A thematic heritage study on australia’s benevolent and other care institutions thematic Study

Course and pattern of welfare history

1788–1850 Convict era

Ideas, attitudes and beliefs

For at least 60 000 years, Aboriginal Australians have lived in Australia occupying a range of geographical contexts, from deserts to coastal fringes to rain forests, sustaining themselves through a complex relationship with their ‘country’ and organised into nations, clans and smaller kinship groups with strong ties to this ‘country’. While each group had responsibility to care for the country they occupied, they also regarded the country itself as the source of cultural and spiritual as well as material life. Resource-wise, Aboriginal people were, for the most part, locally self-sufficient. While some commodities, such as greenstone, were traded, most Aboriginal groups or clans were able to provide for their material needs for food, shelter, tools and weapons through adaptation and use of the resources of their local area.¹ Aboriginal society was organised into clans with specific roles within those groups related to sourcing, hunting, gathering and preparing food, as well as caring for children and the elderly.

In contrast with this way of life, the British and other mainly European people who settled in Australia from 1788 came from societies that were hierarchically organised. Wealth was derived from private ownership of property, particularly land, and the bulk of the population were expected to support themselves through their labour either on the land or, increasingly from the late eighteenth century, in industrial enterprises. British laws had long recognised the obligation to assist people who genuinely could not support themselves through their own labour. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, the primary responsibility for this support was legally placed with relatives. However, over centuries a system of parish support for the poor, raised through rates collected within each parish, had developed via a series of laws known collectively as the Poor Laws. The Poor Laws bound the people of a parish to support those people in desperate straits, by offering ‘outdoor’ relief, such as food, clothing or shelter or through the provision of institutions known as ‘poor houses’.

Major trends and influences of the period

In the early eighteenth century further legislation allowed the establishment of workhouses – institutions that literally incarcerated the poor, including children, putting them to work in rigid, basic and demeaning surroundings. The poor were separated from family members and offered only basic sustenance. The legislation that established these workhouses aimed to make access to assistance extremely undesirable for ‘able-bodied’ people whose labour could be profitably used by an employer. There was little room for understanding the causes of poverty in society. Individuals were regarded as frequently bringing destitution on themselves through their own behaviour. Further British legislation in 1834, at the time that many of the Australian colonies were being settled, abolished outdoor relief making the workhouse the only source of relief for the poor, apart from that provided by charitable societies. It was thought that if the workhouse was the only alternative to gainful employment, only those who were truly desperate for help would accept the workhouse conditions.²

Outdoor relief, it was argued, encouraged the able-bodied to rely on poor relief rather than to work for wages, creating a class of ‘paupers’. The Poor Laws were resented by those who were charged rates for the maintenance of the poor and who feared that offering assistance to the poor would undermine their preparedness to work and by the poor themselves who saw the workhouses as places of fear and contempt.³ The Poor Laws were not formally repealed in Britain until 1948.⁴ Although the Poor Laws were not replicated as legislation in the Australian colonies, they cast their shadow over the ways in which welfare was provided in the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century, influencing attitudes to the provision of welfare for those in need and the ways in which this welfare was delivered. In particular, the fear that ‘undeserving’ people would take advantage of government or privately funded relief was a dominant feature of schemes for the relief of the poor in the Australian colonies in the early years of settlement and beyond in the nineteenth century. Yet it was tempered by the necessity to make some provisions for those in need of assistance in frontier societies.

