FIRST POST

Alice Gordon was not among the initial batch of women hired in response to an advertisement in the press on the day the Constance docked.1 She and a few others stayed on at the Immigration Depot on Hunter's Wharf.2 From the moment they stepped onto dry land they were no longer the responsibility of the Captain and Surgeon. John Loch, as agent of the Tasmanian Government, was their allocated protector until they were signed over to their new employers - or to friends and relations for those to whom they had so conveniently materialised. Their virtue was in his hands; the Depot operated like a parody of an Indian zenana from which the women were only allowed to emerge under the strictest chaperoning. His task was made all the more difficult by the resistance of his charges. In the past, Loch had expressed some regret that the young women, arriving free in this ex-convict colony, regarded his officials 'more as gaolers than protectors', a prescient comment from them, given that they would be subject to a Masters and Servants Act that closely replicated the relationships of a penal colony.3 It was a rare thing for a servant to turn this Act to her advantage. But Alice Gordon did.

Was it John Loch himself who recommended Alice Gordon to her first employer? Both were ex-India men, and both had reason to feel resentful of their treatment in the Colony.4 I imagine employer and servant walking the short distance from the wharf to their destination: Major Hugh Calveley Cotton, a tall man, sixty, bowed down by too many disappointments; Alice Gordon, at last leaving the confines of the Depot and

1

HTC 19 August 1858; Immigration Board. Nominal list of persons supplied with rations at the Immigration Depot with details of immigrants admitted and discharged. AOT CB7/21, Bk 2.

2 _{The arrival of the Constance, with an apparently well-selected list of immigrants on board, has}

… given some animation to the week's business in Hobart Town. These immigrants have been so well spoken of that the greater number of those who were available have been hired within a few days at good wages.' HTC, 27August 1858. On 28 August, Loch was still trying to find positions for one governess, one housekeeper or general servant who had her daughter with her, two nursery governesses, and six housemaids/needlewomen. Mercury, 28 August 1858.

3

LCJ, 1857, 21.

4 _{Loch and Alice Gordon's first employer, Hugh Cotton, were also both senior officers in the}

Tasmanian Public Service; treated so shabbily by that organisation that they would leave the colony within three years. Loch's services as Immigration Agent were dispensed with at the end of 1858 and he was transferred to the position of Accountant of Stores on reduced pay. AOT CSD1/ 1/ 134/4877.

taking in the contours of the place that would be her home for the next twenty years. Each taking the measure of the other. Measuring was Major Cotton's metier. His initial appointment in the colony had been that of Deputy Surveyor-General,5 an occupation that positioned him as a crucial agent of empire. His roods and perches were the tools of an elaborate framework legitimising, both materially and symbolically, the ownership of property on the island.6 Major Cotton was less adept at measuring people. Did he consider his servants as people at all? He is certainly unlikely to have recognised the strength of personality and sense of entitlement housed in the figure of the young Alice Gordon.

It was Macquarie Street they walked up, the town's premier thoroughfare, named by the Governor after himself, on that original grid:

T'was said of Greece two thousand years ago, That every stone i' the land had got a name.

Of New South Wales, too, men will soon say so too: But every stone there seems to get the same. 'Macquarie' for a name is all the go:

The old Scotch Governor was fond of fame,

Macquarie Street, Place, Port, Fort, Town, Lake, River: Lachlan Macquarie, Esquire, Governor, forever!7

It ran from the dockside district of Wapping to the foothills of Mt Wellington. At one extremity lay 'nuisance' industries such as the gasworks, the slaughterhouse, soap factories and tanneries.8 Nightsoil was dumped here in the hope that the Hobart Rivulet

5 _{Mitchell Library 042 P380 in AOT Correspondence File, H C Cotton. Hugh and Louisa arrived in}

the colony per Derwent with six children, five Scottish servants on 10 November 1842.

6

For an in-depth analysis of the role of surveying in colonisation and displacement see Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye: how explorers saw Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 and J B Harley, 'Maps, Knowledge and Power', The Iconography of Landscape, eds. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1988) 1994, 277- 312.

