The River Charm (26 page)

 

 

Fast Facts about Australia in the 1840s

 

• Australia experienced a financial depression from 1841 to 1845 caused by a severe drought, the recession in England and a slump in the price of wool, livestock and wheat. Many previously prosperous settlers were ruined. By 1844, approximately 200,000 sheep, which had previously provided a high income from the export of fine wool, had to be slaughtered and boiled down to make tallow for soap and candles.

• Women in the 1840s had no legal rights to property, education or profession. Until 1882, the common law of coverture meant that a married man could do anything he wished with his wife's property, even the money she earned herself. He could sell it, destroy it or give it away without her consent.

• Divorce was not legalised until 1857, and it was con­sidered scandalous for a woman to leave her husband – even if he mistreated her and her children. In the 1840s, a woman's profession was marriage, so by leaving her husband a woman was perceived to have failed in the eyes of society.

• In the early 1840s, less than half of the children in the colony received any form of education. Education for wealthy girls was often restricted to domestic skills and decorative arts – music, drawing, singing and needlework.

• The transportation of convicts to the colony of New South Wales was suspended in 1840. Between 1840 and 1843 the number of assigned convicts shrank from 22,000 to about 4,000. The issue of transportation was the cause of much political debate during the next decade, with landowners wanting cheap convict labour and workers fearing the effect on wages and crime rates. The last convicts arrived in 1849.

• In the 1840s many of the local flora and fauna were still known by the names of English plants and animals, for example native dog for dingo, native bear for koala, native cat for quoll and native squirrels for possums. I have used the names we know now to avoid confusion, though I have used their 1840s names in dialogue.

• In the 1830s, the population of New South Wales was about 60,000 people, with only 12,000 people of European descent who were born in Australia. The population swelled rapidly during the early 1840s with mass immigration, particularly from Ireland due to the potato famine. The city of Sydney was proclaimed in 1842 when approximately 35,000 people lived there.

• In November 1841 alone, approximately 2,000 immigrants arrived in Sydney. There was not enough accommodation or employment for such a large influx of people. Hundreds of immigrants were sleeping under the rock overhangs near Lady Macquarie's Chair. Caroline Chisholm became famous for her work with female immigrants, organising protection, accommodation and employment.

• Most of the labour was provided by convicts transported from England, Scotland and Ireland, as well as ticket-of-leave workers (ex-convicts).

• Bushrangers, often escaped convicts, made travel within the colony dangerous. Newspaper reports show that the Southern Road in the vicinity of Oldbury was frequently the scene of robberies, armed hold-ups and murders.

• John Lynch was arrested on 21 February 1842 for the brutal murders of at least eight people in the Berrima district. He was executed on 22 April 1842.
The Sydney Herald
published an article claiming that those people would not have died if George Barton had not been too drunk to give evidence against Lynch at his first trial for the murder of Thomas Smith at Oldbury in March 1836.

• For thousands of years, the Gandangara people lived in the Southern Highlands around Camden and Goulburn. They lived a nomadic life hunting animals such as goannas, possums and koalas, and gathering tubers and seeds. The local Aboriginal people were severely impacted by European settlement through disease, violence and dispossession of their lands. An influenza epidemic in 1846, the year the Atkinson family returned to Oldbury, killed most of the remaining Indigenous population in the area. By 1856, the local Aboriginal population was considered to be almost extinct.

 

Acknowledgements

 

When I was a child, my grandparents, Nonnie and Papa, several times took me down to the Southern Highlands to Sutton Forest to visit Oldbury with my younger sister Kate. We would peer through the hedges at the grand old house which had been built by my great-great-great-great grandparents James and Charlotte Atkinson in about 1828. By then it was looking neglected and forlorn. We would visit the churchyard where the family was buried. On the long drive down and back, they would tell us romantic stories about James and Charlotte, and their four children.

Over the years, these stories would be added to and enriched by my mother, Gilly, and by snippets from distant aunts and uncles at family gatherings. These anecdotes included James Atkinson wrapping Charlotte in his cloak on board the ship shortly after they met – and I was thrilled when this detail was confirmed in Charlotte Waring's journal.

