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Australia

202 bytes added, 03:03, 2 January 2010
Walers
::A primary source of vagrants in the 1860s and 1870s, involved horse grooms from Australia. In order to get men to accompany the horses shipped to India, mainly from Melbourne, shippers spread fabulous reports of the abundance of well paid jobs and the easy living to be had in India. The grooms signed up only for the voyage and once the horses had been landed at Calcutta, Madras or Colombo they were discharged. For most of them jobs proved impossible to find, their pay was soon exhausted and they were left destitute.....The 1869 Act specified that those vagrants who could not find work “after a reasonable period of time ‘could be deported, subject to their own consent .The costs of deportation were to be borne by the state, and the deported vagrant was prohibited from returning to India for at least five years. An attempt was made to charge Australian horse shippers and their agents for the cost of deporting grooms left destitute in Indian ports, but a few test cases were sufficient to show the impossibility of making shippers pay. The threat of prosecution and fines did, however, contribute to the decline in the numbers of grooms left stranded in India.
:The end notes of this article refer to a reference: 'In Charge of Horses from Melbourne to Madras' by ‘An Amateur Groom’, reprinted from ''Englishman’s Weekly Journal'', 15 July 1871, in ''India Legislative Procs''., no 44, 10 April 1874.Both these publications appear to be available at the [[British Library]], although its holding of the first publication also known as ''Englishman's Saturday Evening Journal'' 'lacks scattered issues'
==Orphans==
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