Travels with my ancestors #25: The Rags to Riches Tale of the Roberts Family
How did an illiterate horse thief from Warwickshire survive the worst transport ship in the history of convict voyages to Australia, then go on to become the Governor’s ‘go-to man’ for road and infrastructure projects in early Sydney? How did he transform himself from a wretched convict into a wealthy land owner, hotelier, husband and father?
The answer surely includes some good luck. Also, a finely tuned instinct for preservation, dogged hard work, and an ability to grasp the opportunities that the transportation system offered – if you could first survive the cruelties of the British justice system at the time.
William Roberts was my 4 x great-grandfather and his epic story illustrates how someone with physical and mental strength, with a generous dollop of luck, could do that.
His wife, Jane Longhurst, had an equally intruiging tale. I have written an earlier post about Jane and how she and William connected after both were transported; you can read it here.
WILLIAM ROBERTS (Abt. 1754 – 1819)
and
JANE LONGHURST / LONGEST (1783 – 1836)
Part One: Surviving
26 March 1787, Warwickshire, England
When William Roberts reluctantly entered the courtroom of the Warwick Assizes in early spring 1787, it was likely the most modern building he’d ever been inside. The dark wood of the public benches, and the prisoner dock where he stood, shone from regular polishing. Completed eleven years earlier, the courtrooms in the Warwick Shire Hall commanded solemnity, silence and—for the accused—enormous stress.
All eyes were on the Judge’s bench with its red leather seat and curtains, which would be drawn around the bench when a death sentence was pronounced. On a hook next to the bench hung the black cap the Judge would don at that moment. Surely, William would not receive the worst possible penalty for his crime of horse theft?
Mr Justice Heath heard sixty cases before pronouncing all verdicts together, at the end.[i] They were dealt with quickly, on average no more than ten minutes per matter, the sharp sound of the gavel punctuating the conclusion of one and the beginning of the next. William was not the only one facing a charge of horse stealing; there were two others like him, and men and women variously accused of theft of sheep, burglary, house breaking and robbery. Twenty-four times the guilty verdict was pronounced, the curtains drawn and the black cap positioned on top of His Honour’s head. Twenty-four lives to be ended at the gallows.
Most had no money to employ someone to put their case before the Court, had that even been allowed. They now had to hope for mercy from His Majesty King George III.
Thankfully that mercy arrived quickly. Just five days later, William and the other condemned were told that their sentences had been commuted to Transportation to the Eastern Coast of New South Wales, or some one of the islands adjacent, for seven years.[ii]
But what, exactly, did that mean? And where in the world was New South Wales?
~
If he could have looked at a map, he’d have been amazed and horrified at the vast expanse of ocean that lay between his prison in the midlands of England and the new British colony of New South Wales. He’d been raised in the landlocked county of Warwickshire, where the River Leam ambled its way north of the village of Leamington Hastings, his likely birthplace in 1754.[iii] He’d had nothing to prepare him for a voyage across the seas.
Map of England & Warwickshire
Source: https://www.visitnorthwest.com/counties/warwickshire/There’d been Roberts in villages and towns to the south and east of the city of Birmingham for many years.[iv] Most probably worked as agricultural labourers on the farms spread around that part of the county. Life was basic at best, beggared at worst, precarious always. The grand manor house that centuries ago had been home to the local lords, the Hastang family, were not for the likes of the Roberts. They made do from whatever labour or trades they could, settling in places called Arrow, Alcester, Salford Priors, along with William’s own village where he’d been raised with his older sister Elizabeth and younger brother Thomas.[v]
William had been baptised privately, then brought into the church some days later to have the baptism confirmed in front of the congregation.[vi]This often happened when those present at a birth thought that the baby might not survive until a church baptism could be held. In the case of this baby, he proved to be a survivor—several times over.
When he was nine, he’d witnessed his parent’s grief as they buried their baby boy Job, dead within a month of birth. Not a survivor, sadly for the Roberts family. Thomas and Ann had tried again for another boy, born seven months later. He too was baptised Job. They buried that tiny body weeks later.[vii]
There were no more children.
~In his thirties William was working, possibly on an estate known as ‘Wootton Park,’ about twenty kilometres west of Leamington Hastings. Built a century earlier, it had a manor hall, workers’ accommodation and landscaped grounds set amidst fertile green farmland.[viii] Workers kept the manor house in good repair and tended the expansive landscaped gardens. Given the nature of the terrible mistake he was about to make, it’s very possible that he worked in the stables, feeding, watering, and grooming the horses of the estate owners.
His employment at ‘Wootton Hall’ may have provided him with lodgings as well as wages: a real boon as labouring or unskilled work barely brought in enough to cover weekly expenses like lodging and food.
Wootton Hall, Wooton Wawen, Warwickshire UK. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wootton_Wawen_Wootton_Hall_002.JPG
What he did next would turn all that upside down.
He stole a horse, a gelding, probably from the estate—a risky business, stealing from your employer, if that’s what he did. If he enjoyed whatever time he had with the horse, crouching over its mane as it galloped away from Wootton, he would soon regret it. Whether he took the valuable animal to sell, to keep, or to trade, his plan came to a crashing halt when he was arrested and sent to a gaol, probably in Warwick, to await his trial.
After the sentencing, he was transferred in October to the prison hulk Stanislaus on the Thames in London.[ix] Here he was in the company of several other fellows who, like him, had escaped the death penalty at the Warwick Courthouse: Thomas Hughes, James Anderson, Richard Frinchett, James Royal Loome. Their hearts sank as they were rowed out to the decommissioned naval ship moored at Woolwich and clambered the rope up its dripping, rotting side. The old ship looked like a dark, monstrous, crouching thing on the water.
Prison Hulk, National Library of Australia Below, each deck was divided lengthways by metal bars, behind which they were crammed in close together. The smells from disease, unwashed bodies and clothes, and stale air were overwhelming. The other prisoners were thin, despairing, sickly men, many in rags and without shoes. There were some hard-faced veterans of the hulks, but also lads of nine or ten.
