Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Acquiring a room of her own
1839, her father’s speculation in foreign wheat brought upon the family financial
ruin and social disgrace.
David Spence appears to have lost not only all his own money, but substantial
investments made by his wife’s family as well, buying shares in engrossed wheat.
The grain was kept so long that it rotted and the shares became worthless. The
discovery of this unusually just reward for greed destroyed both the family’s immediate
liquidity and the trust and respectability attached to David by the local
community, which were essential for his work. A long-standing friend of Spence’s
sister Jessie was compelled to return some books and music to her by giving them to
an intermediary to pass on to an aunt, a proceeding which left her crying as though
her heart would break. But she could not write a word to Jessie. Nor did Catherine
hear anything from the new friend with whom she had spent a month in Edinburgh
over the Christmas of 1838. ‘We were hopelessly ruined, our place would know us
no more’. In April 1839, Jessie took Catherine to their Aunt Mary’s at Wooden to
be told of their father’s financial collapse: they must leave Melrose, and Scotland,
forever. 24
Apparently plans had already been made. Spence’s maternal grandmother, despite
that family’s losses in David Spence’s gamble, had come to the rescue with
£500. David had already left Scotland for the newly-founded colony of South Australia
where the family had bought an 80-acre section of land. That investment entitled
them to free steerage passages for four adults. 25 Spence’s eldest sister, Agnes,
had died of consumption four years earlier, and her youngest sister, Eliza, had died
at the age of two. 26 They decided to leave Spence’s younger brother David, with his
aunts to complete his education; to spend whatever was necessary to make up the
difference between steerage and intermediate fares; and, since Catherine and Mary
were too young to count in the quota of adult females required by the colonising
authority, to take with them a servant girl. In July 1839, Spence’s mother, her older
brothers William and John, her older sister Jessie, her younger sister Mary, and Catherine
herself, set sail on the Palmyra from Greenock. 27 Spence was already burdened
with her shattered dreams and her conviction that she was destined for perdition by
a tyrannical Calvinist deity. She was armed with nothing but her education and her
confidence in her own abilities.
27