Women in Colonial Australia

            For a single woman or even a widow, transport to the fledgling colony of Australia was a treacherous but hopeful journey. Whether she was a convict and already a resident of the new colony, or if she was a free woman immigrant trying to make a new start, if she survived the journey a woman could not even dream of a comfortable life in the harsh and unforgiving environment they were settling. If she survived the journey, then the struggle for habitation and gainful employment would begin. Whilst the government passages lured the women with images of colonial prosperity and the possibility of marriage and a new start, the reality was that life in the colonies was hard, and every morsel had to be eked out of an environment that wasn't ready to release its own stranglehold on the life it knew. The 'A Place for the Friendless Female' exhibition shows both the extremes of existence in the new colony and does not exaggerate what a woman's prospects were upon arriving in the new colony.
             When convict transportation ceased shortly after 1840, the British government reinvented public opinion of the Colony of Australia and began to promote the country as a prospective new home for their excesses of population. After the convict transportations ceased there was a dearth of female residents in the new communities. To counteract this problem the Government offered assisted passages to single women of 'good character' who were between eighteen and thirty five years of age1. To counteract this, or perhaps to forestall the growing social unease the women who took up the assisted passages were chaperoned in small groups and closely monitored to avoid any impropriety. The Irish emigrants were perhaps the most harshly judged by the upper social echelon of the new colonial society. They were often transported to Australia under a grant because they had skills that were equitable to the new colony, such as domestic servants or agricultural workers, and had been actively encouraged to relocate because of the importance to the forward motion of the new colony of their skills.