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| ISBN-13: | 9781743432044 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 02/01/1999 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Convict Women
By Kay Daniels
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 1998 Kay DanielsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86448-677-3
CHAPTER 1
MARIA LORD
Maria Lord was a convict woman who was sent to New South Wales in the early period before Macquarie became governor. Her shipboard companions were among the first women to be housed in the Female Factory at Parramatta and she was said to have been chosen there to become the mistress of an officer. She arrived in Hobart at a time when there were very few female convicts in the settlement, became one of its richest and most successful women and lived through the whole period of direct transportation to Van Diemen's Land, dying just after its cessation in 1856.
My first glimpse of Maria Lord in the historical records was as an early entrepreneur, a 'Vandemonian Mary Reibey', who had married a trader, a rich man in his own right, and had gone on to manage the business. A fleeting reference in Historical Records of Australia added another dimension. She was an 'infamous' convict woman who, unlike Mrs Reibey, was not reclaimed for respectability nor given ultimate national recognition on the face on an Australian banknote. Notoriety exists in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder in this case was William Bligh: the description was one abusive phrase among many, and directed at her husband Edward rather than at Maria herself. Was this by itself so damning? More research revealed a complex story. Mrs Lord was the mother of a large family, accepted in Hobart's best society, but her marriage did not last and Edward Lord's repudiation of her was highly public. She continued independently in business and announced her intention to provide for herself and those of her children not removed from her by her husband.
The female entrepreneur, the convict whore, the happy family woman and the abandoned wife represent four major narratives in the debate about the nature and fate of women in colonial society. Too much time has been spent choosing between them. Maria Lord's story demonstrates that not all women were destined for the single fate suggested by these stark categories.
What we know about Maria Lord is so little that it would be rash to call what follows biography. There are no diaries or personal letters. No text reveals her inner life or her daily experiences. There is no portrait or sketch. What is known about the first twenty years of her life fills half a page, and little more is known about the last thirty. The press provides some information in the form of advertisements, notices and shipping lists. Her own writing consists of copies of business letters, signatures on receipts and on some documents which mark public rites of passage — marriage, birth. Because she was a convict and came before the law we might expect those records to disclose most, even if from an impersonal and partial perspective. In her case, however, the criminal record of her early life is scant, and when the intimate details of her personal life came before the courts and the press in a most unusual way, what is remarkable about the occasion is the deliberate silence of the public record. There is, however, a certain appropriateness about the absence of documentary evidence. One of the more bizarre acts of her husband, Edward Lord, was to burn the archives of Van Diemen's Land on the death of the man he succeeded for a short time — Lieutenant-Governor Collins.
This historical invisibility Maria Lord shares with other convict women. The prominence of her husband allows us to reconstruct much more of her life than would have been possible had he been less important.
If we begin with the story of Mrs Lord, successful entrepreneur, 1820 is an appropriate starting point. This is the height of her economic power and influence in Van Diemen's Land and the best documented period in the history of the Lord enterprise. In 1820 Edward Lord, by now said to be the richest man in Van Diemen's Land, had gone to England to pursue another land grant from Lord Bathurst and to challenge Macquarie's assertion that he was 'vindictive and implacable', leaving Maria in charge of the business. During 1819 — 20 Maria's dealings attracted the attention of the colonial authorities, and she was accused of attempting to create a monopoly in wheat and meat. She was said to be trying to inflate prices and use her influence over other large suppliers to ensure that they did the same. To Commissioner Bigge she was described as 'the person possessing the greatest local influence in the colony', with her control extending to over a third of the local resources of the island. It was anticipated that within a year the commissariat stores would be 'at the mercy of Mrs Lord and one or two others'.
Mrs Lord's monopoly did not stop at wheat and meat. In the same year, 1820, she was said to share with Kemp & Co. almost total control over the best-quality rum in Van Diemen's Land. She was also in business with partners other than her husband. She and her brother John Riseley, who had come out as a free settler in the previous year, acquired at that time eighteen merino rams, more than any other buyer in the colony. When Bigge came to Hobart, regardless of the repute in which he held her, he stayed in Mrs Lord's house in Macquarie Street. He was, she wrote, 'to be accommodated with my House, which has been put in a state for his reception'. It was the best house in town and the setting for some of its grand balls and dinners. Maria, as usual, made a good profit from the arrangement.
Whether we see her at this time as one of the most powerful people in Van Diemen's Land or as the wife of its richest man, Maria Lord's success in the fifteen years since her arrival was remarkable.
