As Mary Ann read to her father each morning, she was drawing her own, rather different conclusions. From what she could glean, far from weakening the so-called settler’s curse, the incessant stream of vitriol launched at Robert Lowe only added further fuel to the furious zeal of her father’s legal counsel. What her father didn’t know, because she followed her mother’s instructions and avoided reading the court pages to her father, was that Lowe was also involved in another abduction case that was running neck-to-neck with the Kinchela trial. Together the two scandals were putting Lowe right where he wanted to be—front and centre in the legal columns of the papers as well as those devoted to the election. Not only were Lowe and Holroyd still locking horns over Kinchela, a point of which her father was well aware given the hefty retainer he was paying to fight the appeal, but Sydney’s so-called Whimster was also locked in combat over the abduction case involving ‘the mature-looking’ Mary Ann Challenger, who had succeeded in her marital ambitions where Mary Ann Gill had so sorely failed. In both instances Lowe was exaggerating the part of the wounded parents and vigorously rounding on the suitors in question. Mary Ann could not glance at the associated columns without grinding her teeth. And yet, each day after she had finished reading to her father, she would return to the papers and pore over the associated columns.
From the few occasions when Mary Ann had dared to step into the town’s streets she had quickly ascertained the extent to which her so-called ‘Parramatta Romance’ had become common knowledge throughout Sydney. There had been sideways glances and hissed whispers in her direction. She was no longer invited to visit any of the families she had known as a child and had not seen a single school friend since the week before her failed elopement. After several weeks of cool rebuffs she gleaned how things stood beyond her own home and was actually relieved to obey her parents’ strict instructions and remain indoors.
There were, however, numerous other papers that Mary Ann did not know about and which were also delighting in the details of her recent amorous activities. Among these were country news-sheets from other colonies that obtained their stories from Kemp and Fairfax and rewrote them according to their own inclinations before circulating them to the Maitland and Bathurst districts as well as Port Phillip and Adelaide. Other papers went to Hobart and Launceston and even one or two to the new towns in New Zealand—as well as up to Moreton Bay, where those who knew the Kinchela name were keeping up-to-date with legal proceedings. The fact that Mary Ann never knew when the story would crop up added to the nastiness of the whole affair. Nonetheless, the columns did furnish her with information about James Butler, who she learnt was being remanded in the relatively new goal that stood directly behind the Darlinghurst Court House.
Thirty thousand tons of sandstone had been quarried for the massive walls that now surrounded the new goal, which had been strategically positioned at one of the highest points of the town. The decision had been made to situate the gaol up there around the time that J.T. Bigge, a royal commissioner, visited the colony to inspect conditions in the second decade of the new century. Bigge had been appalled by the latitude of life under Governor Lachlan Macquarie, particularly the freedoms enjoyed by convicts in Hyde Park Barracks. He thought even less of the hulk out in the harbour where the governor had been compelled to send second offenders. Bigge wanted a statement that would remind the people they were living in a penal colony and when Governor Ralph Darling arrived in 1824 he was told to get on with building the new prison immediately.
The walls were built first—more than twenty feet high and two feet thick—stacked high with sandstone bricks, each of which had been carved with a darg by a convict intent upon keeping a tally of his work. Such was the scale of this imposing barrier that the gaol could be seen from just about anywhere in town. It was said that when an execution took place on the stage built high above the Forbes Street entrance, parents would lift their children onto their shoulders so that they could see the latest felon squirm and writhe at the end of the rope.
Such public executions were common in Sydney at that time. Indeed, in 1844, over ten thousand locals had made their way through the Hyde Park Racecourse up to the new gaol to watch the hanging of John Knatchbull, a client of Robert Lowe’s who had used a tomahawk to smash in the head of a young widow he had tried to rob. After the trial Lowe adopted the widow’s two children in penance, some said, for having defended such a violent wretch. But even though Knatchbull was greatly reviled, those who went to watch him swing that day received little satisfaction from his execution, for Alex Green—the town ‘scourger’ and hangman—made a horrendous mess of it, as usual. So hopeless was the town hangman at his trade that many said it was little surprise that he was covered in scars—including one large, rather thick white line that ran down the side of his face where a prisoner had come at him with an axe. Green had a reputation for being a simpleton who frequently miscalculated the length of the rope needed to hang a condemned man. Somehow the threat of this incompetent hangman added to the gaol’s foreboding presence and this vast building presided over the town with a spirit of gloom quite at odds with the population’s increasing determination to progress beyond its penal origins.
