Shadows and Suspicions

 

Initial research into Australia of the 1880s to 1890s, revealed a land sparsely populated and challenging to farm. Not only was the weather likely to bring on drought but those droughts were sometimes ended with floods. The lands that were granted were, in most cases, vast. They needed to be to provide a living but even that was sometimes not enough, witnessed by the "abandoned and boarded up farmhouses" that James Moorhouse, the second Bishop of Melbourne saw while traveling from Mallee to Kerang in 1882.*1 Did William McKay take up farming when he arrived in Australia? His occupation has been hard to ascertain. There are no census records to provide clues.

Farming was a prevalent occupation, its trials and tribulations covered in the Australian history that I read. One of the tribulations was the plague of rabbits that had been introduced in 1859 by a farmer planning on hunting and eating them. The few introduced bred like rabbits and soon overran fields and crops.*2 There were some favourable developments. Farmers in the late '80s and early '90s ere aided by the introduction of irrigation schemes and railways; water for their crops and livestock and railways to get their produce to market. Investment in this infrastructure was necessary and fed the boom times which came to an abrupt end in 1890.

1890, the McKays had just arrived the year before so they were in time to feel the brunt of the depression that hit. Thomas Keneally describes the depression as follows:

In the 1890s depression, the working man's paradise thesis came under acute pressure. There was a high level of burglary, babies were abandoned on doorsteps, in the slums there were evictions, and the number of people applying for charity doubled. According to the lively South Australian premier, Charles Kingston, a radical, 'Australian society set high standards for individual self-sufficiency', and sometimes people simply could not reach them. Only South Australia and Western Australia had state-subsidised Benevolent Asylums, the equivalent of British and Irish workhouses, and these asylums, said the visiting Irish home rule campaigner Michael Davitt, 'had at least some of the much-dreaded atmosphere of Poor Law Institutions in England'. On the other hand, he continued, workers who had gone to the wall were not treated like semi-criminals, and there was no hereditary pauper class, as in England. And the richest investors in Australian enterprise often lived overseas, like Mount Morgan's Mr D'Arcy, and this helped the myth of Australian equality.*3

I'm still digging into Australian history to see what else I can find out. I've also stared looking at the newspapers on Trove to see if I can find out more about the McKay family. It's a challenge to weed through results based on the limited search terms that I can guess at but one of the items I found was the death of William and Henrietta McKay's youngest daughter, Ethel Hilda McKay at the age of 36. I have my suspicions about the health of this daughter born to the couple in their 40s but it seems that it will be difficult to find out more about the cause of her death. I'm hopeful that I will be able to find out more about the rest of the McKay family.  

Sources:

Keneally, Thomas. Australians: From Eureka to the Diggers. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2011. *1 p 107; *2 p 115; *3 p 197

Trove – trove.nla.gov.au