Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  The pastoralists reacted to these modest ideas with fury. To fight Gipps the Pastoral Association in New South Wales and its Port Phillip counterpart, the Mutual Protection Society, began lobbying in Britain and locally, predicting the ruin of their industry if licence fees on squatting land and the collection of quit rents within the boundaries went ahead. The Committee on Land Grievances came into being, as gentry like Ben Boyd, WC Wentworth, Henry Dangar and others refused to accept the right of the imperial government to control land policy, a stand, as Gipps said, ‘in opposition to all Constitutional Law and the positive enactment of Parliament’. At a meeting in Sydney, to the delight of genuine republicans, Wentworth—no longer young, now a pastoralist operating beyond the Limits, and well on his way to becoming a Tory—played the republican card by arguing that the Crown had been acting as ‘but the trustee for the public’. All land taxes not sanctioned by the Legislative Council of New South Wales were illegitimate, he said. Ben Boyd, with land holdings on the south coast of New South Wales and over the mountains to the interior, argued that the payment of a £10 licence fee should vest the occupier with freehold over an area twenty miles square (52 km2). One squatter suggested, ‘The best thing they could do with Sir George [Gipps] now would be to Bligh him.’ Another thought that twenty good stockmen would defy ‘any regiment in Her Majesty’s Service’; a third, that the soldiery would switch loyalties in return for twenty acres (8 hectares) and a few cattle apiece. The revolutionary spirit amongst squatters was strong.

  The attempt of the squatters to take up Australian nationalism for their own ends impressed some. One who was initially attracted to their cause was Robert Lowe, the patron of Henry Parkes, an albino lawyer who had come to New South Wales with his wife for his health. After taking some months rest, he had sought a place in the Legislative Council and was appointed by Gipps. Lowe declared, ‘If the representative of Middlesex claims a right to control the destinies of New South Wales, the representative of New South Wales should have a corresponding influence on the destinies of Middlesex.’ But the urban liberals ultimately saw through the pastoralists’ rhetoric, and Lowe withdrew his support from the squatters. ‘I would give them every encouragement,’ he said, ‘but to give them a permanency of occupation of those lands—those lands to which they had no better right than that of any other colonist . . . I can never consent to.’ He decided that having thought they fought for liberty, ‘he found they fought only to defend their breeches pocket’.

  But Wentworth, in particular, fought on with the same intensity and gift for vituperation which had characterised every aspect of his life. Of Gipps’s plan he declared to cheering supporters that it was ‘an imposition such as a lord puts upon a serf—fit for Tunis and Tripoli—worthy of the Dey of Algiers—it is intolerable, it is a nuisance which should not be endured’.

  Throughout the 1840s the argument about whether Australia was to be ‘a sheep walk forever’ (to borrow a later phrase from Robert Lowe) would continue, along with struggles between and within sects and amid a bewildering and coruscating display of political passion.

  CHAPTER 24

  FETCHING SPOUSES

  Hugh Larkin had by the time of Mary Shields’s arrival at Coolringdon served ten years of his life sentence. Eighteen months earlier, on 21 December 1841, he had filled out a form he got from the police magistrate in the new village of Cooma, forty or so kilometres away. It was an application to have his wife, Esther, and their children, Patrick, then ten and Hugh, eight, sent to Australia at the British government’s expense. ‘The Petitioner is desirous of being reunited to the family from which he was separated at the time of his transportation.’ William Brodribb certified that ‘the Petitioner above named has been in my service since the month of March 1834, during which period his conduct has been such, that I respectfully recommend his Petition to the favourable consideration of His Excellency . . .’ Hugh’s application was signed too by a police magistrate and a clergyman.