Life on the hulks was barely a life. He needed every ounce of courage and strength to face each day.
Their rations were poor: mouldy bread, hard ship’s biscuit, some thin soup with a small portion of cheap meat to be divided among each mess of six or more men. They drank weak beer or water from the filthy Thames.[x]
Each morning they were taken off to labour in work teams: digging moats or building embankments, dredging the thick river mud, construction work on docks, breaking up rocks. Each evening they were returned to the hulk to eat and sleep. The next day, and the next, and all the following days repeated the same pattern. Along with the hard labour, they had to avoid fights between prisoners, obey orders barked at them by guards, stay out of trouble, and hope not to succumb to illness—the only thing that flourished on board.
The hulks were the authorities’ solution to the developing problem of overcrowding in prisons across the land. Monied people had pressured the Government to address an alarming increase in property crimes: theft, burglary, poaching, highway robbery. Soon such offences were on an ever-expanding list of crimes for which death, or a long prison term, were the usual sentences. For some time, miscreants had been sent away to the American colonies. Wealthy folks were happy with this ‘out of sight, out of mind’ solution.
In 1775 that all changed. The Revolutionary War in America stopped the easy transfer of Britain’s law breakers. Unsuitable old gaols were groaning under the strain of more men, women and children pushed through their gates. At the same time, there was growing distaste and unease about the number of offences for which people could be hanged, resulting in more death penalties commuted, more prisoners needing to be incarcerated long term. What was to be done?
The hulks provided a solution—of sorts.
After the First Fleet of ships set off for the new colony of New South Wales in 1787, it seemed that the problem of crowded gaols would be solved by resuming the system of transportation. In the meantime, those waiting to be sent away had to be put somewhere.
Six months after arriving on the Stanislaus, William and his fellow Warwickshire prisoner, Thomas Hughes, were sent south to the harbour at Portsmouth, where yet another prison ship awaited them.[xi] The conditions on the Lion proved no better. They were kept here for twenty long months.
Was William told the news that he would, finally, be transferred to a ship that would sail to New South Wales? Or simply bundled onto a rowboat and sent across to clamber up the side of the new vessel? Either way, he would have felt relief to have the hulk at his back at last. Whatever lay ahead in that mysterious place, New South Wales, at least on the voyage there’d be some rest from back-breaking work, and being at sea might even be a kind of reprieve: fresher air, new sights, perhaps even some sunshine.
He was to be horribly disappointed.
~
Along with nearly five hundred other convicts he boarded the Neptune in December 1789. They quickly realised that the hulks had been merely a prelude to further suffering.
After a month of loading provisions for the voyage, as well as tools, animals and equipment for the colonial settlement, they sailed out of Portsmouth harbour in mid- January 1790.[xii] There was no opportunity for prisoners to watch the dwindling shores of England—from the outset they were bundled below decks, the seventy-eight women in a separate area, the men chained in twos or threes on a lower deck.
The prisoners could not have known it, but the ship and its captain, Donal Traill, had previously been in the business of transporting enslaved people from Africa to North America. The new cargo was treated in a similar way.
They were starved on low rations, because the Captain had orders from the Neptune’s owners, the private contractors Camden, Calvert & King, to sell excess provisions on the way if possible. The Government contract paid a flat rate per prisoner boarded each ship. It had nothing to say about how many should be disembarked once they reached Sydney Cove. It was a perfect opportunity for contractors out to make an easy profit.
The ship anchored at Cape Town in April, too late for the forty-eight men and one woman who had already died.[xiii] Many of those still alive, especially the men kept in irons for the whole voyage, were desperately ill: malnourished, their muscles atrophying from lack of movement, infections from lying in their own filth. The stench of rotting teeth and gums from scurvy, the dreaded blight of life at sea, filled the close air of the prisoners’ decks. Some lemon or lime juice would have fixed that, but not for these prisoners.
They were tormented by lice, suffered in the hot airlessness of the tropics, then shivered in the colder southern regions. The meagre food was often fought over by those who could still fight. Sometimes, no fighting was necessary: if a prisoner died, those closest would quickly take the rations and hope the death would not be discovered for a little while. When a corpse was found by guards, it would be taken above and tossed unceremoniously into the sea.
There was plenty of death. It was the one thing the hell-ship had in abundance.
The Neptune made good time on this voyage, sailing into Port Jackson on 28 June 1790, but one hundred and fifty men and eleven women had not survived the voyage. Once known, the total number of dead convicts on the Second Fleet appalled even authorities in far-off London: over a quarter of all prisoners on the four transport ships that made up the fleet, and a third of those wretches on the Neptune, died on the journey. Within eight months of arrival, forty percent were dead.[xiv]
For the ragged, starving convicts of the First Fleet and their equally hungry guards on shore that day, who were hoping the new ships had brought fresh supplies and strong bodies to help grow more food, the sight of the crippled, dying and very sick passengers disembarking from the Neptune was horrifying. More mouths to feed, more sick bodies to care for in the rudimentary hospital. The rations across the tiny, struggling settlement had already been drastically reduced by Governor Philip. How were they to survive without additional food and healthy people to do the work needed?
Even so, some of those watching were reduced to pity, even tears, at the plight of those crawling from the bowels of the Neptune. William was one of the survivors.
Work and freedom
His next challenge was simple: keep surviving. Firstly he had to get through his seven year sentence. In those early years, newly arrived convicts were set to work on the many projects needed by a fledgling settlement clinging to the edge of a huge, unknown continent. These included building, constructing rudimentary roads to make moving around the township easier, making bricks, fishing, growing grain or vegetables in the struggling government gardens. Prisoners were also assigned to military personnel and officers as servants and labourers.
Shelters were tents or simple wattle and daub huts with woven branches for shutters at their windows. Convicts built their own shelter, grew what food they could from a garden plot in their own time, lined up at the government store for dwindling rations.
