Tribute to the waves of migrants who built this island home

There are more than 7.3 million migrants living in Australia, which means that 29 per cent of the Australian population was born overseas, the majority coming from England, China and India.

WHERE do you come from?

With almost all of the Australian population descended from migrants, the majority of us have our roots far from this island home.

In fact right now there are more than 7.3 million migrants living in Australia, which means that 29 per cent of the Australian population was born overseas, the majority coming from England, China and India.

My Scottish ancestor Robert Ramage came to Australia in 1852, leaving a stone cottage with a thatched roof and dirt floor in the shadow of Stirling Castle and sailing down the River Clyde from Glasgow with his wife and small children for what he hoped would be a better life on the Victorian goldfields.

The Orient liner Ormonde berths in Brisbane in 1948 with 567 British migrants, the largest number of migrants bought to Queensland on one ship.

His life was probably harder than the one he had left behind and, having found no gold to speak of, he died, dirt poor, in a “fall of earth” at Ararat.

But Australia, then a collection of separate British colonies, offered his descendants opportunities my great-great grandfather never would have had at home.

The Queensland Maritime Museum at South Bank is hosting a fascinating exhibition about the successive waves of immigrants who came to Queensland looking for a better life, from the Langites in 1849 to the post war settlers, such as my father, who left the ruins of a devastated Europe.

The Oronsay from London in 1959 brought some happy memories for new migrants

The exhibition looks at the ships which transported the immigrants under sail, steam and diesel and the often uncomfortable, unsanitary and very slow journey that often finished with another month in quarantine on Peel Island.

The display chronicles the government propaganda to increase the state’s population by luring farmers, artisans and labourers and it follows the personal stories of Scottish, German, English, Chinese, Danish, Italian and Greek people on the move. There is also a section on the World War II evacuees from Hong Kong, fleeing from the Japanese invaders.

Jayne Keogh, the museum’s artistic director, has a very personal connection with the exhibition as she is descended from James William Thompson, a passenger on the Chaseley, one of the three ships carrying free settlers known as ``Langites’’ who were persuaded to emigrate to Moreton Bay by the firebrand Presbyterian Minister Dr John Dunmore Lang.

The welcome committee at Hamilton in 1959 for the Oronsay from London.

Lang was one of the earliest and most strident of Australia’s republicans and the Langites were Scottish or English Protestants and middle-class artisans. His early social engineering was designed to protect the emerging area — still part of the colony of New South Wales — from ex-convicts and Irish Catholics.

Thompson brought with him his wife Millicent and four children, lured by the opportunities for a savvy entrepreneur.

After spending the first few years in his new frontier home living in a tent and losing his wife in 1856 to bad water and unsanitary conditions, he dabbled in property development, architecture, furniture hire and building.

He built a lovely villa in Vulture Street with gardens down to the Brisbane River and was elected to the Brisbane Municipal Council in 1866.

The Moreton Bay Courier, ancestor of this newspaper, reported on May 5, 1849 that the Chaseley had left the Kent port of Deal at Christmas-time 1848 and had arrived in Brisbane on May 1.

Republican John Dunmore Lang, an early Australian political activist, was behind a mass migration of ``Langites’’ to Brisbane in 1849.

Lang used the Courier to ask the “Inhabitants of Moreton Bay, New South Wales … that, for the general welfare and advancement of the colony, you will individually and collectively do everything in your power to promote the comfortable settlement of these emigrants in your important district.”

He hoped that the “good accounts” the immigrants would send home “may induce hundreds and thousands of others to follow them to Australia.”

The audio version of Grantlee Kieza’s best-selling book, Macquarie, is now available at audible.com

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