‘All the Men at the Pump’: Water, Wool, and Squatter Anne Drysdale’s Diaries, 1840–1851

Abstract

Australian wool-growing has long been cast by most writers as a masculine endeavour, from the male squatters who took great swathes of land to run their sheep, displacing First Peoples and transforming ecosystems in the process, to the shearers who became the embodiment of hardy bush masculinity. The pastoral insights recorded by Anne Drysdale in her diaries spanning the 1840s, however, provide rich insights into a female engagement with the industry. In focusing on Drysdale and her partner Caroline Newcomb as part of the renewed interest in ‘invisible farmers’, this article considers their interactions with water. It examines how Drysdale recorded the rain and the river, allowing us to trace her multifaceted uses of them. As her account indicates, water was an economic safeguard and a productive resource essential to the squatting enterprise, as well as a means for neighbourly connection, a source of pleasure, and a site of danger.

‘All the men at the pump’, recorded Anne Drysdale, one member of the Drysdale and Newcomb squatting partnership on 24 September 1847, as they gathered around the new equipment.¹ The pump had been purchased by Drysdale and her partner Caroline Newcomb to draw water to wash wool while it was still on the sheep’s back. The group likely comprised more than just the men working the pump but their female employers, too, given they had a vested interest in its successful operation – clean wool held more value in the British market. Yet, as Drysdale was to explain ruefully in her diary, the pump was ‘found to be useless for the sheep washing as it will not raise a sufficient quantity of water’.² This brief observation launches the following discussion of two women in Australia’s early sheep farming, an industry that grew rapidly across the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, reaching such heights that the emerging nation has been said to have ridden ‘on the sheep’s back’.³ Drysdale’s remark gestures to the transformations taking place in industry practice, and the techniques for improving wool quality as Australia became the producer of the world’s finest merino fleeces and a dominant force in the global market. It also speaks to the fact that Anne Drysdale (1792–1853) and Caroline Newcomb (1812–1874) were women landowners in a predominantly men’s domain.⁴ As women settlers among a male-dominated Port Phillip community, they engaged in sheep farming – an endeavour that has, until relatively recently, been cast as almost entirely masculine.

Seeking to recapture women’s participation in agriculture more broadly, Jane Whittle and Mark Hailwood have revisited what they call the ‘significant overlap’ in men’s and women’s work in early modern England, when women prepared ground for crops, then sowed and reaped them, and worked with animals – so that a ‘significant proportion of sheep shearers’ were women.⁵ In her study of farmers in the Callide Valley in Queensland, historian Margaret Cook seeks to challenge the rural ideal of masculine labour, in this case as it was articulated in government materials, newspapers and settlers’ own correspondence during the early twentieth century. By looking more deeply at the available sources, she argues, it is possible to uncover some of the key roles played by white women in settlement.⁶

Greater recognition of women as farmers and graziers entails locating them more fully also in histories of dispossession. Across the first decades of British settlement, male squatters, sometimes accompanied by wives and children, claimed swathes of land on a settler frontier dominated by violence, destruction and white settler masculinity. Running sheep or cattle, or planting crops, they transformed ecosystems and displaced First Peoples from their land, not least by taking their water.⁷ More recent scholarship on Elizabeth Macarthur has reminded us of elite women’s contributions to the early Australian wool industry.⁸ Recognising as pastoral pioneers Macarthur and others like sisters-in-law Janet Templeton and Eliza Forlong – whose Saxon merinos further improved Australia’s fine wool following their arrival in 1831 – shines a light on such women as ‘invisible farmers’ within Australia’s pastoral and colonial history.⁹

Some ‘invisible farmers’ were single, whether spinsters or widows, and held runs in their own right.¹⁰ Drysdale and Newcomb were among them. In seizing the opportunity for women to become successful squatters, they changed the land they occupied – its waterways, soil, vegetation and native animal populations. Their engagement with water – captured in Drysdale’s commentaries on pastoral and agricultural matters in her leather-bound diaries – is my focus here.¹¹ In particular, I set out to trace Drysdale’s account of rain and river water, alert as she and Newcomb were to their value as they set out to improve (in the settler sense) their property and its wool production. I follow their entrepreneurial efforts from Drysdale’s arrival in Port Phillip in 1840 to the landmark event that changed the new Colony of Victoria’s fortune: the discovery of gold in 1851.¹²

According to Jennifer Aston and Catherine Bishop, research on entrepreneurial women has tended to focus on towns and cities. They wonder if this unevenness could be a reflection of the availability of sources, or perhaps also because of ‘the false assumption that farmers were not entrepreneurial’.¹³ Drysdale’s diaries reveal that she and her partner, like other nineteenth-century business-minded farmers, were not only producers but also merchants who sought to forecast the market and deploy the best methods so as to sell for profit.¹⁴ In addition to the diaries, the following discussion of Drysdale and Newcomb’s use of water, as they established then developed their enterprise, draws from other squatters’ writing, emigrants’ guides and local newspaper reports.

Anne Drysdale: Squatter

In 1847, John Dunmore Lang, Presbyterian clergyman and migration promoter, published Phillipsland; or the Country Hitherto Designated Port Phillip: Its Present Condition and Prospects, as a Highly Eligible Field for Emigration. Intending to encourage a certain kind of settler – Lang favoured men and women who were Scottish (like himself), moral, of good character, and Protestant – he noted that while some years were drier than others in Port Phillip’s south-west, squatters keenly pursued land ‘of the first quality’ where water was available but not a threat.¹⁵ While other emigrants’ literature broadly framed squatting as a masculine occupation and contemporaries celebrated a certain masculine squatter swagger, Lang included in his account the example of ‘an elderly maiden lady’ he had first encountered four years earlier: Anne Drysdale.¹⁶ In Lang’s eyes, Drysdale made the ideal squatter as she came from ‘a highly respectable family’, possessed ‘superior intelligence’, lived ‘in the fear of God’, had an ‘active disposition’, and was ‘fond of rural pursuits’.¹⁷ ‘On arrival in the Colony, Miss Drysdale [had] determined to “squat”, as it is styled in the phraseology of the country’, Lang explained this word for his uninitiated readers: ‘to settle on a tract of unoccupied Crown land, of sufficient extent for the pasturage of considerable flocks and herds’.¹⁸