Mary Ann hoped for James’ sake that the interior of Darlinghurst Gaol was less grim than its exterior. She had heard the current warden was in the habit of extending certain leniencies to those who had the money to pay for them, and she wondered if Kinchela would be reading the local news-sheets and if so, what he would make of them. From her own survey of this material she had gleaned that the public unanimously considered Mary Ann Challenger’s groom more honourable than Kinchela. Indeed, several papers were not beyond suggesting that Mary Ann Gill’s suitor had been bent upon her seduction from the beginning. It grieved the young woman to realise that her private life had become a platform upon which all sorts of opinionated strangers suddenly felt compelled to pontificate about the modesty of colonial women and the pressing issue of marriage.
Of these, by far the worst was Angus Mackay in The Atlas who insisted that the two recent abduction cases were particularly noteworthy for the way they raised important questions about the age of consent. Indeed, the errant conduct of these ‘two female children’, he opined, clearly confirmed that sixteen was far too young for a woman to exercise choice when it came to her marital future. The legal fraternity must give proper consideration to raising the age of consent to eighteen, the ambitious editor demanded, for ‘at eighteen a woman is in possession of some common sense, while those of sixteen are clearly too thoughtless, giddy and immature to guide themselves through life without being enticed away by the most worthless individuals.’
‘Thoughtless and giddy indeed,’ Mary Ann fumed as she slammed shut The Atlas. What would James make of the insults, she wondered, and the way his name had been all but destroyed? And what of her sixteenth birthday, due to occur a month to the day of their failed elopement and just as the governor dissolved the Legislative Council in preparation for the forthcoming elections? Sure, her birthday would be forgotten and what with the great nonsense of the election Kinchela would also be left to rot in gaol. With all their electioneering, the great men of town would have no time for his appeal, she thought bitterly.
Did Mary Ann entertain secret hopes about the gifts she might receive on the occasion of her sixteenth birthday? An embroidered fan, a leather book? Perhaps some fabric flowers for her best bonnet or a new cameo brooch? Of course, she received nothing from the man Angus Mackay so energetically condemned as one of the colony’s most ‘needy adventurers’. Nor from her parents. Instead, on 21 June 1848 Mary Ann found herself confined to her role as family nursemaid, surrounded by her father’s menacing silence as well as the hateful opinions of all those newspapers. Of the many and varied insinuations and assumptions she read, Mackay had released one arrow that dug deepest. It nagged at Mary Ann such that it was impossible for her to avoid.
They could have waited. One month later and she would have been si
xteen and out of her father’s hands. Legally, he would have had less say in what she did, where she went and with whom. She had not known this, but surely James had. Both his father and brother were men of the law. Why hadn’t he just steadied the matter and waited a few more weeks until she was of age?
One morning while her father was enjoying a breakfast of millet cakes and hot tea, and she was scanning the columns for the latest information from Europe, it dawned on Mary Ann that in her desperation to be done with her father she may have forced Kinchela’s hand. Perhaps his counsel had been correct and James was only wanting to rescue her from her father while she had tried to ensnare him ‘hand in glove’. Now, however, James was in gaol and she was confined to the family home. Their fate reminded Mary Ann of one of the old tochmarca tales her grandfather used to recount from time to time as a warning to those who broke with the way things were meant to be. There was one in particular, which McCormick would take to explaining before Easter most years because it was at this time, he would start, particularly in the country parts, that it was an Irish custom for couples who could not get permission from their families to take it upon themselves to get married in their own way. Once there had been many violent abductions in those parts and some couples would work hard to make sure their elopement looked like one of those. During Lent tide it was common enough for a gang to suddenly appear at a girl’s house—often in the middle of the night. They would pull the girl out of her bed and then throw her across a horse that was already mounted by her future husband. But as well as those violent kidnappings there were also romances. Mary Riley had been a small girl when she had seen at least five couples, all on horseback, with the bride set at the front of the horse, galloping through the village on their way to a local priest who was known to wed such couples for a ‘dacant’ price.
