Not Guilty

by Christine Gardner

  In reply to your letter of today’s date, with reference to the advisability of boarding out Camellia McCluskey, I desire to inform you that I can discover no evidence of mental disturbance; and that she is dissatisfied with her present surroundings, and has expressed her wish to go to the home of Mr Clancy, I can see no objection to this gentleman’s offer. Provided that she be subject not only to the careful supervision of her guardian and his family, but to that of any officer whom you may desire to visit her from time to time, with a view to report, and to periodical examinations by myself. When questioned by me on this latter course, she in the presence of Mr Lewis, offered no objections.

  It is not evident just what Camellia’s relationship was with George Clancy, but he had known her since she was a child. She may have thought that her release to his care meant total freedom, while to Clancy, it meant he was responsible for ‘keeping a watchful eye over her’. The Governor’s order states that she is to be transferred to the Clancy family’s ‘careful supervision’ because the convent, being near the Yarra River, aggravates a cold she has. He also mentions her dis-satisfaction with life at the convent. (See Appendix 4)

  On September 3, Camellia, whose health had evidently improved in her new surroundings at South Yarra, requested permission from the Attorney General to take a job as a housekeeper:

  I trust you will pardon the liberty I am taking of asking your consent to allow me to take a place daily as a light help in a house in this vicinity where I could return here about 6 pm and remain here on Sunday and Saturday if possible. I am very much improved in health, feeling strong and energetic and very much brighter in spirits. My only drawback being the want of some teeth, which I miss when masticating my food. That is the reason I am asking your consent to do this, and, would still be under the care and control of Mr Clancy, who is aware that I am writing to you for this object, and who is quite sure I will be alright.

  I have assumed the name of Milly Sayer (my mother’s name) since coming here, and will always do so, to hide my own identity. My old friends and acquaintances (with the exception of these) I will shun, as fresh faces will help me along ...

  My father is the only person who is aware of my actual whereabouts, and he writes me under the assumed name of Sayer. Should you kindly favour me with a communication would address to me in same manner or to Mr Clancy.

  The reply was sent on September 26, denying permission for Camellia to work outside the home. Was this the beginning of her unhappiness with the Clancy family? Her letter requesting permission to work sounds quite optimistic in spite of the problem she is having with her teeth and she may have thought the independence of earning her own money would make her feel less of a prisoner.

  Patrick McCluskey was confident his daughter had recovered and was ready to be released to him. She asked him to try again to help her and again he obliged, writing to Attorney General Drysdale Brown on November 6:

  Dear Sir,

  I had a letter from my daughter Camellia McCluskey some days ago requesting me to write to you to get her released and as she appears to write a very sensible letter she would like to come here to me and live. Now I am by myself on a block on this irrigation settlement and am doing very well and if things continue so I will be well to do. I have just put up a two roomed house and got it nicely furnished so if she can come there is a good home for her with me so if you can grant this favour I will be most thankful to you.

  And having read in the papers your actions this last few years I feel certain you will do what is right as you have human empathy for the unfortunate.

  Like the nuns and inmates at Abbotsford Convent, the Clancy family was, by now, feeling the strain of Camellia’s dissatisfaction with her surroundings. They had taken in a family friend with the best of intentions and perhaps felt they deserved some gratitude for watching over her. Camellia, on the other hand, may have felt that she was being treated as a prisoner, unable to enjoy the independence of her own income. She appears not to have believed herself deserving of any punishment for the murders of her children and her thoughts seem to have been centred on her own comfort and happiness. On December 1, 1911, George Clancy wrote to the Attorney General:

  Re Miss Sayer,

  I regret that I have found it necessary to write to you on this subject but think that it is quite time something was done so as to let us have our house free from a continual nastiness.

  We have done all we could for her but get no satisfaction at all for all our trouble in fact you would think that we were under a compliment to her for her presence in our house (and of course we are not that).

  She is never satisfied with anything and goodness knows we have treated her like a sister.

  The strain is having a serious effect on the health of my daughter who receives the full benefit of all the nastiness that this young lady seems to be possessed of and I think it is time that we got some relief from this continual strain.

  The latest phase was this morning when she put in an appearance at the breakfast table and informed us that ‘For the future I shall dine out. I’ll come here to sleep only because I know that I have to.’

  This was simply because she had been asked to keep her own room clean and tidy.

