Lost Relations

‘Lost Relations is a quiet masterpiece. In a meditation on his family, his country and his craft, Graeme Davison shows us why he is Australia’s most creative and original historian. It will delight and instruct family historians and general historians alike as he seeks his lost relations, all the while conducting a conversation with his readers about historical imagination and truth.’

—Professor Janet McCalman, University of Melbourne

‘How to produce a good family history? Get a master historian to write about his own. History and family history are combined in this fascinating book.’

—John Hirst, La Trobe University

‘Graeme Davison’s latest publication departs from his usual historical output in being a study of his own family history, but it is written with the same depth of research and breadth of historical understanding as his more academic oeuvre, and with his usual grace and wry intelligence. It will appeal especially to family historians, but also the wider audience who enjoy Australian social history.’

—Professor Marian Quartly, Monash University

Other books by the author

The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (MUP 1978 and 2004)

The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia learned to tell the time (OUP 1994)

The Use and Abuse of Australian History (A&U 2000)

Car Wars: How the car won our hearts and conquered our cities (A&U 2004)

University Unlimited: The Monash story (with Kate Murphy) (A&U 2012)

First published in 2015

Copyright © Graeme Davison 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

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ISBN 978 1 74331 946 8

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Cover photograph: Author's collection

For Helen

and in memory of our mother

May (Hewett) Davison

1909–2004

Contents

INTRODUCTION The great-aunt’s story

CHAPTER ONE Hook Farm

CHAPTER TWO London

CHAPTER THREE The voyage of the Culloden

CHAPTER FOUR Five weddings and a funeral

CHAPTER FIVE Wesley Hill

CHAPTER SIX The millers’ tale

CHAPTER SEVEN Campbell’s Creek

CHAPTER EIGHT Williamstown

CHAPTER NINE Richmond Hill

CONCLUSION Legacies and life chances (includes picture section) 

Acknowledgements

Picture acknowledgements

Notes

Northeast Hampshire in the early nineteenth century. The hamlet of Hook (centre) is strategically located at the crossroads between the London road, bisecting the map diagonally from northeast to southwest, and the subsidiary north-south connections to Reading in the north and the nearest market town, Odiham, in the south. The village of Newnham, with its manor and parish church, lies immediately to the west. Hook Farm is indicated by the patchwork of open fields and woodland to the northwest of the junction. With the growing traffic along the road, Hook will wax and Newnham will wane. (Ordnance Survey First Series, 1817, Sheet 12 (detail), British Library)

The West End. In 1841, John Fenwick and his family were living in Dacre Street, a narrow street off Broadway, only a block from Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. In the mid-1840s the construction of a new main road, Victoria Street, forced many poor families, including the Fenwicks, to move on. By 1851, they had moved across St James Park to 97 Regent Street, a few blocks from St George’s Hanover Square, the church where they had married in 1825. (Payne’s Illustrated Plan of London, 1846 (detail), National Library of Australia)

At the Female Emigration Society’s Home in Hatton Garden the needlewomen made preparations for their long voyage. (Illustrated London News, 12 March 1853)

The Golden Mile in the early 1850s. Most of Melbourne’s residents lived within the rectangular grid of streets laid out by Surveyor Robert Hoddle in the late 1830s. The Immigration Depot, where the needlewomen were accommodated, is located on a government reserve at the west end of town. Jane Hewett and her family lived in Russell Street, in the more respectable eastern end. (Plan of the City of Melbourne published by Campbell and Ferguson, Melbourne 1853? (detail), State Library of Victoria)

Wesley Hill took its name from the Wesleyan Church, the first on the goldfields, planted above the reefs and gullies of Forest Creek in 1852. Robert Hewett ‘pitched his tent’ on Sailors’ Flat (right) in 1852 and later purchased a double block of land on the top of the hill at the point where the road deviates opposite the Welsh Calvinist Church where he built a simple cottage. Other significant features of the landscape are Little Bendigo, home of the Hewetts’ kinsmen the Swallings, the Melbourne and Murray River Railway, and the cemetery reserve at Pennyweight Flat (top). (Map of Castlemaine, Victorian Mines Department, 1861 (detail), State Library of Victoria)

Gold was not the only maker of fortunes in gold-rush Victoria. Between the early 1850s and the 1870s the miller James Maxfield and his family migrated by stages along the Sydney Road from Kilmore to Broadford and then to Longwood. As the wheat frontier moved to the northwest, and the railway supplanted the ox and horse teams, Maxfield’s mills were marooned from the main corridors of commerce. (Tulloch and Brown’s Map of the Colony of Victoria, 1856 (detail), State Library of Victoria)

Campbell’s Creek, 1861. From Castlemaine the main road follows the creek valley, with the township spread out along its north-south axis. The shaded areas indicate the main alluvial deposits, with concentrations to the north, near Twenty Foot Hill and to the south near the Five Flags Hotel, each with a nearby Chinese Camp. Samuel Stephens’s hay and corn store was located at the north end of the town opposite Campbell’s Flat. (Map of Castlemaine, 1861 (detail), Victorian Mines Department)

