This paper analyses the European settlement and development of family and community
structures in a rural community in Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century.
It explores the place of origin of immigrants, their marriage patterns, social mobility
and fertility. It analyses the working patterns of women, examining both paid employment
and, where possible, other cash contributions to the family income.
The study is a social reconstruction of the town of Dungog and its surrounding region
in the Upper Williams Valley, New South Wales, a closely settled agricultural region on
the coastal plain. Social reconstruction is an expansion of the methodology of population
reconstitution, that is 'the systematic assemblage and articulation of information about
the life histories of families'(i)
in order to describe its chief demographic characteristics of birth, marriage and death.
In England population estimates, fertility and mortality trends were established using
parish registers.(ii) Other
studies of communities in the latter half of the nineteenth century have used detailed
census records, but unfortunately these are not extant in Australia.
This study uses the state registration of births, deaths and marriages for the Upper
Williams Valley whose population grew from approximately 1,500 European inhabitants in
1850 to over 4,000 in 1900. There are approximately 4,000 births, 1,300 deaths and 600
marriages recorded for the district from 1856 (the beginning of state registration) and
1900. These records are supplemented by the Anglican Parish registers that include details
of about half the local population. These records are supplemented by aggregate census
data, agricultural records, education records and local newspaper reports. This begins the
process of the recreation of the life histories of individuals and the economic, family
and social relations between them. For this research the information on individuals is
being entered into a computer database. The philosophy of the Dungog community database is
to keep as much richness of the data in the original source as possible so that the
researcher is not restricted to answering a limited number of pre-defined questions.
The data reveals a population that came from varied places in Britain but, once settled
in the valley, tended to stay. Marriage records reveal little social mobility. Most
marriages occurred between members of the local community. Research on the Upper Williams
Valley has raised questions relating to the extent to which social and economic life
conformed to a preindustrial pattern of family labour rather than the form that had become
the standard in Western Europe and America and in the major towns of Australia in the late
nineteenth century. Most husbands and wives worked together at a joint enterprise that
earned an income for the household. Examination of communities in other countries has
revealed the longevity of this pattern of the mixture of waged work, farm work and family
business enterprises in the nineteenth century and the combinations of waged work and
household production of food for sale and consumption in which working class women were
engaged in the second half of the nineteenth century.(iii)
There is no detailed research of these patterns in Australia and the present study reveals
that a similar pattern may have been followed by low-income families in the Upper Williams
Valley.
References
i E. A. Wrigley, R. S.
Davies, J. E. Oeppen and R. S. Schofield, English Population History from Family
Reconstitution 1580-1837, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p. 12.
ii E. A. Wrigley
and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541-1871, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1981; Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen and Schofield, English Population History.
iii Barry Reay,
Microhistories: Demography, Society and Culture in Rural England, 1880-1930, Cambridge
University, Cambridge, 1996; Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily
Survival in Industrializing Montreal, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1993.