Death and the Running Patterer: A Curious Murder Mystery

by Robin Adair

  “Yes,” said the patterer. He gestured to a drought-browned mass rising on their left from the sea. “I know she’s out there somewhere, too.” He wondered if the goats missed the rain.

  As the two men walked back along George Street into the town, they were met by an excited Captain Rossi, who leaped down from his carriage. “Dunne, I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” he exclaimed. “What luck! They’ve robbed the Squatters’ Bank! Come on!”

  The patterer put his arms around the shoulders of his companions as they all moved to clamber aboard the carriage. “The Exclusives robbed!” he cried as the carriage lurched off. “You can bank on the wails!”

  EPILOGUE

  CORONER’S INQUEST. An inquiry was held before Major Smeathman, Coroner for Sydney, on Saturday week, at Bax’s Australian Hotel, on the bones of a woman. It came out in evidence that the men employed at Goat Island to cut stone, on Thursday last dug up an old cedar coffin, at the depth of about 14 inches from the surface, containing the bones in question. The jury returned a verdict, “That the bones were those of a female, which had been interred in a secret manner, about two years ago, but how, or by whom, to them unknown.”

  —Sydney Herald, June 13, 1831

  AFTERWORD

  Pluck one thread, and the web ye mar;

  Break but one

  Of a thousand keys, and the paining jar

  Through all will run.

  —John Greenleaf Whittier, “My Soul and I” (1847)

  WHAT WAS TRUE? WHO WAS REAL?

  I can only echo Michael Crichton, who wrote of his work Next, “This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren’t.”

  My story began with the accidental discovery of the factual, terse inquest report—possibly not dusted off for more than 175 years—which is reprinted here as the Epilogue. Who was this dead woman? I wondered. What could have happened to her only a few years earlier?

  And so I stepped back to the dusty streets and into the lives of long-gone people to create this other 1828. People and events are frozen forever in the amber of old letters, journals and reports. Some of the dialogue I have given my real-life characters are words they actually spoke or wrote when they lived.

  No solutions to the original mystery of who the buried woman was could be too improbable; the time and the place involved were ripe with intrigue and violence. The entirely “new” country, on the other side of the world, a world turned upside down, was populated by little that was familiar: unknowable native “Indians” and weird, unfathomable fauna. Consider the platypus.

  What were strangers to make of a duck-billed, furred mammal with webbed feet—a beast trapped halfway in evolution between reptile and mammal, laying eggs but suckling its young? Science then gave it a suitable name, Ornithorhynchus paradoxus (since altered to Ornithorhynchus anatinus), but most in Britain thought it a fake, a trick by taxidermists.

  And Australia was a place so out of this world that some convicts imagined they could escape across the nearby mountains to China; others really did believe that walking backward could return them their lost freedom.

  Informed by many threads, this tale took to heart Shakespeare’s pronouncement: “Untune that string, and hark! what discord follows . . .” The story became neither all fact nor all fiction—call it instead friction, in which real events, places and people (plus some mischievous inventions, suggestions and interlopers) collide. The result is fantasy and actuality tossed together.

  The central characters of Rachel Dormin, Nicodemus Dunne and some of his immediate associates, notably Norah Robinson and Brian O’Bannion, are figments of my imagination, as are the murder victims and Dr. Owens.

  But I have drawn much from historical reportage. The backgrounds, secrets and troubles discovered by the patterer about the governor and his lady, Captain Rossi, the Flying Pieman, the Wentworths, Doctors Cunningham and Halloran, Alexander Harris and editor Edward Smith Hall involve the real concerns of very real people.

  I have taken some liberties with their lives; I have, perhaps, rearranged their actions and compressed or shifted them in time to advance the story. For instance, Captain Rossi’s various posts, while factual, did not overlap quite so neatly. And Dr. Halloran’s failing newspaper receives a stay of execution in my fictional universe. Mr. Levey’s theater had a longer, more difficult birth. The epitaph on page 301—a real one in the old Parramatta cemetery—critical of Squire’s beer, of course has no bearing on today’s brew of the same name. The cruel and unusual punishments for theft meted out to Privates Sudds and Thompson, however, are very painfully factual and unvarnished.

