by Meg Keneally
Monsarrat wrinkled his nose at the thought of the bats. He couldn’t smell them, but he fancied a few of them had left a souvenir of their transit on the roof.
So Grogan no longer lived. The woman who had become Rebecca Nelson was highly likely still breathing, but who knew where she was now, living somewhere on the fringes of a world which she had thought to rob of Hannah Mulrooney.
The previous night Monsarrat had offered to make a journey into Sydney on behalf of Mrs Mulrooney. ‘We’ll get a better price for the gemstones there,’ he said. ‘And then I’ll provide you any assistance you need in finding a house.’
‘Why would I need to find a house? Am I not wanted here? Maybe I’ve done too good a job teaching Helen.’
It was true that under Hannah’s tutelage Helen had become adept in the art of tea making and was an efficient but unobtrusive presence in the household. Mrs Mulrooney fretted, but tried to hide it, when Helen was absent on Sundays.
‘Of course not, Mrs Mulrooney. No, I simply meant that now you are a woman of means, you may wish for your own household.’
‘I’ve all the household I can stand here, thank you. You’re not getting rid of me that easily.’
‘As it happens, I don’t wish to get rid of you at all.’
‘It’s settled, so. And don’t think you can get out of paying me my wages. I am still the chief housekeeper in this establishment and I will be remunerated accordingly.’
‘Of course.’
How on earth, Monsarrat wondered, was he to afford two housekeepers?
‘You can stop looking so sour, Mr Monsarrat. I’m not expecting you to pay the both of us. I will handle Helen’s upkeep. We need to be very clear on this point – she is employed by me, not you. So please don’t go ordering her around.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it, Mrs Mulrooney. She has someone to do that already.’
At this Mrs Mulrooney rose from the kitchen chair rather more slowly than usual, having to heave herself onto a cane. Half-upright, however, she abandoned her attempt to reach Monsarrat and instead plucked the cleaning cloth from its customary position in her waistband to throw it across the table at him.
‘Mr Monsarrat,’ she said, ‘would you be kind enough to hit yourself.’
He threw back his head and roared with laughter the likes of which his throat was unaccustomed to producing. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, regaining his composure. ‘What you heard from me was simply relief that all is right with the world.’
‘All right, so,’ she said, continuing to regard him with suspicion.
‘What would you like me to do, then? With the proceeds from the sale of the necklace?’
‘They have those banks in Sydney, do they not?’
‘One of them, yes. The Bank of New South Wales. Very good with money, those bankers, but not too imaginative when it comes to nomenclature.’
‘Whatever you get from those stones, I wish you to leave it in the bank. Half under my name, and the rest under Padraig Mulrooney’s. That necklace will be transformed into a public house for him. An honest one, that doesn’t water the rum or deal with the likes of Socrates McAllister.’
‘Very well. I’m sure they will be good stewards of the money. Otherwise I know they’ll have you to answer to, and if they have any sense they’ll do anything to avoid that eventuality.’
Monsarrat wished he didn’t have to keep replacing articles of clothing. He still had his pearl-coloured waistcoat with its red smear – it would never be worn again but he kept it as a reminder of the dangers of making assumptions. This morning he was wearing a new shirt as he walked into the office, looking into Eveleigh’s rooms to nod, let the man know he was in attendance. He was looking forward to a soothing morning in the cellar.
Eveleigh was shuffling papers on his desk, and gestured distractedly to the seat as he got his thoughts in order.
‘Is there anything I can do, today, sir, to assist in preparing for the governor’s arrival?’
‘Probably several hundred things. But they’ll need to be done by someone else.’
Dear God, Monsarrat thought. If I’m to lose my job, I’ll have to offer myself as a footman to Mrs Mulrooney. He must have visibly paled at the prospect because Eveleigh glanced up and said, ‘Damn it, man, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘Not recently, sir.’
‘I didn’t take you for the superstitious type. Nevertheless, there are all sorts of rumours of hauntings where you’re going.’
‘Where I’m going? The cellar?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous – the only thing that haunts that place is the occasional spider. No, Mr Monsarrat, I’m afraid you won’t be here to greet His Excellency when he eventually gets round to showing us his illustrious face.’
‘Sir, is there a problem with my work? If there’s anything you wish me to change …’
‘Ah, stop it now. I don’t have time for this. Nothing wrong with your work, and of course your, shall we say, unofficial work has been noticed. I made a report, you see, on the death of Robert Church to the colonial secretary. Rather more detailed than the public version. And I wish I hadn’t now. Because to be honest, Monsarrat, it’s a pleasure to have someone with a bit of intellect around. Now I’ll have to rely on those cellar spiders for conversation for the next while, and frankly they’re not very good at it.’
‘Why won’t I be here, sir?’
