by Meg Keneally
Port Macquarie is now a thriving seaside town and holiday destination, a few hours’ drive north of Sydney. Lady Nelson Beach now goes by the name of Town Beach, and Shoal Arm Creek is now Kooloonbung Creek.
Fact and fiction
Hugh Llewellyn Monsarrat and Hannah Mulrooney, of course, exist only in these pages. The inspiration for Monsarrat came, however, from a real gentleman convict, James Tucker, a clerk sentenced to transportation for sending a threatening letter. He arrived in Sydney in 1827 (per Midas). He lost his first and second tickets of leave for drunkenness (of which Monsarrat would not have approved) and forgery, and spent some time in Port Macquarie, where he is believed to have written one of Australia’s first novels, Ralph Rashleigh, chronicling the misadventures of a fictional convict.
While researching this book we encountered another man, Charles Desroches, who bore a passing resemblance to Monsarrat. Sentenced to Port Macquarie for ‘running away and committing various forgeries’, his work as a clerk between 1824 and 1828 won him admiration from various commandants, with Commandant F. C. Crotty writing to Governor Ralph Darling of ‘the great utility of prisoner Charles Desroches’.
Desroches shared Monsarrat’s yearning for freedom. In 1828 he, too, wrote to Governor Darling: ‘I am apprehensive … that when returning to headquarters I shall never obtain the object for which I have so long toiled – a Ticket of Leave. Having been allowed to live separate from the rest of the prisoners, I cannot conceal the dread I feel at being herded with them at the Hulk and the Barracks.’
Hannah Mulrooney is a complete fabrication (as are Fergal Slattery, Honora Shelborne, Michael Diamond, Father Hanley and a great many others). Those who did her work at Government House in real life would have been convicts, as the only free women at the settlement were wives and daughters of officials, or of men serving sentences.
The spot which would have been Honora’s burial place is across the aisle from a real grave at St Thomas’s, that of Commandant John Rolland (after whom Rolland’s Plains is named), who died in December 1824. He was buried on the building site, and the church was constructed over him.
Honora’s husband, Major Angus Shelborne, owes his character to two progressive and humane (for the period) Port Macquarie commandants, Captain Francis Allman and Major Archibald Clunes Innes. The major’s real-life chronological counterpart, Captain Henry Gillman, may have been a somewhat darker individual. Michael Diamond’s advances towards the daughter of a convict were based on actions attributed to Gillman. Shelborne and Gillman do share one aspect, though – Shelborne’s dispute with Reverend Ainslie is based on a similar disagreement between Gillman and Reverend Thomas Hassall.
There was never a hanging in Port Macquarie (capital crimes were dealt with in Sydney), but there would have been had Gillman had his way. In April 1825, he wrote to the Colonial Secretary for permission to execute a convict, Patrick Malone, who had struck prisoner William Elliott on the head with an axe when Elliott claimed he had none of the tobacco Malone wanted. Malone had also made an escape attempt, and cut off the fingers of a fellow escapee.
In a hand which might have made Monsarrat jealous, Gillman’s clerk transcribed the following words for the commandant’s signature: ‘Patrick Malone, a Respite on this Settlement, by his Conduct has rendered himself so notorious that as a warning, particularly to the refractory and ill-disposed part of the Prisoners here, I find myself under the disagreeable necessity of suggesting for the Consideration of His Excellency The Governor, that he may suffer immediate Execution.’ His request was ultimately denied, and Malone was sent to Sydney, where he was tried, convicted and hanged.
The Port Macquarie Female Factory was closed, as described in this book, because of concerns for the health of the few women confined there, and a desire to make more efficient use of the building. In this book, however, the factory is closed earlier than it actually was, in October 1825.
All the vessels in the novel bear the names of ships that actually visited Port Macquarie during the period (although the Sally, a frequent visitor, was wrecked in April 1825). The escape of eight convicts on the Isabella actually occurred (in October 1824), and the commandant of the day, John Rolland, ordered the vessel fired on, without success. Rolland told the soldiers they had done their best, as Major Shelborne does in the book.
The Birpai
The relationship between the Birpai and those who invaded their territory was complex. There is a strong oral tradition surrounding a massacre of 300 Birpai at Blackman’s Point in 1841. Prior to this, it seems there was also tension between cedar-cutting parties and the Birpai. In his book Baal Belbora: The End of the Dancing, Geoffrey Blomfield notes: ‘… conflict followed the arrival of the cedar cutter … it seems likely … that the cause of hostility was due to a breach of good conduct by the cedar cutters’.
