Belinda Murrell: Bringing Australian History To Life | Page 28

AUSTRALIA

COLONIES, CONVICTS

AND CHANGE
Credit Nicholas Buenk.
Historical image from the collection of the State Library of NSW.

THE RIVER CHARM IS SET IN THE 1840s. HERE
ARE SOME QUICK FACTS ABOUT WHAT WAS
HAPPENING IN THAT PERIOD.

✓ Sydney was proclaimed a city in 1842, when
approximately 35,000 people lived there.
✓ The population swelled rapidly during the early 1840s
with mass immigration, particularly from Ireland due to the
potato famine. There was not enough accommodation or
employment for such a large influx of people. Hundreds of
immigrants were sleeping under rock overhangs near the
Sydney Botanical Gardens.
✓ Women in the 1840s had no legal rights to property,
education or profession. Until 1882, the common law of
coverture meant that a married man could do anything he
wished with his wife’s property, even the money she earned
herself.
✓ Divorce was not legalised until 1857, and it was
considered scandalous for a woman to leave her husband –
even if he mistreated her and her children. In the 1840s, a
woman’s profession was marriage, so by leaving her husband
a woman was perceived to have failed in the eyes of society.

York Street today.
York Street, Sydney, in
the 1840s, when The
River Charm was set.

✓ The transportation of convicts to the colony of New
South Wales was suspended in 1840. The issue of
transportation was the cause of much political debate during
the next decade, with landowners wanting cheap convict
labour and workers fearing the effect on wages and crime
rates.
✓ In the 1840s many of the local flora and fauna were
still known by the names of English plants and animals, for
example native dog for dingo, native bear for koala, native cat
for quoll and native squirrels for possums.

From the collection of the State Library of NSW.

FAST FACTS
✓ For thousands of years, the Gandangara people
lived in the Southern Highlands of NSW around Camden
and Goulburn, where The River Charm is set. They lived a
nomadic life hunting animals such as goannas, possums and
koalas, and gathering tubers and seeds. The local Aboriginal
people were severely impacted by European settlement
through disease, violence and dispossession of their lands.
An influenza epidemic in 1846 killed most of the remaining
Indigenous population in the area. By 1856, the local
Aboriginal population was considered to be almost extinct.
✓ Bushrangers, often escaped convicts, made travel within
the colony dangerous. Newspaper reports show that the
Southern Road in the vicinity of Oldbury, one of the settings
of The River Charm, was frequently the scene of robberies,
armed hold-ups and murders.

28 randomhouse.com.au/teachers

In The River Charm, the protagonist Charlotte moves from the bush to Sydney’s Double Bay.
In the book it’s described as a quiet farming community, where people could keep horses and
grow vegetables. Today it is one of the most expensive places to buy real estate in Australia.