During the months on board the hulks and the Neptune, William must have decided not to make the same mistake that had brought him to this wild British outpost. He worked hard in his assignment in Sydney and avoided coming to the attention of the guards or convict overseers for the wrong reasons. His industry was rewarded. Along with the punishments meted out for wrongdoing, there were some rewards for good behaviour.
By January 1794, just four years after his arrival in chains, he had been granted thirty acres of land in Sydney Town, near the Brickfields on the southern side of the settlement.[xv] This year was significant for another reason: he had served his sentence and was now a free man.[xvi] Never to return to his native England, he instead turned his mind to creating a new life in this place under the southern skies.
Brickfield Hill and village on the High Road to Parramatta.
Source: National Library of AustraliaThe land of New South Wales had been claimed for Britain by the first Governor, Arthur Phillip, in 1788. However, there was no negotiation, agreement, or treaty with the original people of that land. From then on, it was the Governor and his successors who decided who ‘owned’ or had the right to occupy, particular parcels of land. Land became one of the ways in which settlers’ and convicts’ behaviour could be rewarded, controlled or manipulated. Any convicts who wondered who really owned the land they were clearing, cultivating, or building on, generally kept those thoughts to themselves.
Did William or his fellow emancipists ever wonder about the Governor’s ability to hand out tracts of land to whomever he pleased? In their day-to-day work and movements around Sydney Town and outlying regions, convicts and freed men and women would encounter the people who had lived there before the English ships arrived. These meetings were sometimes friendly, sometimes not. The ‘natives’ had an uncanny ability to melt into the bushland when they needed to, but they were beginning to push back against the encroachments of the white strangers.
From the first months after January 1788, the Indigenous people around Sydney had been struck down in horrifying numbers by unfamiliar diseases. Those who’d arrived on the first fleet of convict ships, witnessed dead and dying people all around the harbour and its surrounds. The white settlers’ activities continued to destroy the waterways, food sources and hunting grounds that the Eora, Dharug and other groups relied on for their physical, spiritual, family, and cultural needs.
But the original people stayed, survived and resisted the theft of their Country.
Whether William and other transportees ever gave them much thought, is another question.
William and Jane’s story will be continued in my next post.
If you want to follow along on the journey and have not yet subscribed, you can do so here.
[i] Birmingham Gazette April 2, 1787,
via https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/ariss-birmingham-gazette, accessed 31 Jan 2026[ii] WR’s Warwick Assizes record: https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C8999560
Reference: HO 47/6/91 Fol. 307. Date: 1787 Mar 31 Held by: The National Archives, Kew.
Accessed 28 Nov 2025[iii] Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43 (for William Roberts) Accessed 29 Nov 2025
[iv] See Author’s Note re factors guiding assumptions made about locations and records for this Roberts family.
[v] Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43 (for Elizabeth Roberts); Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43 (for Thomas Roberts). Accessed 29 Nov 2025
[vi] England, Warwickshire, Parish Registers, 1535-1963, database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-DZCS-LVB?cc=1462403&wc=XDTP-BZ9%3A42645501%2C1583866127%2C1583866128 : 13 March 2019), Warwickshire > Leamington-Hastings > Baptisms, marriages, burials 1705-1812 > image 23 of 80; from parish registers of the Church of England. Database and images, Warwick County Record Office, England. Accessed 29 Nov 2025
[vii] England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538-1975 FHL Film Number 548390, 555353, Web address /search/collections/9841/records/121235106?tid=73626398&pid=202711239221&ssrc=pt
Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43 (for Job Roberts 1);
Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43;
Burial record for Job Roberts 1765 at FreeReg: https://www.freereg.org.uk/search_records/65b28ae2f493fd5ab33201eb/job-roberts-burial-warwickshire-leamington-hastings-1765-06-16?locale=en (for Job Roberts 2)
All accessed 29 Nov 2025[viii] https://www.ourwarwickshire.org.uk/content/catalogue_her/wootton-hall-park. Accessed 30 Nov 2025
[ix] Treasury records [T 1, 7, 39, 46, 62, 64, 172, 176, 229, 236, 247], 1783-1956 [microform]/Fonds T./Series T1/Subseries (Pieces 587-3031)/File 653. AJCP Reel No: 3551/Item 164/Lord Sydney with Mr Campbell’s return of convicts on board the Ceres and Stanislaus hulks
Via Trove at http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1271439159. Accessed 30 Nov 2025[x] https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/prison-hulks-britain-conditions-escapes-transportation-social-reform-charles-dickens/ Accessed 30 Nov 2025
[xi] Treasury records [T 1, 7, 39, 46, 62, 64, 172, 176, 229, 236, 247], 1783-1956 [microform]/Fonds T./Series T1/Subseries (Pieces 587-3031)/File 658. AJCP Reel No: 3551/Item. Lion’s report and accounts/
Via Trove at http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1271598671. Accessed 30 Nov 2025[xii] https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/neptune Accessed 30 Nov 2025
[xiii] Michael Flynn; The Second Fleet: Britain’s Grim Convict Armada of 1790 (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 2001) p1
[xiv] Michael Flynn; The Second Fleet: Britain’s Grim Convict Armada of 1790 p1
[xv] State Records Authority of New South Wales; Kingswood, NSW, Australia; Archive Reel: 1999; Series: NRS 1213; Description: Colonial Secretary: List of all Grants and Leases 1788-1809.
Via Ancestry.com, accessed 1 Dec 2025[xvi] State Records Authority of New South Wales; Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia; Title: Muster of Prisoners in the Colony, 1810-1820; Volume: 4/1237. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 2 Dec 2025
Author’s Note on historical records: the Roberts Family
Locating the correct records for a family with such a common name as ‘Roberts’ is challenging, to say the least. My aim is to only include information for which I have verified sources. In some situations, I have had to do some guesswork, choosing those records which make sense based on the person’s location, age, life circumstances. Then I’ll use phrases or words like ‘about,’ ‘possibly,’ ‘likely to have been.’