  I am very sorry that I have found this letter necessary but something must be done very soon as we can not stand it much longer.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: A New Home

  ‘From the medical viewpoint I do not see any objection in allowing Mr McCluskey to take care of his daughter’.

  At the request of the Attorney General the Government Medical Officer, Dr O’Brien, and Dr W. Beattie Smith examined Camellia on December 4 and reported to him on December 6, 1911:

  In compliance with the instructions of the Honourable the Attorney General, on the 4th inst, we made an exhaustive examination of the mental condition of Camellia McCluskey. There is no evidence of any mental disturbance; we are of opinion she is of sound mind, and thoroughly responsible for her actions.

  W. K. Anderson, Secretary to the Law Department, wrote to Dr O’Brien on December 9, 1911, asking his opinion as to whether Camellia was well enough to be released to her father in Merbein.

  Re Camellia McCluskey

  Referring to the report, dated the 6th instant, signed by Dr W. Beattie Smith and yourself, as to the mental condition of Camellia McCluskey, I am directed to say that Mr P. F. McCluskey, father of the woman above named, called on the Minister yesterday. He appears to be a reputable man, occupying a small farm at Merbein – 6 miles from Mildura – and is prepared to receive his daughter and look after her. The Minister proposes therefore, under the circumstances, to recommend that she be permitted to leave the residence of Mr G. Clancy, 64 Millswyn Street, South Yarra, and proceed to Merbein to reside with her father, but before making such recommendation he will be glad to know whether you see any objection, from a medical point of view, to the proposed arrangement being given effect to.

  Dr O’Brien was then asked, on December 9, if he saw any reason, from a medical viewpoint, that Camellia should not be allowed to go to her father in Merbein and he replied ‘From the medical viewpoint I do not see any objection in allowing Mr McCluskey to take care of his daughter’.

  On December 12, Drysdale Brown submitted a report to the Governor with his recommendation that Camellia should be allowed to leave the residence of George Clancy and live with her father, and the Governor’s approval was granted on December 14. Camellia signed a new agreement on December 16, 1911, undertaking to remain under the supervision of her

  At last Camellia arrived at her father’s home in Merbein on December 19, 1911, in time to spend Christmas in her new home. She sounds optimistic again about her new life and freedom, in her letter to the Chief Clerk of the Crown Law Department:

  Dear Mr Lewis,

  I arrived safe and sound this morning, and am very tired, but am delighted to be here. I like my new home already. It is, of course, more primitive in every respect from Melbourne, but it is home to
me and its first appearance on arrival was homelike, with the chicks and the dog and the stable and sheds with thatched roofs. It is very much warmer here and dusty too, being very windy today. The house is beautifully situated in a little grove of native pines on the crest of a small hill, which commands a grand view all around.

  I wish to thank you for your extreme kindness to me, and trust you will have a Merry Christmas and a Bright and Happy New Year. Any time you may come to Mildura Father and I would be most happy to see you.

  Patrick McCluskey is also grateful to Mr Lewis and pleased to have his daughter with him at last, free from confinement and free from ‘that scoundrel’ as well. Patrick probably never met his three grandchildren, Dorothy, Ida and Eric.

  To Mr Lewis, Melbourne,

  Dear Sir,

  I met my daughter at Mildura when train arrived and drove her to Merbein. She was very pleased with the place and the surroundings and I will try and make things as pleasant as possible for her.

  Hoping you will have a Merry Christmas and happy new year and if you come in the Mildura district don’t forget to give us a call as we will always be pleased to see you.

  This note from Camellia’s father was marked ‘In the Minister’s personal file’.

  * * *

  Camellia married Merbein farmer Peter Lee, in January 1913, at the Catholic Church in Mildura. They had no children and Camellia died in 1945, of cervical cancer, while her husband lived until 1967. They are both buried at North Ryde in New South Wales.

  “George’ lived with Maude Smith until his death in 1928 and is buried at Toowong in Queensland.

  APPENDIX 1

  Truth reports on the murders.

  THE MURDERED BABES AT BENDIGO.

  BETRAYED MOTHER’S DREADFUL DEED.

  MADE MAD BY JEALOUSY.

  Lusts of Her Paramour.

  Poor Woman’s Senses Return to Her – Her Terrible Grief –

  The Pity o’ It!

  From ‘Truth’s’ Special Representative.