  Is it plausible to cast Nicodemus Dunne as the bastard son of royalty—with his father a murderer to boot? Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, was widely regarded as the murderer of his servant. He was also said to have been implicated in an attempt on the life of the Princess ’Drina (later Queen Victoria), who stood in the way of Cumberland succeeding King William IV.

  As shocking, and more guarded, were allegations that he had broken the ultimate taboo: incest. Gossip claimed that Princess Sophia, the fifth daughter of King George III, gave birth to an illegitimate child in August 1800, and that Cumberland was the father. Other versions, however, said that Thomas Garth, a royal equerry, was responsible. Perhaps Garth was just a smokescreen? It is impossible that the real Darling and Rossi could not have been aware of these scandals. Whether they reacted to them in any way remains unreported.

  Dueling had been forbidden by 1828, yet records show it still flourished, and that the governor of New South Wales would fight over a matter of honor is eminently feasible. Even the highest in the land at “Home” in Britain did it.

  Not a year after our story, the Duke of Wellington, war hero and First Minister, faced a political critic, Lord Winchilsea, over an insult. Their confrontation in a London field was as deliberately undamaging as the Garden Island affair. Wellington aimed well to one side, his opponent shot in the air and apologized. Just as in our duel, game over. And for the patterer to have remarked on it in 1828, the Duke of Wellington must have referred more than once to his soldiers as “the scum of the earth.”

  The assertion (that the truth may seem improbable after eliminating the impossible) attributed by Dr. Owens to the artist Horace Vernet coincides with the words used more than half a century later by Mr. Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventure of the Greek Interpreter. And the curious incident of Madame Greene’s teeth predates a similar deduction by Holmes, regarding the dog in the nighttime, in Doyle’s Silver Blaze.

  The explanation is elementary: Vernet’s life (1789-1863) was contemporary with that of Owens. And Holmes, of course, at one stage revealed that his grandmother was that very artist’s sister.

  I have used the common spelling of Bungaree (who, like Billy Blue, was a living person), although in contemporary records there are at least thirty variations. A French artist, Jules Lejeune, once even rendered his name “Buggery.” His kingplate, or gorget, does not survive (although Queen Cora’s does) and there are varying versions of its inscription; there may in fact have been more than one plate. His wide recognition may have spawned the word boong, eventually the enduring pejorative slang for Aboriginal.

  At least I can assure readers that, in the making of this book, no Ornithorhynchus paradoxus was harmed, although a few sacred cows may have been skewered.

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO . . . ?

  Governor Darling was recalled to England three years after this adventure, to a promotion (to full general) and a knighthood. Less pleasing had been his farewell. W. C. Wentworth roasted an ox for a jubilant celebration and an illuminated sign in George Street spelled out, AWAY, YE DESPOT! An official English Parliamentary Inquiry cleared Darling of blame in the Sudds affair. As Captain Rossi foreshadowed correctly, the old lag Patrick Thompson had returned safely to Ireland and traveled to London to give evidence at the inquiry. Oddly, perhaps, he was never called.

  Dr. Laurence Hynes Halloran’s newspaper, The Gl
eaner, lasted for only a handful of issues, as the patterer accurately anticipated. Halloran died in 1831.

  Mr. W. C. Wentworth could look forward to a long and successful, if checkered, career, and to the start of a famous family line. His early, seemingly democratic leanings were to be compromised by his unrealized dream of creating a local hereditary peerage, dismissed derisively as a “bunyip aristocracy.” He died in 1872.

  Captain Crotty, like all old soldiers, faded away.

  But Colonel Shadforth, who died in 1862, became a leading light, literally, in the colony. He played a key role in the introduction of gas lighting in the town, as did our Gazette editor, the Reverend Ralph Mansfield.