Footnotes will take you to verified sources where I’m confident I have the correct records; but I will always indicate if there is uncertainty about a particular fact or record.
In the case of the Roberts, I am sure that the family lived in the county of Warwickshire for at least several generations. The Roberts name pops up across the county; however I have pinpointed connections of family members across generations, around a cluster of small villages and hamlets in the region near Stratford-Upon-Avon (famous as Shakespeare’s birthplace) and east to Rugby. This area is south and southeast of the city of Birmingham.
Location is a factor that I use in my guesswork around which Roberts records belong in ‘my’ Roberts tree: is it reasonable, given the historical time in which the record was generated, for a person to have been baptised in one village but end up at the other side of the county? Certainly that could happen, but where there is a Roberts record closer to their place of origin that fits all the other available facts, I will tend to favour that one.
Family circumstance is another piece of the puzzle. These people were mostly poor, so unlikely to have estates worth making a will for. Marriages licences were expensive; most working class people obtained permission to marriage via having the ‘marriage banns’ (intention to wed) published three times in their local parish prior to the wedding day. My reasoning here is that marriage records involving a licence are less likely to be for my Roberts folk.
Age, marital status, children: all additional pieces to fit into the big jigsaw of constructing a family tree, when the family name is such a common one and records not as forthcoming or informative as they are today.
I hope this gives you some insight into my thinking and that it helps you in making your own decisions about all this as you read.
‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ by Yoval Noah Harari
While we homo sapiens might feel pleased to be the species that has seemingly evolved to ‘rule the world’, this book should give pause for thought.
It’s a sweeping story of our history: how we evolved and separated from other human species such as the Neanderthals, why we have paid a price for the development of our relatively large brains, how the ‘cognitive revolution’ distinguished our species from other animals (and what we have done with this advantage since), how and why myths such as gods, race, nationalities, money and human rights were created.
There are some ideas that I am certain would be controversial to some, including:
- the ‘agricultural revolution’ actually resulted in humankind spending more time and effort feeding itself than in hunter-gatherer communities
- it is possible that, far from grains such as wheat or rice being ‘domesticated’ by humans, it could be the other way around: that these grains trained humans to spend huge amounts of labour tending them, allowing them to become masters of the grain world.
- the three unifying forces of humankind have been money, empire and religion, and of these:
- capitalism is the most successful religion invented by humans, requiring high levels of trust to operate effectively.
Sapiens is definitely a thought-provoking book. Always interested in the ‘back story’ in how things came to be as they are, I found the historic elements deeply fascinating.
The last section of the book ventures into territory which for me was far less comfortable, involving scary questions about the future of humankind, as technological developments seemingly outpace our collective ability to predict where they might lead or to place conditions on their use.
First published in 2015, the questions in this book are now more relevant than ever, surrounded as we are by the growth of cyborg, genetic and other technologies which could conceivably lead to the end of homo sapien and even devolution into a new species.
More questions than answers; but perhaps a book of this nature needs to raise issues that can’t be easily addressed. If the idea is to make readers sit up and take notice, to think more deeply about the rapid pace of change, and to appreciate our collective past as a species, Sapiens achieves this very well indeed.
Books like this should be read by scientists, ethicists, teachers, medical professionals and legislators, because these are the people holding the reins of our collective future.
Sapiens was published by Vintage (an imprint of Penguin Books.)
I listened to the audiobook version, also released in 2015 and read in English by Derek Perkins.
Why I am a feminist: ‘Normal Women’ by Philippa Gregory
Where to begin with this huge, sweeping non-fiction book? Perhaps with the title. In an interview I heard with the author (best known for her historical fiction featuring British royalty like the Plantagenet and Tudor women) she said that she wanted to write about the full gamut of women across 900 years of British history – from royal and aristocratic to peasant women. Because, at the times in which they lived, these were ‘normal’ women, doing what queens, noblewomen, tradeswomen and artisans and peasant farming women did.
I found that a compelling argument; more so since reading this grand work of research and narrative.
Why am I interested in the history of British women?
Apart from the fact that I inherited my fascination with history from my mother; as an Australian woman whose ancestors were almost all from England, Ireland or Scotland, the history of Britain and its women is also my history.
Also, my interest in family history is particularly focused on the women in my family tree, the people about whom it is most difficult to find information and records that extend beyond birth and baptism, marriage and babies, death and burial. I want to know what kind of lives they lived, what their likely interests or preoccupations might have been, what big and small events shaped them.
Ms Gregory sums up her motivation for writing the book as follows:
What we read as a history of our nation is a history of men, as viewed by men, as recorded by men.
Normal Women pp1-2
Is 93.1 per cent of history literally ‘His Story’ because women don’t do anything? Are women so busy with their Biology that they have no time for History, like strict timetable choices – you can’t do both?…
Women are there, making fortunes and losing them, breaking the law and enforcing it, defending their castles in siege and setting off on crusade; but they’re often not recorded, or mentioned only in passing by historians, as they were just normal women living normal lives, not worthy of comment.The book begins with the Norman invasion in 1066 and ends at the modern era, in the 1990’s. In between it examines the lives of women over a range of topic areas, including: religion, violence, marriage, women loving women, women and the vote, prostitution, health, education, work, enslaved women and slave owners, single women, ideas about the ‘nature of women’, rape, sport, wealth and poverty, protest…It’s a huge expanse of information drawn from a wide range of sources.
In the process the real reason for the beginnings of the gender pay gap is revealed; also how the patriarchal systems of law and inheritance were imported and formalised by the Norman invaders; how accusations of rape were dealt with in the legal system and how this barely changed over centuries; when businesswomen and tradeswomen gained admission to important guilds and how they were later excluded; how a queen became the first woman to publish a book in English in her own name; how women worked together and also against each other; a sombre roll call of women martyrs who died for their religious beliefs during the early modern period and another of women murdered by husband, boyfriend or family member in 2019.
The author’s skill is evident in the way she has presented a mind-boggling array of historical facts and themes in a compelling narrative, with snippets of the names and stories of women across different circumstances that help to bring them to life for the reader.
