1874
Glass photonegative
Sarah Southwell poses with her first child, William, on the studio chair. Her husband, Douglas, was a miner in Nuggetty Gully, Tambaroora. Like clockwork, Sarah and Douglas went on to have a child every two years, 11 children in total, five in Mudgee and then the remainder in Liverpool.
When one finds in many of the poorer districts a young man and a young woman, neither yet 21, and who have already three children to provide for and another about to arrive, and when one finds that these young people already so heavily handicapped in the race for subsistence have to pay a rent of 5s 6d. a week out of an average earning of 20s a week, it is perfectly clear that in a short time this family will be in a chronic state of poverty. By the time this man is 30 he will probably have six or seven children living; he will have been unable to save a farthing from his earnings to meet a spell of hard times. And when the "few sticks" that compose his home have been sold, and the clothes of himself and his wife have been pawned, there will be nothing between him and the workhouse but the alms of the charitable. [The Pinch of Poverty. By Geo. R. Sims. The Brisbane Courier, 25 February 1887]
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