The story of Joseph Jenkins is one of the more curious tales of our history. A meticulous diarist, he comes to Australia from his homeland of Wales in 1868, and spends 25 years here as a swagman, streetsweeper, miner, farmhand and poet.
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His life is one of hardship, yet daily he notes in perfect handwriting the things he endures. It’s a kind of extended personal therapy.
He works on farms around Ballarat, and wins the Bard's Chair at the Eisteddfod nine years in a row.
After his death, Jenkins’s diaries are saved from destruction by a member of his family. They are later edited into The Diary of a Welsh Swagman, a staple of school curricula for many years.
Writer and performer Mark Swivel is fascinated by the life of Jenkins, and is writing a show about the man. He spoke to Caleb Cluff.
Few would choose a water fountain as their memorial. Yet that is how the good people of Maldon chose to remember Joseph Jenkins. A bubbler has sat on the platform at their railway station since 23 November 1994. The plaque reads The Welsh Swagman Drinking Fountain and marks the centenary of Jenkins’ departure for home after 25 years in central Victoria. A successful farmer in his homeland, Joseph ended his working life as a street sweeper in the once pulsating goldfield town, after many years as a swagman.
But here’s the thing. Jenkins had lived a large life of accomplishment. How on earth did he pitch up in Maldon and tend to its gutters for a decade? And, why did he leave his model farm, Trecefel, in West Wales to begin with?
Fortunately, Jenkins kept a magnificent diary – for 60 years, always in English, his second language – that gives us some clues. His is a compelling and tantalising story. One of exile and shame. Joseph Jenkins was a singular man who deserves rather more than a bubbler.
I should explain that I lived in Wales for nearly five years and my son and his mother still live there. I fell in love with the place through the poetry of Dylan Thomas and the rugby of JPR Williams. In my experience, Welsh stereotypes hold: they are warm and funny people, communitarian, thirsty for learning and moody. If melancholy were an Olympic event, the Welsh would be hard to beat!
In his diary Jenkins is determined to embody the national character. Early on he cries: ‘I was born under an inauspicious star’ and he curses his luck down the years. With a harelip, Joseph must have been bullied but he plainly lacked the gift of gratitude, for he was a talented man.
West Wales in the mid-nineteenth century was a dull place, full of subsistence farmers, terrified Christians and legions in thrall to the demon drink. As a young fellow, Jenkins had a vision of improvement that he set about realising with gusto. Jenkins improved his land with hedgerows, had new techniques for drainage, manure and compost; he bred prize-winning rams and bulls.
The Eisteddfod in Ballarat on next St David’s Day is to be more of a concert where singing takes the place of composition. I do not think that singing alone is of any advantage to keep up the language of the Ancient Britons. I cannot imagine what the patrons of the Eisteddfod Fawr Caerffyrddin would say to parading this concert as an Eisteddfod
- Joseph Jenkins
He campaigned to bring the railway to his quiet corner of Britain – the Manchester to Milford Haven line - and succeeded. He built the local school and was deeply involved in local politics, never failing to rally voters to his candidate – whether Liberal or Tory. Jenkins was a bard for hire, writing verse for any occasion. A father of eight and husband to his Betty. A poet and a doer. A man of his patch, a most unlikely migrant.
In December 1868, at the fair age of 51, in the doornail-dead of night, Jenkins took off by train for Birkenhead then set sail on the clipper Eurynome – he said no goodbyes but did leave a will gifting his estate to Betty. Joseph missed the opening of the Panama Canal and a far quicker journey by mere weeks. He was teased for his Welsh and bookish ways through the 87 days it took to reach Melbourne.
On arrival Jenkins heard Welsh spoken on Collins Street but work was hard to come by in an economy stalling after the gold rush. So he found a swag and hit the road. Jenkins finds a world of hard men and grifters, jockeying for advantage. Our Joe worked as a shearer, ploughman and pea-picker. He wandered the inland towns, the epitome of a swagman, longing for a day’s work. He struck enough Welshman to manage his hiraeth – the longing for home – finding among them as many scoundrels as friends, and was often disappointed by his debtors.
Through it all Jenkins remained a man of the word. His diary discipline was extraordinary, barely missing days through the 25 years he suffered in Victoria, with no lover or mate for company. He wrote to the newspapers on the wrongs he saw around him – how swagmen struggled to eat, shipowners exploited workers and farmers did not know how to work the land. To cap it all, each year Jenkins went to Ballarat for the Eisteddfod and won the Bard’s Chair some nine years running.