And there are some Oh My God moments. Here are some that stayed with me:
- Sixteen year old Emma de Gauder holding out against William I (aka the Conqueror) at a Norwich castle for three months and later going on the First Crusade with her husband.
- Roman Catholic churches in the eight century hosting same-sex marriages (women marrying women) which were entered in the parish records in the usual way.
- The old Anglo-Saxon word for ‘wife’ meant peace-weavers and ‘spinster’ originally meant the actual occupation (a woman who spun yarn.)
- The 1624 Infanticide Act meant that women who could not prove that a baby had been stillborn would hang. There was no assumption of innocence and no accusation levelled at the father of the baby.
- The sentence of death by burning at the stake was still being applied for crimes such as the murder of a husband in the 1700’s. It mattered not how violent, cruel or abusive the husband was. Husband-killing was seen as ‘petty treason’.
- Forceps for difficulties in childbirth were invented in the 1700’s but kept a secret for three generations in order to increase the profits of the medical family concerned.
- Housewives living in poverty were blamed for poor sanitation and high rates of disease and child mortality.
- Syphilis was thought to occur spontaneously in the bodies of promiscuous women (read: prostitutes) and passed on to men.
- Rape in marriage was thought to be impossible as their wedding vows meant that women gave consent to sexual acts from that time on.
- The widespread belief (even into the early twentieth century) that women would become infertile if they were more highly educated: to quote from the book, a statement by a neurologist – If the feminine abilities were developed to the same degree as those of the make, her material organs would suffer, and we should have before us a repulsive and useless hybrid. (p460)
- Male students at Oxford University were so appalled at the proposal that female graduates should be awarded their degrees on completion of their course of study – in 1948 – that they attacked the college residence of women students.
- and so on and so on…
I dare any woman to read this book and not be thankful for feminism and the changes it has helped to bring about. But – it also highlights the fact that there is a long, long way to go before we can truly say we have achieved genuine equality for women of all classes, races, religious beliefs and family situations.
Normal Women is published by HarperCollins in November 2023.
My thanks to the publishers for a copy.
Travels with my ancestors #1: Things they would want me to know.
When I look at my family tree, going back seven or eight generations, I am astounded at the number of lives represented there. Each little icon, male or female, on the Ancestry.com screen, or names I’ve pencilled in on my hand drawn charts, is—was—a person. A person who was born, grew up, perhaps married, had children. A person who earned a living, learned stuff, developed likes, had their loves and their hatreds. Someone who eventually grew ill or suffered an accident or met their death in some other way. They left people who mourned them, remembered them, laughed with others about happy or funny moments, cried about the sad or terrible ones.
How many ancestors? I haven’t stopped to count them all. Trust me, there are many.
Every one of those individuals had to have lived and reproduced for me to be here. Every decision, mistake, accident of history has led to… me.
How amazing.
I am the unique product of all those people. My own experiences, decisions and actions have led to who I am, but so too have all the actions of past generations. Their DNA, mixed in the marvellous cocktail of life, resulted in: me.
That’s astounding, don’t you think?
Why then, do we weave or stomp or trudge or dance our way through life, giving scarcely a thought to the people who made us? Our parents, of course, usually get our attention; perhaps because they are there; perhaps family resemblance is strong enough for us to recognise the link that joins our own generation to theirs. Grandparents, too, can be more visible, due to proximity, or appearance in family photo albums, or in family stories.
Go back another generation and, well…the scene is a bit emptier. Great-grandparents and beyond: we might know names, and have a vague inkling of eras, if not specific dates when they lived, but most of us are unable to describe what sort of people they may have been.
Unless, of course, you get bitten by the family history bug.
In this, I was lucky. I grew up with many diverting stories about ancestors. My father was one of a huge number of Australians proud to claim a particular Second Fleet convict; my mother had several convicts in her family tree, plus some tantalising hints of romance and some murkier stories buried in the dry records of births, marriages and deaths. They had done much of the groundwork before me: constructing family trees and digging out those records (in the days when nothing was online, and everything had to be found in person at libraries and archive repositories.)
So, I suppose you could say I was bitten by the bug at an early age. Though it wasn’t until I’d left full-time work and had the time (and internet connection, laptop, and subscription to a family history platform) that the passion really took hold. Covid-lockdowns gave me plenty of time to dive down rabbit holes searching for that one person I needed to fill in on the tree, that one missing record or date, that hidden story.
Oh, the stories!
Romances, murders, deserted wives, divorces. Poverty, bravery, wartime heroics. Quiet fortitude and deep despair. People loving, birthing, fighting, killing, growing, leaving, losing, and winning. All of life, there in my family trees.
At the risk of sounding fanciful, I have come to believe that they would want me to know. Every story is part of the whole. Each person had their own story, important to them and to those who loved them. Something urges me to uncover their stories; while there are no doubt things that some ancestors, were they able to say, would rather that I didn’t know (crimes committed, mistakes made) I nevertheless believe I honour them by discovering and then telling their stories.
Beyond myself, the stories of my ancestors are threads that contribute to the tapestry that is Australia today. In both positive and negative ways, the ways in which they lived their lives, the choices they made and the results of those choices: all contributed to the big picture of this country I call home.
By uncovering these threads, I have a greater sense of belonging here, in this island nation on the other side of the globe from where my ancestors originated. Why did they come here? What circumstances, decisions or accidents led them to travel across the world to this place? Why did they stay?
If they had not come here, survived, stayed, married, and had children, then I would not exist. A twist of fate, or a small part of an ordained plan—I’m happy for that to remain a mystery.
I’m not happy to leave their lives to the mysterious past. I want to learn about my ancestors, and the part they played in the complex sequence of events that resulted in me.
I like to think they’d be happy about that, too.
Come with me on the journey as I travel with my ancestors. There may well be something in their stories that ignites something in you: a spark of recognition, or a longing to know more about your own family tree. What are its patterns, what characters and events are represented there? What are some of the stories of your ancestors?
