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matching journals, themes: 'immigrants and emigrants'
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The Welsh Swagman
... journals...Journal Entries...Journal: Joseph Jenkins, 'Of all the stations man may have...', 25 October 1870...Joseph Jenkins detailed journal entries span over 25 years, and provide readers with a comprehensive account of early Victorian working life....During 1874 Joseph was taken ill and spent nearly two months at this hospital in Maryborough. Even while he was sick in hospital he continued to write in his journal. ...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.
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Judy Scurfield
Journey's End
... Journal: John Bowman Diary (1)...Mark Nicholson's (1818-1889) journal of a voyage from Gravesend to Melbourne on board the ship 'Duchess of Kent', 17 January-18 June 1840. These entries show the difficulty that the sailing ships had in negotiating the difficult entry to Port..."... of the land seen to day [previous two words inserted above line], tomorrow morning will be the time to see it (DV) tho: I fear I must relinquish my journal as from the constant state of excitement that I am in I find writing almost ...Try to imagine yourself on board a sailing ship in the 19th century...
Approaching the entrance to Port Phillip Bay, which is known to be a particularly dangerous harbour entrance, being very narrow (only 2 and a half kilometers across), fringed with rocky reefs, and turbulent because of the tides meeting the ocean swells of Bass Strait.
If you were the Captain you needed an accurate chart showing sea-depths, the coastline and its hazards, but also the navigational aids such as lighthouses and beacons which would guide you into port. You would also have needed a book of sailing directions...
Judy Scurfield, librarian at the State Library of Victoria, asks us to imagine the entry through the most hazardous Port Phillip Heads.
Further material can be found at the State Library of Victoria's Ergo site: Thomas Pierson (Diaries of an early arrival chronicle first impressions of Melbourne).