Sydney Cove, after 1845 by Harriot Anley. Government House (right) was the home of Governor FitzRoy at this time. Mary Ann would have been familiar with this view. (State Library of NSW)
Dr John Kinchela, Attorney General of New South Wales, 1831–1836, painted c. 1810. (Private collection of Annette Miller)
Portrait, c. 1810, of Anne Bourne, John Kinchela’s pretty second wife. (Private collection of Alicen Miller)
King Street Looking East, ca. 1843 by Frederick Garling. The man on his chestnut mare is dressed in a style similar to the way our gentleman settler, James Butler Kinchela, probably dressed. (State Library of NSW)
New Post Office, George Street, Sydney by F.G. Lewis, 1845. This image evokes a sense of 1840s Sydney as a sort of London in miniature. Gill’s Family Hotel was probably behind the post office on the other side of the Tank Stream. (State Library of NSW)
Court House, Darlinghurst by Frederick Garling, c. 1840. The fields in front of the courthouse were used for festivities such as the St Patrick’s Day Ball in 1840. Regina v. Kinchela was heard here in 1848. (State Library of NSW)
Prisoners next to the wall of Darlinghurst Gaol, c. 1880. The uniform, including the cabbage-tree hat, is similar to that which Kinchela would have worn during his time there. Note the ‘dargs’ etched into each brick by the convicts who built the wall.
Detail of a map of Sydney drawn up in the mid-1840s by Francis W. Sheilds.
Eloping to Gretna Green was not only the stuff of Jane Austen novels, but also surprisingly commonplace in Regency England. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
By the 1840s the Parramatta racetrack appears to have become the colonial counterpart to Gretna Green. Parramatta Races, Boxing Day 1861 shows a summer’s day at the races. (State Library of NSW)
Gill’s Family Hotel was the only three-storey hotel in town in the 1840s, and is the building shown second from left (top) in this illustration from Joseph Fowles’ book, Sydney in 1848. It was considered ‘without exception the best family residence in Sydney’.
Advertisement in The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 1846. Note the mention of the beautiful bath.
Contemporaries of Margaret and Martin Gill, shown here in a daguerreotype from the 1840s. No images of the Gill family survive from this period. (Missouri History Museum)
A contemporary of Mary Ann Gill. This girl is probably the same age as Mary Ann at the time of her elopement.
Henry Parkes around the time of Mary Ann’s scandalous elopement.
Arthur Todd Holroyd, Kinchela’s legal counsel and later MP. (State Library of NSW)
This illustration of the Supreme Court in session is later than Regina v. Kinchela (1848) but captures the austere atmosphere, which was no doubt intimidating for Mary Ann. (State Library of Victoria)
The deposition of James Butler Kinchela, 1848. (State Records NSW)
The signatures on the depositions of Mary Ann Gill and James Butler Kinchela. Note the tear blotches that punctuate Mary Ann’s signature and the contrast between her uneven signature and Kinchela’s confident hand. (State Records NSW)
‘Shooting with Intent’, the original newspaper clipping from 5 June 1848 that my mother gave me and which inspired this book. (Author’s photograph)
A sketch of Viscount Robert Lowe, aged 58, for Vanity Fair, 1869. (National Portrait Gallery, Canberra)
Ormond House, the Kinchela family residence from 1831 to 1838. This fine two-storey house was built on New South Road by emancipist Robert Cooper in 1824 and named Juniper Hall. It was considered the finest house in Sydney for over a decade. (Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW)
Durundur Station, shown in this 1843 sketch by Charles Archer, is an example of an early colonial station in Queensland similar to the property owned by the Kinchela brothers. (State Library of Queensland)
The hanging of Whittaker and McKenzie, two Sydney Ducks, by the San Francisco Vigilance Committee in mid-1851. It is likely that Kinchela and perhaps even Mary Ann witnessed the lynching.
View of Sutter’s Fort, near Sacramento City, California by Frederick Gleason. The fort was built in 1839 and deserted by the mid-1850s. Kinchela’s ranch was located a mile east of the fort.
A photograph of Sanger Street, the main street of Corowa, taken around the time of Mary Ann’s death. (J.T. Keating presentation album, Wagga Wagga City Library’s Photograph Collection)
The gravestone of Margaret Gill and Mary Beatty, as Mary Ann was then known, in the Roman Catholic section of the Corowa Pioneer Cemetery. Both women died at 69 years of age. (Author’s photograph)
Afterword
. . . a space, a window through which
the reader has the capacity to wonder,
to imagine and discover the past for
themselves.
Mark McKenna, Writing the Past, 2005
This is a book of thresholds, of windows and open spaces through which the reader is free to wander and imagine and perhaps even discover the past for yourself. When I began writing I felt as if I too was slipping, furtively, out a window in pursuit of my own adventure. I wanted to write Mary Ann’s story in a way that made it as exciting as fiction—that revealed how precarious life was for colonial Australians, that there were eccentrics and opportunists as well as ordinary flesh and blood people who were surprisingly similar to those in the novels of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell.