From their house in Parker Street, the Hewetts were within only a few minutes’ walk of the Williamstown Beach Railway Station, the State School, the Mechanics Institute and the Electra Street Wesleyan Church. Nelson Place, facing the still-active waterfront, was only a step further away. (Plan of Williamstown, Department of Lands and Survey, 1894 (detail), State Library of Victoria)

In the 1850s, Richmond was one of an inner ring of suburban townships, formed by the overflow of population from the gold-rush city. Separated from the city by parklands, it attracted some of the city’s elite, whose villas and spacious gardens clustered on the top of the hill. Jane Hewett and her daughter were among the poorer cottage-dwellers who settled on the slopes to the north. (James Kearney, Melbourne and Its Suburbs, 1855 (detail), State Library of Victoria)

CHAPTER NINE

Richmond Hill

‘Men do not emigrate in despair, but in hope,’ the historian W.K. Hancock famously remarked. We can only guess what hopes Jane Hewett and her family carried to Port Phillip in 1850. The fact that they emigrated as a family is surely significant. It testifies to the bonds of mutual dependence nurtured by life on a family farm and consolidated by the premature death of their husband and father. But if Jane had expected her family to continue farming and living together in the new land, she must have been disappointed. By the mid-1850s, with her eldest son dead, and all but two of her other children married and scattered across the colony, Jane and two of her daughters, Mary Ann and Jane, alone remained single. Mary Ann, as we related in Chapter 6, became a monthly nurse and farmer in Gippsland, but what happened to the two Janes?

Theirs was not an unusual predicament. At the peak of the rush, many women were left to wait in Melbourne as their menfolk pursued their dreams of gold. ‘While in no country is wife desertion so common as this, in no country is it harder for the poor woman to live, and maintain herself and her children in an honest way,’ the Melbourne Argus observed in 1860. Widows and single women, like Jane and her daughter, may have been little better off. They gravitated to the cheapest housing they could find, within walking distance of the low-paid, insecure employment, as domestic servants, charwomen (cleaners), laundry women, hawkers, needlewomen and street-sellers, that was all that stood between them and poverty, or prostitution.

Women without partners or children leave only the faintest footprint in the official record, so we do not know with any certainty where the widow Jane lived, or with whom, for the next decade. Perhaps she accompanied one of her children to country Victoria—Lucy, the eldest daughter, married to a well-to-do businessman, is the most probable. But more likely she was already living where we next find her, in a cottage on the outskirts of Melbourne. Jane Hewett was 68 years old when her name appeared for the first time in the 1859 Victorian Directory, in Lennox Street, Richmond. Five years later she was listed in the local rate book at the same address, as owner and occupier of a four-room timber cottage rated at £26 a year. Located just under the brow of the hill, their home was only a few blocks from the house of Edward Bell, the governor’s secretary, who had employed Elizabeth Fenwick as a servant when she arrived in Melbourne in 1850. Two hundred metres or so to the north, however, Lennox Street threads through a pocket of crowded, low-lying timber houses later condemned as a slum. (In the mid-twentieth century it was cleared to make way for Housing Commission high-rise flats.) Halfway between the hill and the flat, respectability and poverty, Jane and her daughter had become members of that ill-used class, the genteel poor.

Although cramped by our standards, Jane’s cottage was typical of the houses of the time: more than two-thirds of Richmond houses were built of wood, and three-quarters had four rooms or less. A cottage like hers would have cost around a hundred pounds, or about two-thirds of a workman’s yearly wages, in 1861. How she acquired it is unknown. Perhaps, after selling up the family’s possessions at Hook Farm, she had saved enough for a modest home in Australia. Perhaps her relatives—brother-in-law James, or one of her children—helped out. Or perhaps her carpenter son Robert contributed in kind. However she managed it, the Richmond cottage became the rock of her salvation.

I have often walked down Lennox Street, usually with a group of students or other historical tourists in tow. Richmond was the subject of my honours dissertation, my first extended effort at writing history. I spent many weeks combing through council rate books, mapping houses and tracing individuals, yet somehow never encountered, or recognised, the name of my great-great-great-grandmother. It did not occur to me that one of my forebears could have passed that way. I had come from lower-middle-class Essendon in search of the Victorian working class, not realising that I was descended from one of them. I walked the backstreets of Richmond photographing humble cottages much like Jane’s without knowing that an ancestor’s home could be in my viewfinder. Years later, when I designed a walking tour of the area, I plotted a route along Bridge Road, down Judd Street, where the boot manufacturer and staunch Methodist Daniel Bedggood established his factory, and back to Lennox Street, turning the corner just where Jane’s house used to stand. Now, alas, it has gone, demolished to make way for an annex of the nearby Epworth Hospital.

As I thought about the lives of the two Janes, mother and daughter, my sympathies were aroused for the many other women who found themselves alone in a new colony, without a male breadwinner or protector, and far from the homeland networks of kin and neighbours. In Richmond, young women between fifteen and 30 years of age outnumbered men by 60 to 40, yet the opportunities for their employment were severely limited. In 1859, one of the Hewetts’ neighbours, Harriet Clisby, a homeopath and feminist, living with her husband in Highett Street, wrote to the Argus newspaper to raise the problem of female employment. ‘The paths that are generally open to women are full to overflowing,’ she observed. ‘And then what a miserable pittance is received for the 10, 12, and 14 houred day compared to what men receive for their eight hours. All women don’t want to be needlewomen, governesses or servants.’ Nor, she pointed out, did they necessarily want to be wives.

