Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher and governess, arrived at Brisbane, Queensland, in 1863, having been sponsored by the London Female Middle Class Emigration Society to work in the colonies as a governess. From illness and the general unemployment then prevailing in Brisbane, she found herself forced to endure great hardships, for a time surviving only by selling her drawings. She described her predicament when she wrote to the society on 18 November 1865 asking for more time to repay the advance they had given her.

Macqueen repeated her request on 18 April 1866 but this time her news was more cheerful, thanks to male intervention: 'For months after my arrival here no employment could be obtained, while respectable board and lodging were not less than 30/- per week. Fortunately I obtained a few small sums by my drawings’. Despite managing to find work as a governess for two short periods, she was dismissed when the children were old enough to go to school; parents in Brisbane, she commented, generally preferred the local 'good schools’ to employing governesses. However, her brother Arthur, a fourth-class clerk in the Queensland Treasury from September 1865 (when presumably he came to join her), had just been promoted clerk, third class, at £300 a year. She had begun keeping house for him and he had promised to pay off her debt.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011