The foundations of European settlement in what became the six Australian states took place between the years 1788 and 1840. The first colonies established – New South Wales in 1788 and Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania) in 1803 – operated as penal colonies governed by a Governor representing the British Government. Queensland’s first European settlement at Moreton Bay was as an outpost of New South Wales. It was a secondary convict settlement from 1826 until 1842 when the convicts were withdrawn from the Moreton Bay settlement and free settlers invited in. Western Australia’s first European settlement was a colony in its own right when it was established under Governor James Stirling in 1829. The Swan River Colony was not based on convict transportation, but used a generous system of land grants, based on the number of servants settlers brought with them to the colony, to encourage free settlers and to build up a workforce for them. These grants were abolished a few years later and, in 1850, just as the transportation of convicts to the eastern Australian colonies had finally ceased, Western Australia began to accept convicts from Britain, to serve as a cheap workforce until 1868. South Australia was also established as a province (and from 1842 a colony) of free settlers, under the shared administration of the British-appointed Governor and the South Australian Colonising Commission. Unlike the earlier colonies, which had used land grants to settle people on the land, in South Australia it was planned that land would be sold to those with the capital to buy it. The proceeds of land sales in the colony would be used to finance the immigration of free labourers, selected by the South Australian Commission’s agent, to work on this land. Victoria, then called the Port Phillip District, was the only Australian colony in which the British Government or its representatives had no hand in the initiation of European settlement. The first settlers to encroach upon Port Phillip in the 1830s were explorers from Van Diemen’s Land, eager to search out fresh pastures on which they could make their fortunes. It took little time, however, after the first of these men landed in Melbourne, for the Governor of New South Wales to send a representative, along with land surveyors and a contingent of convict workers, to oversee the settlement on Port Phillip Bay. The Port Phillip District would remain part of the colony of New South Wales until 1851.

Recipients of welfare

In the early years of the convict settlements in NSW and Tasmania, there was little distinction in terms of welfare between convicts and the free settlers who arrived as marines, gaolers and civil servants. Of necessity the government had to provide for the survival of all from the government stores. In NSW, faced with severe food shortages in the very early years of settlement, Governor Arthur Phillip reduced everyone’s rations to ensure the survival of the society. Similarly, the first British settlers (including convicts) in Van Diemen’s Land faced starvation and Lieutenant-Governor Collins’s solution was to issue guns to everyone – convicts included – to hunt kangaroos, to the detriment of the welfare of the Indigenous residents of Tasmania.⁵ Free settlers outnumbered convicts in Van Diemen’s Land in 1814 when a majority of the European residents were being fed from the government store.⁶ Yet this ‘outdoor’ relief was not freely given to non-convicts. Applicants for rations had to be recommended by a magistrate as being in need. As the settlement in New South Wales began to succeed, there was still a need for some distribution of rations to free settlers or emancipated convicts. Governor Macquarie wrote in 1812 that he ‘would not see Her Majesty’s subjects starve or perish for want of a house on the shores of New Holland’.⁷

IMAGE: Image shows a painting of Edward Smith Hall founder of Benevolent Society in NSW. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an2310341

Convicts in both NSW and Tasmania were used as work gangs to help build essential infrastructure such as roads and public buildings. From 1810, in NSW at least, they were increasingly assigned as servants to free or emancipated landholders. They provided a ready supply of labour, as did the immigrants who began to arrive in NSW from 1810. For female convicts who had not been assigned as servants, were between assignments, were pregnant, or were to be punished for misdemeanours, ‘female factories’ were established in both NSW and Van Diemen’s Land. Known as factories because the women worked within them, they also provided accommodation for women and girls and sometimes their children. Though the female factories were instruments of control over the women incarcerated within them, they also offered a refuge of sorts for women as well as a home for their children and served as ‘lying-in’ (maternity) hospitals for convict and poor women. Eleven female factories were established in NSW, Van Diemen’s Land and Moreton Bay (Queensland). The first of these, the Parramatta Female Factory, had originally been housed in a room above the Parramatta Gaol. In 1818 work began on a purpose-built female factory at Parramatta. This would house women and children until 1848, when it became a lunatic asylum.⁸ In Van Diemen’s Land in 1827, a former distillery formed the nucleus for the Cascades Female Factory. It served this purpose until 1856, when it became a prison for women. It then went on to serve a variety of purposes including as an invalid asylum for chronically ill men and women, and as the site of the Anglican-operated House of Mercy for prostitutes and single mothers between 1891 and 1904.⁹