But none of this explains why such a man would run from his land and people. He was a drunk, to be sure. A prodigious and hopeless one. His biographer Bethan Phillips says Jenkins came to Australia to escape the grog – an unlikely choice of location, possibility unique in the history of drying out. The diaries are full of the self- lacerations of a true addict: ‘Strong liquors produce untimely deaths’, he notes early on. He was forever signing The Pledge. Later he asks impotently, ‘Why am I a slave to drink?’. To be fair, the Welsh temperance movement did not spring from a vacuum. Hard drinking is common among the colonised and still straining at the British yoke, the Welsh proved this law.
One senses Jenkins may already have been a little ‘mad’. His diary hints at mania. While taking the cure at a spa Jenkins says he drank prodigious amounts of healing spring water – 37 pints one day, 45 the next. Think about that. It is some feat. At his harvest party each September Jenkins would make long rambling speeches to his bemused workers, neighbours and family, assuring them, that there was nothing in Patagonia – where many were fleeing - that Wales could not offer. Jenkins plainly underestimated the appeal of the sun to a Welshman. His productivity and excesses suggest Jenkins may have been bipolar. Living before Freud, he was probably seen as a man of wild energy and darker than usual moods.
The grog also came between man and wife. Betty Jenkins loathed her husband for it and would at times decamp to her father’s farm when Joseph went off on a bender. Then in 1863, their eldest boy, Jenkin Jenkins, died of tuberculosis at the age of seventeen. This loss may have undone them both. Joseph’s drinking became dangerous. His mind drifted from his business. He spent and borrowed too much. He lost the respect of his people.
In May 1868 the family explodes into violence. Jenkins describes a tangle with his wife and two of his children – in verse as bad as the incident itself.
‘Three devils were tearing my legs
My testicles the serpent did squeeze
The demon was struggling with pegs
While poking my ribs with his knees’.
This may be crux of the Jenkins mystery and his enduring heartache. A decade later, when in Castlemaine he writes: ‘Very painful. All the work of my female tormentor at Trecefel. I am always very ready to forgive but I am very doubtful of her as she continues in her frolics’.
By frolics Jenkins seems to mean love affairs. Given his constant working, campaigning and drinking, can you blame Betty for seeking pleasure or comfort away from home?
In 2012 I stopped in Maldon to consider the scenes painted in Jenkins’ diary. A colleague gave me the Philips biography and I had long hoped to visit. I imagined the sweep of his broom on the sandstone gutters, the scratch of his pen across the page in his long gone cottage. At the historical society I was told that a Jenkins descendent reckoned Joseph received regular medical treatment and pain relief for his injuries while in Maldon. It was thought his wounds came from the assault or venereal disease. The details were vague but the family shame clear.
Jenkins lived in a one room cottage in Maldon, keeping his diary, reading through the night. It had little in it but still was broken into. Often. Showing his mastery of cliché, Jenkins writes: ‘things are never so bad that they cannot get worse!’ He promptly scalded his foot and was off work for two months. His mind then soon turns to Wales, ‘home is where the soul is’ and he plans his journey back. Jenkins tries and fails to collect his debts before setting off.
He leaves Maldon concluding that Australia is a fine country full of rogues and vagabonds only too ready to rob one another. A steamer, the SS Ophir, returns him to Britain. Back at his farm, Trecefel, he relishes his grandchildren and grieves for his late sons and daughter. Yet comforts of home are not enough and after 25 years of virtual sobriety in Australia the fool returns to his drinking folly and the inevitable rows with long suffering Betty.
His diary is Jenkins’ trace in eternity. But as I age, as a writer and performer, I would like to create a show based on Jenkins life. He is like a character from Beckett and Lawson. The show could be performed alongside the water fountain on the station platform. The bubbler refreshing – its authenticity and plumbing would be admired by the hipsters of Fitzroy - but this singular man deserves so much more!
Mark Swivel is a writer, lawyer and artisanal humorist. His one man show How Deep Is Your Love highlighted the growth of microfinance in Bangladesh alongside the Bee Gees. His show Dad. Joke. 2017 is on as part of the Melbourne Comedy Festival.