All women do not wish to marry, whilst others lose their husbands; and what would be done with these? They may have means and they may not. In either case, they need work, whereby they may come out of that state of uncertainty and incompleteness which at present is the state of their minds—the state of their home life.

Local charities were keenly aware of the predicament of Richmond’s female unemployed. ‘The cases relieved during the past year have been of the ordinary kind—widows, deserted wives, and fatherless children; and not a few cases arising from sickness, and want of employment,’ the Richmond Ladies’ Benevolent Society reported in 1870. Their assistance, in many cases, came in the form of a sewing machine, the entry ticket into the standard form of paid employment for women.

Jane Hewett, ‘widow’, continued to be listed as owner and occupier of the house at 46 Lennox Street until 1874. When she died, in October 1875, aged 84, after a five-month illness, she was living at Longwood with her eldest daughter, Lucy. A ‘gentlewoman’, according to her death certificate, she was buried in the Longwood cemetery, close to the old Hume Highway and within view of the rugged foothills of the Strathbogie Ranges. Thirty-six years had passed since she and her children had gathered in another graveyard, half a world away amidst the soft green fields of Hampshire, to bury their husband and father, John Hewett. As her own life neared its close, did Jane relive her fateful decision to emigrate, and ponder the chain of consequences that flowed from the voyage of the Culloden? Had it all been worthwhile?

In 1876, Mrs Jane Hewett, widow, was succeeded by Miss Jane Hewett, dressmaker, as owner-occupier of the Lennox Street cottage. ‘Dressmaker’ was a small step up from ‘needlewoman’, implying more skill and a semi-professional relationship with a clientele of respectable well-to-do women whose clothes were ‘bespoke’, made to measure, rather than manufactured for sale off the peg (‘slops’). But if the title carried more respect, it did not necessarily offer much more pay. She was edging uncomfortably close to the situation her sister-in-law Elizabeth Fenwick had emigrated to escape and that her nieces Clara and Elizabeth in Wesley Hill still endured. Her brother John took a kindly interest in her welfare, leaving her a small bequest of £50 in his will. Her residence at 29 Lennox Street—the number changed when the street was renumbered in the early 1880s—was undisturbed for the next decade, but after 1888 she suddenly disappears from both the Richmond rate book and the directory. In 1889, the ‘Misses Hewett dressmakers’ appear in Gore Street, Fitzroy, but a year later their names have disappeared. A ‘Mrs Jane Hewitt’ (sic) arrives in Rule Street, Richmond, in 1891, disappears, and is succeeded by a ‘Miss Hewett’ at 97 Church Street in 1894.

What had happened to disturb the apparently settled existence of the middle-aged spinster? The late 1880s was an optimistic time when house prices rose dramatically and there was a good deal of speculative development on Richmond Hill. Could Jane have decided to sell the house and invest in a dressmaking business in Fitzroy (with her sister Mary Ann or her niece Clara perhaps?) only to succumb to the financial crash of the early 1890s? Or was it simply that, with advancing age, she was unable to earn a living and sold her house for income? Whatever the reason, by the end of the 1890s, she had lost the Richmond cottage and become a bird of passage, moving from one rented house to another. When she next appears, on the 1908 electoral roll, it is as co-tenant with a widow, Anna Thomas, in a house owned by John Lennox at 19 Bowen Street, Richmond, just around the corner from her old abode.

Jane was now over seventy years of age, one of the thousands of gold-rush settlers whose fortunes had been blighted by the 1890s depression. In the midst of the crisis, Melbourne’s charitable institutions, the only source of relief for indigent old people, almost collapsed under the pressure of demand. In 1899, the Victorian government had recognised their plight by introducing one of the world’s first old-age pension schemes. In order to qualify, applicants had to show not just that they were indigent but also that they no longer had family able to care for them. Jane’s sister Mary Ann had died in 1892 and her only surviving sibling, Lucy, was now a widow herself. If Jane did not qualify soon after the scheme was introduced, she would certainly have done so after Lucy’s death in 1912. After two decades of anxiety and insecurity, she was about to enter perhaps the most serene stage of her long life.

In 1915, John Traill, manager of Huddart Parker, a shipping company, and a leading member of the Charity Organisation Society, nominated Miss Jane Hewett for admission to the Old Colonists’ Homes in Fitzroy. Its council ‘unanimously’ agreed to accept her. The Homes had been established by the Old Colonists’ Association in 1872 ‘to assist the poor and distressed pioneers of this colony whose position and services entitle them to a more congenial home than the Benevolent Asylum’. The words ‘pioneer’ and ‘old colonist’ had a definite meaning: they applied especially to the first-comers, those who had arrived before Separation in 1851, although eligibility was later extended to those who arrived before 1855. Admission to the homes, like the old age pension, was meant as a reward for those who had suffered the privations of the ‘early days’. So we can appreciate why, when Vic and Emma visited Jane in the Old Colonists’ Homes in the 1920s, she reminded them that she had arrived ‘before the gold rush’. Preference was also given to ‘those who had been in superior positions in life previously’, that is, to the genteel poor. That Jane was ‘unanimously’ accepted suggests that she was seen as deserving not only because of her poverty but also because of her respectability.