I have had plenty of time to wonder and imagine myself, for I began researching this book in 2007. I became increasingly inquisitive about why Mary Ann and James Butler, Martin and Margaret behaved as they did. The more I explored this question the more I found the answers in the particularities of their world. These people were creatures of their time. They thought and acted as they did because of the circumstances they found themselves in and the resources—mental and actual—they had to respond to obstacles and opportunities. As I learnt more about these people I realised that I would need to become intimately acquainted with their everyday life if I was to gain any sense of how they thought and felt. From the beginning then, I have striven to recreate the sounds and smells, textures and tastes of their time, believing that this exterior world would provide a pathway into the interior world of these ordinary colonial subjects.
In so doing I have, like Mary Ann, flouted certain conventions. Mine are concerned with unsettling the role of objectivity and imagination in historical writing, rather than defying the existing mores associated with marriage. I did this because the story has demanded it. It is after all, a romantic tale of sense and sensibility in which feelings are integral. It is also a woman’s history and as such it serves as a foil to the various histories of this period that are concerned with the development of Australia’s distinctive brand of democracy. If, for example, Peter Cochrane’s impressive 584-page Colonial Ambition dedicates one sentence to ‘Miss Gill’s abductor’, The Convict’s Daughter is concerned with this domestic drama and uses the political agitation of the 1840s as a backdrop.
We see this world not through official documents and the eyes of the men who made them, but from the perspective of a young woman who was preoccupied with everyday as well as grander intimacies. We spend more time with middling orders than the influential set, with ambitious emancipists and their native-born children than the members of the Legislative Council. And when we do dwell among the elite, we discover their flaws and foibles, including the fact that the settler classes were often diminished by debt and doubt. And yet, while such men were hardly the heroic pioneers of many previous triumphalist histories, nor were they all as morally bankrupt and malicious as some more recent frontier accounts might have us believe.
By retrieving a little-known woman from historical anonymity I have wanted to contribute to our understanding of the colonial era. As an urban native-born woman Mary Ann Gill belongs to a demographic that has attracted less historical interest than her female convict predecessors and male native-born contemporaries. After reading this book I
hope you have a sense that women like Mary Ann were vital to their society and often exercised considerable influence upon both their immediate families and future generations. Indeed, I like to think that in her own way, Mary Ann was as much of a nation-builder as her father, the convict-made-good, her husband, the gentleman settler, and her neighbour, Henry Parkes, the bounty migrant who became premier.
Mary Ann’s story takes us into less-trammelled parts of the nineteenth century and in so doing provides us with new insight into what it meant to be Australian at this time. We learn that colonial Australia was not only locked into relations with England and the Colonial Office; there were all sorts of connections throughout the Pacific and America. There may be easily recognisable elements to Mary Ann’s story, her convict parents and gentleman romancer, but there are also unfamiliar aspects such as her mother’s ability to operate as a successful businesswoman after she was deserted by her husband, and Mary Ann’s ability to travel to America and New Caledonia and eventually thrive despite the death of one husband and the disappearance of another.
Mary Ann’s story was one that demanded to be told. My curiosity was first piqued by the newspaper clipping my mother showed me after I expressed an interest in the native-born women who lived in colonial cities before the gold rushes. I soon found an obituary from the Corowa Free Press concerning a woman, then known as Mrs Beatty, who died in Corowa in 1902 having encountered all sorts of hardships in both America and the Pacific. Sometime after that I discovered an extensive collection of material, including an abundance of newspapers and three surprisingly detailed legal depositions. Still dusty and tied in their faded pink legal ribbons when I unearthed them in the State Records of NSW, these yellowing documents are punctuated with contradictory eyewitness accounts from the key characters as well as Mary Ann’s tear-blotched signature. Discovering these sources was extremely exciting and it represented the real beginning of my research journey.
As well as undertaking research throughout Australia I conducted several trips to Ireland and England where I learnt much about the history of two families with very different religious and social positions within Irish society. As part of what is now referred to as the Anglo-Irish elite, there was an abundance of material associated with the Kinchelas, including a parcel of family letters as well as several portraits and photographs which Annette Miller, a descendant of James Butler’s sister, generously shared. In contrast, there was no comparable epistolary or visual material associated with the Gills. I well recall the futile afternoons spent at the National Archives and traipsing the windy streets of North Dublin where not only Martin Gill but also Margaret and Thomas McCormick had once lived. Despite such frustrations, Ireland did yield other insights about the Irish heritage of these people, including contemporary legends such as Ellen Hanley and Captain Rock as well as ancient lore like the tochmarca tales.
With only a few exceptions, the majority of the primary material concerned with Mary Ann’s story is associated with the prominent male members of both families. There was a wealth of official correspondence about the Kinchelas in New South Wales and it was also relatively easy to trace the entrepreneurial ascent of Martin Gill in the colonial press. Later, I would also be able to find surprising detail about Margaret Gill’s phoenix-like rise from the ashes in 1850.