Children

The impetus to control the behaviour of women and girls also lay behind the opening of the first orphanage in Australia. Phillip Gidley King, appointed as Governor of NSW in 1800, was horrified by the ‘many girls between the ages of eight and twelve, verging on the brink of ruin and prostitution’.¹⁰ Together with his wife, Anna, and Anglican chaplains to the colony he opened the Female Orphans Asylum in Sydney in 1801. It was not until 1819 that Governor Macquarie established a boys’ orphanage in NSW, while in Van Diemen’s Land, the King’s Orphan Schools for orphaned and delinquent children opened in 1828. Governor Arthur, in investigating the need for orphan schools, was concerned to cater for destitute children and those from ‘large’ families whose parents were unable to support them. There was also concern to separate children from parents or from circumstances likely to lead them into lives of immorality and perhaps crime. Before the orphan schools opened many children were housed with their mothers in female factories, while boy convicts were accommodated with men in the convict barracks in Hobart. There was concern that these children might be ‘morally destroyed’ in these environments.¹¹ These sorts of children, along with those who mothers were convicts or those who were fatherless, were admitted to the King’s Orphan Schools. Boys were amongst the convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land. In 1834, concerned at the at the fate of these young boys being incarcerated with hardened criminals and finding it difficult to assign them as servants, Governor Arthur approved the establishment of the Point Puer Reformatory in buildings converted for that purpose at Port Arthur. Here the convict boys received some education, some trade training (through working to help build the establishment) and religious instruction intended to ‘reform’ them and prepare them to be assigned to employers when old enough.¹² Point Puer was only the second juvenile prison established in the world and, while ‘strict discipline was enforced’; the boys were regarded as ‘objects of compassion’.¹³ In 1844 a new building at Parramatta opened as a Roman Catholic orphanage school, with some Catholic children who had been cared for in temporary premises transferred to this site. While a lay matron ran the orphan school at first there were Sisters of Charity on the staff. In 1859 the Sisters of the Good Shepherd (the first Australian Order of Catholic religious sisters who would become known as the Sisters of the Good Samaritan) took over the orphanage and conducted it until 1886, when it became a government girls’ industrial school. This Catholic orphan asylum initiated a pattern, replicated later in the nineteenth century in the other Australian colonies, in which the desire to provide for the education and upbringing of Catholic children in their own faith led the Catholic hierarchy in each diocese to establish a parallel system of institutionalised care for children, frequently, but not always, partially funded by the state. Catholics perceived government or Protestant-run orphanages as threats to the faith of Catholic children.

Immigrants

Immigrants formed another group who were often in need of assistance in early colonial society. From 1793 ‘free’ immigrants began arriving alongside convicts to New South Wales. In Van Diemen’s Land, land grants were offered to encourage immigrants to the colony, though these were suspended in 1831. The transportation of convicts to these colonies did not cease until 1840 and 1853 respectively. ‘Assisted’ immigration was used from the 1830s to augment the workforce in New South Wales and the British Government instituted a scheme in the same decade to transport impoverished single women and working men and their families to the colonies, as well as military pensioners to Van Diemen’s Land. By 1830 most of the viable land in Van Diemen’s Land had been taken up as grants and there were few opportunities for newcomers with little capital to establish themselves on the land.¹⁴ The immigrants who arrived in Van Diemen’s Land during the 1830s had to compete with assigned convicts for employment. With the removal of the system of land grants in New South Wales it became difficult there too, for those without capital to acquire land. At the same time, the proceeds from the new sales of land were used to fund assisted immigration to the colony. Assisted immigrants often came from the poorer classes of British society, arriving in the colonies with few material resources and no family networks to assist them. While immigrant barracks were provided for government-assisted immigrants who arrived in New South Wales and tents for those who arrived in the Port Phillip District, immigrants were discouraged from remaining in the barracks for longer than a month after their arrival. Bounty immigrants, whose passages were paid for by prospective employers in New South Wales and Port Phillip, were not allowed in the barracks, but were able to stay aboard the vessels on which they had travelled to Australia for ten days. After that, whether employed or not, they were forced to leave the ship. Many immigrants in the late 1830s and 1840s therefore found themselves homeless and penniless in a new land. Single female immigrants and families with young children could be especially vulnerable.

IMAGE: Image shows a painting of the Convict Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney c.1820. Courtesy of State Library of New South Wales. Digital Order No a1120005.