A little village of old people, housed in Gothic cottages clustered in a garden setting, the Old Colonists’ Homes were a colonial adaptation of a traditional English ideal. Jane may have felt as though she was returning to one of the sixteenth-century almshouses in the yard of All Saints Church in her mother’s old town, Odiham. While residents each had their own cottage, guests were not permitted, or only as a special favour. ‘I have pleasure in informing you that the Council has granted you permission to have your friend Miss McDonald to stay with you during the Christmas and New Year holidays,’ the secretary wrote to Jane in December 1916. Once a year, the cottagers were taken on a picnic excursion to Sorrento, and occasionally Jane travelled to the country herself to stay with friends.

In 1925, a Herald reporter visited the Homes to spend ‘An Hour with the Old Colonists’. Their cottages, he noted, were a picture of ‘comfort and cleanliness’. Though subject to regular inspection, ‘each house is really its occupant’s castle’, ‘neat as doll’s houses, furnished to the taste of the resident’, each with its own neatly stacked pile of firewood. More than half the residents were women. Two of them, ‘in their cradles when Victoria was crowned’, contested the honour of being the oldest. Three years earlier, Jane had held the title, but now a new resident, Mrs Susan Soward, 94, beat her by three months. The reporter returned a year later to find Jane—‘the most wonderful old lady I have ever met’—writing Christmas cards, without even the aid of spectacles. ‘Glasses make my eyes tired when I’m writing,’ she explained, handing over half a dozen addressed envelopes for inspection. The writing was firm and straight. ‘My sight is good, I hear as well as ever I did. I haven’t an artificial tooth in my head, and so can chew my food like a youngster, my health is perfect, and I’m 96 years old.’ (She was actually 94, but the ambition to best Mrs Soward may have been irresistible.)

‘I’m from Hampshire. Hook Farm, Hampshire, where my father and his father were born,’ she continued. ‘All my sisters married here, but I was the odd one out. I remained single. I’m a real old maid.’ Had she forgotten her spinster sister Mary Ann, or did the reporter mishear her? She pointed to a row of photographs on the mantelpiece. ‘There’s portraits of some of the young men in my family.’ A previous press article depicting her as the oldest inhabitant of the Old Colonists’ Homes may have prompted her great-nephews Vic and Bob to visit and record her story. Bob, a keen photographer, posed the old lady with representatives of the succeeding generations. Alongside the photographs of her ‘young men’ was one of the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII), who had recently visited Australia. ‘And you have a distinguished young man’s picture there, I see,’ the reporter observed. ‘Oh, the Prince of Wales. Yes indeed. A fine young man too, Prince Charming. I’m as loyal as they make ’em.’

Two years later, on 9 October 1928, Jane Hewett, ‘lady’s companion’, suffered a fatal heart attack. At 96 she was still the second-oldest inhabitant of the Old Colonists’ Homes: her rival Mrs Soward outlived her by a year. The next day, a two-line advertisement appeared in the Argus announcing her death. She was buried the same afternoon, with as little fuss as she had caused in life, in the Boroondara cemetery. On a recent visit, I stopped by the gatehouse and collected a map showing the location of her grave, and followed a path along the western wall to a shady spot under a row of pines. There, between the solid granite tombstones of two worthy Presbyterians, the last of the family to embark on the Culloden lies in an unmarked grave.

CONCLUSION

Legacies and life chances

Family history may be the oldest kind of history. Since Old Testament times families have collected genealogies and handed down stories of their tribe. ‘Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers who begat us,’ begins the psalmist. Most family histories are acts of homage offered by descendants to their forebears. They magnify their ancestors’ virtues and achievements and gloss over, forget or at least forgive their faults. By the time the youngest of Robert and Elizabeth’s children, Frank Deacon Hewett, died in 1954, his parents’ story had been shaped to provide a suitable pedigree for a respectable public servant. Robert was now described as a ‘contractor’, not just a carpenter, while Elizabeth was said to have come from aristocratic ‘Berkly Square’ rather than humble Old Kent Road. She emigrated ‘with her family’ rather than as a ‘distressed needlewoman’. Other Hewett descendants imagined a glorious ancestral past. Robert and Elizabeth’s daughter Clara regaled her niece Millie with tales of the lost ‘Fenwick millions’, while their grandson John Hewett vowed, as he left on a trip to England, to visit the Hewetts’ ‘ancestral castle’.

