THE GREAT MIGRATION
 

This is a page about shipping, and about the journeys people made to Australia and New Zealand to start a new life. It will tell the tale of those ships that did not make it home, and those who became famous for other reasons.

Where possible credit will be given for source material, but often the material offered here is a blend of fact and opinion. Links are provided to other on-line sources or indexes for the purpose of tracing individual families.

Link to ISTG ships site
Link to ISTG Site
 Have you any idea how many ships made the journey from Europe in the mid to late 1800s? If you thought comfortably of genteel sailing ships slowly working their way around half the world, forget it! These guys were in it for the money, and they managed to get three trips in a year to Australia, each with a load of economic refugees from a Europe that was undergoing huge adjustments, both economical and social.
Initially it was governments and/or the churches who initiated the migrations, offering citizens virtual free transport and a promise of a new life in a new land, but as the process developed momentum it became increasingly difficult for those same governments to manage the exodus, and they resorted to what in modern parlance in known as 'out-sourcing', or 'privatisation', and soon unscrupulous men and organisations were setting up to milk the situation for all it was worth. The changeover is visible insofar as the original settlers were shipped from their nearest home port, while later migrants had to make their own way to London, Glasgow or Plymouth, in the English case, or to Hamburg, if you were European.

In many cases whole neighbourhoods came out, and this does ease the load of family researchers who know that even though they do not know exactly which ship on what date, they can trace associates and near family members and obtain a shrewd idea of what happened.

Some people were outright crooks, taking the would-be immigrants for all they had and more. In tracing our lot we came across just such a man, and wonder even now how many other lives were disrupted. In our case this one man largely caused several families to leave New Zealand for Australia.

Other entries on this page relate to ships who sank, spectacularly or otherwise. The Elingamite is such a ship. She foundered on the Three Kings Islands off the northern tip of New Zealand, simply because a map was incorrect.

We hope these pages will slowly grow and provide more information, more insight. Please bear with us while we go about the task.

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