As a forty-seven-year-old Scottish spinster, Drysdale brought with her to the colony what she called the ‘very small capital’ of £1250, inherited from her father.¹⁹ She also brought experience gained in Ayrshire having ‘rented a large farm’ on which she ‘superintended the management in person’.²⁰ Thus, she was a woman who had both the resources and the knowledge to set herself up as a squatter in the Australian colonies. Drysdale seemed confident that, in spite of cycles of depression and drought, sufficient numbers of good seasons would elevate the colony to (in the words of another guide for early settlers) ‘if not one of the richest regions of the world, [then] certainly one of the most abundant in all the necessaries of life’.²¹

In Port Phillip, Drysdale met Caroline Newcomb. An earlier arrival to the Australian colonies, Newcomb had lived in Van Diemen’s Land from 1833 before sailing to Port Phillip three years later as governess to John and Eliza Batman’s children. Though twenty years Drysdale’s junior, Newcomb became Drysdale’s friend and then partner – ‘I hope for life’, Drysdale wrote. Dysdale considered Newcomb to be ‘the best & most clever person I have ever met’; a woman who did ‘every thing [sic] … so well & so quickly’ that there appeared ‘to be magic in her touch’.²² Drysdale and Newcomb took up land near Corio (Geelong): first holding Boronggoop in 1841, a run of more than 10,000 acres, followed by Leep Leep and Coriyule, the latter converted to sought-after freehold in 1848.²³ Across the 1840s, they pursued a range of agricultural and pastoral activities: cropping wheat, oats, barley and more, running cattle, breeding horses, keeping poultry and pigs. But their primary focus was sheep and wool production. Evidence of their early success can be seen in the fact that, by 1844, their original flock of 800 had grown to 6000.²⁴

While Drysdale contributed capital and experience to the partnership, Newcomb possessed an irrepressible energy and capacity for work. Active, ‘industrious’ women were admired in the Australian colonies, as was emphasised by both female and male writers of contemporary colonial memoirs and emigrants’ guides.²⁵ Such writers endorsed increasing domestic labour and limited work outside the home for women on the land. Drysdale’s and Newcomb’s actions extended beyond such ideas of industriousness, however, in managing their home and their station, directing a male and female workforce, and in planning for and making decisions with the ultimate aim of returning a profit. As Drysdale recorded at various points in her diaries, Newcomb also searched for missing sheep, carried supplies to shepherds and marked out fences, as well as carrying out a range of other tasks both inside and outside of the home.²⁶ She was experienced in the saddle and so could travel across the land: ‘Miss N. was quite at home on her high-spirited steed’, Lang observed.²⁷ According to Lang, Drysdale’s and Newcomb’s working partnership was a success; he described them as ‘kindred spirits’.²⁸ ‘I have great cause to be thankful for having such a friend as Miss Newcomb’, wrote Drysdale in 1841.²⁹

That Drysdale and Newcomb were considered by Lang as competent as their successful male contemporaries suggests that (at least in some quarters) they were respected and accepted. According to Catherine Bishop, entrepreneurial women have been obscured from history because they do not fit historians’ discrete categories, such as wage-earners or domestic workers solely outside or inside the home. However, from the point of view of Drysdale’s and Newcomb’s contemporaries, there was nothing unusual in their activities.³⁰ Bishop reveals that Sydney’s streets were likewise teeming with colonial women entrepreneurs: dressmakers, boarding house keepers and teachers, as well as those in roles more traditionally perceived as masculine such as butchers and grocers; some owned plumbing and ironmongery businesses.³¹ Béatrice Craig finds comparable women in nineteenth-century Britain and North America who, in their working lives, ‘did not act differently from men’.³²

Anne Drysdale: Diarist

As several previous accounts of Anne Drysdale’s diaries have shown, in a period dominated by male voices, they offer unique insights into how a white, educated, middle-class woman carried out a meaningful personal and working life.³³ The diaries record her social connections, document her religious activities and describe the work she and Newcomb undertook inside the home, revealing the intimate and often mundane patterns of daily life. It is in Drysdale’s meticulous observations of work outside the home, however, that the diaries shine a light on the work of women variously described in their day and later as ‘lady pastoralists’, ‘land ladies’, or ‘lady squatters’.³⁴

When Mary Lou Horne wrote her study of Drysdale and Newcomb in the 1980s, feminist historians were interrogating the nature of women’s work, including in rural settings, mapping their labour from ‘helpmeet’ to ‘slave’ (as Marilyn Lake described them).³⁵ The experience of landowners such as Drysdale and Newcomb, noted Horne, paralleled what ‘many men of a similar background’ experienced: they did not undertake physical labour themselves but employed workers. Their participation ‘at managerial level’, as Horne described it, allowed them to ‘maintain a genteel lifestyle, as befitted their sex and station’ while daily directing the work of an overseer and farm labourers whose numbers swelled seasonally with the addition of itinerant shearers and reapers.³⁶

For Bev Roberts, Drysdale’s diaries offer ‘an odd hybrid of personal and practical, of the domestic, the social and the agricultural’, shifting in focus once the run had been established to become ‘more of a squatter’s daybook than Anne’s private diary’.³⁷ Roberts sees their experience as determined by their class position – as owner-managers – not by their sex. As she notes, the diaries indicate that Drysdale and Newcomb, who ‘largely lived independent of men, and worked like men’, in the sense of being proprietors and entrepreneurs, ‘seem to have moved into the male domain quite confidently, unselfconsciously, with no sense of any oddness about their actions’.³⁸ While their trusted overseer, John Armstrong, played a critical role in the development of the farm, the growth of the merino flocks, and the management of the labour force, the two women possessed ultimate decision-making power over their own success or failure.³⁹

Approaching the diaries from another direction still, Kate Hunter recognises them as ‘records of some of the mechanics of dispossession’ because Drysdale and Newcomb competed with the Wadawurrung people for the land and its resources.⁴⁰ Hunter explores Drysdale’s often-contradictory views of Indigenous people: while she expressed a degree of sympathy for their situation, she assumed that her success required their displacement.⁴¹ At the same time, Drysdale and Newcomb were aware of the local Aboriginal people’s long connection to and care for country. For example, Drysdale recorded in her diary in 1841 that Reverend Francis Tuckfield, who had established the nearby mission station Buntingdale, had told them ‘that Boronggoop (the name of this place) means turf’.⁴²

