'Family' in First Fleet Society

1st of October 1788. The Sirius is anchored just outside Sydney Cove, preparing to sail for the Cape of Good Hope for provisions. Her captain, John Hunter, writes in his journal that day:

‘Unmoor’d the Ship, the Governor & his family din’d on Board, and the Wind being Easterly we got under way, and Workd down to the lower Anchorage’

On his return to the settlement the following May, ‘the Governor & family’ came on board and dined with Hunter once again.[1]

Phillip wasn’t married at the time and while a disaffected mariner would claim that he had a mistress, she certainly wasn’t living with him at Government House and would not have accompanied him on board the Sirius. So, what was this ‘family’?

1 August 1789. Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, the commandant of the settlement on Norfolk Island, has one of the government boars killed for his personal consumption. He gives up 40 lbs of his own salt rations in return, ’deducted from my familys Allowance’.[2]

King had formed a relationship with Ann Inett, a convict, and a son had been born in January that year. He had baptised the child himself and given him the name Norfolk, but the precise nature of King’s relationship with Inett is unknown. Can this reference to ‘family’ tell us more?

The word ‘family’ had three meanings in 18th century England: (i) the nuclear family; (ii) the wider kinship network (parents, siblings, uncles, aunts and cousins); and (iii) the household, which might include live-in servants and apprentices. In his pioneering dictionary, published in the 1755, Samuel Johnson had defined family as ‘those who live in the same house’, which conveniently covers two of these three categories.[3]

A study of the word ‘family’ as it appears in almost 500 Old Bailey trials throughout the 1780s reveals that in the great majority of cases, they were referring to a nuclear family whose members were living together in the same house: a husband and wife (with or without children), a mother or a father with children, or just the children, sometimes with a resident mother-in-law or cousin. Blended families were common at the time, but then as now, the focus was on a couple and their children living together as a group.

Extended family mattered when it came to reputation, and in the Old Bailey cases, they were often invoked by character witnesses giving evidence in court. The prisoner was ‘of a very creditable family’, or from a family known to the witness for a great many years. D’Arcy Wentworth, the remittance man who arrived in NSW in 1790, was ‘of an excessive good family in Ireland’.

In some cases, stolen property had been passed down through the family – a ring, a watch, some plates, a greatcoat. One offender was said to bear a family likeness, another bore a mental illness manifest elsewhere in his family.

But the concept might also include servants and apprentices who lived in the house, people who were seen as ‘living in’ or ‘living with’ the family. In most of these cases, the defendant was accused of having stolen from the family of which they had once been a part. These included the households of the aristocracy and the gentry, and in one case, a member of the royal family. ‘I am Lady's maid in Sir Alexander Crawford's family’; ‘his wife lived in a gentleman’s family’; ‘I am house-keeper to Lady Forrester in Portland-street, her family consists of myself, a house maid, a cook, a man servant, and a boy’.

The result was that a husband and a wife who lived and worked in different households would be seen as belonging to different families, and a gentleman might have two families. John Henry Palmer, a businessman who was sent out as a convict on the First Fleet, was said to have two families: one in the country made up of himself, his wife and a servant, and another in town consisting of himself and another servant.

In less well-to-do households, such a family might consist of a husband and wife (or a woman on her own) and a single maid. Sarah Allen, a childless widow, conducted her business from her home in Lombard Court with the support of a housemaid: ‘I have no family but a maid and myself; she sleeps with me, and eats and drinks with me’. Allen made the mistake of bringing another woman into her ‘very small family’, who turned out to be untrustworthy.

In some cases, the family extended to apprentices and other workers who lived in the house. As Johnson recognised, one of the primary indicators of a family member was that they lived in.

So, what did ‘family’ mean in First Fleet society? The term does not appear (at all) in court transcripts of the First Fleet period, which is surprising, given that they are an invaluable source of social history in so many other ways. The marines and civil officers wrote of their families, but the earliest (known) mention by a convict is a letter written by the First Fleeter, Matthew Everingham, in October 1792, where he refers to ‘myself and family’, which at that point in time included his wife and a 10-month-old daughter.

In his published journal for February 1789, David Collins referred to a hut that had been built for William Bryant, the convict overseer of the fishing boat, and 'his family’. Bryant had a wife and daughter by that stage, but we do not know whether this passage refers just to them, or whether another fisherman was living with them. It was common in the first year or two of the colony, for married or co-habiting couples to have another convict sharing their hut.

One of the earliest known convict letters, from Henry and Susannah Kable to Henry’s mother and his siblings in Norfolk, written in November 1788, reported that they had a small garden, and that their little boy Harry was going to school – all the domesticity of a family without the word itself being used. So, while we are currently lacking sources, there is little doubt that First Fleet convicts routinely spoke of their families, nuclear and extended.

