While researching Australia’s colonial years for my day job as an assistant museum manager, I discovered a memoir that had probably only been read a handful of times, penned by a feisty Yorkshire woman named Emma. It’s in most respects a run-of-the-mill story of a poor English family emigrating to Australia in search of a better life. And I can’t explain why it stayed with me the way it did, other than its blasé and offhand attitude to the most heinous violence.
Born in a seaport town born in the early 19th-century, Emma was one of eight children. ‘Very early, I got passionately fond of dancing,’ she writes. ‘But my father would never let me go if he knew of it. Once he found out that I had been to a dance; after I got home, he took a horse-whip and beat me so that the blood ran down my back.’
‘I determined to run away from home, which I soon did.’ Emma ‘entered service’ as a nurse-girl for three years before reconciling with her family and returning home to ‘a loving welcome’. However, sickness claimed the life of her mother some weeks later. Rather than re-locate to another town with her father and siblings, Emma re-entered service.
‘I got my own way once more. I attended Balls and Parties whenever I had a chance. My mistress did not interfere with me, as long as I did my work, so that I had plenty of time. One night at a ball in the Hull rifle barracks, I found a young man. He took me home that night, and often took me to balls and parties. Soon he went to Scotland, and there he sent for me to be his wife. I consented, and we were married at Port Glasgow.’ Emma enjoyed almost four years of marriage in Scotland before her husband ‘was taken very ill’ with consumption. ‘His spirit passed away,’ she wrote, ‘and I was left with a little boy.’
‘After my man’s death I could not settle down. As a young widow, I took a place with a dear old lady in Hull, then took a situation in Green Bank. I soon got acquainted with some more young women. I took to dancing again and met my present husband, Tom, who wanted me to be his wife, but I would not consent. He gave me no rest until I said “yes”, so in three months we were married. I soon found out that I had made a great mistake.’
Tom was a heavy drinker, and the proverbial inveterate gambler. Soon, Emma says, she became a heavy drinker, too. Unhappily married, she wrote that ‘I was determined to put an end to my life by taking poison, but the Lord was looking down upon me in mercy, and spared my life ... Many times My Husband tried to take my life, once trying to drown me; another time lying drunk with a razor under his pillow to cut my throat; another time putting me under a train.’
Melodramatic as it sounds, Emma ‘stayed the course’ as a wife and mother. Her family stayed together, albeit uneasily. The young family was swept into the evangelical fervour of the Christian Mission, later rebranded as the Salvation Army, and they ended up immigrating to Adelaide, South Australia in 1882.
'And Emma, the Yorkshire woman who found herself adrift in colonial Australia, is just one person who was representative of countless others like her. Her world was a brutal place, a world in which a woman’s worth was measured by her capacity to endure. Domestic violence was not considered a crisis so much as a constant.'
It wasn’t many years before Tom left his employment under dodgy circumstances; he believed he was owed hundreds of pounds, while he was also the subject of whispered accusations of embezzlement. After time spent in Burnie, Tom eventually abandoned his family, wandering off to Kalgoorlie in WA. The record is unclear on the facts, but from what I could discover, it seems likely he re-married and was arrested for bigamy.
It all made for heavy reading. And while going through Emma’s story I kept wondering, why didn’t she just get a divorce? While there were separations and rapprochements, arguments and reconciliations, I have found no record of Emma undertaking divorce proceedings. Was she unable to raise the needed capital for legal representation? Did she just accept abuse as her lot? Or did changes of heart and forgiveness sway her course? She didn’t say.
Last month marked 49 years since Australia passed the Family Law Act, issuing in a new era of ‘no-fault’ divorces granted after a year’s separation. Prior to that legislation, parties in an unhappy marriage had to prove ‘grounds’ for severing a marriage, such as adultery, cruelty, habitual drunkenness, insanity, etc. For those of us who have not had to endure the adversarial ‘defending’ of one’s fitness, or the proving of the ‘unfitness’ of one’s spouse, it can be difficult to comprehend the stigma attached to ending a marriage under the old legal regime; the sense of shame and the public prurience that would have come Emma’s way if she had tried to institute divorce proceedings. Instead, she persevered in an often life-threating situation, a burden that few have to carry.
It is easy to forget the weight of history, when the laws, the customs, the very air itself seemed to conspire against the powerless. Like Hobbes writes in Leviathan, with much of human history existing outside of the confines of modern civilised society, life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. Hobbes believed this was the ‘natural’ state of humanity: violent and brutal. (Hobbes argued that it necessitated a strong, authoritarian government to keep people in line.) For someone like Emma, that base level of brutality certainly seems to be there in spades.
And Emma, the Yorkshire woman who found herself adrift in colonial Australia, is just one person who was representative of countless others like her. Her world was a brutal place, a world in which a woman’s worth was measured by her capacity to endure. Domestic violence was not considered a crisis so much as a constant.
Thankfully, Women’s Suffrage introduced laws that allowed women to vote and own property, although domestic violence, rape within marriage, and coercive domination of spouses were still often par for a woman’s course.
While we encounter tales from an era that was more markedly cavalier in its discussion of daily cruelty, we like to believe that our society is moving in a steady arc towards enlightenment, and there are no shortage of success markers. Consider the rate of women killed by their current or previous intimate partners as a measure of violence against women. It has fallen by two-thirds since 1990. But despite the clear downward trend over the last few decades, there has been a spike in recent figures. In 2022–23, there were 34 women killed by a partner compared with 26 the previous year. And there have already been 42 women killed in the first half of this year alone.
The intention of Australia’s National Plan to end violence against women is to make sure instances of casual violence that pepper Emma’s life become truly relegated to history. I hope that in some distant future, when a museum researcher stumbles upon the figures of the recent spike in violence against women, they will find it as odd and unsettling as I found Emma’s.
The last records I have found of Emma are from the 1920s, when she was a beloved local figure in Invermay, Tasmania. Emma’s life was neither exceptional nor unexceptional. Her statements on family and domestic violence, spousal abuse and control, suicide attempts, and even attempted murder are calmly rattled off as an accepted, almost expected, part of her story. In her final years, Emma found joy in teaching village girls to dance — the passion that once led her father to beat her until she bled. How far we’ve come. And how much of the past still lingers in our present.
Barry Gittins is a Melbourne writer.
Main image: (Getty Images)