommodated thirty-seven destitute incurables but funds were urgently needed for a cancer ward since vacancies were currently only available when sufferers were ‘almost dying’.’! The Ryde Home was intended for those who ‘were once able to support themselves in comfort, but who have become necessitous as a result of some incurable affliction’. Medical staff in the home had to certify that prospective patients were at an advanced stage of terminal disease, with no means to obtain pain relief or proper care and nourishment. Though the accommodation had increased to seventy-seven by 1915, the home was £4000 in debt, but destitute cancer sufferers at least had the alternative of applying to the Liverpool Hospital.” The second New South Wales initiative came from the Catholic Sisters of

Charity who founded Australia’s first non-sectarian hospice for the dying poor, the Sacred Heart Hospice at Darlinghurst in 1890. The building pro-

gram was partly funded by unexpected bequests from patients who had wished to show their gratitude and proved less poor than the sisters had assumed. The tiny hospice with twelve beds had been replaced by 1908 by a

more impressive building with fifty beds. Cardinal Moran, patron of the hospice, made an interesting comment in 1901 on community attitudes to terminally ill patients: In the present age there was a utilitarian spirit growing up in some countries which taught that an end should be put to patients suffering from incurable diseases. He

had heard that the principle had taken root in one of the Australian States, but he fervently hoped that the doctrine would not spread. There should be hospices, he thought, where patients suffering from incurable diseases would be carefully treated and attended to.”

During 1904, 367 patients were admitted to the hospice, of whom 192 died (with half of these being consumptives); 172 were discharged but many subsequently returned to die. By 1915, cancer equalled tuberculosis as the second

AN ASYLUM SYSTEM 239

killer disease in the hospice.’* No doubt the notorious state Moran mentioned was Queensland, which was not much worse than New South Wales in its treatment of terminal inmates of asylums in the 1880s. But by 1918 New South Wales had at last outpaced its neighbour in providing specialised treatment and appropriate medical care for the destitute aged and terminally ill. In conclusion, it could be argued that the worst New South Wales benevolent asylums of the 1880s bore comparison with the English workhouses of the 1830s and 1840s, made famous by Dickens’s Oliver Twist in 1837 and the

1846 Andover scandal. Truth’s propaganda campaign of the 1890s had its earlier English parallel in the Times campaign of the 1840s, both publicising gross inhumanity and numerous abuses, including starvation of inmates. It is difficult to make such comparisons between two different countries and periods half a century apart, especially when English workhouses were so diverse, and definitions of cruelty are so variable. Most workhouse infirmaries in England in the later nineteenth century were seen as vastly superior to most

medical wards in Australian asylums, where these existed at all, and Australian asylums were probably closer to the harsher Irish workhouses. It is significant that Sir Alfred Roberts, director of the Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, had inspected many workhouse infirmaries in London and considered them infinitely better than Australian asylums.

The history of institutional death in benevolent asylums in New South Wales from the 1860s to the First World War reveals a belated transformation in the care of the dying, largely resulting from increased medical profession-

alisation and specialisation, reinforced by serious public health concerns. Politicians and the wider community could tolerate all the horrific excesses practised in benevolent asylums, as long as the costs remained low, and as long as there was ignorance about the wider dangers of tuberculosis transmitted into the general community. Institutional cruelty, indifference, and murder were challenged and minimised only when the medical profession itself succeeded in introducing a new discourse and a new set of values for this area of public life.

,

PART IV

Death in the Bush and the Great War

Chapter 13

Death and Burial in the Bush A Distinctive Australian Culture of Death The Bulletin, the radical nationalist weekly founded in 1880, did much to promote the idealised bushman as the distinctive Australian and its writers argued that national character was forged through a heroic struggle with a harsh environment. By the late 1880s the ‘Bushman’s Bible’ was the bestselling weekly in Australia, with a national influence and a strong readership in the outback, even if its writers included urban intellectuals idealising a rural myth. Like the bush ballads it frequently published, the Bulletin recognised the vital role played by death in this heroic ideal. In a long editorial in 1894 entitled ‘Dead in the Bush’ the Bulletin depicted as an epic tragedy the hopeless but valiant struggle of the courageous bushman against the destructive forces of nature: The human tragedy has no grimmer scenes than those daily acted in the vast theatre of the Australian bush ... Pitilessly pursued by the blind forces of destructive Nature, isolated Man staggers continually across the stage, racked by hunger, consumed with thirst, crushed in sickness, yet turning feebly to confront his Furies, and fighting to the last against the Inexorable which overwhelms him. Nowhere appears the human figure more august, more terrible than in this Promethean combat, when ... desperate Manhood, divine in suffering, defies its destiny of annihilation.!

The Bulletin’s stress on ‘isolated Man’ was a key component of the Europeans’ fear of the Australian bush, as was the emphasis on the antipathetic character of ‘destructive Nature’. The Bulletin highlights the significance of death in the bush, making it the more surprising that it has been largely overlooked by historians. 243

244 DEATH IN THE BUSH AND THE GREAT WAR

The death of the heroic bushman was a dominant cultural image of death

in colonial Australia, in marked contrast to the peaceful domesticated deathbed scene, surrounded by family, so popular in nineteenth-century British art and literature. There was no equivalent of the British deathbed scene in nineteenth-century Australian art. The concept of the idealised bushman as cultural hero was a foundation of the image of self-identity for many British settlers in the Australian colonies, with a powerful appeal to the popu-

lar imagination. The prototypical death of the bushman took a variety of forms, always masculine, usually heroic and sometimes violent. Images of colonial deaths in art and literature are dominated by deaths of explorers, bushrangers, bushmen, and gold diggers who supposedly died valiant deaths from thirst and exposure while struggling against the merciless environment. The remarkably early development in colonial Australia of a secular tradition of death and burial derived in large part from the harsh and initially alien

environment of the bush, reinforced by isolation from family, church, and community support and rituals. The Australian landscape appeared strange and the bush unwelcoming to many new European migrants who often perceived it as a tough environment in which to sustain human life. Many early immigrants saw the outback as a parched wilderness of brown plains, far distant from the familiar ‘green and pleasant land’ of home. Geoffrey Blainey tells of a surgeon named George Bennett who observed in 1832 that the free migrant was bound to feel despondent knowing he would ‘lay his bones in a

distant soil’ and inevitably ‘compares with regret the arid land before him with the fertile country he has forsaken’. When dealing with death, the focus tends towards the alien, melancholic, and inhospitable view of the landscape. It is worth noting, however, that much recent scholarship has tried to balance that emotional, negative stereotype by reminding us that many settlers, such as Georgiana Molloy, ultimately found the strange land liberating and magnificent.

Powerful images of heroic deaths in the bush sustained myths through the ideals they valorised and those they excluded. The colonial Australian ideal of the bush death was the antithesis of the British and European ideal of the

good Christian death in the midst of the family, presided over by caring females, and supported by Christian rituals for dying and for mourning. The

characteristic images of bush deaths largely excluded religion and most Christian rituals of mourning, as well as moving attention away from church, community and family. The colonial images of death in the bush usually overlooked the Aboriginal peoples, except where they were depicted as a dying race, or as the ‘fierce fantastic savages’ of Henry Kendall’s poetic imagination. The high Aboriginal death rate in prolonged frontier conflict and dispossession was trivialised or remembered selectively. Colonial narratives and visual

images also ignored European women, except in supporting roles, such as John Longstaff’s 1887 painting Breaking the News, in which a woman learns of her husband’s death in a mining accident (see plate 19). The deaths of children primarily captured the colonial imagination when they were lost in the bush, despite the appalling death rates for infants and young children from

DEATH AND BURIAL IN THE BUSH 245

infectious diseases and accidents such as drowning. Death from old age, accidents, suicide, and disease, and women’s deaths in childbirth were also omitted from the popular colonial images of death in the bush. The next two chapters examine some of the historical evidence for the marginalised deaths of Aboriginal people and European women and children. This chapter explores two dominant images of bush deaths in colonial culture: the heroic deaths of explorers, bushmen, and gold diggers who perished from thirst and exposure, and the representation of bush funerals and burials. These images were popularised by artists such as Frederick McCubbin and S. T. Gill and by writers such as Marcus Clarke and Henry Lawson, and were widely disseminated through the popular bush ballads. Considerable emphasis is placed on literary and visual images of bush deaths and burials, because these are so widely transmitted. People have been culturally trained to read

novels, poetry, bush ballads, and paintings as ‘authentic’ sources for the colonial period; but literary and visual genres are sources for cultural constructions of death which need to be interpreted with care, and read in conjunction with a variety of historical sources, including police records and autobiographies. Most popular images of bush deaths have originated from New South Wales and Victoria—Western Australian evidence adds a useful new dimension to this chapter. Literary and visual images of colonial Australian bush deaths were extraordinarily powerful. As Graeme Davison notes, since the late nineteenth century the bush ‘has been exalted as a source of national ideals ... Contemporaries

recognised the bush as the most distinctive and formative of Australian environments.’° Its wide popular appeal sprang partly from the fact that the idea of the bush was both broad and flexible. The term defied precise geographical definition, though it was often used in opposition to ‘the town’.

Russel Ward observed in 1978 that ‘throughout the last century in every colony most people lived in the bush. In New South Wales, for instance, only about 25 per cent of the population lived in Sydney in 1841 and only about 36 per cent in 1901.’ Even in 1911, over one million out of a population of 1.6 million in New South Wales still lived outside the Sydney metropolitan area, though admittedly many of these lived in large country towns. Brisbane and Perth were still frontier towns in the 1880s.4 I examine significant colonial images of bush deaths, partly through the

Western Australian experience, as the most vast and challenging colonial frontier in the second half of the nineteenth century. Western Australia was the largest and most isolated colony, with a harsh climate, vast distances, and alien environments for Europeans. Its population was very small and exceptionally scattered, with only 1.4 per cent of the total Australian population in 1861, rising to 4.9 per cent in 1901. It long remained a rural colony. Western Australia’s level of urbanisation was still very low at 20 per cent in 1901 compared with 36 per cent in New South Wales, 41 per cent in Victoria and 45 per cent in South Australia.» The bush covered an immense territory in the west, and the one major city, Perth, developed late, with a population of only 5007 in 1870 and 9617 in 1891, rising dramatically to 43 798 in 1901 after

246 DEATH IN THE BUSH AND THE GREAT WAR

the goldrushes. By 1901 Western Australia was one of the last remaining masculine frontiers, though the great surplus of males was largely a rural phenomenon. The number of males to each one hundred females in 1901 was 158

in Western Australia compared with 110 in New South Wales, 101 in Victoria, 102 in South Australia, and 126 in Queensland.°® In the west, vast distances were travelled by explorers, swagmen, stockmen, and goldseekers across some of the most inhospitable land in a hot, dry continent.

Bushed and perished ‘That’s how the dead men die!’ Out on the wastes of the Never Never— That’s where the dead men lie! ...

Out where the grinning skulls bleach whitely Under the saltbush sparkling brightly; Out where the wild dogs chorus nightly— That’s where the dead men lie! ...

Strangled by thirst and fierce privation— That’s how the dead men die! (Barcroft Boake, 1891)

Explorers and bushrangers who became national legends were almost invariably dead explorers and bushrangers. Death played a crucial role in the creation of young male heroes, changing the perceived nature of their enterprise, making them heroes and even martyrs in a national cause. The fact of their

dreadful bush deaths was regarded as more significant than the quality of their achievement, as the extraordinary fame accorded the leaders of the disastrous Burke and Wills expedition testifies. Moreover, the potential for death always existed in the occupation of explorers and bushrangers as in few others, encouraging a self-conscious awareness of the prospect of death. Representations of the deaths of explorers were among the most powerful contributions to the cultural narratives of heroic bushmen with noble qualities of courage, mateship, and self-sacrifice. Burke and Wills were enshrined

in Australian folklore as national heroes, Burke’s incompetent leadership notwithstanding, partly because they perished. The deaths of Burke and Wills

captured the imagination of artists such as William Strutt, S. T. Gill, and Sidney Nolan (see plate 20). Henry Kendall’s poem “The Fate of the Explorers’

related how the fame of ‘the glorious martyrs’ spread far and wide, ‘For a glorious work was finished, and a noble task complete’. Death was at the heart of Kendall’s epic tragedy: He had sunk, the worn-out hero, fainting, dying by the way! But with Death he wrestled hardly; three times rising from the sod.’

DEATH AND BURIAL IN THE BUSH 247

Explorers were depicted as noble heroes who fought the pitiless forces of nature with courage, and stoically endured dreadful deaths from thirst and exposure. Their fame was so much greater than their achievement because of Australian literary preoccupation with heroes in the 1850s and 1860s. As heroes the bushrangers were even more flawed than the explorers, since the bushrangers were usually disreputable armed robbers and sometimes murderers. Yet they were depicted in heroic literature as daring Celtic rebels and Australian Robin Hoods. As O’Farrell observes, only 22 of the hundred most prominent bushrangers were Irish, but they were the most colourful. He sees the bush ballads as celebrating their sheer ability to survive in the bush while on the run from the law.® Above all, the bushrangers were prepared to die; the bush ballads and the many images in the press focused on their courageous deaths. “The Wild Colonial Boy’ celebrated that ‘together we will plunder, together we will die’, and ‘with a heart that knew no danger ... I'll fight but

not surrender’. Ben Hall was the most celebrated bushranger of all except Ned Kelly, and was killed by police near Forbes in 1865 (see plate 21). One of the many ballads commemorating his death lamented that many hearts would always mourn him: ‘a hero has been slain/Savagely they murdered him/While the victim slept’. The death of Daniel Morgan was unusual in the depiction of the rush for trophies as soon as he was shot: “They cut off his beard, his ears, and the hair from off his head’—in part because of his notor-

iety but also because he was more feared and hated by settlers than most bushrangers.?

This section, however, emphasises the significance of death in the nineteenth-century images of ordinary bushmen and diggers. The rhetoric of heroism was not just reserved for failed explorers and violent bushrangers, as the Bulletin editorial of 1894 demonstrates. The Bulletin’s heroes were all those valiant bushmen and gold-diggers who defied ‘destructive Nature’ and

fought to the finish against the ‘vast theatre of the Australian bush’. The Bulletin’s vision was widely shared. John Marshall, a Scottish adventurer and goldminer, arrived in Coolgardie in 1894, perceiving it as a place for ‘men of the most marvellous energy and daring ... No dangers are too great, no hardships too severe.’ Marshall noted in his memoir, Battling for Gold, that deaths were most common among the youngest, the strongest, and the healthiest; heroism played a powerful role in the large number of deaths of young men aged between 19 and 30 years—‘the very flower of the Eastern States—who

have paid their lives as forfeit for their energy and courage’. Marshall’s rhetoric about the pioneer diggers who opened up the Western Australian goldfields was comparable to that commonly applied to the Anzac soldiers after Gallipoli in 1915. The ‘mighty dead’ of the goldfields proved their ‘willingness to dare, and suffer, and do and die’, leading ‘the van of civilization ... Their example will not be lost.’ 1°

The deaths of the explorers Burke and Wills had such an impact on the popular imagination in part because theirs was an epic version of an agonis-

248 DEATH IN THE BUSH AND THE GREAT WAR

ing death that was universally feared and was not uncommon in the bush. But where Burke and Wills became national heroes, most men who died of thirst, exposure, and malnutrition in the bush or on the goldfields were never recovered or identified and most were forgotten. The Bulletin analysed this tragic fate poignantly in 1894: In every nook of the Australian wilderness bleach the bones of Australian pioneers. The dingo and the crow, sole witnesses of their death struggles, tore the flesh from

the shrunken limbs. Sun and rain disintegrated the poor remnants, and left the ruined framework of a man to shock the unthinking traveller ... Myths and creeds fall helpless before the problem of such a pain perpetually repeated through interminable variations of wretchedness ...

In hundreds of instances the man who is lost in the Australian waste disappears silently for ever ... There are so many homeless wanderers tramping across the con-

tinent that the here and there one who drops out of the ranks is never missed. Maybe tears are shed in far-away lands; but the bush keeps its secrets well, and rarely lets slip a clue to the identity of its victims.!!

The Bulletin’s hyperbole points to the deep fear of the dangers of outback journeys. It was not true that the bones of pioneers lay ‘in every nook of the Australian wilderness’-—that overstates the numbers of lonely graves—but they exerted a major influence in the colonial imagination.

Visual images and popular bush ballads had a similar focus on lonely deaths caused by exposure to a hostile and unforgiving land where men fought hopelessly against the harsh environment and superior power of nature. S. T. Gill’s paintings and sketches of the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s included ‘the unlucky digger that never returned’, depicting the skeleton of an unknown digger who probably died from starvation and fell prey to the hovering scavengers!’ (see plate 22). Fear of these scavengers’ desecration of corpses partly explains the great emphasis on the need for bush burials in the earth. Where Gill’s image of the man who perished in the Victorian goldfields was stoical and resigned, Norman Lindsay’s cartoon in the Bulletin fifty years later was infinitely more malevolent, reflecting the greater harshness of the Western Australian goldfields. Lindsay’s landscape is dotted with skeletons of animal heads, while two aggressive crows perch close to the dying man waiting for his agonising death struggles to end so they can take out his eyes and pick the skeleton clean!> (see plate 23).

These images of men who died of thirst and exposure in the bush were supported by a whole genre of bush ballads, categorised as ‘Perishes’ in one edition.'* The Bulletin published many bush ballads, especially the famous

‘Where the Dead Men Lie’, written by Barcroft Boake, a land surveyor, drover, and poet—a ballad which foreshadowed his own early suicide by hanging himself with his stockwhip. These ballads were sung around campfires or hummed by lonely men to themselves, trying to make light of disaster, thirst, heat, and death, with a laconic humour and ironic realism. These tales

DEATH AND BURIAL IN THE BUSH 249

were of the courage and endurance of bushmen who helped create a distinctive image of national identity forged in the face of adversity. J. E. Liddle’s ballad ‘A Man Prospecting’ provides a vivid portrait of a gold prospector’s awful death when his horses went astray while he was sleeping and he was unable to find water. He slowly became insane, turned his clothes

inside out and cast away his precious belongings. The Aboriginal people pitied him, ‘now perishing with want and thirst’, and though they feared ‘the madman wretch’, their culture encouraged them to help even a madman. The

digger was unable to eat the ‘rough foods’ they provided: ‘he weakened, raved, and soon he died’.'> Ernest Favenc, an explorer and poet, wrote a ballad depicting Death and Time as the two grim watchers, ‘a ghastly pair’ awaiting the inevitable death of three doomed men ‘under the curse of a pitiless sun ... in that grim grey land’.'¢

Heroism, sacrifice and mateship were significant refrains in the bush ballads. EK W. Ophel’s ballad ‘A Rhyme of the West’ described two men preparing to die of thirst in the Western Australian bush, when one man sacrificed his life for his mate. Reuben poured his own scarce water back into the water can, determined to endure the thirst to save his mate, ‘As brave a deed as man could do for the sake of a fellow-man/His hero’s heart gave strength for his last brave deed’.!7An anonymous ‘tale of the bush’ told of two mates lost in the bush, when a huge gum tree fell on Joe as he slept. His mate was unable to move the ‘fallen forest giant’, so Joe asked for a bullet to save him from dying ‘inch by inch in misery’. The mate wondered, ‘Was it crime, or only mercy’ when he ended Joe’s life: Hunger, thirst, despair and madness seized me as I fled away. Succour found me naked, raving, sobbing, cursing, trying to pray. And, though since that time of horror twenty years have come and gone, Seared upon my heart for ever its dread memory lives on.!®

The historical record is consistent with the visual images and bush ballads in depicting such deaths as tragic, but its evidence on their cause is more complex and less complimentary. Western Australian police files, the autobiographies of bushmen and diggers, and the records of Lonely Graves reveal that greed, stupidity, bad judgment, and alcohol were also significant factors in bush deaths, alongside heroism and mateship. Another consideration was the

lack of experience of the bush, particularly of the hot, dry outback of the goldfields regions of the west and the north. But the results remained the same—the terrible lonely deaths, usually without mates, and the bodies unremembered, buried with little ritual if buried at all. Yvonne and Kevin Coate’s Lonely Graves of Western Australia provides an unusual and valuable historical source for details of men who perished alone in the bush. Over seven years the Coates recorded and published their list of over two thousand ‘lonely graves’—burials outside registered cemeteries or churchyards, often on settlers’ properties, by the roadside, on mining leases,

250 DEATH IN THE BUSH AND THE GREAT WAR

or at sea. Burial often took place at the site of death in isolated bush areas because in the hot climate bodies had to be interred immediately. These two thousand listed deaths cannot be comprehensive, since many must have remained undiscovered, many were in unmarked plots, and many inscriptions have disappeared over time. But they provide a valuable indicative source for the relative numbers and variety of bush deaths from various causes. The thirty-nine male deaths associated specifically with the goldfields in the ‘A to K’ categories of Lonely Graves can be used as a sample—where cause

of death is cited, sixteen or about a third, died from thirst, sunstroke, or exposure after being ‘bushed’ or lost. The remainder included four deaths from mine accidents and explosions, three from dysentery, six from enteric fever, six speared by Aboriginal people, two from alcohol related causes, one

from old age, and one from gunshot wounds.'” The proportion who were ‘bushed’ was high, given that the vast majority of such deaths were probably

not discovered, identified and recorded, especially as they often perished alone. The entries in Lonely Graves usually provide the only meagre information

available about the forty men listed under A-K who perished in the bush as well as the goldfields specifically from thirst, heat, and exhaustion (sixteen in the goldfields regions and twenty-four elsewhere in the outback). Many, like Robert Chandler in 1899 near Port Hedland, were described merely as ‘lost in the bush and perished from thirst’. Matthew Barlow ‘perished in the bush from exhaustion and thirst’ in 1888, even though he was an old hand, an employee of the Billabong Station north of Mullewa in the Murchison district.

Several other station hands were also not saved by their experience of the bush on particular unfortunate journeys.*° Those cases in Lonely Graves which provide more detail often reveal stupidity, inadequate planning, or poor judgment. Thomas Cantwell and Gerry Connell died of thirst on the Norseman—Coolgardie track to the goldfields in 1895. Connell had recently sold his ‘show’ at Norseman for £5000 and was travelling to Coolgardie to collect his money from a bank. The two men left Norseman in ‘boiling’ weather carrying only one gallon of water. Although they were close to Sunday Soak they lost the track because they marched at night. A man named Edward Hicks died on his way to the goldfields in 1887, 18 miles from Wyndham. ‘He was so drunk when he left Wyndham that he had to be led.’ He died from dehydration caused by heat and lack of water, though he was drinking ‘painkiller’ rather than alcohol on the day he died.*! Police records provide more detailed information on one victim who perished in the bush. The death of Frank Boortz in 1888 was reported in a police statement from Warder’s Camp in the Gold Field district, as well as in the Inquirer and subsequently in Lonely Graves. Boortz and his mate John Reece were both ‘elderly men’ who had left the Mary River gold diggings for Derby. They did not know the route and missed the camp at Soda Springs. Since they were low on water and Reece had fever, Boortz unwisely left the track on foot alone to search for water. The police trooper received a report that Boortz’s body was found four miles past the camp. Two troopers found the decom-

DEATH AND BURIAL IN THE BUSH 251

posed body, agreed that he died from thirst and exhaustion, and buried him on the spot.**

One case stands out, not only as a rare record of courage, but also for its graphic depiction of a terrible death from thirst in the bush. N. G. Sligo’s reminiscences of the Western Australian goldfields in the 1890s included the death from thirst in 1895 of a brave prospector named Albert Lochner, about 30 miles from Leonora, north of Coolgardie. Lochner’s mate, Bob Erroll, reported to Sligo that Lochner was missing, presumed ‘bushed’. The two prospectors had travelled more than 70 miles across waterless country but had to jettison their packs and return to water to save their horses. Lochner later travelled back 40 miles to recover their packs while Erroll looked after their camp at the soak. When Lochner failed to return, Erroll, Sligo and two other bushmen set out on a search, though they instinctively recognised it was a hopeless case in such a sweltering climate. As they followed Lochner’s circular tracks they imagined his tortured thoughts as the ‘hideous nightmare’ of death by thirst became more likely. They finally discovered Lochner kneeling down, and Erroll hopefully jumped off his horse, only to stagger back on finding Lochner had shot himself in the head, accepting his fate ‘as a brave determined man should do’: Accustomed as we were to all kinds of bush tragedy, as we gazed at poor Lochner, a great thrill of blended pity and horror struck deep into our souls. It was a sad sight and the end of a brave man, who had fought a hard bitter fight, one of the few who at the end retained sufficient reasoning power to prevent the last horrible delirium and delusions of those who die of thirst. Perhaps only experienced bushmen can estimate Lochner’s courage and will power. The last act of this tragedy was as clear to us as though we had been eye witnesses. The never ending narrowing circle, the last stoppage, the turning adrift of the pack horses, his strength gave out and he crept on hands and knees to an open space in the Mulga scrub. He knew

the end had come, his reason was tottering in the balance, another hour and he would be a raving nude madman, chasing phantom lakes of cool clear water, throwing the sand over his naked body and laughing demoniacally as the sparkling drops fell on his blistering peeling skin. Again poor Lochner shook himself and rea-

son once more held sway as drawing his revolver from his belt, he pauses one moment as his mind sends forth a prayer to God, which his parched lips cannot utter, then feeling with his revolver barrel for his forehead, a report and his soul has gone to join other brave men who would welcome and lead him safely to everlasting peace and rest.”°

The tragedy was the more distressing to Lochner’s widow and mother since he died of thirst within 3 miles of a chain of waterholes, as the Coolgardie Miner reported.*4 Ernestine Hill, writing The Great Australian Loneliness about her outback travels in the 1930s, demonstrated that it was still too easy to die of thirst in

the vast desolate Kimberley district, the original goldfield of Western Australia. ‘There are some shocking tragedies of thirst to be found in the

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records of the outback police stations, and you hear the word “perish” often enough in that country. There it has a meaning all of its own.’ Often the victims were old hands who drank too much beer before embarking on a bush journey at the end of the dry season and miscalculating the availability of water. Hill reported that the body of a man known as Foghorn Foley had been discovered, completely mummified in six weeks in the dry heat. ‘Some of them die raving mad ... Some of them fight to a finish, vainly trying to dig themselves a soak—a soak that becomes a grave—and there are others who shoot themselves in the first day rather than go on with it.’ Ernestine Hill found the desolate land between Halls Creek and Wyndham ‘a trail of tragedy’. Every few miles on their journey they saw another nameless grave, ‘men who died of spear-wounds, of fever, of thirst, of delirium tremens, unremembered save for a post and rail grave or a name on a baobab tree’.*° These individual stories of men perishing from thirst and heat exhaustion in the bush are transformed in popular mythology to represent the doomed struggle of courageous bushmen in their unequal battle with the harsh, relent-

less outback. But the idealisation of heroic bushmen in their ceaseless struggle with the forces of an alien environment has some basic flaws, as we have seen. The bush was not directly responsible and many such deaths could have been prevented. When individual cases of bush deaths are examined more closely, they often seem pathetic or unnecessary rather than heroic. But some cases, such as Albert Lochner, do come close to the heroic model.

A significant misconception in the mythology of the bush death was a romantic interpretation of ‘mateship’ as mutual self-help, wherein loyal and courageous comrades supported and sustained each other through shared hardship and suffering. In practice mateship operated more effectively among the young, fit, and successful than among the elderly, the chronically sick, and the incapacitated. In older age and fragile health, numerous swagmen, shepherds, vagrants, and worn-out bushmen were solitary hermits out of necessity, not choice. Raymond Evans made this point forcefully in 1976: The mechanics of mateship were essentially reciprocatory: a man did not qualify for membership unless he was originally strong and capable and could contribute his share towards the common good. There could be no workable mateship bond with a madman or an incapacitated cripple. Thus, as well as its sexist and racist overtones, the tragedy and the central irony of mateship was that when help was most needed it was also most likely to be denied. At its core, one of the great weaknesses of mateship was its fear of the incurable and its distrust of the useless.

The bush ‘easily corroded the brain and body of the less adaptable’, as Henry Lawson recognised in his depiction of hopeless, frail, half-starved swagmen as ‘lost souls’ in the bush, where failures were not readily tolerated.*°

Some bushmen’s deaths fell entirely outside the heroic ideal. Old men rarely received mention in bush ballads, which idealised heroic deaths of young men, because heroism is partly about embracing death prematurely.

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The realist Henry Lawson was unusual in immortalising one old bushman who died alone in his story of ‘The Bush Undertaker’. The Bulletin in 1881 also recorded the death of a stoical old swagman who lay down to die, wrapping an old blue blanket about his face ‘lest the crow or the dingo should begin too soon’. His death was a common death which was not heroic: ‘Probably many die thus every week. Rivers, creeks, and dams, mallee-scrub and mountain gorges, long white plains and spinifex wastes of the hot North, hold a host of silent witnesses whose evidence, perhaps, will be never heard. They died; they are buried; or their bones lie bleaching.’*” Most men in the outback and the goldfields were young and many died young, though ‘young’

was usually defined as under 40. But many stayed on; as Ernestine Hill observed, men in the far outback of the north-west grew old and grey alone without white women.*® A minority of deaths in Lonely Graves of Western Australia were recorded as due to old age, senility or ‘natural decay’ but such deaths were never commemorated in detail. It seems likely that many of the men who perished from thirst in the bush were elderly and therefore more vulnerable. The Western Australian sources rarely mentioned ages, though Frank Boortz was described as ‘elderly’, and Ernestine Hill referred to ‘old hands who drank too much beer’. But the South Australian police records provide more specific details of destitute deaths from thirst and exposure, including age, which strongly support this hypothesis. The mortuary book for the isolated frontier town of Port Augusta from 1888 to 1921 reported nine unidentified bodies found in the bush as well as five specific cases of death due to exposure, thirst, or exhaustion. The latter five were classic bush deaths, but they were not heroic, nor were the victims young. The average age of the five who were known to have perished from heat exhaustion or thirst was 54 years, ranging from 45 to 60 years, with four in their fifties. Older men were less able to cope with the extreme conditions as they grew more vulnerable. The eldest, John Jervis, aged 60, was caretaker of Middle Back Station where he had worked for several years. He was walking back to the station with provisions in January 1889, a distance of 46 miles, but perished of thirst about 19 miles from the station. James Miller, a vagrant aged 56, died on the road near Port Augusta in 1921 from exposure and exhaustion. Thomas Fisher, aged 56 in 1889, and George Brown, aged 45 in 1888, also perished from thirst and exhaustion while walking between Port Augusta and their stations.2”? No doubt several of the unidentified decomposed corpses and skeletons were those of older men who shared a similar fate.

Bush burials and secular rituals The diverse representations of bush funerals and burials in the second half of the nineteenth century reveal images that help us to understand the characteristics of the bushman’s view of death and its transmission into the wider colonial culture. The bush was largely incompatible with elaborate imported

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burial ritual which was designed to disguise the more unpleasant aspects of death, including the realities of decomposition. Bush deaths were natural deaths dictated by geography, landscape, isolation, climate, and the lack of established cemeteries. The harsh practical circumstances of a bushman’s death in the remote outback usually made elaborate burial ritual impossible as well as inappropriate.

More than that, such ritual seems to have often been unsought, possibly reflecting the bushman’s hostility to the British parent culture and his scepticism or indifference to institutionalised Christianity. Beverley Kingston notes ‘the tendency of men who were working class, mobile, restless, to leave their religion behind ... Frontier communities were more likely to contain nominal

Anglicans, Catholics, or self-conscious atheists and agnostics.3°9 David Fitzpatrick observes that religious indifference was ‘commonplace in disorganised Australia’, citing an immigrant Irish Catholic, Michael Normile, who complained that ‘they are wild and careless about religion’ in the bush, with few priests available.*!

One important reason for the cultural emphasis on the bush grave in nineteenth-century Australia was its role in establishing a sense of belonging to the land. Irish Catholics may have played a somewhat perverse role here,

with their ‘persistent, centuries-old preoccupation with death ... the most evident hallmark of the Irishness of Irish culture’.22 Patrick O’Farrell eloquently records the obsession of Irish migrants with their final resting places, citing James Joyce, “The Irishman’s house is his coffin’, to underline Irish priorities in life. Irish people often felt a passionate desire to be buried with their family in Ireland in their own churchyard, not in a strange country far

from home. O’Farrell quotes a husband in 1840 reminding his wife ‘to remember your promise; not to let my bones rest in the strange country’ but to ‘send me home when I’m dead to my own people in Kilcrea’: ‘It was a traditional wish, rooted deep in the Irish pagan past. It became less of a wish, more of a dream as the nineteenth century wore on ... Ireland remained firm in the mind as the place for dying: living must take place elsewhere.’?? Death was a recurrent topic of dialogue between Irish migrants and their families, though for most Irish migrants burial in Ireland was a practical and financial impossibility. They would not see their parents in Ireland again, alive or dead, and had to content themselves with hopes of a spiritual reunion in the next life.

When migrants became reconciled to the prospect of ultimate burial in Australia, however, they had usually accepted their new land as home. This helps to explain the emphasis on bush burials and bush graves in the ballads, many written by Irish migrants. Bush burials symbolised the making of sig-

nificant new bonds with the Australian land, as the next generation had parents’ graves to visit in their own homeland. The grave in the bush became an important cultural image in its own right in the nineteenth century. Indeed Elizabeth Webby has argued that it was even more popular and pervasive in Australian literature and art than the image of the lost child:

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The image of the bush grave in Australian literature and art usually functions as an indication of ownership of the land or the desire for such legitimacy. While the unburied body may be consumed by the land, in the sense that it is likely to be eaten by dingoes, crows or other fauna, the buried body is at home in it. In some of the earlier poems the white man’s grave marks out a little domesticated space in what is otherwise seen as wilderness.

