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The Welsh Swagman

Joseph Jenkins was a Welsh itinerant labourer in late 1800s Victoria.

Exceptional for a labourer at the time, Jenkins had a high level of literacy and kept detailed daily diaries for over 25 years, resulting in one of the most comprehensive accounts of early Victorian working life.

Itinerant labourers of the 1800s, or 'swagmen', have become mythologised in Australian cultural memory, and so these diaries provide a wonderful source of information about the life of a 'swagman'. They also provide a record of the properties and districts Jenkins travelled to, particularly around the Castlemaine and Maldon area.

The diaries were only discovered 70 years after Jenkins' death, in an attic, and were in the possession of Jenkins’s descendants in Wales until recently, when they were acquired by the State Library of Victoria in 1997.

Film - Sophie Boord, 'The Diary of Joseph Jenkins: A look at the diaries of the 'Welsh Swagman'', State Library Victoria

Courtesy of State Library Victoria

Film - Sophie Boord, 'The Diary of Joseph Jenkins: A look at the diaries of the 'Welsh Swagman'', State Library Victoria

My name is Jock Murphy. I'm the Collections Services Manager at the State Library of Victoria.

I'm going to tell you about the Libraries acquisition of the diaries kept by Joseph Jenkins, who was also known as the Welsh Swagman.

The particularly remarkable thing about the diary is that it provides an account of a casual and itinerant agricultural labourer, Joseph Jenkins, who came to Victoria in 1869 and lived here until 1894. He was working in Central Victoria particularly in the areas around Malden, Castlemaine and Ballarat during that period.

The diary provides a detailed account of a life that's often poorly recorded.

Most of the people who worked as farm labourers or in other unskilled jobs didn't have the literacy skills to write even a letter let alone a detailed day by day diary.

The diaries themselves are quite remarkable.

This is an example of one of his home made diaries.

Here you can see where it's suffered damage at some time in the past, a rat or a mouse or a possum has nibbled at the binding.

On at least one occasion Jenkins... hut was broken into and the diaries were scattered around on the ground outside the hut and this is an example of one of his diaries that, sadly, has become very wet at one time in it's past and therefore suffered mould damage.

Some diaries, like this example, were manufactured diaries which he would have bought in a shop... that's for 1874. This last example is another handmade volume created by Joseph and as you can see it has a canvas wrapper around it.

One of the things that excites people about the diaries is that researchers today can often find references to properties owned or operated by their forbearers and if we look at this example of a diary, each page has a note which records the property that Joseph Jenkins was working on and where it was.

Here we see, Victoria Hotel, Coghills Creek, Victoria. The day before he was at Mr Hawkins Hut, wherever that was.

Here we have Glendinning Farm at Kingston, which is near Ballarat.

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Courtesy of State Library Victoria

Video about the original diaries of Joseph Jenkins, also known as the Welsh Swagman, who was an itinerant worker in the mid-1800s Victoria, particularly around the Castlemaine, Maldon area.

Jock Murphy of the State Library Victoria, gives us an insight into the diaries.

Film - Sophie Boord, 'Acquiring the Joseph Jenkins Diaries: Interview with Jock Murphy', State Library Victoria

Courtesy of State Library Victoria

Film - Sophie Boord, 'Acquiring the Joseph Jenkins Diaries: Interview with Jock Murphy', State Library Victoria

In 1975, this book, the Diary of a Welsh Swagman was published here in Melbourne by Sun books.

People would often contact the Library just assuming that we held the original diaries, because of course having been given an introduction by looking at the published form, they wanted to see the full 25 years worth, not just an edited version.

But in fact the diaries were not held here, at the State Library nor were they held in any other Library in Australia.

No one at any of the major Australian Libraries knew of the location of the original diaries or even whether they still existed.

Peter Bristow, a man from Mt Eliza here in Melbourne, had been on a trip to the UK and he had gone to Wales.

He had taken, purely of his own volition, the initiative of finding Miss Frances Evans who owned the diary and contacting her, knocking on her door and suggesting to her that she should think of placing the diaries here in the State Library's Collection.

So you can imagine my surprise when in October 1995 I was contacted by Peter Bristow who told me this story and told me that I should now contact Miss Frances Evans and see what I could do about arranging to have the Library acquire the diaries.

I wrote to Miss Evans in Wales and I arranged for her to be visited by Miss Sarah Joins who's a Library Consultant who's based at Australia House in London.

And so Sarah Joins went to Wales and visited Miss Evans.

We were expecting that Sarah would simply look at the diaries and provide us with a report but instead of that we had our second great breakthrough when Sarah returned to London she was able to contact me and tell me that in fact Miss Evans had agreed to her taking the diaries and that she had permission to send them to Australia so that we could assess them.

Once the diaries were received by Sarah Joins on behalf of the Library they were taken to London.

There she had to obtain an export licence which is what we can see here, to take them out of the UK and then they had to be sent to Australia by courier and of course they had to be insured while they were travelling.

Here in Australia we had to assess the diaries then we had a valuer come in to look at them. Then we had to obtain the approval of the Library Board because this was quite a major purchase.

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Courtesy of State Library Victoria

In this video, Jock Murphy, from the State Library of Victoria, describes the process of acquiring the diaries of Joseph Jenkins, also known as the Welsh Swagman, an itinerant labourer in Victoria in the mid 1800s.