Drysdale and Newcomb supplied sheep for the Buntingdale flock and supported the mission financially. Some of its ‘residents’ also visited Boronggoop.⁴³ Such connections between Drysdale’s and Newcomb’s own fortunes as landowners and dispossession warrant further study. So does the fact that they brought Indigenous children named Maryanne and Katherine Scott into their home. Reflecting a bifurcated view of Indigenous people as both familiar and other, Drysdale wrote of the Scott girls as children and ‘creatures’ when she described them as ‘children from King’s Island, very fine little creatures, dressed in pelisses of kangaroo skin’.⁴⁴ As Penelope Edmonds and Michelle Berry explain in their account of the home of John and Eliza Batman, violent dispossession was often followed by ‘acts of kindness’ such as taking Aboriginal children into settler homes.⁴⁵ Edmonds and Berry’s work is especially pertinent to Boronggoop as Newcomb, who had been employed as governess for the Batmans the decade before, had witnessed this form of kindness firsthand when they ‘adopted’ Tasmanian Aboriginal boys.⁴⁶

Drysdale’s diaries also illuminate the environmental history of white women as settlers – a history entwined with the story of settler–Indigenous relations. The environmental history of colonisation has thrived in recent years through the scholarship of Katie Holmes, Ruth Morgan, Margaret Cook, Karen Twigg, and others.⁴⁷ As Morgan and Cook explain, ‘excavating the power relations of the past to reveal the gendered ways in which non-Indigenous people have shaped environments, and been shaped by them in return’ offers new understandings of intersecting forms of settler-colonial dispossession and humanitarianism, and of placemaking more broadly.⁴⁸

By reading Drysdale’s diaries through the lens of these themes we can also see a land changing as a result of settlers’ presence.⁴⁹ As I will show, Drysdale and Newcomb deepened their knowledge of the land over time, working with its resources and responding to the seasons that shaped them. In this process, they returned again and again to the crucial question of water. Frequently pragmatic and occasionally emotional, Drysdale’s diary entries describe the centrality of water in life on the land, ranging from economic safeguard and reproductive resource to a point of neighbourly connection, a source of pleasure, and a site of danger.

Water

In May 1840, Drysdale set off on foot to visit a neighbour. On her return, she described her impressions of the land:

a plain extending for miles, but perfectly dry, fine rich soil, all ready for the plough, as there are no trees & these marshes have evidently been at one time under water. The rising grounds which surround them are always wooded in the most beautiful manner.

Drysdale was so delighted by what she saw that day that she added: ‘those at home have no idea of the pleasures of this country or they would certainly not waste their lives in cold damp Scotland’.⁵⁰ Her rapturous tone can be heard again a year later, when she described the land as ‘really beautiful, a short distance from the Barwon which is a noble river, all around so green & fresh with trees of the finest kinds, Mimosa, Accacia [sic], She Oak &c scattered about & in clumps like a nobleman’s park’.⁵¹ Drysdale had identified the potential of the land and its water.

Similar responses can be read in other squatters’ diaries written as they set out through Port Phillip, hoping to claim the best country. Soon after Edward Henty arrived in Portland Bay in 1834, he observed ‘beautiful Sheep Land, well covered with grass’ that looked ‘down on East River distant about 1 ½ Mil[e]s’ and that extended ‘right and left for 12 Miles’.⁵² Five years later while travelling west from Melbourne, Scotsman Niel Black wrote of country ‘finer, richer and more beautiful than the finest park land I ever saw at home, grass in many instances up to the flaps of the saddles’. He also cautioned, however, ‘that I have travelled hundreds of miles before I saw this, and a very great proportion of this fine land is totally useless for want of water’.⁵³ Likewise, Henry Grey Bennett expressed his concern in 1846, when riding out to view the place intended for a new station, at seeing ‘[p]lenty of grass but no water’.⁵⁴ Once he had found the land he sought, Black claimed it by setting ‘fire to the bush about the lake to prevent any person from squatting on it for some time’ and ‘plant[ing] a station at every three or four miles’ distance where water can be had’.⁵⁵

Some squatters occupied runs with fertile river outlooks, like John Cotton who claimed ‘six miles of river frontage with an extensive rich flat, & wooded ranges all around’ along the Goulburn River, north of Melbourne, in 1843.⁵⁶ For Penelope Selby and her family who experienced the ‘very wettest winter ever known’ in 1842 beside the Yarra, the river’s proximity had its drawbacks. ‘The Yarra has twice risen to such a height that many families have been completely washed out of their houses’, she observed, the overflow causing ‘a great deal of damage to crops’. Later, however, she reported that the country ‘look[s] beautiful now’.⁵⁷ Some settlers reported other water sources. Katherine Kirkland noted of her and her husband’s land in 1840:

Every one thought highly of our station; and we were well off for water, having several large water holes (as they are always called here, but at home we should call them lakes or large ponds); and when the rains come on, these ponds are joined together in a river.⁵⁸

Squatters knew that fresh water – falling from the sky, flowing along rivers or creeks, pooling in lakes, water holes or wells – was essential. Drysdale, more than many of her contemporaries, documented in rich detail its layered uses. Her sheep and other animals drank it and grew on the feed it produced. It sustained flocks and crops, together with shepherds and hut keepers on out stations. Closer to home it washed clothes and bodies, nourishing the garden and orchard. Water gave life, although, as we will see, it could also cause death.

Rain

‘Had 4 sick lambs all the even^g in the parlour’, Drysdale jotted matter-of-factly in her diary on 23 May 1842.⁵⁹ The following day she recorded ‘3 lambs in the parlour all day’, noting ‘about 6 or 7 have died altogether from the storm’.⁶⁰ Bringing lambs into the parlour – often the finest room in the nineteenth-century home and a distinctly feminine space – was surely an unusual decision.⁶¹ This was especially true given the two women and their charges took care in ‘cleaning & beautifying’ that room.⁶² May had been a wet month. Less than a week earlier, a ‘constant calm rain’ fell until two o’clock. While the men on the station undertook a variety of jobs – pickling wheat (treating the grain against fungal disease), taking the plough to the smithy, and working in the garden or with the sheep – she and Newcomb, she wrote, were ‘quietly at work all alone’.⁶³ As I have argued elsewhere, this phrasing echoes other women diarists of the time for whom quietly working was shorthand for ‘women’s work’ in one of its most gendered forms: needlework.⁶⁴ So it is quite possible that in the parlour they could watch over the weak lambs at the same time as continuing with their sewing.