Charles Harpur recognised the significance of the grave in establishing a sense of national identity and individual belonging in such poems as “The Grave of Clements’ and ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’. Unlike the literary and visual representations of death in Britain, which emphasised deathbed scenes, those in Australia focused on the burial and the grave, which established the link with the land. Webby argues that Harpur’s poems show how white colonists attempted to possess the landscape imaginatively by ‘heroic deeds of suffering and endurance, by dying and being buried there’.** The powerful link with the land was again revealed in pastoralist Robert Fellowes Lukis’s memories of the burial in the 1920s of his friend Rob Edkins, owner of the Indee Station near remote Port Hedland in Western Australia. Rob ‘loved the bush life and birds and animals’ and had asked to be buried at Merrinyia claypan, a lovely location between two hills, about 4 miles from his station, and his favourite spot in life. The bishop tried to resist the request on the grounds that it was not consecrated ground, but Lukis insisted it was Rob’s dying wish after living there for many years and he had ‘consecrated every inch of Indee’. The night before the funeral, Lukis and two other men worked until midnight to clear the hard rock out of the grave, meanwhile imagining Rob ‘sitting up there on a cloud laughing his head off at us blokes here’. Next day many men from miles around attended the wake around the coffin in Rob’s office at the Indee station, where Rob had ‘left a gallon of Scotch for us to give him a welcome away ... We swapped a lot of stories

about the dear old fellow.’ Later, after placing the coffin in the grave at Merrinyia claypan, Lukis and four other men sat on top of the grave to drink a bottle of whisky to say farewell.*° Henry Lawson’s two short stories of the 1890s on bush burials are illuminating about bushmen’s views of death. Lawson has been seen as ‘the voice of the Bush’, the founder of an Australian national literary tradition, and his bushman as ‘the national culture-hero’. Lawson’s bush was a ‘blasted, barren wilderness’, a constant, harsh and unforgiving foe in the heroic bushman’s battle with nature. Henry Lawson’s grim realistic images of the bush and the bushman were complex and revealing of life and death on the isolated bush frontier. As Brian Kiernan has observed: “Through him we see men living on the margin of life, so much so that their values and existence are definable only in contrast with the absolute of death. Yet the universal ritual of burial calls forth what is residually and minimally human in these hard cases. There is no sentimental idealising of “the Bushmen”. Lawson’s two stories reveal

different perspectives, though both were written in the same casual and

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ironic style. “The Union Buries its Dead’ portrays the communal alcoholic wake, in contrast to the solitary old shepherd burying his mate alone in ‘The Bush Undertaker’. Both stories present a complete antithesis to the European ideal of the good Christian deathbed scene and the highly ritualised Victorian funeral ceremony. Organised religion is mentioned only indirectly, with scepticism and lack of reverence, replaced by the bushman’s creed of mateship and simple morality.

‘The Union Buries its Dead’ describes the funeral of a stranger in town, a young worker of the General Labourers’ Union who was drowned while driving horses across the Darling River. The local bushmen, who did not know

the stranger, joined the funeral gathering at the corner pub, dancing jigs, drinking, skylarking, and fighting. The deceased was a Catholic while most of the locals were nominally Protestant, ‘but unionism is stronger than creed’, while drink was stronger than unionism. When the carthorse hearse arrived, two-thirds of the funeral party were too inebriated to follow. ‘The procession numbered fifteen ... We were all strangers to the corpse.’ The story suggests an interesting juxtaposition of respect for the dead and lack of respect for the institution of the church and its priest. Two pubs closed as the little procession walked past: ‘Bushmen seldom grumble at an inconvenience of this sort, when it is caused by a funeral. They have too much respect for the dead.’ One

mourner described the attendant priest as ‘the Devil’ and ‘one or two heathens winced slightly when the holy water was sprinkled on the coffin’. Lawson commented that ‘man’s ignorance and vanity made a farce of the funeral’. The ritual seemed inappropriate and sentiment was absent: I have neglected to mention the heart-broken old mate, with his grizzled head bowed and great pearly drops streaming down his rugged cheeks. He was absent— he was probably ‘Out Back’ ... The dead bushman’s name was Jim, apparently; but they found no portraits, nor locks of hair, nor any love letters, nor anything of that kind in his swag—not even a reference to his mother.’

Henry Lawson’s second story, “The Bush Undertaker’ written in 1892, captures other significant features of bush burials. An old shepherd and his sheep-

dog were celebrating Christmas Day alone together, robbing an Aboriginal grave, when they discovered the shrivelled body of the shepherd’s old mate Brummy, ‘dried to a mummy by the intense heat’. The shepherd’s response was laconic but respectful: ‘now I expect I’ll have t’fix yer up for the last time

an’ make yer decent, for ’twon’t do t’leave yer a-lyin’ out here like a dead sheep ... I’d do as much for yer an’ more than any other man.’ The shepherd recognised that it was his duty to his old mate to carry him six miles home to his hut for a ‘decent’ burial, despite the blazing heat, rather than leaving the body to predators—this was apparently a basic human response by an old bushman who sought to prevent the further desecration of his mate’s corpse. The double standard here is astounding, given his own total violation of the indigenous grave. The discovery of Brummy’s bottle of rum no doubt encouraged the shepherd’s plan besides aiding the identification of the corpse. The

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shepherd prepared a makeshift coffin from long strips of bark, ‘sandwiching the defunct between the two pieces’ and bound the bundle together with his belt and strips off his ancient overshirt. With immense effort he carried the corpse the six miles back to his hut, with interruptions for nips of rum.>® The shepherd could not leave his sheep to gain help from the station, so he had to bury Brummy himself, leaving the authorities to disinter him later for inquest if necessary. He intended to ensure that Brummy had ‘a good comfortable buryin’ even if he ‘never rightly knowed Brummy’s religion’. This was probably fairly common among mates in the bush. But the shepherd was certain that no person ‘is a-goin’ ter take the trouble ter travel out inter this God-

forgotten part to hold a service over him, seein’ as how his last cheque’s blued’. He measured Brummy, dug the appropriate sized hole, lowered the body with a clothesline and threw in an armful of gum leaves. At this point the shepherd became anxious about the absence of any ritual, despite his ignorance of his friend’s religion: “Theer oughter be some sort o’sarmin ... tain’t right to put ’im under like a dog.’ So after filling the grave, he stood at its head and solemnly recited the only suitable phrases from the burial service he could remember, ‘Hashes ter hashes, dus ter dus, Brummy,—an’—an’ in hopes of a great an’ gerlorious rassaraction!’ Lawson concluded his tale with

an apt comment on the abnormal nature of burial in the Australian bush— ‘the home of the weird, and of much that is different from things in other lands’.*?

Several bush ballads echo Lawson’s themes about bush burials, especially the anonymous ballad ‘Corney’s Hut’ which describes the lonely death of a fencer in Deadman’s Gap, of heart disease and rum. Few ever visited his hut

and none heard ‘a hint of home, or friends, or brothers’. Only his dog witnessed his death: ‘And he at last was left behind to greet the rough bush undertakers.’ The sawyers found him several days later, knowing that ‘time and distance’ made the rules in the bush, which spared Corney ‘the inquest horrors’. When the bushmen came with horse and dray ‘to tuck the old cove under’, Corney’s dog was ‘chief of mourners’. At the desolate bush cemetery the bushmen buried Corney and read the necessary words but hurried on to avoid darkness, unaware that Corney’s dog had stayed behind to mourn his master alone.*? Like the alcohol, the dog was a constant loyal companion to these lonely bushmen in death. And though this old fencer was friendless, fellow bushmen felt obliged to bury him with appropriate words. The artistic images are broadly consistent with the literary images of the nature of bush funerals, depicting only the social rituals that take place after death, with no deathbed scenes or religious themes, and almost no female participants. S. T. Gill included ‘A Bush Funeral’ in his Australian Sketchbook of 1864, showing the sad, dignified cortége accompanying the plodding bullocks

pulling the coffin. The chief mourner walks slowly beside the coffin—presumably that of his mate, whose dog trots beside him (see plate 24). By contrast, the comic aspects of Lawson’s burial stories are illustrated by a Bulletin cartoon in December 1901. This shows the carthorse hearse hopelessly stuck in a gully while three bushmen of the funeral party attempt to pull it out; the

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corpse’s head is clearly seen in the open top of the coffin, while his loyal dog howls, and the audience of twelve bush creatures observe these peculiar activities with interest*! (see plate 25). Frederick McCubbin’s famous paintings of sentimental scenes, such as Bush Burial and the triptych The Pioneer, are less illuminating about bush burials in the outback, since they depict more domesticated settler families facing death in the coastal forests (see plate 26). What do these various representations of bush burials tell us about bushmen’s views of death, apart from suggesting the grave in the bush was evidence of attachment to the land? Attitudes and behaviour must have varied greatly, especially in the goldfields, but literary evidence and memoirs provide

some clues to certain common preoccupations. First, Henry Lawson was probably correct to highlight many bushmen’s respect for the dead, where circumstances allowed. The local bushmen in “The Union Buries its Dead’ participated in the wake and the burial for a stranger in town, and the old shepherd in “The Bush Undertaker’ went to considerable trouble to give his old mate ‘ a good comfortable buryin’ and ‘make yer decent’. A second common characteristic of bushmen’s approach to death, revealed in Lawson’s stories and others, was a stoical acceptance of inevitable death. Bushmen were pragmatic because they believed there was no more to be done

for the dead and they must look instead to their own survival. In the harsh circumstances of the outback, prolonged formal mourning and elaborate ritual were impractical luxuries. Robert Fellowes Lukis, a pastoralist in Marble Bar and Port Hedland in the early twentieth century, elaborated these truths: We looked upon death up there [in the Pilbara] in those days in a very different fashion to what they look upon it down here [in Perth]. We used to adopt the attitude that we’d known a lot of these chaps for so long and we’d enjoyed their company for so long that we had no regrets at their passing. We knew it had to come to us all. And when the time came, we were quite philosophical in our outlook, and we said, ‘oh well, he was a mighty good bloke and we’ve had lots of happy times. Well, we’ll go and give him a good send off. And that we did’.*?

A third feature of death for bushmen was the tribute required by mateship to a dead mate—a wake with plenty of beer and sometimes some black comedy. These wakes took many forms which were often modified versions of wakes in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Patrick O’Farrell observes that the Catholic Church from the 1820s tried to prohibit the more riotous wakes, which were regarded as primitive pagan practices, but it seems that the censure was more effective in urban areas than the outback.*? When Margaret Bennet, née Durack, died in Queensland in 1864, the Durack extended clan and their friends held a wake: ‘Irish families, determined to wring every ounce of emotion from “the tragedy” came flocking from miles around with offerings of food and drink and blessed candles to burn beside the bier. The keening and the praying went on for a day and a night while the distracted husband [an English Protestant] pleaded with the family to turn “the barbarians”

away.’** Middle-class Protestants often shared John Bennet’s disgust at

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boisterous Irish wakes. Charlotte Suttor was ‘most annoyed with the men about’ on the funeral of an Irish neighbour’s child in 1850, attended by forty men on horseback: ‘The Irish people seem to make quite a holyday of a funeral and a “wake” it is a most barbarous custom.”*° In the outback, wakes were noisy and exuberant masculine affairs. They usually took place in public houses before the burial and sometimes continued into the cemetery, as bushmen walked behind the hearse, drinking as they went. Robert Fellowes Lukis described the burial in Port Hedland of ‘old Bill

Cream’: ‘the bushies from far and wide rallied to the call as usual and the wake started a bit earlier that day ... of course a funeral up there was always an excuse for a grog up’, especially as it was one of the hottest places in Australia.*¢

The bushmen’s fundamental respect for the dead can easily be misunderstood by later generations and urban people because it was often accompanied by so little formal ritual or respect for institutional religion. Bushmen preferred to invent their own rules and adopt casual rituals more appropriate, as they saw it, to a harsh environment and climate, and to particular unusual circumstances. Clergymen often lived too far away or were unavailable, so local laymen had to say the burial service or some approximation to it. Henry Lawson’s two stories of bush burials portrayed the lack of respect for the priest, his church, and his ritual, which ‘made a farce of the funeral’—while

by contrast the old shepherd’s bizarre makeshift ceremony at his mate’s burial seemed more fitting. Ernestine Hill observed that in the far north and west of Western Australia the usual service was merely ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul’, followed by ‘all hands back to the pub’ for ‘the strange unspoken homage, expression of pent-up sorrow for a mate that is gone’.

When Harry Hopkins died many years earlier at a race meeting at Halls Creek, ‘Nobody knew his religion. Most had forgotten their own. A few prayers petered out half-way.’ So instead they sang the song of ‘good mateship Australia over’-—‘For he’s a jolly good fellow!’—“‘beery but heart-felt’.*’ Evidently this was a common conclusion to the dilemma posed by the lack of

a prescribed bush ritual for burial. Revd John Flynn recalled how, as a Presbyterian home missionary in 1902, he encountered some tough bushmen gathered around the newly dug grave of a mate nearly 2000 miles inland from Adelaide. Like Henry Lawson’s old shepherd and Harry Hopkins’ mates, they knew that something was needed, but they did not know any hymns and had no idea what to say. But ‘Jim was a damn fine cobber, so we’ll sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” ... It was the nicest funeral I was ever at.’** Burials in the early goldfields should not be seen as representative of bush burials in the outback. Most prospectors were strangers to the area, many of them from towns, cities, and overseas. Respect for the dead was often missing because of the greed to get rich, the relatively large numbers of dead, and because funeral and burial facilities were inadequate or non-existent (see plate 27). Memoirs throw a lurid light on the casual conduct of goldfields burials. When the undertaker at the Sofala diggings in New South Wales departed in

1863, William Derrincourt, a former convict, was co-opted by the local

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doctor to do the job. During his few years as undertaker he kept no records of burials; funeral rites were performed by clergymen only when friends or family attended, and ‘the bodies were huddled into the graves and covered up without further ceremony’.*? Jock Lowe of Aberdeen in Scotland was a carpenter and stonemason who found himself similarly co-opted as undertaker at the Wattle Flat gold diggings in the early 1850s. Before the first parson arrived, Jock was also expected to perform the rites of burial when required. Since Jock was partial to raw spirits, the drinking bouts at the local pubs which usually preceded burials tended to be prolonged. On one occasion the coffin accidentally fell out of the horse-cart hearse while ascending a rough hill; after the coffin was retrieved and the cemetery reached, the members of

the funeral procession found the grave-digger in a state of stupor at the bottom of the newly dug grave.°? Graves were shallow and not marked by stones, so if relatives later learned of the death they would be unable to identify the site of the burial. John Marshall’s memoir Battling for Gold is revealing about ‘the careless fashion in which funerals were conducted’ in Coolgardie in the 1890s. The

number of deaths was so great that ‘funerals were often seen without any mourners’, the driver of the cart carrying the bodies being the only attendant. Wood for coffins was scarce, so they were often made of packing cases, bearing legends such as ‘stow away from boilers’. The police were the only authority to ensure that the bodies were decently interred, leaving everything to

the undertakers who allegedly became callous through alcohol or overfamiliarity with death. Graves were rarely sunk more than four feet deep, usually much less, and funeral parties sometimes had to wait until the graves were dug. On one occasion a large funeral cortége arrived at the cemetery at the arranged time only to find the gravediggers lying beside the grave ‘in a helpless state of intoxication’.>! There is little surviving information about bushmen’s perceptions of what happened after death. While most had little time for organised religion, it seems probable that many retained a residual belief in God, and a hope for some sort of existence hereafter. Bush ballads and stories again provide pointers. The old bushman Alf Morris in Such is Life said to Tom Collins as he was dying, ‘I’m not a religious man, Collins; I don’t know what will become of me after death; but God does, and that’s sufficient for me.”* That was probably also good enough for many other bushmen, who were likely to be agnostic rather than atheist, and stoical whatever the result. Adam Lindsay Gordon wrote of ‘The Sick Stockrider’: I’ve had my share of pastime, and I’ve done my share of toil ... I should live the same life over, if I had to live again; And the chances are I go where most men go ... Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave, With never stone or rail to fence my bed; Should the sturdy station children pull the bush flowers on my grave, I may chance to hear them romping overhead.°°

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The many ballads on death published in the Bulletin over ten years between 1896 and 1906 adopted three broad approaches to the question of immortality. One group of doubters shared the view of Gordon’s sick stockrider that they had hopes but no certainty of any afterlife. But a larger group believed in annihilation at death, though most, like R. Crawford of New South Wales, preferred to call it ‘sleep’: Who can say what the end will be? Who can guess how the game will go? Dust to dust at the last for me, Earth to earth when I no more know.

In another poem, Crawford specifically defined death as sleep, as did ‘Zadig’: ‘welcome was the sleep/Dreamless and sound—the falling into dark’. They also acknowledged that it was foolish for mourners to grieve for the sake of dead loved ones. J. Liddell Kelly went further than most in welcoming death and rejecting Christian consolations: Why should we yearn for Heaven When weary of this sad Earth? Go we, with souls unshriven, Where neither is grief nor mirth.

Kelly sought a place of ‘easeful silence ... sleeping and never waking’, with no priests urging him to seek redemption. He sought ‘the bliss of being not’.°* A third group of balladeers sought hope in the beauty and regeneration of

nature rather than religion. John Drayman ‘mused upon the mystery of Nature’s wondrous harmony’, which he considered far more ennobling than church, priest and prayer. Charles E. Howell of New South Wales wanted to be buried on the seashore ‘with the scream of the gulls for my requiem,/With no muttered mass and no mumbled prayer’. The voice of the sea would whisper ‘Peace and rest’. The most hopeful poets were those who sought regeneration of life through the natural cycle of the seasons. “Trouvere’s’ beloved slept in the earth, awaiting the rain that would restore her ‘in sweet second birth/To me, as a lily, again’.°° The poet Henry Kendall offered the pantheist perspective on death with more elegance than the balladeers. After severe personal trials, including his daughter’s death, Kendall discovered in the Australian landscape a source

of spiritual regeneration and ‘a secular basis for belief’. His poem ‘To a Mountain’ echoed Wordsworth: I take thee for my Teacher. In thy voice Of deathless majesty, I, kneeling, hear God’s grand authentic Gospel ! ...

Thou my Bible art ... Thou hast lifted up The blind horizon for a larger faith!>®

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Kendall’s words may well have expressed something of the kinship with the land and love of the landscape felt by many bushmen who were less articulate.

Attitudes to death and burial in the Australian bush arguably owed more to the imperatives of the bush itself and to the popular customs and beliefs of the poor labouring classes in Ireland and Britain than to the middle- and upper-class ‘Victorian way of death’.>’ The literary and visual images of bush

burials are well supported by historical evidence, and help to construct the distinctive Australian culture of death which developed in the bush largely independently of imported European traditions and rituals. By contrast, the narratives of fearless men who perished after valiant battles with the alien bush were sometimes conjured out of the imagination to satisfy a psychological need for Australian heroes. ‘Bushed’ deaths from thirst and exposure were feared more than they were valorised, in part because predators would devour the corpses and proper bush burials were rarely possible. The next chapter looks more closely at several facets of the many other types of death which men suffered in the bush, according to historical evidence.

Chapter 14

Male Deaths in the Bush Frontier Violence, Old Age, Suicide, and Accidents

The literary and visual images of European deaths in the Australian bush in the nineteenth century reveal major omissions and misconceptions. It is highly significant that Aboriginal people and European women and children were almost entirely overlooked in the heroic tales of death in the bush, except occasionally as minor supporting characters. And though the heroic myths focus on European males, that focus is often distorted and inaccurate. In this chapter the mythology of death in the bush is tested against the historical and statistical evidence for the outback and the small rural towns in the bush. This study of male deaths in the bush can draw useful parallels between the frontier experience of Australia and other colonial settler societies, especially the United States. In 1991 David T. Courtwright examined the high levels of violence, disease, death and disorder on the nineteenth-century American frontier. He argued that behavioural disorders and socio-medical problems were closely related to the social and demographic characteristics of the population.! Courtwright’s focus was on the abnormal demographic and social structure of the American frontier, where young single males were disproportionate in numbers and were also more destructive and unhealthy than either women or married males. The harsher the environment and the longer the journey from settled regions, the higher the ratio of men to women, especially in the mining areas. Children were few and the elderly were unusual, even when men in the mining camps were considered old at 40. Young single men were more prone to violent and antisocial behaviour, including murder, suicide, and accidents. Married men benefited from the nourishing and protective influences of women, who paid more attention to cleanliness, sanitation, order and nutrition. Where women were scarce, nutrition and sanitation were more likely to be neglected, so the levels of infectious diseases increased, and excessive drinking raised the tendency to violence.? 263

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Courtwright’s work has considerable relevance for the Australian colonial

experience, even though the Australian frontier was generally considered more orderly than the American because Australian goldfields were closer to centres of government. As Pat Grimshaw and others observed in Creating a Nation: For every reserved, self-sufficient bushman or digger there were others whose absence from what Chisholm termed ‘domestic influences’, and from familial responsibilities, left them incentive, time and energy for drinking and gambling, and fighting among themselves—or against Aborigines. The raw male frontier thereby contributed to the construction of one style of colonial masculinity which valorised all-male company and pursuits ... and was essentially hostile towards women.°

The male to female ratio in Australia was very high in 1861 with nearly fourteen men for every ten women, falling to eleven men for every ten women by 1901. Young single men continued to dominate the outback, especially in

Western Australia and Queensland, where the numbers of males for every hundred females in 1901 were 158 and 126 respectively, compared with 101 for Victoria, 110 for New South Wales, and 102 for South Australia.* FE B. Smith has recently noted the implications of the sex imbalances: ‘the colonies with the highest masculinity proportions and younger populations and highest alcohol consumption rates, Queensland and Western Australia, had the worst lethal accident and negligence counts’.» Moreover, the high male ratios in the bush were accentuated by the fact that women predominated in urban areas and men in the bush.

Men died from violence and accidents in colonial Australia on average three times more frequently than women between 1869 and 1903. Qingfeng Zou has shown that male mortality rates from violence differed substantially between colonies from the 1860s when mortality statistics first began to be published. From 1869 to 1893, male death rates from injury and violence were highest in sparsely populated Queensland at 228 per 100 000 population

in 1869-73. By 1899-1903 Western Australia’s male mortality rates from violence were highest at 207 per 100000 males, whereas Queensland had dropped to 167. New South Wales and Victoria came next with 183 and 175 respectively in 1869-73, while the rates for South Australia and Tasmania were the lowest at 119 and 116 respectively in 1879-83.° The reasons for focusing on Western Australian evidence were advanced in the previous chapter, and they apply also to some extent to South Australia, the colony which receives more attention here. Both colonies contained vast expanses of isolated bush; and although South Australia was more than twice as urbanised as Western Australia by 1901, I concentrate here not on Adelaide but on several small frontier towns with high masculinity ratios—as the places of transition to and from the more remote bush. Indeed Port Augusta, in par-

ticular, provides a vital link between the two colonies, given its position on the daunting route from the east to the goldfields of the west. The choice of

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South Australia was also determined by the survival, accessibility, and considerable value of its police and coronial records, which are arranged chronologically within regions, facilitating analysis of complete groups of records for particular areas and periods.’ The two colonies make an interesting contrast

since the male death rates from violence were much lower in South

Australia—no doubt because it had no convict history, and a much lower masculinity ratio; it also had a less scattered, more urbanised and settled population from an earlier date, with a strong religious tradition. Western Australia’s male death rates from injury and violence at 207 per 100000 male population in 1899-1903 were more than double those of South Australia at 99.°

Aboriginal deaths on the frontier ‘The great Australian silence’ The heroic bush and pioneer legends combined with selective memories to

erase the death and dispossession of the Aboriginal people from many Australian history books, with denial or trivialisation of the extent of their slaughter. The history of white conflict with Aboriginal people was not regarded as heroic and was not commemorated like the deeds of the noble Anzacs. As Ken Inglis observed in 1974: Until the natives were exterminated or tamed or driven to regions unwanted by newcomers, the advance of white settlement was bound to lead to the shedding of blood, most of it Aboriginal. Black and white endured on the frontier a relationship of wariness and tension punctuated by what the whites called outrages, affrays and incidents, and on occasion flaring into engagements which they described in the language of warfare.’

In The Other Side of the Frontier Henry Reynolds argues in 1987 that ‘as many as 8000-10000 Aborigines died violently in Queensland. For the continent as a whole it is reasonable to suppose that at least 20 000 Aborigines were killed as a direct result of conflict with the settlers.’!° Lyndall Ryan in The Aboriginal Tasmanians estimates that about 700 Aboriginal people were killed in Tasmania, ‘or nearly four times as many as the 176 Europeans killed by the Aborigines’.!! In a Quadrant essay, Keith Windschuttle has recently challenged the estimates of Reynolds, Richard Broome and others as ‘unsubstantiated guesswork’ which substantially exaggerate the Aboriginal death

toll—a charge which has given rise to heated debate.!* In opposition to Windschuttle, scholars such as Mark Finnane and Bain Attwood have argued that the figure of 20000 Aboriginal people killed by Europeans was a symbolic estimate of massive violence and dispossession. The actual total number could never be authenticated because by their very nature such deaths in frontier conflicts were never reported, and the historical records have been lost, destroyed, or never existed.!?

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Despite controversy about precise statistics, it remains clear that the numbers of Aboriginal people killed, especially in Queensland and Tasmania, far exceeded those of Europeans. Moreover, such statistics take no account of additional Aboriginal mortality from disease, deprivation and dispossession. Noel Butlin argued in Our Original Aggression in 1983 that the Aboriginal people of south-eastern Australia had been decimated by two extensive smallpox epidemics in 1789 and 1829-31." Infectious diseases continued to be a significant cause of Aboriginal deaths in the colonial period. Richard Broome

contends that ‘massacre was a noted feature of the frontier... Aboriginal deaths by massacre formed a significant proportion of the total killings... Records now list hundreds of alleged massacre sites around Australia.’!> The massacre at Myall Creek near Inverell in New South Wales in 1838 was one of the best documented and most unusual in that seven of the armed white stockmen who killed at least 28 unarmed Aboriginal victims were sentenced to death, having been acquitted at the first trial. There is a considerable literature concerning massacres in Queensland, including government inquiries

into punitive expeditions by the Queensland Native Police. Newspapers reported such killings as accepted fact, illustrated by the Bulletin’s statement

on 19 June 1880 regarding the ‘wholesale massacre of human beings’ in North Queensland: There has been open war between the races and there is hardly a man in North Queensland whose motto is not ‘See a nigger and “pot” him’. The blacks have been

murdered by thousands, and, whether on the Palmer, Hodgkinson, Gilbert, Etheridge, or Coen fields, to say nothing of the pastoral districts, the white settlers’ policy has been one of extermination ... And what is happening in Queensland now once happened every day in New South Wales. It is too late to think of preserving the Aboriginal race.!¢

This subject is best left to experts such as Henry Reynolds, Richard Broome, Lyndall Ryan, and Bain Attwood, but I will venture a few comments on the Western Australian situation since it is a central focus of this chapter. Neville Green in 1979 examined violent conflict between Aboriginal people

and settlers in Western Australia between 1826 and 1852, carefully documenting the details of each death. He recorded 102 Aboriginal people killed compared with 25 settlers and soldiers, a ratio of four to one.!” The so-called battle of Pinjarra on the Murray River about 80 kilometres south of Perth in October 1834 involved a massacre of at least 30 men, women and children of the Nyungar people. This is well documented because it was an official expedition of 24 mounted police, soldiers, and civilians led by Governor James Stirling, intended to end the Aboriginal resistance to European settlement in

the area. Colonist Thomas Peel had complained bitterly that the Nyungar people were threatening both stock and individual settlers on his Mandurah land grant in revenge for the recent flogging and imprisonment of four tribes-

men following a raid. The expedition was a planned ambush which surrounded the camp of about seventy Nyungar people on the Murray River

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near Pinjarra. George Fletcher Moore, an Irish legal official, noted in his diary

that the colonists surprised the Nyungar who broke ranks and ran. The Aboriginal men briefly turned to stand their ground at the river bank, but when about five were killed they took to the river, where they were exposed to the cross-fire of mounted men on both sides, and were picked off one by one. Moore’s account is particularly incriminating given his obvious anxiety to justify the armed expedition.'® Subsequent research has estimated the number of Nyungar dead at more than 30 men, women, and children compared

with only two members dead from Stirling’s party. The diary of another colonist, Joseph Hardey, noted that ‘about 25 or 30 of them [Nyungar] were killed, one woman and several children. It has been a shocking slaughter; I fear more so than was needed.’!? As planned, the Pinjarra expedition ended the effective resistance of the Aboriginal people to settlement in the southwest of the colony.7° No doubt Joseph Hardey kept his private criticism of the ‘shocking slaughter’ at Pinjarra to himself. W. E. H. Stanner, an anthropologist, described the

European Australian tendency to deny the frontier killings as ‘the Great Australian Silence’.2! Tom Griffiths wisely observes that such silence takes

many forms, including rationalisation, denial, selective memories, and troubled consciences. After the executions of the white perpetrators of the Aboriginal killings at Myall Creek, many colonists kept silent about the murders in their regions for fear of penalties, acquiescing in what they rationalised as an inevitable process.** Some justified the killings by the argument that the

Aboriginal people were a dying race of savages doomed to extinction, and that the land was legally annexed rather than conquered. From the 1860s such rationalisation was greatly reinforced by the ideas of social Darwinism which used evolutionary theory to place indigenous peoples at the bottom of an evolutionary scale with civilised European nations at the top. Until the 1930s the ultimate extinction of primitive Aboriginal people was regarded as inevitable and necessary in the universal battle for the ‘survival of the fittest’. Scientists sought Aboriginal skulls for scientific measurement to provide expert proof that they were deficient in brain size and mental ability, and so incapable of being civilised.*? The European colonists did not see the sporadic frontier conflict as a proper war, nor were they able to valorise as heroes those whites killed by Aborigines.

Gravestone inscriptions, colonial press reports, and diaries are revealing about European rationalisation of frontier violence, as can be seen in Lonely Graves of Western Australia, which draws entirely on European sources. For example, twenty-five separate entries (from the sample of entries A to K) in

this list of isolated graves, record the murder of Europeans by ‘hostile Aborigines’. For example, in 1864 four Aboriginal men were hanged as a deterrent at the spot where they speared Thomas Bolt and were buried alongside him. Charles Brackell of Carnarvon was reported as killed in 1882 by an Aboriginal couple who worked on his station. Peter Chidlow, a 29-year-old shepherd, was killed by Aboriginal people in Northam. John Dunn, a pioneer, was likewise killed by an Aboriginal man in 1880, as was Jeremiah Durack in

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1901 at Lake Argylle. Tom Henry and two mates in the Kimberley goldfields

were reported as murdered by Aborigines. John Hourigan in 1896 was allegedly murdered ‘by his native boy for a few ends of tobacco’.** Lonely

Graves does not notice any murders of Aboriginal people by Europeans, though there were undoubtedly many more of these.

Significant causes of European male deaths The most significant causes of death in the bush and the goldfields were not perishing from thirst, but accidents and diseases. It is notable that only 8 per cent of accidental deaths in Western Australia during the peak goldrush years of the 1890s were caused by perishing from thirst and sunstroke, compared with 42 per cent by fractures and 19 per cent by drowning.*> Though diseases are not a focus of this chapter, and receive some attention elsewhere, I merely wish to note here that disease was always a threat in the bush as in the settled areas, and in the unplanned goldfields it could be disastrous. Early goldfields’ settlements were unsanitary, overcrowded, and unhygienic; fresh food and water were in limited supply, and malnutrition and adulterated alcohol were common. Bryan Gandevia has remarked that in the Victorian goldfields the assimilation of a multitude of 100000 people ‘without wholesale famine and distress is amazing’.*® At the height of the goldrushes, gastrointestinal infections, notably typhoid fever, diarrhoea, and dysentery killed large numbers of

diggers, but these were not deaths that could be romanticised and they received far less attention than their numbers justified in bush ballads and folklore. Enteric diseases were associated with dirt and inadequate sanitation, trans-

mitted by fouled water or food, and caused fever and diarrhoea.”’ In South

Australia, diarrhoea and dysentery were ranked fifth in order of fatality between 1893 and 1902, while enteritis ranked eighth.*® Typhoid fever had little impact in Western Australia before the great rush to the newly discovered goldfields in the 1890s, when it caused more than 10 per cent of the

colony’s deaths over a decade. The worst years were 1895-98, with 400 deaths in 1896 amounting to 19.80 per cent of total deaths, but increased Sanitary precautions reduced the proportion to 4.76 per cent in 1901. During the height of the typhoid epidemic the numbers of deaths from diarrhoeal diseases, including dysentery, also increased from 5.08 per cent of total deaths in 1893 to 8.65 per cent in 1898—but were likewise reduced to 4.17 per cent by 1901.??

