The Convict's Daughter

by Kiera Lindsey

  Mary Ann would no doubt have enjoyed watching her only son grow from infancy to early childhood as she marvelled at the way he resembled each of them in different ways, although the records suggest that he had blue rather than brown or hazel eyes. When in February 1860 Edith Ann died at the age of seventeen months, Mary Ann may have buried her only daughter beneath one of the great American oaks on their ranch, watching as her baby daughter’s coffin was lowered into the winter ground. Then, a few years later, Mary Ann would have tended to her husband as he too became ill—with cancer of the mouth. We do not know how long Kinchela’s illness lasted, although the records confirm that he was in his fifties when he finally died of this disease in the spring of 1864.

  And what of Kinchela’s death? What would it have meant for 32-year-old Mary Ann, who had already been separated from her own family for over a decade and had also quite recently lost her daughter?

  Mary Ann’s obituary claims that after Kinchela’s death she returned to ‘her parents’ in Sydney and, shortly after that, embarked upon a voyage to the French penal colony of New Caledonia, where colonial speculators had begun investing in cattle and cane in the mid-1860s. By then the papers regularly contained vivid descriptions of the various crops that could be grown by colonists keen to ‘turn a pretty penny’ in cane and cattle. Whether Mary Ann travelled there with a family member or by herself is unclear, although it seems unlikely that she would have been joined by her sometime companion, William Gill, for he had returned from America sometime before 1856. He married that year in a part of the Bathurst district, where eventually gold was found.

  By this time Thomas McCormick and his second wife Mary Riley were both dead and Margaret and Martin were once more living together in Sydney. There are no records with which to trace this final stage of their working life together, but we might imagine the Gills running a private catering business and hoping to enjoy some of the comforts of their eldest daughter’s fortune. Alas, this was not to be, for not long after returning to Sydney, Mary Kinchela sailed to New Caledonia, probably in a clipper like the Friend or the unfortunately named schooner Black Dog, which regularly made this short but treacherous voyage throughout the late 1860s.

  At this time New Caledonia was generally no more than two days sail from Moreton Bay and the French convicts who had been imprisoned there since 1863 had become a great source of moral alarm for Australian colonists, who appear to have been equally horrified by the close proximity of French citizens as they were of convicts. The public were somewhat reassured, however, that the voyage was known to be a treacherous sail and that the island was ‘girdled with coral reefs’ which ran along the 400 miles of coast, forming an outer barrier, against which the ocean ‘broke in thunder’, and through which only a carefully timed vessel might find a gap into the smooth waters of the harbour.

  As Mary Ann’s boat sailed within sight, she would have observed the low chain of hills that ran the entire length of the island and sometimes climbed as high as 2000 feet. They were said to look well suited to cultivation. Did Mary Ann share with other passengers a sense of excitement about the possibilities of the island, or was she filled with dread about this next stage of her life? Her vessel was one of the hundreds that miscalculated the reef and her obituary describes how the ship was violently wrecked upon the coast and that this ‘ill-starred arrival’ soon became ‘a forerunner of the great financial wreck that was to follow’.

  When ‘Madame Kinchela’ eventually found her feet on dry land on Nuevo Caledone, she may have been struck by how much the French settlement resembled the Sydney of her childhood. This was yet another port town with a bay of clinking ship masts, narrow roads cut into impossibly steep hills and streets lined with wooden cottages. Like Sydney in the 1830s, there were also convicts. More than 20,000 in total, and Kinchela’s widow may have been startled by her proximity to these diminished French men and women, as well as the ‘shabbily clad’ Indigenous inhabitants who also lived about town. There were, in fact, some ‘twenty-seven rival tribes’ settled about various parts of the island. These included a considerable number of rebels who hid out in the mountains committing arson attacks and guerrilla warfare upon the wealthy settlers who had arrived before the convicts, and were known to exact exceedingly vicious reprisals upon the ‘cannibals’ of the island.

