Eliza Davies joins the Charles Sturt 1839 expedition as 18-year-old; first of three roles in early South Australia
Elizabeth Davies on the frontispiece of her autobiography The Story of an Earnest Life: A Woman’s Adventures in Australia and in Two Voyages Around the World. At right: Map of Charles Sturt's 1839 expedition. Inset: John Michael Skipper's painting of the expedition at the "extreme point at the junction of the Murray with Lake Alexandrina. Victoria the Lake in the distance". Eliza Davies (then Arbuckle) is in the boat during this encounter with a Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal family.
Map courtesy of CartoGIS, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. Painting from papers of Lieutenant-Colonel George Gawler from State Library of South Australia, with permission of Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority.
Eliza Davies had remarkable walk-on-walk-off roles in South Australia’s early years.
Her first appearance, as an 18-year-old, was in 1839, with explorer Charles Sturt and second South Australian governor George Gawler, for a five weeks’ tour of the River Murray’s lower reaches. At the time, Davies was employed as a second nursemaid by Sturt, who was keen to allay fears that the colony’s interior was unsafe for women. Sturt alos brought his wife Charlotte, and Gawler his 15-year-old daughter Julia, on the tour for the same reason.
Davies had arrived in South Australia, via New South Wales, in 1839 from Scotland as Eliza Arbuckle. From a well-off background but feeling neglected by her widowed mother, Davies was well read and charmed by the romantic novels of Walter Scott. She also was comforted by the Scottish Baptist Church, becoming an evangelical Dissenter like many in South Australia.
She escaped Scotland to avoid an arranged marriage to an older man. After the 1839 expedition in South Australia, Charlotte Sturt determined, against Eliza’s will, that in 1840 she marry William Davies, who proved violent and abusive. Eliza left him in 1842 and returned to Sydney. In 1847, she went back to Scotland and became a devout member of the Church of Christ, inspiring her to follow visiting missionary Alexander Campbell to the United States of America. She combined missionary zeal with being associate principal and assistant matron at Kentucky female orphan school.
Davies returned to join her half sister in New South Wales, opening a school at Mount Pleasant. In 1861, Davies sailed for South Australia where a Church of Christ community had developed around New Zealand immigrant Thomas Magarey. Alarmed to hear her husband was still alive (although bigamously remarried), Davies filed for divorce, then fled back to “the crime-stained” New South Wales. She set up a school at “destitute and wicked” North Sydney from 1862-69.
Sailing again to Adelaide, Davies’ final teaching position was at Bowden Public School in the Adelaide suburb of Hindmarsh, where she taught poor children of all denominations. Philanthropist George Fife Angas, who reportedly gave £10,000 a year to religious and educational causes in his last years, converted a granary into a schoolhouse and provided a house for her at the former flour mill owned by Thomas Magarey, who also gave support.
In 1872, the South Australian Advertiser said the “behaviour of the scholars, and their attainments in general knowledge reflected great credit upon Mrs Davies, the Superintendent of the school”.
Davies returned briefly to New South Wales before sailing to live permanently in the United States in 1874. For an American audience, she wrote her 570-page autobiography. In it, she describes encounters with Aboriginal people on the South Australian 1839 expedition, falling into racial clichés and stereotypes that even Charles Darwin bolstered, along with phenomena such as phrenology.