Old age and destitution Police records indicate that old age was often linked with destitution as a major contributory factor in deaths in the bush. The Statistical Register of South Australia for 1902 listed ‘old age’ as the top cause of death out of 113 causes in order of fatality between 1893 and 1902—higher than consumption, infant diarrhoea, debility, or cancer. The Statistical Register for 1920-21

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altered the category from ‘old age’ to ‘senile debility’, but it remained in the top two causes of death between 1911 and 1920. By 1914, heart disease overtook senile debility in first place, with cancer third and tuberculosis fourth, with considerable overlap in categories since all three were killers of the elderly.°° Tasmania reported old age as the top cause of death between 1881 and

1910, while in Victoria it was fifth in 1890 and 1898. New South Wales listed old age as the third major cause of death in 1891, the second in 1900 and fifth in 1905—09. Heart disease in 1905—09 overtook old age in first place,

with cancer in third.*! Sherwin B. Nuland, an American surgeon, observes that people today are expected by actuaries to die of specific clinical categories rather than the generic ‘old age’. And yet he argues that many people indeed die of old age, despite the doctors’ classification as stroke or heart attack: ‘These aged folk have in fact died because something in them has worn out. Long before the days of scientific medicine, everyone understood this.’>7 Inevitably there was overlap between categories and lack of clear definition in the Statistical Register, but we gain significant indicators of the role of old age in death from this data. Although death from ‘old age’ or ‘senile debility’ was cited as the first cause of death in South Australia from 1893 to 1914, only 3 per cent of people over 65 years were able to enter the Adelaide destitute asylum, the only asylum in

the state. Most old men were obliged to eke out a fragile but independent existence outside the asylum, with only a tiny minority receiving outdoor relief from the destitute board. When destitute people died outside institutions

with no family or friends to pay for their burial, their bodies and burial became the responsibility of the local police, whose records can be revealing about the circumstances leading up to the death. Thus we can learn something

about those who tried to remain independent despite their poverty, often working for as long as they were able. But in most cases the loss of mature strength with advancing years, often reinforced by ill health, meant the end of full-time paid employment and a precarious existence until death intervened. The critical years of vulnerability came early, often between the ages of 40 and 65. Most adult pauper deaths were those of lonely old immigrant men who had never married or had abandoned their families for the goldfields or the bush. Many were homeless tramps, while others were ageing bushmen, swagmen or shepherds. Police records certainly demonstrate the horror of being a

homeless and penniless immigrant, far from home and still regarded as a stranger.

Life and death in Port Augusta is recorded in police mortuary books, with ninety-four entries for the period 1888-1920—many more than most other towns outside Adelaide. The high masculinity ratio and the high male rate for deaths by accident and violence both account for the fact that only two of these ninety-four deaths were those of women. Port Augusta was a small masculine frontier town in a very isolated location on the route between Adelaide and the Kalgoorlie goldfields. It was a significant gulf port and regional centre for mining, shipping, and agriculture, with a population of 1529 by 1890. This was a masculine world, but the two cases of female death hint at

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the plight of the tiny minority of women in such an isolated frontier town. Katherine Fisher, aged 80 years, had lived in Port Augusta for thirty years, with no known relatives, and died in 1918 of ‘senile gangrene’ in the Port Augusta Hospital, where she spent her final two months. Mary Ann Turner, aged 30, was found in her house in 1899, lying in a fit, and the doctor ordered her to be moved to the hospital where she died next day. Unlike Katherine Fisher she had three children under 11 who had been removed to the control of the state children’s department; she died alone—the whereabouts of her husband were unknown, and he may have deserted her.?? Only one Port Augusta destitute death was identified as specifically due to ‘old age’, but at least forty-three out of ninety-four were aged over 50, including twenty-three over 60, and several more with no ages noted must also have

been elderly. Seven out of eleven drink-related deaths were aged over 45, including four over 60. Out of the ninety-four cases, the most frequent causes of death were eleven drownings and eight who died from heart disease. Only seven of the eleven drownings mentioned ages, which included two in their fifties and two in their sixties. It might be expected that several of the eight cardiac deaths would be elderly men but ages are given in only four cases, which included John Butterworth, aged 75, and two men in their fifties. Four out of six tuberculosis deaths with age cited were men aged over 45. At least three of the six stroke victims were over 60, including two in their seventies, and two of the three cancer cases were also in their seventies. These statistics

can only be indicative of the high death rate from diseases and accidents among elderly men, because age and cause of death were so often missing in the records.*4

In addition, it is instructive to examine those entries which provide more information on the twenty-three men over 60 who died while still employed, or in hospital. These elderly men included all sorts of bush characters, shearers, swagmen, labourers, shepherds, and respectable tradesmen fallen on hard

times, living rough in huts or tents, and in boarding houses. Four of these were still employed and working up to the time of death. Geordi Eipperlin, aged 70, was found dead in a dairy in the course of his station work in 1910. James Patton, a Scottish station hand aged 65, was still employed when he was found dead in his hut in 1888 suffering from general debility. The wages due to him amounted to £11 15s 8d, which meant that he avoided a destitute burial. Patton’s belongings included ten books and a Bible, as well as a book containing eight letters—the Bible was less unusual than the other books in such lists of possessions. John Butterworth, aged 75, was still employed as a

carpenter on a station when he died of heart disease in 1906, after having complained to the doctor of feeling unwell.°> These men can represent hundreds of others who eked out a modest living while they were still fit enough to be employable, but joined the ranks of the destitute elderly thereafter. Other old men had been obliged to give up employment due to ill health, but were trying to sustain a precarious independence. William Morvall was found dead from natural causes in 1907 in an empty house in Port Augusta at the age of 76; he had recently been a hospital patient and had been receiv-

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ing destitute board rations for about a month. Frederick Young, a 67-year-old pensioner of Belgian nationality, had formerly been a marine engineer and worked for Beltana pastoral company. More recently he had become an outdoor patient at the Port Augusta Hospital, suffering from an aneurism, the cause of his death in 1912, though he had continued to live in a house alone.*® Many old men with no relatives to care for them went to the Port Augusta Hospital to die when they could no longer cope alone with their debility, and were sometimes moribund on arrival. Stephen Morris, aged 85, survived outside hospital until his final week, when he died there of ‘old age’ in 1892. He was thought to have two sons in South Australia but no addresses were available. Four other old men in their seventies died in the Port Augusta Hospital, including three with no known relatives. William Langford, aged 73, died in

the hospital in 1891 of cancer, nearly three weeks after admission. James Smith, aged 73, and Richard Mainstone died of strokes in the hospital in 1892 and 1893, two days and one month respectively after admission. Daniel Sinclair, aged 70, died of septicaemia in 1893 twelve days after admission.’ Some of these old men might have ended their days in the destitute asylum had they lived in Adelaide; but in Port Augusta they were obliged to survive alone in a precarious manner until the final stages of terminal illness ultimately led them briefly to hospital. Renmark in South Australia offers further evidence of how elderly men without family or friends managed to maintain a fragile existence until death.

Renmark was established in 1887 as a small irrigation settlement on the Murray River near the New South Wales border. It acted as a small rural centre for inland shipping and a hinterland port for sheep and wheat and was located about 150 miles from Adelaide. Between 1890 and 1921 the Renmark

police completed returns in their mortuary book for forty-three cases of people without money, property, family, or friends who required pauper burials.?°

All but one of the forty-three cases were men; nine were in their fifties, ten in their sixties and six in their seventies. On average 1.4 such cases arose in

Renmark per year over thirty-one years—a tiny number, but generating enough information over time to provide a useful picture of the deaths of sixteen people (out of the forty-three) who were over 60 years. The evidence is revealing about those people who were determined to remain independent in old age, even if it meant retaining only an insecure existence clinging to useful employment of some kind for as long as possible. There was an unusually high proportion of such cases of independent old men in the Renmark mortuary book. Nationalities were not usually specified in the returns, though those identified included one Dane, one German, one Irishman, one Scotsman, and six English.*? Of the nine men who died in their fifties, three were alcoholics, one died from acute bronchitis, one committed suicide by shooting, one died from heart disease, two from ‘natural causes’, and one fell off a haystack.

Only three of the sixteen people over 60 were men who either received rations from the Adelaide destitute board or an old-age pension and all three were over 70. Isaac Willis was a 73-year-old fisherman who held a permit to

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camp by the Pyap River and who had received government rations for two years since 1904. He died in the Kapunda Hospital in 1906 of unspecified causes. Shortly before his death he revealed that he had two married daughters in England with whom he had not communicated for years. Johan Rogall was a German, aged 72 years, who spoke no English despite fifteen years’ res-

idence in Renmark. He had been drawing destitute board rations for five years since 1909, while his health had been bad. He was found dead in his

bed in January 1914 but no cause of death was given and no more was known. Peter Hansen, a 78-year-old Dane, was the only one in receipt of an old-age pension. He died in January 1921 of suicide after years of suffering from cancer of the face. He had lived in a tent on the banks of the river in Renmark where he regularly fished from the bank. He drowned himself by attaching a quantity of sand to his waist and placing an axe in his hip pocket. He had no relatives in Australia, but managed to leave £4 Os 9d in his tent, intended perhaps as a contribution to his burial costs.*° Three of the sixteen deaths of people over 60 were alcohol related. Henry

Maxwell, aged 67, was a former fitter who had been employed by the Renmark Irrigation Trust until four years before his death and had lived in the town for fifteen years. He had been drinking very heavily for some weeks

before his death in 1912, no doubt depressed by uselessness and failing health, and was found lying dead in the scrub near the township. Thomas Fitzpatrick, an Irish labourer aged about 60, and a long-term resident of Renmark, ‘had done all kinds of labour, was a hard worker, and a heavy drinker’. The alcohol presumably contributed to his admission to Renmark Hospital in April 1916 and his death next day. He left £3 Os 2d in cash and a few old clothes which were sold at auction for 7s 6d to contribute to burial costs. The police could find no trace of relatives. The third, Ben Sister, aged 66, was a recent visitor from Adelaide who was found drowned in the river in 1913 after drinking heavily for several days.*! The remaining corpses belonged to a variety of swagmen, tramps, itinerant workers, rabbiters, and bushmen. Three can fairly be described as swagmen and one as a swagwoman—the latter the only woman in all forty-three cases. Christina Pearson, known as Mary Pearce, was aged about 60 and was well

known on the Murray River, ‘having been tramping up and down for ten years’. She was described as ‘stout build, grey hair, 5ft 3ins high’. She had left

her husband and children about thirty years earlier at Millicent, and they could no longer be contacted. She had on various occasions told individual policemen that she suffered badly from sciatica and police thought rain might have so aggravated her sciatica, as to make her helpless. Her badly decomposed body was found in a creek in 1908 and buried by the police where she had died.* An unidentified swagman, aged about 60, was found dead in 1896 near his camp by the river, having been dead about six weeks. The police categorised him as ‘one of those old men whose home is travelling up and down the Murray’, like Christina Pearson. But an entirely different dimension to the old man was discovered in his camp, as the police looked at old watch cases,

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clocksprings and watchmakers’ tools, revealing his trade in younger years.

Douglas Margie, also aged about 60, had been in the neighbourhood of Renmark for some years, making a fragile living by fruit-picking, trapping,

and fishing in the river. The police report commented, ‘He had a hard struggle of late to get a living. Had not a particle of food in the camp.’ His body was buried near his camp where it was found in 1903, as were those of most swagmen and itinerant bushmen; an appropriate bush burial was in order when bushmen died far from cemeteries and burial costs could not be retrieved. The final case testifies to the great variety of destitute old men in

outback South Australia. Samuel Wilson, aged about 60, was ‘a heavy laudanum drinker and opium smoker’ who was reported to have kept a ‘Chinese house’ at Wilcannia in earlier years. More recently he was well known in Renmark where he had been employed at an unspecified job and was ‘smart and active’. But he was found in February 1890 sitting under a tree near his tent in a weak condition and died shortly afterwards, with no known friends or relatives.*°

The police records in South Australia attest to the value placed by many old people on independent survival and some measure of dignity in their final

years. Some old men, like the watchmaker at Renmark, chose to become swagmen travelling up and down the Murray when they became too frail to practise their trade. Outside cities and larger towns the police seem to have generally shown respect and occasional kindness to these unfortunate old men struggling to sustain a precarious living on the margins of humanity. Most were keen to stay outside the destitute asylum, where one inmate, B. G. Faulkner, aged 78, ‘felt his manhood damaged, and a certain loss of selfrespect’.*4

Suicide and despair Suicides, murders, infanticide, and accidents were all classified in a mortality

group together as ‘violent deaths’. Male homicide rates were very low throughout Australia, falling from 3.6 to 3.1 per 100 000 in New South Wales between 1869 and 1903, and from 3.5 to 2.0 in Victoria; about two men were killed for every woman.*> Male suicide in colonial Australia was far more significant, as the third cause of death by violence after fractures and drownings. Suicide was a highly unusual category in that it was self-determined and self-inflicted, unlike disease, accidents, or other involuntary deaths. Police and coronial reports rarely provide much insight into motivation for suicide, but

one rare suicide note in Port Augusta highlighted despair as the primary reason. This was the only suicide note mentioned in the cases examined for South Australia, but the emotional agony expressed probably applied to many

suicides of men aged over 40. David Clarridge, aged 52, was one of four suicides in Port Augusta out of ninety-four deaths entered in the police mortuary books between 1888 and 1920. Clarridge had been a boundary rider for the same employer in the Gawler Ranges for the previous eight years. He was born in England, but his wife and other relatives were likely to be in

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Western Australia, addresses unknown. He was a ‘quiet steady man’, a depressive, who was found dead in his hut at Buckelboo, with a gunshot wound to his head and a suicide note on the table: ‘Goodbye to everyone as

I am going to die today. I am that miserable that I cannot live any longer everything has gone wrong do the best with the sheep that you can.’*® To understand more about society’s responses to suicide in Australia, it is helpful to consider the British heritage, which was still so influential. Suicide was traditionally seen in Britain as the converse of the good Christian death whereby a pious Christian faced suffering and death with fortitude as the will of God. Rather, suicide was regarded as a form of murder—a felony in criminal law and an offence against God. In the Middle Ages, suicide was condemned by the Church and the common law, which exacted harsh penalties of desecration of the corpse, denial of Christian burial, and forfeiture of prop-

erty. But coroners’ juries were increasingly reluctant to punish surviving families, frequently returning verdicts of non compos mentis—innocent of self-murder because of unsound mind. The British parliament repealed the custom of profane burial in 1823 and forfeiture of property in 1870—recognising that juries rarely applied the law. But most Christians still regarded sui-

cide as a sin against God and wished to deter potential suicides; families of suicides shrank from the stigma of burial in unconsecrated ground and tried to conceal suicides of relatives if they could. The common-law felony of selfmurder was not repealed in Britain until 1961.*” Up to the 1880s, Christians in Australia also condemned suicide as a sin against God. Charlotte Suttor, a devout Christian, observed in her diary in 1849 of one of her neighbours: I was truly shocked to hear that Mr. Dowling had put an end to his life by blowing out his brains poor man what misery is in the thought to meet his God in such a dreadful state, to cut himself off from all mercy, his wife and family are very much to be pitied ... The place seemed as desolate as though a corpse had just left, what a lesson should such things afford us, they had all that would render life happy but from vice and folly it was dashed away.*®

Harsh attitudes to suicides in the Australian colonies reflected those in Britain. For example, suicides in both Victoria and New South Wales who were considered mentally sound were to be buried between 9 p.m. and midnight—and in Victoria also without benefit of clergy.*” The British debate about the trend to greater leniency in treatment of suicides in the nineteenth century was repeated in Australia. Doctors and churchmen in both countries were concerned that coroners’ juries interpreted the law

too mercifully for the sake of the families, returning verdicts of ‘temporary insanity’ instead of ‘felo de se’ (self-murder). Only about 2 per cent of suicides

were returned as ‘felo de se’ in the 1890s in Victoria? From about 1880 anxiety increased in both countries out of a belief that the incidence of suicide was growing; more conservatives therefore appealed for a stricter interpretation of the law as a deterrent. The Melbourne Age in 1895 charged that sui-

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cide was often cowardice and that the statistics were ‘more appalling than those of war’: ‘it is wise that law and custom should frown on this growing habit of self-slaughter’. Certainly the Age accepted the opinion that suicide

had increased throughout the century, and that it was still growing ‘far beyond the growth of the population’—later disproved by G. H. Knibbs’s statistics. The Age believed it expressed ‘public opinion’ in 1893: The offence is becoming unpleasantly common, and some means of stamping it out is imperatively called for ... Christian moralists have never varied from the dictum that for a man to kill himself was as grave a crime as to kill anybody else ... Juries usually take the lenient view that self murderers are temporarily insane. But in the large majority of cases there is not the slightest indication that there is such a brain disturbance.

The Age’s condemnation of suicide was enhanced by the news in 1894 that many of that year’s annual suicides were judged by the city coroner to be alcohol related: ‘of the [50] suicides, all but 9 were proved to have been committed either while the victims were in a state of drunkenness or suffering from the after effects of a protracted drinking bout.’*! Henry Keylock Rusden, atheist and leader of Melbourne’s secular movement, presented a more merciful view with his Essay on Suicide in 1875. He charged that the popular judgment of suicide was cruel and illogical, and arose from the ‘pernicious spirit of intolerance’ induced by Christianity. The love of life was so powerful that the impulse to suicide would only arise in the most extreme cases; it was almost impossible ‘to realize the appalling load of hopeless despair which must oppress and excruciate the sensibilities of a sane suicide’. In Rusden’s view, such cases should inspire compassion instead of condemnation and punishment. Society needed to understand the social and economic circumstances and the personal history of a suicide to explain the torture and misery that caused the act, including terminal disease. ‘I presume that in most of these cases death is known to be inevitably near, when I think suicide, to avoid pain, is wise, rather than otherwise.”>? In later nineteenth-century Australia, as in Britain, this compassionate secular view of suicide gained support, explaining suicide in terms of broader socioeconomic forces, or genuine mental illness, rather than as a mortal sin against God. These perspectives were reinforced by the scientific challenges to religious orthodoxy and the increasing secularisation of social thought. Later writers placed greater emphasis on socioeconomic factors in suicide, as in Emile Durkheim’s influential classic Suicide: A Study in Sociology, first published in 1897.

G. H. Knibbs, Commonwealth statistician, in 1911 provided a useful analysis of the statistics for suicide in Australia.°’ He observed that suicide was not a leading cause of death, being responsible in Australia in 1910 for only 1.13 per cent of deaths from all causes. The rate of suicides was remarkably constant, but varied somewhat according to social and economic conditions, so that variations in suicide rates indicated reactions to stress. For example,

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the rates rose in 1887-88 with the silver and land booms, again in 1893 with bank failures, and in 1903 with serious drought. The Age in 1895 also identified ‘the railroad pace of modern existence’ as a potent causal factor in suicides: ‘The steam, the electricity, the great daily newspapers are said to entail greater stress than human nerves can bear, until men break under the strain.’** Knibbs also highlighted the consistency of the gender ratio in suicide rates: ‘It is a remarkable fact that in the western world the frequency of male suicide ranges from double to quintuple the frequency among women’, whereas in India and some other Asian countries female suicide was more common. In Australia between 1871 and 1909 there was a steady ratio for each decade of 4.92 male suicides for every one female—higher than today’s ratio of about 4. The methods of suicide used in Australia were also very regular according to gender. From 1907 to 1910 ‘poison and drowning are resorted to two and a half times more frequently by women than by men; suicide by cutting is resorted to twice as often, and shooting five times as often, by men as by women’.°’ Simon Cooke sampled 906 Victorian suicides from 1841 to 1921, concluding that women tended to employ methods less likely to be effective, using guns in only 3 per cent of cases, compared with 21 per cent for men.°° Substantial research by experts such as G. H. Knibbs and Simon Cooke for Australia and Olive Anderson and Victor Bailey for England has demonstrated a strong link between ageing and suicide in the nineteenth century, especially for men.°’ Knibbs’s statistics revealed a distinct increase in the suicidal tendency with age, though this was retarded in women during their childbearing years. In men the frequency of suicide grew between 15 and 62 years, when it reached its maximum, before starting slowly to decline. Cooke supports Knibbs’s conclusion that the suicide rate rose with age, and argues that illness, unemployment, and fear of economic dependence emerge as vital

contributory factors in inquests on the elderly. Western Australia and Queensland had the highest suicide rates among middle-aged and elderly men

from about 1890 to 1914, reflecting the high masculinity ratios, lack of family support, social isolation, the insecurity of the goldrushes, and rural occupational mobility.°®

The suicide rate in South Australia in 1911 at 1.08 per cent was somewhat lower than the national average of 1.13 per cent, as calculated by Knibbs. The

Statistical Register of South Australia, 1880 shows that nineteen of the twenty-five suicides in 1880 were males and six were females. The methods

used by the men were six by gunshot, five knife-cuts, three poison, two drowning, and three hanging. The six women chose one by gunshot, four drowning, and one hanging. Eight of the total twenty-five suicides came from the metropolitan Adelaide area and seventeen from rural areas. The numbers of suicides in the decade 1871 to 1880 ranged from eleven in 1871 to twentyfive in 1880, and in seven of those years there were only one or two female suicides. Six of the thirteen male suicides in the extra-metropolitan area were clustered in the age group 45 to 55, whereas the remaining seven were scattered fairly evenly across the age range 20 to 70. The Statistical Register tor 1902 also shows a greater concentration of male suicides (eighteen out of the

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total twenty-five) in the 40 to 60 age range, and only three female suicides.>” The 1920-21 Statistical Register shows that out of a total of 391 suicides in the decade 1901 to 1910, methods included 106 by firearms, eighty-five by

hanging, seventy-two by poison, sixty-three by knife-cuts, forty-nine by drowning, and sixteen others, with no gender breakdown. For the decade 1911 to 1920, 168 males came from the Adelaide metropolitan area and 196

from the rural areas, which produced the largest proportion of suicides. Almost all coroners recorded verdicts of insanity regardless of the method used. Twenty-two out of twenty-eight cases recorded temporary insanity verdicts in 1900 and twenty-six out of twenty-eight in 1902, revealing an exceptional reluctance to record ‘felo de se’ verdicts.

The fortunate coincidence of good suicide statistics in the Statistical Registers for South Australia alongside excellent police inquest books for the

small agricultural town of Mount Gambier allows a closer analysis of the individual tragedies behind these statistics. Police inquest reports for Mount Gambier summarised the verdict without great detail, but they do indicate general patterns over a thirty-five-year period from 1884.

The inquest book for Mount Gambier provides useful information on twenty-one suicides out of fifty-nine inquests. The most common method for male suicides was death by shooting—with seven cases out of twenty-one. All but one of these were judged to be mitigated by ‘unsound mind’ or temporary insanity, as was usual in the colony. It was perhaps not accidental that the one exception was a Chinese man of 40, Ah Chack, who ran a laundry business in 1917; the jury could only find that they had no evidence of his condition of mind, though his manner had recently been ‘peculiar’. In several European

male deaths from gunshot wounds, extenuating circumstances were cited, including illness and economic insecurity. Alfred Mallet, aged 62, ran a barbers and tobacconists shop and shot himself there in 1912, perhaps because he had suffered poor health for some time, or because he was becoming too frail to run a profitable business. William Creek, aged 69 years in 1900, had been suffering from cancer for some months and shot himself with a revolver when his daughter was absent from his sick room. Ludwig Toske, aged 65, a builder, shot himself in the head with a repeating rifle in 1902 because of temporary insanity caused by financial difficulties. The suicide of William Reece, a horse trainer, aged 48 years in 1909, was partially explained by the fact that he had been depressed and could not sleep. Adam Grieve, a ledger keeper at the National Bank in Mount Gambier, arrived at the bank in December 1895 ahead of the other clerks, who found him lying in a pool of blood, having shot himself with the bank revolver. Death by shooting was clearly the choice of professional people and tradesmen who were almost always regarded as temporarily insane.°! It is significant that in the five cases where age was cited, three men were in their sixties and two in their forties. They were probably

coming to the close of productive careers and feared an old age without means and with failing health. In that perilous stage of the life course between early and later old age, physical deterioration no longer allowed these men to hold on to secure full-time jobs requiring mature strength.

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The next largest category of male suicides chose death by hanging. Edmund Lewis, aged 34, an ironworker, hung himself in his father’s chaff shed while allegedly in a state of temporary insanity. A sad case in 1906 was

that of Robert Pickering, aged 72, who was still librarian at the Mount Gambier Institute where he had worked for twenty-seven years. He hanged himself while also suffering ‘temporary insanity’ induced by worry, perhaps about the ending of his job or increasing ill health. Ferdinand Wheeler was a house painter in financial difficulties who hanged himself in his own shed in 1892, but the jury stated there was no evidence of his state of mind. In 1898, Walter Thurman, a blacksmith, had been drinking heavily and hanged himself from a beam in his shop over a lighted tin of charcoal which burned his body badly. The final case of hanging was that of a vagrant, Patrick Keane, in

1912, who hanged himself with his belt from the water tap in the Mount Gambier jail, having just been diagnosed as insane by the doctor and about to be moved to Parkside Lunatic Asylum.®*

Only two men chose poison as a method: David Leaney, aged 40, used carbolic acid in 1917, while Christopher Smith used strychnine in 1885; only the latter was considered of unsound mind. It is notable that only two men out of twenty-one chose poison, compared with two out of four women. Only one man cut his throat—William Lamb in 1886. The final two male suicides opted for drowning—a Chinese man, Ah Kin, employed at the Chinamen’s

garden, committed suicide by jumping down the well, with no evidence regarding his state of mind. Also in 1894, William Jennings, a hospital patient suffering from melancholia, suddenly ran away to drown himself in the Valley Lake.®?

Four of the twenty-one suicides in Mount Gambier were women, including one committed by a self-inflicted wound while of unsound mind. One woman poisoned herself while ‘under great mental affliction’ in 1886; but no more

information was recorded. The other poisoning case was that of Caroline Hillyer, aged 20, a farmer’s daughter who took strychnine in 1903 because her parents refused her permission to attend church, having threatened, ‘you will be sorry for this before morning’. This case was probably perceived as typically female at the time in that the method was poison, and the cause related to family and emotional problems. In a case in 1904 where a married woman of ‘weak intellect’ fell down a well and drowned, the jury had no evidence as

to intention.

Accidents The two major causes of accidents for men in colonial Australia were fractures and drowning, which will be examined chiefly for South Australia with

some reference also to Western Australia. Other categories of accident, including burns, poison, sunstroke and suffocation had a substantially lower impact. The category ‘fractures and contusions’ signified the fatal breaking or shattering of bones and bodies in road, rail, horse, mining, or industrial acci-

dents, and it far exceeded all other categories of accident for males in all

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colonies from 1869 to 1903. Male mortality rates for fractures were exceedingly high, with 80 deaths per 100000 for Victoria in 1869-73 and 75 per 100 000 for New South Wales in 1879-83. The highest rate of all, at 82 per 100 000, was recorded in Western Australia in 1899-1903. Male mortality rates from fractures declined in all colonies between 1870 and 1903 due to improvements in roads and transportation, higher occupational safety standards, and better working conditions. In stark contrast, the female death rates from fractures were very low throughout the colonies, and the male-to-female ratios were therefore very high, varying in Victoria across the thirty years from 10:1 to 6:1, while in Western Australia in 1899-1903 the ratio was as

high as 11:1. The deaths from accident or negligence in Western Australia in the decade from 1892 to 1901 ranged from 74 (or 7.95 per cent of total deaths) in 1892 to 236 (or 9.37 per cent of the total) in 1901, with 1899 as the most dangerous year when the percentage reached 10.71. Greater mortality from accidents in these years was attributed to the increased employment of labourers in mining, the timber industry, the railways and other public works. Fractures caused 42 per cent of these accidental deaths, followed by drowning at 19 per

cent, burns at 11 per cent and perishing from sunstroke at 8 per cent. The 1897 Year Book shows that males accounted for eighty-four out of the ninety deaths from fractures, all eleven from accidental gunshot wounds, and all but one of the twenty-seven drowning deaths.°° In the earlier stages of goldrushes, most accidents were due to ignorance or carelessness, such as men falling down shafts, claims collapsing, and winding gear breaking. In Victoria as a whole in the 1860s about twenty men were killed each year from falling down shafts.°” At later stages, as capitalist enterprises grew larger, more machinery and deeper shafts meant more explosions with high casualties, inadequate ventilation and the frequent flooding of new workings. Notifiable accidents due to these causes doubled in Queensland and Victoria in 1897-1900.°*° Broken-column gravestones representing an early death by accident were a distinctive feature in the cemeteries of mining towns. The entire category described as ‘accident or negligence’, which included fractures, drowning, and burns, was ranked as high as sixth in order of fatality for the whole decade 1871-80 for South Australia. Its total of 1485 cases included 1183 males and only 302 females—a masculinity ratio of nearly 4.°?

The male death rates from fractures in South Australia were considerably lower than those for Victoria and New South Wales in 1879-83—at 54 per 100000 population, compared with 67 and 75 respectively. And so the decline in rates was less marked, moving from 54 in 1879-83 down to 37 in 1899-1903. By comparison, the female rates declined from 8 in 1879-83 to 4 in 1899-1903, with a masculinity ratio ranging from 6.6 in 1879-83 to 8.3 in 1899-1903. In 1880 fractures were ranked as high as eleventh in the Statistical Register’s list of causes of death in order of fatality, with ninety-six cases, ranking above diphtheria, cancer, typhoid, drowning, and suicide. The six accident cases drawn from the ninety-four Port Augusta mortuary

book cases for 1888-1920 were mainly occupational and transport related,

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including three men run over by a wagon, a train, and a motor car respectively. James Hucker from England had been driving a wagon and a team of three horses in 1890, loaded with three tons of wood, when he accidentally fell and was run over by the two rear wheels. William Robert of England,

aged 35 and a railway employee, was run over by a train in 1891. John Cream, aged 59, a navvy on the railway, supposedly under the influence of strong liquor, was struck by a doctor’s motor car in Port Augusta in 1915. William Goldsmith, employed as a lumper unloading coal, was killed at the age of 55 in 1918 when a basket of coal fell on him. Michael Hill, a farmer aged 57, fractured his skull when he fell downstairs in 1907 at the Terminus Hotel in Port Augusta, while Hans Smith, aged 50, died on falling from a stable loft in 1892.” Drowning was the second most important cause of accidental death for men in colonial Australia. Mortality rates from drowning were far higher than in Britain, and again male mortality far exceeded that of females, with ratios varying between 3:1 and 5:1. Zou shows that rates from drowning in Australian colonies between 1879 and 1883 ranged from 70 per 100 000 per annum for males in Queensland down to 23 per 100000 in South Australia. Mortality rates dropped sharply in the last twenty years of the century, especially for males, declining from 70 to 30 per 100000 males in Queensland, and from 41 to 19 in New South Wales. Adult male mortality from drowning was largely related to occupation, including shipping, fishing, and mining, especially in areas with long coastlines, like Western Australia. In the earlier periods of settlement and the goldrushes, safety measures were frequently inadequate, as also was water-safety education. ’! In Western Australia in the 1890s, drowning still ranked very high as a

cause of accidental deaths, with the second highest rate in all colonies between 1899 and 1903. Out of a total of 945 deaths in 1893, 10.89 per cent were caused by violence. Of these, the top category was the thirty-three fractures, followed by twenty-seven drownings, thirteen suicides, twelve deaths by poison and seven by burns. In 1897 there were again twenty-seven drownings—this time broken down by gender, into twenty-six males and only one female. The Year Book for 1900-03 again cited drowning as the second major

cause of fatal accidents, with 19.15 per cent of total accidental deaths, following fractures at 41.66 per cent.” Even in South Australia, where the mortality rates from drowning were

low compared with Western Australia and Queensland, the Statistical Register shows the statistics were still alarming. In 1880, accidental drowning ranked 21st out of 81 causes of death in order of fatality, with a total of

forty-seven deaths, including ten children under 5 years. Drowning was numerically more important as a cause of death than dysentery, lung disease,

and burns. During the ten years 1893-1902, accidental drowning was still high on the fatality list, ordered at number 24 out of 113 possible causes of death. Of 425 drownings in the ten years, 355 were male and only 70 female, a masculinity ratio of 5:1.”

MALE DEATHS IN THE BUSH 28]

Although the death rate from drowning in South Australia was comparatively low, eleven men out of a total of ninety-four cases in the Port Augusta mortuary books drowned from 1888 to 1920, including four sailors, illustrating the high male death rate from drowning in ports or maritime locations. Clement Baker, an English seaman on the SS Saros, aged 20, drowned while swimming in the Gulf in 1914. A Norwegian sailor drowned after falling off the gangway of his barque in 1890. Two German sailors, including the captain, were drowned after the barque Apollo ran aground in 1889. Two men were found drowned in Spencers Gulf, one in 1890 aged about 40, and one in 1902 aged about 50, but no evidence was recorded of the reasons for their deaths. Two men were drowned under the Port Augusta wharf—one an Irish bushman aged 62 in 1899, the other a 56-year-old Norwegian who had just been discharged from his job as an ostler at the Port Augusta Hotel in 1903. Two men aged about 40 fell from the wharf in 1917 while intoxicated. The last case of drowning was that of Neil Lindsay in 1912, aged about 65 years, a shearer’s cook, ‘an old identity of the North’, whose death may have

been caused by a combination of drink, failing eyesight, and advancing years.’* Most drownings required inquests, but few were able to provide motives or explanations, though some could well have been suicides, and several were alcohol related.

