Robert Whatmough

Following in the footsteps of John Batman

 

Robert did not meet John Batman, a founder of Melbourne.  Batman died in 1839, aged only thirty-eight years old.  However, the influence of Batman on aspects of Robert’s life was quite significant.

  In 1836, Batman transported about 1,000 fruit trees from Tasmanian farmlands and established an orchard and market garden on land that he named Batman’s Hill.  After his death, the farm was leased by Benjamin Baxter, who gave Robert his first significant horticultural job.  This would have been priceless experience for Robert and provided him the opportunity to become known to the enthusiastic horticultural community in Melbourne, such as the Pastoral and Agricultural Society formed in 1840. Robert would also have been interested in the establishment of the Botanic Gardens in 1841.

  However, Robert’s days at Batman’s garden were numbered.  In September 1841, the assets of Batman’s estate were sold and Baxter purchased the crop and orchard of the Batman estate.  Baxter then sold some of the fruit trees to Mr Flintoff “who bought a number at £1 a-piece and transplanted them in the Greensborough district”. 

Robert continued his work as a Melbourne lamplighter and was likely to have continued helping out at local market gardens.  Within a few months of their arrival in Melbourne, Mary was pregnant, and the couple prepared for the birth of their first child in Australia.

 

Making a home in Melbourne

 

While Robert worked for hours each day, Mary was keeping house in the hut, looking after baby Jemima and managing in a warm climate so different from home.  At least if she needed Robert during the day, she had only to step outside to Batman’s orchard.  In the evenings, however, with Robert out lighting lamps, it must have been quite frightening.  Drunkenness was a common problem, and with a police corps of only eleven men backed by 25 soldiers, control of the new residents was severely wanting. The winter of 1841 was particularly rowdy.

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          "Owing probably to the insufficiency of the police force, the setting-in of the winter was marked by a series of nocturnal outrages, and robberies became so rife that the shopkeepers of Collins Street were compelled…to retain at their own cost the services of two private watchmen for night duty…"

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Keeping house was rudimentary at best.  Basic needs such as water could be difficult to come by, and there is no doubt that Mary’s lot involved much hard labour.

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           "…though well enough off for general provisions, the people were wretchedly provided with water.  Unless when the tide was low, the river was brackish, for there was as yet no real breakwater at the “Falls,” and the water had to be procured by hand-buckets.  After a time pumps were fixed, and the fluid retailed in loads to water carters, by whom households were supplied.  But if the water was bad, there was an abundance of the now almost unknown luxury, unwatered milk, for everyone of any means kept a milch cow, which, for a trifling sum was taken charge of by a town herd, and there was such an abundance of cow-feed about the township, that pure new milk was easily attainable."

 

  Mary kept house in the bark hut over the summer of 1841-1842, made more difficult for her as her pregnancy advanced.  On 26 March 1842, Robert Emmett was born at home, a common choice, but in Mary’s case, the only choice.  There was only a temporary hospital that served more as a clinic to check the health of newly-arrived immigrants. Mary would have relied on local women to aid in the birth.  These women were sometimes titled midwives, although they generally had no qualifications, and simply used the skills they had learned from their own birth experiences.  Provided the birth was not complicated, colonial women and their babies were more likely to survive with midwife support than at the hands of the local doctors who tended to be poorly trained, if at all, in obstetrics, and were only called if the birth situation posed a threat to mother and baby.  Further, doctors of the time unwittingly added to the mortality of new mothers by transmitting infections from their visits to previous patients. It is a testament to Mary that she was able to care for her two babies with such limited resources.  Both children survived and ultimately lived long lives.