When my grandmother Nonnie died, she left me a pile of her treasures. Among them were a painting of Oldbury and a pile of old books. One had been written by James and one by Charlotte.

Two years ago an extraordinary heirloom came to light, which had been inherited by a distant relative, Jan Gow. It was Charlotte Waring Atkinson's sketchbook, filled with exquisite sketches. Three generations of my family went to view the sketchbook before it was auctioned. In complete awe we examined the book, as the curator explained the significance of the drawings. It was more than a sketchbook. It was Charlotte's teaching book – that she used to instruct her four children about the natural world around them, about the local Aborigines and about her own family stories.

There are two illustrations which I particularly remember. One was of a graceful Aboriginal mother, clad in a possum skin cloak, carrying her child on her back. In her hand she held the glowing ember from a campfire, which would be used to start the flame of the new home fire. There was such beauty and respect evident in this drawing.

The other was a drawing of Charlotte's own mother, Elizabeth, as an unusually small child travelling with her father. This was the illustration for a family story about her mother, who died when Charlotte Waring was just two years old.

Many of the stories which Charlotte told her children are preserved in
A Mother's Offering to Her Children
, Australia's first published book for children, and in the writings of her own daughters Louisa and Charlotte.

My mother has a beautiful rose gold charm bracelet which has been handed down through her family. One of the charms is a red-brown pebble, which, according to stories from our childhood, Charlotte Waring picked up from the river bank just before she left England forever.

The Atkinson family members did not write about this pebble. However, Louisa several times wrote about the charm stones that the local Aboriginal women always carried – ‘the smooth white stone she carries in her wallet . . . a reference to spirits . . . which shall be carefully kept a mystery from the curious white invader' (‘Recollections of the Aborigines',
Sydney Mail
, 19 September 1863).

This story is a work of fiction, based on the life of this extraordinary family. The key events in this book are based on true happenings. For example, Oldbury really was the scene of murders and multiple bushranger attacks. It was the terrifying attack on Charlotte Atkinson and George Barton near Belanglo which triggered their hasty marriage. A convict did shoot at George Barton through the drawing room window, narrowly missing him, and the bullet hole in the window was recorded as still being there as late as the 1930s. Charlotte did flee Oldbury on horseback through impenetrable wilderness down the Meryla Pass with her four young children, an Aboriginal boy called Charley, their pet koala called Maugie, and Charlotte's writing desk. And Charlotte really did have to fight through the law courts for the right to keep her children – a battle that went on for years and drained the extensive fortune that James Atkinson had bequeathed. Charlotte Waring Atkinson was an inspiring woman of immense courage and determination.

Her daughter Charlotte was also a strong, talented woman. Her outstanding academic results were recorded in the
Sydney Morning Herald
in 1842. She was engaged to William Cummings when she was only fifteen, but they did not marry. She eloped with Thomas McNeilly, a charming Irish coachman, and was married on her nineteenth birthday. Some of her paintings and sketches still survive, as well as an account she wrote about her family published in the
Australian Town and Country Journal
when she was in her late seventies.

I chose to tell this tale as stories within stories to acknowledge the importance of oral history within families, passing down wisdom and knowledge from generation to generation.

I would like to thank many members of my extended family for sharing their own anecdotes and research but particularly: my mother Gilly Evans, Jan Gow, Neil McCormack, Paula MacMillan-Perich, Kaye McBride, Margaret Broadbent, Jen Paterson and Elaine Johns.

