My project is made up of four distinct pieces.

The first is a study guide, that is designed to assist and educated its reader on how to expand research into assisted migration of the mid nineteenth century.

The second and third items are both stories, focusing on particular individuals connected to the Quarantine Station for the Q-Station and University of Sydney joint project "Stories from the Sandstone."

The last document is my speech, which I delivered at the Q-Station on 22 November 2015.

Throughout my undergraduate history education, I have been interested in the history of Ireland, particularly its relationship to the British Empire. Was it a colony of Britain? How engaged was it with the imperial project? These were questions that drew my attention.

I think part of this fascination with Ireland is the stories I have been told growing up. Hearing tales from my grandmother of how her grandmother was forced to migrate to Australia by her family because she wanted to marry a Catholic. How she couldn’t read, but always ensured the newspaper she looked at was of the correct orientation.

After learning of the Famine, I came to see the history of Ireland marked by tragedy, by all the souls who perished or migrated away from home. To this day, Ireland remains the only country in Western Europe to have a smaller population than two hundred years earlier.[1] Yet coupled with this story of loss, was one of renewal, opportunity. After all, in some way, I am a product of this history; it was my ancestors who made the trip to Australia.

This project itself began when I asked Peter if he had any Irish connections to the Q Station that he wanted researched. He kindly replied with a gravestone of a man called Joseph Ambler.

Ambler died en route to Australia aboard the Araminta in July of 1854. He was 34 years old, a stonemason, and migrating to Australia with his wife, Esther, aged 24, their daughter, Esther, aged 3, and their newborn son, Jaber, who was born on the voyage. According to Ancestry.com, he was born in Willamstown, part of the parish of Ballingary in County Tipperary. Thus began my journey to attempt to uncover the story of Joseph’s life. But any sort of a story, I couldn’t find.

After much searching through online census records, I became assured that nothing would be found. It was only after consulting with my teacher for this course that we uncovered that the Ambler family wasn’t Irish at all.

Upon looking at the ship arrival records, the faint, handwritten script was deciphered, telling us they were actually from Cheshire, in the west of England.[2] Further probing revealed Ambler and his wife were non-conformist Wesleyan Christians, a denomination that looked to place emphasis of an individual’s private relationship with God. I found that Esther and Joseph were married in Bangor in February 1849.[3] By 1851, they had moved to Cheshire, England, where they gave birth to Esther.[4] In April of 1854, the young family had embarked on migration to Sydney aboard the Araminta, as assisted migrants, hoping to make for themselves a new life.

Both Joseph and Esther were literate, so it is likely that they had read the expanding genre of travel literature that depicted the rewards of hard work in the colonies. Historian Robin Haines has explored assisted migration to the colonies. She argues that migrants were not merely paupers, vagabonds and sub criminals, but were hard working individuals, who looked to take advantage of generous assistance schemes put forward by private philanthropic groups and colonial governments.[5] Potential migrants were educated and knowledgeable, and were responsive to messages such as those espoused by John Dunmore Lang, a politician from New South Wales who published in 1852 The Australian Emigrant’s Manual or, A Guide to the Gold Colonies of New South Wales and Port Philip.[6] In this guide, he outlined the plentiful bounty of the Australian colonies, describing the excesses of food and material wealth that were available to those who migrated. Through this literature, migrants were enticed to take a gamble, and sail for the colonies, in the hope for a better life.

Yet, as Ambler’s death reminds us, not all the endings were happy. Death accompanied new life, particularly for infants, how suffered the most from the cramped conditions on transport ships. Despite the upmost care, diseases such as dysentery, pneumonia, scarlet fever and diarrhoea, could all end one’s life prematurely.[7] Coupled with this physical loss, was also the loss of a previous life, the loss of one’s old home. When migrants moved to Australia, they had to balance the creation of a new identity with that of their old. What Ambler’s grave stones represent to us is a relic from the past, a physical reminder of the suffering that previous generations endured to make for themselves a better life. History is important, as it calls upon us to remember those who suffered in the past, so that in the future we can remember the difficulties that our forebears faced, and in this remembrance draw strength.

NOTES

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1 See Patrick Joyce, “The Journey West”, Field Day Review, 10 (2014) pp. 62 – 93; See also, Malcolm Campbell, “Ireland's Furthest Shores: Irish Immigrant Settlement in Nineteenth-Century California and Eastern Australia” in Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 71, no. 1 (February 2002), pp. 59-90 David Fitzpatrick, ‘“The Galling Yoke of Oppression”: Images of Tipperary and Australia, 1853 -1868’ in Tipperary Historical Journal (1991) pp. 82 – 108; David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Cornell University Press 1994)

2 NRS 906, Immigrant ship reports - ‘Araminta’, ‘Plantagenet’, and ‘Sabrina’, 1854 [4/1881.3].

3 The North Wales Chronicle and Advertiser for the Principality, 27th February 1849 p. 3

4 Esther in the UKBMD

5 See Robin Haines, Emigration and the Labouring Poor: Australian Recruitment in Britain and Ireland, 1831 – 60 (London: Macmillan 1997); also Haines’ other work continues this theme of migrant agency, see Robin Haines, “Indignant Misfits or Shrewd Operators? Government-assisted Emigrants from the United Kingdom to Australia, 1831 – 1860” in Population Studies, vol. 48 no. 2 (July 1994) pp. 223 – 247;Robin Haines, “‘The idle and the drunken won’t do there’: Poverty, the new poor law and nineteenth century government-assisted emigration to Australia from the United Kingdom”, in Australian Historical Studies 27 no. 108 (1997) pp. 1 – 21; Robin Haines, Life and Death in the Age of Sail: The Passage to Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press 2003)

6 John Dunmore Lang, The Australian Emigrant’s Manual or, A Guide to the Gold Colonies of New South Wales and Port Philip (London, 1852)

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