From the 1830s colonial governments attempted to correct the gender imbalance of the colonial populations by assisting single female immigrants, some of them orphaned and still quite young, to migrate to Australia.¹⁵ These ‘boatloads’ of women were not always welcomed. Prospective employers were mainly interested in sourcing single men, without families, to work on pastoral stations. Single women, arriving without husbands or fathers, were regarded as both ‘vulnerable’ and ‘uncontrolled’.¹⁶

The first European arrivals at the Swan River settlement in Western Australia were offered generous grants of land – 200 acres for every indentured servant over the age of ten that they brought with them to the colony. These employers were required to feed and maintain their employees and Governor Stirling reinforced the responsibilities of employers through a series of proclamations about the obligations of masters and servants. The regulations, however, did not allow for the possibility of landowners being unsuccessful in farming on unsuitable soil, taking some years to establish themselves or simply releasing their servants from their indentures. The Governor was soon required to take measures to assist unemployed and destitute servants.¹⁷ Unemployed male immigrants were offered government work, building roads and public buildings, in return for rations. Those unable to work were offered rations from the government store, if they could prove with a certificate from the ‘Government Resident’ that they were genuinely in need.¹⁸ Although there was no attempt to provide ‘indoor’ relief for the destitute until 1840, when Governor Hutt rented premises as a ‘hospital for the destitute sick’, Governor Stirling hinted in 1831 that he would open up the town of Guildford on the Swan River where ‘discharged servants could each obtain four or five acres of good land and the advantage of mutual assistance’.¹⁹ By 1841 Governor Hutt had purchased premises as an immigrant home for those who were not indentured to employers.²⁰

The British Government insisted that the South Australian Colonising Commission take steps to ensure the welfare of early immigrants to South Australia by appointing an Emigration Agent to not only ensure the immigrants’ welfare was safeguarded on the journey to South Australia, but also to provide accommodation on their arrival in the colony, give them advice and assistance in finding employment or, if they could find none, provide work for them. He was also to provide rations and shelter for immigrants who were sick or destitute on arrival in the colony and to continue this for immigrants who could not find employment or rely on relatives and friends to support themselves and their families.²¹ The Emigration Agent was soon providing temporary shelter for immigrant families in parklands in Adelaide, as well as distributing ‘outdoor’ relief to destitute immigrants.²² A symbol of the hardship that immigrants to South Australia experienced in the early decade was the fact that when the colonial government moved to replace much of the work of the Emigration Agent with a committee, it became known as the Destitute Board.

Aboriginal Australians

Frontier conflict over resources, disease introduced by European settlers and settlers’ misunderstanding of Aboriginal ways of life and the meaning of ‘country’ to Aboriginal people did much to disrupt Aboriginal ways of life in the districts into which Europeans moved in the first 40 years after 1788. Actions to ‘help’ Aboriginal people, though sometimes well-intentioned, were misguided, often aiming to ‘civilise’, Christianise and ostensibly ‘protect’ them. Governor Macquarie, Governor of NSW from 1809 to 1821, established a school for native children in 1814 for the ‘civilisation and education of the natives’. A small number of Christian missions in New South Wales and Western Australia were very short lived. In Van Diemen’s Land, where relations between Aboriginal people and white settlers had deteriorated to the point where martial law was declared in 1828, Governor Arthur appointed George Augustus Robinson as a ‘conciliator’. Robinson managed to persuade 134 Tasmanian Aborigines to accompany him to Flinders Island where he established the Aboriginal settlement, Wybalenna, in 1834. Many of this group died on Flinders Island and in 1847 the remaining 47 were transferred to Oyster Cove, on the Tasmanian mainland.²³

