The Convict's Daughter Read online

  Kiera Lindsey has a passion for Australian history. She has worked in the Australian film and television industries and presented a history program on ABC Radio. She has also published a regular column in The Adelaide Review. She lectures in Australian history at the University of South Australia, and was the winner of the inaugural Greg Dening Memorial Prize.

  In 2006, Kiera came across a faded newspaper clipping describing the moment her great, great, great aunt, Mary Ann Gill, sobbed bitterly in the witness box of Sydney’s Supreme Court. She was being forced by her furious father to give evidence against the man she hoped to marry. This tantalising clipping compelled Kiera to rummage through the Australian, British and Irish archives to unearth the astonishing history of a controversial ancestor who was determined to pursue her own marital ambitions, come what may.

  Praise for The Convict’s Daughter

  ‘Truth really is stranger than fiction. A youthful and intrepid heroine makes a daring escape down a drainpipe, is pursued by her outraged father and disappointed by her down-at-heel gentleman lover. The Convict’s Daughter contains all the elements of melodrama or farce: love divided, love betrayed, and love triumphant. Hardest of all to believe is that these events actually occurred, in a period of Australia’s history often dismissed as dull—and that no historian or novelist has ever before done them justice.

  Kiera Lindsey certainly does them full justice in this delightful narrative, and in so doing fearlessly carves a new path between the genres of history and fiction. Her most soaring flights of imagination are firmly anchored to a bedrock of archival research as broad as it is deep. Best of all, with a true historian’s sensitivity to person, place and period, she weaves a profound emotional plausibility into this wildly improbable colonial drama.’

  Professor Penny Russell, Department of History, University of Sydney

  For my mother

  First published in 2016

  Copyright © Kiera Lindsey 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781760112585

  eISBN 9781952533907

  Index by Puddingburn

  Author photo (here) by Brian J. Marshall

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover design: Christabella Designs

  Cover image: Portrait of a Young Lady (detail), attributed to Louis-André-Gabriel Bouchet © Fondation Napoléon, Paris

  Contents

  Prologue

  Introduction

  Chapter One: High-Growing Fruit

  Chapter Two: Decline and Fall

  Chapter Three: The All-Seductive James

  Chapter Four: The Parramatta Romance

  Chapter Five: Shooting With Intent

  Chapter Six: The Deposition

  Chapter Seven: To Court

  Chapter Eight: A Sporting Affair

  Chapter Nine: The Gloves Come Off

  Chapter Ten: The Thoughtless and the Giddy

  Chapter Eleven: A Story Without a Hero

  Chapter Twelve: The Manly and the Unmanly

  Chapter Thirteen: A More Exalted Position

  Chapter Fourteen: In the Soup

  Chapter Fifteen: A Gross Breach

  Chapter Sixteen: The Thwarted Plot

  Chapter Seventeen: Defiance

  Chapter Eighteen: Lions After Slumber

  Chapter Nineteen: The Camel’s Back

  Chapter Twenty: Under the Hammer

  Chapter Twenty-One: All That Glitters

  Chapter Twenty-Two: A Tuppenny Damn

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The High Seas

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Natural Justice

  Chapter Twenty-Five: What Mary Ann Did Next

  Picture Section

  Afterword

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  For words, like Nature, half reveal

  And half conceal the Soul within

  Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, 1849

  Prologue

  1848. Pitt Street, Sydney.

  Clutching hard to the wooden frame, the fifteen-year-old girl hoists herself up, knees first, onto the windowsill then through the open window and onto the third-floor ledge of her father’s hotel. Carefully negotiating her precarious position, she twists her body this way and that until finally she comes to standing. Next, she places her palms flat against the sandstone wall and shuffles along the wet ledge until she finds a spot to stop.

  She peers out at the darkening city harbour, then up at the night sky—chest rising and falling as steamy scuds of her breath burst into the night. Already her gloves are damp with drizzle. If the rain sets in she will be soaked through before she gets to The Sportsman’s Arms on the Parramatta road, let alone the coachman up on York Street.

  She must hurry. The town’s streets are unsettled at the best of times—worse still at night. The darker it is, the greater the chance of trouble. She is wearing her street boots, and a good thing that is, for the drainpipe looks more difficult than she had previously assumed. She squints into the dark, trying to trace the path of the rusty piping onto the street below, but from where she is standing it seems to disappear into a pool of black. Suddenly, the prospect of scrambling down the unstable structure seems absurd and she glances behind her uncertainly.

  She should turn back. Climb inside and shake the damp from her dress, slip into bed. No one other than James would know any different. Only she has made a promise. Just the night before James had been standing under an arc of gaslight right below this very spot. She had heard him whistling soft and low and hurried from her bed to the window, still in her night bonnet, face aglow with the impossible thrill of it.

  Straightaway she noticed he was rocking on his heels, and when he finally asked her she detected a slight slur to his words—but she didn’t care. This was what she had been full of for months. So she had answered him, nodding fast and full of breath, ‘Yes, James. Yes.’

