Joseph Jenkins’s Australian Diary: “Carving My Own monument”

Abstract

Joseph Jenkins emigrated to Australia from his native Wales in 1869. He worked as an itinerant agricultural worker in the Ballarat and Castlemaine area of Victoria before returning to Wales in 1894. For almost sixty years, he assiduously maintained a diary, which probably comprised fifty-eight volumes in all. This article examines the twenty-five annual volumes that survive for his Australian years.

The article investigates Jenkins’s phenomenal sequence of diaries in order to understand the literary culture of a lower-class poet (in Welsh) and writer. I explore Jenkins’s reading and his epistolary activity, as well as the dynamics of his diaries, to demonstrate the purpose and function of the written word in the life of the labourer commonly known as “The Welsh Swagman”. Reading and writing preserved a connection with his distant homeland and with Welsh culture. He was an “intensive” reader, repeatedly turning to a small number of religious texts. His diary serves as an example of “ordinary writings” – the raw materials of a new history from below, one that recognizes the importance of individual experience and reveals the often-underestimated textual practices of the subordinate classes.