The scots language in Australia

Arriving in Port Phillip (in present-day Victoria) in 1839, Neil Black found that it was 'aScotch colony' in which 'two thirds of the inhabitants are Scotch' (Richards 1988: 9). Whilethere is no doubt some rhetorical exaggeration here, Hugh Watson, who arrived in SouthAustralia in the same year, also reported that there were plenty of Scots to talk to in thatcolony (Richards 1985: 487). These comments offer a personal light on a wider phenomenon, the nineteenth-century emigration of Scots to Australia. Although, as Eric Richardshas reported, this emigration has not been as thoroughly studied as that to North America,it was certainly significant. Scots came to Australia from the very beginning of Europeansettlement: there were seventy Scots among the just over 1,000 people who came in the FirstFleet of convict settlement in 1788. Later, three early governors were Scots and there weretwo sets of Scottish political prisoners, but it was with the growth in the numbers of freesettlers in the nineteenth century that Scottish emigration to Australia really got under way.In the later twentieth century, Scots migration has continued but has provided a muchsmaller percentage of the total number of immigrants. The exact number of Scots peoplecoming to Australia is impossible to determine, but some idea is given by the fact that,between 1853 and 1880, 138,036 Scots arrived in Australasia under government-assistedmigration schemes, representing 13 per cent of the total of assisted migrants. Scots migrantswere not equally distributed across Australia, and the 1891 censuses of the Australiancolonies show the proportion of the population born in Scotland ranging from 11 per cent inSouth Australia to 15.7 per cent in Victoria (Richards 1988: 12). These percentages are nothigh (though they are also not insignificant), and generally Scots dispersed among the widerpopulation. As Richards notes, even though there were a few places where Scots collected ingreater concentrations, like Mount Gambier in South Australia or the Western Districts ofVictoria, 'none of these became permanent enclaves, nor exclusively Scottish settlements'(Richards 1988: 13).