Alcohol Alcohol was clearly a major problem for Australian males in the late nineteenth century, causing the passage of numerous liquor acts in attempts to control it (see plate 28). The masculine pub culture was the centre of social life in rural areas, and alcohol consumption was high when single adult males outnumbered females, and solitary drinking was also common.” Statistics on causes of death vastly understate the influence of drink, since excessive drinking clearly increased the tendency to violence, especially when alcohol was

often adulterated, irrespective of its broader impact on ill-health. The 1887 New South Wales Intoxicating Drink Inquiry showed that the alcohol content of many drinks including beer was very high, often containing methylated spirit.’ The Western Australian Year Book for 1896-97 cites only four deaths from ‘intemperance’ in 1893 and five in 1894, rising to seventeen in 1895, and eleven in 1896. When figures for gender are indicated in 1897, sixteen males and one female died from intemperance, out of a total of 2643 deaths registered (1825 males and 818 females).’” But obviously a far higher proportion of deaths were alcohol related rather than directly caused by chronic alcoholism and delirium tremens. Many such deaths in the outback were not registered at all, but their prevalence is suggested in the bush ballads and the stories of Henry Lawson and Ernestine Hill. The records of Lonely Graves in Western Australia reveal many deaths in the goldfields where alcohol was especially mentioned (even though the great majority offer no cause of death). For example, James Graham, a Scottish

282 DEATH IN THE BUSH AND THE GREAT WAR

miner, died near Marble Bar in 1906 aged 65 from ‘apoplexy through excessive drinking’.’> Robert Greaves was buried on the road to the goldfields, 60 miles from Wyndham in 1886, having recently arrived from Sydney—the cause of death was believed to be ‘excessive drinking’. I have already noted that Edward Hicks and other prospectors in the goldfields were known to have been drinking heavily before they died and that it evidently affected their

judgment and their resistance to heat exhaustion and thirst. The inquest records for the Victorian goldfields also show that a large proportion of deaths in the 1850s were due to alcohol-related causes.’? The Western Australian police records reveal that alcohol played a signifi-

cant role in deaths from violence, such as the brawl in the tap room at the

town of Williams which led to William McMullen’s death in 1889.

McMullen, an expired convict and hospital orderly, was involved in a disturbance at Williams Inn when he was knocked down by William Allison and died a week later. This was only one of six incidents of manslaughter or murder in the colony that year, and the publican testified at the inquest that both men had been drinking heavily.8° Excessive alcohol was often a significant contributory factor in suicide, as in that of Harry Faulkner at Mingenew in

1899. Faulkner was a drunken pauper who was ‘running about the Mingenew Hotel with a knife in his hand trying to commit suicide’ in June 1899. Nobody apparently tried to stop him until the police found him lying on his bed with his throat cut. The coronial inquiry found that he killed himself during a fit of temporary insanity caused by excessive drinking. The police

could discover no relatives so he was given a pauper’s burial costing £6 7s 6d.8! The suicide by shooting of Albert Curnold in Bunbury in 1880 led

to a verdict of temporary insanity caused by the fact that ‘drink turned him into a madman’, even though he was otherwise a ‘quiet respectable man’ with five children who would hence be ‘perfectly destitute’. He had recently been ill and irritable, and unemployment may also have been a factor.*? In South Australia, as in Western Australia, few deaths were reported as being directly due to alcohol. Eleven deaths were cited as due to intemperance

in 1880, and a further three attributed to delirium tremens. In the ten years between 1893 and 1902 only eighty-three deaths were reported as caused by chronic alcoholism (fifty-five males and twenty-eight females)—which was

listed as number 65 out of 113 categories in order of fatality. Delirium tremens caused sixteen male deaths in ten years and was listed as 99 out of 113.°° But countless other deaths, accidental and violent, were alcohol related, as illustrated by the eleven cases out of ninety-four deaths in the Port Augusta police mortuary books between 1888 and 1920 which were alcohol related, including the two already mentioned who accidentally drowned while intoxicated. Six of the nine remaining men whose ages were noted were over 45, including three aged 60, suggesting a strong connection between alcohol and advancing age. Four worked in various capacities on the Kalgoorlie—Port Augusta railway. James Finney, aged 60, had been employed by the railway as

a carpenter for two years, but for several days in January 1915 he was seen drinking heavily in the Port Augusta Hotel before he was found dead at his

MALE DEATHS IN THE BUSH 283

bar table. George Lindsay, aged 55, was a railway navvy addicted to drink who was seen about the hotels for a fortnight until he collapsed in the lane of the Great Northern Hotel in 1915 and died in the hospital soon after. Arthur Edwards, aged 35, was another railway worker long addicted to liquor, and

so ill that he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital in January 1916.5*

Many of these drink-related deaths actually took place in public houses, notably the Railway Terminus Hotel at Port Augusta, including the deaths of two employees of the hotel. Frederick Tongue, aged 60, had earned a living for thirty-five years as a labourer at various Port Augusta public houses. For four days before his death in 1888 he was seen drinking heavily and was found dead in a public house from heart disease. August Faltin, aged 47, was a Swedish yardsman and alcoholic employed by the Railway Terminus Hotel who collapsed in the hotel kitchen in January 1916. Two of the remaining four cases were in their 60s. John Gray was a 60-year-old shearer, a stranger in the town, who had been drinking in bars around the town for several days until he dropped dead in the bar of the Railway Terminus Hotel. John Wright, aged 68, a carpenter by trade, had been drinking heavily for some time. The day before his death in 1918, he complained of dysentery but went home drunk to the ‘suburban boarding house’ where his landlady found him dead on the bed next morning, fully clothed. Joseph Simmonds, aged 30, was admitted to the Port Augusta Hospital in 1888 with ‘acute inflammation of lungs accelerated by alcohol’. Colin Cooke, an English immigrant aged 37, died in the hospital a week after admission from acute alcoholism and hepatitis.°>

These records of actual male deaths in nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury South and Western Australia contrast markedly with the heroic mythology explored in the previous chapter. Deaths from frontier violence, old age, accidents, disease, and suicides were not susceptible to heroic treatment, and demonstrated the very limited social support available to those who were poor. Men’s lives were fragile on the Australian frontier, and their deaths were marked by perfunctory ritual or no ritual at all. The situation for women and children was in some respects even worse, as the next chapter documents.

Chapter 15

Frontier Struggles for Survival Stoical Women and Lost Children

The realities of death in the bush and the goldfields were multiple and diverse, like the settings themselves. This chapter explores the experiences of death in

the bush for women and children, remembering that, until recently, women were neglected as key participants in the conventional histories of colonial

Australia, and this neglect is intensified in rural and frontier locations. Women were crucial to the economic expansion and social transformation of colonial Australia. They bore the colonial children and brought them up; they cared for the sick, the old and the dying; they did the housework, and helped work the land and run the general stores. Women shared the privations of pioneering in a harsh climate far away from their relatives and home communities.! As the proportion of women in the colonies increased, the women acted as civilising agents. In the more settled areas respectable working-class family men began to compete in numbers with the independent bushmen. In the outer pastoral regions and on the goldfields, women played a lonely and vulnerable supportive role to their husbands. Women were vividly portrayed by Henry Lawson as victims of frontier struggles for survival. John Hirst emphasises that Lawson’s description of bush women in his story “The Drover’s Wife’ was a vital contribution to the pioneer legend, depicting bush women as heroines precisely because ‘the bush is no place for women’.* The bush seemed weird and unwelcoming to many new European migrants, and it was especially alien for women and children. The bush itself can be seen as a gendered space where women were particularly vulnerable. Only a minority of early women settlers, such as Georgiana Molloy in Western Australia, seem to have found beauty and spirituality, as well as strangeness, in the Australian plants, gum trees, and wildflowers. In Henry Lawson’s story the drover’s wife displayed fortitude in the face of suffering while her drover husband was away with the sheep for months on 284

FRONTIER STRUGGLES FOR SURVIVAL 285

end. She brought up her four ragged children nineteen miles from the nearest sign of habitation, a shanty on the main road. Her last two children had been

born in the bush, the second while her husband was away persuading a drunken doctor to attend her. She prayed to God for assistance as she was alone and sick with fever, and a local Aboriginal woman helped her through labour. One of her children died while her husband was away; and ‘she rode nineteen miles for assistance, carrying the dead child’. ‘She is used to being left

alone. She once lived like this for eighteen months ... Her surroundings are not favourable to the development of the “womanly” or sentimental side of nature.’ She loved her children but had no time or energy to show her feelings and had become accustomed to the loneliness and monotony.* Women in isolated rural situations could develop the habit of not communicating their emotions—lack of communication was not a male prerogative.* Barbara Baynton’s stories in Bush Studies present an even grimmer view of

the lives of women in the bush in the 1890s, as Sally Krimmer and Alan Lawson observe: The bush is constantly portrayed as a lonely, hostile place, antagonistic to its inhabitants who depend on it for survival ... Women, without choice, become acquies-

cent victims of men largely without realizing it. In most of the stories woman is shown as maternal, loving and peaceful while man is portrayed as brutally sexual. Man’s natural home is the cruel landscape while woman is instinctively associated with civilisation and the town ... For the lone woman in the bush there is no escape, no defence, no refuge and no rescue.°

Baynton’s depiction of the brutal bush emphasises male exploitation, greed and violence, while eliminating mateship and compassion. Motherhood was one of the few redeeming features that provided any hope for the future, since birth gave meaning and continuity to life. Even religion was largely ineffectual and incongruous in the harsh and indifferent bush environment.°® When illness and death struck rural families they were often isolated or far distant from extended family, community, and church support. Rural settlers tried to turn the bush into farmland, with little local support and few, if any, servants. Mary Durack has observed that the ecology, climate, and environment of the Swan River colony forced settlers who had been landed gentry in Britain ‘into the hardworking mould identified elsewhere with the “lower orders”. [They] faced with varying degrees of fortitude, the bleak fact of their unique isolation and what was to prove for many years a lonely and more or less friendless battle for survival.’’ Continual hard labour was needed in that struggle for survival by both women and men, with no time, energy, money, or support for idealised death scenes.

Stoical rural deaths It is instructive to examine the deaths of selector John Currie, aged 67 in 1901, and his wife Catherine, aged 63 in 1908. Although only in their sixties

286 DEATH IN THE BUSH AND THE GREAT WAR

both essentially died from premature old age after a very tough pioneering farming life. Doctors were not called out to either until they were very close

to death. They were British migrants who farmed a large selection near Warragul in Gippsland, Victoria, which required years of backbreaking work to clear the forest. Though John’s net assets at death were £2000, they were far from rich. Usually one or more members of the family attended church on Sundays, but there is little evidence of deep beliefs, more of customary and neighbourly behaviour. The work was tough, life was hard, and their horizons

were limited to their farm and their family of seven. Catherine’s life was blighted from 1880 by the death of her baby who drowned in a well, a tragedy which probably precipitated her two admissions to Yarra Bend lunatic asylum with a diagnosis of ‘furious mania’ or ‘delusional insanity’— possibly bipolar disease.° Catherine’s diary reveals that John’s health had deteriorated from 1899 as a consequence of diabetes. By 2 June 1901 he was declining rapidly and could

not work or digest solid food. On 11 June, their son Tom went to Warragul to seek Dr Trump’s advice on his father’s serious condition, but the unhelpful doctor’s response was that ‘he did not think he could help him even if he saw him’. Anticipation of a negative response may partly explain the family’s failure to seek medical advice earlier, though financial considerations and custom probably also applied. On 1 July Catherine briefly described John’s death and her own role as nurse: Dear Daa \eft me for that Bourne from whence there is no return. I shall go to him

but ah he cannot come to me, he was weary here, anxious to go. So we cannot grieve as those that have no hope. He said he could not be more comfortable than we all tried to make him—he passed peacefully away in his sleep on the 15 of last month ... I fear he suffered through the night, his poor mouth was so dry. He could not tell us how he was at last but he seemed to like to hold my hand all the time. I just kept wetting his mouth with glycerine and water as the Dr. said I could all night. Then he dropped asleep about four. I was glad to see him resting so well, he never waked again. Everyone was very kind, but it seemed very hard to beatr.?

The funeral was well attended as John Currie had been respected, but he was rarely mentioned in his wife’s diary thereafter. Catherine Currie’s own death at 63 over six years later received very little acknowledgment in the entries by her daughter Katie. Catherine’s last few entries for 24 and 25 December 1907 refer as usual to the weather and farming activities. But Katie took up the diary at that point, merely noting on 28

December, ‘Mother ill today’. Through the next two months the entries recorded hot weather, fires, and routine farm tasks, with occasional references to ‘mother very unwell’ or slightly improved. Then on 9 March 1908 came the sudden announcement: ‘Mother much worse this morning, had to send for Dr Cowens, and he can give us no hope for a recovery. Raining all morning.’ Again the doctor was summoned only at the point of death. The next entry recorded Catherine’s death next day: ‘She did not know anyone for the last

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24 hours and we can only hope she was in no pain. When will we manage to do without her, the place seems so lonely now.’ Katie noted that the visits of all the aunts and uncles for the funeral gave them more to do ‘and break us in to our sorrow’. The next entry was dated 1 April, with routine farm entries, and no further references to their mother’s death or their mourning; nor was there any mention of the first anniversary of Catherine’s death on 10 March 1909.!° These bleak descriptions of the deaths of a pioneer farming couple in their 60s can probably stand for many rural people in Australia. There was little ritual or religious reference on John Currie’s death in 1901 and none at all on Catherine’s in 1908, although we can presume a quiet belief in God and a nebulous hope for a life after death. No attempts were made to construct any particular form of deathbed scene in the diary, merely a brief statement of practical information. There were no prayers or Bible readings, nor any formal family farewells. The primary attitude to death was stoical and resigned, with no detail and no introspection. These deaths in the Currie family took

place early in the twentieth century but they could have happened years earlier or years later. They are probably more representative of the deaths of

the majority of the population than are those of the urban comfortable classes, such as the Bussells, the Stephens, or the O’Learys. The Currie family was resigned to death and, even early in the twentieth century, they still had no expectation that doctors could avert the inevitable and did not call doctors until death was imminent. Ritual and religious ceremony were minimal.

Lost children in the Australian bush The great nightmare of the colonial imagination in nineteenth-century Australia was the vision of the innocent Anglo-Australian child lost in the alien vastness of the Australian bush. The monster in the British Gothic horror story of the 1820s and 1830s was transported to the Australian bush as ‘some strange beast—some impossible monster, enormous and irresistible’, as Marcus Clarke put it in 1869. This imaginative horror story could not be sus-

tained but it drew on the deep adult fears of an indifferent, unfamiliar, and thinly populated bush.'! In reality, the major killers of young children were

accidents such as drowning, and diseases such as diarrhoea, bronchitis, consumption, measles, and scarlet fever. Such children’s deaths from disease and accidents inspired fear and grief, but not the nightmare terror of sudden, violent deaths from imaginary monsters in the alien bush. By 1900 the theme of the lost child in the Australian bush had become a national legend in both literature and art. Its imaginative power was based on both the adult fear of an alien bush and the high mortality rate among children in nineteenth-century Australia. Henry Kingsley first popularised the theme of the lost child in 1859 in his novel The Recollections of Geoffrey

Hamlyn. The focus on the lost child was developed further by newspaper reports on the famous case of the three missing Duff children who were rescued after nine days in the Victorian bush in 1864. The Illustrated Melbourne

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Post produced the first visual illustration of ‘Children Lost in the Bush’ in July 1866, and William Strutt depicted the Duff children in The Little Wanderers

exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1865. A popular pantomime, Babes in the Wood, illustrated how the theme had captured the popular imagination in the 1880s, and drew on frequent press references to lost children. Frederick McCubbin used the theme of the lost child for his first great painting Lost or The Lost Child in 1886, possibly based on the 1885 rescue of little Clara Crosbie, who was lost for three weeks in the bush near Lilydale in Victoria. The popular appeal of the theme continued into the first decade of the new century with a new version of the Lost painting by McCubbin in 1907, this time a pathetic depiction of a weeping lost urchin. !4 Marcus Clarke, a leading Melbourne journalist who had immigrated to Australia in 1863, had a grim view of the bush, illustrated in his well-known preface to Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Poems. Clarke saw ‘Weird Melancholy’ as the dominant note of Australian scenery—‘funereal, secret, stern. Their soli-

tude is desolation ... All is fear-inspiring and gloomy.’!? Stories of children lost in the bush are the closest that Australian art and literature came to imaginative equivalents of Charles Dickens’s death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, a sentimental deathbed scene which achieved immense popular success. Marcus Clarke published the first version of his lost child story, ‘Pretty Dick’, in the Colonial Monthly in 1869, impressed by the appeal of the

theme soon after his arrival in Australia. ‘Pretty Dick’ is the tale of a shepherd’s son—originally 12 years old, but reduced to 7 for the subsequent book—a merry little fellow beloved by all, who was lost in the bush and found dead by his father six days later after ‘God had taken him home’. Clarke vividly described the little boy’s increasing terror: The calm, pitiless stars looked down upon him, and the broad sky spread coldly over him, and the birds flew away terrified at him; and the deadly chill of loneliness fell upon him, and the cold, cruel night seemed to swallow him up, and hide him from human sympathy ... There among the awful mystery and majesty of nature, alone, a terrified little human soul, with the eternal grandeur of the forests, the mountains, and the myriad voices of the night ... He was dimly conscious that any moment some strange beast—some impossible monster, enormous and irresistible, might rise up out of the gloom of the gullies and fall upon him;—that the whole horror of the bush was about to take some tangible shape.'*

The story was initially well received in 1869 by readers of the Colonial Monthly but in later issues it was criticised as excessively sentimental—‘he failed more dismally than Dickens at his most mawkish moments’.'!> Despite comparisons between the styles of Clarke and Dickens, there was a stark contrast in their substance—the one drawn on traditional models of death scenes and the other appealing to popular fears of bush deaths. The alien bush killed ‘Pretty Dick’, while internal disease killed Little Nell. Pretty Dick was very

much alone and afraid, with no description of his actual death, nor of his family’s grief.

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Peter Pierce has recently revived interest in this subject with his stimulating

book The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. He argues that ‘symbolically, the lost child represents the anxieties of European settlers ... about having sought to settle in a place where they might never be at peace’. The metaphorical use of the ‘lost child’ enabled European settler communities to express their insecurities and their guilt at bringing their children to an alien land. The loss of innocent children in such a terrible way was far worse than the perishing of adult men who chose to seek their fortune in the bush. Yet Pierce’s only account of nineteenth-century children who actually died

was that of the three boys in Daylesford, Victoria, in 1867, gruesomely described in the press. The grim story of the Daylesford children stimulated Marcus Clarke’s ‘Pretty Dick’; and though the Daylesford tragedy was unrepresentative of the fate of lost children in the bush, Australian writers seemed to prefer the tragic outcome as appropriate to illuminate imaginary insecurities and dread of the bush.!® Scattered historical evidence suggests that most lost children were ultimately found. The available statistics show clearly that many more children were drowned in family wells or nearby rivers or oceans than died of thirst and exhaustion while lost in the bush. And certainly far more babies and children died of disease than exposure in the bush. The theme of the lost child was securely based on a deep-rooted parental fear of the hostile bush—a fear that was powerfully shared in the popular imagination. Georgiana Molloy in isolated Augusta in south-western Australia in the 1830s was not the only mother to hang a little bell round her child’s neck to alert his family if he strayed into the bush. Yet only a few children, such as those at Daylesford, needed to perish in the bush to provoke the popular nightmare. Yvonne and Kevin Coate’s list of Lonely Graves of Western Australia indicates the approximate numbers of

deaths of children who perished in the bush. In a sample of those people listed under the letters A-K, forty males were reported as ‘bushed’, having perished from thirst and heat exhaustion after becoming lost, including thirtyseven adult males and only three boys. However, the lost men were far more likely to be under-reported than the children. Of these three children, Walter Allender, aged about 11, was lost in the bush near Mullewa, died from exposure and was buried on the nearby hillside, with no date recorded. Darcy Ives, aged 8 months, the son of pioneers at Mukinbudin, followed a dog from his parents’ home into the bush in 1893 ‘and became lost, perishing in an April heatwave’.!” The most unusual case was that of 4-year-old Johnny Kearney who died in 1875 and was also buried near Mullewa. His father was a stockman working for a pastoral group at the Irwin River, but when both parents died suddenly

in 1872 Johnny was taken to live with his mother’s family, the Morrisseys. According to the contemporary account by Sister Mary Bain, as cited in Lonely Graves: ‘Johnny was lost or stolen and then eaten by the natives. Years

later, a native told the Morrissey family where to find the grave and they found the skull and bones in it.” Contemporary Europeans alleged this was

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not an isolated case, citing a similar case in the 1860s of a small boy who dis-

appeared from the mining settlement at Wanerenooka, whose bones and clothes were found eighteen months later.'® These reports revive the Gothic horrors of the ‘strange beasts’ of the bush, transformed in this instance into supposed cannibalistic Aboriginal tribes allegedly stealing children as they stole sheep or cattle. No direct evidence was cited (or available) for these horror stories, which contrast so markedly with the real kindness and tracking skills of Aboriginal people in searching for and sometimes discovering other lost children. But the fears of colonial immigrants, and their ignorance, kept the ‘impossible monster’ alive in the European imagination, either in the form of alleged Aboriginal threats or mythical creatures like the Bunyip.

Two historical examples illustrate the significant role that Aboriginal people sometimes played in the search for lost children in the bush, providing a human link to the alien bush world and its tragedies. It is important to note that the Aboriginal dimensions of the lost children stories are often forgotten

or distorted and are recounted here from a European perspective.!? When Elizabeth Ann O’Rourke of North Gippsland, Victoria, was about 18 months old in March 1866, her aunt Honoria was looking after the children while her mother Mary was ill in bed. The children’s father, David O’Rourke, rode off one day after lunch and, unknown to hin, little Elizabeth Ann must have tried to follow. Honoria did not become alarmed for some time, thinking at first that her brother must have taken the little girl for a ride. Most people in the district joined the search parties without success, though the parents contin-

ued to look for Elizabeth Ann for months after hope was generally abandoned. About a year later, Aboriginal people found the little girl’s body in her pink dress about a mile from home, where she had fallen over a cliff and broken her neck. They walked to Mary’s house to report the sad news of their discovery, thus transforming her attitude to Aboriginal people from fear and uncertainty to gratitude.2° Mary could not bear to remain on the family farm with all its memories, nor to bury the child’s body there. So Elizabeth Ann was buried with her grandfather at the next family station at Black Mountain, while David O’Rourke transported and re-erected the family house there, to join the family graves. Another rare case of a lost child who died in the bush is recorded in the Western Australian police records for Pender Bay near Broome in 1912, in the journal of Constable Johnston. The Constable reported the death of 10-yearold Bertha Clarke, from Wyndham, a ‘half-Aboriginal’ girl, as ‘a sad ending to a day of pleasure provided for the mission girls’. Bertha had been attending a picnic with the other Christian mission girls, when she wandered off. When they noticed her absence, the priest from the mission in charge of the

picnic set out to trace her without success. Next day the police sent two Aboriginal people to track her, to no avail, followed by other trackers in subsequent days. About two weeks after Bertha’s disappearance, a tracker finally discovered her body, ‘very much torn about by the wild dogs and several parts of her missing, the only thing left to identify her by was her dress’. Her scattered remains were gathered up and buried, leaving her blue dungaree dress

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hanging in a tree close by. Bertha Clarke almost certainly had a far more dreadful death than Pretty Dick, with no mourning ritual or memorial to remember her.*!

The deaths of mothers and children Infant and child mortality was high throughout the nineteenth century, in the bush and the cities, and across the class boundaries. Women had large families, not only because they expected to lose one or more children, but also due to the lack of effective, cheap contraceptive methods. The mothers themselves knew they could die in childbirth, and sometimes prepared themselves spiritually and practically for that possibility. The statistics for Victoria (which were the most reliable) show that the

number of deaths of mothers for every 1000 children born alive scarcely improved between 1871 and 1905, ranging from 6.43 in 1871-80 to 6.09 in 1901-05. The figure for the Commonwealth in 1907 was still as high as 5.56, varying from the highest level of 6.74 in Western Australia to the lowest in

Tasmania (4.54) and South Australia (4.78). There was not much further decline in the Commonwealth maternal mortality rate up to 1923, at 5.04 per 1000 live births.** Childbirth was the third most important cause of death in

Victoria in 1870 for young women between ages 15 to 24, at 7 per cent of total female deaths. At ages 25 to 44 this moved up to second place at about 10 per cent, after tuberculosis. By 1920, puerperal causes of death held joint first place with tuberculosis for the 15-24 age group at 13 per cent; and had increased to 19 per cent, still in second place, at ages 25 to 34. The equivalent cause of high male mortality was the category of ‘accident or negligence’ in 1870, which became ‘violence other than suicide’ in 1920.2? This continuing high maternal mortality rate improved significantly only with the widespread use of antibiotics from the 1940s. Bryan Gandevia believes the scarcity of contemporary accounts of childbirth in the Australian colonies suggests that it was regarded ‘as just another natural function’, despite high infant and maternal mortality. Medical attendance was seen as a non-essential luxury in rural areas, even in the unlikely

event that a doctor was close enough to assist at a delivery—though some pregnant women who could afford to do so took lodgings in a town to ensure medical attention.** Ada Cambridge commented in 1903 that ‘the majority of

bush women preferred to stay at home and make shift with the peripatetic Gamp [midwife], old and unscientific as she always was’.*? An extreme example is provided by Rose Lindsay’s childhood memory of her sister’s birth at Gosford without a midwife, while her father was away drinking. Her father returned as the baby died. The father was sent for the undertaker but instead spent the money on drink, so the baby had to be buried in a deal box near the shack. The mother determined never to live with her alcoholic husband again but was unable to keep her vow.7°® The experience of Georgiana Molloy in Western Australia illuminates the

tragedies and hardships attached to childbearing among early settlers in the

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remote bush. Georgiana Molloy was a pious Presbyterian from an English gentry family who married Captain John Molloy, a Waterloo veteran twice her age. In 1830 the pioneering Molloy and Bussell families established the

settlement at Augusta on the Blackwood River, where Molloy became Resident Magistrate—an extremely isolated location (even today), 180 miles south of Fremantle. On arrival on 1 May 1830, they camped in tents above the beach and just over three weeks later, Georgiana’s first daughter was delivered on the ground of the tent with an umbrella over the bed to keep out the

rain. There was no doctor and the weak baby girl only survived nine days after a very painful labour. Nearly three years later the vivid memories of the loss of her first-born still brought great pain, as she confided in her Scottish friend Helen Story, who had just lost her own child: I could truly sympathise with you, for language refuses to utter what I experienced when mine died in my arms in this dreary land, no one but Molloy near me. Oh! I have gone through much ... I know I have not made the use of these afflictions that God designed. It was so hard. I could not see it was in love, and I thought I might have had one little bright object left to me to solace all the hardships and privations I endured, and had still to go through. It was wicked, and I am not now thoroughly

at peace ... The baby I called after dear Mary was like a little angel. Its grave, though sodded with British clover, looks so singular and solitary in this wilderness, of which I can scarcely give you an idea.”’

Georgiana’s account was evocative, not least because it was written three years after Mary’s death. Georgiana’s comment that ‘language refuses to utter

what I experienced’ suggests that she and Captain Molloy might not have talked together about the baby’s death. Despite her Presbyterian piety, she believed a good Christian death for her child was impossible in such hostile circumstances, without support from family, friends, church, or community. Mary’s grave would certainly have looked ‘singular and solitary in this wilderness’, with none of the usual religious rituals accompanying the baby’s burial,

other than planting the clover. In this initial crisis her solitary situation and the alien bush reinforced her despair, while her faith seemed to offer less consolation than it might have done in Scotland. Only seven months after the first baby’s death, Georgiana Molloy suffered a painful miscarriage entirely alone, while her husband and the surgeon were away in the bush. She felt ‘as faint as death and in agony’.”®

Georgiana Molloy’s second child was born in 1831, her third daughter in 1834, and a son in 1836. Captain Molloy was away frequently for long periods as resident magistrate, leaving Georgiana to fight loneliness, homesickness, and sheer exhaustion from physical labour, compounded by frequent childbearing. Georgiana Molloy suffered the second tragedy of her life when the little son, born in 1836, died ‘by the aggravated death of drowning’ in the family well at the age of 19 months. The ‘bitter loss’ took place after Johnny strayed and had to be pulled out of the well, ‘his flaxen curls all dripping’. Georgiana Molloy was left with a profound feeling of guilt that she had not

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prevented the accident, compounded by the lack of supportive friends: ‘Dear

Augusta is quite out of the world and even the limited society of S.W. Australia.’ The dreadful shock and guilt caused a ‘dangerous illness’ of many months and her only therapy for grief was to turn herself into a highly competent botanist and seed collector.*” Despite the fulfilment Georgiana derived from her family and her botanical project, her health gradually failed from the exhaustion of continual hardships and childbearing, including the birth of another daughter in 1840 which confined her to bed for many months of ‘real suffering’.°° After the birth of her fifth living child in 1842, Georgiana was again bedridden, this time from prolonged puerperal septicaemia, together with exhaustion and anaemia, not helped by the ministrations of a drunken surgeon. Georgiana died at the age of 37 in 1843, in Revd Wollaston’s view from lack of good nursing in the final months, but no doubt chiefly from the cumulative effects of successive pregnancies. Wollaston administered the Last Sacrament a week before she died, comatose at the end from the opiates necessary for the pain.?! Her spiritual journey from Evangelical piety to a less intense Christianity, which allowed her to seek additional comfort in the natural life-cycle of the bush, was later to become a not uncommon response to living in the colonies. The combination of social isolation, pioneer hardships and an initially alien environment could encourage an early move towards secularism or a different kind of spirituality.

Two further examples, both from Queensland, show something of the distress experienced by isolated mothers in the outback on the deaths of their children. Matilda Wallace arrived in Australia in 1859, and after her marriage in 1861 lived initially with friends in South Australia where ‘we buried our first little baby’. Her husband was an explorer and wanderer, so later they

travelled by wagon to Queensland, where she lived at Mount Murcheson while he was away hawking, but ‘the loneliness was dreadful to bear’. She lost

a second child during a three-week illness, but her husband left again when she began to recover. Two more little sons died in these years of transient bush

loneliness, when her husband was away for weeks at a time, leaving her to look after the sheep and horses. In 1868 she moved to Minindra for her confinement to secure medical aid to deliver her baby alive; it was her first sight of ‘civilisation’ in seven years. When her baby daughter was 3 months old Matilda returned to their camp to deal with a rat invasion and her husband’s departure for another three months. But for the first time she had a baby as a companion ‘after so many years of loneliness’, though it was necessary to pray ‘fervently’ that the baby’s life be spared. When her husband announced he must go to Burra to take delivery of five thousand sheep, for the first time she protested that she was still in delicate health and could not cope alone with the hardship and responsibility. Her husband accused her of losing heart and courage, so she tried again, moving the sheep on, while her little daughter was blind with sandy blight.** There the record of her story ends, but it can stand for many women’s lives in the outback, with no reference to any religious faith or rituals to help her deal with the deaths of four babies in

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almost complete isolation in the Queensland bush during her husband’s long absences.

