Bringing history to life: ‘Free’ by Meg Keneally

Meg Keneally’s first stand-alone historical fiction Fled (published 2019) was inspired by the true story of Mary Bryant, a First Fleet convict who effected a daring escape from Sydney by boat. This was followed up by The Wreck (2020) which featured events that followed on from the notorious Peterloo Massacre in England, and introduced readers to Mary Thistle – a character inspired by another amazing historical figure, Mary Reibey. It is Molly Thistle who is at the centre of Fled.

The novel opens with young Molly, living in poverty with her grandmother in England. When she is sent to work as a scullery maid in a wealthy household and find herself bullied and compromised by the master’s valet, she sees no option but to escape. But she does it on horseback – on the master’s valuable mare, and dressed as a boy.

This part of the story echoes something of the origins of Mary Reibey, who was arrested at a very young age for horse theft (and also while dressed as a boy.)

From here Molly experiences all of the horrors of the British ‘justice’ system of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The courts where the poor had no voice. The appalling overcrowded gaols where men, women and children were thrown together, and survival of the fittest was the only rule that mattered. Molly quickly learns the rules, adapts – and survives.

On arrival in Sydney Town Molly is rowed upriver to the Parramatta Female Factory – another gaol for female convicts, which also served as a workhouse, maternity hospital and a ‘marriage market’ (where free settlers and emancipists could come in search of a wife.) I enjoyed the scenes here, as the author, like myself, has an ancestor who was an inmate of the Female Factory. Ms Keneally is a Patron of the Friends of Parramatta Female Factory and gives great support to their work.

Molly’s fortunes take a turn for the better when she marries Angus Thistle, a free settler whom she met on the transport ship. For many convict women, marriage was often the way to a better future, although to the small colonial society at the time, taking a convict wife was still frowned upon. A mistress? Perfectly acceptable and very common for military officers, free settlers and emancipists. Even a governor. Having a wife and family back in Britain was no impediment for a man taking a convict women to his bed and fathering a whole new gaggle of children in the colony. But marrying her? That was often seen as a step too far.

Molly was no simpering, decorative accessory to Angus. She works just as hard as he. Early in their marriage they build a wattle-and-daub hut together on the banks of the Hawkesbury, the wilder reaches of the colony, where the river bursts its banks and destroys farms and homes with unpredictable ferocity. Molly experiences this.

She also learns about the ferocity of the so-called ‘frontier wars’ between the original people of the region, fighting to protect their land and livlihood, and the invaders, determined to make the place theirs. Some of the stories turn her stomach with their cruelty and make her look at her fellow settlers with new, jaundiced eyes. She befriends an Aboriginal woman with a baby, just like Molly’s own new baby, and finds the stories even harder to stomach, begging Angus to move them back into Sydney to live, away from the violence.

So they do, and their family grows along with their fortunes, as Angus and Molly’s trading and ship building business flourishes. If you visit Sydney today and walk along Circular Quay to where the old warehouses are, you might imagine Molly visiting their warehouse, admiring the many different goods that Angus brings home from his voyages to far-off places. Goods that the settler communities – those with money to pay – crave: Indian muslin, tea from China, spices, wooden furniture, fine china and glassware, tobacco, the latest fashions from London…

It is Molly’s business acumen, organisational and financial skills that allows their commercial interests to prosper despite ruthless competition from other traders in the colony.

The novel includes references to the many characters and events that made Australia’s early colonial years so colourful: a succession of Governors, a military coup, corrupt officers and venal landowners, a hypocritical churchman, all fictionalised but easily identified. This is perhaps one of my hesitations about the novel. On the one hand I do understand that peopling the story with a fictionalised version of historical figures gives the author more room to play, so to speak, to move people and events around to suit the narrative; on the other hand I think it can add richness and depth to the story to have these people live in their own skin.

Anyway, that is a minor point and each writer of historical fiction makes their own judgement about this when it comes to the story they want to write.

And the story of Molly Thistle is a beauty, as is the story of the woman she was inspired by – Mary Reibey. As I wrote in my review of Grantlee Kieza’s terrific biography of the real Mary, The Remarkable Mrs Reibey, there are some overlaps between her story and that of my own convict ancestor, Jane Longhurst, another early colonial woman who survived the convict years to become a wealthy and successful businesswoman, in a place and time when being both a woman and an ex-convict should not have allowed it.

Meg Keneally has brought Mary’s world to us in a different form, through another woman’s story. As I often say, the early history of modern Australia is quite an extraordinary one, much more interesting than I remember from my school history lessons! Stories like this help to bring our true history to life.

Free was published by Echo Publishing in 2024.