  In his arduous broad-stroke handwriting, Hugh gave Esther’s address as Lismany, Galway, of the parish of ‘Cluntowescirt nr Laurencetown’. As referees he nominated Walter Lawrence Esquire of Belview, Laurencetown, County Galway and the Right Reverend Thomas Cowan, Bishop of Loughrea, County Galway. Hugh could have found out these men were alive and willing to be referees only from Esther. In her late twenties in 1840, she would have hiked by road to Loughrea to bespeak the bishop, or lobbied him while he was in Clontuskert parish on a pastoral visit. Similarly, she took a short walk south through country in which she knew every cabin, fence, nuance of stone and mound and field, and up the long avenue to Belview House, to ask Mr Lawrence for the use of his name so that she might be removed from the familiar to an Australian future.

  More than a year earlier, Esther had made her own appeal to Dublin Castle asking the Lord Lieutenant to look upon her situation with the eyes of pity and send her and her boys by free passage to New South Wales. Perhaps Hugh had received a letter from Esther and was operating on the basis of Esther’s stated willingness to cross the mighty ocean. Their combined applications would surely be Esther’s ticket out of a connection which, at the large house, in the cabin, in the field, poisoned the spirit.

  Having filled in the form, Larkin must have enjoyed the heartiest Christmas yet of his Australian exile. From assignments all over the Australian bush, other men also applied for reunion. James Doolan, a shipmate aboard Parmelia, wanted his wife, Margaret Egan, and two children to join him. Stephen Doyle of the Lady McNaughton, serving seven years for a Ribbon crime, had applied for his wife, Jane McCone of Banbridge. But he had been flogged in January 1839, for losing sheep on Patrick’s Plains. A year later he was flogged again. His application would be marked, ‘Not Recommended on account of punishment.’

  Hugh’s petition needed to make its way by bullock wagon and mail coach to Sydney, where two months later a Colonial Secretary’s clerk checked Larkin’s record and wrote, ‘Nothing recorded.’ On that basis, Governor Gipps himself inscribed the petition, ‘Allowed.’ In May 1842, the Colonial Secretary in Sydney told the Superintendent of Convicts to apprise the successful applicants.

  Dependent on shipping availability, the approving document would have reached Ireland in the summer of 1842. There was no problem with the way Hugh had addressed the petition. Laurencetown was a well-known market centre, Lismany a few kilometres north of it. Since Esther was still in the parish of Clontuskert, in Laurencetown or Lismany, under the eyes of relatives and the clergy, it was not likely that a lover delayed her. In early 1840 she had been more than willing to voyage to Australia, in fact desperate to. If she did ever receive the invitation to travel, it may have been an elderly and ailing parent who halted her departure—it may even have been Hugh’s mother. Or perhaps Esther found she did not have the financial means to travel with her sons to the port of embarkation, or acquire the food and range of clothing required for the journey. Or maybe she never received the approval: sometimes, for reasons of inefficiency on the part of the Irish constabulary, laziness, malice or loss of documents, the papers were not delivered.

  The most likely, and most pathetic, explanation for Esther’s failure to reach Australia was the success of the anti-transportation movement. Convict transportation to New South Wales was ended by a Royal Order-in-Council in August 1840, implementing the recommendation of the Molesworth Committee. But the wives of convicts could receive free passage only on convict vessels. Even when Esther Larkin made her petition in February 1840, it was already nearly too late to link up with the last women’s ship, the Margaret from Dublin.

  The renewal of transportation seemed Esther’s best hope. Then, about 1848, arrangements were made for convicts’ wives to travel on emigrant ships. But all these adjustments would be too late for Hugh and Esther. There were still transports travelling to Hobart. But it was probably assumed by a bureaucrat within Dublin Castle that Esther, landed in Hobart without connecting transport, might be reduced to prostitution. So, probably for
lack of a ship, Esther remained in Galway, and all enquiries and demands she made at barrack gates in Ballinasloe and at constabulary posts in the countryside were futile.

  The Colonial Secretary in Sydney had signed Hugh’s ticket-of-leave on 1 June 1843. He was lucky to be far from towns where the malicious or the righteous might report him for some peccadillo. But near-freedom brought no hope of an Australian hearth. The dream of showing Esther the bush, of introducing his sons to its particular grandeurs and squalors, of eating meat and damper with them in quantities to make them cry out in wonder, could no longer be entertained without pain.