Maria's husband, Edward Lord, was born in Pembroke, Wales, on 15 June 1781. His father had been mayor of the town and his mother was the daughter of Lieutenant-General John Owen, brother of Sir William Owen, fourth baronet, of Orielton. He was also connected to the Barlows of Lawrenny, another wealthy Pembrokeshire family. His elder brother inherited the Orielton estate, took the name Sir John Owen and went on to serve as a Member of the House of Commons for over fifty years. Edward joined the Royal Marines as a second lieutenant, accompanied Lieutenant- Colonel David Collins to the aborted settlement at Port Phillip and subsequently to Van Diemen's Land in February 1804 when Collins took over from Lieutenant Bowen at the Derwent. There he was quick to see the opportunities the new settlement offered. His family connections (publicly proclaimed in the names he gave to his two substantial colonial properties) and his colonial contacts were both to serve him well.
In Van Diemen's Land, with his friend Adolorius Humphrey, a mineralogist, Lord quickly got into the meat trade. The form their infant enterprise took — providing the kangaroo carcasses which sustained the hungry settlers — was an indication of the primitive and desperate state of the camp at Hobart Town in its first years. Acquiring five dogs for £25, they provided (according to Humphrey) 1000 pounds of kangaroo meat to the settlement a week at sixpence a pound, as well as selling the skins for shoe leather. Kangaroo formed an essential part of the diet of the settlement. The Revd Robert Knopwood recorded its first killing 'by any of the gentlemen in the camp' on 13 March 1804, and thereafter (when not listing his own bag of quail, ducks, pigeons, black swans, 'horks', and 'emews') records occasions when he ventured out with Mr Lord and his 'doggs' after kangaroo or sent his servant and his own dogs out for the same. Giving evidence before a committee of the House of Commons in 1812, Lord testified to the hardship of the early years: 'During eight or nine years we entirely depended on the woods. We had 21bs. of biscuit weekly for thirteen months ... I have often myself been glad to go to bed for want of bread.' Lord bought and sold flour and livestock, and like his fellow officers in the New South Wales Corps, bought and smuggled rum. While he was involved in supplying the resource-starved settlement with goods he began to build up extensive landholdings stocked with cattle and sheep.
He and Humphrey together built a small house, the first in Hobart. Knopwood dined there with him for the first time on 19 June 1804. Building at the settlement was slow and haphazard, and much of what was built was insubstantial. The wattle-and-daub cottage consisted of four rooms, one of which accommodated Humphrey and his equipment, one Lieutenant Lord, and a third was lent to fellow officer William Sladden and his wife. As John West said, 'That it was the first, constituted its chief claim to distinction'. An early drawing of the house exists and a sketch of Hobart at this time shows it as 'Sladden's cottage'.
After a year in the southern settlement Lord asked for sick leave to return to England. He and Humphrey left Hobart on 4 March 1805 on the return trip to Sydney of the Sophia, which had arrived in the estuary a month before with a small group of female convicts on board, but instead of going to England he spent six months in New South Wales, returning to Van Diemen's Land on the Sydney on 28 November. He brought back with him some cattle and sheep, including a gift from Governor King — a ram 'near the Spanish breed', probably from the flock of the man with whom he has been compared, John Macarthur. Promoted to first lieutenant at the end of the year, early in 1806 he received his first land grant (apart from the land on which he built his house): 100 acres. By late 1806 he was the colony's largest stock-owner and the second most senior officer in the settlement.
The 1805 trip was auspicious for more than the gift of the merino. John Pascoe Fawkner describes the subsequent arrival in Hobart of Lord's 'Paramour', 'notorious Maria Risley of Sydney', bringing with her a quantity of trading goods for what became her shop. According to Fawkner she quickly became involved in the rum trade, making huge profits. Allegations about Lord's involvement were made but never substantiated (though Knopwood recorded in his diary in 1807 that Lieutenant Lord had landed a cask of spirits without a permit — 'His men came past my house with it in a barrow', he wrote). One of Lord's accusers was the splenetic Governor Bligh, who alleged that he traded through his wife while he was still an officer and barred from commercial dealings. If he did, and it seems certain that it was so, he followed the pattern established by some of his fellow officers in Sydney who used assigned convicts as middlemen in their trading ventures.
For this part of Maria Risley's (or Riseley) career we are dependent on hearsay, and Maria herself formally dated her business activities from 1813 (when they were clearly legal), not 1805.
When Collins died in 1810 Lord took over the control of the settlement until relieved by Captain Murray. It was he who burnt the records of the colony and organised the elaborate and expensive funeral for his dead commander. He went to England in 1812 and, disappointed when he failed to be appointed lieutenant-governor, he resigned his commission. Before this he had received land grants of about 600 acres. Through the influence of his brother, Sir John Owen MP, he received a further grant of 3000 acres, half of it in New South Wales, and he returned to Van Diemen's Land in March 1813 with £30 000 worth of goods on his own ship, the James Hay. Lord's fully fledged and legitimate entry into trading began at that time and coincided with the opening of the ports of Hobart and Port Dalrymple to general trading and to trade in spirits. Maria, it seems, was his partner in 'the shop' — the trading establishment which grew so greatly after 1813.
