Joseph Jenkins (diarist)
Joseph Jenkins (27 February 1818 – 26 September 1898), was an educated tenant farmer from Tregaron, Ceredigion, mid-Wales who, when aged over 50, suddenly deserted his home and large family to seek his fortune in Australia.
The compiler, his grandson Dr William Evans, a Harley Street cardiologist, coined the title Diary of a Welsh Swagman[1] by which name he is familiar to generations of Victoria school students for whom the book became a prescribed history text in 1978.
Jenkins commenced education under a disciplinarian private tutor and later attended a small Unitarian church school at Cribyn, a five-mile walk from home.
In his writings appearing in farming journals, he emphasised the importance of harvesting young hay, and preparing lucerne and clover crops to provide fodder for cattle during a severe and prolonged frost in winter and periods of drought in summer.
His dogged determination in keeping a daily journal, often under the most difficult of circumstances and in the most unpropitious surroundings, has given us a uniquely valuable historical record of life in the nineteenth century.
[2]: pp 164–198 The following month's diary records Jenkins carrying his swag, pessimistically prospecting and offering rural labour in and around the goldfields town of Castlemaine, where he found many fellow Welshmen.
He rarely left that vicinity except to attend the annual St David's Day eisteddfod at Ballarat where, on thirteen consecutive occasions, he was awarded the premier prize for an englyn (Welsh verse form).
In 1994, a drinking fountain and a plaque were erected at Maldon railway station to recognise the centenary of Jenkins' departure, and his unique record of the life of a rural worker in Victoria.
[2]: p xv Destruction of the diaries had been favoured by some family members who were concerned by their potential to arouse adverse reflection on reputations, especially that of Joseph's wife, Betty.
In Pity the Swagman, Bethan Phillips argues that Jenkins drank excessively while at home, though he generally abstained in Australia, and that he became disliked by neighbours for actively supporting landowners and the politicians who backed them, at a time when they were oppressing many tenant-farmers who promoted Liberal candidates.
(The title is Welsh for "Poems of Redcheek", the bardic name of Jenkins' brother John, but the book also records the writing of several other distinguished family members.)
In 1998, Dr Bethan Phillips of Lampeter, having devoted many years to the project, including a visit to Australia, published her extensively researched account of Jenkins' life: Rhwng Dau Fyd: Y Swagman O Geredigion, followed by Pity the Swagman—The Australian Odyssey of a Victorian Diarist, in 2002.
