,+Saturday,+May+6,+1871;+Issue+75.jpg) |
| Idealised Deck Scene on an Immigrant Ship The Graphic (London, England), May 6, 1871 |
My opinion is that the inhabitants of Queensland would better consult the ultimate interests of their country by putting up for a time with a limited supply of carefully selected immigrants than by having it cursed and polluted by the introduction, under whatever guise, of the scum and refuse of the town populations of Great Britain.
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| Thomas Harlin ca. 1870 State Library of Queensland |
In 1866 a recently arrived Englishman felt impelled to write a long
letter to the Brisbane Courier
questioning the quality of immigrants being recruited in Britain to sail to
Queensland.
Thomas Harlin had sailed on the ship Southern Ocean for Moreton Bay. On board was a large number
of assisted and free passage emigrants intended for public works in the Colony, chiefly
to work on the railway being constructed from Ipswich to the Darling Downs.
Harlin and many other paying passengers soon noticed that, among the
labourers, a group of men that seemed grossly unqualified for the jobs for
which they were recruited. Harlin described them thus:
It was quite unnecessary for me to look twice at the men,
two hundred and fifty or thereabouts in number, consigned to Queensland as
"railway artisans," in order to feel satisfied that a considerable
proportion of them had been drawn from the loafing, and not from the working,
population of Great Britain. [3]
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| Henry Jordan 1887 State Library of Queensland |
Two ideas seemed to have possessed the minds of the
Commissioners; the first was - that the poorest, idlest, and most worthless -
those who were no use at home, and whom they were very glad to get rid of,
would do very well to send out here; and secondly, - they appeared to think
that the whole of our land fund would be properly disposed of in sweeping
England of her useless population.
The very poorest, the most degraded, the most worthless,
men of no value, either to their employers or to themselves, seemed to have
been selected as being most in need of a change of air, as if their removal to
a distant part of the globe would effect any transformation in such characters
- make the lazy, hulking loafer an industrious, thrifty, and frugal man, or
transform the miserable slattern into a clean and tidy housewife.
Now, however, these things were altered. The Imperial
government has placed the money derived from the sale of lands into the hands
of the colonists themselves, to do with it as they thought best, and it was not
now deemed desirable to devote it to the purpose of relieving England of her
worst paupers. [4]
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| No more of your rubbish! Ipswich Punch April 1866 |
According to Harlin, the navvies recruited by Jordan were properly
vetted and required to provide references. Simpson, another emigration agent,
took it upon himself to make up the numbers before the ship sailed, by recruiting a large number of emigrants from the poorer areas of London. It is unclear what
connection, if any, Simpson had to Jordan.
[It was] my belief that several of the chosen of Mr.
Simpson had been loafers and lurchers[5]
about the street corners of Whitechapel, Rotherhithe, Greenwich, and Deptford,
well known, at all events in personal appearance, to the police of those
districts, who had probably never taken kindly to regular work, and had
certainly never been regularly employed as navvies.[6]
Henry Jordan’s time as the Emigration Commissioner was marred by controversy
and he returned to Queensland in 1866. He
continued his parliamentary career into the 1880s & died in 1890.
His best efforts at bringing immigrants to Queensland were undone by
the economic crisis in the late 1860s, which resulted in the unemployment
suffered by many of the newcomers. A cartoon in the Ipswich Punch magazine nicely
sums up the mood of the time.
 |
| Ipswich Punch April 1866 |
In 1869, Thomas Harlin was appointed as the first headmaster at the
Brisbane Grammar School. In the 1870s he moved on to Melbourne Grammar School
& died in Melbourne in 1913.
© K. C.
Sbeghen, 2014.