A British Parliamentary Select Committee inquiry into Aboriginal Tribes in British settlements abhorred the treatment meted out to Aboriginal people in the Australian colonies in the late 1830s. Amongst its recommendations the committee ordered that Protectors of Aborigines be appointed to work closely with Aboriginal people and protect their interests. This committee’s report coincided with the early years of European settlement in South Australia, the Port Philip District and Western Australia and protectors were appointed in each of these districts. In South Australia Matthew Moorhouse was the first Protector of Aborigines. His first office was situated on Kintore Avenue, where a number of other institutions for the destitute would later be established and he established a mission station in Adelaide on the north side of the River Torrens.²⁴ George Augustus Robinson was appointed Chief Protector in the Port Phillip District, along with four Assistant Protectors of Aborigines. Protectors established stations based in different locations around the Port Phillip District, often moving with the local groups with whom they were working, establishing schools, learning their languages and representing them in court. They also offered food and clothing to the Aboriginal people within their protectorate. Although it had been established by the British Government, the Victorian protectorate was abandoned by the New South Wales Government in 1849.²⁵ However, William Thomas, one of the four Assistant Protectors remained as Guardian of the Aborigines in Victoria from 1850, appointed to that position by Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe. The protectors’ positions in South Australia and Western Australia were abolished in the 1850s (though revived later in the nineteenth century).²⁶ The British Select Committee was also of the view that missionaries should be encouraged to Christianise and civilise Aboriginal people. Some Lutheran missions, along with an Anglican Native Training Institution, were established in South Australia in the 1840s.²⁷

Providers of welfare

Government institutions

In the foundation years of the Australian colonies care was primarily provided by government. This was partially as a result of the fact that, as administrators of penal settlements, the Governors of NSW and Van Diemen’s Land wielded great control, and, as the colonies were administered as outposts of the British Government, the British Government was responsible for funding the fledgling settlements. Although it had been traditional for private and faith based philanthropists to offer charity in Britain, for many years as the early settlements struggled to survive, there were not sufficient numbers of middle or upper class people to serve as committee members of benevolent societies. There were some women, such as Anna King, wife of Governor King, who played a role in establishing orphanage facilities.

Aside from the issuing of rations, the earliest form of government–provided welfare services in the colonies were hospitals for those who were too ill or infirm to work and lacked the resources to fund their own medical treatment. A makeshift hospital was set up in tents at Sydney in 1789 and by 1792 Governor Phillip had built the colony’s first hospital at Parramatta. Between 1811 and 1816 Governor Macquarie oversaw the building of what would become the Sydney Hospital in Macquarie Street. Colloquially it was known as the Rum Hospital because Macquarie paid for it by allowing the builders a monopoly on the importation of spirits from India to the colony. Two sections of the original building for the hospital survive today as New South Wales Parliament House and the Mint Building. While those with money could afford to get attention from a doctor privately, the hospitals established in the early colonies not only catered to those who had been injured through accident, but also for invalids with chronic illnesses. Gradually the early hospitals became repositories for the aged who had no family to care for them, as well as for younger, disabled folk until purpose-built asylums were constructed.²⁸ Hospitals were rapidly overcrowded with those too ill or frail to work. Convict hospitals established in Launceston, Hobart and other centres in Van Diemen’s Land were available to free and emancipated people, though they were supposed to pay something for the service. Those who could not afford to pay were not required to do so. However, to gain admission they had to be certified as ‘destitute’ by a reputable person, such as a clergyman or magistrate, and required the word of a doctor that their admission was essential.²⁹

The New Norfolk hospital, which had been established by the military, was, by 1827, serving primarily as an invalid asylum.³⁰ The New Norfolk hospital also served as a lunatic asylum from the early 1830s and, after 1848 when the invalid patients were moved out, this became its major purpose.³¹ Before places were made available for the insane at New Norfolk, convicts assessed as insane were locked up in penal establishments. Other Tasmanians deemed to be ‘lunatics’, as people with a mental illness were then known, were sent to New South Wales where Governor Macquarie had established an asylum at Castle Hill in 1811. In 1838 a purpose-built asylum – Tarban Creek – was constructed at what is now Gladesville in New South Wales and those declared to be lunatics in the Port Phillip District were also sometimes shipped off to this establishment before 1848 when Victoria’s first asylum was opened at Yarra Bend, north of Melbourne. Prior to this, ‘lunatics’ in Port Phillip were often held in police watch houses or the gaol.

Lunatic asylums were seen as necessary to protect society from those deemed to be insane – a wide definition which included those with epilepsy, alcoholism and intellectual disability and those who had attempted suicide.³²

In Moreton Bay the former convict hospital served as a repository for the chronically invalid and vagrant, as well as the insane.³³ In 1844 a Benevolent Society was formed in Brisbane – committed to assisting the poor, the distressed and the aged. Four years later the Benevolent Society combined with the hospital as one charitable organisation, subsidised by the New South Wales Government. Benevolent cases would be accommodated at the hospital until the mid-1860s.