It is tempting to see this example (that is, women doing needlework and caring for sick stock within the one domestic space) as confirming the notion of separate male and female spheres, an ideology in which women were considered naturally suited to certain forms of labour within the house.⁶⁵ Within this ideology, women were caregivers: in the first instance of children, although their womanly skills might extend to the care of ailing lambs. Moreover, that Drysdale and Newcomb retreated from the rain, while the men worked outside regardless, perhaps also indicates the ways in which men and women were assumed to be differently disposed to aspects of the outside environment. It could just as easily reflect, however, their class position that afforded them the choice to stay inside while their employees worked in the rain. Certainly, Drysdale appreciated the counterpoint to rainy days: fine days with bright sunshine, so different from the dull, misty ‘Scotch’ weather she had left behind.⁶⁶ Lang dutifully recorded how Drysdale suffered ‘the cough and colds, and other ills that flesh is heir to in our hyperborean Scottish climate’, motivating her migration to Australia as ‘a milder region, where she might enjoy better health’.⁶⁷

From another perspective, however, the lambs in the parlour offer an example of the merging of domestic labour and farmwork. The blurring of such distinctions when two women run a property can be sensed in the comments of Lang, who, following a visit he made in 1843 then again in 1846, wrote of the ‘domestic character’ of Drysdale and Newcomb’s station that he had rarely observed elsewhere.⁶⁸ Catherine Bishop would perhaps see this as an example of one man’s attempt to account for the success of two businesswomen who ‘brought their outside interests inside, turning kitchens into workshops, bedrooms into lodgings for boarders, and living rooms into classrooms and shopfronts’.⁶⁹ Lang appears, however, to also acknowledge how the domestic spread out to the exterior, when he noted the domestic character of their ‘establishment generally’; even the livestock ‘seemed to consider themselves more at home than elsewhere’.⁷⁰

Well beyond the lambing season, Drysdale carefully logged the temperature, sun, wind, and rain and the state of precious water sources on the property across the pages of her diaries. Soon she had first-hand knowledge that some years could be dry and others devastatingly wet, flooding low ground so that her sheep were left ‘standing in water all night’, while in one wet spell in 1842 black swans swam over the adjacent crops.⁷¹ In addition, she recorded the quality of the rain, describing it as ranging from ‘misty’ and ‘mild’ to ‘violent’.⁷² So did other women, like Georgiana McCrae, who wrote of rain ‘gently falling’ and of downpours ‘[r]aining cats and dogs’. Similarly, in his own journal, the squatter Mackworth Shore was attuned to intensity that could escalate from ‘brisk rain’ to ‘furious storms of rain hail wind and intense lightning’.⁷³

Rainfall is necessary for grass to nourish sheep, but fire was also recognised as important for generating new growth. Another contemporary squatter, John Cotton, wrote in letters home to England that the local Aboriginal people ‘set fire to the bush in order to clean away the low shrubs & mark gaps that they may walk with greater facility’. ‘The settlers also usually burn a portion of their run every year’, Cotton continued, with cattle and sheep ‘particularly fond of this young grass, which springs up after the burning’.⁷⁴ In another examaple, Niel Black reported that he routinely burned his land ‘with a view to have fresh feed when the rains set in’.⁷⁵ Drysdale and Newcomb adopted burning to enhance new growth too, with Drysdale echoing Black’s words when stating that controlled fires were started ‘to improve the feed when rain comes’.⁷⁶

Equally, squatters quickly learned to fear bushfires that could rage uncontrollably. The Geelong Advertiser described them moving ‘as quick as a horse at full gallop’ across tinder-dry land. Rain or ‘a broad sheet of water’ was a godsend then.⁷⁷ Depending on its ferocity and the extent of the grass parched brown, the danger of bushfires might be averted. It was through ‘great exertions’ in January 1842 that station hands stopped a fire tearing across the marsh on Drysdale and Newcomb’s property in the direction of the wool shed.⁷⁸

Drysdale noted that rain sufficient ‘to moisten the ground & keep the grass green & fine’ made all the difference for her sheep’s health and their wool-growing potential.⁷⁹ ‘We have had a great deal of rain last night & today which was much wanted as the grass begins to look brown’, she wrote in December 1841.⁸⁰ After a dry summer in 1845 she worried the grass was ‘much burnt & no feed’.⁸¹ ‘Thank God’, she penned a few days later, for the ‘constant mild rain’ that fell.⁸² A year later with ‘scarcely … any rain’ over the summer months, she described the grass as ‘more compleatly [sic] burnt-up than I have ever seen it’.⁸³ It was ‘a great blessing’ when heavy rain fell the following week.⁸⁴

River water

Although the Barwon River was subject to the vagaries of rainfall and even more so the tide (their property was near the river mouth on Port Phillip Bay, and so its freshness depended on the tidal flow), Drysdale and Newcomb were able to harness its water to clean wool.⁸⁵ Washing sheep before shearing them was an important and commonplace first step. It cleansed wool of dirt, dust and other matter, thus increasing its value at market.⁸⁶ As fellow Port Phillip squatter John Cotton explained in 1845, ‘the value of the wool so much depends upon its being well washed & cleaned it is obviously the interest of the sheep farmer to get it up in the best possible manner’.⁸⁷

But first, a wool shed was necessary. ‘Yesterday the wool shed was finished’, Drysdale recorded in her diary on 8 October 1841. ‘It looks very well, 30 feet in length by 14 wide’, hinting at the amount of wood felled and split by men from across the property.⁸⁸ That same day ‘we’ – whether she meant herself, Newcomb, Armstrong or all three – hired four shearers. Offered £1 per hundred sheep shorn, these men would receive five additional shillings daily ‘to assist in washing & making a washing place’ in the river.⁸⁹ When the shearers arrived four mornings later, they spent ‘the whole day making the washing place’.⁹⁰ In what was called the Saxon method of washing, ‘the sheep are flung & allowed to swim’ between two poles that spanned the river while ‘men with flat sticks rub off the dirt’.⁹¹ Drysdale felt compassion for the animals’ ordeal as she watched them swim through the wash. It ‘seemed rather cruel as the day was cold & windy’, she noted. It was also a precarious exit for the fatigued sheep as ‘the river close to the bank is very deep’. This sight of ‘dripping & exhausted’ sheep emerging from the Barwon River may later have motivated Drysdale to test innovations in sheep washing.⁹²