But the Birpai were a peaceable people, and of considerable help to the interlopers. As described in this story, they provided assistance in returning escapees, and also saved convicts from drowning when boats overturned.
Major Archibald Innes wrote of the Birpai: ‘I consider the natives to be very friendly. Numerous tribes for sixty miles round constantly visit us and, in my opinion, security and prevention of desertion of the prisoners is greatly to be attributed to the natives who generally apprehend them a short time after they are at large.’
Geoffrey Blomfield reports that the Birpai also befriended commissariat clerk George Macdonald, who resembled a dead tribesman called Bangar (whose name has been used in this book).
The story of the three brothers, as related here, comes from Uncle Bill O’Brien of the Birpai Local Aboriginal Land Council, who attributes it to the oral testimony of Aunty Marion Hampton.
Arsenic
There are no cases, as far as we are aware, of Scheele’s Green, the copper arsenic pigment in Honora Shelborne’s wallpaper, being used in a murder. But other substances impregnated with arsenic certainly were. In 1911, insurance company administrator Frederick Seddon poisoned his boarder, Eliza Barrow, with arsenic derived from soaking flypaper in water. Like Honora, she took some weeks to die.
But while it may not have been used to murder, Scheele’s Green certainly killed people, although concerns about it were not raised until the 1830s, so its dangers would have been unknown at the time this book is set.
There was a popular theory that Napoleon died of arsenic poisoning due to the green paper in his bedroom in exile on St Helena. This theory has since been discounted.
By 1830, one million rolls of wallpaper were printed annually in the UK, with later tests finding four out of five samples contained arsenic. The article ‘Deadly Décor: A Short History of Arsenic Poisoning in the Nineteenth Century’ by Jessica Charlotte Haslam in Res Medica provides a fascinating insight into the discovery of the toxic properties of the pigment.
German chemist Leopold Gmelin raised concerns about the pigment, noting that damp walls covered in green paper gave off a mouse-like smell, and suggesting the vapour could be an arsenic compound. Gmelin was the first, in 1839, to warn against applying papers containing Scheele’s Green.
Four children in London’s Limehouse district died in a room papered with Scheele’s Green. And in the mid-1850s, physician William Hinds noted that he suffered nausea, abdominal pains and light-headedness in his green-walled study. He had samples of the paper tested and found they contained arsenic. The paper was removed and the symptoms vanished. Haslam reports Hinds wrote that ‘a great deal of slow poisoning is going on in Great Britain’.
The article Monsarrat reads draws on these and other cases reported by Haslam.
Select Bibliography
For those interested, we found the following references extremely helpful in the writing of this book:
Baal Belbora: The End of the Dancing, Geoffrey Blomfield, APCOL
Dancing with Strangers, Inga Clendinnen, Text Publishing
‘Deadly Décor: A Short History of Arsenic Poisoning in the Nineteenth Centu
ry’, Jessica Charlotte Haslam, Res Medica: Journal of the Royal Medical Society, Volume 21, Issue 1
Female Skeletons in the Cupboard: Stories of Convict Women at Port Macquarie, Gwen Griffin, Port Macquarie Historical Society
Place of Banishment: Port Macquarie 1818–1832, Iaen McLachlan, Hale & Iremonger
Port Macquarie: A History to 1850, Frank Rogers (ed.), Port Macquarie Historical Society
‘Port Macquarie: Former Government House Ruins Conservation Management Plan’, Rosemary Annable, Margaret Betteridge, Christopher Marks and Colleen Morris, prepared for the New South Wales Heritage Office, March 2003
Port Macquarie, the Windingsheet, Gwendoline Griffin and Ronald Howell, Port Macquarie Historical Society
The Colony, Grace Karskens, Allen & Unwin
The Inheritor’s Powder, Sandra Hempel, W. W. Norton
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Version 1.0
The Soldier’s Curse
9780857989376
First published by Vintage in 2016
This edition published by Vintage in 2016
Copyright © Margaret Keneally and the Serpentine Publishing Company Pty Ltd
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
A Vintage book
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Keneally, Meg, author
The soldier’s curse/Meg Keneally, Tom Keneally
ISBN 978 0 85798 937 6 (ebook)
Series: Monsarrat series; bk. 1
Historical fiction
Detective and mystery stories
Other Creators/Contributors: Keneally, Thomas, 1935– author
A823.4
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