Collection S9 - Richard Stickney Collection

Richard Stickney (d.1834) was a young Quaker from the North of England. His sister, Esther, was a friend of George Washington Walker, the Quaker who accompanied James Backhouse on a missionary journey to Australia in 1831, and she asked him to look for her only brother, young Richard, who had run away to sea on an Australia bound ship, because of hardships in his job. By 1834, however, he had written to his sisters from Sydney but, before G.W. Walker was able to trace him there, his uncle Isaac Stickney received news of his nephew's death by drowning in November 1834 at the mouth of the Manning River N.S.W., from Thomas Soltit who kept the "Jolly Tar" public house where Stickney lodged in Sydney. Isaac Stickney wrote to Governor Burke of New South Wales enclosing Soltit's letter and asking for further information. This, together with information and papers from the Port Master, was given to Backhouse and Walker, who discovered that Richard had used an assumed name "Robert Smith" and had been employed by Thomas Steel as one of the seamen sailing up the East Coast for cedar on a small coasting craft which sank near the mouth of the Manning River, and that Steel had Stickney'S watch, gun and some old books (nautical works and 3 or 4 religious Friends' works). Stickney's own letter to his sister Sarah in 1834, with these papers, expressed regret at the grief he had caused his family and described his impressions of Sydney. He found that "the country born inhabitants are now becoming numerous and will soon form a sufficiently distinct people, they are a facsimile of the Americans both in body and mind, tall rawboned and muscular, with a most exalted opinion of themselves ¬ indeed in most athletic exercises as cricket, rowing or boxing they bear away more than their share of prizes. They are mostly ignorant to the last degree." The "currency lasses" he thought "not very elegant" but "there is one accomplishment not generally reckoned in the female list in which they excell they can most of them .swim." He remarked too that 99 percent of the children had fair hair. Richard Stickney attended the Friends (Quaker) Meeting House in Sydney when he had time. George Washington Walker wrote to Esther Stickney also of Quaker matters, his journey, botanical specimens, etc.