Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney by Bishop Catherine

Author:Bishop, Catherine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth
Published: 2015-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

‘We have changed servants again’

‘We have changed servants again …’ So wrote Rachel Henning, in a somewhat weary tone, to her sister from a pastoral station in Queensland in 1865. As we have seen, letters middle-class women wrote home to England from the colony in the nineteenth century were often a litany of complaints about the scarcity, incompetence and inappropriate boldness or ‘independence’ of domestic servants in New South Wales. In rural areas, Indigenous women and men were often employed as domestic servants, but in Sydney this seems to have been less common. Boatloads of young women, intended to be domestic servants, were given free passage from Britain and Ireland to the colonies. There were, however, few formal means of matching them with prospective employers once they arrived. This was particularly the case once they had settled in Sydney and were seeking a second or third position when either servant or mistress had proved unsatisfactory. Similarly, employers who did not want freshly disembarked servants, but preferred those with colonial experience, also needed a means of hiring help. Who better to organise the supply of that commodity than women?22

Caroline Chisholm, whom we met in chapter 3 running a school, is well known for arranging the immigration of female domestic servants from Britain to Sydney in the 1840s and 1850s. She then famously escorted cartloads of these young women around rural New South Wales, where women were still scarce, and offloaded them to eager farmers as domestic servants and prospective wives. Within Sydney, though, there were a number of other women who ran servants registry offices. Some were operated on a very small scale, in conjunction with a small shop or boarding house and with little more than a noticeboard, but others were long-lived and well known.

Mrs Eliza Capps’ registry office operated in King Street from 1854 (see figure 22) and then in Castlereagh Street until 1874, when ownership passed to Ellen Crease. Originally from Longford, Ireland, Eliza Read arrived in Australia in 1848 on the Sir Edward Parry as a thirty-four-year-old widow with two young children. She was matron in charge of a number of Irish children, who were being reunited with their emigrant and convict parents in Australia. (The implementation of this government-funded program of sending children to join their parents was partly influenced by Caroline Chisholm.) Soon after arriving, Eliza Read married Englishman Edward Capps, who had been the schoolmaster on the immigrant ship.

Eliza Capps was then employed as matron in charge of the Irish female orphans at the Immigrant Depot at Hyde Park Barracks. Her new husband was a clerk, before being appointed postmaster at Sofala on the goldfields about 50 kilometres north of Bathurst in 1851. Eliza does not seem to have accompanied him, but remained in her position as matron until February 1854, when she opened her servants registry office. Unsurprisingly many of her clients were recently arrived immigrants. Domestic servants, nursemaids and governesses came to her seeking positions. She then advertised their availability in the

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