  By the time Mary Shields and her son ascended the slight slope where the homestead of Coolringdon stood, Hugh was entitled to go out and seek employment where he chose; to set up in business in his own right if he wished. Like many convicts who rubbed along well enough with a master, he chose to remain in this isolation, in the rawness and splendid space of that rising plain. He might never get his conditional pardon if he went off to some district more administratively fussy, or fell foul of new masters. The arrival of Mary may also have been a cause of his sticking with Brodribb.

  Vivacious Mary must have been a wonderful relief to the weight of languor which afflicted the bush. William Forster, a future premier of New South Wales, described his life as a stockman on the Molonglo Plains to the south of Coolringdon as being that of ‘a miserable sort of outlaw . . . exerting the whole of my faculties in taking care of sheep and cattle’.

  Even the squatters were reluctant to bring their families into the remoter country. Squatting was a form of exile from the defined world aimed at setting a man up for life. When the squatters finally won security of tenure in 1846-47 many of them began to settle, enlarge and refine their habitations, bring in furniture, raise families and cherish books and a piano in the parlour. That had not yet happened at Coolringdon, however, on the rawest edge of the Upper Monaro.

  A BIRTH IN THE BUSH

  Mary Shields quickly became inured to her work in William Brodribb’s slab timber and bark homestead. Apart from the bush flies, ants, large—but not particularly vicious—spiders, and the occasional hut-intruding brown or red-bellied black snake (a particular terror to the natives of snake-free Ireland), the homestead must have seemed freer and more pleasant than the Female Factory. As the Australian spring came on, in the rush of activity around shearing when excitement, talk and the flow of liquor was at its peak in the Monaro, she and Hugh Larkin took each other as partners. The following July, screaming at a bark ceiling, she gave birth on a bed of sapling and leather strapping to a boy. Though an observing Anglican, Brodribb seemed philosophic about these liaisons between felons, even if both were married to others, as in this instance; such flexibility, shocking to visitors from Britain, was not considered extraordinary in New South Wales.

  Brodribb himself was to be married that year, 1844, and would bring his wife, Eliza Matilda Kennedy, to Coolringdon. She was a cultivated young woman who had grown up on her father’s pastoral stations. In the bush’s natural democracy, her own children in years to come would play around the woolshed with convict children such as the Shields-Larkin son, perhaps under the care of Michael O’Flynn, Mary’s Irish son, who was nearing ten years of age when his half-brother was born.

  Mary Shields’s new child was baptised Thomas by Father Walsh at the end of August 1844. The priest gave the couple the usual talking-to for begetting an Australian bastard. If wise, Hugh took this in silence. After all, Mary’s sentence would be fully served by October the following year. She would then be free to live and marry as she chose, on the basis that she knew that her first husband had died, or that she was willing, as many were, to tell the authorities he had. Besides, like other convicts, Hugh must have thought that if authority could make his marriage to Esther a dead letter, he was, in return, entitled to be indifferent to the letter of authority, even to the canon law.

  Now that ceaseless tragedy was the daily order of famine-struck Ireland, those transported earlier lived lives almost of banal well-being in their distant quarter of New South Wales. Hugh Larkin and Mary Shields did not escape the average, bitter nineteenth-century bereavements, though. In December 1847, a second child, Mary, was born and lived only eleven days. Hugh performed his own baptism of her, pouring the waters over her head, having been trained from childhood in the importance and potency of the rite. With the mother still ailing, he took the small coffin and his dead child by cart to burial somewhere in that immense country. Mary had now lost both daughters she had given birth to: O’Flynn’s Bridget and Larkin’s Mary, and that must have weighed appropriately on her.