In general, however, the uneven nature of these primary sources points to the fact that it is often much easier to find sources relating to well-established historical characters than those from the ‘middling’ and ‘lower orders’. Similarly the project of ‘retrieving’ female historical subjects from anonymity is usually more challenging than with their male counterparts. Mary Ann’s scandal ensures that she is something of an exception to this, and we can certainly learn more about her than many other native-born women from this period. And yet, there are no daguerreotypes or photographs of Mary Ann. Nor have I uncovered a private diary or personal correspondence with which to study the secrets of her interior world. In addition to this, the records associated with her life tend to cluster around the years of 1848 and 1849 where, consequently, much of this book has been focused.
In writing the biography of this little-known native-born woman I have been presented with the task of recreating a life that is only partially documented. I have approached this challenge in three ways: The first involves drawing upon the existing primary sources to recreate what is already known about Mary Ann. Where there is sufficient material I have done this with considerable accuracy, down to the detail of the carpetbag Mary Ann ‘stole’ from her mother for her elopement and what she and James Butler said to one another at the window of her father’s hotel. The elopement and later court proceedings are therefore all closely drawn from the newspapers and deposition files. I have, however, added embellishments. I don’t know, for example, the colour of the gloves and bonnet Mary Ann wore when she stepped into the witness box in 1848, but I do know the fashionable colours of that year and the importance of stagecraft in nineteenth-century courts, particularly when it came to romantic scandal.
To bring context and colour to this world, I have also referred to a vast array of primary and secondary sources. For example, the convict and prison records frequently include details regarding height and skin complexion, eye and hair colour. Such records confirm that Martin Gill had black hair and hazel eyes, while Margaret had brown hair as well as ‘freckles across her broad nose’. While I have no records regarding Mary Ann’s appearance, I have assumed that she had light freckled skin, brown hair and hazel-brown eyes. Similarly it is well known that during Mary Ann’s childhood, native-born Australians were often referred to as ‘cornstalks’ because of the way they were said to ‘shoot up’ in the fresh air of a new country and quickly become taller and healthier than their parents. This encouraged me to imagine fifteen-year-old Mary Ann standing nose-to-nose with her father who, the records reveal, was no higher than five foot five.
During this period native-born men and women were often referred to as currency lads and lasses because they were considered a local currency of lesser value than their ‘sterling’ immigrant counterparts. In 1844, at the very time that Martin Gill was managing a confectionery stall at the Royal Victoria Theatre on Pitt Street, an Irish convict named Edward Geoghegan wrote a frothy musical farce entitled The Currency Lass; Or My Native Girl, which he smuggled off Cockatoo Island while still serving his sentence and organised to have performed at the Vic. The Currency Lass represents the first theatrical performance to be specifically concerned with local characters and its namesake was a young native-born woman like our heroine. I have found it reasonable to speculate that Mary Ann, who was approximately twelve years of age at this time and working within the family business, witnessed a performance of The Currency Lass.
In a desire to weave Mary Ann’s story through particularly evocative and illuminating episodes of this era I have made similar creative assumptions about the presence of these characters at events such as St Patrick’s Ball in 1840 and the two Monster Rallies held at Circular Quay in 1849. I do not know if these characters were present at any of these occasions, but the possibility seems reasonable. Similarly, while I have no evidence that Mary Ann ever visited Kinchela at Darlinghurst Gaol, she certainly demonstrated sufficient pluck to embark upon such an adventure and if she had done so on election eve in 1848 she certainly would have encountered a fire at Hyde Park as well as dangerous mobs throughout the city streets.
I have sought to sew these characters into the fabric of their society by weaving them into both the everyday and the eventful of the colonial world. For this reason I have implicated Kinchela in the brutal reprisal that took place in the Upper Burnett in early June 1849, in response to the murder of the Pegg brothers by Aboriginal warriors. While I cannot confirm Kinchela’s presence at this conflict, the records indicate that at least fifty settlers from the district were involved. There are records which suggest that Kinchela engaged in such activities if not then, then most probably another time.
Again, while I do not know if Kinchela ever met Edward Hawkins, there is evidence that Hawkins and Thomas Archer were both settlers from the Upper Burnett and that the two men travelled together to Californian goldfields.
There have been occasions when the trail of clues associated with Mary Ann’s tumultuous romance petered out and I have found myself perched upon the stepping stone of one fact—needing to make something of a leap in order to land safely upon the next set of solid facts. On such occasions I have drawn upon the conventions of the romantic and social fiction that was popular during this period, as well as my long association with these characters, to make certain assumptions about what these people may have said and done and why. In several such instances I have imbued these historical characters with the sort of interior world their fictional counterparts enjoyed and in so doing I have woven a thread of fiction into a book that is otherwise solidly grounded in historical research.
Sometimes this has been necessary because the facts associated with this story appear stranger than fiction. The incident involving Kinchela and Louisa Aarons, for example, seems utterly unlikely but was true. Even more incredible is the fact that despite the numerous hostilities and disappointments that occurred between James Butler, Martin Gill and Mary Ann some sort of reconciliation was eventually achieved. Again, I have found no records that cast light upon how and why this occurred, but the facts are irrefutable; Mary Ann travelled to California and married Kinchela there in 1852, with her father’s blessing.
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