Like other Australian families, the Hewetts shaped their story as a colonial Book of Genesis. By the early twentieth century, they had begun to cultivate a sense of their history, photographing the last of the pioneers, recording their stories and revisiting the sites of their first settlement. They looked back to the voyage of the Culloden with gratitude and respect, as the gateway to their own fortunate lives. There was real heroism, mixed with desperation, in the decision of Jane and her children to set sail for Port Phillip. In ‘pitching his tent’ on the Castlemaine goldfields, Robert Hewett became our Abraham, the first-comer to our Promised Land. Their children followed in the path they had set, adding further members to the tribe. The first tellers of this story, like Jane Hewett, the maiden aunt with whose memory this book began, tactfully passed over the misfortunes of the diseased and unfruitful branches: the black sheep, hard cases, solitaries and drifters. They forgot or suppressed the memories of bereavement, dispossession, penury, imprisonment, bankruptcy, scandal, and premature and sudden death that shadowed, and often shaped, their lives.

In a post-Freudian age, we may deplore or pity their reluctance to confront the demons in their past. Only if the secret sins and pains of the past are laid bare can we hope to be healed from them—or so it is often said. Yet many of the sad events I recount here were too long forgotten to affect more recent generations, and even when they were not, I wonder whether stoic silence was always more hurtful than disclosure. I did not begin this book looking for skeletons in my family’s cupboard, but once the cupboard was opened, they simply fell out. As a historian, I had no choice but to include them in my story, but the point of revealing them is not healing so much as an enlarged understanding.

Interest in family history usually grows stronger towards the end of life, as our past grows longer and our future shrinks. Genealogy and family history have flourished as baby boomers review their roller-coaster ride from the austere 1940s and 1950s, through the liberated 1960s and 1970s, to their chastening years of maturity. In a famous essay, ‘The Eight Ages of Man’, the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson defined the goal of old age as ‘the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substitutions’. ‘An individual life,’ he continues, ‘is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history.’ Investigating family history, placing oneself in the intersection between one’s own unique life cycle and the history of our times, may be a step towards the integrity Erikson sees as the ultimate goal of life.

Family history grounds our identity in a past deeper than our own memory. Asked when they feel most connected with the past, many people talk about looking at old family photographs, visiting museums and touching heirlooms or other objects associated with their family’s history. A tangible past—a history one can see, touch and feel—often seems more evocative than one based on words alone. In touching heirlooms, we may feel closer to the person who made or used them than we do in simply hearing or reading about them. Anthropologist Diane Bell suggests that heirlooms have a special significance for women in maintaining links between generations otherwise obscured by marriage. Apart from their old home at Wesley Hill and the photographs in my mother’s album, only a handful of commonplace objects survives to connect us with the lives of Robert and Elizabeth Hewett. My kinsman John Boothroyd treasures a spokeshave rescued from Robert’s workshop by another descendant, Roy Mussett, and a small silver button, part of a riding jacket said to have been brought by Elizabeth aboard the Culloden. (What possible use did a London needlewoman have for such a getup?) Beth Pidsley, a distant cousin now resident in Queensland, inherited Robert’s painted sea chest, the Bible and Prayerbook presented to Elizabeth by the Female Emigration Society, and a brooch supposed to have been made from a gemstone given by Robert to Elizabeth. In a short story, ‘The Heirloom’, Beth imagines Robert picking up a milky white stone from the beach as they landed in Australia. ‘“Robert, we shan’t have a betrothal ring,” Elizabeth declares. “This, our very first possession in our new land, can do instead.”’ Heirlooms lend themselves to such flights of fancy; they are relics, designed to stir sentimental attachment, not reliable testimony.

Beyond sentimental attachment or ancestral homage, family history, especially in our times, has become a search for self-understanding. It offers an answer to the question ‘Who do you think you are?’ In tracing where we came from, we hope to understand who we are now. Perhaps, we think, we are not products of our genes and upbringing alone, but of a longer chain of ancestry in which talents, values and foibles, as well as physical characteristics, pass mysteriously from generation to generation. ‘Who does she take after?’ parents and grandparents anxiously enquire about a new addition to the family. They are looking for traits of personality as well as physical resemblance. The answers we give are often wishful, always conjectural, yet we would be unwise to dismiss them entirely.

Personal identity is formed first of all in the family setting. Our most significant role models are usually family members. I was aware as I grew up of my parents’ admiration for my grandfather, the printer, bibliophile and Methodist preacher Vic Hewett. More than anyone else, he modelled and encouraged my interest in history and literature. Even after he died, his influence continued through the books I inherited from his library. Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus, The Poems of Wilfred Owen and Francis Adams’ The Australians—to select just three books among many—mapped my intellectual journey as they had his before me. Vic Hewett, in turn, was formed by the interests, skills and religion of his parents and grandparents, influences I understand better now than I did before I began to write this book. Yet in writing it I have resisted the temptation to create my forebears in my own image, or my generation’s. The Hampshire farmer John Hewett and his wife Jane lived a world away, in time and space, from our Australia. I am now more aware of the ruptures, as well as the continuities, in the lineage that connects those worlds. And more aware, too, of what I have taken from it, and rejected.