  Since Sunday afternoon Bendigo has been all agog. Not for many years past has there been so sensational a happening in Quartzopolis as the butchery which took place at ... Don-street, Ironbark, in the early part of last Sunday afternoon. Then Camellia McCluskey, an unmarried woman of about 30 years of age, slaughtered her three illegitimate children in almost indescribably horrible circumstances. The motive for this appalling slaughter of her innocent, unoffending offspring appears to have been that of jealousy, arising from the neglect of the man for whom the wretched woman had sacrificed honour, home, and friends, and the cankering suspicion, amounting in her mind to conviction, that he had tired of her, and transferred his attentions to another woman. This circumstance, calculated to be peculiarly distressing to a woman in her UNENVIABLE SITUATION, seems to have at length wrought the unfortunate creature to a pitch of despair, culminating in an uncontrollable frenzy, under the influence of which she brought death in dreadful shape to those whom her maternal instincts in normal conditions would have prompted her to protect and cherish, even at the cost of her own life.

  Even as the mad impulse to riot in slaughter seized and swayed her to a dreadful execution, so, almost as speedily, it passed, AND LEFT HER SANE again, horrified, anguished, and remorseful. So that it was from herself that the police received the first intimation of the awful occurrence – a halting, incoherent story, punctuated by dry, choking sobs, indicative of the broken-hearted sorrow of unavailing penitence. They might have been disinclined to believe her story as she stood, wild-eyed and dishevelled, at the watchhouse-keeper’s desk and panted her fearful tidings, but there was the sickening evidence of her blood-stained hands, her gore-bespattered dress, to support HER SHOCKING STORY, and dissipate the supposition that this distressingly agitated female was the victim of some frightful hallucination. Detectives Commons and Currie, with Senior-Constable O’Callaghan, staying only to pick up Dr. J. D. Boyd, drove hurriedly to the house, and, even as they approached, their apprehensions of evil were quickened by the sight of smoke coming from the building. Having burst open the front door and entered, the evidences of a maniacal outburst of fury were all about them. The carpets had been cut into shreds, the furniture had been HACKED AND SMASHED out of all utility. Much of it had, in fact, been reduced to matchwood. The window curtains had been torn down, and, indeed, the interior had been reduced to a ruin, and an attempt had been made to incinerate the wreckage by piling some of the stuff in an armchair and setting fire to it. It had only smouldered, and produced a pall of smoke, through which the police found it difficult to penetrate in their search for the slaughtered innocents whom they expected to find. They found them, and, accustomed as police are to BLOOD-CURDLING SIGHTS, they were aghast at the awfulness of the spectacle which was presented to them. In the back yard of the house they found the eldest of these three ill-fated children. This was Dorothy McCluskey, a bright, and, in life, a pretty little girl of four years, now a sickeningly-mutilated little body. She was stretched, face-downwards, at the corner of the house, and on the path leading to the front gate. Apparently she had been toddling, fast as her tiny feet would take her, away from the presence of her mother, who, in one dread instant, had INSPIRED HER WITH TERROR, and enforced the first law of Nature – self-preservation. Quite evidently the poor little mite had been struck down as she ran. There she lay, upon her face, in a great pool of blood, the back of her head stove in as with a tomahawk, an extensive fracture running along the side, her neck gashed and her jaw laid open to beneath the lobe of one ear. Her flaxen curls were soaked in the blood that had poured plenteously from her wounds, and her clothing was saturated in the pool that had collected beneath her PATHETIC LITTLE FIGURE. And which was still increasing when the police arrived. Indubitably the tragedy had happened but a very short while previously, for this tiny victim’s wounds were still oozing, and rigidity of death had not yet seized upon the small limbs. Twenty-five paces away, at the top of the steps leading to a basement room, they found the mutilated remains of Ida Helen McCluskey, two years of age. She lay upon her back, her arms outstretched and her head in a ruddy pool. She had been struck above and behind the ear, A DEPRESSED FRACTURE resulting, attended almost certainly by instantaneous death. But the blow which produced this effect was not by any means the only one delivered upon the wretched child by her temporarily demented mother. Her body was slashed and cut in a most dreadful fashion, so that it was practically bloodless when the doctor examined it. The trio of sacrifices was completed by the discovery of the body of Eric McCluskey, Ida’s twin brother. It was found in the basement. There was a gash in the throat, opening into the windpipe. Across the back of the neck there was ANOTHER DREADFUL WOUND. The skull had been battered in and the brain exuded, and the force with which the blow on the head had been delivered was evidenced by the spattering of brain matter and pieces of bone upon an article of clothing which lay in a rack some feet above the body, and the splashes on the wall near by. From the position of each small body it was apparent that the children had died instantly. Beyond the few minutes of maddening terror which preceded the infuriated mother’s fatal; blow for each, the unhappy little people had not SUFFERED THE ANGUISH of a lingering death. They lay just as they had fallen at the first onslaught, their wide, staring eyes retaining their pitiful expression of uncontrollable terror. There was evidence, too, confronting the police that the woman, after the commission of these frightful atrocities, had attempted to end her own miserable life by means of a carving knife, which was the instrument she had used to gash her children’s throats, but succeeded only in inflicting a few unimportant wounds on her wrists and a few slight cuts on her neck. It was a half-hearted attempt at self-destruction. Seemingly her FRENZY HAD ABATED at the sight of her children’s weltering bodies, and remorse and horror obtained the mastery, so that she abandoned her attempts at self-murder, and made all haste to acquaint the police with the dreadful things that she had done.