  By the late 1860s, ‘tropical storms and shipwrecks’ had caused Mary Ann’s plantation investment to entirely collapse and she had little choice but to return to Sydney. There in 1869, she married again—this time to a man thirteen years her junior. At the time 24-year-old Charles Augustus Beatty married the 37-year-old widow he was five feet nine with a dark complexion, with dark hazel eyes, and dark whiskers and moustache. Their courtship may have begun during one or another of Mary Ann’s short visits to Sydney during her time on New Caledonia. The wedding took place at the Free Church of England and Mary Ann’s sister Harriet was there to witness the marriage between the ‘esquire’ and his ‘lady’, as they were listed in the certificate. It is possible that the union was one of convenience that helped Mary Ann navigate the financial hardship after New Caledonia for there is little evidence that the pair enjoyed much intimacy.

  Not much can be found about Charles Augustus, although it does appear that he may have been another gentleman settler from the Darling Downs, for it was there he disappeared in 1888 when his wife placed a notice in the Police Gazette seeking the whereabouts of her husband. This note indicates that Beatty might have been working in the ‘north of Queensland’ as a station manager, for he had previously held a similar role at Chinchilla Station near Dalby. Like Banjo Paterson’s poem ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, Charles Beatty had ‘gone to Queensland droving’. A few months later the Police Gazette concluded this episode by noting that Mrs Beatty, as she was then known, had been informed that her husband was working in Queensland’s Mitchell district. And perhaps that suited them both.

  By that time, Mary Beatty had been living in the rural town of Corowa on the New South Wales side of the Murray River for more than thirteen years. She had moved there with her widowed mother Margaret Gill in 1875 and taken possession of a large one-storey weatherboard building—just a little distance from the banks of the Murray. There she established a seminary that became known as ‘Mrs Beatty’s Boarding & Day School for Young Ladies’.

  By the 1870s Corowa was a thriving port town that had benefited from the discovery of gold in the nearby towns of Beechworth and Rutherglen. This in turn had encouraged the expansion of pastoral interests throughout the region making the town both populous and reasonably affluent. The area had something of the Australian bush feel to it. It was at a large sheep station just outside Corowa that Tom Roberts painted one of his most well-known Australian works, Shearing the Rams, which he completed in 1890, when Mary Ann was still in charge of her seminary. There was regular strife along the river throughout this period as a result of the different tariffs that were charged on goods as they were shipped back and forth across the Murray. These conditions encouraged the growth of both the Australian Native Association (ANA) and the Federation League—two patriot organisations intent upon resolving inter-colonial differences through the creation of a Federated Nation.

  Given her early years in Sydney, these political debates may have been of particular interest for Mary Beatty, especially when she learnt that a good number of the country’s most important politicians were to converge upon Corowa for the Agricultural Show of winter 1893. These men were determined to secure agreements from both the ANA and the Federation League so they could further the cause of Federation.

  The now ancient white beard of Australian politics, Henry Parkes, was meant to attend this event. Mary Ann would certainly have been aware of his public persona well before this, for by the early 1890s the one-time bone turner had served as the Premier of New South Wales several times and was already declaring himself the future ‘Father of Federation’. Mary Ann may have been curious to see her childhood neighbour again.
A long time had passed since she and her brother had stood at Circular Quay in 1849 and watched the fiery bounty migrant striding back and forth upon the ‘triumphant car of defiance’. Such was Mrs Beatty’s standing in Corowa by the 1890s that she may have been granted permission, as a number of women were, to sit in on the debates at the Globe Hotel in Corowa, on the explicit proviso that they didn’t interrupt. There she could have watched a young Edmond Barton encourage others to embrace their vision of a united nation. Sadly, however, Henry Parkes had suffered an episode of ill health shortly before the Corowa Convention and was unable to attend this event, so it is unlikely that Mary Ann encountered her previous neighbour, the one-time rocking horse vendor, ever again.