Yet continuities there were. The family was English and Protestant, loyalties maintained through four generations by intermarriage with other mainly English, Protestant families. The regional origins of their partners, from Cornwall to Yorkshire and from rural Hampshire to central London, were diverse, but only one family of Scottish and none of Irish descent appeared in its family tree before the fourth generation. In this respect, the Hewetts were probably not unusual: religious sectarianism, or tribalism, was a powerful binding and dividing force in Australia, at least until the Second World War.

As yeomen farmers, the Hewetts were people of ‘the middling sort’, a rank in society that their emigrant descendants largely maintained. In wishing his sons to learn a trade, yeoman John Hewett established a pattern of skilled handwork continued by his son Robert, a carpenter; his grandsons, the engineer Robert Henry and the building inspector Frank; and his great-grandsons, the printers Victor and John, the mechanical engineer Robert (Reuben) and the marine engineer Frank. Not all of the Hewetts’ Australian descendants were able to maintain a respectable position in society, and some fell into poverty. During the gold era, meanwhile, Jane’s eldest girl Lucy and her husband James Maxfield rose a step higher, although by the 1870s, when their business failed, they, like their sister and brother Susan and Robert Maxfield, settled for ‘middling’ occupations, much like those they had left in England. As in many immigrant families, the second and third generations prospered more than the first.

For almost a century, Hewett men tended, unconventionally, to marry women older than themselves. John Hewett, the farmer with whom this story began, was 25 years old, five years younger than Jane Parsons; Robert Hewett three and a half years younger than Elizabeth Fenwick, Robert Henry three years younger than Susan Stephens, Victor seven years younger than my grandmother Emma, and my own father, George Davison, two years younger than my mother, May. In the 1880s, Victorian grooms marrying for the first time were on average about four years older than their brides, so the marriage pattern of the Hewetts flouted contemporary norms. An older man who marries a younger woman potentially increases the size of the couple’s family, although at the risk of a shorter working life over which to rear them. An older woman who marries a younger man, by contrast, may produce a smaller family but may be able to rely on her husband’s longer working life to see them educated and launched into adulthood. Whether by accident or design, the Hewetts’ marriages seem to have reinforced the ‘self-discipline’ and prudential restraint that marked their working, family and religious lives.

Yet as the voyage of the Culloden and the fortunes of its passengers remind us, migration was not a sure recipe for success. Jane Hewett brought her eight children to Australia hoping to improve their prospects and keep her family together, but it was not long before the family scattered, and of her eight children only five appear to have left descendants. ‘Settler colonies,’ Janet McCalman reminds us, ‘were not only sites of dispossession and destruction, they were also severe testing grounds for those who took possession and transplanted their culture and social forms.’ Some single men and women led fulfilling lives, either alone or within the family circle, but others ended their lives as ‘solitaries, drifters and failures’. Their deaths, unlamented and sometimes conveniently forgotten, were simply written out of family history.

Jane’s eldest son, Henry, who died alone in the bush at the age of 32, and her fourth son, Richard, who served time in Maitland Gaol for forgery, were among the casualties of colonisation. Her second son, John, married in haste but appears to have repented at leisure, while two of her daughters, Mary Ann and Jane, remained single, each relying, however, on family support to stay afloat. My own forebears, Robert and Elizabeth, were perhaps the most fruitful, if not the most fortunate in every way. Of their five adult children, four married, giving them, in turn, sixteen grandchildren, 45 great-grandchildren and over a hundred great-great-grandchildren, although—such was the predominance of girls among the second and third generations—few still bear the Hewett surname. Robert, the bush carpenter, is our Abraham, and Elizabeth, the distressed needlewoman from London, is our Sarah. I bless them both, as I also salute Robert’s widowed mother, and their childless brothers and sisters.

Family history, according to one view, should instil pride, a warm glow of satisfaction with the achievements of one’s forebears and an incentive to later generations to conserve their heritage. We visualise our ancestors marching bravely into the future, confident of where they were going, plotting a steady course towards a glorious destination—us. I have no quarrel with those who view it in that light. But family history, understood more broadly, should also foster a measure of family humility. It should embrace the black sheep as well as the white, the wanderers and stumblers as well as the confident marchers. In reclaiming our lost relations, we may learn compassion for those who were caught in the riptides of history, and for those who struggle against them still.

Lychgate of the churchyard of St Nicholas Church, Newnham Green, Hampshire, the last resting place of the yeoman farmer John Hewett. His widow, Jane, emigrated with her eight children to Port Phillip in 1850.

The White Hart Inn (now Hotel), established in the eighteenth century, operated as a staging post for coaches on the road from London to Portsmouth and Southampton. Publican James Hewett looked across the road to Hook Farm, home of his sister-in-law Jane.

Jane Hewett was in her early eighties when the German-born photographer Herman Moser took this image between 1871 and 1874. Found among images of other members of the family in the house at Wesley Hill, it is most likely the matriarch herself.

‘A Collection of Valuable Recipes by Mrs Hewett’, copied by several hands into an 1858 cashbook and left among the relics of the house at Wesley Hill, gathers the family’s stock of household lore from the old country and the new.

The carpenter Robert Hewett (Jane’s third son) and his wife, Elizabeth (née Fenwick), the former needlewoman, visited a Bendigo photographer sometime in the late 1860s to pose for these companion portraits.