  A curious circumstance in the case is that
though the scene of the tragedy is in a thickly-populated portion of Bendigo, none of the neighbours appear to have entertained any suspicion that anything was amiss. Though as early as half-past 10 o’clock on the Sunday morning, as some of them aver, they HEARD THE SOUND of timber smashing proceeding from this particular house, there was nothing otherwise extraordinary to attract their notice or excite their alarm. It is to be inferred that even this early the woman’s passions had become inflamed, and she was already losing control of herself. The destruction that she had wrought in the interior of the house and upon its furnishings was so great and distributed throughout the rooms, that it must have required some time and exercise of CONSIDERABLE FORCE for its accomplishment. It may be that the work of devastation was begun in an access of anger against her paramour George McDonald, with whom she had that morning quarrelled. Knowing herself to have been deeply and irreparably wronged by McDonald, and believing he had tired of her and was enthralled by another or other women, it may be, too, that her naturally strong resentment, by brooding, magnified the hopelessness and bitterness of her position as mistress of a man whom she JUDGED TO BE UNFAITHFUL, until the balance of a highly-strung temperament was turned, and in the resultant agony of desperation, the energies which the heartbroken, self-reviling woman had hitherto expended on the inanimate possessions of the man who had ruined her life and destroyed her self-respect were turned, as an avalanche, upon her unsuspecting children, and she was prompted to sacrifice them in some mad notion of saving them from such a fate as hers, and punishing the author of her own disgrace.

  The home in which this woman, Camellia McCluskey, AND HER PARAMOUR, George McDonald, lived, abuts on the famous Garden Gully Co’s lease. The ground falls sharply and steeply away from the line of Don-street, so that while the front is on a line with the level of the footpath, the back stands on piles, 10 feet or more above the sloping surface of the gully, which Don-street skirts. In this respect it is not an exception. There are a dozen others of similar construction in the same locality, and in every instance, this one included, the space between the floor and the earth has been utilized for the purpose of basement rooms. It was in one such room that the POLICE FOUND THE BODY of Eric McCluskey. McCluskey and McDonald, with these three children, the offspring of their illicit unions, had lived in this house since March last. McDonald is employed as manager of H. M. Leggo and Co.’s jam factory in Bendigo, having taken up that position in or about January of this year, and being followed a couple of months later by McCluskey and the children, who had until then lived in one of the suburbs of Melbourne. In Bendigo the woman was known as Mrs McDonald, and none of the neighbours, until the relations incidental to last SUNDAY’S DREADFUL OCCURRENCE, had any suspicion of the true relationship between the pair. Nor was it suspected that their domestic life was unhappy. Outwardly, there was nothing to suggest that anything was amiss, though that is not singular, in view of the fact that the woman McCluskey held herself aloof from her neighbours, and admitted none into her confidence. But that her association with McDonald was, latterly, most unhappy, is evidenced by letters which she had written before slaughtering her children. Two of these were found in the house, and were ADDRESSED TO McDonald, who, needless to say, was absent from home on this eventful Sunday. He had biked to Woodstock that morning, after, as he admitted, a quarrel with his mistress, and he did not return until late in the afternoon, all unconscious of the horror that awaited him. In one of these letters the woman wrote: -