The Good Girl Song Project tells in a very real and lively way an important story about Australia’s past which clearly resonates with us today.

 

As an immigrant nation, Australia has experienced the arrival of countless people from theearliest days of settlement until the present time. In the early 1830s, just over 3000 free women migrated to Australia on 16 ships chartered specifically for them. These women madean informed decision to migrate. The colonies offered a new life, but the risks were enormous. Emigration was clearly an attractive option for many women in the depressed economies of the 1830s and like people today, they left their homes because they could see a better life in a new country. They were drawn from a variety of backgrounds throughout Britain and Ireland and a significant number of educated women took up this opportunity to migrate. The emigration motivations of the educated women are not as transparent as those of the distressed, unskilled women, but their determination to seek new opportunities was just as real.

Despite the realisation that there was little likelihood that they would ever see their homes again, the very real dangers of undertaking a lengthy sea voyage, the lack of any detailed knowledge of frontier life in the colonies, despite all the odds stacked against them, these adventurous and courageous single women decided to take on the challenge of migration.

 

From the British government’s empire-building perspective, the women would build social stability in the colonies where large numbers of single men dominated the population: in a white population of nearly 60,000 in New South Wales, 73% were male and 27% were female, while in Van Diemen’s Land, in a white population around 40,000, 71% were male and 29% female. These were the overall figures. In the bush it was estimated that in some districts, males outnumbered females

20:1. The arrival of such a large number of women had an enormous impact and altered the nature of colonial society. Today their descendants number in the untold tens of thousands. Australia was populated then largely through Britain’s desire to expand its empire, causing a huge moral dilemma for many

Australians today. As Manning Clark asked white Australians, reiterated by Professor Davison at a recent community history awards ceremony, "Do we belong here?. How do we reconcile those who have migrated to this country, or who are descended from migrants, in these times when non-Indigenous presence is being questioned? It’s a long conversation in Australiatoday as it was in the nineteenth-century. It’s a question which invokes passionate responses. In considering this question, it

helps to study and understand the processes by which people migrate, whether from government action or inaction, and the

motivations and processes of the agents and agencies involved. 

 

In the nineteenth century, the topic of migration was as controversial as it is for us today. From the time of their arrival, the women occupied an ambiguous position in colonial society. Encouraged to migrate for the skills they brought to the colonies and to provide homes as wives and mothers, they were expected to be of good moral character and conform to colonial expectations. Any indiscretions, whether real or imagined, were widely reported. Yet they were willing to risk leaving their

homes for an unknown future on the other side of the world. Travelling without a male protector combined with their need to work in order to survive in the colonies made them not respectable in the eyes of many colonists. Poems, songs and ditties lampooned the newly-arrived women and presented an image of them as immoral, depraved and “fair game.”

It is hard for us to imagine that there would have been prejudice against single women arriving here - in colonial Australia there was such a shortage of women, you would think that they would have been welcomed. But many of these women only spoke Gaelic, many were Catholic and they were entering a largely Protestant, English society. These issues of religion and language resonate with us in considering immigrants who wish to make Australia their home today.

By whatever means individuals are pushed or pulled to migrate to Australia, whether two hundred years ago or as recently as this year, we are all contributors to this wonderful country, perhaps the greatest multicultural success story in the world today, and it is a test of our maturity as a society how we welcome new people, particularly those who speak a different language or who worship under a different creed.

 

The Good Girl Song Project provides the framework for discussion about the centuries-old issues of migration: identity, adaptability, acceptance.