My Life and Caroline Chisholm

By Brenda Stevens-Chambers

From the age of six I was reared seven kilometers north of the famous gold rush city of Bendigo, Victoria, Australia. This childhood home was known as the Halfway House. It was at a place called Maiden Gully and stood beside the busy Calder Highway which runs from Melbourne to the far north of Victoria. The Halfway House was an old inn of several of its type built in the 1850s around the goldfields of Bendigo. A century later, our Halfway House was almost as important to the traveller as in the 1850s. Homeless men, veterans of WWII, distressed families, the unemployed, all were welcome. They were fed, provided clothes, and always left with a supply of food. When it came to writing compositions at school, I always had plenty to write about.

By the age of ten I was interested in big words, one of these was philanthropist. When I looked it up in the dictionary and found how a philanthropist helped others, I thought, that’s what mum does. Of course, she was only exercising her heartfelt caring for others. Starting secondary school, I was placed in the sporting house with the name of Chisholm, and for the first time learnt about Caroline Chisholm. Gosh, I thought, mum’s a lot like her. Gradually I learnt that Caroline Chisholm was more than a kind hearted woman. She loved to travel, was even a bit of an adventurer, she was funny and a little flirtatious. But, she was also feisty, brilliant, determined. She stood up to churchmen, governors and prime ministers, informing them of desperately needed help for the destitute and the lonely, of the deprivations of the British Isles and the opportunities of the new land. Unlike my mother, she was more a woman of a later age, unafraid to leave her children in care to pursue something which concerned her beyond the home.

Clipping from Newspaper

To find myself living in the town Caroline Chisholm had chosen as her Australian hometown in 1855 was a captivating turn of fate. From the outset her Kyneton life was of interest to me. I knew lots about how she helped the bounty girls of 1840 Sydney but nothing about her Melbourne life other than her trip to the goldfields to inspect living conditions at Castlemaine and Bendigo, out of which came the shelter sheds from Essendon to Elphinstone to enable lonely wives and children to join their husbands and fathers at the diggings. It is 150 years since these shelters were erected, and in many ways, the thought of them is as fascinating to people now as they were then.

It is fun to consider that Caroline Chisholm might have stopped in Kyneton during that trip to stretch her legs, and to have a cup of coffee. This she would have done at something like Frank Robertson’s pie and newspaper stall a landmark of early Kyneton. There Caroline, in her warm and friendly way, may have chatted to some of the women who were out to collect the latest newspaper. The women may have boasted of their four doctors and their apothecary, of their flourmill, the proposed new bluestone hospital, the little schoolhouse in the distance. They may also have reassured her that reports in the press about the town being deserted by bakers and water carriers who had run away to the goldfields, were greatly exaggerated. Their friendly enthusiasm may even have caused her to consider the town as an ideal and permanent Australian home.

That the Chisholms had moved to Kyneton sometime in 1855 is evident in that Mrs Clinton, the children’s governess, was invited to open a school for the town’s Catholic girls in early 1856. That early in 1856 her son Archibald was invited to stand as a candidate in the first Victoria election suggests that he was well known to locals.

It is amazing to consider that with every step I take in Kyneton Caroline Chisholm had walked there before me, saw the buildings which I admire being constructed, enjoyed the surrounding scenery. In imaginative moods I see her entering the old Bank of New South Wales, window shopping in Piper Street, buying her three youngest children a bag of sweets, smiling as they patted a pet lamb in the yard of a pretty cottage.

However, one thing was completely changed. The men were now the public face of the Chisholm name. Her two older sons Archibald and William helped form the Garrick Club and planned theatrical performances for the benefit of the Mechanics’ Institute, which opened in 1858. Captain Chisholm sat on the Magistrates’ Bench and was so highly esteemed that he was chosen to address Sir Henry Barkley, the new Governor of Victoria, when he visited the town on September 16, 1857. The Kyneton Observer gave a lengthy description of Governor Barkley’s visit, but there was no mention of Caroline. Yet a telegraph she sent on October 1 from the Kyneton Post Office suggests that she may have been in the town at the time and could have attended the dinner.

The Kyneton sojurn was but a brief respite in the life of Caroline Chisholm. Local legend has it that by mid February 1858 her health was of some concern and her Melbourne physician suggested that she find a milder climate in which to live. Could there have been something other than her health that caused her departure from the town? Were there too many reminders in this town where almost every street was named after a squatter of her struggles to free up land for settlement. Had the bitter sectarianism of the 1856 election not fully subsided? Were the vested interests involved in the route of the proposed railway the last straw? Was the store, as indicated by the recent calling in of bad debts, in trouble? Were the increasing number of hotels, or even the large quantity of alcohol stocked in their own store, distasteful to her? Was playing second fiddle to the men in her family a fraction too frustrating?

It is sad to think of the Chisholm carriage as it slipped quietly out of Kyneton on that late February day of 1858, a few friends waving her goodbye. But Caroline Chisholm could not have known how her memory would live on. That for much of the twentieth century the women of Kyneton would strive to keep her memory alive. That newspaper articles and books would be written about her, plays performed, a traveller’s seat constructed in her memory. Nor could she know that a little girl of a woman who sheltered strangers, would grow up to explore her life in relation to other Kyneton women, those she knew and those of the future whose lives her courageous character may have influenced.

About the Author

That Caroline Chisholm and her family lived in Victoria, Australia is a little known fact. That they chose to live in Kyneton, a small rural town halfway between Melbourne and Bendigo in Victoria, Australia, is also not well known. Brenda, was interested in this period of the Chisholm’s life, and in the fact that they operated a store in the town, that they played a large part in the 1856 general election to form a people’s house in the Victorian Government, and took part in ordinary daily life in the newly forming town. Her book offers new material in the Chisholm story and makes a contribution to the full understanding of the life and work of Caroline Chisholm. In the course of her research, Brenda was to discover that the women of Kyneton have always remembered Caroline Chisholm.