Writing about her experiences onboard the migrant ship Tartar, Janet Millett stated that whenever the ship encountered really bad weather her husband would go to the married persons’ quarters where he would look after the women and children, presumably to reassure them and also to give them ‘biscuits and raisins and any little dainties’ from their own provisions. She described one of the married women as a Shetlander and although she doesn’t give her name it was almost certainly Mary Sinclair.
There was one emigrant from the far north of Scotland —I think the Shetland Isles—whose wife was always ill and low-spirited, let the weather be what it might, and who, when at her worst, could suggest nothing eatable that she fancied except “a Wick herring,” drawled out in such very broad Scotch as took a practised ear to understand. “A wee drap o’ whuskey,” which she proposed as an accompaniment to the herring, my husband was able to procure for her, and a few of our sardines proved a tolerable substitute, for the unattainable fish of the North.1
Mary Sinclair was born Mary Mainland in Dunrossness, Shetland, on the 3rd of January 1826. She was the third of six daughters of James Mainland and his wife Mary Bairnson who, along with their three brothers shared the family croft in Garthsbanks. Mary married Thomas Sinclair, two years her junior, in 1851 and her younger brother James married Thomas’s sister Ann seven years later. Mary and Thomas settled into Hughsbrake, a croft in Hillock where they had five of their seven children. Thomas worked as a crofter and fisherman for several years until the family decided to emigrate to Western Australia.
The Sinclairs were only in Western Australia for five years before Thomas died, aged just 39 years. Mary was now left to bring up their children on her own. Their eldest child, Jessie, was 16 when her father died and the youngest, George, was barely a year old. The family lived on a small allowance from the Convicts Department but when that ran out Mary had to find a way of supporting them all.
The immediate years after Mary’s allowance ran out in 1870 are a blank, but at some stage Mary went to Albany where she acquired a house in Finlay Street which she named Dunrossness Cottage. She ran Dunrossness Cottage for a number of years as a boarding house.2
Mary joined her son Laurence and other children at Esperance in later years. Laurence, who had gone to work with the Dempsters after the death of his father, had helped them to establish their pastoral station at Esperance Bay which led to the establishment of the township of Esperance. Mary died in Esperance in 1915.
The Albany Advertiser ran an obituary which, faithful to the patriarchal views of the time, referred to her not by her maiden name of Mainland, nor even her given name of Mary, but by her husband’s name.
- Millett, J. 1872. An Australian Parsonage or the Settler and the Savage in Western Australia, UWA Press, Nedlands, pp. 8-9
- Sinclair, Margret. nd. Half A World Away – Thomas Sinclair’s Family Story – The first generation in Western Australia. City of Albany Library
- Western Mail, 16 July 1915
- The Albany Advertiser, 14th of July 1915
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