Private charity

It was not until 1813 that Australia’s first private philanthropic organisation was formed in New South Wales, where there were by then sufficient numbers of interested people to form a Benevolent Society. Seven men – all evangelical Christians – were the founders of the society, which raised funds through donations and distributed ‘outdoor relief’. By 1818 they had focused the society’s aims as being to ‘relieve the poor, the distressed, the aged and the infirm and thereby to discountenance, as much as possible, mendacity and vagrancy, and to encourage industrious habits amongst the indigent poor as well as to afford them religious instruction and consolation in their distress’.³⁴

Their aims illustrated the approach that many evangelical Christian philanthropists of the nineteenth century adopted – reaching out to others as Christians but believing that it was within the individual’s grasp to improve their own lives through hard work, good habits and religion. The Benevolent Society distributed rations, firewood and clothing to the destitute. By 1821, with government funding, the society had erected a benevolent asylum to accommodate the really desperate. The society would continue to derive much of its funding from the New South Wales Government. (The Benevolent Society continues to operate in 2015.) On the other hand, three of the four philanthropic societies formed in Van Diemen’s Land in the 1830s were short lived. They were refused government assistance by Governor Arthur, although he was a private subscriber to some of them, and the proportion of the population of Van Diemen’s Land willing and able to financially support the societies was too small.³⁵

These societies’ fortunes revived in the 1850s. Private benevolent societies were also formed in Adelaide, Port Phillip and Queensland in the 1840s. They did not all establish benevolent homes, in the way the New South Wales society did, but focussed more on distributing ‘outdoor’ relief.

Perhaps the first individual to identify recently arrived immigrants as a distinct group needing assistance was Caroline Chisholm. Deeply held Christian values motivated Chisholm to begin both practical support for and advocacy on behalf of female immigrants in Sydney in the early 1840s. She soon extended her work to include all unemployed immigrants. Chisholm, a convert to Catholicism, had arrived in New South Wales with her husband and three children in 1838. Concerned by her observations that the homelessness and destitution faced by many single female immigrants threatened to lead them into prostitution, Chisholm petitioned Governor Gipps for a space in which she could establish a temporary immigrants’ home for the women. Though there was considerable opposition to her scheme, including initial reluctance from the Governor himself, she was eventually given permission in 1841 to use a portion of the old immigrants’ barracks to establish the Female Immigrants’ Home, with a ladies committee to supervise it. Chisholm also established an employment registry which both employers and employees could access for free. She was proactive in moving immigrants to employment in country districts, often with the ultimate aim of marrying the women to ‘good’ husbands.³⁶ In the early 1840s she established a number of country employment centres in Parramatta, Moreton Bay, Liverpool, Maitland, Campbell Town, Wollongong, Scone, Bong Bong and Yass, overseen by local committees, where local employers could register their search for employees.³⁷ She advocated for better conditions aboard migrant ships, established an affordable family colonisation scheme and, during the 1850s, convinced the Victorian Government to help build ten shelter sheds along the main routes to the goldfields to provide comfortable and affordable accommodation for travellers to the goldfields with the aim of assisting families to stay together.

Period summary 1778–1850

The first European settlers came to Australia, with the idea and values of eighteenth century Britain. Wealth was derived from private ownership and every ‘decent’ man was expected to provide for himself and his family. No attempt was made to understand the causes of poverty and individuals were seen as bringing destitution on themselves.

The fear ‘undeserving’ poor would take advantage of state or charitable care was soon tempered by the harsh conditions and isolation of the colony and the realities of frontier survival.

As a penal colony the provision of state care centred around the ideas of control and containment. Convict men were set to work in exchange for food rations and a bed in barrack accommodation. Female 'factories' were established as a way to contain and control women and as a refugee of sorts for vulnerable women and their children. The poor, aged and 'insane' were housed in government-built hospitals and asylums. Newly arrived free settlers also needed assistance.

In response to a new environment, isolation and the need to support and encourage new settlement, the colonial government developed and maintained a system of care and benevolence that, while rooted in the values of Britain, was unique to early colonial Australia.