7

Van Diemens Land was being governed from New South Wales in the Macquarie period. John Dunmore Lang, Poems: Sacred and Secular; Sydney: William Maddock, 1873 pp., 153-156. Lang's writings cover almost every issue of the time, including his virulent opposition in 1848 to Caroline Chisholm's female emigration scheme which he saw as 'extending the Romanism of the colony through the vile, Jesuitical, diabolical, system of “mixed marriages”'. Cited by Michael Roe, Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia, 1835-1851, Parkville: Melbourne University Press, 1965 p. 137.

8

would wash it out to sea. This was the domain of the poor and the transient. At the other extremity lay what was currently the Female House of Correction, and would later become a more general disciplinary depot for those the colonial and city fathers wished out of sight. But at its civic heart Macquarie Street was Hobart's most prestigious address.

The Macquarie Street that Alice Gordon and Major Cotton walked up that day attested to a colony in transition. Walking southwesterly up its gentle slope they passed the newly completed Italianate town hall, 'worthy of Venice'with its 'large and well- proportioned ballroom', to which would be added an excellent free library, and a reading room liberally supplied with British and colonial periodicals and newspapers'. Soon the adjacent paddock would be paved and planted, with fountains and statues of eminent men, a future employer of Alice Gordon's among them; but for the present it contained the ruins of old government house and a visiting menagerie: a lion, 'King of the Beasts' and 'Hercules, the Monster Bengal Tiger'. 'Young Tasmania will now have a chance to see the denizens of the wilds of Africa and India under safer, if less exciting , circumstances than those encountered by Mr Bruce, Mr Cumming, or Dr Livingstone,' commented the Mercury.9

On the other side of the street was St David's Cathedral, affirming the position of Anglicanism and established social hierarchy in the face of Catholicism and Dissenters and republicanism .10 At least three of Alice Gordon's life events would be played out here. For the Major, though, St David's would be a daily reminder of his ongoing warfare with the current Bishop.11 Across Murray Street, as the Major and the servant continued, the old gaol was in the throes of demolition and would soon be replaced by tall, ornate sandstone buildings accommodating lawyers' chambers and other

professional consulting rooms, and a few doors up the elite Tasmanian Club. It was in this block that the Cottons leased a house, adjacent to the Temperance Alliance Rooms.12

9

James Smith 'Tasmania – descriptive sketch', Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, Sydney: Picturesque Atlas Publishing Co., 1886, vol. 2, p. 103; Mercury, 20, 21 August 1858.

10 _{See the arguments put forward by Roe, Quest for Authority, passim.} 11

See deputation HTC, 9 June 1852, and a public meeting called by Cotton. HTC, 12 April 1854.

12 _{20 Macquarie Street, leased from Alice Wilson. 1858 Valuation Rolls for Southern Tasmania:}

including the districts of Franklin and Hobart, comp. Trudy Cowley, Hobart: Research Tasmania, 2005.

Temperance was a subject close to the Major's heart; temperance, not abstinence , a glass of wine with a meal in the dining room was quite a different thing from its consumption below stairs.13 Today the Rooms were being prepared for a public tea meeting to celebrate the laying of a foundation stone for a Ragged School. 'Those who are trained up with the fear of God in their youth,' Henry Hopkins, the man wielding the trowel had told his audience earlier that day, 'turn out well in their mature years'.14 If the coaxing, moulding, threatening of the Welsh into homogeneity had been seen as essential for the unified project of empire, how much more was this the case for a population of convicts and their children?

