Chisholms Down Under
Chisholms
came first to Australia and later, from
the 1840’s, to New Zealand.
Australia
A Chisholm
arrived early in
Australia’s history. James
Chisholm from Mid Calder (outside Edinburgh) had come to the colony in
1790 as
a member of the New South Wales Corps to keep the peace.
He elected to stay after his service was
completed, having acquired property and a family. He
was one of the settlers to be granted a “rum license” (rum
being the only liquor in the colony and a more important commodity than
money). James set up an inn, the
Thistle Inn, in Sydney and prospered so much that he was able to buy
and
receive grants of land in the expanding colony.
By the
1830s, he held vast sheep-rearing lands in
the Goulburn district, 200 kilometers south of Sydney.
The home that he and his son James had built
there, Gledswood,
stayed with the family
over the next hundred years.
Emigration to
Australia came
in waves, starting with the early settlement days and progressing on. The first settlers were amongst the early
pioneers who endured the rigors of the early days of New South Wales in
an
isolated and harsh corner of the world to establish their families and
livelihoods. The second wave came in
the 1830s when Australia was encouraging immigration. In this group
were two young newly-weds, William and Christine Chisholm, who arrived
from Scotland on the Lady East
in 1833.
Perhaps
the best-known Chisholm of this period was
one who didn’t stay, Caroline Chisholm.
She had married Captain Archibald Chisholm in 1838 and moved to
Australia where she observed single girls being dumped on the Sydney
wharves. So she set up a Female
Immigrants Home with the help of the clergy.
However, her attempts to encourage Catholic immigration to
Australia
were met with resistance from the mainly Protestant colonists there and
she died
in poverty and obscurity in England.
Later Arrivals. In the gold
rush period of the
1850s and 60s, a number of Chisholm families, many with a mining
background,
came to Australia. They suffered the
hardships of life in the mining settlements
Many went on to open farming areas in the remoter Victorian and
New
South Wales areas. Lachlan Chisholm
from Inverness was one of the first farmer settlers in
Queensland. Colin
Chisholm, born in Victoria, raised eight children, the seventh of
which,
Alec (born in 1890), later became a well-known Australian journalist in
the
inter-war years.
New Zealand
It was not
until the signing of the Treaty of
Waitangi in 1840 that systematic British settlement of New Zealand
began. In that year, two single Chisholm
men, John
from Fort William and Adam from the Edinburgh area, arrived in New
Zealand
within a month of each other.
Adam moved to Auckland,
setting
up a slaughterhouse and butcher's shop in O'Connell Street. He sought cattle land around Auckland. But it took him fifteen years to secure
the
legal rights to these lands. The
struggle clearly affected him. When he
died in 1873, the New Zealand Herald observed with regret “how
during
his life Adam descended the social ladder until he reached the last
rung, and
how at the end those who knew him in his more prosperous days had come
to shun
him.” It was from what is thought to be his
younger
brother Robert,
who
had arrived later in 1858, that most Chisholms from these roots are
descended.
The
Chisholm immigrants
between 1850 and 1880 included a mix of single and family men. Some like Joseph Wilson Chisholm, a miner
from Yorkshire, had arrived via Australia.
A number settled in that “Edinburgh of the South.” Dunedin South
Island. Robert Chisholm came there from
Kinross in 1858. He joined up with a fellow
Scotsman Arthur Scoullar in a furniture business. They beame
local
dignitaries as first Arthur Scoullar and then Robert Chisholm, at the
turn of the century, were mayors
of the city. Today, Chisholm Park, laid out in the 1930's in the
outskirts of Dunedin, is one of New Zealand's foremost golf courses.