The shearers washed 700 sheep that day. On the Wednesday to follow, when the remainder of the flock had passed through the wash, a total of 1500 had swum across the river.⁹³ Only one drowned. Quickly pulled out, it was cooked and fed to the men.⁹⁴ Its rapid retrieval helped prevent contamination of the river, a source of drinking water and abundant in fish. Reflecting on the river’s continuing importance for the local Aboriginal people, Drysdale wrote a couple of weeks later that ‘[t]o day we had fish caught by the natives, who get great quantities in the river beside us’.⁹⁵

Following the washing, the men waited a day for the yolk to rise, a natural process that Drysdale described as ‘the wool becom[ing] greasy’ and ready to be shorn.⁹⁶ When Drysdale and Newcomb’s first shearing season concluded more than two weeks after it had begun, 2060 sheep had been washed and shorn.⁹⁷ Drysdale continued to record the busy cycle of washing and shearing in her diaries, beginning each year with the preparation of the wash.⁹⁸ Every year, they sought good, competent men, as washing could be tiring, posing dangers to sheep and to the many labourers who could not swim.⁹⁹ Drought could further complicate washing or prevent it altogether if a water source could not be found.¹⁰⁰

The fertile land that bordered rivers was precious. When Drysdale and Newcomb’s neighbour, Mr Langdon (likely James Conway Langdon), sought access to the Barwon to wash his sheep via their property, at first the two women were opposed. He ‘begged so hard for permission’ that they agreed on the condition that he should promptly remove his sheep wash on completion and not allow his flock to cross their marshland.¹⁰¹ They had recognised the value of this marsh from the time they planted their first potato crop there. ‘No previous working!’, Drysdale had marvelled in 1841, ‘No dung!’¹⁰² Drysdale and Newcomb had protected the marsh from the damage caused by sheep’s hooves ever since. Giving Langdon’s sheep river access had a direct impact on the price his wool would reach at market. As they might need Langdon’s support in an emergency, no doubt Drysdale and Newcomb were concerned to maintain good relations with their neighbour. Indeed, while Langdon was washing his sheep, presumably close by in the following year, he warned them of ‘a tremendous fire coming up to the back of the hut’.¹⁰³

Washing wool by swimming sheep through the running water of a stream or river continued, though John Cotton reported in his account of the colony that ‘great improvements’ were being ‘made every year’.¹⁰⁴ One innovation reported in 1842 was the introduction ‘of washing under spouts constructed where the river has a fall, by which the fleece is effectively cleansed with very little hand labour’.¹⁰⁵ The spouts also meant fewer men standing in the water.¹⁰⁶ Around Geelong and the western district, ‘the leading sheepmen vied with each other in the cleansing of their wool’.¹⁰⁷ They tested various forms of washing troughs, washing boxes and washing pools of warm water.¹⁰⁸ Some methods required a pump to pull the water from its source.

Drysdale and Newcomb were among these innovators and used a pump from at least 1844. It worked well, Drysdale confirmed that year, and ‘makes the sheep very clean’.¹⁰⁹ By the time Drysdale and Newcomb tested their new ‘force pump’ in 1847, they had high hopes for even better results. Their leadership in new methods was reported in the Geelong Advertiser, where it was noted that the pump had been constructed to order in London and imported specially by the two women. A tank to receive the river water, and from which the spouts would issue, had yet to be built.¹¹⁰ Although Drysdale and Newcomb tested and tweaked the process over a number of days, according to Drysdale the results were disappointing.¹¹¹ Finding its force of ‘no use’, she wrote, they returned to ‘the old one’ to complete the washing that year.¹¹² The new pump might have failed, but their interest in testing new equipment contributed to improvements in water management and sheep washing practices that would be refined in turn by others.

As innovators in wool washing, Drysdale and Newcomb were perhaps inspired by their concern for animal and worker safety. The river was known to be a dangerous place. It was the first place to be searched when people or livestock disappeared, while retrieving animals, including horses and bullocks that fell into the water while attempting to drink, was perilous.¹¹³ The two women may also have been wary of polluting the Barwon River through sheep washing when its water was drunk by station residents. As well as valuing the river for its economic value, Drysdale appreciated its potential for pleasure. She and Newcomb fished its waters and enjoyed strolling along its banks.¹¹⁴

Conclusion

That John Dunmore Lang chose Anne Drysdale as an illustration of a Port Phillip squatter was hardly accidental. As his writing in Phillipsland was intended to promote the colony as a land of promise for certain British (preferably Scottish) migrants, he was not so much concerned with Drysdale’s sex as with her experience and character as a successful squatter, and thus with her contributions to the colony.¹¹⁵ Drysdale offered an exemplar of a moral, upright, white, and educated woman immigrant who had become a fine squatter. As argued here, Drysdale confidently made her place in Port Phillip, successfully adapting her skills and experience to sheep farming in the antipodean landscape with its distinct seasons, rhythms, and resources. She had the support of a capable partner, a hard-working overseer, and – although labourers came and went – for the most part a constant workforce. She also held some of what Lang recognised as Port Phillip’s finest land.¹¹⁶

Observing and responding to the environment were integral to this adaptation. As Drysdale grew her station and her flocks, she documented the critical place of water in the venture. Regular rainfall and access to river water were essential for improving the value of Drysdale and Newcomb’s wool, and for the station’s workers and for her and Newcomb’s quality of life. Drysdale wrote about water as both generative and deadly, productive but unpredictable – a resource that was awe-inspiring, to be admired or feared as well as relied upon. While they acknowledged the presence of Aboriginal people and their connection to the land and its waterways, neither Drysdale nor Newcomb seemed to be troubled by their dispossession of the original people.

Determined to succeed as entrepreneurs, Drysdale and Newcomb were directly involved in the work of their property, increasingly understanding its variations over the seasons with their many implications for the viability of sheep and the quality of wool. At the same time as they extended their authority into the world of the property, Drysdale described moments when that world literally entered their domestic space, such as when they cared for ailing lambs in the parlour as it drizzled outdoors, or when the domestic spilled outside the home. Indeed, Lang remarked upon it with approval when he observed ‘something of a domestic character about Miss D.’s establishment generally which is but rarely seen at the squatting stations of the interior’.¹¹⁷ This blurring of formal distinctions between the work of women inside and outside the home, along with a growing awareness of the crucial role of water in their daily lives, would be integral to Drysdale and Newcomb's success as sheep farmers in the Port Phillip colony.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

With thanks to the editors of Australian Historical Studies, Fiona Paisley and Tim Rowse, together with the reviewers of this article, for their close engagement with and invaluable suggestions for my work. Thanks also to the History of Early Modern Natural Resource Management research team at the Australian Catholic University for their feedback on an earlier draft.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was funded by an Australian Research Council [grant number DP210100104].