Constance Jane Ellis described in her autobiography the death of her premature baby girl, born six weeks early, in outback Queensland in the 1890s. Constance’s husband, Tom, was out ploughing when the baby arrived, listless and unable to take nourishment. Tom did not go for help as the nearest station was a full day’s journey, with nobody there available in any case. The parents did their best but the infant died on her fourth day. Then Tom went

to the nearest station for help, but as all the men were out mustering he merely returned with timber for the coffin, which he had to make alone. ‘We were a very sad pair, I can tell you. Even now, I can’t bear to think of what we suffered. Well, Tom chose a pretty spot beside the jungle and dug a grave

and we buried our baby ... About the saddest time we ever had.’ But the parents decided they could not bear to remain at the site of their child’s burial,

so they packed their dray to move on. When a station hand died, it was necessary for somebody to ride 20 miles to the nearest magistrate for a death

certificate to permit burial, but such formalities were not needed for their premature baby.*? Deaths of infants were seriously under-reported because many were never registered. Children’s deaths by accidents were common, as in the death of Georgiana Molloy’s son from drowning in the family well. Mothers often played the primary role in coping with such deaths in the absence of their men who were

working elsewhere—as on Andrew O’Rourke’s sudden death in North Gippsland in Victoria in 1851. James and Eliza O’Rourke’s son Andrew was 4 years old in 1851 when his nightgown caught fire one night, leaving him so

severely burned that he died within twenty-four hours. All the men on the local properties, including Andrew’s father and uncle, were away for a week, mustering in the bush. So Eliza O’Rourke and her sister-in-law, Elizabeth Ann O’Rourke, dug the boy’s grave and placed his body between two sheets of bark. They then said prayers at the grave with the remaining children. The boy’s mother only had the support of her sister-in-law and the children until her husband returned nearly a week later.**

Babies’ burials and stillbirths The two thousand ‘lonely graves’ in Western Australia recorded by the Coates

often included babies and children. Burial often took place where the death occurred in isolated bush areas because bodies had to be interred quickly in the years before refrigeration. The 180 names listed alphabetically under A and B in Lonely Graves can be taken as a sample, excluding those who died after 1918 and those who died at sea. Of these 180 deaths, seventy-three or 39 per cent were those of infants and young children, and most of these were buried on the family property. Only two of these seventy-three deaths were children aged between 5 and 10 years, and thirteen were one to S years old. Fifty-eight of the seventy-three (almost 80 per cent) were less than one year

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old, including the twenty-five described only as ‘babies’ or ‘infants’. Of these fifty-eight, twenty-three were identified as ‘stillborn’, three as ‘premature’, and seven died within three weeks of birth.*° Some of the allegedly stillborn and premature babies may have been cases of infanticide, which would have been easy to conceal in isolated rural areas. Judith Allen suggested in 1982 that some working-class women resorted to infanticide to limit their family size since they lacked the means and privacy to use artificial contraception; but the actual prevalence of infanticide was unknown as it was so often concealed.*°

Most of these thirty-three stillborn and premature babies were buried on the settlers’ properties either because of the distance from a town cemetery, or because church burials were not available to stillborns or babies who had not been christened. For example, the stillborn baby of Henry and Laura Box had

to be buried in 1913 on top of a hill behind the old orchard at the Popanyinning Pod farm: ‘the church would not bury him in the cemetery, because he had not been baptised’. This was the case with most other stillborn children in the bush. Several children who died in their first month of life from

natural causes were not baptised, like the two Bishop infants who died at Greenhills, near York, in 1896 and 1905. One stillborn baby named James was buried in unconsecrated ground in Toodyay public cemetery, but most parents preferred a burial on their own farm or homestead. The fathers of these babies buried in the Western Australian bush were usually described as farmers and they frequently attended the burials of their infants, though the mothers never did, presumably because convention decreed that they were still too emotional or too frail after confinement.>’ In cases of unbaptised infants and stillborns, and in isolated bush areas, lay people were allowed to select their own burial sites. They were accorded minimal burial ceremonies or none at all, and were often buried in their own garden. The health risk of private interments encouraged authorities to forbid private burials within townships, but rural families frequently had no alternative. Until the 1920s, stillbirths were officially registered only in Western Australia, but this was hard to enforce outside towns. Elsewhere stillbirths did not require registration, and there were no regulations to enforce their burials in cemeteries, with the result that infanticide could be readily concealed. Some parents clearly derived comfort from having the little graves close to their homes, planting pine trees or wild roses around the fenced grave sites near the house as a memorial to their loss (see plate 29). But if the family was

poor, bare wooden crosses soon rotted away, leaving nothing to mark the burial site.**

Most entries on infant deaths in Lonely Graves reveal little other than the names of the parents and the date of the child’s death. Occasionally a pathetic detail was added, telling us, for instance, that baby Broad, a farmer’s daughter, was buried in a shoe box on Round Hill, east of Moora. A sad entry

records the death in 1915 of baby Carmichael who was cremated at Wellington Mills, some distance from Bunbury, to avoid the expense of burial, at a time when cremation was still most unusual:

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As Mrs Carmichael was much too ill at the time and also illiterate, she placed the responsibility of notification of the birth and death of her child in the hands of her doctor. As the child only survived its birth by a short time, it was thought unnecessary to go to the expense of a burial and undertaker from Bunbury ... Her husband did not see her for some days after the birth and death of the child.°?

Stillborn baby Chitty was buried by his father on private property at Bruce Rock in 1915: “The cause of death was through malnutrition as a consequence of his mother’s sickness and overwork.’ This situation evidently did not improve, for three years later Rose Chitty lost twin boys only eight hours after birth, still at Bruce Rock.*° Records of ‘lonely graves’ and tombstone inscriptions tell us little about the human suffering of stillbirths, but the West Australian police records for 1899 are more informative. George Cadwallder, a farmer of Belmont, reported the death of his infant child who was born prematurely at about 8 months, but only lived fifteen hours. He had lost another child ‘under exactly similar circumstances on 30 May 1898’, less than a year earlier. The police inspector interviewed the mother, who was in bed with ‘the dead body of a female child fully dressed lying on the bed by her side’. The baby, born the previous day, was very small, weighing only about two pounds, and born a month early. She was very weak at birth and could not take the breast or any food, so her early death was anticipated. Her husband had christened the child and given it the name Alice.*!

Mrs Le Page had been engaged as a nurse and was called to Cadwallders the night before the baby’s birth. She told the police that the child was in a state of mortification at birth and she knew it could not possibly live twentyfour hours. She blamed the premature birth and the child’s condition on the fact that George Cadwallder made his wife ‘work like a slave’, an allegation the inspector considered accurate. On the basis of the police report, the district coroner decided not to hold an inquiry into the possibility of infanticide.** We can only imagine the mother’s feelings on the deaths of two babies in a year and the prospect of more to come if the same conditions continued.

Belmont was close to Perth and to assistance from the police or a nurse. Similar if not greater pressure of work would have applied in more isolated areas in the bush. Police intervention in this case is a reminder that many of these stillbirths may actually have been cases of infanticide.

Women and children and the goldfields Geoffrey Blainey has estimated that men still outnumbered women by ten to one in many gold towns as late as 1897, because miners were reluctant to take wives and families to primitive, insanitary camps.*? Many diggers abandoned their wives in the cities or the frontier towns to follow the goldrushes, leaving the wives to seek outdoor relief from benevolent societies where they existed, claiming their husbands were temporarily away seeking employment. Some miners tried to send part of their goldfields earnings home, but families of

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miners who were killed at work received little or no compensation—at best the funeral might be paid by a friendly society, or surviving miners would pass

a hat around. Miners who wanted to keep their families intact, while recognising the insecurities of the search for gold, often turned eventually to other work or supportive commercial roles on the fields, such as cabinet-makers or shopkeepers.

Some wives could reach the point of desperation when their husbands abandoned them for the goldrushes. To take an extreme case first, the inquest into the suicide of Catherine Shaw, aged 40 years, at Portarlington in Victoria in September 1855 concluded that she died from ‘the effects of poison by her own hand’. Catherine told her neighbour, Sarah Rose, that she was very ill, and that her heart was broken because her husband, William, had left for the goldfields a month earlier and she knew she would never see him alive again. Sarah Rose called a doctor, but Catherine Shaw went into convulsive fits and was dead when the doctor arrived, to find a portion of strychnine still left on a shelf.*4

Conditions for women who followed their husbands to the goldfields could

easily become intolerable, especially if they were ill, elderly, or pregnant. Given the small proportion of women, those few could readily become isolated and vulnerable in the absence of family or community support, as illustrated by two female deaths on the Kalgoorlie goldfields in 1899. One was the

suicide of Elizabeth Prince, a married woman who poisoned herself with strychnine at Broad Arrow near Kalgoorlie in 1899. The records recall nothing more, but it is likely that her digger husband had died or abandoned her.*° Such female suicides on the goldfields were most unusual, given the small number of women in the goldfields and their far lower propensity than men to suicide. It has to be noted also that the worst such stories usually relate to the earlier goldrushes, while subsequent decades of goldmining treated both women and men somewhat more kindly.

The case of Janet Nicholson is a rare example in the police files of an elderly destitute woman who died in the goldfields, apparently from a com-

bination of old age, alcohol, exhaustion, and near-starvation. She died at Kalgoorlie on 20 September 1899 at the age of about seventy. The previous day Janet had been found naked at the rear of her camp after drinking heavily for several days. Her hut was in a filthy condition, with dirty rags and clothes scattered around, and police initially assumed she had no relatives. But they found in her bag a marriage certificate dated 1893 which led to the discovery of two daughters in Scotland who said she had been a nurse in a Queensland hospital in 1883.4 Possibly Janet’s second husband had tried his luck in the goldfields but died before her, leaving a formerly respectable nurse to suffer the humiliating death of a destitute alcoholic. Those women who died in the goldfields were more likely to die in childbirth than old age. Andrew Inglis, a Scottish schoolteacher on the Bendigo goldfields in the 1850s, lost his first two wives in childbirth. Joanna died in 1854 at Lockwood, aged 28, nine days after the birth of her daughter, Anna Isabella, who followed her to the grave three months later. Andrew remarried

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in 1856 to find a mother for his surviving child, but his second wife also died in childbirth in 1858, at the age of 23, having lost both infants. Andrew Inglis left the Bendigo goldfields to settle in Geelong as a Wesleyan minister and was more fortunate in his third marriage in 1864, which produced four sons.*/

Women had more reason to worry about the possibility of their babies’ deaths on the goldfields than their own. This is made poignantly clear by the evidence from Pennyweight Flat cemetery, near Castlemaine, the site of the rich Victorian Forest Creek gold diggings. This small, isolated bush cemetery was the burial site of about two hundred people, almost all babies and children, and all buried between 1852 and 1857. It demonstrates the high death

rates of young children on the goldfields from diseases such as diarrhoea, dysentery, and convulsions, as well as accidents and drowning. Pennyweight

Flat cemetery provides an unusual surviving record of child deaths on the goldfields, when little or no trace remains of many such infant deaths elsewhere. Headstones were rare because few diggers could afford them, marking their children’s graves instead with circles of stones or building up the graves with rocks. In the early months of gold-rushes, children were buried in a shroud as there was no sawn timber for a coffin, and later funerals used a dray or a bullock cart.*®

If we take as a sample of Pennyweight Flat Cemetery deaths the first seventy names of those buried between June 1853 and June 1855, the causes of death are revealing (after eliminating twelve with no cause cited). More than half the children were infants under one year. Fourteen died of dysentery and four of diarrhoea, constituting together a third of the fifty-eight deaths with cause cited. Five died of convulsions, four of inflammation of the lungs and consumption, two of measles and one of whooping cough. The majority thus died of childhood diseases whose impact was vastly increased by the dirt, bad water, and unsanitary conditions of the early goldfields. Three boys and three girls drowned accidentally, aged between 3 and 12 years, including one

who fell into a waterhole. Two cases of manslaughter of children were recorded, one boy of 14 and one case of infanticide, while a boy of 4 was accidentally killed.*”

At the White Hills cemetery, two miles from Sandhurst on the Bendigo goldfields in Victoria, 4800 people were buried between June 1856 and December 1862, with an estimated additional 1100 in the earlier years when no regular record was kept. Out of a total of about 5900 burials, only about fifty were over 40 years of age, ‘while the greatest number are under three years’. The graves in White Hills cemetery were marked only by the plainest tombstones, with humble wooden or sandstone slabs and verses of home made poetry. A common inscription on the children’s graves expressed the hope that they ‘bloom in immortal life’.°° The annotated lists of over 700 Lonely Graves of the Gippsland Goldfields also reveal large numbers of deaths of infants and children.°! Thomas Francis Ahier, goldminer, twice buried infants of three weeks, in 1863 and 1865, at

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Spring Hill near Grant and at B.B. Creek in the Jordan Goldfields. These lone graves were necessary in the early goldfields before burial grounds were officially established. Children died in the Gippsland goldfields of a variety of complaints, including convulsions, croup, burns, drowning, and prematurity. Charles Bugnall died at 4 months in 1865 of ‘inanition’ at the gold town of

Grant, because his mother had no breast milk and no equivalent milk was available in the town. The baby was buried by the father, presumably near the site of their home. Amelia Burgess, 5-year old daughter of a Russell’s Creek goldminer, died of burns in 1886 after having a fit and falling into the open fire. Charles Burgess made a small casket for his daughter and began to walk to the Russell’s Creek cemetery, carrying the loaded casket and a pick and shovel. But his burden was so heavy that he was obliged to dig Amelia’s grave at the side of the road.°* Records of ‘lonely graves’ and cemetery inscriptions reveal little or nothing

of the meaning of these children’s deaths for individual miners’ families. However, in the case of two miners’ families we have surviving correspondence and a memoir to illuminate the experience—Charles and Jane Foreman

in the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s, and Mrs C. C. Richards in the Kalgoorlie goldfields in the 1890s. The Foremans arrived from England in Melbourne in 1855 to try their luck on the Victorian diggings. Their letters to Charles’s parents in Kent, England, reveal that Charles moved from one field to another in search of fortune, sometimes living alone when conditions were especially harsh, leaving Jane to stay with her mother at Ballarat. In February 1857 Jane’s first child ‘a fine big boy’ was born, but two months later mother and child were both very ill with dysentery. Two years later they moved from the Inkerman to the Gordon Diggings at Mount Egerton where they had a miserable Christmas because ‘little Willy was very ill with inflammation on his chest’. Five months later Charles Foreman reported sadly on their son’s death to his brother in Kent: ‘I suppose ere this you have herd of our sad loss of our poor little Boy—We all felt it a great loss as he was just getting interesting. I hope he is better off than in this wicked world and if the Almighty choose to take him from us we ought not to grieve but to say let thy will be done.’ Charles Foreman sought consolation in the traditional biblical concept of God deciding to spare the little boy the sorrows of this world. He was also able to report thankfully that ‘the grief of one is lost in the Birth of another for Jane was safely delivered of a daughter ... I was away from home when | herd.”°?

Gender differences operated here, but Charles’s Christian faith seems to have been stronger than his wife’s. Jane’s letters to her mother-in-law in Kent do not share her husband’s resignation to God’s will, nor his trust that joy in the new baby would displace their sorrow for their lost son. We have to read between the lines of her letters for the echoes of Jane’s experience of the death

of one child and the birth of another three weeks later in a tent in an alien goldfield, in her husband’s absence. The terrible sanitation, lack of privacy, and ever presence of disease added to the privations:

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My dear Mother. No doubt you have received the news of our dear little Willy ere this. He died on the 23rd of March. I was confined on the 15 of April. I have not felt like myself since and I sometimes think I shall never recover ... I know it is a sin to mourn, but not to mourn, Oh I would have found such comfort in him had it been the will of the Almighty to spare him.

Jane explained that she was still very sickly four months after Clara’s birth, but Charles was ‘a first rate nurse to me’ and she had a girl to help nurse the baby for a few weeks. She was also taking quinine, port wine, and three newlaid eggs every day to help her recover.°* Two months later in October 1859, Jane Foreman was no better: I have not felt well since the birth of my little girl. The Doctors tell me it is grief is the cause of my complaint. I feel nothing but time will [help?] ... I will never find a comfort in [Clara] as in dear little Willie. I am afraid to love her as we doated on him but for a short time. I hope my Sisters will never experience a loss like this ... Charles is away about 10 miles alluvial digging.>°°

The traditional Christian consolations evidently offered little comfort to this goldfields mother, even retrospectively. Looking back, in 1864, Jane told her mother-in-law that ‘I quite gave up on myself when I lost my dear little Willy, nothing but time will bear it away.’°° For Jane Foreman, God had simply stolen her boy and instructed her not to mourn, which she found quite impossible.

Three years after the death of their son, the family correspondence is again

revealing on the death of Charles’s father in Kent, England. These letters emphasise the powerful impact of distance and the differences between the coping mechanisms and rituals in England and on the Victorian goldfields. The Foremans in Kent were devout Evangelical Christians who clearly sought and found consolation in the traditional pieties. Guilt at his own absence and

grief were combined in Charles’s response in 1863 to news of his father’s death, 16000 miles away: I can scarcely make myself believe he is gone to his eternal home ... Elizabeth tells me all were with him in his last moments except myself. If I ever wished to be home it was to have been with you then. Little did I think I should never see my Poor

Father more when I left England ... Its a great consolation to me to hear he departed so very happy and let us all prepare to follow his example both temporal and spiritual.>”

The Foremans in Victoria went into mourning and Charles sent a series of instructions to his brothers and sisters on looking after their mother and taking over the family business. He thought about them all even more since his father’s death but his major consolation was that they would all ‘finally meet again above’. Jane evidently felt it was easier to lose an elderly parent than a

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child, telling her mother-in-law, ‘think how much worse it would have been losing your family when all young and helpless’. Charles derived some consolation from the ‘likenesses’ of his parents sent by his sister, though he could plainly see the effect of her afflictions in his mother’s face. A year or so after

his father’s death, Charles went into business in the Mount Egerton post office, which ‘gave us a permanent house a thing we never enjoyed while digging’. He and his brother obtained three government appointments by late

1865, the post office, electoral registrar, and deputy registrar of births and deaths, bringing in £60 per annum. Jane had another son in July 1865,°° this time in the comfort and security of her own home, but she would never see this boy as a replacement for her lost little Willy. Thirty years later, Mrs C. C. Richards experienced the harsh impact of the Western Australian goldfields in the 1890s as she watched two of her children die of typhoid fever at Kalgoorlie. Mrs Richards landed with her husband and four children at Albany in Western Australia in 1895 from South Australia, to follow up her husband’s earlier claim at the Kalgoorlie goldfields. She tolerated the discomfort, perpetual dust, heat, and flies of their canvas home in the goldfields until her children became affected by the primitive living conditions. One morning in 1896 her eldest boy carried his two-and-a-half-year old brother back home saying ‘I saw blood on his legs’. A doctor attended the little boy for three days but he died on the third afternoon and was buried the

next day. No details were given in this goldfields tragedy either of the deathbed scene or any ritual at the funeral. The depth of Mrs Richards’ misery is illuminated by her poignant remarks about her advanced pregnancy and her grieving cat: I just don’t know how I survived that time. I was in a delicate state of health, and for my little one to be taken from me at that time seemed the last straw. But I lived through it ... Our dear old tabby cat never ate and rarely left our baby’s room after

he died. About ten days later we found him lying dead on the foot of baby’s cot.°”

A month later a baby girl, called Ella, was born, ‘who seemed to have been sent to fill the vacant place in our hearts’. By then C. C. Richards was managing the underground works at the Boulder Perseverance mine and they were ‘a happy community’ until death struck again. Just fourteen months after the first catastrophe baby Ella, 13 months old, died from the same complaint as her little brother, starting with diarrhoea. The doctor attended for two days but knew there was little he could do as ‘the lining of her stomach was coming away’, and he told the mother the fever was caused by the water. Again,

there was no mention of any ritual at the deathbed or the burial. The goldfields were just as hostile to ritual as the bush, reinforced by the nature of sudden deaths from infectious fevers. The mother’s earlier grief was reactivated and intensified: ‘After that I felt I just wanted to die—our two lovely children taken from us in just over a year. I grieved terribly, and felt so rebellious that

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I told Puppa I would never be happy again. I would sit for hours and hours wondering what was the meaning of it all, and why my little ones had been taken from me.’®°

Nor was Mrs Richards pleased to learn she was pregnant again, as she still had no explanation for the loss of her two little children. In her terse statements of her children’s deaths and her subsequent depression she made no mention of her religious beliefs. But even in the goldfields she remained a

practising Christian who sent the children to Sunday school and helped to organise the church services on Sunday evenings. But her Christian faith had not seemed strong enough to withstand the double deaths in the inhospitable and insanitary goldfields. Ultimately, however, the familiar tenets of her faith returned to help her in her mournful contemplation: ‘As plain as if the words were spoken to me I was told this: “You had to give your little Ella for God to have her in Heaven”. I thought it over, and my whole outlook seemed to change overnight. Away went those rebellious feelings, my health improved,

and I grew happier each day.’®! By the 1890s, however, this traditional Christian response to death was becoming more unusual, especially in the goldfields.

Mr Richards was not mentioned at all in his wife’s brief accounts of the children’s deaths and her depressive reactions. We may assume that he was occupied for long hours managing the underground works at the mine and probably did not talk much, if at all, about their bereavement. However, his concern for his wife and family may well have taken the most practical form since they returned to South Australia before the next baby was born, leaving Mrs Richards with her memories of the two children’s graves in the goldfields. Women were in a small minority on the goldfields but they were invaluable

as nurses to sick and dying diggers; even if they could not save lives, they brought comfort and helped to ease mental pain in the final days for children and also for young men who were usually dying far away from their families in appalling conditions. S. T. Gill’s sketch of the invalid digger is a reminder of the lack of tolerance in the goldfields for men who were ill and dying (see plate 30). Emily Skinner was fortunate in discovering ‘a good angel of a little woman’ to alleviate her family’s tragedies on the Victorian goldfields. Emily arrived from England in 1854 to join her husband on the Ovens diggings in Victoria, where she supplemented their income with dressmaking and washing. Three of their nine children died on the goldfields, including one baby from fever at Woolshed Creek during an intensely hot summer in the 1850s. Emily and her husband, William, were also ill with the fever, ‘and but for our good angel of a little woman who lived near, we should have fared worse than we did’. Though this angel had to look after and cook for her own husband and his mates, she contrived to devote considerable time to nursing Emily and her baby. Emily was close to death for many weeks and was raving in delirium when the baby died, and was almost indifferent until the shock came with improving health. Emily commented later that ‘woman’s mission of kindness and help’ was fulfilled in the Buckland, where they moved in 1859. Many

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women were willing to help the sick at short notice, without financial reward, and their skills were vital since no doctor lived within fourteen miles.°* But such angels of mercy were rare on the predominantly male goldfields. Life in the bush or on the goldfields was at its most perilous in times of illness and death, especially for babies and young children. Only survival and good fortune were valued in the longer term, in an environment which could undermine any transported Christian beliefs in higher human values. Neither

the Australian bush nor the goldfields could be reliably domesticated by women and children in the nineteenth century; human life was fragile in a harsh and uncaring land. Great courage, or desperation in the absence of other alternatives, was necessary to sustain life and hope. Women and children remained on the geographical margins of this great colonial struggle for settlement and economic success until the twentieth century, but shared its human costs.

Chapter 16

Epilogue The Great War and Silent Grief

The Great War of 1914 to 1918 marked a turning point in the history of death, grief, and mourning. The war reinforced the stoical and reserved response to death learned by bushmen and isolated settlers over many decades of adjustment to the Australian geography and environment. It also shattered

the traditional Christian culture of death as the dominant model in urban Australia, as well as accelerating a decline in religious adherence and Christian mourning rituals which was already under way. The Great War compressed and magnified all those forms of violent and premature death which middle-class Christians had been least able to resolve within the conventional religious framework. This final chapter is not an overview of the history of death in the Great War, or the war memorial movement, or the

Anzac legend, since those are huge subjects on which excellent work is already available. The more limited purpose here is to explore soldiers’ responses to their mates’ deaths and the private grieving strategies of several bereaved families to illuminate the origins and character of the new model of so-called ‘death denial’. Philippe Ariés, Geoffrey Gorer, and others have argued that a complete reversal of death practices and attitudes occurred from the 1920s, as the ritualised, emotional and expressive death of nineteenth-century Christians was replaced by the ‘denial of death’ or hidden death of the next half century.' We may differ about the appropriateness of the terminology used by Ariés and define the transformation somewhat differently—perhaps as a repression of grief or a silence about death—but there can be little disagreement that a significant cultural change took place. The timing of such a shift has rarely been explained, except by religious and demographic forces. Yet its coincidence with the end of the Great War was not an accident, and the evidence strongly suggests that the war itself contributed to this profound transformation. It can be argued that the tragic loss of so many young men’s lives in itself stimulated 304

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a new model of suppressed or silent responses to loss and grief which deeply constrained the next two generations. The war accelerated changes already in process—in the decline of funeral and mourning customs, and the increasing erosion of Protestant Christian

beliefs about death and the afterlife; and these in turn interacted with the changes wrought by the war itself. Earlier chapters have shown that funeral and mourning rituals in Australia were never as extravagant as in Britain, despite powerful efforts at imitation in the cities, encouraged by the undertaking business. Funeral and mourning reform associations formed in Australian colonies from the 1870s encouraged cheaper and more modest funerals and burials and simpler mourning dress. Formerly rigid rules were increasingly relaxed and even middle-class female mourners began to add touches of black or recycle old mourning costume with fresh black trimming.

Moreover, the Australian secular tradition of simple bush burials in rural areas had developed largely independently, and had never introduced elaborate or expensive rituals. The prolonged process of funeral and mourning reform was hastened by the Great War. So many random mass deaths of young soldiers overseas made individual deaths of civilians at home seem insignificant. People felt that individual displays of funeral pageantry for civilians were self-indulgent and even immoral when those noble soldiers who died for their country overseas could never be buried in Australia. The wearing of deep mourning was seen as bad for morale and mourners felt greater freedom to choose whether they would

wear it at all. Even condolence letters seemed to offer less consolation in wartime, and many mourners no doubt shared the view of John Roberts, a Melbourne accountant, that they were ‘very distressing’ on the death of a soldier son.? In the context of mass deaths in war, condolence letters seemed to underline the hopelessness of the bereaved and the declining stocks of sympathy in a community required to write far too many such letters. The Great War involved the terrible slaughter of young men on an unprecedented scale, far beyond anything conceived before August 1914 (see plate

31). It represented a combination of vast numbers of young soldiers killed within a few short years, horrific violence, and the absence of traditional community mourning rituals. War deaths were often anonymous and ugly, and that added immensely to the trauma of their sorrowing families back home. Not only could families not see their sons’ bodies or attend their funerals, but many men were missing and never identified—blown to bits or left for dead in no man’s land, with bodies scattered in subsequent fighting. Nearly half the men of the British Empire who died in action in the Great War were

unidentified and have no known burial place, including about 25000 Australians.° The human cost of the Great War to Australia seemed overwhelming, with about 60 000 soldiers killed, 75 per cent of them in France and Belgium. More than one in five of the soldiers who left for war were killed, and they were all

volunteers. About 22000 died in 1915 and 1916, and the numbers rose to nearly 36 000 from 1917 to 1918. As Ken Inglis notes, two out of every three

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Australians in uniform were killed or wounded and every second Australian family was bereaved by the war.* Moreover the 7600 or so Australian soldiers

who died at Gallipoli in 1915 created an enduring national legend. They proved their abilities as imperial soldiers at Gallipoli, passing the supreme test

of war and providing Australia with its dominant image of the formation of national identity. The close association between the Anzac legend and the bush legend has frequently been noted, especially by C. E. W. Bean in his testimony to the coura-

geous sacrifice of Anzac soldiers, including many bushmen who became a unique type of fighting men. Bill Gammage captures this cultural fusion well: The conditions of battle produced a great re-flowering of the bush tradition. The bush and the war demanded similar qualities in individuals—for example, resource, initiative, endurance, reliability, courage, and mateship ... The Australian land taught the bushman stoic acceptance; war taught the Anzacs that guns were greater than men, and men must accept fatalistically what the guns might do. For both there was no better way, there was no faith, there was only acceptance and endurance.°

Or, as Marilyn Lake noted, “The Great War transformed the bushman as cul-

tural hero into the new national hero, the Digger or Anzac.’® Death had played an important role in the evolution of the bushman legend, especially in creating heroes of explorers, disreputable bushrangers, and isolated bush-

men who lost their battles with an untamed land. But in the Great War Australia at last found worthier heroes in those 60 000 inspirational soldiers who sacrificed their lives for the noble causes of patriotism, duty, and honour. While some may argue that the Anzac legend excluded Aboriginal people and women, it did have great popular appeal in a young nation hungry for heroes and had immense significance for every family that had lost a son.’

Soldiers’ responses to violent mass deaths ‘Keep a stiff upper lip and bear up’ To understand the impact of the Great War on death and mourning practices and attitudes in Australia, we need first to look briefly at the responses of Australian soldiers to violent mass deaths, and more particularly the deaths of their mates and the prospect of their own death. Repression or even denial of death was expressed from the early war years in the soldiers’ stoical ‘stiff upper lip’ in the face of death, which was necessary for their own chances of survival. Many Anzacs were influenced by an English background which

forced men to suppress open expression of personal feelings. They were affected even more powerfully by the bush tradition of stoicism in the face of death, while respecting the dead as far as war conditions permitted. Bill Gammage’s classic book Fhe Broken Years makes eloquent use of sol-

diers’ letters and diaries to portray their experience of the horrors of war,

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including death in all its brutality. The Anzacs’ personal accounts recorded the triumph of the bush legend at Gallipoli in 1915 as Australia ‘leapt into

Nationhood, Brotherhood and Sacrifice at one bound’, as one soldier exclaimed. The bush legend and the Anzac legend merged. Gammage shows how the soldiers’ initial grand, romantic ideals of fighting for imperial glory, freedom, and patriotism were replaced by 1917 by more limited notions of keeping going for the sake of duty, honour, manhood and their mates. They became accustomed to the horror and frequency of death; they became fatalistic about death, even callous, in order to carry on with the job and win the war. By 1917 the huge fatality lists in France ensured that soldiers deliberately suppressed thoughts of death, of necessity, because horrific casualty statistics

and the death of most mates left no doubt of their own likely fate. As Gammage shows, those who survived the longest often did so by a curious psychological state of mind. They could not afford to think too much about the death of their mates, because they would then be contemplating their own deaths and undermining their courage. In the end they lived in a world apart where most men expected to die.® Horror and fear were presumably felt by most soldiers, but were not usually expressed because they were perceived as cowardice, and made it more

difficult for comrades to cope. It was seen as both manly and effective to repress fear, grief, and indeed most emotions. Masculinity was a crucial factor in this repression of feelings, reinforced by the combined heritage of British manliness and the Australian bush tradition. The model of response to death that evolved drew on the bush model of stoicism and private coping. Men were meant to be strong and silent in the face of war and environmen-

tal hardships, and their repression of grief on the death of their mates was vital for survival. The culture defined crying by males as weakness. There was

a fine line between silent private grief on the one hand and actual denial of sorrow to themselves on the other. Soldiers’ letters and diaries in the Australian War Memorial and the State Library of Victoria illustrate Gammage’s arguments powerfully, with diaries somewhat less restrained than carefully censored letters home. Soldiers developed a language of chivalric romanticism to describe the indescribable in let-

ters home, using euphemisms and abstractions to conceal the horrors they endured. This is well illustrated by the diary entry of Sergeant Henry Molony, aged 28, on the death of his mate Leo, who had been ‘all kindness’ to him in the AIF in 1915. Leo’s death was ‘a terrible shock’ and the saddest day since landing at Gallipoli, leaving him ‘pretty sad’. Even so, ‘in this game one has to show a smiling face to the world’.? William Edward James, a Victorian farmer, described his experience at Lone Pine in 1915 in characteristic understatements: 10 September 1915 ... Bodies of our men and also the Turks lie unburied just as they fell. It is astonishing how cheap is life in War. No one takes any notice of the fact.

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17 September. Getting used to the smells and the dead bodies which protrude at various points. 23 September. Heavy bombardment ... Nettle of B. Coy had his head blown clean off, a most ghastly sight, but a mere detail here.!°

Elliot Wilkie of Melbourne, aged 40, described conflicting emotions in his

Gallipoli journal. On 29 April 1915 he noted calmly: ‘It is wonderful how casual one gets over things I have seen; many ghastly wounds in men and mules. One takes things with marvellous “sang-froid” somehow.’ But during the next three weeks he was deeply affected by attending the burials of sev-

eral mates which disturbed his composure. Wilkie confessed that funeral services ‘have a very depressing effect on one’. Burials of mates made him ‘terribly sad’—testing his masculine reserve—whereas he could cope more easily

with the piles of anonymous dead bodies outside the trenches, despite the ‘awful stench’. Even so, the most he was able to write about these feelings of loss was that he felt ‘quite queer’ and it ‘makes a man think’. Overall he witnessed so many ‘horrors of war which sicken me’ that he admitted to ‘feeling the strain of things a bit’.!! Two soldiers testified more frankly to their former headmaster than they might have done to their parents. William Edward Bruce enlisted in July 1915

and wrote to the headmaster two months before he was killed in action in November 1916: ‘One soon gets used to the sight of dead and wounded men, and becomes callous, but I must admit that the sight of the dead torn about in such horrible ways by the huge shells made me feel different.’!* Another former student, Alexander Ellis, wrote in 1916 from a London war hospital where he was recovering from shell-shock on the Somme. He described the desperate fighting which he would never forget, because it killed or wounded most of his company and he had expected to die at any moment: Nearer the line the horror of the unburied dead is unforgettable. The pathos of the scene engraves itself on the mind. Imagine the dead lying along the tracks by the wayside, in trenches, along parapets—some lying, some kneeling, some standing, some with rifles clutched tightly facing the enemy to the last ... Such scenes as these harden one, make one callous, but what man could remain unmoved when his comrade is struck down beside him? In places it is death to stand up. Here the dead are buried beneath the trench itself.!3

Soldiers usually wrote home to parents rather than wives, since 80 per cent of the AIF were young and unmarried. Their letters home were usually less frank and explicit than diaries, especially since families were already frantic with anxiety about the huge casualty lists. Though these letters were both officially and privately censored, they are still a valuable reminder of the culturally correct line for these soldiers in responding to death. These letters

are also important because they were often imprinted later on bereaved parents’ minds, reminding them not only how their beloved sons believed

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soldiers themselves ought to deal with death, but also by implication how the writers hoped their own parents would grieve if they were killed. Most letters are rich in understatements and euphemisms, with an emphasis on the soldiers’ fearlessness in the face of death, sometimes illustrated by clumsy jokes.