  Now, however, Mary Ann feels rooted to the spot. She pats her skirts about her legs and fixes her bonnet, trying to steady her thoughts as she teeters a little on the ledge. An image of her father’s pistols comes to mind and she remembers how he thrust both of them under her nose just a day or so ago. ‘If what I hear is true,’ her father had muttered, thumb tight under her chin so she had no choice but to look him square in the eye, ‘there will be trouble.’

  Mary Ann had been sure to warn James that night. ‘If you take me from my father’s home,’ she had said, swallowing to steady the tremor in her voice, ‘there can be no turning back.’ But the gentleman settler only brushed her fears away with a flurry of his hand. ‘There is no fear to it, Mary Ann,’ he had said, ‘you shall be mine.’

  The convict’s daughter nods to herself and peers
below. She has come this far. The carpetbag she has stolen from her mother is already in James’ carriage. The coachman is waiting. She must to it. So, Mary Ann straightens each glove and reaches for the drainpipe and when it is firmly in her grip, she begins to fumble in the dark, searching for a foothold with which to commence her descent.

  Introduction

  This is the story of Mary Ann Gill, a little known Australian woman who was born in Sydney in 1832 and died in 1902, a year after the Federation of Australia. Mary Ann’s parents were Dublin convicts who had very different ideas about their daughter’s marital future than her own. Like many girls of her age and class, Mary Ann was allowed a little learning as long as it served her role as a helpmate within the family business, which included several well-patronised confectionery stores and a number of hotels. Mary Ann’s parents, Martin and Margaret Gill, were capable and canny and by the early 1840s had assumed management of a large three-storey hotel on Pitt Street. This solid Georgian mansion occupied the position where Martin Place stands today and soon became known as one of the best hotels in Sydney.

  In 1848, just months before Mary Ann’s sixteenth birthday, Gill’s Family Hotel became the site of a romantic interlude between this young currency lass and a gentleman settler named James Butler Kinchela, who also happened to be the son of the previous Attorney General of New South Wales. When Martin and Margaret Gill found out about this intimacy, a domestic drama erupted that spilled into the courts and newspapers where it became one of the great causes célèbres of that year. More than 40,000 words were published about Mary Ann’s ‘Parramatta Romance’, ensuring that her ‘strange and eventful history’ was widely circulated throughout the Australian colonies, even as far as New Zealand.

  I first became fascinated with Mary Ann’s story in 2006 when my mother showed me a clipping from The Sydney Morning Herald of 5 June 1848. It was, she explained, an excerpt from a larger newspaper article that described the moment when my great, great, great aunt, Mary Ann Gill, stepped into the witness box of Sydney’s Supreme Court. As she took to the stand, the report noted, this fifteen-year-old girl was ‘too agitated to be sworn for several minutes’. No wonder—for she was being forced by her father to give evidence against the man she hoped to marry. Her testimony could condemn her to social ostracism and him to prison, but with the pressure of the court and her family upon her, what choice did she have?

  Mary Ann’s romantic scandal occurred during a crucial period in the colonies when people like the Gills were insisting upon their rights as British subjects, while ‘Regency gentlemen’ such as her suitor were finding themselves increasingly at odds with the new middle-class sensibilities of the Victorian age. The year of this scandal, 1848, saw dramatic change throughout much of the world and eventually became known as the ‘Age of Revolutions’. Each week, it seemed, newspapers were reporting upon fresh uprisings in France, Italy, Germany and Hungary as well as the Netherlands and Denmark as, one by one, feudal systems began to crumble under the pressure of a new and defiant democratic temper. In Sydney, radical colonists used this European unrest to stir up social and political change. It was, after all, an election year in New South Wales, and men like Martin Gill were keen to secure their position within the colony.

  The trouble unloosed upon the world in 1848 had, in fact, been brewing for some time. In Australia this might be traced to the late 1830s when thousands of free British immigrants flocked to the colonies eager for a better life. After the cessation of transportation in New South Wales in 1840, many saw their chance to establish the foundations of a new and free society better suited to their personal and professional interests. These men and women were energetic and ambitious and their often single-minded pursuit of these objectives helped to make the 1840s a time of activity and enterprise.

  This decade was also a time of rapid European expansion that led to the establishment of numerous fledgling outposts beyond established townships throughout Australia. In many the male population outnumbered their female counterparts by as much as twenty to one. Such rough and ready settlements were also frequently marked by ferocious frontier conflict. Indeed, an atmosphere of brooding violence seemed to permeate colonial society in ways that provoked a vigorous assertion of European manners from those wanting to assuage their unease about these conditions.

