My mother’s work was painstaking and meticulous. My father had not quite the same level of perseverance so I had to start from scratch. Dad was a fifth generation Australian born in Tasmania, the state that as a nineteenth-century colony received approximately 75,000 convicts transported mainly from the British Isles. My genealogical digging revealed that seven of his forebears had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land, as Tasmania was called up to 1856. In the process I uncovered stories which had been completely lost to memory.
The genealogical research that underpins the story was done well before I sat down to write. Like anyone else who takes family history seriously, this research was painstaking, triple-checked and revisited. By the end, I knew the whats and wheres of Ellen’s life—Cold Blows the Wind is my attempt to understand the whys.
While I was able to draw on the work of a number of Tasmania’s generous and dedicated researchers and historians, my greatest research challenges were in discovering the daily details of the world Ellen inhabited. She was one of what is described today as the working poor—living conditions were basic; pay was low for men, lower for women; life was precarious and illness or an accident could tip a family into dire poverty. These lives left few artefacts and while it’s acceptable to fill the gaps in historical knowledge with plausible imagining, it is necessary to get as close as you can to the reality of the past before you let your imagination take flight.
Numerous visits to Hobart up to 2019 had given me an understanding of the topography of Hobart and its streetscape—Hobart retains a substantial number of solid Georgian and Victorian buildings—but street numbers have changed over the years. I attempted to locate some of the houses Ellen lived in using a combination of Assessment Rolls—lists of the names of the people renting each property—and Water Board maps as well as the time-honoured method of locating a place by vicinity to the nearest pub.
Only one of the houses Ellen lived in is still standing—a narrow 1840s labourers cottage in Molle Street, Hobart. Fortunately, there were estate agent photographs online to give me a sense of the interior so there was no need to arouse the current residents suspicions that I was casing the place with robbery in mind like one of my forebears.
Through endless hours searching contemporary copies the Hobart Mercury, I was able to glean basic information about the type of house Ellen would have lived in in Moodie’s Row off Liverpool Street. The Row no longer exists—its location is the concrete driveway on a commercial property. In the early 1880s it was a row of seventeen houses, mostly two-roomed weatherboard, each with a front yard where some grew vegetable gardens and one even kept a cow. There was a yard in common at the rear where the seven privies and single water tap serving all the houses were located. The lane was unpaved and there was no gutter—refuse was tipped into the street.
My problems with locating information about housing were repeated in many other aspects of research. While there is a wealth of information available about women’s clothing in the nineteenth century, it concentrates on the women with money to spend on fashion. For women like Ellen, new clothing was often second-hand, from the pawn shop or the second-hand dealer. I have no doubt, though, that young women tried to make their dresses into something resembling the clothing of the monied.
To get some idea of what ordinary women might have worn, I spent hours staring at the extensive collection of cartes de visite, digitized by the State Library of Victoria, of ordinary men and women dressed in their very best. There are scenes of labouring men but almost none of women at work cleaning out grates, blacking fireplaces, or doing the laundry. The few photographs there are of working women, I stared at intently, almost willing them to come alive so I could see what was hidden beneath the voluminous aprons, wondering if the skirt matched the bodice, were they wearing some sort of skirt and blouse (blouses as we know them were not really a ‘thing’ until the 1890s) or a dress. I believe that I have gained a sense of what life was like for women like Ellen but it is more an impressionist painting than the hyper-reality of the Pre-Raphaelites.
My hope, beyond telling of Ellen’s life and struggles, is that readers will see that those who came before, even the most ordinary of people, were like us. While they may have held some attitudes that we now find objectionable, at their core, like us, they wanted shelter, warmth and enough to eat, love and security, freedom from illness and, most of all, a better future for their children. It is the daily heroism of ordinary lives, the survival, over generations, that has given most of us, up till now, a life far better than that experienced by any generation before us.
Catherine Meyrick
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