Two English immigrant families in Australia in the 19th century

Mass immigration to Australia began in the late 1830s. It was a small part of the international movement of people in the nineteenth century. The majority of emigrants to the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century were from Britain and Ireland. As in north America in the previous two centuries, they quickly overwhelmed the indigenous people and became the dominant population on the Australian continent. In the first half of the nineteenth century the British government and British private enterprise were instrumental in diverting some of the flow of emigrants from Britain and Ireland to the Australian colonies away from north America. Other factors, such as chain migration, helped once this emigration field became known. At the heart of the immigrants' quest, as it probably was for most free emigrants in the nineteenth century, was the family. I have constructed a story of the operation of two sets of extended families over several decades to provide insights into their culture and customs, to look...