Probable Effects of Over Female Emigration, or Importing the Fair Sex from the Savage Islands, in Consequence of Exporting all our own to Australia!!!

Well known satirical print, issued with Cruikshank’s The Comic Almanac for 1851.
Throughout the first decades of settlement, men outnumbered women to an extraordinary degree, resulting in grave social problems. Active attempts to address the imbalance included immigration drives for women in Britain. Cruikshank’s burlesque cartoon imagines that the supposed exodus of women who took up offers of assisted passage to Australia has created a critical shortage of women in England. His dockside scene depicts the ship-load of Pacific Island women who have responded to the desperate call of the crowd of pallid, quivering Englishmen greeting them on arrival.

It was only a few decades earlier that Gillray and Rowlandson had made good jokes about the reverse of the situation then applying, the shortage of suitable British brides in the colonies (see catalogue number 109).