"I have another duty, equally sacred, a duty to myself " Dora: A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen,1879
1. Welcome to Our Foremothers - "Here is one story ..."
2. First Owners
On this page:
KOORIE STORY: Pre 1863.
SOCIAL STORY: Melbourne 1863.
3. Sara and Sheyda Rimmer
On this page:
OUR STORY: Sarah Curry
KOORIE STORY: 1864 Corandarrk - Diaspora, the Start;
SOCIAL STORY: The Immigrants Home, 'The Fortunes of Mary Fortune'.
4. Smythesdale Goldfields
On this page:
SOCIAL STORY: Women on the goldfields - 'What a Woman on Ballaraat Can Do'; The Sandhurst Impersonator; the Sinking Cathedral.
5. The Egalitarian Idea
On this page:
KOORIE STORY: Resisting Oppression - Louisa Briggs;
SOCIAL STORY:
Enlightenment Thinking; Education; the Education Act. 1872.0's-80's - Free, Compulsary and Secular Education; Not Equal if you are Aboriginal
6. A Fair Go
On this Page:
OUR STORY: Sarah's 'Fair Go'.
KOORIE STORY: Struggles; Coranderrk Petition.
SOCIAL STORY: A Fair Go, the 1882 Tailoresses Strike, the Woman's Suffrage Society; the 'Mother of Womanhood Suffrage' - Louisa Lawson; Orphans & Institutions.
7. Going Backwards
On this Page:
KOORIE STORY:
the Half Caste Amendment Act oy Murphy; Coranderrk.
SOCIAL STORY - Reaction; 1890’s Economic Depression; Women's Paid Work.
8. Running Free
On this page:
OUR STORY: "NO DAUGHTER OF MINE ..."; Hard Yakka.
KOORIE STORY: Indigenous Exclusion.
9. Women Were Not Quiet
On this Page:
Social Story: The Hospital Run By Women For Women;The Victorian Lady Teachers' Association; The 1891 'Monster' Suffrage Petition - Vida Goldstein.
10. Building Peace at Home WW1
On this page:
OUR STORY
KOORIE STORY - Coranderrk Closure
SOCIAL STORY - Conscription; White Feathers; The Zurich Women's Peace Conference; Free Trade
11. A World Not Fit For Heroes
On this page:
OUR STORY
KOORIE STORY: Australian Aborigines League; Cummeraaginja; 26th January, Day of Mourning - Beryl Booth, Margaret Tucker.
SOCIAL STORY: Economic Depression; Making Do - Yvonne Smith.
12. Another War - WW2
On this page:
OUR STORY Our Family
KOORIE STORY: There's Work When We Need You - Nora Murray.
SOCIAL STORY: Pulling Together - Edith Morgan; After the War - Things Weren't All Rosy - Joyce Stevens.
13. Howard's Way - the 1950's
On this page:
OUR STORY
KOORIE STORY: Maralinga - Joan Wingfield, Gwen Rathman; More Protest - Warburton Ranges; Lake Tyers; More Protest;
SOCIAL STORY: Camp Pell; Conformity & Hidden Poverty; The Communist Party Dissolution Bill..
14. A Life Well Spent
On this page:
OUR STORY - Sad times
SOCIAL STORY: Hypocrisy; Hope
Our Foremothers is published by
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© Geraldine Robertson except for study, social justice and feminist sharing.
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3. SARAH CHANDLER CURRY
On this page:
OUR STORY: 1864 Sarah Curry.
KOORIE STORY: 1864 Coranderrk; Diaspora, the Start;
SOCIAL STORY: The Immigrants Home, 'The Fortunes of Mary Fortune'.
Sarah Curry was:
- one of your great, great, great grandmothers,
- one of my great grandmothers and
- the mother of my grandmother, Nana Ritchie.
On her birth record it says that her father, Ralph Curry, was a miner (although it says he was a trader on the ship’s records). He was born at 38 Chester Street, Durham, England and was 38 at the time of her birth.
Her mother was Mary Curry, born from Northumberland, England and she was 35 at the time of Sarah’s birth.
They were married at Durham and came to Australia with their children Anne – 11 years; Mary – 9 years; Margaret – 7 years; Ralph – 5 years and Susannah – 1 year.