  The “Die Hard” 57th Regiment (to which our tale’s rapists did not, of course, actually belong) and the 39th soon made way for relieving garrisons. The last British troops to march out of Sydney, in 1870, belonged to the 18th (Royal Irish) Regiment. But there were no longer any new Irish prisoners to guard. Transportation to Sydney had been abolished in 1840.

  Editor and cleric-baiter Edward Smith Hall, fined and jailed for his pugnacious publications, died in 1860, honored as a champion of the introduction of trial by jury and of freedom of the press.

  Dr. Peter Cunningham, remembered for his medical successes and keen social eye, left the colony in 1830. His wanderlust undiminished, he served on the Royal Navy’s South American station, based in Rio de Janeiro.

  Captain Francis Nicholas Rossi remained a leading figure on the Sydney crime and justice scene until his retirement in 1834. He died on his country estate in 1851. He never talked publicly about the case of Rachel Dormin or many other intriguing matters.

  “Old Commodore” Billy Blue sailed on until his death in 1834. He may have exaggerated his grand old age. London trial records gave his birth year as 1767—if so, he died at sixty-seven, not the eighty-six indicated by the census. And, to cloud the issue further, the Blue family bible entry claimed he died at a hundred! Murdering Point? The name became as forgotten as any crime there. It became, simply, Blue’s Point.

  Sadly, his comrade in arms, Bungaree, is largely forgotten. Death, speeded by drink, dethroned the “king” at an indeterminate age, four years before Billy’s passing. Cora Gooseberry lived for another twenty years.

  Alexander Harris lived in Australia until 1840, when he left for the United States, Canada and England. His legacy was his vibrant book of recollections, Settlers and Convicts (1847). He died in 1874.

  William Francis King, the Flying Pieman, continued his career of astounding athleticism, becoming more and more eccentric until his death in the mid-1870s.

  Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, became ruler of Hanover and died in 1851.

  Princess Sophia never married and died in 1848.

  There was a convict named James Bond. From Lancashire, he arrived on the transport Albion in February 1827, and went to Hyde Park Barracks. He was caught as a runaway on April 7, 1828—but soon disappeared again. His fate is unclear. That Dunne and Queen Cora’s young attacker shared the same name is pure coincidence. Or a case of identity theft?

  Dr. Thomas Owens’s name seems to have been removed from all colonial medical records—perhaps a transgression after the facts related in our story merited this. Certainly, his grasp of medicine may seem quaint and crude (even dangerous) by modern standards, but he was, after all, a man of his times. Nevertheless, his diagnosis, long after the event, of Joseph Sudds’s condition was astute, as was his clever conclusion as to the cause of Madame Greene’s death.

  There were, no doubt, many Irishmen in the colony named either Brian or O’Bannion, or both, but our man seems to have slipped from officialdom’s gaze. We do know that many convict records were incomplete to start with and also that many criminal records were lost in the great fire of 1882 that destroyed the wooden Sydney Exhibition Building, where they were stored.

  Or, perhaps, Owens, O’Bannion and Norah Robinson simply lived quietly and productively—except on those occasions when they were inveigled into more mischief and mayhem by . . .

  Nicodemus Dunne, who regularly found he could not keep out of trouble. He is last heard of—perhaps?—in the mid-1850s. A business directory then refers to a Nicodemus Dunn (sic), a maker of ginger beer and soda water. Were they one and the same person? For the Nicodemus we knew, it would have not been an inapt career change. The patterer would always have agreed with Lord Byron, who wrote in Don Juan:Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,

  Sermons and soda-water the day after.

  Some of the few physical reminders of the patterer’s time are the Hyde Park Barracks (now a museum), parts of The Rocks, St. James Church and the nearby courts, part of the Rum Hospital (now inhabited by well-nourished State politicians) and a rebuilt replica of Macquarie’s lighthouse. Rachel Dormin’s beloved Goat Island, surrounded by millions of Sydneysiders, is today as silent as, well, the grave. It is little used and unloved.

