Girls Becoming Teachers: An Historical Analysis of Western Austra ...

The author, Mrs. Edward Millett, was the wife of the one-time Anglican chaplain of the small Wheat Belt town of York, Western Australia. In it, she described—with humour, insight, and detail—the six years they spent in the colony. Of the convicts, she wrote, ‘As time passed on a much worse class of criminals composed the cargoes, so that to have “come out” in one of the first ships was a point on which a man might deservedly pride himself’.⁴²

The presence of convicts, particularly those who arrived in later transportations, created anxiety in the settler population, and there was an appreciable rise in the crime rate during the years 1861–1868.⁴³ It is ironic that the free colony became a British penal colony exactly twenty-one years after the arrival of the first settlers. The post-Napoleonic troubles of early nineteenth-century Britain had followed the minor gentry and yeoman farmers to the Swan River. In her memoirs, Mrs. Millett observed dryly that not only had the transportation of convicts to the Swan River relieved the British government of the problem of what to do about their rising prison population, but it also had ‘perhaps staved off for some time longer the question of compulsory education’.⁴⁴

This most isolated colony survived precariously until the discovery of gold in the far north of Western Australia, and later in the renowned Eastern Goldfields. The rush brought huge population influxes, many from the eastern colonies, and, with them, a potential for a sharper class-based consciousness and conflict. The political clout of the established families was threatened as ‘the first stirrings of working class participation in politics manifested’.⁴⁵ It has been suggested that the decision of the premier, Sir John Forrest, to enfranchise women derived from his wish to swell the ranks of nongoldfield voters, who were more likely to support his policies. However, Reekie argued that Forrest ‘acted to remove the agitation for female suffrage’ in order to focus his attention on the potentially much more divisive issue of federation with the other Australian states.⁴⁶ Nevertheless, in 1899 Western Australia was the second Australian state to extend the vote to women, South Australia having done so in 1894.