Notes

1 Anne Drysdale, “Diary of Anne Drysdale, Vol III: Manuscript, 1844–1847,” 24 September 1847, MS 9249, State Library Victoria (hereafter SLV).

2 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 24 September 1847.

3 For a small sample of this considerable scholarship, see: Charles Massy, The Australian Merino: The Story of a Nation (Sydney: Random, 2007, repr. 1990); Kosmas Tsokhas, Markets, Money and Empire: The Political Economy of the Australian Wool Industry (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990); Simon Ville and David Merrett, “Too Big to Fail: Explaining the Timing and Nature of Intervention in the Australian Wool Market, 1916–1991,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 62, no. 3 (2016): 337–52; Simon Ville and Claire Wright, “Buzz and Pipelines: Knowledge and Decision-Making in a Global Business Services Precinct,” Journal of Urban History 45, no. 2 (2019): 191–210.

4 For biographical information on Drysdale and Newcomb, see: P.L. Brown and Jean I. Martin, “Drysdale, Anne (1792–1853)” and “Newcomb, Caroline Elizabeth (1812–1874),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/drysdale-anne-2000/text2441/ and https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/newcomb-caroline-elizabeth-2238/text2441, published first in hardcopy 1966 (accessed 15 August 2023); Mary Lou Horne, “Caroline Newcomb and Anne Drysdale: Pastoralists,” in Double Time: Women in Victoria – 150 Years, ed. Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly (Melbourne: Penguin, 1985), 20–26; Nance Donkin, “Land Ladies,” in Always a Lady: Courageous Women in Colonial Australia (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1990), 97–108; John Richardson, The Lady Squatters: Miss Anne Drysdale and Miss Caroline Elizabeth Newcomb, “Boronggoop” and “Coriyule” (Drysdale: Shire of Bellarine, 1986); Bev Roberts, “A Black Apron View of History? Anne Drysdale & Caroline Newcomb, Victoria’s ‘Lady Squatters,’” La Trobeana: Journal of the CJ La Trobe Society 9, no. 3 (November, 2010): 2–16; Bev Roberts, Miss D & Miss N: An Extraordinary Partnership – The Diary of Anne Drysdale (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009).

5 Jane Whittle and Mark Hailwood, “The Gender Division of Labour in Early Modern England,” Economic History Review 73, no. 1 (2020): 16–17.

6 Margaret Cook, “Challenging Gender Stereotypes in Queensland’s Callide Valley: Settlers, Patriarchy and Environment,” History Australia 18, no. 1 (2021): 71–72, 78, 92.

7 For example: Heather Burke, Amy Roberts, Mick Morrison, Vanessa Sullivan and the River Murray and Mallee Aboriginal Corporation, “The Space of Conflict: Aboriginal/European Interactions and Frontier Violence on the Western Central Murray, South Australia, 1830–41,” Aboriginal History 40 (2016): 145–79; Amanda Nettelbeck, “Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier,” Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 2 (2016): 209–24; Angela Woollacott, “Frontier Violence and Settler Manhood,” History Australia 6, no. 1 (2009): 11.1–11.15.

8 Most recently: Alan Atkinson, Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm (Sydney: NewSouth, 2022); Kate Grenville, ed., Elizabeth Macarthur’s Letters (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2022); Michelle Scott Tucker, Elizabeth Macarthur: A Life at the Edge of the World (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2018). See also: Lennard Bickel, Australia’s First Lady: The Story of Elizabeth Macarthur (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991); Joy Hughes, ed., The Journal and Letters of Elizabeth Macarthur (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1984); Hazel King, Elizabeth Macarthur and Her World (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1980).

9 On Templeton and Forlong: Nance Donkin, “The Ladies Bo-Peep,” in The Women Were There: Nineteen Women Who Enlivened Australia’s History (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1988), 169–77; R.V.B., “Women Pastoral Pioneers: Story of Janet Templeton,” Australasian, 22 April 1944, 33. On “invisible farmers,” see for example: Carolyn E. Sachs, The Invisible Farmers: Women in Agricultural Production (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983); Nikki Henningham and Helen Morgan, “Update: The Invisible Farmer: Securing Australian Farm Women’s History,” Archives and Manuscripts 46 (2018): 90–99.

10 In Port Phillip see: R.V. Billis and A.S. Kenton, Pastures New: An Account of the Pastoral Occupation of Port Phillip (Melbourne: Macmillan & Company, 1930), 114–16; Ruth Teale, ed., Colonial Eve: Sources on Women in Australia 1788–1914 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978), 233. In New South Wales see: Tucker, 136.

11 Anne Drysdale, “Diary of Anne Drysdale, Vol I: Manuscript, 1839–1842,” “Diary of Anne Drysdale, Vol II: Manuscript, 1842–1844,” “Diary of Anne Drysdale, Vol III: Manuscript, 1844–1847,” “Diary of Anne Drysdale, Vol IV: Manuscript, 1851–1854,” MS 9249, SLV. Though Drysdale arrived in Port Phillip in 1840, the earlier 1939 entries record her setting sail. Entries following her death were made by Caroline Newcomb in 1854. The diary spanning 1847–1851 is missing.

12 Shearers, shepherds, and farm labourers could be difficult to find from 1851. William Pitt Faithfull of Springfield Station, for example, predicted that those who left for the diggings would soon return: “the better luck for us, [when] it is not one out of very many who succeed at gold digging’. Shearer Robert Gerrand noted in his diary the move from stations to goldfields (and back again) as reports of “new diggins ware found [sic]’. See: William Pitt Faithfull, Springfield, Letterbook 1851–1854, 30 August 1851, Folder 1, Box 1, Faithfull Family Papers, MS 1146, National Library of Australia; Robert Gerrand, “Diary and Account Book of Robert Gerrand, 1852–1854,” 23 November 1852, MS 10831, SLV.

13 Entrepreneurs in Aston and Bishop’s definition identified ‘opportunities for business, t[ook] risks (however small they might seem), assum[ed] responsibility for decisions’ and pursued profit. Jennifer Aston and Catherine Bishop, “Discovering a Global Perspective,” in Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Perspective, ed. Jennifer Aston and Catherine Bishop (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 4–5.