  It was apparent to her that they must marry for the sake of young Tom Larkin, now three years old. On the one hand, there was no doubt that Hugh and Mary, being now dead to the Old World, could still not permit themselves to marrying outside the church. But the priests were not as easily convinced. In their eyes the fact wives or husbands in the northern hemisphere were unreachable did not justify new unions at the earth’s extreme south. An Attorney-General of New South Wales, the Irishman Roger Therry, who lived thirty years in the colony, was well aware of the marriage stratagems of some of his convict brethren. He told of how a man transported from Cork had left his wife and two children behind in Ireland. On becoming free, he wished to marry within the colony. He was able to produce a letter, complete with a Cork postmark forged in Sydney in red ink on the corner of the envelope. The letter, purporting to be from his brother in Ireland, indicated that the man’s dear wife had died in the bosom of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, a touch which worked well, said Therry, with the clergy.

  In the end, Hugh and Mary managed to marry just before Hugh’s conditional pardon was granted, when in theory he still needed permission from the Convict Department. This wedding prior to Hugh’s freedom could have occurred only because both Esther Larkin and John O’Flynn had died in Ireland or else through the use of subterfuge of the kind mentioned by Therry. In any case, the ceremony took place on 16 March 1848, the eve of St Patrick, at Sts Peter and Paul’s Catholic Church at Goulburn.

  The marriage came at the end of an Australian summer and of another fatal Irish winter. News of the immutable Famine was in every paper they flinchingly read to each other, or had read to them. The Famine fell over their plentiful bush table, and made its claim upon them at dead of night, when they were released from distracting labour and lay together, as spouses in this hemisphere, wondering at what was happening in the parallel universe.

  There was now a new governor in New South Wales. Well-meaning George Gipps had left in 1846 in a state of failing health and with the general disapproval both of the progressives, who saw him as too much a servant of the Crown, and of the squatters who believed him to be too lenient towards Aboriginals and indifferent to their problems of tenure. The new governor, Sir Charles Augustus FitzRoy, had fought at the age of sixteen at Waterloo, and had experience of colonial government in both St Edward’s Island in Canada and in the Leeward Islands of the West Indies.

  It was FitzRoy who, on 1 June 1848, signed the conditional pardon of Hugh Larkin. In this ornate document, towards the bottom of its page of print and penmanship, lay the clause: ‘Provided always . . . that if the said Hugh Larkin, shall at any time during the continuance of the term of his said Sentence, go to, or be in, any part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, then this Pardon shall thenceforth be and become wholly void . . .’ He could not take his dark, knowing benevolence even temporarily back to Galway to encounter his sons.

  Hugh had an intention now to give up the remote stations. He and Mary left that boulder-dotted high plain, going away as their own people, possessed of freedom of movement and the rights of ambition. In late October 1848, Hugh bought for £25 a town allotment in Cowper Street, Goulburn, and set to work to build a house upon it and opened a small store. An infant, Anne, born of Mary Shields/Larkin on 30 November 1848, was healthy, and like her elder brother Tom, now five year
s old, would live on into another century. These colonial children, speaking in a potent, crow-harsh Australian accent, confirmed for their parents their distance from the Irish disaster, but also evoked other children who spoke more liquidly in Limerick or Galway.

  The future seemed promising for the Larkin children, but utterly limitless for the children of their parents’ former employer, the two young Brodribb daughters and a small son. When, en famille, the Brodribbs had visited the parsonage at Cooma one weekend, the elder daughter had come out from her mother’s bedroom, with her hair nicely dressed. Brodribb wrote, ‘My friend, Alex H-, who was present, remarked to me, “She will be a handsome woman.” I thought I never saw a finer looking child.’

  But in the middle of 1849, when Hugh and Mary were establishing themselves in Goulburn, Brodribb’s wife, Matilda, fell ill, and almost at once his daughters too. It was diphtheria. The doctor from Cooma ‘had their hair cut off, and cold applications applied to their heads’. At the end of July 1849, in the same room where her mother and sister lay, Brodribb’s eldest daughter died. Brodribb rode by phaeton forty kilometres to Cooma for a coffin. Eight days later the second daughter died in great suffering. Mrs Matilda Brodribb recovered, but the ‘loss of our daughters weighed heavily on her mind’.

  William Bradley, Brodribb’s employer in turn, also suffered more immediate grief than his former employees and convicts. During his journey to Europe, he lost his sickly wife, Emily, whom Italy was meant to cure.