Bravado was necessary for the soldiers’ own survival, as well as for the reassurance of anxious families. Private Jack Tuck wrote to his sister from France in 1917 that ‘soldiers become quite accustomed to seeing bodies lying about in heaps—it is only a mere trifle’; the effect was undermined, however, by his next bald statement, ‘All my mates are gone.’!* Cyril Laurence, aged 25, wrote to his father in December 1915 from Gallipoli: “The Australian has

learned to laugh at everything now ... and it’s a blessing that the men see things in this light or otherwise we’d go mad in this God forsaken hole.’!° Other soldiers wrote to their parents and sisters more explicitly about the stoical response required in facing war deaths. Sergeant Jack Baillie, aged 21,

confessed to his girlfriend in Newcastle that the deaths in action of his brother and brother-in-law hit him hard. However, ‘we shall only have to keep a stiff upper lip and bear up’, and console themselves that their relatives died ‘as men, nobly doing their duty’. Jack concluded: ‘I don’t want to be sad in this letter if I can help it.’ Again we see the anxiety to suppress expression of genuine grief and avoid discussing it with their families.!® Oliver and Joe Cumberland sent revealing letters home to their sister Una, in Scone, New South Wales. Joe, aged 21, died of wounds on the Gallipoli landing and Oliver, aged 26, was killed only months later at Lone Pine. Oliver wrote in January 1915 to Una, who had become the boys’ surrogate mother on the deaths of their parents: Well dear old sister, you never know what is going to happen, so if anything does happen to Oliver or I don’t let it upset any of you too much, because dear Una, you must remember that thousands of sisters are losing their brothers daily, and Una, if the boys are prepared to die fighting for their country, I reckon their sisters ought to be prepared to give them up if need be, when they know they are fighting for a noble cause ... Don’t get gloomy over this letter because we are not dead yet by a long way.

This idea that individual grief by bereaved civilians must be repressed because it was self-indulgent in the face of mass deaths of young men on such a vast scale was common. Only four months later Oliver had to write to inform Una

that Joe had died of wounds in a Cairo hospital on 5 May, and had been buried weeks before Oliver even knew he was dead. Oliver attempted to soften the blow and play down his own deep sorrow: ‘Losing Joe has broken me up a bit, but Una it might be for the best—war is a terrible game especially this war, and those who are killed quick are sometimes better off.’!” Three months later Oliver was killed at Lone Pine in Gallipoli, but was reported as ‘missing presumed dead’, and it was seven years before Una was informed that his remains had at last been officially identified and re-interred.

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The Ferguson family of Enoggera, Queensland, lost two of their four sons directly to the war, and believed that ‘the war is responsible for poor Mater’s

death’ in 1917. The correspondence between the businessman father in Queensland and his four soldier sons in Europe is revealing about the transmission of expectations for appropriate grieving behaviour between serving

soldiers and parents. In 1917 Hector had been fighting for two years and Douglas, Norman, and Malcolm for one. There is no reference to spiritual faith except for Douglas’s comment in 1917 that they were ‘never a very religious family’. When Lieutenant Hector Ferguson was killed on 21 October 1917, soon after the death of their mother, Malcolm wrote to his father: ‘I can hardly realize it myself. But it has happened Father, and we miss him terribly —but I must not keep writing like this.’ The code of silence governed all four

brothers in writing about grief—they felt strongly that they must each bear their deep sorrow internally, and that expressions of emotion signified masculine weakness. In a later letter Malcolm tried to console his father with heroic wartime rhetoric: ‘Well Father you have something to be proud of and looking at it in a certain light—it was a glorious death for him ... As a man he was a man. As an officer he stood out alone.’ Malcolm also gave clear direction to his father that quiet stoicism was the appropriate response to the ‘terrible hard knocks’ of wartime: ‘I know you just “stick” it, like you always have in all your troubles.’ Douglas’s letter to his father and sister was brief, ‘It is very hard to think that I will never see him again ... But I cannot write more as I am too upset. Try to be of good cheer, you two poor selves.’!® Most of the surviving correspondence to the father came from the youngest son, Norman, who was perhaps the most helpful in his support to his father,

as well as expressing his grief the most openly—‘It was the greatest blow I ever had in my life’. Norman channelled some of his own grief into ensuring that Hector—and later Douglas, who was killed in August 1918—were honoured by respectable burials and appropriate graves. This concern with the proper graves of dead soldiers was a constant theme in the letters and diaries of Australian soldiers, again reflecting the bushmen’s traditions of respect for the dead and regard for decent burials (see plate 32). Norman was determined to see Hector’s ‘last resting place’ while he was still in France, and anxious for ‘a permanent mark put over his grave ... when this awful war is over ... some-

thing plain but substantial’. In March 1918 Norman at last found Hector’s grave, in a war cemetery laid out in regimental rows: ‘the graves are all well kept and in time the place will look rather pretty’. Five months later when Douglas, who had only just received his commission as a pilot, was killed during his last ‘battle practice’ on 18 August 1918, Norman and Malcolm made arrangements for a funeral. Douglas was buried at Brookwood cemetery near

London with full military honours, the funeral led by a firing party and a band, and the coffin covered with a flag.!? The family was fortunate to have bodies to bury and graves that could be marked, tended, and even perhaps visited in later years.

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Through all their letters home to their sorrowing father, Malcolm and Norman Ferguson emphasised that he had always been brave and that he must bear these terrible blows in the same way as earlier trials: ‘you just squared your shoulders and carried on’. It was tough for all the family but Malcolm intended to try to follow his father’s example of courageous but silent stoicism: ‘I know what it must be for you, and I know you are battling through it like you always have.’ The two surviving brothers left their father in no doubt of the necessary grieving behaviour on a father’s part in response

to his two brave sons’ sacrifice of their lives—it required an equivalent courage by a grieving father.*°

Family strategies in grief Survival of the good Catholic death The Great War further weakened institutional Protestantism, which was already in decline. Attendance at church services was reduced in the late nine-

teenth century as indifference increased among the working classes and intellectuals more often questioned their faith. Hilary Carey has observed that

the early twentieth century saw further decline for most denominations as working people left the churches in greater numbers. She notes a real change in the patterns of religious belief after 1901, with serious reduction of church membership in a more secular society; but she argues that it was mainly men

who abandoned religious adherence, while religion became privatised as women took over ‘much of the responsibility for religious observance in Australia ... Religion had ceased to be a manly concern.’*! The Catholic Church, however, was more effective in keeping up its numbers, partly because the sacraments brought comfort, and also because Catholics were

forces.*? )

more likely to be both Irish and working class, uniting two powerful cohesive

For some Australian soldiers in 1915, church attendance had probably reflected custom more than active faith, and the indifference of others was further increased by their experience of war—contributing no doubt to the growing feminisation of the churches. Many soldiers resented the failure of chaplains at the front to offer plausible explanations for war’s carnage, or to give adequate consolation when mates were killed, or to justify a God who could seemingly support both sides. Bill Gammage has observed that the soldiers’ accounts of the war rarely mentioned religion, even though they supposedly enlisted to defend their God: ‘the average Australian soldier was not religious ... Most Australians found little in war to prompt consideration of a higher divinity.’*°

Most soldiers’ accounts of the war sent to their families at home were secular, with more references to the loss of faith or its futility than to the consolations of religious belief. Sergeant Jack Baillie wrote from France to

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Nell, his girlfriend in Newcastle, after the deaths in action in 1917 of his favourite brother and his brother-in-law: ‘I have lost a great deal of faith in religion and the whole pale of religion since I have come abroad and seen the world. I guess if you see what we soldiers see you would think likewise. Our pay sergeant was in pre-war time a Sunday school teacher but he says as far as he is concerned with religion he is finished with it—a hollow mockery.’”4

Norman Ferguson was devastated on the death of his brother Hector Ferguson, in 1917: ‘I am afraid that there is no clergyman alive that could comfort me or give me any reasonable explanation why this blow should have fallen.’*>

The Catholic faith seems to have provided more consolation than the Protestant for men facing death at the front. Jack Brotchie, a Protestant, sent his father an account from Gallipoli of the death of an Irish Catholic comrade, Mick Halligan, in August 1915. Brotchie helped to bury Halligan, removing his identity disc but leaving his crucifix on the body. He concluded: ‘Their form of religion seems very comforting to them it helps them wonderful over danger, trouble and Death.’° At least some of this strength probably came from the greater willingness of Catholic soldiers to talk through with priests their ambivalent emotional responses to death. When Henry Molony, a Catholic soldier from Melbourne, was shocked and saddened by the death of his mate Leo, he had ‘a long yarn about Leo’ with Father McAuliffe, the Catholic chaplain, who comforted him.*7 One detailed archival example illustrates the experience of families who

found consolation on the death of a soldier son primarily through the Christian tradition of the good death. It is not surprising that this example comes from a Catholic family, since Catholics could be fortified in facing death by their familiar death rituals, reinforced by the belief in purgatory and the possibility of prayer for deceased’s souls. Moreover, Catholic chaplains at the front played a special role in mediating between the Catholic soldier and his God, and helping him to prepare spiritually for a possible death in war.

The Freeman’s Journal in Sydney noted in December 1916 that Catholics made ideal soldiers because their combination of patriotism and a devout faith could make them remarkably zealous as soldiers.7°

Sir Thomas Hughes of Sydney was a prominent member of a group of upper-class Irish Catholics who strongly supported the British war effort in Opposition to most anti-conscription Irish Catholics who were more likely to be working class. He had been three times lord mayor of Sydney, and a successful businessman, as well as a member of the Legislative Council. Hughes

was also a leading Catholic layman and his two sisters were nuns. Sir Thomas, his wife Louisa, and their two sons shared a profound belief in the power of the Catholic faith as consolation and support through the trauma of war. The two sons enlisted in 1916—Roger as a doctor in the Australian Army Medical Corps and Geoffrey in the Royal Flying Corps. Roger Hughes joined up soon after his wedding in 1916 because he saw war as ‘a glorious adventure’ for God and Empire, but he was killed by a shell

after only five days at the front. On 11 December 1916 Geoffrey sent his

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parents the ‘heartbreaking’ news of Roger’s ‘noble sacrifice’. Geoffrey believed it was ‘God’s miracle’ that made him accept a fortuitous lift from his own base 50 miles away to see Roger on what turned out to be the day of his death. On arrival he learned that Roger had been seriously wounded that morning by a shell which hit the hospital dressing station as he was tending a wounded man. Geoffrey found Roger unconscious with compound fractures in both legs, suffering severely from shock and loss of blood. Geoffrey spoke to Roger, who opened his eyes, smiled and said ‘Geoffrey, you dear old chap’,

before relapsing into unconsciousness and dying. Geoffrey wrote to his parents in chivalric terms reminiscent of Emily Vines’ description of her husband Fred’s ‘beautiful’ death at sea nearly fifty years earlier: It was an awful blow and I felt dazed and dulled by it. I had not thought the darling old chap would die so soon. I went to him and knelt by him and prayed ... His face was beautiful and he was smiling with indescribable happiness. Roger received

the Last Sacraments that afternoon, and died as he had lived a noble Catholic, strengthened and blessed by all the comforts of our Faith ... Even in my moments of greatest sorrow I had every consolation God could give. I had seen the darling old chap and he had recognized me. I had seen and wondered at his wonderful calm and holy peace. I knew that he was strengthened by the Last Sacraments and was ready to go to God. I had those around to tell me of his wonderful bravery and resignation to God’s Holy Will.

Geoffrey advised his parents not to grieve for Roger, whose death was ‘so beautiful and glorious and noble and inspiring’. Afterwards, Geoffrey went to communion for Roger and arranged for masses to be said for his soul*? (see plate 33). Sir Thomas and Lady Hughes in Sydney also found consolation on Roger’s

death in their Christian faith, On 27 December 1916, Sir Thomas wrote to Geoffrey: ‘I can only thank God that Roger died an heroic martyr’s death, and is now safe for ever in heaven, though we shall never cease to pray for him,

and to get prayers and Masses for him.’ Lady Hughes was convinced that Roger would ‘always be near to help us to live a better life and to pray for us in heaven so that one day we may be united together once more never to be parted in all eternity. I feel that he is happy for ever.’ The parents would not have deprived their son of his ‘glorious death’, and believed they should be better people for bearing such grief. Roger’s parents and friends had masses said in dozens of churches and offered Holy Communion for him. They all believed ‘that those who fall in this war in the Allied cause are true Christian martyrs’.?”

Christian consolations for the Hughes family were supported by other traditional forms of solace, of which the most important was the memory of their son. Sir Thomas noted on 20 December 1916 that ‘we see him and feel his presence in every corner of the house, and almost persuade ourselves we hear his quick step and his bright voice’. More immediate and physically consoling was the birth of Roger’s son in January 1917, especially as he was ‘very

314 DEATH IN THE BUSH AND THE GREAT WAR

like Roger’. Sir Thomas felt Roger had left ‘a most beautiful memory behind him’, and he kept it fresh by sending dozens of Roger’s photographs to friends and family, with miniatures for his widow and mother. Roger’s most valuable belongings were sent to his widow, Eileen, including ‘his very personal little treasures, wallet, prayer books’. Moreover, Lady Hughes decided in April 1917 to collect together some of their ‘dearest remembrances of Roger’ so

that one day his son could learn ‘something definite and beautiful of the heroic man who bore him’. She had made an oak-lined box with a brass plaque on top inscribed with Roger’s name and dates of birth and death; there she would keep Roger’s ‘little personal things’ for his son Peter in future years, together with every photo of Roger they could find. The parents and Geoffrey believed that ‘our darling Roger is very near to us and praying and watching

over us—a common hope during the Great War and not confined to Christian families.*!

Where the grieving mother found consolation beyond her faith chiefly in memory, Sir Thomas and Geoffrey also sought solace in the poetry of the early war poets who used chivalric language to extol the nobility of the sacrifice and the grandeur of the Imperial cause. Father and son often read volumes of Rupert Brooke’s war sonnets given them by Roger because he loved them so. They gained ‘some germ of comfort’ from the popular, ‘Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!’, which reminded them of Roger’s ‘glorious sacrifice’. Perhaps this heroic war poetry provided much-needed reassurance of the worthiness of the cause as the 1917 casualty lists for the AIF mounted. In December 1917 Sir Thomas sent Geoffrey details of the mortality statistics, revealing his sombre doubts in the appeal, ‘Please God his sacrifice will not have been in vain’.°* The Hughes family may have been unusually devout. Certainly their views on the war differed from those of many working-class Irish Catholics who were critical of the British cause after the Easter Rising. Yet their testimony demonstrates the survival of the traditional Christian way of death among some Catholics, and reminds us both of the original strength of that model in urban middle-class colonial Australia and its near collapse among Protestants by 1918.

Alternative strategies in grief Spiritualism David Cannadine has applauded the ‘inventiveness’ with which the griefstricken in Britain responded to bereavement during and after the Great War.°’ That is also true of Australian families in mourning. The Great War challenged grieving families to develop effective secular and heterodox responses to mass bereavement when conventional faith and ritual were shaken. Spiritualism was the most popular alternative spiritual source since it allowed bereaved tamilies to believe they could communicate with dead sons. Spiritualism, argues Jay Winter, ‘was one of the most disturbing and powerful means by which the living “saw” the dead of the Great War, and used their

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“return” to help survivors cope with their loss and their trauma’.** There was a common belief during the war that the spirits of the dead remained close, and it was shared by Christians, secularists, and spiritualists alike, at home in Australia as well as at the front. In 1917, Douglas Ferguson wrote from war

service in England to his father in Queensland on his mother’s death: ‘we know that although she has passed away, she in her spirit form, is with us all, just the same’.*°> On the death of her husband in 1917, Roberta Jull, a doctor and social reformer in Perth, found consolation in the verse of Archdeacon Basil Wilberforce written in 1918: There is no death! And ever near us, though unseen, The dear immortal spirits tread.*°

It is scarcely surprising that some soldiers at the front, who were surrounded by the dead, coped psychologically through spiritualism and beliefs

in the supernatural and psychic phenomena.*’ Those who were sceptical about communication with dead mates could still hope that their former comrades were close to them in spirit. Many bereaved families in Australia shared a similar belief that the spirits of beloved soldier sons were close, or even perhaps reincarnated. A verse published in the Bulletin in 1919 wrote of

the reincarnation of the ‘happy ghost’ of an Australian soldier buried in France: Ah! Do not go to see my lonely grave,

For I shall not be there; but rather part .

Of every wind, of every silver wave That dances mad with Spring, along the Seine.*®

The spiritualist movement began in the United States in the 1840s and spread to the United Kingdom in the following decades. British migrants brought spiritualism to the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s, and a decade later Melbourne became its major centre, with Alfred Deakin its most famous member in the 1880s. Spiritualists believed in the immortality of the soul and the possibility of communication with the dead through mediums. The movement declined in popularity by 1900 but was revived by the desperate needs of the bereaved in the Great War. The census statistics show that 1534 spiritualist adherents in 1901 rose to 2378 in 1911 and to 4332 in 1921; after the war numbers again fell to 1807 in 1933 and 1111 in 1947.7? However, many

who did not identify themselves on the census form as spiritualists shared spiritualist beliefs, if only for short periods. An example from Western Australia demonstrates the enhanced appeal of spiritualism to distressed bereaved parents during the Great War. Richenda Cooper was a descendant of the pioneer Eliot and Clifton families of Perth, and had been a widow with four children since 1879. Richenda worked in the Department for Woods and Forests to support her family, and was aged 61

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when her elder son, Astley, was killed in France at the age of 35. Richenda’s responses to Astley’s death were recorded in tiny diaries in minute scrawl. On the day he died, 25 June 1917, she seemed to have a presentiment of her son’s death: ‘Strange feeling this morning ... All was bright and fair. Suddenly the light went out from it all.’ During the next week she marked several entries as ‘horrid days’; she slept badly, and felt unwell and wretched. On 7 July 1917, Richenda’s son-in-law, Ernest Chase, gave her the shocking news that Astley had been killed instantaneously two weeks earlier, as she recorded in her diary: ‘Oh black day ... I have known for the last fortnight that some heavy

sorrow was near me.”4? i

Richenda resorted almost immediately to spiritualist means to attempt to communicate with Astley’s spirit, assisted by her son Alec and her daughters Muriel Chase and Arum Keall. In the two months after she heard the news, Richenda frequently tried to contact Astley at séances held at a Miss Colby’s, presumably a local medium. The group sometimes used table-rapping, where they placed their hands on the table and addressed questions to Astley’s spirit; rapping noises were interpreted by the medium as messages from the dead soldier. They chiefly used the ouija board with letters at its rim, to which a planchette—a moveable stick—pointed in answer to questions from participants, supposedly enabling Astley’s spirit to form letters, which could be interpreted as messages. Richenda and her daughters, Muriel and Arum, also tried sitting at the table to ‘alphabet’ (as they called it)—without a medium, with mixed results. Richenda appears to have used these occasions ‘at Table’ to tell Astley about her feelings and her everyday activities, probably a therapeutic activity in the dreadful weeks after his death, though it could also be interpreted as denial of the grim fact. On 4 August 1917 Richenda noted: ‘Sat at Table for a short time and had good results. Asked Astley why he did not come last night and he said Resting’. Several times his response was ‘short’ or ‘not strong’, and Astley’s spirit never wrote anything more revealing on the

ouija board than that he was ‘home again’. Richenda tried to communicate with her son almost every night for the first three weeks after receiving the news, but the sittings became less frequent as they produced fewer results. The last was noted on 15 September 1917, nearly three months after his death.*!

No doubt spiritualist experiments helped Richenda in the depth of her early grief when she desperately wanted to believe that Astley’s spirit was close and she could talk with him. To most of us it must appear that his few reported statements emerged from her own wishful thinking; perhaps she recognised this, abandoning the quest when it seemed futile and the intensity of her anguish began to diminish. Moreover, she gradually started to face up to the reality of his death as material reminders came in the form of a series

of letters and postcards sent by Astley in the weeks before he died. On 8 September 1917, a day at Fremantle revived memories of Astley’s departure in 1914: ‘I was sick with sadness. I said “goodbye” again to my dear boy and watched the ship he was in. How could I know that I would never see him again?’ A week later she had almost abandoned her spiritualist experiments:

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‘Lovely day but what a mockery it all is. I am sick to death with sorrow and pain of life.’ This was her first reference to the depth of her suffering, suggesting that the belief in contact with Astley’s spirit had left her in a frozen state of shock and denial which temporarily suppressed her grief.*4 From this point on Richenda took more interest in discovering precisely where Astley was buried in France, and found some consolation in spending time with her daughter Arum Keall and her young family. But many entries recorded ‘Gloomy, wretched day’ or the equivalent. On 8 December 1917 she noted ‘My birthday. Life nearly over.’ On New Year’s Eve she wrote, ‘A year of deep sorrow and sadness and suspense ended.’ Richenda was less depressed though often unwell in 1918, taking refuge in her office work and time spent with her family. On Astley’s birthday on 26 April 1918 she commented: ‘If only we could speak to him’, possibly indicating her reluctant rejection of belief in spiritualist communication. On Christmas Day 1918 she noted: ‘My heart was full of my absent boy.’*? Like so many other bereaved parents, Richenda herself was never able to visit her beloved son’s grave so far away in France; but she was delighted when Arum visited the grave in 1926 after a

holiday in England, as she wrote to her daughter: ‘You had a very long journey to reach our dear Astley’s grave, and to see so many others around it must have given you a heartache. It must have been a strange experience to stand by his grave in such a far off land. You are the only one of the family ever able to see it and I am glad you were able to go."

Stoical but expressive grief John Roberts, 1918 Christian modes of consolation were in marked decline by 1918 and there were no clear alternative resources for grieving. John Roberts, an accountant with the Melbourne Tramways Board, was one of many grieving parents who

still drew on traditional nineteenth-century mourning customs to varying degrees, adapting them to a new secularist temper in society in response to the

war. But he also searched for appropriate modern ways of mourning, as he dealt with the death in September 1918 of his 30-year-old son Frank, an orchardist, without the support of either Christianity or spiritualism. John Roberts was remarkable in his determination to maximise the limited creative strategies available to him in grieving for Frank, so that the family could honour his death and support each other through their sorrow. They could not say farewell, view his body, or attend his funeral, but they could still find some consoling ways to mourn him. They drew on those traditional customs

which did not demand Christian faith, notably those that honoured and recalled his memory. John Roberts also adopted enterprising new strategies in organising supportive fathers’ groups of the bereaved. Whereas women had usually taken the leading role in mourning before the war, male initiative and participation was far stronger in John Roberts’ case, reflecting the masculinity of the war and its sacrifice.

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John Roberts, aged 57, was more expressive than many Australian men in grief, and seems to have been able to share his sorrow therapeutically with his supportive wife and family and his large network of male friends. He started a diary recording his grief and mourning practices just six days after learning the tragic news: ‘the worst [day] of my life and yet the proudest’. Keeping a diary record of the grieving process was a traditional practice among a minority of nineteenth-century educated middle-class people, as one way of working through grief, as we saw earlier with Dr John Springthorpe. For both men

the mourning diary helped to create some sort of order out of emotional chaos, and contributed another daily ritual to the much-needed new routine of life. In writing such a diary in 1918 and conducting mourning for Frank as he did, John Roberts was unusual, but he demonstrates one important strand in the range of mourning strategies after the war. John Roberts learned of his son’s death on Friday 13 September 1918, ‘the most awful day in our lives’. John noted, ‘I felt very much upset, positively sick with grief’. Then, ‘I had to tell my brave son’s brave mother that our first born had died a hero’s death in France to help to save mankind. We were both distressed but proud of our son’. Subsequent evidence verified Frank’s heroic

death—he had been killed by machine guns during the decisive victory at Mont St Quentin near Peronne in France. It was vital for the parents to believe implicitly that their son had died fighting bravely as a hero for a great cause, to give some purpose to his premature death and justify their terrible loss. Some of their grief was converted to pride in their son’s heroic death.*> In the absence of a corpse and a funeral, the chief focus of John Roberts’

grief was private memory—a powerful traditional source of consolation which transcended religious faith. As Pierre Nora has observed, ‘to begin with there must be a will to remember’.*® That will was strong in bereaved parents like John Roberts who knew the details of their sons’ brave deaths, but perhaps less so for the relatives of the missing soldiers. John Roberts and his family gained significant consolation from recalling memories of Frank, just as

they might have done fifty years earlier. On the night they received the sad news, John and his wife Berta sought refuge in shared distress: ‘My old wife and I talked of old memories of our son and how proud we were of him and what a fine dear son he had been.’ The grieving parents went in the afternoon to Sunnyside, Frank’s orchard in the Dandenongs: ‘Berta and I sat in the dining room at Sunnyside and spoke of Frank there for 5 happy years, clearing the ground, planting trees etc. building sheds etc and his joy in the country life and how the place was endeared to us by a thousand memories.’*” On the third day of mourning, 15 September 1918, John Roberts system-

atically began the traditional duties and rituals associated with death. But without a body, and with no funeral to organise, it was unlike most peacetime deaths and much harder to deal with. However, John sent brief death notices to the Argus and the Age, and wrote letters to numerous relatives and friends informing them of Frank’s death. On the fourth day his wife Berta went to look after Frank’s widow, Ruby, and John returned to work, where he was received with much sympathy by his colleagues and male friends from outside

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the office who called to offer condolences. During the next few days John devoted considerable time and thought to the few traditional rituals still available to him in the absence of religious faith and a funeral—such as the prepa-

ration of memorial portraits and brooches. On 17 September 1918 he arranged for miniature photographs from the portrait which was taken in Paris before Frank left for the front; John also ordered four souvenir brooches in Frank’s battalion colours with a space in the centre to hold the miniature portraits. He presented these four brooches to his wife, daughter, and daugh-

ter-in-law, and also to Frank’s little daughter Nancy to remind her of the father she never knew. Equally important was the memorial card for Frank which also displayed his Paris portrait; the photographer who prepared the half-tone block on copper refused to charge for it to show his sympathy. John and Berta then spent an evening addressing the mourning envelopes for the 400 memorial cards.*°

In addition to the traditional customs, John Roberts introduced his own personal series of rituals and routines that helped to recapture for him a vivid memory of his beloved son’s final year. Thus John preserved and treasured all Frank’s postcards and letters including those that arrived after his death. Like

so many other bereaved parents of soldiers, John and Berta Roberts were anxious for every detail of the manner of Frank’s death and burial, and wrote for information to nine of his fellow soldiers. This intense interest extended to a passion for knowledge of the various engagements of Frank’s battalion in the year leading to his death, to fill in the gaps in their knowledge and enlarge their memories. John’s scrap-book included press cuttings of several battles, notably the capture of Mont St Quentin in which Frank died.*? This was not a morbid obsession with macabre detail but a natural human response to the sudden death of a loved one in a distant land, especially in the absence of a last farewell and a funeral. It was a vital component of the lengthy ‘searching’ period of grief identified by psychologists, which can involve several months of disorganised anguish, and intense preoccupation with thoughts of the lost loved one. This need to search helps explain the popularity of spiritualism and various paranormal experiments in wartime. A further wartime strategy adopted by John Roberts was valuable because it not only aided the ‘searching’ process but also provided him with a support group of parents whose sons were actually killed and buried alongside Frank in France. In the search for details of Frank’s death and burial, Ruby’s soldier brother recorded his own visit to Frank’s grave in France, including a list of the names of the eleven soldiers buried in the same grave and others nearby. John’s response was enterprising and generous—he obtained addresses for

parents of thirteen of the soldiers buried with his son and sent them a proforma typed letter. This included particulars of their sons’ graves, expressing the hope that they would be comforted to know the exact location, ‘amongst a gallant community’. He noted later that seven bereaved parents replied and four more called on the Roberts family, establishing a small support group of bereaved parents—mostly men but not all—who shared a bond, and who met to share their memories and their grief.°°

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John Roberts also participated in a more formal organisation of fathers committed to the commemoration of those who died, as well as the interests of returned soldiers. In May 1918 a group of middle-class fathers established the Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Fathers Association, with 1023 members in June 1918 and more than double that number two months later. As Joy Damousi notes, this association gave fathers a part of their sons’ glory, making them ‘representatives of those gallant boys’.°! It also provided bereaved fathers with an invaluable social support network to share their sorrow and their memories. John Roberts found consolation in talking with other fathers— many of them his former school mates—about the deaths of their sons and their pride in their sons’ noble sacrifice, thus reinforcing their necessary faith in the chivalric values of duty, honour, courage, manliness, and Empire. John Roberts was probably unusual in having the temperament, the confdence and the determination to experiment with traditional as well as modern responses to death. Unlike the two alternative modes of grieving explored earlier—the traditional Catholic and the spiritualist—his was stoical and secular, but like them it was also emotionally warm and expressive. John was to some degree self-conscious about his efforts, as he recognised in midOctober 1918. When an unexpected week of confinement in bed with influenza left him with too much time to contemplate his loss, he became more introspective than usual: “Thoughts of dear Frank’s death recurrent as one lies

sick. Berta has the same and they retard recovery.’°* John Roberts was far from denying his son’s death, but he knew his own limits and temperament; for him, constructive grieving meant active memorialising through practical projects and peer group support which helped him work deliberately through SOrrow.

‘Ache deep but make no moans’ Henry Higgins Henry Bournes Higgins was probably more representative of most grieving

parents of soldiers killed in the Great War in his powerfully repressed response to his son’s death. We have seen already how he lost his brother at

sea in 1870. Here we meet him again after the death of his only child, Mervyn, in Egypt on 23 December 1916, having been one of the few survivors of the Light Horse regiment after the Gallipoli campaign. As his niece Nettie

Palmer observed in her memoir of the judge: ‘The effect of the blow on [Mervyn’s] parents was all the more profound from their determination not to be overcome by it.”°’ Five weeks after Mervyn’s death, Henry Higgins confessed to Nettie: ‘I thought I had steeled myself for an event like this; but I had not ... Poor Aunt Mary and J are trying to be brave and cheerful towards life,

because he would have us so. This may seem priggish; but it is genuine.’°* Like so many bereaved parents, Henry Higgins was honouring his son’s code of stoical bravery, duty and self-sacrifice in the same manner. He seemed to feel that parents must prove themselves worthy of their son’s sacrifice.

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Ten months after Mervyn’s death, Justice Henry Higgins confided in a close

friend in the United States: }

I take as much care as I can of my health, in order to do my work efficiently. Sometimes, however, I am weighed down by the grief which you know of; but it cheers me to fancy that I am doing just what my boy would like me to do. What, after all, am I among so many who suffer? There are many homes suffering here; we have lost about 52,000 men (deaths alone).°°

Thus, apart from his conviction that Mervyn would have wished him to show ‘a brave and cheerful’ face to the world, Justice Higgins shared the common belief—expressed earlier by Oliver Cumberland—that mass bereavement rendered insignificant the grief of individual parents safe at home. Higgins reinforced this view in a subsequent letter to his friend, describing his despair late in 1918 on hearing the first victory cheers: ‘I have no right to infect others with our grief.’ The use of the word ‘infect’ is revealing, likening grief and the potential loss of control in public to a contagious disease. Thousands of other boys would return to their parents, ‘but never our boy’. Instead Higgins must brace up to life and work: ‘My grief has condemned me to hard labour for the

rest of my life.” On 21 December 1920 he confessed to his friend, ‘If you visited Australia, you would find us sadly trying to do our duty in such life as

is left to us.’ He felt his sorrows as keenly as ever, but followed Thomas Hardy’s advice: ‘Ache deep; but make no moans/Smile out; but stilly suffer.’ His wife was wonderfully brave, but so very sad.°° Justice Higgins had few consolations in his intense and prolonged grief, other than his judicial work. He was more an agnostic than a believer, and felt there was little foundation for inconsistent theories of an afterlife, even in the Bible.°” In time he found some comfort in the beauties of nature, especially at

his country home by the sea where he enjoyed the ‘dark eucalypts and the darker pines’.°® Like other bereaved parents, Higgins also found some consolation in looking at ‘sacred’ photographs of his son. He further discovered ‘a

kind of self-healing, self-communion’ in composing occasional elegies to Mervyn, ‘to which my grief has constrained me’. They ‘relieve the strain a little’ and allowed a private outlet for expression of his sorrow, as in the verse of Easter 1917: Ah, lad! You taste not of our deep despair, Our bitter sense that our high hope is dead ... As duty bade, not pleasure—your young might You flung to help outraged humanity.

Mervyn had gained a noble death with honour, but lost about fifty years of life, including ‘a home and children—work, success, defeat’. His parents could look forward only to an old age with ‘a childless home—and tears’. In. 1923 the bereaved parents also had the consolation of visiting Mervyn’s grave

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at El Kanbana in Egypt—on a journey round the world denied to less wealthy Australian mourners.°” Justice Higgins’ resort to silent suffering was his way of honouring his sol-

dier son’s noble death, though it may not have been his preferred way to mourn in less abnormal peacetime circumstances. Higgins’ mute response to his son’s death in war was probably far more common than Thomas Hughes’ intense Catholic piety, Richenda Cooper’s spiritualism, or even John Roberts’ more expressive form of secular stoicism. But for obvious reasons little evidence survives in archives or biographies of the immense burden of such silent grief. The occasional terse reference gives glimpses of such trauma. In the Australian War Memorial there is a simple printed ‘thanks for sympathy’ card from the Gluyas family on the death of their son and brother, Private Reginald Gluyas, who died of wounds in France at the very end of the war, aged 19. The cover notes that Private Gluyas died ‘for King and Country ... His duty done’, and a sentimental verse inside refers to his ‘nobly won reward’. But a handwritten note inside the card’s back cover informs the reader that ‘Father committed suicide on son’s death’.©° There are numerous other passing references to the anguish of parents caused by sons’ wartime deaths. When Cecil Ashdown was killed at the battle of Fromelles in July 1916 his mother was ‘well nigh heartbroken’.®! Jack Baillie regretted that the shock of the death of his brother Bill in 1917 ‘utterly broke dad up’.°* And there were countless more families like these.

