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I also will analyse my relationship with Big Liz – as a direct descendant, a historian, as a man
writing about a woman, as a person living in the 21 st century depicting events that straddle most of
the 19 th and into the 20 th centuries. There is a need to exercise empathy, to enter imaginatively into
another place, another time, another life, and through which extract meaning that is relevant for
both then and now. This is an attempt to chronicle an outward story (the facts) to reveal an inward
life (a comprehensive truth).
Biographies are divided into those of subjects who require identification and those who do not.
Some want to emphasise a lesser known element of the subject’s life, change opinion, or provoke
reassessment. This one is to recover a minor player in Australian history, but a crucially active
participant in my family history. Also I have a desire to write a doctoral thesis. In this I am in good
company; David Kennedy’s biography of Margaret Sanger and Deidre Blair’s Samuel Beckett both
began as PhD dissertations.
My aim is to recreate the life of Elizabeth Mary Ham (London, 19/3/1840 – Thane’s Creek, Qld.
4/8/1927) from historical documents, archival documents, interviews with family members, diaries,
newspaper articles and family myth. On another level, the narrative of her life will also be
constructed through description of the time and place from historical and literary sources which will
be placed alongside the greater historical narrative of the nation – Australia – in whose founding my
family plays a minor but contributory role.
My biography will locate the events of Elizabeth Mary Ham’s life, her decisions and their
outcomes, in the greater historical picture by attempting to consider the implications of each
moment within the historical and social context of the moment. It will locate her actions, as a single
18‐year‐old woman migrating to Australia alone in 1859, transposing herself from early Victorian
upper‐middle class London to the frontier of a colonial Tasmania that had recently been “swept
clean” of the indigenous people. It will describe the options open to women in a frontier society and
the way lives were rewritten to match differing situations.
Further, it will consider the absences within the narrative, from the missing voice of Elizabeth
Mary Ham, to the absence of the indigenous peoples in a narrative that twice claims different
children of hers as being “the first white baby born” in frontier districts – a claim with clear
ramifications for the dispossessed indigenous peoples..
To do this I will analyse the relationship between different forms of life writing – including
biography, autobiography, memoir, journals and letters – and the development of concepts of self
between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries – focussing primarily on the period in which the
subject lived. It will explore the relationship between life writing and fictional genres and the
questions of memory and representation that they raise; the changing relationship between
confession and testimony and notions of historical truth, and the role of biography and
autobiography in shaping personal and political identities. I will consider these questions in relation
to the process of the life writing of Elizabeth Mary Ham.
Elizabeth Mary Ham grew up in comfortable upper‐middle class London, the daughter and niece
of watchmakers; watchmakers who founded the Watchmakers Guild and had positions within the
City of London. However, once she had come of age, at the age of eighteen she left her family and
sailed to Australia alone; sailing to the frontier. Not just content with Melbourne she went to
Tasmania and ended up at the newly opened mining town of Mt Lyell. Here she met a Welsh exconvict
who had been sent to Australia and later sent to Norfolk Island – the destination for
particularly serious crimes or second offenders in Australia. She married this man, 12 years older
than her, and started a family. After 3 children are born, her husband Hugh Humphries dies of
Pleurisy. About 2 years later a fourth child is born and registered with his father’s name Charles
Hyndham. That Charlie always though he was a Humphries meant a shock when as a man he needed
identity documents. During this time she is supporting herself and her family by running a hostel in
Launceston. Later two brothers from the north of Ireland, who had been searching for gold around
southern Australia and New Zealand, arrive. She has a child with the eldest and later marries him in a
joint ceremony with her eldest daughter marrying the younger brother. This assorted mob then
travel over 2000kms following gold until reaching the newly gazetted Thane’s Creek goldfield in