Major Hugh Calveley Cotton had been born into an aristocratic family whose members were key players in the British Empire. His uncle, Stapleton 'Lion d'Or' Cotton (Viscount Combermare), had served at the Cape 1795; at Madras in 1799, vanquishing the forces of Tippoo Sahib at Malavelly and Seringapatam; led forces as Lieutenant -General under the Duke of Wellington against Napoleon at Salamanca; was Governor-General of Barbados in 1817, and Commander-in-Chief first in Ireland then India (and was lampooned for his vanity by Thackeray).15 But Hugh was a middle son in a family of fourteen children; and although three of his eleven brothers were considered

sufficiently distinguished to warrant individual entries in the Oxford National Dictionary of Biography, and two more were named, Hugh was not one of them.16He appears a rather charmless man, socially awkward, quick to take offence, arrogant, autocratic and unprepared to admit to faults.17

Alice Gordon's first interchange with her mistress is most likely to have taken place in the drawing room, a key space in the performance of class identity. The setting, its furnishings, ornaments and their arrangement, as well as their polish and gleam, spoke volumes about the mistress of the house.'One's self', mused the fictional Madame Merle in Portrait of a Lady,'overflows into everything that belongs to us – and then it

13

HTC, 4 July 1854; Mercury, 5 July 1854.

14 _{Mercury, 23 August 1858.} 15

Craig Thornber, 'The Cottons of Combermere Abbey',

http://www.thornber.net/cheshire/htmlfiles/combermere.html accessed 1 August 2008.

16

The entry for Hugh's brother Richard noted that all the brothers had gained some distinction in the church, army or navy. The entry also notes 'there were also three daughters'; Peter B

Nockles, 'Cotton, Richard Lynch (1794-1880), ODNB; H M Chichester, 'Cotton, Sir Sydney John', rev. James Lunt, ODNB. A J Abruthnot, 'Cotton, Sir Arthur Thomas (1803-1899)', rev. Peter L Schmitthenner. ODNB. Named were Admiral Francis Vere Cotton and General Frederic Cotton.

17

flows back again'. The tastefulness of the mistress's dress: understated, fashionable and high quality, spoke eloquently of her class.

It is hard to draw the line between person and dress as between mind and matter, and there is, perhaps, no form of matter into which, and by which, mind can infuse more subtle and incalculably radiating influence. 18

By interviewing her servant in this setting, the mistress reinforced her centrality to her surroundings. She would be seated comfortably, the room her prosthetic web. Had Alice Gordon been a more senior servant, a housekeeper, perhaps, or a governess, a hard chair would have been brought in for her. As it was, she would have been required to stand throughout the interchange.19 Louisa Cotton's pedigree was just as elevated as her husband's. She was Scottish, a Brodie of Brodie, whose father had missed inheriting the Lord Lieutenancy of Nairnshire by drowning off Madras. Her mother's second marriage had been to Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Bowser, Commander-in-Chief of the Madras Army.20 These certainties of social and military rank would have been embedded in the way Louisa Cotton demarcated boundaries between herself and her employees. And her formative years as a privileged member of a ruling family in India followed by fifteen years of running her own household there when her husband was managing massive irrigation projects in Tanjore and Agra would have further

emphasised these power structures.The role played by the memsahib in India situated the domestic sphere as one of the key legitimising sites of colonial rule. Of the twenty- five or more servants a memsahib of Louisa Cotton's status would have had, it is unlikely that any other than a possible ayah would have been a woman, so that by her every household command, the superiority of the English – even an Englishwoman – , over Indians – even Indian men, was reinforced. 21

18

Henry James, Portrait of a Lady, quoted in Athena Vrettos, 'Defining habits: Dickens and the psychology of repetition', Victorian Studies, Spring, 1999/2000, vol 42, issue 3, pp 399-426, 411.

19 _{In Oliné Keese's Broad Arrow, a social realist novel, set a decade earlier in the same street, the}

master of the house (in the absence of the mistress), tells his new servant exactly where to stand (near the door) while he issues commands. His niece, aware that the servant, although a convict, is middle-class, mouths to him to please let her sit down. He refuses. Oliné Keese, The Broad Arrow: being the story of Maida Gwynnham, a 'Lifer' in Van Diemen's Land, North Ryde: Eden, (1859) 1988, p. 129.

