Living the past - 1790s style

Remember when I sacrificed my hot showers in the name of research for the 1930s bathing challenge? I was pretty proud of sticking with the sponge-bathing routine for a whole week.

But Scottish writer and museum researcher, Fiona Houston, puts my paltry effort to shame. In 2005, she embarked on a year-long project to live as her forebears had in 1790s Scotland - housing, clothing, food, agriculture, technology...all exactly as it had been for her ancestors.

In this video she talks a little about the project:


Fiona has now published a book with a detailed account of how she lived that year, The Garden Cottage Diaries. (Check the link for an interesting extract from the book regarding the making of nettle soup.)

The publisher says about the book:

Bemoaning the evils of the modern diet, Fiona J Houston was challenged to prove her claim that people ate better 200 years ago than they do today. Thus began an extraordinary experiment: for a full year, she immersed herself in the 1790s lifestyle of her rural ancestors. She wore home-made clothes, ate from her garden (frequently entertaining family and friends), learned lost crafts and skills, and endured dark, cold winter nights with only her fire and candles for warmth and light. Her quirky, lively and down-to-earth account is packed with history, folklore, facts, practical tips and curiosities.

If you are interested, the book can be obtained direct from the publisher (UK readers). For non-UK readers, I discovered I could get it from http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ who deliver worldwide for free.)

The part that would really get to me, I think, would be sleeping on a straw mattress. Give me my inner-sprung posturpedic any day. And hot showers.

Reading about Fiona Houston's experience made me reflect on the lives of my own ancestors, who also lived in Scotland, however I then started to think about how life would have been for women in Australia in the same time frame and what it would take to live that life for a year.

If you were a woman in Australia in the early 1790s you fell into one of three groups; Indigenous women living a traditional life, convict women transported for crimes committed in Britain, or the wives and families of the officers, marines and ships' crews accompanying the first fleets to establish the new penal colony of New South Wales. After 1793 a new group joined them, the free settler women.

Life for most of these women was tough, and particularly so for the second of these groups. The conditions on the transportation ships were horrendous. There were one hundred female convicts aboard the Lady Penrhyn of the First Fleet. Many of them were ill and they were badly clothed. They had been imprisoned in England for years before transportation and had bathed infrequently. Five women died before the ship even set sail and many others died on the journey or soon after arrival.

Once they were in New South Wales, the convict women were assigned to military or free families and worked as servants doing hard physical labour, or worked in groups building roads. They lived in barracks or in tents. There are many interesting stories about what happened to these women, some of which can be read at the Australian Government Culture and Recreation Portal.

Many convicts received pardons or tickets of leave within a few years of arriving in New South Wales and they then attempted to build a new life in this very strange land.

In her excellent novel, The Secret River, Australian writer Kate Grenville immerses the reader into the experience of creating that new life on the banks of Hawkesbury River in the early 1800s. It was truly frontier territory. In addition to having to start from scratch in building shelter, growing food, securing fresh water and tending animals, the settlers had to negotiate living alongside Indigenous people who already had rights to this land. The 'negotiations' were often carried out through violence.

The main character in The Secret River is William Thornhill, a bargeman from London who is transported to New South Wales in the early 1800s for the term of his natural life. He arrives with his wife Sal and their children. Eight years later, Thornhill is a free man who sails up the Hawkesbury River to claim a hundred acres.

I found his wife Sal to be a fascinating character. She holds very dearly to the idea of returning to England and yet, she battles on with a stoic determination to create a home and life.

It is a world in which there is no medical treatment for sick children, where crops fail and families starve. Supplies are days, if not weeks, away and there is little communication with the outside world. The 'house' is a rough-hewn hut constructed out of forest timbers. Despite the area being reasonably rich in natural flora and fauna, for the Thornhills there was nothing but salt pork and damper to eat as they were unwilling to learn from the local Indigenous experience.

It would be a life of extreme physical hardship and, while I am in complete awe of Fiona Houston's Garden Cottage project, I wouldn't be volunteering to take on a year in a Hawkesbury hut. I think this is definitely a case where it is better to experience it vicariously through the pages of fiction.

A year as a 19th century English lady of the manor, however... I think I would be up to that task.

What previous life would you be prepared to live for a year?