‘What are your opinions about Van Diemen’s Land?’
Monsarrat shuddered. Port Macquarie was known as one of the least brutal penal settlements, and it had certainly had its share of brutality. But its reputation paled in comparison to the stories emerging from some of the more distant outposts. And as far as distance was concerned, Van Diemen’s Land was as remote as it was possible to be, dangling off the edge of the world as it did.
‘They’ve had a murder there. Not just the usual a-convict-splitting-somebody-else’s-head, either. No, the head that got split on this occasion belonged to a free man. And no one has the faintest clue who did it.’
‘Unfortunate. Nevertheless I’m sure a solution will present itself to them.’
‘So am I, Monsarrat. And you will be the one to present it. You are to sail for Van Diemen’s Land in two days. Which means, my friend, that you need to get to Sydney. I’ve arranged for you and your housekeeper to be on the first cutter leaving here. How does high tide tomorrow suit you?’
Authors’ Note
The Parramatta Female Factory was the template for eleven similar factories which operated around Australia during the colonial period. Conceived as a means of keeping men and women separate in a society where one group greatly outnumbered the other, the Factory was also supposed to embellish the colony’s coffers through the work of the women detained there. Far more than a factory, though, it was also a marriage and employment bureau. And for many women, particularly those in the Third Class, it was a place of punishment.
The Factory went through a few iterations, and during the period in which this book is set the second Female Factory was in operation. Its buildings still stand on land which is now part of Cumberland Hospital.
Around 5000 women went through the Parramatta Female Factory over the years, including Meg’s great-great grandmother Mary Shields, who was transported from Limerick for stealing clothing. It is estimated that as many as one in five Australians are related to Factory women.
For all its influence, though, the Factory is not as well-known as it deserves to be. The Third Class penitentiary stands empty and is not open to the public. Neither is the Third Class dining hall, which still bears smoke stains from an internal fire some years ago. Several of the buildings, including the one housing the committee room where women stood to be selected for marriage or service, are now part of the New South Wales Institute of Psychiatry, who are sympathetic custodians of the site.
It is a tremendous shame, in the opinion of the authors, that those who have sprung from the outcast women, as one governor called them, c
annot stand where their ancestors did. The authors support the contention of the Parramatta Female Factory Friends that the site should be preserved and parts of the precinct repurposed as a museum of Australian identity.
The Factory has a long and fascinating history, both as a convict site and later as an asylum. We have sought to represent that history as accurately as possible; however, for the sake of the narrative certain parts of the story depart from the facts.
Robert Church is, we believe, a worse character than any superintendent who actually had charge of the Female Factory. However, some superintendents did indeed skim the women’s rations for profit. The superintendents lived outside the Factory walls, but for the purposes of the story we have married Robert Church to the matron, and situated them both in her quarters.
While the fictional Church may be more monstrous than any actual administrators of the Factory, there is no doubt that conditions there were frequently inhumane. The story of the starvation of Emily Gray, for example, is based on an actual event, involving a convict called Mary Ann Hamilton. Head shaving was also a real punishment, together with the wearing of what were known as caps of shame, though there is no surviving record of what these looked like.
The first riot at the Factory did not occur until after this book is set, in 1827. The article in the fictional Sydney Chronicle, mentioning Amazonian banditti, is lifted from an actual article on the riot from the Sydney Gazette, published on 31 October 1827.
The Factory itself was twice a penal site, and we have conflated these for the purpose of the narrative. For example, the mattresses of untreated wool and the broken windows referred to here were features of the first Female Factory, not the second. The clock, described in this novel as above the entryway, was not installed in reality at the time this story is set.
As mentioned in the novel, the children of convict women were taken away from their mothers and placed in orphan schools from the age of four. However, only girls went to the Parramatta Orphan School. Boys went to a similar institution further away. We have also taken various liberties with the Factory’s layout for the purposes of the plot, particularly in relation to the stores and the Dead House.
Ralph Eveleigh, private secretary to the governor, is a complete fabrication, as are his office and the cellar attached to it (but Government House, with its observatory and bathhouse, still stands today). We have been unable to find a record of anyone performing Eveleigh’s function in Parramatta, although as in the novel Governor Thomas Brisbane did spend a significant amount of time at Parramatta Government House, and was criticised for doing so.
There was a gap between the departure of Brisbane and the arrival in Parramatta of his successor, Ralph Darling, and we have extended this for narrative purposes.
Two characters in the book bear some resemblance to key figures in Parramatta’s history, although we’d like to stress the likeness is passing. Hannibal Macarthur, like Socrates McAllister, was the nephew of a great pastoralist, John Macarthur. Like Socrates, Hannibal struggled to win his uncle’s approval, and there is some suggestion he dealt in sly grog. Hannibal was also a magistrate. However, Socrates’ Machiavellian nature, and some of his more lurid adventures, are entirely fictional.