20

James George Smith Neill, The Honorable East India Company's First Madras European Regiment London: Smith Elder, 1843, 547

21

Englishness was exalted, Indian men were feminised, all the while preserving the colonising Englishman's public sphere untainted by domestic involvement. Ann Laura Stoler makes this point about the constitution of European identity, or whiteness, in the colonies; how the English and other colonisers 'cultivated their distinctions from those to be ruled'. Ann Laura Stoler, Race

The woman who now interviewed Alice had left India eighteen years before. Unlike her brother-in-law, she had not brought Indian servants to Van Diemen's Land, but had arrived in the colony with five Scottish servants, having spent time 'At Home' before coming out.22 These may have come from her family's estate, born and bred into a hierarchical relationship with their mistress. By bringing her own servants to Van Diemens Land, Louisa Cotton was creating a buffer between herself and a penal colony where servants were, for the most part, either assigned convicts or former convicts and, more importantly, part of an existing culture. Servants from Scotland without

associations in Van Diemens Land were far more dependent on their employers and less likely to get into 'bad company'. Employing a newly arrived female immigrant like Alice Gordon was a higher risk. Although not part of the convict culture, her life had not been entwined with that of the Cottons, and for several months she had been closely

associated with a large number of other prospective servants of unknown background. Alice Gordon stood while all these comparisons were being made by the woman, the

lady, under whose scrutiny she now had to compose an acceptable demeanour. For it was not just the labour of the servant that was required but also loyalty, an attitude of submission, obedience and respectfulness. She was to appear willing but not bold, quiet but not sullen or secretive. Although 'in the know' she should never presume to

comment on family matters. The actual, unavoidable, daily intimacy of the relationship between mistress and servant had to be denied through strict regulation. 'Never stoop to the degradation of making companions and confidants of your servants,' one household manual advised mistresses. If they were treated as equals, the servants would become spoilt and the mistress would debase herself.23 The working-class servant had to be domesticated and Colonised into a bourgeois ideology, observing the values of her ruling-class employers and submitting to her own position on the social scale. The natural order had to be asserted in the domestic sphere. Home lay at the heart of the civilizing mission that was so crucial to Tasmania's place in the empire.24

and the Education of Desire, Durham: Duke University Press, 1995, p 99; Ann Laura Stoler, 'Cultivating bourgeois bodies and racial selves', in Catherine Hall (ed.) Cultures of Empire: a reader, New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 87-119; Nupur Chaudhuri, 'Memsahibs and Their Servants in Nineteenth Century India', Women's History Review vol. 3, no. 4, 1994, pp. 549-562, pp. 550-553.

22

1841 Scotland Census, General Register Office of Scotland, Dyke, Moray, p. 9.

23 _{Cited in Elizabeth Langland, Nobody's Angels: middle-class women and domestic ideology in}

Victorian culture, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p. 51.

24

Entering service was not like other kinds of employment. There was no going home at the end of the day. 'Have you ever lived as a parlour maid?' a mistress asks her personal maid in Wilkie Collins' No Name.25 A parlour maid was at the beck and call of her employers almost without break.26 Alice Gordon's days would begin well before breakfast and continue until ten or later at night. But if her temporal presence in the house might have seemed endless it was, like her spatial occupation of the house, tightly regulated. Her orders would calibrated to the finest detail. They would define where she could be in the house and when she could be there, how she moved, how she dressed at different times of the day, how she spoke and how she was spoken to, what she ate, and when she rose and when she went to bed and when she was allowed to go out. And this regulation was designed not only so that the work was done, but also, through every movement, to reinforce the social hierarchies of the household, to ensure, in particular, that the servant knew her place. 27

But the occupation Alice Gordon had selected to define herself by in the colony placed her in a very particular and elite market in Tasmania, and also a complex, but passively powerful position in the household. It was, first and foremost, an occupation that would almost certainly give her either an urban posting or one in a large house in the country. It was, furthermore, an occupation for which there was no demand in Tasmania where the 'servants wanted' advertisements barely deviated from housemaids, cooks, nursemaids, general servants and laundresses. No female domestic servant faced such