On Norfolk Island, the authorities were thinking of the family as an economic unit capable of managing the farms. As he was leaving the island in April 1790, Lieutenant King wrote in a report that: ‘from the goodness of the soil. . . Norfolk Island is very Capable of maintaining a hundred Familys, allowing to each family 100 acres of Ground’.[4] And in January 1791, his successor, Major Robert Ross, tried to formalise the family-as-household by way of regulation:

‘It is expected that the convicts who are indulged with the privilege of maintaining themselves shall be classed together, and not less than three in a family, women and children included. And for the further encouragement of such male convicts as are desirous to maintain the females, such females shall not be called upon by the public to do any work, except in hoeing the corn upon an appearance of rain, or picking the caterpillers or grub from the corn, or any other work of evident necessity.’[5]

There is further evidence of these three-person ‘families’ in the allocation of government pigs the following month, although for obvious reasons, they did not persist.[6]

Among the officers and gentlemen who had servants or otherwise supported strangers, family meant the extended household, as in England. Thus, following the outbreak of smallpox among the Aboriginal peoples of Port Jackson in 1789, the chaplain and the surgeon were each reported as having taken an orphan child into their families. Several journals refer to Arabanoo and Bennelong – two of the Aboriginal men kidnapped so the colonisers could learn something of their language and culture – as members of ‘the Governor’s family’.

Who belonged to Phillip’s family? There were a significant number of people living and working at Government House. The domestic staff – cooks, housekeepers and gardeners – slept in separate accommodation nearby and might not have been regarded as family. But Phillip had a steward, a maid servant and two Aboriginal guests, a young woman and a young man, being trained as domestics, who slept in bedrooms upstairs and would have been regarded as members of his personal household. Mary Rose, a convict who arrived in the colony in 1790, wrote shortly after her arrival, that she had been taken into ‘the Governor’s family’. But stewards, housekeepers and Aboriginal servants would not have accompanied Phillip on board the Sirius.

The Governor did have two senior staff with whom he worked very closely – David Collins, the Judge Advocate, who also functioned as his official secretary, and George Johnston, a marine lieutenant whom he had appointed as his aide-de-camp. As best we can determine, neither of these men slept at Government House – there wasn’t any room. But Collins’ house was right next door, and through this period he wrote to his family at home that he lived with the Governor: he spent most of his working days there and regularly dined at Phillip’s table. George Johnston’s role and his living arrangements are not as clear.

It is likely that these were the members of Phillip’s family who accompanied him on board the Sirius, and that they were the men with whom the Governor was socializing on the night that Hunter returned from the Cape. Hunter described the occasion:

‘As soon as the Ship was secur’d’ I went on shore to wait on the Governor, Whom I found in good health. He was sitting by the fire drinking tea with a few freinds, Amongst whom I Observ’d a Native Man of this Country who was decently Cloathd, & seemed to be as much at his ease at the tea table as any person there, he manag’d his Cup & Saucer, as if he had been long accustom’d to such entertainment.’[7]

Because of its several meanings, it is impossible to know what King meant by ‘family’ in his journal entry. No doubt he had regard for Inett as the mother of his sons, but it is possible that her position in the household was closer to servant than wife.

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The image at the head of this catspaw is Robert Dighton, [Philip Gidley and Anna Josepha King, and their children Elizabeth, Anna Maria and Phillip Parker], 1799, State Library of NSW, ML 1244.

[1] John Hunter, ‘Journal Kept on Board the Sirius During a Voyage to New South Wales, May 1787 - March 1791’, State Library of NSW, Safe DLMS 164, p. 68 & 101.

[2] Philip Gidley King, ‘Remarks & Journal kept on the Expedition to form a Colony. . ., with additional information, 1786 - December 1790’, State Library of NSW, Safe 1/16, Vol. 2, p.94.

[3] Naomi Tadmoor, ‘The Concept of the Household-Family in Eighteenth Century England’. Past and Present, (1996) No. 151, pp. 111-140.

[4] Philip Gidley King, ‘A Journal of the Proceedings of His Majestys Ship Sirius Arthur Phillip & John Hunter Esqrs Commanders, Commencing October 25 1787. . .’, Royal Collections Trust, RCIN 1047381, p. 127.

[5] General Order of Major Robert Ross, 8 January 1791, Historical Records of Australia Series 1, 1:241-243

[6] ‘An Account of Sows and Sowpigs delivered to the Convicts on Norfolk Island. . .‘, 5 February 1791, UK National Archives CO201/9/31-41

[7] John Hunter, ‘Journal Kept on Board the Sirius. . .’, op. cit., p. 100

Philip Gidley King and his second family in 1799