Some things change (and some definitely remain the same!) ‘Rum: A Distilled History of Colonial Australia’ by Matt Murphy
Hands up if you sometimes think “We are rules by fools and knaves!” Or if you fret about the unhealthy role that alcohol seems to play in our Australian society. Me, too. It may be reassuring (or not) to know that this is not a new thing. In fact, according to this history by Matt Murphy, Australia’s very beginning as a British colony in the eighteenth century was inextricably linked to and shaped by alcohol, and the idiocy and corruption that so often accompanies it. One type of alcohol (rum) played a greater role than others, and this book deftly fills in a history of the beverage itself, how it first arrived on the shores of New South Wales, and what happened after.
Startling snippets of information are revealed: did you know, for example, that the First Fleet brought sufficient rum for seven years for each marine on board – but only enough food for two years. Rum was packed into the holds of those tall ships at the expense of tools, clothing and food supplies that the penal settlement would need in its early years.
Alcohol had an immediate, detrimental impact on Aboriginal people around Sydney and further afield; one that is still being felt today. Very quickly rum became a measure of currency and exploited by those in charge of the settlement – the NSW Marine Corps – which earned them the epitaph of ‘Rum Corps’.
We are introduced to some well-known historical figures: First Nations figures such as Bennelong; colonial Governors; convicts; emancipists and free settlers; those responsible for guiding the settlement all the way from England. Some of these characters are more notorious than others: John Macarthur, for example, is given a lot of attention due to his incessant meddling and blatantly corrupt activities, many of which involved the importation, sale and use of rum to further his own interests.
Murphy highlights the huge amount of energy expended on dispatches, petitions, orders about rum to and from authorities in NSW and London, canvassing the advantages and pitfalls of importing, distilling, trading, controlling and drinking the stuff. Well meaning but unsuccessful edicts regarding the control of alcohol consumption have echoes in our own times:
A further law proclaimed in June 1825 was aimed at publicans who condoned disorderly conduct on their premises or permitted patrons to become drunk. While the law pertaining to convicts was somewhat easy to maintain, the second one only meant that boozed-up barflies were being turfed out of hotels to drink in the street…Now there were more drunks on the street than ever before.
Rum: A Distilled History of Colonial Australia p229Is it just me, or could these attempts to curb the negative effects of alcohol consumption be the Georgian equivalents of Sydney’s lock-out laws and today’s ‘responsible service of alcohol’ guidelines?
Matt Murphy writes with humour and a fast pace, so this is an entertaining read as well as a sobering (no pun intended) look at our modern relationship with alcohol, and it is refreshing to re-visit some well-known people and events from history through the prism of one substance or object – in this case, the bottom of a rum bottle.
Rum: A Distilled History of Colonial Australia is published by HarperCollins Publishers in June 2021.
My thanks to the publishers for a copy to read and review.A romp through colonial Sydney: ‘Flash Jim’ by Kel Richards
Did you know that Australian expressions such as yarn, snitch, swag or cove originated from Flash cant, the jargon and coded language spoken by criminals in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and transported along with convicts to the Australian colonies? And that the very first dictionary written in Australia was written by a convict in an effort to curry favour with authorities – a vocabulary of the Flash language written by an Englishman by the name of James Hardy Vaux.
Kel Richards’ biography of Vaux is based in part on the convict’s own memoirs, though as Richards points out, Vaux’s account of his actions needs to be treated with caution. He was a nineteenth century version of Peter Foster, an complete fraudster and convincing con-man, who skipped his way through English and Australian society with a fast and slick turn of the tongue and an apparent inability to stick at an honest job for more than a few weeks.
Born into a respectable middle class family, Vaux declined opportunities available to him that were not offered to people from less comfortable beginnings, preferring instead to swindle, rob, steal, pickpocket and scam his way to an income. He seems to have been a clever man with very little judgement and a breathtaking level of recklessness, and it must be said, very good luck that frequently enabled him to avoid capture or, when he was arrested, got him acquitted on some legal technicality or other.
I thoroughly disapproved of his criminal activities but I admit to being amused that the methods Vaux employed to hoodwink people in authority (employers, magistrates, etc) were the very aspects of ‘respectable society’ so sacred to those authorities: letters of recommendation from one acquaintance to another, for example; or the ability to present himself well and speak in a cultured and respectful manner. It was also ironic that at times, he got taken in by the very same sorts of scams he himself loved to perform on others.
Good luck eventually runs out and so Vaux was finally found guilty of one of his many crimes and transported to NSW on a convict ship. Here his education again served him well; being one of a small group of convicts who could read and write enabled him to wheedle his way into easier jobs such as clerical or transcription work – much preferable to assignment as a farm labourer or on the iron gangs, especially for someone who seemed to have an allergic reaction to anything looking like physical work.
I was astonished that he served not one, but two sentences of transportation – after arriving back in England after his first sentence expired, (in itself an unusual achievement) he returned straight away to his life of crime, resulting in a second period of transportation to the colony. This was clearly a man who did not learn from past mistakes!
His example also serves to show that the horrific sentencing laws of Georgian and Victorian England were no deterrent to crime: people either stole because of extreme poverty and desperation, or because they preferred it to legal employment. Either way, the threat of a death sentence or of transportation to the far side of the world, did not stop the rising tide of crime in England.
It was on his second stint in Australia that Vaux began work on his dictionary of Flash slang. Serving time in the convict settlement of Newcastle (reserved for re-offenders like Vaux) he recorded the huge array of words and expressions used by criminals, that so bewildered and frustrated magistrates and colonial authorities. Vaux planned to present his helpful guide to the Commandant of the Newcastle convict station. It was eventually published in London in 1819.
Richards has included the dictionary as an appendix in his account of it’s author’s life, and it makes for terrific reading. There are many words recognisable today; though some have expanded or changed in meaning or use, many are used exactly as they were in Vaux’s world. If, for example, I said ‘He looks like he’s about to croak’, I suspect you’d know what I meant. ‘Can I cadge $10 from you?’ means just the same as it did in 1800, except with different currency.