Pioneer photographer Richard Daintree captured the manmade devastation of the Forest Creek diggings in this view of Golden Point in 1858. The taller buildings on the horizon line the highway where Robert Hewett began to build his house in this year. (State Library of Victoria)

Robert Hewett’s house at Wesley Hill viewed from the side garden. The low-slung central section, constructed with hand-made bricks, was probably the first to be built, but the original gable was replaced with a skillion roof when the kitchen and bedroom wings were added.

The house at Wesley Hill viewed from Duke Street, c. 1900. The children are Robert Hewett’s grandchildren, Agnes, Millie and Clara Morecroft, who shared the house with their widowed mother, Elizabeth, and maiden aunt, Clara. They are photographed with a neighbour, Mr Smith.

Interior of the kitchen at Wesley Hill today. With its underground cellar, the room appears to have been designed as a kitchen, but was later used by Robert’s daughter Clara as a bedroom.

Kitchen garden at ‘The Ranch’, 1920s. In retirement, Robert Henry Hewett, Robert’s son, returned to Wesley Hill, buying this former pub a few doors from the house his father built; he spent his time growing vegetables and entertaining his grandchildren. His sisters still lived in the family home.

Langstone Mill, the childhood home of James and Robert Maxfield, is situated on the swift-flowing Garron, a tributary of the Wye, near the village of Llangarron in Herefordshire. The low circular window indicates where the axle of the waterwheel, now removed, penetrated the wall.

James Maxfield’s mill once dominated the town of Kilmore. Maxfield took it over from its original owner, James Allan, in the early 1850s and carried out improvements valued at over £5000 later in the decade. (State Library of Victoria)

Lucy Maxfield (née Hewett) (1824–1912). (Euroa Historical Society)

James Maxfield, miller (1819–1887). (Euroa Historical Society)

James Edward Maxfield, son of James and Lucy (1860–1931). (Euroa Historical Society)

Jeannie Maxfield (née Macdonald) (1859–1919). (Euroa Historical Society)

Box Brownie snaps of life at ‘Woodstock’ (centre right) on Upper Flynn’s Creek, c. 1904. Edward (Ted) Maxfield sits astride his horse and inspects a prize bull, while his wife Martha and daughter Kitty prepare to drive to town. Kitty coaxes their dog to jump for a bone and ties the shoes of sister Florrie after paddling in the creek. (Collection of Colin Maxfield)

Miner Samuel Stephens, depicted here as a bandsman in the Castlemaine Volunteer Rifles (c. late 1860s), was born in Cornwall, where tin mining, band music and Methodism were strong. In Campbell’s Creek he became proprietor of a hay and corn store and served on the local council.

Born in Carmarthen, Wales, Martha Lloyd met and married Samuel Stephens in Cornwall before emigrating with him to Burra in South Australia and later to Victoria. This photograph, found among other Stephens photographs, is almost certainly of her.

Susan Stephens (1856–1919), youngest child of Samuel and Martha, married Robert Henry Hewett in 1880.

Robert Henry Hewett (1859–1931), eldest son of Robert and Elizabeth, followed his trade as a railway engineer from Castlemaine to Melbourne in the mid-1880s.

Campbell’s Creek viewed from the northwest in the 1870s. The pitched roof of Samuel Stephens’ house and adjoining hay and corn store appear midway between the Primitive Methodist (left) and Wesleyan Methodist churches. (Castlemaine Historical Society)

Newport Railway Workshops. During the railway boom of the 1880s the workshops became Victoria’s largest industrial complex, employing more than 1500 men, including Robert Hewett. (Public Records Office of Victoria)

Taken in 1883 shortly before the workshops moved from Williamstown to Newport, this photograph of railway fitters captures the dignity of a trade that attracted the elite of the railway’s industrial workforce. (Public Records Office of Victoria)

The respectable Methodist family, c. 1905. From left, Frank, Robert (John), Susan, Victor, Robert Henry and Reuben (Bob) Hewett.

Electra Street Wesleyan Church. Opened in 1876, its imposing interior, with pipe organ, choir stalls and central pulpit, reflected the prosperity of the industrial suburb and the confidence of the ‘Forward Movement’ in contemporary Methodism. (State Library of Victoria)

The author’s grandfather, Victor Hewett (foreground), worked as a compositor in a Christchurch printing shop during his time in New Zealand (1906–07). Printing would become his entrée into the wider worlds of literature, art and book collecting.

Victor Hewett (in bowler hat, centre front row) among young Methodists, c. 1905. Combining evangelical zeal and social uplift, Methodism also accommodated many features of contemporary youth culture such as fashionable dress and cycling.

Jane Hewett, last survivor of the family that emigrated in 1850, now resident in the Old Colonist’s Homes, posed for this photograph around 1920. Her great-nephew Reuben (Bob), the photographer, stands at the rear, while his father, Robert Henry, nurses the youngest male heir, also Robert Henry (‘Harry’) (born 1914).

Aunt Jane Hewett and a female lineage. On the left, Nell, Bob’s wife, baby Meryl and older children Glad and Harry; on the right, May, Frank’s wife, with baby Ruth and daughter Olive.