14 Adam Ward Rome, “American Farmers as Entrepreneurs, 1870–1900,” Agricultural History 56, no. 1 (1982): 37–49.

15 John Dunmore Lang, Phillipsland; Or the Country Hitherto Designated Port Phillip: Its Present Condition and Prospects, As a Highly Eligible Field for Emigration (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847), 116, 121. See also: Vallerie Wallace, “Sectarianism and Separatism in Colonial Port Phillip,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 20, no. 3 (2019): n.p.

16 On squatter swagger: Edward M. Curr, Recollections of Squatting in Victoria: Then Called the Port Phillip District (from 1841 to 1851), 2nd ed. (London, NY: Melbourne University Press, 1965), 5.

17 Lang, 111.

18 Ibid., 113.

19 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” March 30, 1840.

20 Lang, 111.

21 Robert Howe, “Advice to Emigrants Newly Arrived in the Colony,” in Australian Almanack, For the Year of Our Lord 1831 (Sydney: Ralph Mansfield, 1930), 259.

22 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 9 August 1841.

23 Richardson, 22.

24 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 3 August 1844.

25 On active women, see for example A Lady (Katherine Kirkland), Life in the Bush (Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, 1845), 1, 9, 15–16; John Sherer, The Gold-Finder of Australia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1853 (1973)), 14.

26 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 21 January 1843; “Diary, Vol III,” 5 February 1846; “Diary, Vol IV,” 1 August 1851, 27 December 1851.

27 Lang, 115.

28 Ibid. Drysdale left everything to ‘her friend’ in her will. “Last Will and Testament, Anne Drysdale,” Public Records Office Victoria, VPRS 7591/P0001, 1/062. For a queer reading of their relationship see: Graham Willett and others, “Coriyule and Mourning Brooch,” in A History of LGBTIQ+ Victoria in 100 Places and Objects (Melbourne: Australian Queer Archives and State of Victoria Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, 2021), 76.

29 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 8 December 1841.

30 Catherine Bishop, Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney (Sydney: NewSouth, 2015), 10–22. For women in business becoming historically invisible across Britain, Europe, North America and elsewhere, see: Aston and Bishop, “Discovering a Global Perspective,” 7–12; Béatrice Craig, Women and Business Since 1500: Invisible Presences in Europe and North America? (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

31 Bishop, Minding Her Own Business.

32 Craig, 111.

33 Horne, 20–26; Donkin, “Land Ladies,” 97–108; Kathryn M. Hunter, Father’s Right-Hand Man: Women on Australia’s Family Farms in the Age of Federation, 1880s–1920s (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2004); Roberts, “A Black Apron View of History?’ 2–16; Roberts, Miss D & Miss N.

34 Horne, 20–26; Donkin, “Land Ladies,” 97–108; Richardson; Roberts, “A Black Apron View of History?,” 2–16.

35 Horne, 20–26. On women’s rural labour: Marilyn Lake, “Helpmeet, Slave, Housewife: Women in Rural Families 1870–1930,” in Families in Colonial Australia, ed. Patricia Grimshaw, Chris McConville, and Ellen McEwen (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 173–85.

36 Horne, 24.

37 Roberts, “A Black Apron View of History?,” 9, 11.

38 Roberts, Miss D & Miss N, 26–27.

39 Ibid., 85.

40 Hunter, 19.

41 Ibid., 12–14.

42 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 1 October 1841.

43 On Buntingdale: Heather Le Griffon, Campfires at the Cross: An Account of the Bunting Dale Aboriginal Mission 1839–1851 at Birregurra, Near Colac, Victoria, With a Biography of Francis Tuckfield (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2006). On Drysdale and Newcomb’s donation of sheep: Francis Tuckfield, “Wesleyan Mission to the Aborigines, Buntingdale, Geelong,” Geelong Advertiser, 28 March 1844, 4. On Tuckfield purchasing 1000 ewes off Drysdale and Newcomb under a special arrangement: Francis Tuckfield, “Letter to the Editor: Aboriginal Mission Station, Buntingdale,” Geelong Advertiser, 24 September 1847, 1. Drysdale and Newcomb also donated money to the station and had a relationship with Tuckfield beyond the mission: Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 7 March 1842, 22 July 1842, 17 January 1843, 14 March 1843, 6 September 1843, 14 December 1843, 8 April 1844; Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 24 February 1845, 30 April 1845, 4 January 1847.

44 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 16 November 1843.

45 Penelope Edmonds and Michelle Berry, “Eliza Batman’s House: Unhomely Frontiers and Intimate Overstraiters in Van Diemen’s Land and Port Phillip,” in Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony, ed. Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck (Cham: Springer International, 2018), 118.

46 Hunter also connects the violence of kidnapping with Newcomb’s earlier experiences in the Batman home: Hunter, 12–13.

47 On gender and environmental history, see for example: Katie Holmes and Ruth A. Morgan, “Placing Gender: Gender and Environmental History,” Environment and History 27, no. 2 (2021): 187–91; Ruth A. Morgan and Margaret Cook, “Gender, Environment and History: New Methods and Approaches in Environmental History,” International Review of Environmental History 7, no. 1 (2021): 5–19; Karen Twigg, “Dust, Dryness and Departure: Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity During the WWII Drought,” History Australia 18, no. 4 (2021): 694–713; Karen Twigg, “The Green Years: The Role of Abundant Water in Shaping Postwar Constructions of Rural Femininity,” Environment and History 27, no. 2 (2021): 277–301.

48 Morgan and Cook, 18.

49 On the challenges water posed for settlers, see: Ruth Morgan, Running Out? Water in Western Australia (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2015); Ruth Morgan, “Prophecy and Prediction: Drought and Meteorology in British India and the Australian Colonies,” Global Environment 13, no. 1 (2020): 96–133; Margaret Cook, A River with a City Problem: A History of Brisbane Floods (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2019); Kylie Carman-Brown, Following the Water: Environmental History and the Hydrological Cycle in Colonial Gippsland, Australia, 1838–1900 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2019); Rebecca Jones, Slow Catastrophes: Living with Drought in Australia (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2017); Heather Goodall, “Riding the Tide: Indigenous Knowledge, History and Water in a Changing Australia,” Environment and History 14, no. 3 (2008): 355–84.

50 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 6 May 1840.

51 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 14 August 1841. Drysdale was not the only squatter to compare the land to parkland. See Niel Black below.