The family sailed from London on the package ship RESULT, as Intermediate Steerage passengers. They landed at Melbourne in August 1863.
The RESULT caught fire and sank in Hobson’s Bay a year later. It is the Melbourne Illustrated News depiction I have included here. I found it of the State Library of Victoria site.
Sarah was born on the 3rd July 1864 at Station Gully in the District of Smythesdale, in the middle of the Central Victorian goldfields.
A doctor, Dr Griffiths and a nurse, Mrs (Mints), helped with her birth.
KOORIE STORY - Diaspora, the start.
1864, the year Sara was born, was the year the Cooranderrk Aboriginal Mission was set up.
1869
Aboriginal Protection Act legislatively enshrined the notion that Aborigines were socially children, incapable of determining their own futures.
Men of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station were demanding wage payments for their labour and official tenure of the station.
Taking Time a women's historical data kit Yvonne Smith Union of Australian Women
I can’t find record of Station Gully (where Sarah was born) ever existing. It doesn’t sound as if it was meant to be a permanent place, does it?
Was she born in a tent?
The Fortunes of Mary Fortune
To convince myself that I was awake I got up and dressed myself. I was surrounded on all sides by a calico wall that rendered windows quite unnecessary.
… Never shall I forget my first look at the diggings by daylight … It was from a back entrance that I saw the piles of uprooted soil, where the diggers were burrowing like moles, and heard the monotonous rock of a hundred cradles that went ‘swish, swish’ down by the creek that wound through the Flat.
It was from thence also that I saw the long double lines of business tents that formed the street, and the waving of gay flags of all nationalities, from the rough flag poles in front of store, or restaurant, or billiard room, or what-not.
It was from thence, too, that I laughed at and commented on the extraordinary display of constructive and adaptive ability displayed in the material and formation of the hundreds of odd chimneys within my view.
Lucy Sussex Penguin Australian Women’s Library 1989
The type of person attracted to gold rushes and the excitement
and danger this provides is often not the type of person who makes the best husband and father, and people wanting to settle down and have a family don’t usually go across the world looking for gold and a dream!
Letter from the Magistrate of the City Police Court, Melbourne, to the Chief Secretary of Victoria, dated 14th June 1856:
Previous to the gold discoveries the crime of desertion was of infrequent occurrence, which however I regret to say is not now the case.
The scattered nature of the population, and the number of goldfields and central towns, renders it a difficult task to trace a person’s locality, thus the mother of a family may in vain seek the father, who in the eager pursuit of his vocation forgets the ties of nature.
The increase to our population has been attended by a worse than a proportionate number of idle and dissolute persons who regardless of all social bonds, become familiar but with crime, drunkenness and the Watch House.
To these causes may be attributed the many instances of desertion, and the painful cases of distress that so frequently come under my notice.Kay Daniels & Mary Murnane, Uphill all the way A documentary History of Women in Australia, University of Qld Press, 1980
Also,
Jenny Lee:
Desertion was the poor man’s divorce, and court maintenance orders from one colony could not be enforced in another.So ‘doing a flit’ on one’s family was a common practice … work was casual or seasonal, physically grueling and unskilled; where it was extremely difficult to establish a family life; where there were few opportunities for people of small means to set themselves up on the land. …
Though historians … have romanticized the masculine society of the bush, there was precious little romance for those who actually endured it or for the families they left behind.
A Most Valuable Acquisition Verity Burgmann, Jenny Lee, McPhee Gribble 1980
NEGLECTED ?
Geelong. 1863. Sir, I have the honor to bring to your notice, the case of the two children who have been left destitute from the fact as their mother Eliza Taylor 'alias' Birdwood having been sentenced to Twelve Months Imprisonment at the Sessions, Geelong, on the 8th inst. for stealing from the person.
I beg further to add, that the children although 10 and 12 years of age, are in a very weakly state of health, emaciated, which I attribute to their being neglected, and want of sufficient nourishment for a long time past, and would strongly urge their case to your consideration in order that you would be pleased to grant the necessary authority for their admission into the "Immigrants Home" Melbourne - there being no other institution that I am aware of to receive them, and being very reluctant to send them to Gaol … Mayor
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