What was caroline chisholm known for

During the seven years Caroline was in Australia, she placed over 11, people in homes and jobs. People came to see her as a very good person. Two Legislative Council Committees asked her to give evidence for them. Caroline carried out her work in New South Wales without taking money from individuals or individual organisations because she wanted to act independently and did not want to be dependent upon any religious or political group.

The girls and families Caroline helped came from different backgrounds and held different religious beliefs. Money was raised for the homes through subscription. Archibald was released from the Army because of his poor health and returned to Australia in In , with the support of a few important people, Caroline founded the Family Colonization Loan Society from her home.

The Society's aim was to lend people who wanted to go to Australia half the cost of the fare, the emigrant finding the other half of the cost, which was to be refunded after two years in Australia. By , the Society had helped more than 3, people travel to Australia.

The family moved to Victoria. Chisholm continued to help the poor , mainly around Ballarat and the Goldfields. After some time, she became very ill and the family had to move back to Sydney in Her health improved at the end of Archibald senior took the younger children back to England in Archibald junior went with his mother back home in Perhaps Chisholm's failing health was one reason.

Financial straits may have been another. In the Victorian Legislative Council had voted the Chisholms 5, pounds, with a further 2, pounds voted by public subscription, in recognition of their achievements, but also noting their financial position, which was not strong.

By this time they had sent out some 3, immigrants, but were in some personal financial distress. They used part of the funds to open a store. In Caroline Chisholm was nearly fifty. She had borne six children and kept up a punishing schedule of philanthropic work. But in this year she first experienced the crippling kidney disease that would recur for the rest of her life.

The Chisholms had moved to Kyneton, where they kept a shop with the assistance of their two elder sons, but in Caroline became so ill that the doctors advised her to go to Sydney for treatment.

In the next few years she battled both illness and poverty, but by had recovered sufficiently to open a school for girls.

She had largely retired from public life by this time. In the Chisholms left for England, intending to settle their youngest children in school there. Caroline hoped to return to what had become her home, but ill-health was to prevent it. For the last five years of her life she was bedridden, living in poor circumstances in miserable lodgings. She died in Her husband died shortly afterwards and they were buried together in Northampton.

The tombstone read 'The Emigrant's Friend'. When she visited Victoria in the mids Caroline Chisholm was almost a celebrity. Her work was widely supported, her opinions sought out and respected.

Within a few years all this changed. Ill health and poverty drove her into obscurity and when she died in England the press scarcely noted her passing. Historian Patricia Grimshaw charts the ways in which Caroline Chisholm eventually re-entered popular memory in Australia in her thoughtful introduction to the revised edition of the first full-length biography of Chisholm, written by the young Margaret Kiddle in Kiddle was herself exceptional - one of very few female academic historians in a profession dominated by men.

Tragically she died young, also a victim of kidney disease, but her biography re-established Caroline Chisholm as a notable character in Australian history. In the first Australian five dollar note initially featured her portrait on one side, with Sir Joseph Banks on the other. This was recognition indeed! Charles Dickens wrote several articles in his periodical Household Words championing her cause, and with such support the Family Colonization Loan Society was founded in By the end of , families had been enrolled and plans for chartering a ship were begun.

In providing for passage to Australia, the Society effectively eradicated overcrowding and other injurious conditions on ships which had plagued earlier immigration schemes. The first vessel to be chartered, the Slains Castle, sailed in September of with families on board. Soon, other ships followed, and Chisholm succeeded in convincing whole families to undertake emigration. Chisholm's work had gained the support of the Australian government, and the success of the Family Colonization Loan Society had been assured.

Concerning the second and third goals of her stay in England, Chisholm had little problem securing transport, and later homes, for two shiploads of children taken from several orphanages around England.

She managed as well to secure assistance from the British government for the transport of the families of convicts sent to Australia in the previous decades.

But while her work in England ensured a sustained, successful colonization of Australia, Chisholm was not without her detractors.