The Reverend Samuel Marsden sat with Hannibal on the bench and was on the Factory’s management committee. While he was hardline in his views on morality and convicts, the fictional character of Reverend Horace Bulmer takes these attributes to extremes.
The smearing of Monsarrat’s old employer Cruden was inspired by a similar event in which charges of immorality were brought against magistrate Henry Grattan Douglass, who was ultimately vindicated. Hannibal Macarthur and Samuel Marsden were removed from the bench as a result.
There was also a pieman in Parramatta: William Francis King plied his trade some decades after Stephen Lethbridge in this novel, styling himself the Ladies’ Walking Flying Pieman, and dispensing his own brand of philosophy along with his pies. His feats of pedestrianism include beating the mail coach in a race between Sydney and Windsor, walking 309 kilometres around the Maitland racecourse in 46 hours and 30 minutes, and walking from Campbelltown to Sydney carrying a 30 kilogram dog between midnight and 9 am.
We have also made some small changes to the geography of the township of Parramatta. The intersection of George and Church Streets, known as the Corner, existed in 1825 as did a number of public houses, most notably the Freemason’s Arms (now the Woolpack Hotel). Sophia’s guesthouse, though, is fictional, as is Crotty’s shebeen, although there were likely to have been a number of unlicensed drinking establishments operating at the time (that sly grog had to go somewhere). The bend in the river where Monsarrat finds the awl is also fictional.
In addition to more general works on Australian history (including Tom’s Australians Volume 1, The Great Shame and Commonwealth of Thieves, as well as Grace Karskens’ The Colony), we drew on a range of sources which specifically relate to the Parramatta Female Factory, or to Parramatta’s history more generally. These include:
These Outcast Women: The Parramatta Female Factory, 1821–1848, Annette Salt, Hale & Iremonger, 1984
Women Transported: Life in Australia’s Convict Female Factories, a project of the Parramatta Heritage Centre and University of Western Sydney, 2008
Colonial Ladies: Crime Reports from the Sydney Herald Relating to the Female Factory, Parramatta, Judith Dunn F.P.D.H.S., 2008
Rules & regulations for the management of the female convicts in the new factory at Parramatta, issued 31 January 1821, Government Printer
The Prisoners of Australia: a Narrative, Charlotte Anley, Bodleian Library Oxford, 1841
Parramatta: A Past Revealed, Terry Kass, Carol Liston and John McClymont, Parramatta City Council, 1996
The Cradle City of Australia: A History of Parramatta, James Jervis F.R. A.H.S., Council of the City of Parramatta, 1961
Acknowledgements
One of the challenges of historical fiction is conjuring a sense of how a place would have looked, sounded and operated in the period you’re writing about. For this reason we are hugely indebted to Gay Hendrickson of the Rowan Tree Heritage and Cultural Services, former president of the Parramatta Female Factory Friends and now vice president of Museums Australia. Gay organised access to t he parts of the Female Factory which few people get to see, walked around with us, and answered innumerable questions over a period of months. She helped us to step out the murder of Robert Church and the escape of his killer, pinpointing the optimal spot for the event to occur. She was also kind enough to read the manuscript and provide feedback. Any errors are ours, not hers.
We’re also grateful to Noela Vranich of the Parramatta Female Factory Friends for her advice, and in particular for sending us a tract by Charlotte Anley, a representative of prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, who visited the Female Factory in the 1830s. The scenes Monsarrat encounters in the Third Class yard are drawn from this work.
Karima-Gae Topp of Topp Tours was also generous in providing information.
We’d like to thank the numerous volunteers at Parramatta historical sites such as Government House, Elizabeth Farm, Experiment Farm and Hambledon Cottage (the kitchen of which was the model for Mrs Mulrooney’s kitchen). These people live and breathe their local history and are a wonderful source of information. We are fortunate to have such custodians of our heritage.
As always, our thanks go to our family – our beloved and insightful first reader Judy; and Craig, Rory and Alex, all of whom have patiently accommodated the intrusion of Monsarrat and Mrs Mulrooney into their lives.
Also by Meg and Tom Keneally
The Soldier’s Curse
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Version 1.0
The Unmourned
9780857989406
First published by Vintage in 2017
Copyright © Margaret Keneally and the Serpentine Publishing Company Pty Ltd 2017
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
A Vintage book
Published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Keneally, Meg, author
The unmourned / Meg Keneally; Tom Keneally
ISBN 978 0 85798 940 6 (ebook)
Series: Monsarrat series; book two
Historical fiction
Detective and mystery stories
Other Creators/Contributors: Keneally, Thomas, 1935– author
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