  What must it have been like for Mary Ann to be in charge of the education of the young women of the area, the majority of whom were probably the daughters of wealthy and well-known pastoralists? No doubt these girls were well fed, having Margaret Gill to supervise in the kitchen while she supported her eldest daughter’s new business venture. Her eldest daughter had certainly achieved a degree of respectability and domestic comfort but there may have been some sadness, too—for both of Mary Ann’s own children were now dead and her extended brood of nephews and nieces lived some distance away. In total, eight nephews and nieces had been born to William and his wife Elizabeth, although they were living about 500 miles further north, while her younger brother Thomas Edward had ten children with his wife, Mary Jane Trasey, but they were living in Melbourne where Thomas was working as a milliner.

  Mary Ann had been a headstrong and defiant adolescent, who had been determined to pursue her own romantic ambitions and disobey her father if necessary. Would Mrs Beatty of Corowa have recognised a similar spirit in some of the young ladies in her care, or would age, experience and responsibility have compelled her to censure such behaviour in a way that gave her a new appreciation of her father’s discipline? Mary Ann’s obituary suggests that she was ‘endowed with a keen sympathy for the afflicted’—and often ‘foremost in the promotion of charitable relief’ particularly when it came to ‘deserving cases’ such as those associated with the Corowa Hospital and other ‘public movements’. Was Mary Ann Beatty more interested in public life than the domestic sphere? Or did she simply share her parents’ entrepreneurial instinct, as well as her father’s desire for public recognition and her mother’s particular ability as an independent businesswoman?

  Mary Ann did not entirely shirk her familial responsibilities, for in the early 1880s she adopted one of her nephews, a son to her brother Thomas who had died. This young boy, Frederick James, was the youngest of ten surviving siblings and must have been under five years old when Mary Ann assumed his care. Many years later F.J. would describe his aunt as cold and his time in her care as harsh and unloving, but Mary Ann was raising her nephew in a school for young ladies and no doubt concerned about the presence of a young boy in such an establishment. F.J. would go on to work as a jeweller and a diamond trader. He acquired property in Rutherglen then Victoria’s western district, where he also became a town councillor. He earned a reputation for being a charming if somewhat erratic adventurer, travelling to Papua New Guinea in his late seventies to visit the Ok Tedi mines. He was known to have put himself before his children on several occasions, not unlike Martin Gill. Perhaps Mary Ann detected this in her adopted nephew and was intent upon curbing his headstrong disposition. Again and again, this portion of the story raises more questions than the archives answer. Nonetheless, we might return to the documents to consider what they do reveal and allow them to guide Mary Ann’s story to its conclusion.

  On 11 May 1883, Margaret Gill died of Bright’s disease aged sixty-nine. She was buried—after a short service that morning—in the Roman Catholic section of the Corowa cemetery. Her death certificate identifies her as the mother of twelve children; of whom three men and three women were still living, while two males and four females had all died within a year or so of birth. The certificate notes that Margaret was born in Dublin and that her father had been a farmer and that she had come to the colony more than fifty years ago. No other details were present with which we might connect the deceased to her life as a successful hotelier in Sydney, let alone her earlier years as a transported felon.

  Mary Ann died nineteen years later. She had endured more than ten months of bowel cancer, but eventually on the morning of 2 March 1902, she slipped away ‘so peacefully’, the obituary claimed, that none of those around her bedside noticed ‘for some little time’. Mary Ann’s remains were interred in ‘the old cemetery’ alongside her mother. The two women share a gravestone, modestly engraved with their names, as well as the dates of each woman’s birth and death; each of them were sixty-nine when they died.

  Together, the lives of these two women span from the Napoleonic Wars to the Federation of Australia. Margaret had come to the colony a young convict in 1828 and died fifty-five years later, as the mother of a respectable school mistress. In that time she not only bore twelve children but also gained a reputation as a hotelier who catered for banquets, balls and routs, as well as the colony’s most distinguished gentry. She reinvented herself, from convict to respectable colonist, from deserted wife and mother to successful businesswoman.