Mourning the missing If grief was terrible for those parents who knew how their soldier sons died and where they were buried, how much worse for those whose sons were reported as missing. Their fate has only one parallel today—with parents of young people who disappear and are simply reported missing indefinitely. Approximately 25 000 Australian soldiers who died in the Great War had no known burial place because their bodies were never recovered. Innumerable soldiers were blown to bits, or left for dead in No Man’s Land, or they just disappeared. Corpses left from one battle were often scattered in later engage-

ments, making burial impossible, even if the remains could be identified. Forty-two per cent of the Australian dead remained missing, presumed dead, and could only be commemorated communally by memorials to the missing, like that at Menin Gate, Ypres, where 6176 Australian names are inscribed.®3

Bereaved families of the 25000 missing Australian soldiers had to face overwhelming problems in coming to terms with the finality and reality of their deaths. The lack of a corpse, a known burial place, and an individual grave created fears, which could last for years, that their loved ones were not dead, but maimed, lost, or helpless. Families could suffer continuing distress by imagining dreadful forms of death that would render bodies unrecognis-

able. Many continued to grieve for the rest of their lives, traumatised by . wartime losses that they never completely accepted. Any normal process of mourning was impossible when anxiety and uncertainty about the location

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and condition of the body persisted. Chronic or obsessive grief is defined by modern psychologists as an extreme response to the death of a loved one which takes place in acutely distressing circumstances, such as war or suicide, causing a pathological disorder characterised by prolonged duration, intense depression and social withdrawal. The archives of the Red Cross Missing and Wounded Inquiry Bureau in the Australian War Memorial provide an abundance of evidence of the agony suffered by families of missing soldiers as they persisted for years with exhaustive searches for information. The prospect that a beloved son or husband would not be buried induced anguish; the need to honour the dead through burial was still deep-rooted in the early decades of the twentieth century. Red Cross Information Bureaus were established in 1915 in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, with offices in London, Paris and Cairo. Their volunteer staff aimed to end the awful suspense about the missing, dead, and wounded, and convey messages of comfort where possible. They also provided more frank and detailed information than that conveyed in the advice from the army, which usually expressed formulaic regret at the noble death of a good soldier,

whatever the circumstances. Two hundred and twenty-four Australian searchers in France in November 1916 visited war fronts and hospitals, and talked to fellow soldiers to try to discover whether men were actually dead, and, if so, to obtain details of their final hours and location of their graves. In three weeks in November 1916 the Red Cross Inquiry Bureau run in London by Vera Deakin, Alfred Deakin’s daughter, and twenty-six permanent staff, had to deal with 748 inquiries from Australia by cable, 614 by letter and 420 local calls. In 1917 the searchers sent in more than 30 000 reports on missing soldiers in their efforts to establish reliable evidence of their fate beyond reasonable doubt.® Thousands of grieving relatives searched for information on the fate of missing loved ones—frequently with no outcome; many pursued their own enquiries through the military authorities and their sons’ comrades, while others used the search facilities of the Red Cross Inquiry Bureaus. Private Jack Melvin, a civil engineer, was apparently killed on the first day of the landing on Gallipoli, 25 April 1915, but his parents, James and Margaret, had great difficulty obtaining confirmation and particulars amid continuing military confusion. There was no definite news until long afterwards. The parents were first officially advised that Jack was missing and two weeks later they

were notified that he was killed in action; but the death certificate dated September 1915 stated there was ‘no record available’ of his death. Over six months the parents sent letters to the chaplain and to Jack’s superior officers,

as well as enquiring among dozens of his comrades. They had twenty-six replies from Jack’s many friends who could provide no information, since those who went into action with him quickly became separated. James and Margaret Melvin feared that the ‘killed in action’ notice meant that some definite evidence had been received of Jack’s death, and were

anxious to know how it had happened; but they were never told. By September they began to accept that Jack must have been killed in action. In

324 DEATH IN THE BUSH AND THE GREAT WAR

one enquiring letter James Melvin observed that Jack’s loss was a terrible blow, but ‘it is made all the more distressing to us by the fact that we have got no news of how he fell’. He believed the soldiers ‘have shed lustre on the name of Australia, but at what terrible cost!’ As late as 24 November 1915, James Melvin wrote to the Red Cross in Geneva asking them to find out if Jack was taken prisoner, but the only reply two months later reported no news.°®’ In

February 1917 the bereaved father was still trying to find a man known as ‘Lofty White’ who was reported as bringing in Melvin’s body—‘this is the only piece of definite news we have ever got about our boy’. He still wanted evidence of Jack’s death beyond reasonable doubt, and the particulars ‘as to when, where and how Jack fell’. Since there is no further enquiry correspondence in the archive, it appears that such evidence was never forthcoming and that Jack was commemorated at Lone Pine Memorial to the Missing at Anzac Cove with 4227 others. The Melvin archive also includes many letters of condolence on Jack’s pre-

sumed death, sent between July 1915 and February 1916, which were unlikely to have carried consolation for the grieving parents in the circumstances of terrible uncertainty. A characteristically modern letter advised denial: “Try

not to brood too much. Busy yourselves all day, keep constantly occupied.’ Several traditional writers offered chivalric rhetoric about ‘glorious death’, which could scarcely mitigate grief when the hero in question was missing and nobody knew how he was killed or even if he was dead. There is no evidence in the archive as to how the Melvin family coped, except through their obsessive but understandable search for information on Jack’s death. The archive contains invitations and programs for a memorial service at Commonwealth Parliament House in 1918 and the Caulfield City Memorial service in 1925, while James Melvin planted a tree in the Caulfield Avenue of Honour in 1918. But we do not know whether this public commemoration helped the Melvins deal with their private grief, especially when it did not begin until three years or more after his death.°? The family of Private Noel Nicholas at Hastings, Victoria, had to learn to

live with the knowledge that their son had initially been given a decent Christian burial after his death at Poziéres in France in August 1916, but the original grave could not be identified later. At the time of Noel’s death his family received some particulars from the chaplain and his comrades, that he was buried where he fell alongside the trench and his grave was marked by a cross. His identity disc, pay book and wallet were handed in by the three men from another battalion who buried him, but it was never possible to locate those soldiers. For the next year his parents continued to seek more details about his death and the precise location of his burial. In July 1917, the Graves Registration Enquiry authorities at the War Office in.London confirmed the original information on the burial location, north-east of Poziéres, but regretted that it was impossible to make a thorough search of this war zone; if the grave was located in the future the family would be informed. In August 1917, Noel’s brother, Phil Nicholas, also fighting in France, ‘had two shots at

finding Noel’s grave but with little success’. The ground in that area of

EPILOGUE 325

Poziéres was badly torn up and the graves were mostly in shell-holes, as more battles had been fought there since Noel’s death. Nearly a year later Phil was still wondering ‘exactly what happened to Noel’s grave’, concluding that a new shell explosion had probably obliterated the original shell-hole used for

the burial. A formal letter from base records in Melbourne suggests that Noel’s father was still searching in 1921. The archive provides no evidence of the way the Nicholas family coped with their grief, or of any forms of commemoration.’? When Christian ritual seemed increasingly inappropriate and individual burial ceremonies were impossible, a public display of commemoration and

mourning was required to honour those who sacrificed their lives for the nation. This public commemoration of the dead soldiers was even more vital in Australia because of the vast distances from the battlefields, which meant that few bereaved would ever visit their loved ones’ graves. It is impossible to know how far the construction of public war memorials across Australia after 1918 actually helped to console grieving families at a private and individual level. The limited evidence in the archives suggests that families with information about their loved ones’ deaths and known grave sites may have found less difficulty in working through the process of grieving. The desolate families of the 25000 missing soldiers with no known graves probably needed support and solace most of all—but my impression is that they were least open to it because they continued to search and to doubt that their loved ones were dead. Large numbers of parents and widows may have remained in a state of chronic grief, frozen at the searching phase. It is difficult to see the public war memorial movement giving significant help to all such mourners. Two distinguished scholars on the subject of war memorials reach somewhat different conclusions as to their effectiveness in mitigating grief. Jay Winter suggests that rituals at public war memorials in Europe ‘were means of avoiding crushing melancholia, of passing through mourning, of separating from the dead and beginning to live again’.’! I share Ken Inglis’s doubt about the validity of this claim for Australia: ‘At this distance we can only wonder.’ Inglis argues that the large civic war memorials were constructed too late ‘to serve most bereaved people as sites of healing meditation’, since only two of the seven Australian capitals had completed them by 1930. ‘But that was not their primary purpose. They were public declarations, acts of formal

homage ... honouring the sacrifice of the dead and the service of the survivors.’ 77

Medicalisation and denial of death since 1918 The tragic mass slaughter of young men in the Great War stimulated a new model of suppressed or silent grief which deeply constrained the next two generations—and helps to explain the so-called ‘denial of death’ in the next half century. Australia had a long tradition of stoical death and private grief learned in the bush in the nineteenth century. The Great War powerfully reinforced that inheritance. Without the war, various modes of creative secular

326 DEATH IN THE BUSH AND THE GREAT WAR

grieving might well have evolved much earlier in the twentieth century along the lines suggested by John Roberts and others, as indeed they have done since the 1980s. Beverley Raphael, a leading psychiatrist, has underlined the continuity between the effects of the two world wars in Australia: The pattern of privacy and avoidance of overt expression of grief continued in the early years after World War II. People held their sadness within or expressed it in the literature and art of the day. Women grieved the deaths of their babies, but were advised to forget them ... Men were to be strong and silent; they were not to shed their tears or show their feelings, for this would be ‘unmanly’.”?

Thus a model of death and grief based on stoicism, privacy, and survival was powerfully encouraged by the two world wars, but it had a long history in colonial Australia in the encounter with the bush. This stoical and private model was increasingly also a secular model of death after 1918, as the influence of the Christian churches in Australia declined further. Graeme Griffin has argued that since the Great War the Australian churches have abdicated their leadership, ‘first by their willingness to follow the secular world into denial of death and later, as that denial began to break down, by their failure even to try to provide a new, cohesive, and believable understanding of the place of death in human life’.”4 It may well be that since 1918 Australians have tended to concentrate on life and to keep their thoughts about the meaning of death to a minimum.

Avoiding thoughts and feelings about death was facilitated by the major demographic changes whereby life expectancy at birth in Australia rose from

below 50 years in the 1890s to close to 70 years by 1950; and by a rapid decline in rates of infant mortality from over 100 to under 50 deaths per 1000

live births.’> This demographic transformation was virtually completed between 1900 and 1940, and may have had a long-term impact on death attitudes and practices equivalent in influence to that of the Great War. The nineteenth-century preoccupation with death was understandable given high mortality rates, and it was unexpectedly prolonged in its impact because of the mass slaughter of young men in the Great War. But after 1918 the shift from infancy to old age as the most probable time of death allowed society’s concern with death to decline, since death could be seen as increasingly the monopoly of the aged. Gender also had a profound influence on the change from the more open

and expressive Christian way of death and mourning among the urban middle classes to the stoical, private and secular model of the bush and the Anzac soldiers. Expressive and open grieving have been identified as more characteristically female. Women were the primary carers for the dying and the chief mourners up to 1914; they were also discouraged from attending funerals because they were allegedly more prone to hysterical tears. By contrast, the bush culture of death was strongly masculine, as was that of the Great War; in the bush and at war it was more often the views and practices of men that counted in relation to death—both in the war itself and after-

EPILOGUE 327

wards. In the fifty years of ‘death denial’ since 1918, caring for the dying and

preparing for the funeral increasingly moved out of the family home and away from female influence—death to the hospital or nursing home, and the funeral to the undertaker’s parlour. The so-called medicalisation of death since 1918 has been a major contributor to changing practices and attitudes. In the nineteenth century the

inability of the medical profession to cure most diseases reinforced the Christian concept of death as the will of God. Doctors were usually paid to offer hope and reassurance, and to treat the symptoms of middle-class terminal patients in the cities. As a revised view of disease began to attribute death to specific diseases rather than to God’s will, the role and status of the doctor improved significantly. In the twentieth century new theories of the causes of disease led to more effective treatment, reinforced by a new body of scientifically based knowledge and improved technology. But medical progress did not significantly alter attitudes to death at a more

fundamental level until the advent of the sulpha drugs in the 1930s led to cures for a wide range of diseases and the possibility of challenging death from disease. Twentieth-century progress in medical science has helped to transform attitudes to death. Once doctors came to believe they could cure most diseases, the death of a patient represented failure and death became a topic to be evaded. Moreover, as medical science and modern technology have progressed, terminal illnesses and death have increasingly taken place in hos-

pitals, where intervention was possible to prolong life. Thus death was removed from the family home to a sterile institution concerned with technical efficiency which was likely to depersonalise the process of dying. The dying patient might face pain, indignity, and isolation unprepared and alone. There were no guidelines on how to die with dignity and doctors controlled the new rituals of death in institutions designed to save lives rather than manage death. People became far less accustomed to seeing a death or a corpse, and were more reluctant to cope with death in their own homes, and so acquiesced in the increasing control by doctors and funeral directors.’® The remarkable period of silence or ‘denial’ of death began to break down among small sections of the community from the 1970s. Beverley Raphael has emphasised the influence of European migration in restoring to Australia a Christian culture of open expression of grief; but she notes that its impact was slow because assimilation policies reinforced the message of death denial for people anxious to adapt and survive in their new country. Later waves of migration encouraged a growing acceptance of diversity in death rituals and behaviour, which helped to spread the view that open expression of grief could be healing.”’ A parallel development among the caring professionals, including psychol-

ogists and social workers, began to encourage a philosophy of death and dying which was more in tune with the cultural heritage of many European migrants. From the 1970s the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Cicely Saunders helped to develop a modern hospice movement which allowed dying patients to experience death in a positive way, with sufficient pain relief and

328 DEATH IN THE BUSH AND THE GREAT WAR

family participation to humanise the process. Hospices view death as a natural and inevitable process rather than a medical failure. They further encourage more open and emotional ways of grieving, which they believe help to resolve loss more effectively. Moreover, palliative medicine was established in some Australian hospitals in the early 1980s, with inpatient units and home nursing services, dedicated to a multidisciplinary approach to terminal care which aims to facilitate ‘a good death’. These recent developments revive significant elements of the nineteenth-century ideal of the good Christian

death—though medicine and psychology have largely replaced religious authority in the new discourse as we enter the twenty-first century.

Abbreviations

AGPS Australian Government Publishing Service

AJCP Australian Joint Copying Project ANU Australian National University AWM Australian War Memorial CUP Cambridge University Press LISWA Library Information Services Western Australia, previously known as the Battye Library

ML Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales MUP Melbourne University Press

NLA National Library of Australia NSWUP_ New South Wales University Press

OUP Oxford University Press SLSA State Library of South Australia, previously known as the Mortlock Library

SLV State Library of Victoria SROSA — State Records Office of South Australia

UQP University of Queensland Press

329

Introduction 1 Michel Vovelle, ‘On Death’, Ideologies and Mentalities, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 79-80. 2 Ken Inglis, ‘Passing Away’, in Alan Atkinson & Marian Aveling [Quartly] (eds), Australians 1938, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Sydney, 1987, p. 246. 3 Graeme M. Griffin & Des Tobin, In the Midst of Life ...: The Australian Response to Death, MUP, Melbourne, 1982, p. 16. 4 Michel Vovelle, Mourir Autrefois: Attitudes Collectives devant la Mort aux XVIlIe et X VIIle Siécles, Fayard, Paris, 1974; Pierre Chaunu, La Mort a Paris, X VIe, X Vile et X VIIlTe Siécles, Paris, 1978; John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France, OUP, Oxford, 1981; Philippe Ariés, The Hour of Our Death, 2nd edn, London, 1981. 5 Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, OUP, Oxford, 1996/1999; Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1987; Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology, CUP, Cambridge, 1990. See also John Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians, Studio Vista, London, 1971; Ralph Houlbrooke (ed.), Death, Ritual and Bereavement, Routledge, London, 1989. 6 Seee.g. Kathy Charmaz, Glennys Howarth & Allan Kellehear (eds), The Unknown Country: Death in Australia, Britain and the USA, Macmillan, London, 1997; Peter C. Jupp & Clare Gittings, Death in England. An Illustrated History, Manchester UP, Manchester, 1999; Sarah Tarlow, Bereavement and Commemoration. An Archaelogy of Mortality, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999. 7 Griffin & Tobin, In the Midst of Life. See also Leonie B. Liveris, The Dismal Trader: The Undertaker Business in Perth, 1860-1939, Australian Funeral Directors Association, Perth, 1991; Leonie B. Liveris, Memories Eternal: The First Hundred Years of the Karrakatta, Metropolitan Cemeteries Board, Claremont, WA, 1999. L. A. Gilbert, A Grave Look at History: Glimpses of a Vanishing Form of Folk Art, John Ferguson, Sydney, 1980. James Semple Kerr will shortly publish a guide to cemetery monuments. 8 Robert Nicol, At the End of the Road: Government, Society and the Disposal of Human Remains in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994. 9 Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia, CUP, Cambridge, 1999. See also Marian Aveling [Quartly], ‘Death and the

330

NOTES TO pp. 3-9 331 Family in nineteenth-century Western Australia’, in Patricia Grimshaw, Chris McConville, & Ellen McEwen (eds), Families in Colonial Australia, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985. 10 Simon Cooke, “The Cremation Debate in New South Wales, 1863-1925’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 24, no. 9, Oct. 1991; Simon Cooke, ‘ “Terminal Old Age”; Ageing and Suicide in Victoria 1841-1921’, Australian Cultural History, no. 14, 1995. 11. ~=Ken Inglis, Sacred Places. War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Miegunyah Press at MUP, Melbourne, 1998. 12 Allan Kellehear (ed.), Death and Dying in Australia, OUP, Melbourne, 2000. See especially essays by Allan Kellehear, Robert Nicol, Graeme Griffin, and Beverley Raphael. 13. ~=An analysis of the birthplaces of the Australian population of 1861 includes 54.69 per cent British and 37.23 per cent Australian. The only other two groups of any note were 3.23 per cent born in Northern Europe and 3.64 per cent in Asia. Charles Price noted that the population was still 90 per cent Anglo-Celtic in 1938. See J. C. R. Camm & John McQuilton (eds), Australians. A Historical Atlas, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Sydney, 1987, pp. 2, 12. 14. ~+Geoffrey Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come. The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788-1972, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1973, pp. 30, 52.

15 David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation, MUP, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 613, 601-5, 39-95, 16 ~— Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come, p. 21.

17 Ann Macintosh (ed.), Memoirs of Dr Robert Scot Skirving 1859-1956, Foreland Press, Sydney, 1988, pp. 222-4. 18 See e.g. the deaths of Ben Hall and John Gilbert, I/lustrated Melbourne Post, May-June 1865. 19 ~~‘ Joan Kerr, ‘Art and Death in Australia’, The Annual Lecture, Canberra Institute of the Arts, ANU, 13 Sept. 1996, p. 12. I am grateful to Joan Kerr for a copy of this lecture. 20 ~=— Alan D. Lopez & Ladislay T. Ruzicka, ‘The Differential Mortality of the Sexes in Australia’, in N. D. McGlashan, Studies in Australian Mortality, University of Tasmania, Environmental Studies Occasional Paper no. 4, Hobart, 1997, pp. 77, 83.

21 ibid., table 4.2, p. 78. 22 C.M.Young & L. T. Ruzicka, ‘Mortality’, ch. VII in Population of Australia, vol. 1, Country Monograph Series No. 9, United Nations, New York, 1982, pp. 167-70. The Victorian statistics have been used because they are the most reliable and extensive. 23. J.H.L.Cumpston, ‘Adolescence and Adult Life’, in Health and Disease in Australia, A History, 1928, (ed.) M. J. Lewis, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1989, pp. 132-3. 24 FE. B. Smith, ‘The First Health Transition in Australia, 1880-1910’, in G. W. Jones, R. M. Douglas, J. C. Caldwell & R. M. D’Souza (eds), The Continuing Demographic Transition, OUP, Oxford, 1997, p. 46. 25 Lopez & Ruzicka, ‘Differential Mortality of the Sexes’, table 4.2, p. 78. 26 Alan D. Gilbert, “Old Age and Death’, in Graeme Davison, J. W. McCarty & Ailsa McLeary (eds), Australians 1888, Fairfax Syme & Weldon Associates, Sydney, 1987, p. 325.

27 Frances Mary Bowler, diary, 22 Thursday [sic 1837], ML FM4/1390. 28 See Elizabeth Webby, “The Grave in the Bush’, in Dennis Haskell (ed.), Tilting at Matilda. Literature, Aborigines, Women and the Church in Contemporary Australia, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1994, pp. 30-8. 29 Robert Gouger, Adelaide, to George Fife Angas, May 1857, SLSA, George Fife Angas papers, PRG 174, series 1, fos 789-96. 30 See Russell McGregor, Imagined Destintes. Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880-1939, MUP, Melbourne, 1997/8, pp. 19-59. 31. A. P. Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1938/1974, pp. 336-61, esp. pp. 336-7. See also Janice Reid, ‘A Time to Live, a Time to Grieve: Patterns and Processes of Mourning among the Yolingu of Australia’, in Larry A. Platt & V. Richard Persico Jr, Grief in Cross-Cultural Perspective. A Casebook, Garland,

332 NOTES TO pp. 9-18 New York, 1992, pp. 347-97; M. J. Meggitt, Desert People. A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1965, pp. 317-30. 32 ~~ Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, pp. 336-61.

33 ibid.

34 ~~ Ronald M. & Catherine Berndt, The World of the First Australians. Aboriginal Traditional Life Past and Present, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1964/1988. 35 ~~ See e.g. W. L. Warner, A Black Civilisation: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe, Harper, New York, 1937/1958; Kenneth Maddock, The Australian Aborigines. A Portrait of their Society, Penguin, Melbourne, 1972/1982, pp. 142-57.

36 Berndt & Berndt, The World of the First Australians, pp. 452-89. 37 Yvonne and Kevin Coate, Lonely Graves of Western Australia and Burials at Sea, Hesperian Press, Carlisle WA, c. 1986, p. 32. 38 Iam grateful to Dr Paul Turnbull for a copy of his excellent paper ‘Colonial Encounters with the Indigenous Dead, and the Meanings of Native Title-—a chapter of his forthcoming book on the history of the procurement and scientific uses of the remains of the Aboriginal people since 1788. Paul Turnbull cites L. Threlkald, Lake Macquarie Journal, 16 Oct. 1824-2 July 1825, fos 4-5, AJCP M 11. 39 Alfred P. Bussell to brother, John Garrett Bussell, 19 May 1864, Bussell Papers, LISWA, MN 586/337A/114. 40 OD. J. Mulvaney, Encounters in Place. Outsiders and Aboriginal Australians 1606-1985, UQP, Brisbane, 1989, pp. 83-7. 41 Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday, MUP, Melbourne, 1963, pp. 505-6. 42 Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath & Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 133, 144—S.

Chapter 1 The Terror of ‘a Watery Grave’ 1 Most of these diaries are located in the National Library, with a few in the Mitchell Library. The majority of extant diaries were written by middle-class males and very few by steerage women.

2 Eleanor, Lady Stephen to step-daughter Virginia Hewlett, 11 July 1872, Stephen papers, ML MSS 7777/7.

3 Joseph Clifton to brother Cecil Clifton, 22 Dec. 1900, Clifton papers, LISWA MN 1294, 4184A/70.

4 Andrew Hamilton, journal on Birmingham, 15 Aug. 1852, NLA Mfm M862. 5 William Nichols, diary on James Gibb, 9 Feb. 1849, NLA MS 8166. 6 James Espie White, diary on Henry Fernie, 1862, NLA Mfm M864. 7 Francis C. Taylor, Journal on Stag, Feb—June 1850, NLA Mfm M2514. According to the passenger lists he was an ‘agriculturalist’ from Herefordshire who travelled steerage. 8 Anon, diary on Great Britain, Liverpool to Melbourne, 10 Nov. 1863, NLA Mfm M2514. 9 Edwin S. Pegler, diary on Prince Albert, 6 Nov. 1852, NLA MS 3128. 10 ~—s Patrick O’Farrell, Letters from Irish Australia 1825-1929, NSWUP, Sydney, Ulster Historical Foundation, Belfast, 1984, p. 2.

11 Andrew Hassam, Sailing to Australia. Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth Century British Emigrants, MUP, Melbourne, 1995, p. 116. 12. Don Charlwood, The Long Farewell, Allen Lane, Ringwood, Vic., 1981, pp. 105-9. See also Emma Curtin, ‘Gentility Afloat: Gentlewoman’s Diaries and the Voyage to Australia, 1830-80’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 26, Oct. 1995, pp. 634-52. 13. Charlwood, The Long Farewell, pp. 105-9. 14 —sibid., pp. 112, 117-18. 15 See Robin Haines & Ralph Shlomowitz, ‘Explaining the Modern Mortality Decline: What Can We Learn from Sea Voyages?’, Working Papers in Economic History, no. 72, Nov. 1996, pp. 2-3. 16 Helen R. Woolcock, Rights of Passage: Emigration to Australia in the Nineteenth Century, Tavistock Publications, London, 1986, p. 274; Mark Staniforth, ‘Diet, Disease

NOTES TO pp. 18-28 333 and Death at Sea on the Voyage to Australia, 1837-1839”, International Journal of Maritime History, vol. 8/2, Dec. 1996, pp. 126-7. 17 John Carter, diary on General Hewett, 24 Oct. 1844 - 9 Feb. 1845, NLA Mfm M1618. 18 Anon., a memorandum of a voyage to Australia on Prince Albert, 17 Oct., 1 Nov. 1852, NLA MS 1363. See also Edwin S. Pegler’s account, NLA MS 3128. 19 Frederick Edelsten, diary on City of Adelaide, 1867, NLA Mfm M 837. 20 Hassam, Sailing to Australia, pp. 129-30. 21 Thomas Davies, diary on Lord Raglan, 6 Sept. 1854, NLA MS 200. 22 Elizabeth Allbon, diary on Samuel Plimsoll, 3 June 1879, Andrew Hassam, No Privacy for Writing: Shipboard Diaries 1852-1879, MUP, Melbourne, 1995, p. 202. 23 Edward Stamp, diary on the Tasman from London to Port Phillip, June — 28 Oct. 1849, NLA MS 29, esp. entry for 16 Sept. Edward Stamp’s father was the alcoholic surgeon on the Tasman but his commentary seems not to have been influenced by this. 24 ‘The Diary of Edward Hufton An Assisted Immigrant, 1879’, 22 July 1879, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal, vol. 45/6, 1960, p. 341. 25 Abijou Good, diary on Beejapore, 12 April 1863, NLA MS 513. 26 Staniforth, ‘Diet, Disease and Death at Sea’, pp. 126-7. 27 Quoted in Haines and Shlomowitz, ‘Explaining the Modern Mortality Decline’, p. 6. 28 Woolcock, Rights of Passage, pp. 274-6. 29 Arthur Manning, diary on Earl Grey, 12 Nov. 1839, NLA MS 289. 30 Stephen Brennand, diary on the Harbinger, 9 Sept. 1883, NLA Mfm M977. 31 Abijou Good, diary on Beejapore, 30 April 1863, NLA MS 513. 32 Edwin Bird, diary on Marco Polo, 17, 26, 29-30 March 1853, NLA MS 6064. 33 = William Nichols, diary on James Gibb, 1849, NLA MS 8166. 34. ~~ Lucy Frost, No Place for a Nervous Lady: Voices from the Australian Bush, rev. edn, UQP, St Lucia, 1995, p. 199. 35 Woolcock, Rights of Passage, p. 257. 36 Staniforth, ‘Diet, Disease and Death at Sea’, pp. 126-8. 37 ~~ Woolcock, Rights of Passage, p. 275. 38 ~— Ralph Shlomowitz & John McDonald, ‘Babies at Risk on Immigrant Voyages to Australia in the Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 1991, pp. 86-101; John McDonald & Ralph Shlomowitz, ‘Mortality on Immigrant Voyages to Australia, 1838-1892’, Explorations in Economic History, vol. 27, 1990, pp. 84-113. 39 Hassam, No Privacy for Writing, appendix 1, pp. 208-9. 40 William Shennan, diary on Crusader, 6 May 1870, ibid., p. 154. 41 Alexander Turner, diary, 6 Oct. 1883, NLA Mfm M1131.

42 ‘The Diary of Edward Hufton’, p. 320. 43 G. Annison, Logbook, ‘London to Port Phillip 1853’, NLA MS 3878. 44 J.P. Ricou, diary on Indus, 13-14 June 1872, NLA Mfm M437. 45 Richard Dana, Two Years before the Mast, Dymock’s, Sydney, 1946, p. 215. 46 _—_ Joseph Fowles, ‘Journal of a Voyage from London to Sydney’, 1838, 14-23 June 1838, ML B1310 CY Reel 775. 47 — ibid., 30 June 1838. 48 Henry Bournes Higgins, journal on Eurynome, Nov. 1869 — Feb. 1870, Liverpool to Melbourne, NLA MS 1057 series 3.

49 ibid., 14-16 Feb. 1870. 50 ibid. The last date noted in the diary 1s 14 February, though the account continues in narrative rather than diary form to c. 20 February. 51 Anne Higgins to husband John, 3, 30 March, 15 May 1870, NLA MS 1057/2/2418. 52 Frost, No Place for a Nervous Lady, p. 33. Ellen was the daughter and wife of brewers and a reference to ‘a young gent, a cabin passenger’ makes it clear she travelled steerage. Presumably a relative subsequently edited and improved the prose. 53 Frost, No Place for a Nervous Lady, pp. 32-8, 224. Ellen Moger’s letter, 1840, typed transcript, NLA MS 5919. $4 Henry Knight, diary, ML MSS 2405X, quoted in Hassam, No Privacy for Writing, pp. 12-36.

55 ibid., p. 17 (13-14 Dec. 1852).

56 ibid., p. 17.

334 NOTES TO pp. 28-38 57 ibid., pp. 18-19 (17, 24 Dec. 1852). 58 ibid., pp. 19-22 (25 Dec. 1852 — 19 Jan. 1853). 59 ibid., pp. 23-4 (5 Feb. 1853). 60 __ibid., pp. 24-6 (15-25 Feb. 1853).

61 ibid.

62 _ ibid., pp. 26-7 (25 Feb. —- 1 Mar. 1853); letter from James Rivers to Capt. Christianssen of the Java, March 1853, ibid., appendix 2, pp. 212-13.

63 ibid., pp. 28-9 (5-12 March). 64 ibid., pp. 29-33 (26 March — 24 April). 65 __ ibid., p. 33, note 40. 66 Jean Duncan Foley, In Quarantine: A History of Sydney’s Quarantine Station 1828-1984, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, NSW, 1995, pp. 55-6; Woolcock, Rights of Passage, pp. 84, 90. 67 Abijou Good, diary on Beejapore, NLA MS 513, fo. 2.

68 Woolcock, Rights of Passage, pp. 114-15. 69 Haines and Shlomowitz, ‘Explaining the Modern Mortality Decline’, pp. 16-18. 70 Abijou Good, diary on Beejapore, 11, 17, 22 April 1863, NLA MS 513. 71 ~~ ibid., 30 April 1863. 72 ~~ ibid., 16-20 May.

73 ibid., 20-22 May. 74 ibid., 6-25 June 1863. 75 Ellen Moger to her parents, 28 Jan. 1840, NLA MS 5919; Frost, No Place for a Nervous Lady, p. 36.

Chapter 2 Faith, Fever, and Consumption 1 Helen R. Woolcock, Rights of Passage: Emigration to Australia in the Nineteenth Century, Tavistock Publications, London, 1986, p. 33. 2 Quoted in Don Charlwood, The Long Farewell, Allen Lane, Ringwood, Vic., 1981, pp. 97-9. 3. E. M. Lawrence, ‘Religious Instruction Diary’ on the Daylight, 27 May — 29 Aug. 1875, LISWA, Acc. 504.

4 William Nichols, diary on James Gibb, 9 Feb. 1849, NLA MS 8166. 5 Thomas Davies, diary on Lord Raglan, 3-5 Aug. 1854, NLA MS 200. 6 J. H. Parrington, letter account to his uncle and aunt of his voyage on the Storm King from London to Brisbane in 1869, NLA MS 1384. 7 Quoted in Charlwood, The Long Farewell, p. 220. 8 Charlwood, The Long Farewell, pp. 98, 219, 294-5; Woolcock, Rights of Passage, pp. 33, 106, 209. 9 Francis Taylor, journal on Stag, 21 Feb.-12 June 1850, NLA Mfm M2514 10 __ibid., 7 June 1850. 11. ~— Patrick O’Farrell, Letters from Irish Australia 1825-1929, NSWUP, Sydney, Ulster Historical Foundation, Belfast, 1984, pp. 2-3, 19-31.

12 Woolcock, Rights of Passage, pp. 220-1; J. H. L. Cumpston, Health and Disease in Australia: A History, ed. M. J. Lewis, AGPS, Canberra, 1989, pp. 201-3; E. B. Smith, The People’s Health 1830-1910, Croom Helm, London, 1979, pp. 238-9. 13 Jean Duncan Foley, A History of Sydney’s Quarantine Station 1828-1984, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst NSW, 1995, pp. 29-32. 14 Cumpston, Health and Disease, p. 202; Charlwood, The Long Farewell, pp. 187-8. 15 Woolcock, Rights of Passage, pp. 279-81, 283, 289. 16 = #=Arthur Wilcox Manning, diary on the Earl Grey from Plymouth to Sydney, 27 Oct. 1839-25 Feb. 1840, NLA MS 289.

17 ibid.

18 _—ibid., 12, 24 Nov. 1839.

19 ibid. 20 ibid.