While some in the villages loved these runaway romances, most did not, and the ancient tochmarca tales were told to put a stop to such nonsense. There was one such story that might have gone back to the old folk, McCormick thought, and which Mary Ann had been thinking over since she had been confined to the upper storey of the Pitt Street hotel. It concerned a woman who had by way of a dowry no more than her own personal accomplishments and a fine gold gown. Her beauty, however, was renowned and she drove one particularly ferocious warrior so mad with love that he travelled hundreds of miles just to look upon her. When he could no longer help himself, so the story went, the young warrior slipped back into the royal court belonging to the girl’s father, hoping to make the beautiful girl fall in love and marry him. But the woman was a second daughter and in possession of so small a dowry that even though she did fall in love with the warrior, she had no choice but to reject his proposal. Days later the man broke into the grand house belonging to the woman’s father. In a frenzy of passion he murdered the girl’s brothers and then took the girl, before fleeing across the north pursued by a vast army that chased him to the Boyne River. There, at that wide river crossing, he had little choice but to turn and face his adversaries; ever since, every ford on the river had been named after a soldier who had died at his hands that day, McCormick would explain, before noting that even though the warrior had won that day he and his new bride were never happy because from that time onwards both were forever exiled. ‘They were forced to travel,’ Mary Riley would add, ‘never to return home and never to see their loved ones again.’
Mary Ann wondered if she and Kinchela were being punished for going their own way, too. Despite the election hubbub, her thwarted romance continued to be a subject of considerable public interest and much of it made her feel that she and Kinchela were being severely admonished—perhaps even banished. However, not all of it was grim. In stark contrast to Mackay’s pompous pontifications, Bell’s Sporting Life was refusing to take the ‘Late Affair at Parramatta’ seriously. In one of many columns dedicated to this ‘strange eventful history’, Charlie Nichols gleefully described how ‘two erring children of nature’ had suddenly ruptured the quiet of the town by ‘taking it into their heads to become one’ at ‘Australia’s Gretna Green’. Before the pair could ‘traipse down Hymen’s path towards the altar of love’, however, the couple had been ‘hotly pursued by the girl’s papa’, who tracked down ‘the gay gallant’ who had won ‘the heart of his little Venus.’ Mary Ann couldn’t help but find it amusing that the first article Bell’s published was entitled ‘Gill-iver’s Travels’ and that they had cheekily dubbed Kinchela ‘the Don Giovanni of the South’ before describing the moment out at Cutt’s, when the so-called ‘bolter had looked white about the Gills’ after a pistol had been levelled at his head. For weeks Mary Ann had wondered what actually happened out there, and why her father had been so celebrated. From what she gleaned, he had done nothing less than attempt to murder Kinchela. For Bell’s the whole thing was a lark, but it wouldn’t have been, Mary Ann thought, if her father had hit his mark.
One morning, in late June, the sixteen-year-old girl was reading her father the latest news from France when the germ of an idea began to develop. For three horrific days and nights, Frenchman had murdered Frenchman in a fight in which the future of France had hung in the balance. But then, Mary Ann read, the Second Republic had broken through the barricades and crushed not only the ideologue and the rebel but anyone else who dared to dream of a fairer world. From this time forth, the victorious Republic proclaimed, there would be no more revolution. Martin Gill cheered when he heard the barricades were down. He had little sympathy for rebels these days, whether they were back home in Ireland, in France or right here in Sydney. ‘A lot of hot air and needless destruction,’ he muttered, forking up the crisp hot bread Mary Ann had toasted in the embers of the kitchen fire. ‘You can’t run a business or build a town with pitchforks and clasp knives,’ he said. ‘You need a firm rule.’