There are some expressions that have faded into the past and are as inexplicable to me as they must have been to a magistrate in Vaux’s time. What, for example, would ‘I’ll get the vardo and you can tow the titter out so she can be unthimbled’ mean?
Some of the entries are hilarious, some quite grim, but they all give the feeling of the world in which they were created and used. It was a hard, unforgiving time for many and their language is imbued with sly humour and an anti-authoritarian slant that arguably still underpins aspects of modern day Australian culture.
Flash Jim is a romp through the world of nineteenth century crime, criminals and their culture. Readers who enjoy language and it’s origins, and history brought to life, will find it an engrossing read.
Flash Jim is published by HarperCollins Publishers in May 2021.
My thanks to the publishers for a copy to review.Long overdue – the real story of the Hawkesbury-Nepean: ‘People of the River – Lost Worlds of Early Australia’ by Grace Karskens
I was born and grew up in the Hawkesbury region and returned to live there and in the nearby Blue Mountains in my thirties. I have at least four ancestors who arrived in the Hawkesbury and Nepean region after serving their sentences, to take up land as settlers. Despite this, and despite attending high school in Richmond, not far from the river itself, I had learnt little of the early history of the region – which is rather sad, when you consider that it was an area rich in stories of the people who lived here before and after British colonisation.
In People of the River, historian and author Grace Karskens brings those stories to life, digging down into layers of history, back to what she calls ‘deep time’, tracing the ways in which the First People of the river and its surrounds lived before the English arrived, and the subsequent interactions between and among Aboriginal and settler communities.
This is no lightweight or dry history text. It’s an incredibly comprehensive account, though the impeccable research is always conveyed with a deft touch. The book includes chapters about the Hawkesbury-Nepean’s ancient geology, geography, earliest human habitation, the cultural and spiritual lives of its people (both Dharug and settler), the economic, political and social contexts of the colonial era, as well as the tragedies endured by the First Peoples, such as disease, family and community dislocation, child stealing, and violence.
However, we also learn of the many ways in which the First Nations communities adapted to and survived British colonisation and the many, sometimes surprising, ways in which they interacted with settlers. Referring to artefacts discovered, some held in museum collections, she writes:
These are the poignant ‘small things forgotten’, the scattered, silent, yet insistent record of a vast and extraordinary human experience: the enforced creation of new worlds and lives, woven from the old. Despite the terror and violence, the determined campaigns, the loss of so many of their kin, the disruption to their food sources and their social and sacred places, the people of Dyarubbin survived, and remained in their Country.
People of the River p175Ms Karskens is a gifted writer and her histories are engaging, lyrical and deeply moving – if you have read her earlier work, The Colony, about the history of the Sydney region, I am sure you will agree.
Along with her research for this book, the author has also been involved in a project with Dharug knowledge holders and fellow historians, that aims at re-discovering and reinstating the Dharug place names of the region. I am so glad to learn that the town I lived in for ten years, Richmond, has a much older name: Marrengorra.
I struggle to keep this post about People of the River brief – there is so much to enthuse about and so many amazing stories here. If you, like me, enjoy learning more about the real history of our country, this is a must-read. I lingered over it for several months – it’s a hefty book at 525 pages (not including appendices) but such a joy. I finished it with a satisfying sense that I now have a better understanding of the corner of Australia that has been so personally meaningful to me.
People of the River was published by Allen & Unwin in 2020.
#2021ReadNonFic 
#AWW2021 
#AussieAuthor21
Thought-provoking: ‘Land’ by Simon Winchester
The new book by prolific non fiction author Simon Winchester takes a sweeping look at the topic of land in a broad sense. Subtitled How the hunger for ownership shaped the modern world, the book’s opening introduces the author’s personal take on his ownership of a piece of land in northeastern USA, and in the process introduces the sorry history of the dispossession of the First Nations people in that corner of America.
Coming back to fundamentals, the author then tells the story of how the Earth was first measured; a tale of mathematics and precise instruments put to the task in the nineteenth century.
Then came the astonishing proposal to create a common map of the world – ‘a common map for a common humanity’ – put forward by Professor Albrecht Penck, an Austrian geographer. It was not surprising to learn that this project, embarked upon with such lofty idealism, was a fraught endeavour that eventually foundered on the rocks of divisions, rancour, rivalry and ineptitude after nearly a century of effort.
Winchester examines what makes borders; how human-created borders have resulted in absurdities and bloodshed; how in more recent times and with huge effort, the Dutch created land to live on and farm from the North Sea; the link between land and national identity and ways of doing things.
He returns to America to recount the brutal disgrace of settler land grabs and broken treaties in the westward movement of the nineteenth century; then explains the legacies of enclosure laws and clearances in England and Scotland; the effects of colonialism in various parts of the world including Australia, New Zealand, the African continent, India and Pakistan and the Middle East.
The book is full of startling snippets of information like this:
A quarter of the world’s population lives on land in which, though individual citizens may not know it, they exist in a notionally feudal relationship with the British Crown.
Land p195That quote alone should fire up the passions of supporters of the idea of Australia becoming a republic!
Almost every part of the world is included in the embrace of this book: from the Ukraine (Stalin’s disastrous and murderous ‘collectivisation’ of farms in the 1930’s), to the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII; the contradictions and confusions of the Treaty of Waitangi, struck with New Zealand’s Maoris; and the destruction caused by industrialisation and exploitation of the Earth’s resources across the globe.
Winchester argues that the once firmly held belief that ‘land is the only thing that lasts’ is no longer true, due to rising sea levels and encroachment on low lying regions and islands. He offers examples of changing attitudes and methods of managing and conserving land, including from my own part of the world, Australia: widespread catastrophic bushfires in the summer of 2019-20 have led to a re-think of fire management and a growing respect for traditional ‘cool burning’ methods practised here for thousands of years by First Nations people.