  The Squatters’ Bank—and who robbed it? Ah, well. That’s another story . . .

  SOME SOURCES

  Ashdown, Dulcie M., Royal Murders: Hatred, Revenge and the Seizing of Power, Sutton, Stroud, 1998.

  Australian Dictionary of Biography, sequential volumes in progress, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1966-.

  Bell, Gail, The Poison Principle, Picador, Sydney, 2001.

  Bennett, Samuel, Australian Discovery and Colonisation, Vol. II: 1800-1831, Currawong Press, Sydney, 1982.

  Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, revised by Ivor H. Evans, 14th edition, Cassell, London, 1992.

  Cannon, John & Ralph Griffiths, The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Monarchy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988.

  Crowley, Frank, A Documentary History of Australia, Vol. I: Colonial Australia, 1788-1840, Nelson, Melbourne, 1980.

  Cumes, J. W. C., Their Chastity Was Not Too Rigid: Leisure Times in Early Australia, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1979.

  Cunnington, C. Willett & Phillis, Handbook of English Costume in the Nineteenth Century, 3rd edition, Faber, London, 1970.

  De Vries, Susanna, Historic Sydney: The Founding of Australia, Pandanus Press, Brisbane, 1999.

  Flannery, Tim (ed.), The Birth of Sydney, Text, Melbourne, 1999.

  Fletcher, Brian H., Ralph Darling: A Governor Maligned, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1984.

  Fraser, Flora, Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III, John Murray, London, 2004.

  Hughes, Robert, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868, Collins Harvill, Sydney, 1987.

  Joy, William, The Venturers, Shakespeare Head Press, Sydney, 1972.

  Murray, Venetia, An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England, Viking, New York, 1999.

  Ritchie, John, The Wentworths: Father and Son, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1997.

  Scott, Geoffrey, Sydney’s Highways of History, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1958.

  Smith, Keith Vincent, King Bungaree: A Sydney Aborigine Meets the Great South Pacific Explorers, 1799-1830, Kangaroo Press, Sydney, 1992.

  Tyrrell, James R., Old Books, Old Friends, Old Sydney: The Fascinating Reminiscences of a Sydney Bookseller, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1987.

  Wannan, Bill, Dictionary of Australian Folklore: Lore, Legends, Myths and Traditions , Viking O’Neil, Melbourne, 1987.

  Ward, Russel & John Robertson, Such Was Life: Select Documents in Australian History, Jacaranda, Brisbane, 1972.

  MEASURES AND MONEY

  Imperial measures have been retained in this story, since use of the metric system would have been out of character. Some approximate equivalents are:

  Money, unlike weights or measures, makes for more confusing conversions. It is difficult to accurately weigh and relate monetary values in the late 1820s with today’s. It helps to know, however, that there was one penny, twelve of which made a shilling. And twenty shillings made a pound. Now, consider that tobacco then cost three shillings to three and six a pound, eggs one an
d six to three shillings a dozen, bread two and a half to threepence a pound, and mutton six to seven pence a pound. A man’s good suit cost nine to ten pounds and a dozen bottles of claret thirty shillings.

  A tradesman could earn about six shillings a day. A female servant, fed and clothed, cost ten to fifteen pounds a year. A farm laborer received twelve to twenty pounds a year, plus weekly rations of seven pounds of beef and a peck (fifteen pounds) of wheat.

  And what price a human life? In Britain until 1827, a child could be transported for life, even hanged, for grand larceny—which meant stealing personal property worth more than a shilling.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To all those authors, past and present and too numerous to be mentioned, thanks for the memories that informed this tale.

  I owe a debt to Robert Sessions, Penguin Australia’s publishing director, who overcame his initial shock at being confronted with a manuscript knocked out on an old manual typewriter and talked me out of abandoning the project when my confidence flagged.