But Mary Ann wondered. She had read the news with a heavy heart and could not help but compare the Republic’s oppression to her father’s, to see in the people’s capitulation her own. She must do something before it was too late, she decided. For the past few weeks she had been watching from her bedroom window as the campaigners gathered around Pitt Street in greater numbers. Indeed, many of the speakers were drawing huge crowds. As winter set in over the harbour, and June turned into July, the speeches seemed to ward off the wet with fiery talk about how the time had come for the colony to bring an end to wrong rule. Mary Ann could not hear all that was being said but some carried well enough and the thick-set toyshop owner from Hunter Street was one she heard mention the recent affairs in France in a particularly strident tone.
Mary Ann had also noticed that there were occasions when the mood about the speakers could turn very quickly. Usually it was the same troublemakers—a couple of Cabbagers who began by heckling the speakers before giving someone in the crowd a bit of a push. There were now well over two thousand men with no ‘visible means of livelihood . . . lurking about the purlieus of Sydney’ and many had nothing better to do than stir up mischief. Several papers were expressing their considerable dissatisfaction with the failure of the ordinary constabulary to control the election crowds and one or two campaigners had organised a few big men from the docks to come and stand around the perimeter of their meetings, their work tools slung over their shoulders, just in case. In the past week alone there had been two occasions when Mary Ann’s father had needed to step in with several of his hotel servants until the police arrived.
‘All I need,’ Mary Ann explained to Rebecca, a night or two before polling day, ‘is another situation when my father is distracted and I can get up to Darlinghurst Gaol and be back at the hotel before anyone notices.’ ‘What will you do up there?’ Rebecca asked uncertainly. Mary Ann didn’t know herself, but she felt an urgent need to see Kinchela and decide for herself. Was James a villain who had been bent on her seduction, she wondered? Or had she, as Holroyd said, chased the reluctant settler about town because she was so ‘desperately in love’? There had been so much talk—Mary Ann wanted t
o see Kinchela for herself and know her own mind on the matter.
‘Do you think they will just let you in?’ William asked in astonishment when Mary Ann shared her plan with him the following morning. His sister shook her head and reminded William about the notoriously lax prison governor. ‘The gates are not even finished yet, Will, and Kinchela is only on remand,’ she said trying to keep her voice to a whisper. ‘A gentleman seeking an appeal,’ she hurried on. ‘Don’t you think the governor would want to show a little latitude?’ William scuffed his boot before looking away. ‘This is not a good time to be out,’ he said, ‘and you know you are not to go beyond the house. If you got into something,’ he asked a little tetchily, ‘who would help you?’ Mary Ann leant forward and fixed her younger brother with a look. ‘You, Will,’ she said, a slight dare to her voice. ‘You could chaperone me.’ But Will only sucked in his breath and shook his head before turning back to the stable yard where his father had him overseeing the shoeing of the hotel horses.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A Story Without a Hero
The rumours were right. Despite the foreboding appearance of the prison walls, life at Darlinghurst Gaol was hardly horrific under the governor, Henry Keck, the bespectacled dandy from Dublin. Prisoners could earn a reasonable living by working the huge bundles of leaves that were brought in each day to be woven into wide-brimmed cabbage-tree hats, or if inmates were too thick-thumbed for this task, they could work the vegetable garden or tend to the various cows and chickens that provided a regular supply of eggs and milk. They could also do laundry for Keck’s family as well as several of his acquaintances, including the Police Magistrate, Captain Joseph Long Innes, who had become something of a close personal friend of the prison’s governor. One or two inmates were even dressed in livery so they could drive the coach Keck used to call upon his mistress—a young woman he had accommodated in the judge’s rooms next door at the court while her house was being whitewashed. Keck had been forced to dismiss this young woman as the governess of his six children when—much to his surprise—his ‘dead wife’ suddenly appeared in Sydney, intent upon assuming her role as matron of the new gaol.
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