21 ibid., 8 Dec. 1839.

NOTES TO pp. 38-45 335 22 ibid., 9 Dec. 1839. 23 ibid., 9, 11 Dec. 1839. 24 ~~ ibid., 22 Dec. 1839 and 28 Jan. 1840.

25 ibid., 21-22 Dec. 1839. 26 ibid. 7-8, 11, 20 Jan. 1840. 27 See Mark Staniforth, ‘Diet, Disease and Death at Sea on the Voyage to Australia, 1837-1839’, International Journal of Maritime History, 8/2, Dec. 1996, pp. 132-3; Cumpston, Health and Disease, p. 201. 28 Manning, diary on Earl Grey, 23 Dec. 1839; 28 Jan., 19 Feb. 1840, NLA MS 289. 29 ibid., 30 Jan. — 1 Feb. 1840.

30 ibid., 21, 25 Feb. 1840. 31 See F. B. Smith, The People’s Health and F. B. Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850-1950, Croom Helm, London, 1988. 32 Cumpston, Health and Disease in Australia, pp. 276-91. 33. Alan D. Lopez & Ladislay T. Ruzicka, “The Differential Mortality of the Sexes in Australia’, in N. D. McGlashan (ed.), Studies in Australian Mortality, Univ. of Tasmania Environmental Studies Occasional Paper no. 4, Hobart, 1977. 34 F. B. Smith, ‘The First Health Transition in Australia, 1880-1910’, in G. W. Jones, R. M. Douglas, J. C. Caldwell & R. M. D’Souza (eds), The Continuing Demographic Transition, OUP, Oxford, 1997, p. 31. 35 Dr Dougan Bird, On Australasian Climates and their Influence in the Arrest and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption, Longman, London, 1863, pp. 54, 57, 62, 71, 117-18, 122. 36 John Singleton, A Narrative of Incidents in the Eventful Life of a Physician, Hutchinson, Melbourne, 1891, p. 408. 37 W.R. Dovey, ‘New South Wales as a Health Resort’, reprint of a paper read before the Insurance Institute of NSW, 22 June 1899. 38 Quoted in Cumpston, Health and Disease in Australia, p. 276. 39 EB. Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850-1950, pp. 48-9. 40 William Thomson, On Phthisis and the Supposed Influence of Climate, Stillwell & Co., Melbourne, 1879, pp. 5, 9, 10, 20, 34. 41 Lancet, 1863, 1, p. 163, cited in Woolcock, Rights of Passage, p. 226; see also British Medical Journal, 1876, II, p. 360. 42 Bird, On Australasian Climates, pp. 47, 83, 86. 43 William Thomson, review of S. D. Bird, On Australasian Climates in The Medical and Surgical Review, Australasian, Jan. 1864, p. 344. 44 Revd James Ballantyne, A Handbook of Victoria as a Field for Immigration, Melbourne, 1871, p. 104. 45 Quoted in Charlwood, The Long Farewell, pp. 175-6. 46 A. J. Proust, History of Tuberculosis in Australia ..., Brolga Press, Canberra, 1991, p. 10.

47 Woolcock, Rights of Passage, pp. 281-3. 48 See W. Thomson’s review of Bird in Medical and Surgical Review, Jan. 1864, pp. 334, 340.

49 Woolcock, Rights of Passage, p. 142. 50 Daniel Adey Fowles, “The Doctors Diary during a voyage to New South Wales’, 1836, ML MS 3140X CY Reel 775. 51 The Diary of Mary Maclean on board the Africana, 1865-66, Andrew Hassam, No Privacy for Writing: Shipboard Diaries 1852-1879, MUP, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 114-17. $2. John Carter, diary on General Hewett, 1844-45, NLA Mfm M1618. 53 James Espie White, diary on Henry Fernie, 1862, NLA Mfm 864. 54 Margaret Walpole, diary on S.S. Pathan, 9 July 1883, NLA MS 2209. 55 Bryn Thomas & Bryan Gandevia, ‘Dr Francis Workman, Emigrant, and the History of Taking the Cure for Consumption in the Australian Colonies’, Medical Journal of Australia, 4 July 1959, p. 4. 56 Papers of H. Harvey, 1867-68, NLA MS 4009. 57 Harry Harvey to his parents, 29 Dec. 1867, ibid.

336 NOTES TO pp. 45-60 58 Joseph Bell to Mr Harry Harvey Snr, Barnsley, n.d., ibid. 59 J. E. Howarth, Melbourne to Mr Harvey Snr, Barnsley, 19 May 1868, ibid. 60 Howarth to Harvey, 19 May 1868; Mrs Eliza Kennison (Ben Beddow’s aunt) to Mr Beddow, 23 May 1868, ibid. 61 Howarth to Harvey, 19 May 1868; Mrs Eliza Kennison to Mr Beddow, 23 May 1868, ibid.

62 Mr Joseph Bell to Mr Harvey Snr, n.d. [1868], ibid. 63 Mr J. E. Howarth to Mr Harvey Snr, 19 May 1868, ibid. 64 Mrs Eliza Kennison to Mr Beddow, 23 May 1868, ibid.

Chapter 3 The Transmission of the European Culture of the Good Christian Death 1 See David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, Unwin Hyman, London, 1989.

2 Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, Oxford, 1857; 1st edn 1651, pp. 47-55, 95-105, 230-42, 77-8. 3 Roberta Jull, ‘Religious notes’, 24 June 1917, LISWA Jull 69/956A/77. 4 Funeral sermon for Ambrose Foss, church deacon, 7 May 1862, by Revd W. Slatyer, 7 May 1862. 5 Funeral sermon by Revd S. Mead & Revd W. Clare on death of Mrs J. Langdon Parsons, Adelaide, 1876. 6 Geoffrey Best, ‘Evangelicalism and the Victorians’ in Anthony Symondson (ed.), The Victorian Crisis of Faith, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London, 1970, pp. 54-5. 7 Biographical sketch of Martha Schofield, including an account of her death, 30 April 1849, sent by Revd W. Schofield to the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, Misc. Papers of Revd W. Schofield,1828-1878, ML MSS 1145.

8 ibid. 9 ibid.

10 F. B. Smith, ‘The First Health Transition in Australia, 1880-1910’ in G. W. Jones, R. M. Douglas, J. C. Caldwell & R. M. D’Souza (eds), The Continuing Demographic Transition, OUP, Oxford, 1997, p. 31. 11 Samuel Beckett, My First Grief: Recollections of a Beloved Sister, 2nd edn, Bath, [1854], pp. 125-6, 128. 12 EC. Russell to Edmund Gerald Cooke, 20 Aug.1872, Winter Cooke papers, SLV MS 10840, box 4/3/3. 13 Edmund Gerald Cooke to Uncle Trevor Winter, 31 Aug. 1872, ibid., box 4/3/2. 14 D. A. Manton, ‘The Good Shepherd ... the death of Samuel Newham’, 26 Sept. 1849, Hobart Town, 1849. 15 Revd Robert Hamilton, ‘Joy Triumphant: or, Memoir of Mrs. M—’, 29 March 1873, Melbourne, 1874. 16 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, OUP, New York, 1975, p. 310. 17 ~—“ Penny Russell, A Wish of Distinction: Colonial Gentility and Femininity, MUP, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 25-9, 129-30. 18 Diary of Thomas Anne Ward Cole, SLV MS 10570 Box 1483, diary 24 March — 26 April 1879.

19 ibid.

20 ibid., 26-27 April 1879. 21 tbid., S~7 May 1879. 22 Emily Vines to Charlotte Bussell, 14 Nov. 1868, Bussell papers, LISWA MN 586, Acc. 337A/278-9. 23 ~The Bussell correspondence from the English branches of the family is now united with the Australian in the State Library in Perth. 24 Frances Bowker Bussell to daughter Francie, 19 March 1870, Bussell papers, LISWA MN 3628A/24.

NOTES TO pp. 60-70 337 25 See Marian Aveling’s [Quartly’s] excellent article on the function of Fanny Bussell’s representation of her mother’s death in sustaining family unity. Marian Aveling, “Death and the Family in Nineteenth-century Western Australia’, in P. Grimshaw, C. McConville, E. McEwen (eds), Families in Colonial Australia, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, pp. 33, 35. 26 Charlotte Bussell to Fanny Bowker Bussell in England, 27 Feb. 1872, Bussell papers, LISWA MN 586/2, Acc. 3819A/76; Emily Vines to cousin Francie Bussell in England, 21 April 1872, ibid., Acc. 3917A/12. 27 Emily Vines to Francie Bussell, 21 April 1872, ibid., Acc. 3917A/12. 28 Mary Taylor to Fanny Bowker Bussell, 22 June 1872, ibid., Acc. 3898A/81. 29 Frances Ardagh (England) to aunt Charlotte Bussell, 11 May 1874, ibid., MN 586, Acc. 337A/188. 30 Frances Ardagh to aunt Charlotte Bussell, 11 May 1874, ibid. 31 J. G. Bussell, to T. A. Bussell 18 July 1874, ibid., MN 586/2, Acc. 3896A/26. 32 Mary Taylor to T.A. Bussell, 6 Nov. 1875, ibid., Acc. 3898A/99. 33 Francie Bussell’s note on her 28th birthday, 6 March 1876, ibid., MN 586/1, Acc. 3628A/133. 34 Emily Vines to Charlotte Bussell, 14 Nov. 1868, ibid... MN 586, Acc. 337A/278~-9.

35 ibid. 36 ibid. 37 ibid.

38 Charlotte Bussell to Fanny E. C. Bussell, 27 March 1869, ibid.,. MN 586/2, Acc 3891A/70. 39 Emily Vines to Frances Elizabeth Cotton Bussell, nee Bowker, 27 Jan. 1869, ibid., Acc. 3917A/8. 40 Emily Vines to Francie Bussell, 21 April 1872, ibid., Acc. 3117A/12. 41 William Wingate to his brother and sister, 20 Oct. 1862, from Birdham Farm, Gawler River, Wingate Family MSS, SLSA D 4496/1-4 (L). 42 Eliza Pederick, Gawler River, SA to her uncle, 27 Jan. 1882, ibid., D 4496/4 (L). 43 Revd J. Michael Miller, ‘Praying for the dead’, in Ann Ball (ed.), Catholic Book of the Dead, Huntington, Indiana, 1994, pp. 11-26. 44 David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Emigration to Australia, MUP, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 553-4. 45 __ ibid., pp. 64-6, 165, 170-1, 259-61. 46 Mary Rowe’s diary, 1886, Rowe papers, SLV MS 12298, box 3063/12, 8-23 May 1886; Fanny O’Leary, ‘Reminiscences’, TS, 1927, SLV MS 12298, box 3068/1. 47 Fanny O’Leary to son Arthur, 7 June 1886, ibid., box 3071/1(a). 48 Mary Rowe’s diary, 14 June 1886, 1bid., box 3063/12. 49 Mr McCarthy O’Leary to Fanny O’Leary, 24 Aug. 1886, ibid., box 3066/10.

Chapter 4 ‘Angels in Heaven’ 1 Bryan Gandevia, Tears Often Shed: Child Health and Welfare in Australia from 1788, Pergamon Press, Rushcutter’s Bay NSW, 1978, p. 93.

2 F. B. Smith, ‘The First Health Transition in Australia, 1880-1910’, in G. W. Jones, R. M. Douglas, J. C. Caldwell & R. M. D’Souza (eds), The Continuing Demographic Transition, OUP, Oxford, 1997, p. 31. 3. J. H. L. Cumpston, ‘Infantile Mortality’ in J. H. L. Cumpston, Health and Disease in Australia, ed. M. J. Lewis, AGPS, Canberra, 1989, pp. 108-13. 4 FE. B. Smith, ‘First Health Transition’, p. 31; Cumpston, ‘Infantile Mortality’, pp. 108-13. 5 EB. Smith, ‘First Health Transition’, pp. 42-3. See also Philippa Mein Smith, ‘Mothers, Babies, and the Mothers and Babies Movement: Australia through Depression and War’, Soctal History of Medicine, vol. 6, pp. 51-8; J. C. Caldwell, Theory of Fertility Decline, Academic Press, London, 1982.

6 Margaret Anderson, ‘Marriage and Children in Western Australia, 1842-49’ in Patricia Grimshaw, Chris McConville & Ellen McEwen (eds), Families in Colonial Australia, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, p. SS.

338 NOTES TO pp. 70-80 7 Revd Richard Hill, ‘A brief narrative of Eliza Reynolds who died on Sunday, Oct. 19, 1834’, Sydney, 1834, pp. 8, 14. 8 | Mathew Hale’s address on the death of his son, Feb. 1862, Marian Aveling [Quartly] (ed.), Westralian Voices: Documents in Western Australian Social History, University of Western Australia Press, Perth, 1979, pp.140-2. 9 Jane Dickson, Notes 1838-1877, ‘On the Death of an Infant Son’, 1 Dec. 1843, ML MSS 1972.

10 Sir Alexander Stuart to his sister-in-law Rachel Blomfield (nee Wood), 20 Jan. 1860, Blomfield-Brooks-Wood family papers, ML MS 5658 Add. ON 2063/1. 11 Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, OUP, Oxford, 1996, ch. 6. 12 ‘An Elegy for Mary Ann Burdekin’, Mary Ann Burdekin papers 1817-1871, ML MSS 147/91.

13 Hale, 1862, Westralian Voices, pp.140-1. 14 Harry Johnston to cousin, Cecil Clifton, 17 Oct. 1890, Clifton papers, LISWA MN 1294, Acc. 2587A/37. 15 Patrick Taylor to cousin, Mr [J. G. ?] Bussell, 9 April 1870, Bussell papers, LISWA 586, 337 A/737.

16 Mrs F. M. Monk to Mr Jean Emile Serisier and Mrs Margaret Serisier, 14 Dec. 1871, ML DOC 1369. 17 + Fanny Barton to Nora Murray-Prior, 20 Feb. [1876], NLA MS 7801, box 4, folder 22, no. 16/93. 18 Colin Murray Parkes, Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1978/1991, p. 148. 19 L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1977, pp. 651-2; Parkes, Bereavement, p. 148; Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900, CUP, Cambridge, 1983, passim; Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, pp. 119-42. 20 Wray Vamplew (ed.), Australians: Historical Statistics, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Broadway, NSW, 1987, ch. 1 ‘Immigration and Ethnic Origin’, by Charles Price, table pp. 11-13.

21 Anna Victoria Ey, Early Lutheran Congregations in South Australia. Memoirs of a Pastor’s Wife, A. P. H. Freund, Adelaide, 1986.

22 ibid.

23 ibid., pp. 72-3, 83-4. 24 ibid., pp. 72-3, 83-7. 25 ibid., pp. 86-7, 100, 112, 116-18, 120-5. 26 __ibid., pp. 130-4. 27 ~~ ibid., pp. 141, 149-53.

28 ibid., pp. 172-3. 29 Charlotte Suttor diary, 17, 31 Dec. 1848, 11 Feb., 3 March 1849, ML MSS 1520: CY418. 30 __—ibid., 9, 12 June 1849.

31 ibid., May 1849. 32 __ ibid., 2 Jan. 1850.

33 ibid., 16-17, 19 Jan. 1850. 34 ibid., 10 July 1850. 35 ibid., 11-12 July 1850. 36 ~—ibid., 12-13 July 1850.

37 ibid., 12-13 July 1850. 38 ibid., 1-3 Aug. 1850. 39 __ ibid., 13 July 1850.

40 ibid.

41 ibid., 12-13 July 1850. 42 ibid., 11 July 1850. 43 ibid., 20 July, 4, 11 Aug. 1850. 44 This section on the death of baby Drew is entirely based on the unpublished volume of Blanche Mitchell’s diary, Vol. II, 1865-66, 26-29 Sept. 1866, ML MSS 5278: CY reel 2454

NOTES TO pp. 80-92 339 45 ibid., II, 1865-66, 26-29 Sept. 1866. 46 ibid., 28 Sept. 1866.

47 ibid. 48 ibid.

49 ibid., 29 Sept. 1866. 50 __ ibid. 51 Ruby Hindson to her aunt, Caroline MacLeod, 27 Dec. 1890, Francis Henty Papers, SLV MS 7821, box 7101; Louisa Henty to Caroline MacLeod, Sat. Spm, postmarked 29 Dec. 1890, ibid., box 682/2. 52 Alice Hindson to her sister, Caroline MacLeod, 31 Jan. 1891, ibid., box 700/1; Louisa Henty to Caroline MacLeod, 29, 31 Dec. 1890, ibid., box 682/2. 53 Alice Hindson to Caroline MacLeod, 31 Jan. 1891, ibid., box 700/1. 54 Alice Hindson to Caroline MacLeod, 30 Dec. 1890, ibid., box 700/1; Louisa Henty to Caroline MacLeod, 12 Jan. 1891, ibid., box 682/2. 55 Alice Hindson to Caroline MacLeod, 9 Jan. 1891, ibid., box 700/1. 56 Alice Hindson to Caroline MacLeod, 30 Dec. 1890, 31 Jan. 1891, ibid., box 700/1. 57 Louisa Henty to Caroline MacLeod, 12 Jan. 1891, ibid., box 682/2. 58 Alice Hindson to Caroline MacLeod, 9, 31 Jan. 1891, ibid., box 700/1; Louisa Henty to Caroline MacLeod, n.d. [31 Dec. 1890?], 12 Jan. 1891, ibid., box 682/2.

59 ibid.

60 __ ibid. 61 Janet Lee Archer to Caroline Henty, 30 Dec. 1890, ibid., box 690/5.

62 ibid., 17 Jan. 1891, box 690/5. 63 Alice Hindson to Caroline MacLeod, 9 Jan. 1891, ibid., box 700/1.

64 ibid.

65 Alice Hindson to Caroline MacLeod, 19 Jan. 1891, 1bid., box 700/1.

66 ibid., 31 Jan. 1891.

Chapter 5 Medical and Secular Challenges to Christian Ideals of Death 1 See e.g. R. R. Ewing, ‘A Premature Sunset’, sermon on the death of Norman Robertson, 1864, St Andrew’s Church, Launceston. 2 Lenox Bussell to sister Fanny Bussell, May 1835, Bussell Papers, LISWA MN §86/337A/772 no. 3 (2). 3 Charlotte Suttor’s diary, 3 Feb. 1850, Suttor Papers, ML MSS 1520: CY 418. 4 _ Alfred P. Bussell to Charlotte Bussell, 21 June 1877, Bussell papers, LISWA MN §86/337A/116.

5 ibid.

6 Sir Alfred Stephen to Lord Carrington, 13 July 1886, Stephen papers, ML MSS 777/5: CY 2954; Note by Sir Alfred Stephen, ‘Some Particulars of Lady Stephen’s Last Illness’, 12 July 1886, ML MSS 777/1. 7 Ann Macintosh (ed.), Memoirs of Dr Robert Scot Skirving: 1859-1956, Foreland Press, Sydney, 1988, pp. 282-4.

8 Dr Samuel Beckett, My First Grief: Recollections of a Beloved Sister..., 2nd edn, Bath, [1854], pp. 113-14, 116-22, 126-7. 9 EB. Smith, ‘The First Health Transition in Australia, 1880-1910’ in G. W. Jones, R. M. Douglas, J. C. Caldwell & R. M. D’Souza (eds), The Continuing Demographic Transition, OUP, Oxford, 1997, pp. 29, 42-3; John Goldsmid, The Deadly Legacy, NSWUP, Kensington, NSW, 1988, pp. 33-4; Michael Cannon, Life in the Cities, Viking O’Neil, Ringwood, Vic., 1988, pp. 146-7. 10 Lady Stephen’s diaries, Jan-Feb. 1861, ML MSS 777/3a; Ruth Bedford, Think of Stephen, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1954, ch. XIII, ‘Sorrows’, pp. 144-55.

11 ibid. 12 ibid. 13 ibid.

340 NOTES TO pp. 92-103

14 ibid. 15 ibid. 16 ibid. 17 ibid. 18 T. S. Pensabene, The Rise of the Medical Practitioner in Victoria, ANU, Canberra, 1980, pp. 4-14. 19 Henry Bournes Higgins, diary, 14[?] Feb. 1870, NLA MS 1057/3/box 7. 20 Age, 20 April 1858, quoted by Pensabene, Rise of the Medical Practitioner, p. 21. 21 ~~‘ Pensabene, Rise of the Medical Practitioner, pp. 19-27. 22 W.G. Manners, ‘So I Headed West’: Ballarat to Broken Hill, to Kanowna, to Kalgoorlie, 1863-1924, Hesperion Press, Kalgoorlie and Carlisle, 1992, pp. 8, 9, 49, 65, 186.

23 See Pat Jalland, Death mm the Victorian Family, OUP, Oxford, 1996, chs 4, 5. 24 Blanche Mitchell’s diary, 9-10 Sept. 1866, typed transcript, vol. I, 1865-66, ML MSS 5278: CY reel 2454. 25 Sophie Hayward to Frances Louisa Bussell, 21 April 1837, Bussell papers, LISWA MN 586 Acc. 337A/697, 26 Gavin Casey, Launceston, Tasmania, to “Dear sir’ (Major/Capt. Wentworth’s son ?) 22 July 1861, Wentworth Papers, ML MSS 8/2/item 41. 27 Charlotte Suttor’s diary, 14 July to 16 Aug. 1850, ML MSS 1520: CY 418. 28 Mary Rowe’s diary, 8 May—14 June 1886, Rowe papers, SLV MS 12298 box 3063/12, 8—23.

29 = Dr William Munk, Euthanasia: Or Medical Treatment in Aid of an Easy Death, London, 1887.

30 ibid.

31 Georgiana H. Macartney to Mary Rowe, 4 May 1882, SLV MS 12298, box 3063/3 (g).

32 ibid.

33 Munk, Euthanasia, pp. 73-83; Lancet, 7 Jan. 1888; 18, 25 Feb. 1899. 34 ‘~Virginia Berridge & Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Century England, Allen Lane, London, 1981.

35 Cannon, Life in the Cities, p. 133. 36 Fanny Bussell to sister Bessie Ommanney, 29 June 1845, LISWA MN 586/294A/10. 37 Fanny Sutherland (née Bussell) to Charlotte Bussell, 15 Feb. 1855, LISWA MN $86/337A/361. 38 Medical account, 30 June 1881, in the legal documents concerning the estate of Mrs Frances Sutherland, Prinsep Papers, LISWA MN 773, Acc. 3594A/25. 39 Cecil Pybus Cooke to Arbella Cooke, 25 Dec. 1878, Winter Cooke Papers, SLV MS 10840 box 3.1.4. 40 Pensabene, The Rise of the Medical Practitioner, pp. 33-SO0. 41 Alice Hindson to Caroline MacLeod, 9 July 1913, Francis Henty Papers, SLV MS 7821, box 701/4. 42 jill Roe, ‘Challenge and Response: Religious Life in Melbourne 1876-86’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 5, 1968-69, pp. 149-66. 43 Hilary M. Carey, Believing in Australia. A Cultural History of Religions, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards NSW, 1996, pp. 105-6, 113-18. 44 See Audrey Tate, Ada Cambridge: Her Life and Work, 1844-1926, MUP, Melbourne, 1991, pp.1-64; Ada Cambridge, The Retrospect, Stanley Paul, London, 1912, passim. 45 Ada Cambridge, Thirty Years in Australia, Methuen, London, 1903, pp. 126-31.

46 Australasian, 7 Aug. 1875, p. 167. 47 Cambridge, Thirty Years, pp. 126-31.

48 ibid., pp.140-1. 49 Ada Cambridge, ‘The Lonely Seas’, Atlantic Monthly, vol. CVIII, July 1911, pp. 95-100; Tate, Ada Cambridge, ch. 9. 50 Cambridge, ‘The Lonely Seas’, pp. 95-100. 51 See G. W. Foote, Infidel Death Beds, 1886, pp. 43-4. 52 Ada Cambridge, ‘The Lonely Seas’, pp. 96-100. 53. Dorothy Green, Henry Handel Richardson and Her Fiction, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1973/1986, p. 31.

NOTES TO pp. 103-15 341 54 ‘Diary of H. H. Richardson about her mother’s last illness’, Nov. 1896, NLA MS 133/8/10-21.

55 ibid. 56 ibid. 57 ibid.

58 ‘Henry Handel Richardson and Ireland’, in Colm Kiernan (ed.), Australia and Ireland 1788-1988: Bicentenary Essays, Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 1986, p. 51. 59 Henry Handel Richardson, Myself When Young, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1948, p. 142. 60 Green, Henry Handel Richardson and her Fiction, pp. 418-19. 61 ‘Mary Christina’ in Henry Handel Richardson, The End of Childhood and Other Stories, Heinemann, London, 1934, pp. 275-87; previously published as ‘Death’ in English Review, 1911. 62 Henry Lawson, “The Bush Undertaker’ in Henry Lawson’s Best Stories, The Australian Classics, Angus & Robertson, 1966/1968, p. 31. 63 H. H. Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, The Australian Classics, The Discovery Press, Penrith, 1930/1968, pp. 518-43.

64 ibid.

65 — Henry Handel Richardson to Oliver Stonor, 29 April 1941, quoted in Green, Henry Handel Richardson and Her Fiction, p. 30.

Chapter 6 Funerals and Undertakers 1 See e.g. Bertram Puckle, Funeral Customs: Their Origin and Development, T. Werner Laurie, London, 1926, pp. 87, 253-4; J. S. Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death, David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1972, pp. 7, 20; John Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians, Studio Vista, London, 1971, pp. 19-31.

2 Times, 27 Feb. 1865. 3 E. Chadwick, Report on the Practice of Interment in Towns, 1843, pp. 50-1, evidence of Mr Wild of London.

4 ibid., pp. 50-1, 48-9. 5 Glennys Howarth, ‘Professionalising the Funeral Industry in England 1700-1960’, in P. C. Jupp & G. Howarth (eds), The Changing Face of Death. Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal, Macmillan, London, 1997, pp. 120-1. 6 Punch, Jan.—June 1850, p. 185.

7 Times, 27 Feb. 1865. 8 Lancet, 20 Jan. 1894. 9 Holland House papers, British Library Add. MS 51472, fos 8-46. 10 Press cutting, Argus, 1913. 11 Bill for ‘The funeral of the late Mr Thomas Burdekin’, Sept. 1844, Burdekin papers, ML MSS 147/94.

12. Sydney Morning Herald, 5 Nov. 1853. 13. =Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians, pp. 80-1.

14 ibid., pp. 81-3. 15 Times, cited in Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians, pp. 82-3. 16 Ken Inglis, The Australian Colonists: An Exploration of Social History 1788-1870, MUP, Melbourne, 1974, p. 300.

17 ibid.

18 Tim Bonyhady, Burke c& Wills: From Melbourne to Myth, David Ell, Sydney, 1991, p. 232.

19 Argus, 5 Jan. 1863. 20 Bonyhady, Burke and Wills, p. 241; Argus, 24 Jan. 1863.

21 ibid.

22 Robert Nicol, Death and Burial in South Australia 1836-1901, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1986, pp. 407-22. 23 ‘1879 Memorandum for my executors’ by James Henty, Henty papers, SLV MS 7664. 24 Memo dated 23 June 1875, quoted in Sydney Mail, 29 May 1886, p. 1110.

342 NOTES TO pp. 115-25 25 Sydney Morning Herald, 1 March 1884.

26 ibid. 12 Aug. 1878. 27 Funeral sermon by Revds S. Mead & W. Clare for Mrs J. Langdon Parsons, Adelaide 1876, ML.

28 Age, 27 July 1901. 29 ~=T.A. Cole diary, 28 April 1879, SLV MS 10570, Box 1483.

30 Sydney Morning Herald, 20 March 1877. 31 See Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, OUP, Oxford, 1996, p. 204; The Times, 12 Jan., 17 June 1875. 32. ~~ Philip L. S. Chauncy, Memoirs of Mrs Poole and Mrs Chauncy, Lowden, Kilmore, Vic., 1976, pp. 20-4. 33. Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday, MUP, Melbourne, 1963, pp. 505-6; Gordon Forth, ‘The Winter Cooke Papers: A Valuable Record of the Pastoral Age in Western Victoria’, La Trobe Library Journal, vol. 7, no. 26, April 1980, pp. 1-8. 34 Simon Cooke, ‘Death, Body and Soul: The Cremation Debate in New South Wales, 1863-1925’, Historical Studies, vol. 24, no. 9, Oct. 1991; Robert Nicol, At the End of the Road. Government, Society and the Disposal of Human Remains in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994, pp. 169-95, 320-9. 35 John Mildred Creed, Second Reading Speech on Cremation Bill, Legislative Council, NSW, 24 June 1886, L. Bruck, Sydney, 1886, pp. 9-11. 36 Robert Nicol, ‘Australian Burial Customs’ in Allan Kellehear (ed.), Death and Dying in Australia, OUP, Melbourne, 2000, p. 97. See also Nicol, At the End of the Road, pp. 169-95. 37 Bulletin, 26 June 1886. ‘Cremation! “Hell to Let”’ (plate 9). 38 Duncan Waterson & Sandra Tweedie, ‘A Study of the Funeral Industry in New South Wales. A Preliminary Report’ in Mira Crouch & Bernd Huppauf (eds), Essays on Mortality, UNSW, Sydney, c. 1985, p. 130. For Perth see Leonie B. Liveris, The Dismal Trader: The Undertaker Business in Perth, 1860-1939, Australian Funeral Directors Association, Perth, 1991. 39 Graeme N. Griffin and Des Tobin, In the Midst of Life ...: The Australian Response to Death, 2nd edn, MUP, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 206-7. 40 Funeral bill for Mrs Sutherland, 9 July 1881, Prinsep papers, LISWA MN 773, Acc. 3594A/25/10. 41 Joseph Medcalf, Funeral Records 1881-1900, ML FM4/2214.

42 ibid., 1886. 43 ibid., 1886, 1891, 1900. 44 ibid., 1886, 1891. 45 Claude Trevelion, Undertaker, Day Books, 1881-95, SLSA BRG 149.

46 ibid.

47 Nicol, ‘Death and Burial in South Australia, 1836-1901’, p. 63. 48 Trevelion, Day Books, Frederick Hannaford’s funeral, 1898, SLSA BRG 149. 49 South Australian Parliamentary Papers, 1898-99, vol. 3 Report of the Select Committee of the House of Assembly on the site for a Metropolitan Cemetery, paper no. 75. 50 — Griffin & Tobin, In the Midst of Life, pp. 209-10, 187-8. 51 Undertakers’ Assistants and Cemetery Employees’ Union, minimum payments for piecework, c. 1920, Noel Butlin Archives T57/9. 52. Griffin & Tobin, In the Midst of Life, pp. 90-8; Lionel Gilbert, A Grave Look at History, John Ferguson, Sydney, 1980, pp. 21, 32. 53 Christina Clifton to son Cecil Clifton, 19 March 1898, 1, 2, 23 April 1898, Clifton papers, LISWA MSS 2587A/8.

54 Sarah Tarlow, Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999, chs 3, S. 55 Sir Joynton Smith, My Life Story, Cornstalk, Sydney, 1927, pp. 154-60. 56 —_ Bulletin, 24 Oct. 1896. 57 Morley, Death, Heaven, and the Victorians, pp. 28-9, 25-7.

58 Age, 24 April 1896. 59 ibid., 23, 24 June 1864.

NOTES TO pp. 125-36 343

60 nbd. 61 Report of the Royal Commission on the Friendly Societies of New South Wales, 1883, p. 34, Noel Butlin Archives 7262/40. 62 Royal Commission on Friendly Societies, NSW, 1883, pp. 25, 42-3. 63 Annual Report on Friendly Societies by Victorian Government Statistician, 1886, Victoria, Noel Butlin Archives 7262/38. 64 List of Friendly Societies in Victoria, Statistics 1887, Noel Butlin Archives Z227/430; Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows, Registration Book for Myrtleford Lodge, Ovens—Murray District, Victoria, Noel Butlin A Z227/3. 65 Ancient Order of Foresters, Digby, Papers (1862-1943), SLV MS 7661. 66 Royal Commission on National Insurance, Commonwealth of Australia, 1924-25, Noel Butlin Archives 7262/38, pp. 23-4. 67 Sir Samuel James Way to Grand Master, 6 June 1914, SLSA PRG 30/5, Letter Book 1913-14. 68 Brian Lewis, Our War, Penguin Australia, Ringwood, Vic., 1981, pp. 261, 336.

Chapter 7 Women, Widowhood, and Gendered Mourning 1 South Australian Register, Register: Personal Notices, I, 1836-59, comp. Reg Butler and Alan Phillips, Gould, Adelaide, 1989, p. 230. 2 A. Murray to Mrs J. S. Price, 14 July 1878, LISWA MN 442, Acc. 2093A/7. 3 Charlotte Suttor, diary, 17, 21 July 1850, ML MSS 1520: CY418. 4 Blanche Mitchell diary, 10-11 Sept. 1866, ML MSS 5278: CY reel 2454. 5 Ann Catherine Currie, diary, 1879, SLV MS 10886, MS B 623. 6 Jane Macartney, diary, 12-14 May 1864, SLV MS 10994, MS B 631. 7 Lady Stephen, diary, 1-2, 6-7 April 1878, Stephen papers, ML MSS 777/3b. 8 Mary Ann Henty to Laurence Henty 2, 16 June 1861, Francis Henty papers, SLV MS 7821.

9 Christina Clifton to son Cecil, 20 Oct 1880, Clifton papers, LISWA MN 1294/2587