52 By East River, Henty meant Fitzroy River. Edward Henty, “Journal 19 November 1834–31 August 1836,” 2 December 1834, in The Henty Journals: A Record of Farming, Whaling and Shipping in Portland Bay, 1834–1839, ed. Lynette Peel (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996), 38.

53 Niel Black, “Journal, 26 December 1839,” in Strangers in a Foreign Land: The Journal of Niel Black and Other Voices from the Western District, ed. Maggie MacKellar (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2008), 121.

54 Henry Grey Bennett, “Squatter’s Journal, 1845–52,” 19 February 1846, Bennett Family Collection, Box 4911, MS 16136, SLV.

55 Black was referring to Lake Terang. Black, “Journal, 28 February 1840, 29 February 1840,” in MacKellar, Strangers in a Foreign Land, 174–75.

56 John Cotton, “Letters,” 26 July 1843, MS 9052/2, SLV.

57 Penelope Selby to Her Sisters, 21 November 1842, in No Place for a Nervous Lady: Voices from the Australian Bush, ed. Lucy Frost (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble Publishers, 1984), 162. Georgiana McCrae and her family also had an ‘allotment on the Yarra – nine miles and a half – with a river frontage, though ground thickly covered with boulders’. Georgiana McCrae, 20 March 1841, in Georgiana’s Journal, Melbourne 1841–1865, ed. Hugh McCrae, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1966), 28.

58 Emphasis in original. Kirkland, Life in the Bush, 19.

59 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 23 May 1842.

60 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 24 May 1842.

61 On the importance of the parlour in the nineteenth-century middle-class home, see: Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997).

62 Caroline and Adelaide Batman, then in Drysdale and Newcomb’s care, were “employed all day cleaning & beautifying the parlour,” Drysdale wrote in 1843. Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 31 March 1843.

63 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 18 May 1842.

64 Lorinda Cramer, Needlework and Women’s Identity in Colonial Australia (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

65 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle-Class, 1780–1850, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2002).

66 For example: Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 19 February 1842.

67 Lang, 111.

68 Ibid., 114.

69 Bishop, Minding Her Own Business, 11.

70 Lang, 114.

71 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 25 October 1842.

72 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 4 May 1846, 7 May 1846, 13 July 1846.

73 McCrae, 1 January 1844, 14 January 1844, in Georgiana’s Journal, 121–22; Mackworth C. Shore, “Journal,” 24 December 1845, 4 January 1846, Box 966/4, MS8260, SLV.

74 John Cotton, “Some Account of the Colony of Port Phillip in Australia Felix in a Series of Letters to a Brother in England by a Squatter,” c. 1943–44, Box 643/5, MS7941, SLV.

75 Black, “Journal,” 28 February 1840, in MacKellar, Strangers in a Foreign Land, 175.

76 Drysdale, “Diary of Anne Drysdale, Vol I,” 15 December 1841.

77 “Destructive Bush Fires,” Geelong Advertiser, 23 January 1843, 2.

78 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 25 January 1842.

79 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 1 September 1841.

80 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 2 December 1841.

81 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 16 April 1845.

82 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 19 April 1845.

83 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 3 April 1846.

84 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 11 April 1846.

85 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 23 June 1842, 30 June 1842.

86 Michael Pearson and Jane Lennon, Pastoral Australia: Fortunes, Failures and Hard Yakka, A Historical Overview 1788–1967 (Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing in association with Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, Australian Heritage Council, 2010), 151. Washing wool on the sheep’s back fell out of favour later in the century. Alexander Sinclair, A Clip of Wool from Shearing Shed to Ship (Sydney: John Andrew, 1899), 31.

87 Cotton, “Some Account of the Colony of Port Phillip’.

88 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 8 October 1841.

89 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 8 October 1841.

90 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 12 October 1841.

91 On the Saxon method: “Saxon Method of Soaking and Washing Sheep,” Hobart Town Courier, 1 April 1836, 4.

92 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 12 October 1841.

93 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 12 October 1841, 15 October 1841. Larger numbers of sheep could be washed in a single day, depending on the sheep wash and those who worked it. Robert Gerrand, for example, helped wash 1900 sheep in late October 1852. Two weeks later they “put through upwards of 2000 & had them all done by 3 o’clock’. Gerrand, “Diary,” 28 October 1852, 12 November 1852.

94 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 15 October 1841. Sheep drowned in years to follow, too, including one day in 1842 when “1 died in the water & 3 on coming out’. Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 4 November 1842.

95 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 5 November 1841.

96 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 15 October 1841. “Yolk,” also called “suint,” is a “fatty secretion from the skin of the sheep which is always, more or less, assoicated with the wool’. Sinclair, 68.

97 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 5 November 1841.

98 For example: Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 29 October 1844, 30 October 1844, 31 October 1844, 30 September 1845, 1 October 1845.

99 On the dangers of sheep washing for labourers see: “Very Extraordinary Accident,” Geelong Advertiser, 5 October 1848, 2. When a boy drowned in a waterhole on Drysdale and Newcomb’s property in 1849, his body was not recovered until the following day as none of the labourers working close by could swim. “Another Death by Drowning,” Geelong Advertiser, 15 November 1849, 2.

100 “The Weather,” Geelong Advertiser, 3 August 1848, 3.

101 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 16 September 1844.

102 Drysdale, “Diary of Anne Drysdale, Vol I,” 22 September 1841.

103 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 24 January 1845.

104 Cotton, “Some Account of the Colony of Port Phillip.”

105 “Sheep Washing,” Geelong Advertiser, 8 August 1842, 4.

106 John Cotton to William Cotton, “Letter,” October 1845, in Billis and Kenton, Pastures New, 251.

107 Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victoria 1834–1890 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1961, repr. 1963), 71.

108 “Sheep Washing,” Geelong Advertiser, 12 January 1847, 3; “Sheep Wash Pools,” Geelong Advertiser, 21 June 1848, 2; “Sheep Washing,” Geelong Advertiser, 21 August 1849, 2.

109 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 2 November 1844.

110 “A Force Pump,” Geelong Advertiser, 14 September 1847, 2. Robert rode that same day to Corio to collect the force pump. Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 14 September 1847.

111 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 24 September 1847, 25 September 1847.

112 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 30 September 1847.

113 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 15 May 1843; Drysdale, “Diary, Vol III,” 6 February 1846.

114 Drysdale, “Diary, Vol I,” 8 September 1841; Drysdale, “Diary, Vol II,” 20 January 1842.

115 Lang, 112.

116 Ibid., 114–16.

117 Ibid., 114.