So, what of these
emigration societies and the ladies who operated them? There had been
government assisted passages to South
Australia up until the late 1880s. These began again
during the early 1910s, and this must have been the chance that Ethel took.
Young boys, who were destined to work as farm apprentices, often shared the sea
voyages with the many hundreds of British women who sailed away to become
‘domestic helpers’ until the start of the Great War. One of the first
stopping-off points for those who sailed to Adelaide was the Domestic Helpers’ Home at 5 Charles Street, Norwood,
in the suburbs of the city. Fortunately there is a wonderful on-line historical
resource called Trove which has allowed me to discover how these emigration
societies worked, and the motivations and attitudes of those involved, even
down to interviews with the young émigrées themselves. A word of warning,
however – these contemporary accounts seem to have been written with the aim of
bolstering the emigration schemes supported by the South Australian government:
it would have been regarded perhaps as disloyal to the ‘new’ Australia for the
press to paint in all the ‘warts’.
Australia in 1913 has been
described as a land of tremendous optimism. It was a pivotal year in its
development, progressive and free, embracing the new technologies of motor and
air transport, the culture of cinema, and was a country where women could
express themselves politically: the state of South Australia had enfranchised them as
early as 1895, and the entire adult female population could vote by 1911. Of
course some of the prejudices of the previous century were still in evidence,
but women were not afraid to speak out and work towards further change. The
South Australian women who were looking to employ the British domestic helpers
were generally married and comfortably off, but did not see wedlock and
families as the be-all-and-end-all of their destinies: they wanted to go out
into society and work for the good of their country. Women like Ethel
Shorthouse would help them achieve their goals. This is, of course, ironic in
that Ethel had been doing much the same at home in England. The difference for Ethel
may have been that she could realise some goals of her own in a more socially
mobile environment.
Australia’s exciting,
emerging society, often anxious to break from the influences of the Old
Country, nevertheless needed the services of Britain’s Christian maidens to help
it on its way. Newspaper articles of the time emphasised the scarcity of
domestic help. Large numbers of British women were leaving for such work in Canada. It
seems that a keen sense of competition between the Dominions spurred South Australia into
reviving the assisted passages scheme of the late 19th century in
order to relieve its hard-pressed mothers. Committees were formed, Ministers
lobbied, letters written to the Press. It also appears that the Australian
government not only encouraged applications from adult females, but were not
averse to plundering British orphanages for willing sixteen year olds. A name
that occurs most frequently in discussions of the problem is that of a Mrs Maud
Hume Lindsay, the globe-trotting agent for the British Women’s Emigration
Association, and an associate of the Royal Sanitary Institute of London. It seems
likely that it would have been one of Mrs Lindsay’s colleagues who met Ethel
after her arrival from Tamworth at the hostel in Victoria,
London, on that
Wednesday in 1913.
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