The Blewetts and Morgans came to Melbourne in three waves in the 1850s. In the space of a single short generation, all but one of the adults had died in awful circumstances or disappeared, leaving Elizabeth Morgan and her surviving children to pick out a life on the streets of the inner city. As Melbourne galloped towards its late-century ‘marvellous’ reputation, many of its citizens were left behind. The remnants of the Blewett and Morgan families, alongside so many in the poor inner suburb of Collingwood, struggled to survive, their lives circumscribed by courts, prison cells, asylums and hospitals. Their experience would have far-reaching consequences, well into the twentieth-century. Their story shows what happens when family support fails, when gender controls your opportunity and when welfare becomes an exercise in judgement.

The working title for my project, Dearest, are you in Melbourne?, is taken from an advertisement in the Missing Friends column of a Melbourne daily newspaper in 1905: ‘Dearest, are you in Melbourne? Let me know, love, as I would like to write’.