  Such complex conditions make the 1840s a time of intense tension and tribulation, and yet this period remains something of a forgotten decade in Australian history—a time often dismissed as little more than a drought and depression-afflicted lull that occurred after the precarious beginnings of penal settlement and before the glittering madness of the gold rush. For me, however, the 1840s was a thrilling threshold period. A time when everything was up for grabs and anything could and often did happen. Eighteen forties Sydney often resembled something of a miniature Dickensian London. It was a place where fortunes could be made and lost in a heartbeat and reputations were vulnerable to vicious vicissitudes. In the streets could be found Regency rakes and military men as well as scurrilous entrepreneurs and drunken debt collectors. There were also ‘flashmen’, native-born idlers and shabbily clad sailors from the South Seas. And there were women, such as Mary Ann and her mother, Margaret Gill.

  Mary Ann’s story allows us to see the colonial world through the eyes of a young Australian woman. We travel through the streets of Sydney at a time when both she and this town were on the threshold of a new era. We meet the influential people whose lives intersected with her own and who helped to shape the colony during this period. Hers is a story that spans from transportation to Federation, from the excesses of the Regency era to the high ambitions and petty peccadillos of the Victorian period. It confirms that women’s lives were controlled by constraining ideas and attitudes, but that there were nonetheless numerous ways that an enterprising woman might become, as one newspaper wrote of Mary Ann, ‘the Mistress of her own Actions’.

  Mary Ann’s story also travels far beyond the British world to tropical villages and goldfields, ranches and plantations in America and the French Pacific. In so doing it confirms that Australia has always been part of a much larger world and that Australians, or colonists as they were then most commonly known, frequently travelled the world with curiosity and confidence. As such Mary Ann’s story reminds us that colonial Australia was much more diverse and dimensioned than the well-known narratives of discovery, convicts, gold and bushrangers sometimes suggest. Like Mary Ann, colonial Australia was contested and contradictory—shaped not only by uncertainty but also by a growing desire for greater freedom and self-expression. Perhaps then we might consider Mary Ann’s story not only the biography of a little-known colonial adventuress, but also a fresh way of charting the transformation of Australia in the nineteenth century.

  CHAPTER ONE

  High-Growing Fruit

  The Gills had made good. Little Martin had come a long way from the wind-shocked cobblestone lanes of North Dublin where he had learnt to live off scraps once the weaving work died after the war had finished. He had had nothing really. A ma he couldn’t remember, and a da who had passed him onto an uncle who sent him over to a man who ran the workshops. It was there he had been left after the boss cleared out during the slump when everyone who could leave, did.

  Twelve-year-old Martin Gill had watched the carts and coaches piled high with trunks—twisting this way and that as they crawled out along the road to Dun Laoghaire like a giant wooden caterpillar. Those who remained in the winter, hunched up against the cold, were lucky to survive. Or were they? All the while more cast-off soldiers kept drifting into town where they haunted the inns and markets with makeshift weapons beneath their filthy army coats.

  In this brutal universe Gill fossicked and stole, using his fists and teeth to rip food out of the hands, sometimes even the mouths, of others. He was small, even for a Dublin desperate. A sharp thing, all bones and tight skin with a bold shock of greasy black hair. Just seventeen when he was caught with an iron griddle he s
lipped up his shirt while begging at one of the big kitchens off the park. The prison book said his eyes were hazel and his complexion pale. No wonder of it, standing only five feet and two inches and lucky to get something in his belly each day. Actually, it was something of a relief when they finally hauled him off to gaol in the winter of 1819. Once a day, they threw something like food at him, however foul. He had to fight for this, too, but at least he usually ended up with something.

  By the time they took him from the city cell and dragged him down into the hulk of the boat, ready to sail, six months had passed and Martin Gill was almost animal. Living off his senses more than wits. Feeling into the dark wet spaces, trying to anticipate the next thwack, shove, thud or bludgeon. Most of the time, the boat rocked and groaned in the heaving black and he was too weak to move. A day or so from Dublin, they docked again and picked up another crew of felons who slurred their curses and smelt of animal shit. With not much but instinct to keep him alive, he slumped back into the shadows. Nonetheless he noticed things. And again he stole. Bits of rations the others didn’t finish and which were small enough for him to take with no one seeing. Once, when he was mad with hunger, he chanced a chunk of green meat hanging above a tub. When they found that on him they flogged him on deck, then locked him down below in hand irons. No food for days. Shat his pants.

  He had been lucky, the ship’s doctor told him; things used to be tougher. But in the last few years there had been so many complaints in the newspapers that the captains were now keen to keep the men alive. It wasn’t worth the cost, let alone the noise from do-gooders who put about pamphlets and wrote flowery, high-minded letters about the rights of British subjects. It was also generally understood, the doctor said, that there were useful men among the criminal classes and a hungry boy stood a better chance than most of coming good. Out there, there were all sorts keen to make a fortune from the grunt work of government men, he explained, and a young man was considered a commodity even if he was not much more than a runt. So the doctor fed the boy and sent him down below where the captain of the City Boys gave him a solid thumping and Gill kept quiet for the rest of the voyage.