Victor and Emma Hewett with their first child, the author’s mother, Emma May (born 1909). The family had recently moved to Essendon and Vic would shortly become deputy overseer at Varley Brothers Printery.

The Brothers Hewett: motor engineer Reuben (Bob) (left), tug captain Frank (centre back), and printer Victor (right), farewell their younger brother, John, as he departs on one of his overseas trips with the Church Missionary Society.

Acknowledgements

In February 2013, I accompanied my sister, Helen Hobbs, then visiting us from England for a birthday celebration, back to the Hewett family’s old homes in Castlemaine and Campbell’s Creek. Some of our cousins and children accompanied us. As the self-appointed guide, I had previously made a few enquiries into the family’s history. The story of Elizabeth Fenwick, previously unknown to us, caught my interest and I decided to write a short account for family members. Over the following months, however, the thread grew longer and the story expanded; this book is the result. I wish to thank Helen for the stimulus of her visit and her continuing support for the project. I also thank my cousin Philip Jackson, who accompanied me on an expedition to Flynn’s Creek, and my aunts Marjorie Jackson and Florence Lear for their recollections. Richard Jackson and the folk at the Orient Expresso provided excellent coffee and cheerfully endured my progress reports.

Only when the research was well under way did I make contact with John Boothroyd, who had already compiled a genealogical table of the descendants of Robert and Elizabeth Hewett and interviewed a number of surviving Hewett descendants in the early 1980s. He generously allowed me to make use of his collection and read some draft chapters of this book. I also thank him for introducing me to other Hewett descendants, Colin and Iris Maxfield, Maree Kininburgh, Beth Pidsley and Roy Mussett, who have eagerly supported the project, also making documents and photographs in their possession available. Joy Crawford, daughter of my great-uncle John Hewett, provided valuable details on his life. Geoffrey Fairbairn pointed me towards the panoramic photograph of Campbell’s Creek and helped identify the probable site of the Stephens house. In England, I thank Nick, Mimi and Anne Hart of Llangarron, Penny and Paul Shewry of Malvern, Barry Stapleton of Portsmouth, and archivists at the Hampshire and Wiltshire record offices. In Australia I acknowledge help from librarians and archivists at the Public Record Office of Victoria, the State Library of Victoria, the Uniting Church Archives, Castlemaine Historical Society, the Williamstown branch of the City of Port Phillip Library, Carringbush Library, and Euroa Historical Society. Tony Dingle and Charles Fahey placed their knowledge of mining houses at my disposal, and Tony accompanied me on a visit to Wesley Hill where, thanks to the kindness of Dugald McLellan and Adrian Saunders, we were able to inspect the two Hewett houses. Janet McCalman kindly enabled me to draw on data gathered for her long-term study of maternal health and child mortality.

I wish to thank Janet and my colleagues John Hirst and Marian Quartly for their helpful comments on the manuscript, Tom Griffiths and Andrew May for leads into the literature on family history, and publisher, Elizabeth Weiss, copyeditor Clara Finlay, and editorial manager Angela Handley of Allen & Unwin for their encouragement, incisive criticism and support. Barbara Davison has been a more than tolerant supporter of my late conversion to family history: sharing the journey with her has been one of its special rewards. Our children Jim, Lucy and Mim have also taken an interest: this book is for them and their children too.

GD

May 2014

Picture acknowledgements

The photographs in this volume come mainly from private family sources. As the eldest daughter, and a photographer herself, my mother took a keen interest in old family photographs; her family albums are the principal source. My niece Elizabeth Tranter helpfully digitised and organised some of these images. I am grateful to John Boothroyd, Beth Pidsley and Colin and Iris Maxfield for images in their own collections. Images from public collections are acknowledged in the captions.

Notes

I have made extensive use of the standard genealogical sources, such as parish registers, official registrations of births, marriages and deaths, probate records, city directories and British census records, often accessing them through Ancestry.com, Find My Past and other online sources. These are too extensive to cite except in cases where critical judgement was required.

ABBREVIATIONS

EA Euroa Advertiser

HA Hampshire Advertiser

KFP Kilmore Free Press

MC Morning Chronicle

MAM Mount Alexander Mail

TR Traralgon Record

WC Williamstown Chronicle

INTRODUCTION

Charles Taylor on identity in his ‘The politics of recognition’ (1992), in David Theo Goldberg (ed.), Multiculturalism: A critical reader, Blackwell, Oxford, 1994, 79; family reunions, Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, History at the Crossroads, Halstead Press, Sydney, 2007, 32; family history boom in my The Use and Abuse of Australian History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2000, 80–109; family history as a gateway to the national past in Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998, 15–22; Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, ‘At home with the past: background and initial findings from the national survey’, in Paula Hamilton and Paul Ashton (eds), Australians and the Past, special issue of Australian Cultural History, vol. 22, 2003, 5–30; critical remarks on digital family history in my ‘Speed-relating: family history in a digital age’, History Australia, vol. 6, no. 2, 2009, 43.1–43.10.

CHAPTER ONE: HOOK FARM