How involved was Maria Lord in the Lord enterprise? One must assume that she played an active enough role during Lord's presence in the colony for him to place quite happily with her the entire running of his Van Diemen's Land ventures during his absences, which from 1819 became longer and more frequent. Advertisements in the Hobart Town Gazette in 1818 when Edward Lord was in Van Diemen's Land carried her name. On one occasion during that period she advertised for sawyers, labourers and seamen to join the brig Jupiter on a trip to the Gordon River, in pursuit, no doubt, of Huon pine. When he was absent in 1819–20 she acted as his agent. On Christmas Day 1819 it was Mrs Lord's festive greeting which appeared in the Gazette: 'Mrs Lord calls upon the numerous Persons who stand indebted to her, as Agent to Edward Lord, Esq, to come forward and settle their respective Accounts at the close of the present Month and Year.'
She was always very involved in the running of the store in Hobart. It was usually referred to as her store. Whether Lord was in Hobart or not, notes for goods went to his wife. When Lieutenant-Governor Davey wanted a pound of green paint or a quantity of salt the note went to Mrs Lord, as did this note from his daughter: 'Miss Davey will thank Mrs Lord to send her by the bearer one ounce of white bugles [beads].' On Christmas Day 1814 William Morgan sent an order from Hollow Tree: 'Mrs Lord please to let the Blackman Cazzar have two Gallons of Rum for me and place the same on my account.' Knopwood placed his orders for tea, sugar, butter, tobacco and gallons of rum with Mrs Lord and, when in Bagdad in March 1814 he saw a party going to Port Dalrymple with a cartload of goods, he identified them as hers. Each of these last references came from a year when Maria was not engaged in child-bearing, although in 1812, with a newborn baby and Edward in England, she seems to have been in charge of the business.
It is tempting to characterise Maria as the shopkeeper, the partner who stays at home and minds the business, and Edward as the peripatetic adventurer, constantly adding to his empire, fighting rivals both in the marketplace and in the courts. He travelled to England in 1812 and stayed there some months, again during 1819 and 1822 returning only briefly between October 1824 and early January 1825. Although he returned to Van Diemen's Land three more times in 1827, 1838 and 1846, from May 1822 he was a visitor to the colony rather than a resident. While he was in Van Diemen's Land he visited Sydney, sometimes for lengthy periods, travelled to Port Dalrymple and took frequent short sea voyages to relieve his asthma.
No serious attention has been paid to his wife's role in the accumulation of the wealth of 'the richest man in Van Diemen's Land'. The assumption usually made is that the business brain behind the building of the Lord enterprise is that of the well-connected Welsh lieutenant and not that of the convict woman. Mable Hookey, for instance, described Maria Lord this way:
Mrs Lord, an unlettered woman, was left behind [when Lord returned to Britain] though as the settlement was well aware, she and the Lt were legally married. She opened a store and traded with the whalers that came to the port of Hobart Town. She could not read or write but employed a sort of sign language in keeping her accounts — a circle represented a cheese and so on.
A closer look at the period when Maria was creating her monopolies within the Van Diemen's Land economy does not suggest that she was either illiterate or that she was merely 'minding the shop' while her entrepreneur husband initiated bolder ventures.
Her letters of this period are those of an astute woman, 'assiduous in Business' as she described herself later; a woman, too, with broader ideas about the economic development of the colony. They reveal that she was acutely aware of what later came to be seen as the central problem in the infant economies of the penal settlements. In the absence of an export staple, the large sums of money which flooded out to pay for goods imported by overseas traders were not balanced by export earnings. What Hainsworth said of New South Wales in the early period was true of Van Diemen's Land: the major export of the new colony was not goods but money. In these letters Maria Lord comments on the effect on trade of the numbers of British ships which arrive in the colony 'laden with merchandise', glutting the market and pulling down profits. The key issue, she suggests, is the shortage of money which results from the repatriation of profits and cash to Britain with the departure of each of these trading ships. Local men of property, such as her husband, have wealth but not money. As she says of Edward, 'extensive as his property here is the unconvertible shape of the great bulk, together with the uncertainty of Markets for produce, and the little Money on the Island, frequently leave us with little more Cash than local demand requires'. Elsewhere she comments on how much can be done with money in the colony, what 'the opportunity [is] of turning it here'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Convict Women by Kay Daniels. Copyright © 1998 Kay Daniels. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,Introduction,
1 Maria Lord,
2 Writing about convict women,
3 Transportation and its management,
4 Assignment,
5 The female factories: the failure of reform,
6 Rough culture and rebellion,
7 Sexuality,
8 Prostitution,
9 Freedom,
10 Heritage,
Endnotes,
Index,