Land is an engrossing and thought provoking read. Readers who enjoy learning about history, geography, maps, as well as the contradictions of human behaviour, will enjoy the mix of anecdote and analysis with which Winchester packs a lot of information into a very readable package.
Land is published by William Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, in January 2021.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.Familiar places through the lens of the past: ‘The Cartographer’s Secret’ by Tea Cooper
Readers of Tea Cooper’s fiction will know that she likes to write dual timeline stories set in Australia’s past. The Cartographer’s Secret is no exception.
The protagonists are two young women: Evie in 1880, and her niece Lettie in 1911. The story connects the two: Lettie drives from Sydney to visit her Great Aunt Olivia on the family property in the Hunter Valley, to inform her that Lettie’s brother (and the heir to the property) has died. She soon gets caught up in the secrets and puzzles held within her family’s history, particularly the mysterious disappearance of her Aunt Evie, thirty years earlier.
Evie had shared her father’s fascination with maps and exploration, and become similarly obsessed by the famous explorer Ludwig Leichhardt who had disappeared without trace in 1848. She sets out to track down evidence that she believes will prove her theory of what happened to Leichhardt and his party, but she is never seen again, leaving her Aunt Olivia heartbroken.
Poring over the map of the Hunter region that Evie left behind, Lettie begins to put the pieces of the puzzle together. She wants to solve the mystery of Evie to give Olivia, and the whole family, some peace (or closure, as we would call it today.) But things don’t go smoothly and Lettie uncovers more than she’d expected.
Tea Cooper’s heroines are likeable and relateable: young women with gumption and interests unusual for women at the time (Evie with her maps, Lettie with her Model T motor car.)
I found some of the details of the plot a little complicated and often needed to refer to the copy of Evie’s hand drawn map. While there is no happy conclusion for all the characters, there is a satisfying and believable resolution.
For me the strength of Tea Cooper’s novels lie in the central role played by their settings. She takes me on a journey through time of and in doing so, shows me an earlier version of often familiar places, through the lens of history. I believe this is what historical fiction can do best: immerse readers in another time so that we can see the present in a different way.
I also enjoy how aspects of the everyday inform that picture of the past. In The Cartographer’s Secret, this includes the beginning of rail and motor travel, the genesis of the famous Bulletin magazine, rural economies, the exploits of early European explorers, and the lives of women in both city and country.
The Cartographer’s Secret is a satisfying addition to Tea Cooper’s historical fiction and fans of her novels won’t be disappointed.
It is published by HarperCollins Publishers on 29 October 2020.
My thanks to the publishers for a copy to read and review.#AWW2020
#AussieAuthor20Resilience and friendship: ‘The Bird in the Bamboo Cage’ by Hazel Gaynor
This novel introduced me to a previously unknown story of WWII : the experience of teachers and pupils at a Protestant boarding school in northern China while under Japanese control. The students, children of missionaries, business people or diplomats from around the world, received a traditional British-style education including the classics, religious instruction and preparation for English university study.
After Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, school life continued largely as before for a time, until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour in 1941. Overnight, citizens of the US and the British Empire became enemy aliens and everything changed at Chefoo School. They were, suddenly, prisoners of war. They were moved twice; firstly to another location in the town and later to Weihsien Internment Camp, where they were kept captive for two years until liberation by US soldiers in 1945.
The author heard about these events and knew this was a story she wanted to write. The novel’s characters are her own creations but she researched accounts of internment and pored over the archives from Chefoo School, to write an authentic and moving account of people living through great hardship and fearful times with humour, compassion and resilience.
The story centres around a teacher, Elspeth Kent, and three pupils who are young girls at the novel’s opening but teenagers by the time of liberation. Nancy, known as ‘Plum’ to her friends, is the child of missionaries and, even before her capture by the Japanese, had not seen her parents for three years. For someone like me, not familiar with the boarding school system, that seems an incredible time for a child to be without her parents. Nancy and her friends endure an additional four years under the most testing of circumstances.
What holds the children and teachers together are their friendships and the teachers’ steadfast adherence to maintaining a sense of safety and unity, and what we might think of as a ‘stiff upper lip.’ Or, as Miss Kent puts it,
I closed my eyes and absorbed the simple familiarity of the moment: chalk dust on my fingertips, the pool of winter sunlight against my cheek, the sounds of singing and instruction drifting along the corridors. Routine and discipline. The glue holding me together while the world was falling apart.
The Bird in the Bamboo Cage p25Told through alternating viewpoints of Miss Kent and young Nancy, we see the circumstances under which the school community must survive deteriorate rapidly; the brutality of some of the Japanese guards; the tragic experiences of the local Chinese communities.
There are two potent themes throughout: sunflower seeds and the Girl Guides. The seeds are given to Miss Kent by the school’s Chinese gardener just before they are moved from the campus. She plants a seed at various locations throughout the story, one in each place they are interned and in remembrance of specific people.
She resolutely keeps the rituals of the Guides alive for the girls in her charge, as a way of holding onto meaningful traditions for her pupils, and to follow the teachings of the Guides about honourable and right behaviour and deeds, despite the suffering and cruelty around them.
One interesting character who really was at Weihsien Internment Camp is Eric Liddell, the Scottish Olympic athlete on whom the film Chariots of Fire was based. He was held captive at the camp and sadly died there before the prisoners were liberated. There is a memorial at the location where he was buried.
Both Miss Kent and Nancy come to realise that freedom can be taken away from without but not from within. Nancy’s version of this understanding is this:
For the first time since we’d been under Japanese guard, I understood that freedom wasn’t something I had to wait for, but was something I could choose. In my mind, in my imagination and my memories, I could be as free as the birds that raced the wind, as free as the clouds that chased the sun far above me.
The Bird in the Bamboo Cage p277The Bird in the Bamboo Cage is a beautifully told story of loss and courage, the strength of the human spirit, and the bonds of friendship.
It is published by HarperCollins Publishers in September 2020.
My thanks to the publishers for a copy to read and review.
