Fractured Families: Life on the Margins in Colonial New South Wales

by Tanya Evans

Countless convicts and free migrants arriving in New South Wales struggled with limited prospects, discrimination, and misfortune, and many of them turned to the Benevolent Society, Australia’s first charity founded in 1813, for assistance and sustenance. In this rich and revealing book, Tanya Evans collaborates with family historians to present the everyday lives of these people. We see many families who have fallen on hard times because of drink, unwanted pregnancy, violence, unemployment, or plain bad luck, seeking help and often shunted from asylums or institutions. In the careful tracing of families, we see the way in which disadvantage can be passed down from one generation to the next. Fractured Families helps to reclaim these unknown lives and sheds light on the often random nature of betterment and progress.

336 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2015

Reviews

[Gwen Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is difficult to review, as reactions will differ according to whether you are reading for academic or personal reasons. The latter in my case. Tanya Evans has assembled the research of family historians to present us a picture of life for the impoverished before the welfare safety net, and the role that the Benevolent Society played in their support. That in itself is well worth reading and informing ourselves about. The chapters can be read individually, but it does pay to try to read each in one go, as the similarity of family names and moving backward and forwards between generations, personal stories and historical opinion can become confusing. The illustrations enhance the content with some of them showing the stark reality of infant mortality.

[Red Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deeply interesting read. Very pleased that the racial diversity of early NSW was covered in a way that has not been acknowledged in Australia including Aboriginal and white coupling without suppressing the power relation issues and role of coercion. Deeply depressing how much wealthy and middle class resistance to social security existed and persisted throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

The book’s strengths exist not only in foregrounding the work of non-professional family historians but in contrasting fortunes of individuals according to both “luck” and structural inequalities throughout, both in-period and between ancestors and dependents. An excellent antidote to Whig history and inevitable progress narratives.

[Janine · Rating 3 out of 5]

As the title conveys, this is a book about families in colonial New South Wales and the Sydney Benevolent Asylum is the lens through which Evans studies marginalized families in colonial Sydney. To the extent that it is a history of the Asylum, it is not a conventional institutional history of dates, buildings, policies and personnel: instead, she traces the Asylum through the people who came through its doors as both patrons and petitioners. For this people-based focus, she draws on the work of family historians who have approached the Benevolent Society for access to their records.

In choosing this particular family-history methodology to tell an institutional history, Evans certainly brings family historians on to centre stage as historical practitioners. Each chapter ends with a potted biography of the present-day genealogist who has in many cases been the source for the case study that Evans has supplemented with contextual information. This is a deliberate philosophical stance on Evans' part, who aims to "unpick the relationship between the conservative and radical motivations involved in the practice of family history in Australia" (p 240) and believes that "it is crucial for academics to engage with the medium of historical television and family history, even if they find its limits frustrating" (p. 252).

With its emphasis on family history and the prominence given to 'families' in its title, I am sure that the book is aimed at a readership interested in family history. I found the writing uneven- at times warm and engaging, but interspersed with a rather stilted academic signposting. She often speaks of what 'we' have seen and what 'we' know, that I'm not sure that 'we-ness' was ever established well.

Having said that, though, her collaboration with family historians, both under the auspices of the Benevolent Society and through crowd-sourced collaboration with genealogical associations and websites, has provided a view of otherwise invisible people. Family historians, impelled by curiosity and a sense of identification, have combed through a whole range of data sources that a single historian could never undertake alone. In this regard, Evans and her collaborators whom she so strongly champions, have brought context and a continuity to lives that would otherwise be just names on a ledger.

See my full review at : https://residentjudge.wordpress.com/2...