  Like her father and mother, Mary Ann took risks. She had been so determined to marry the man of her own choice that she had defied her parents and flouted social convention. In so doing she had earned the ire and perhaps even a little admiration from the colonial newspapers, including one which commented upon her ardent determination to become ‘the Mistress of her own Actions’. Such daring conduct came with consequences, however, and Mary Ann was compelled to travel far from her home and family. Rather than watch the world from the confines of her bedroom window, Mary Ann climbed down the drainpipe of the Pitt Street hotel determined to pursue her romantic ambitions and embrace adventure. In so doing, she witnessed events that must have far exceeded her childhood imagination. She had been the wife of a gentleman settler—perhaps more than once. She had been in San Francisco during the craze of the gold rush and at the very time fellow colonists were violently lynched. She had lived in New Caledonia when it was rife with French convicts and in a state of constant guerilla warfare. She had suffered shipwrecks, encountered pirates and experienced not only the loss of a great fortune but also the deaths of two children and a much-loved husband. Like her mother, Mary Ann—Madame Kinchela, Mary Beatty—reinvented herself several times, so successfully that during the final decades of her life she was able to enjoy considerable respectability.

  The theme of reinvention resonates throughout this book, but while we might expect nineteenth-century men such as Martin Gill and James Butler Kinchela to enjoy social mobility, it was less usual for colonial women to so successfully marshal and manipulate the social conditions of the period to their advantage. It took pluck and guile as well as imagination and determination. As it was in life, perhaps also in death, for Mary Ann’s last will contains a few final clues regarding her ability to engage in self-fashioning.

  In this document Mary Ann’s mother is given a maiden name that conceals her connection with her convict father, Thomas McCormick, while the occupation of Mary Ann’s father, the emancipist Martin Gill, is listed as that of gentleman. This thin web of half-truths is too flimsy to conceal what we now know about the Gills’ convict past, yet this concealment is precisely what Martin and Margaret’s descendants needed to do if they were to have any chance of achieving respectability for themselves in Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century. So perhaps this final act of concealment, of concealing the convict taint in the family’s history, was the best parting gift Mary Ann could leave her great brood of nephews and nieces, including F.J., the young boy she adopted.

  And yet, as I scan the sundries that were put to auction upon Mary Ann’s death, certain curiosities appear that suggest links between Mary Beatty and Mary Ann Gill. At the time of her death, for example, the mistress of the Corowa Semin
ary was £500 in arrears on her rent, a debt that far exceeds that which brought about Martin Gill’s financial ruin in 1849–50. These outstanding costs made it necessary for all of Mrs Beatty’s remaining items to be sold at auction.

  Among the hundreds of goods sent to A.A. Piggins and Co. Auction House were a steam cooker and several flower pots, two quills, a number of jugs and decanters, several rocking chairs and a wheelbarrow. Modest items indeed, and nothing in keeping with the considerable means Mary Ann must have enjoyed as the daughter of two Sydney hoteliers and the wife of one, possibly two gentlemen settlers.

  Among the items there were also two picture frames—which probably held the portraits of her husbands—now sadly gone. There was a sausage machine and also a gun worth £2.4, which may have once belonged to Judge Kinchela. The list also includes a number of horsehair chairs, a washbasin and a small silver looking glass. Were these perhaps the very things that Margaret Gill rescued from the George Street auction rooms in November 1849?

  All of these items are now long gone. The Piggins’ auction very likely dispersed Mary Ann’s unremarkable possessions among private homes and perhaps even one or two historical societies and country museums. To such very ordinary remnants of an extraordinary life we must add the distorted memory of an adopted nephew. And of course, a faded newspaper clipping from The Sydney Morning Herald in 1848 when a fifteen-year-old currency lass stepped into the witness box of Sydney’s Supreme Court and was for several moments, ‘too agitated to speak’.