As well as the oral history of my own family, I was able to draw on many details recorded in the prolific writings of the family – books, journals, newspaper articles and letters written by James Atkinson, Charlotte Waring Atkinson, Charlotte Atkinson McNeilly and Louisa Atkinson. Some of these publications included
A Mother's Offering to Her Children
by A Lady Long Resident in New South Wales (Charlotte Atkinson),
Journal written on board the Cumberland
by Charlotte Waring (her maiden name),
An Account of the State of Agriculture and Grazing in New South Wales
by Charlotte's first husband James Atkinson, novels by Louisa Atkinson including
Gertrude the Emigrant
,
Tom Hellicar's Children
and
Debatable Ground
, as well as Louisa's collection of newspaper articles including
The Native Arts, Excursions from Berrima, Recollections of the Aborigines
and
A Voice from the Country
. The Atkinson family left an incredible legacy for future generations about life in the nineteenth century.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Patricia Clarke and her wonderful book:
Pioneer Writer – the life of Louisa Atkinson: Novelist, journalist, naturalist
. The extracts of letters in this book are from actual correspondence between the executors of James Atkinson's estate (Alexander Berry and John Coghill) and Charlotte Atkinson, which were quoted in
Pioneer Writer
. Another invaluable modern source was
The Natural Art of Louisa Atkinson
by Elizabeth Lawson. In addition, many books gave me an insight into everyday life in the mid-nineteenth century including:
Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management
,
The Letters of Rachel Henning
and
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew
by Daniel Poole.

I spent many hours searching Trove – the National Library of Australia's digitised collection of newspapers.
The Sydney Herald
,
Australian Town and Country
,
Sydney Mail
and
Sydney Gazette
have dozens of news­paper articles about Oldbury, the Atkinsons, the protracted legal battle, John Lynch, the Cummings family, letters written by George Barton and even his death notice. The staff at the Berrima District Historical and Family History Society were very helpful, particularly archivist Linda Emery and volunteers Philip Morton and Nancy Reynolds, who shared her own childhood memories of Oldbury.

The Atkinson family was fascinated by the Indigenous people of Australia. James Atkinson wrote letters to the Colonial Secretary about the local Aborigines and his fear that ‘in a short time (they) will be nearly extinct' (12 May 1828). Charlotte Atkinson wrote about the Aborigines in
A Mother's Offering
, and in her journal on board the
Cumberland
. Her first entry describes her meeting with James Atkinson and mentions his colonial estate ‘called by himself Oldbury, by the natives Jillynambulla'.

Louisa wrote a series of articles about her childhood recollections of the local Aboriginal clan and their culture. By today's standards, their attitude to Aborigines might be perceived as patronising and racist. However, by the standards of colonial society, their attitudes were unusually sympathetic, concerned and affectionate. They recognised that the Aborigines had been dispossessed of their land, and that colonisation had brought widespread death, disease and destruction of Aboriginal culture. Louisa referred to her Aboriginal ‘friends', acknowledged their relationship to the land and expressed her concern for their future – attitudes which were rare in nineteenth-century Australia.

I have drawn on the writings of the Atkinson family as the source for the descriptions of the Aboriginal characters and scenes in this book. They used nineteenth-century terms such as kings, chiefs and tribes to describe Aboriginal society, so this is reflected in dialogue. I have tried to reflect the spirit of the family's affection for the Indig­enous people, while also conveying the horrific treatment of the Aboriginal people of the area by the white settlers at the time.

As well as the writings by the Atkinson family, I drew on
Aboriginal Legends
by C.W. Peck – a number of Aboriginal folktales collected in the Shoalhaven area during the 1860s, including the two waratah stories – and
Illawarra and South Coast Aborigines 1770 to 1900
by Michael K. Organ, University of Wollongong, 1993.

Thank you to the current owner and ‘custodian' of Oldbury, who has renovated and restored the estate to its former colonial glory. Charlotte Atkinson would be proud.

Finally, I would like to thank the many people who helped in the writing of this book. My first readers were my family – Emily Murrell, Rob Murrell and particularly my sister Kate Forsyth, who gave me much help, advice and encouragement in writing this story based on our shared family history.

As always a huge thank you to my incredible publishing team: Zoe Walton, Brandon VanOver, Pippa Masson, Dorothy Tonkin, and my talented cover designer, Nanette Backhouse.

Apology

In the 1840s most European Australians used disparaging and patronising terms to describe the Indigenous Australians. These terms and attitudes are now considered racist. I have included some of these attitudes and terms, particularly in dialogue, not with the intent to offend any readers but to provide a reflection of attitudes prevalent during the early nineteenth century.

I acknowledge that my ancestors settled on land of the Gandangara people. I would like to pay my respects to the Gandangara people, both living and dead.