Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/374

Sydney, and the Orphan House and grounds, were held by the committee, consisting of Mrs. King, Mrs. Paterson, Rev. Samuel Marsden, the principal surgeon (T. Jamison), the commissary (J. Palmer), and the naval officer (Dr. Harris).

How necessary, and how beneficial, the institution has been may be gathered from the last paper (1806) in which its founder described it. There were then 1808 children of both sexes under nineteen years of age. Only 900 of them were legitimate. Four hundred and thirty-four were maintained from the government stores, the rest by their parents. The managing committee, under the Governor, had remained almost the same throughout. When Marsden went to England he handed to the succeeding secretary £845.

Six of the girls had been well married and portioned with £10 sterling each, and eleven had been apprenticed to officers' wives, and other respectable persons." Between sixty and seventy girls were in the school. As King sailed with his wife from Port Jackson in 1806, in the ship which carried Mr. Marsden also, he wrote:

"A most sincere wish is formed by those who have had the principal management of it, and are about to leave the colony, that its success and good management may long continue, being well persuaded that nothing else can make the rising generation useful to themselves or creditable to the country their parents came from. Nor can those who have felt such anxiety for the success of this benevolent institution lose sight of the land it is placed in without repeating the sentence—Esto Perpetua—which has been adopted as the motto of the asylum, and engraved on a stone placed over the front door of the house, with the month and year of its commencement (21st August 1801).^[1]

When King retired, in 1806, he wrote a separate despatch announcing that Governor Bligh would protect the institution, the intention of which would be "materially promoted by his amiable daughter having undertaken to succeed Mrs. King in the internal superintendence."

An attempt was made in 1803 to form a similar asylum for boys at the Hawkesbury, but the original scheme was abandoned, and the building was used as a day school.