No Time for Toys

By Gail Annette Tregear

In January 1818, Sarah Elizabeth Thatcher found herself at the age of four alone in the colony of New South Wales.

She sailed from England on the Friendship with her convict mother and two older brothers, but sadly, her mother, Martha, died before reaching Port Jackson. Her convict father was already in the colony but was not allowed to care for the children until he was eligible for a ticket of leave. Sarah went to a foster mother and then to the Female Orphan School in Parramatta, where she remained until her father got permission to look after his motherless children.

Sarah married James Smith in 1827. She was fourteen, and he was thirty-four. He died in 1839, leaving Sarah a widow with four children under ten. She then met Henry Harren, a political prisoner, and they went to join her father and brother in the Maneroo district, south west of Sydney.

From there, they moved to Melbourne where Henrys sister and brother had arrived in 1836. They were all involved with the Angel Inn and livery stables. Sarah had a grocery business, which she sold, and moved to a market garden in Brighton. When the gold rush came, Henry left and the rest of the family relocated to Ballarat, where Sarah became the postmistress in the gold fields, retiring in her late eighties.

When she arrived at Port Jackson, there was no Victoria, no Melbourne, no Canberra, and no Australia. She saw these all happen in her lifetime, but in her very hard childhood, there was no time for toys.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jul 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984500175

Gail Annette Tregear

Gail Annette Tregear is a journalist specialising in international horse racing, traveling the world to cover major horse racing events. She ran a sweep on the English Derby in Mongolia on one occasion. Despite living in and visiting many exotic places she still calls Canberra home. Gail grew up in Canberra where her father was as a Parliamentary Officer and her mother a champion golfer. Her grandmothers scrap book fascinated her not only for her grandmothers story she was Premier of the Womens Parliament in Melbourne when women newly had the vote but also the story of her grandmother my great-great grandmother and the subject of this book, Sarah Elizabeth Thatcher Smith Harren.

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Copyright © 2018 by Gail Annette Tregear.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018907206

ISBN:      Hardcover          978-1-9845-0019-9

                Softcover            978-1-9845-0018-2

                eBook                 978-1-9845-0017-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 07/09/2018

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter 1 The Voyage of the Friendship

Chapter 2 Samuel Hale

Chapter 3 From an Orphanage Girl to Mrs Smith

Chapter 4 To The Maneroo

Chapter 5 Henry Harren

Chapter 6 Melbourne

Epilogue

Bibliography

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

S PECIAL THANKS TO Don Macreadie and the Hopton family whose research into the family history has been the basis of this work.

Brigid Whitbread, of the Queanbeyan Palerang Regional Council, Queanbeyan Library, alerted me to the naming of Hale Street in Googong and other information. The late David Meyers was the instigator of this process. Unfortunately he had passed away before I was in a position to contact him and thank him.

Greta Jones, from the Jindabyne Library, who was so helpful in getting the information about the Thatcher-Hale-Beard properties in the ‘Maneroo" especially the 1841 Census for the ‘Maneroo’.

The staff of the National Library have been wonderful, showing commendable patience with my sometimes trivial problems in retrieving data and evincing an interest in my work.

And thanks to all my friends who have encouraging me in writing this work.

The life of my great-great-grandmother Sarah Elizabeth Thatcher-Smith-Harren was inspirational and I hope I have done it justice.

PROLOGUE

M Y CHALLENGE WAS to start this book on Australia Day, 26 January, 2017 and finish it on Australia Day 2018.

By that year, it will have been 200 years since my great-great-grandmother arrived in Australia at age four on 14 January 1818. This is her story.

*     *     *

In 1818 the Friendship sailed into Port Jackson, carrying my great-great-grandmother Sarah Elizabeth Thatcher, aged four, together with her brothers but without her mother, who had died on the voyage, or her father, who was already in the colony of New South Wales.

It was only thirty years since the first European settlers landed on Australian shores, first at Botany Bay, but shortly after, they moved to Port Jackson, which was to become the city of Sydney. The European settlers were a mix of convicts, adventurers, and members of the army. They had brought supplies with them and expected to be able to start farming, but Sydney Cove had poor soil. So a settlement for farming was set up at Parramatta, twenty-four kilometres to the west and at a spot where the Parramatta River turned from salty to fresh. They also had problems realising the seasons were the opposite of what they had known.

People were described by the name of the ship they had reached Australia in, either as a convict or a free settler. James Smith Recovery was how Sarah’s first husband was distinguished from others of the same name.

There was a great need to find good grazing land, and in the 1820s various expeditions went inland to the site of the Limestone Plains, which was eventually to become Canberra, and through to the high country referred to then as The Maneroo (now Monaro).

In 1803 and 1804, the island of Tasmania was used by the British to establish further penal colonies to stop the French from settling. Tasmania eventually provided good farming territory but was not able to produce enough to cope with feeding the non-indigenous population, so in 1835 John Batman was sent across Bass Strait to look for grazing lands around Port Phillip. His ‘site for a village’ became Melbourne.

The journey of our heroine, Sarah Elizabeth Thatcher, took her from Kent in England to Port Jackson; thence to Parramatta to live with Mrs Frazer, her foster mother; and then to the female orphan school. Her father, Samuel Hale, was able to take her and her brother to live with him when he gained a ticket of leave. Her father and brother moved on to the Limestone Plains, while Sarah, aged fourteen, married her first husband. After he died, she met her second husband, Henry Harren, and they and her four children from her first marriage followed her father and brother to the Snowy Mountains area of the Maneroo. They moved to Melbourne with horses, having added two more children. That was where Henry’s brother-in-law and sister had gone in 1836, a year in which the non-indigenous population of that settlement was just over two hundred.

Henry was an unreliable provider, so Sarah had a laundry-and-sewing business, which put bread on the table. Conditions were very much like the Wild West for a number of years, with economic downturns causing