In Australia, in fact, the Presbyterian minister Dr. John Dunmore Lang stirred up old religious bigotries, crying, "No Popery! Fearful that Chisholm's efforts might lead to the creation of a Catholic majority in Australia, Lang devised his own reactionary and divisive immigration scheme and vowed to "deliver this Colony and Hemisphere for all time coming, from the justly apprehended and intolerably degrading despotism of Rome.

In response, Chisholm wrote:. I have lived happily amongst pagans and heathens, Mahometans and Hindoos—they never molested me at my devotions, nor did I insult them at theirs; and am I not to enjoy the same privilege in New South Wales? Ironically, the feud between Lang and Chisholm only served to promote the colonization of Australia.

Since she had secured the only viable means of accomplishing this task, British support, the subsequent success of her venture was guaranteed. But by , with the advent of the Crimean War, ships became scarce, and Chisholm decided to return to New South Wales.

Upon her arrival, she discovered a new problem which required her attention. With the discovery of gold in the wilderness, vast tracts of land beyond the original boundaries of the 19 counties of NSW originally surveyed in the s were deemed off-limits by the local government.

Chisholm toured the goldfields, becoming a champion of the cause of the small farmers and demanding that the government "Unlock the Lands! Our aim must be to make it as easy for a working man to reach Australia as America, and we must hold out a certainty of being able to obtain land. Nothing else will tempt the honest working man of the right sort to emigrate. Still, her call for this opening of the land and the sale of tracts of land at an affordable price, initially fell on deaf ears.

When her health failed in , she was forced to leave this fight half-fought as her tenure in public life drew to an end. Archibald Chisholm's pension from the Honourable East India Company had all but dried up, and in an effort to address her family's economic hardship, she opened a ladies' school at Rathbone House, Newtown, in , which subsequently closed in By , Archibald and Caroline Chisholm had returned to England.

The last five years of her life were spent bedridden and ill. The Times' obituary outlined her achievements in about ten lines, and Australian papers barely marked her passing. The inscription on her headstone reads: "The Emigrant's Friend. In her first year's report, Female Immigration, Considered in a Brief Account of the Sydney Immigrants' Home Sydney, , she was able to announce the closing of the home because her plans for dispersing immigrants into the interior had been so successful.

To a select committee on distressed labourers, she outlined a scheme for settling families on the land with long leases. Her prediction of permanent prosperity for these families ensured the opposition of the land-owning members of the committee. Undaunted, she arranged at her own expense the settlement of twenty-three families on land at Shellharbour given to her by Robert Towns and told a second committee in about this experiment, but her plan was again rejected.

Captain Chisholm retired from the army and returned to Australia in to work with his wife. Denied government assistance, the Chisholms travelled throughout New South Wales and collected over statements from immigrants about their lives in Australia, this 'voluntary information' to serve as a guide to those in England who wished to emigrate. By now Mrs Chisholm had been led away from alleviating immediate distress to expounding reforms and to promoting her own colonization scheme.

With her husband she left for England in in the Dublin. She was already a legend in New South Wales, although her last days were clouded by a revival of religious controversy.

In London her eloquent arguments won the sympathy of Earl Grey and James Stephen and she achieved two of her objects: free passages for emancipists' wives in the Asia and Waverley , and for seventy-five children in the Sir Edward Parry. She gave evidence before two House of Lords committees, on the execution of the criminal law, and on colonization from Ireland, a rare tribute to a woman.

A pamphlet letter to Earl Grey, Emigration and Transportation Relatively Considered , better written than her first report, contained her first public attack on the Wakefield system. Eighteen voluntary statements formed an appendix and she published others in Comfort for the Poor! Meat Three Times a Day!! Her house became an Australian information centre and for several years she and her husband received an average of letters a day.

After two years of official indifference to her principal object, family emigration, she decided to act unaided. Her first plan for a land-ticket system was defeated by the influence in London of alarmed squatters.