by Peter Wells
And we know about the ship in which he was transported to Australia. The Mangles was a small schooner, 121 feet in length and built of teak, with 190 males and no females on board. The voyage took 106 days; eighty-one members of the 40th Regiment acted as guards. There were rumours of a mutiny outside Tenerife but these turned out to be false. Three men died on the voyage. The ship arrived in Sydney Cove on 27 October 1824, and Samuel Northey Mangles (as the authorities called him) was immediately forwarded to Bathurst.
From then on he would be identified by the ship in which he was transported, as if it were his nose, or the colour of his eyes, or his tribe. As for his thoughts, or his role in the rumoured mutiny or anything else, there is just a blunt, painful silence. Silence wrapped so tight that it forms a gag.
A convict does not have thoughts. If he does they are not worth anything. Besides, if thought is not written down as opinion, it escapes into the air like vapour and vanishes.
Here is what we know. He arrived at Sydney Cove and was taken to Cockatoo Island, then moved to Bathurst ‘for distribution’. In 1828 he was assigned to a Mr Balcomb of Bathurst as a bullock driver. That same year he was sent into a deeper exile, to Wellington Valley, New South Wales, which was a place to fear. There were only males here, and it constituted virtual imprisonment by geography. The road to the settlement was ‘one of the longest and most difficult overland routes in the colony’, and Wellington Valley was ‘a sort of inland Norfolk Island’.1 To attempt to escape was often fatal: men would wander lost in a harsh landscape, or would be scooped up by Aboriginals, who stripped them of the rags they were wearing before delivering them back to the prison settlement.
What happened for Samuel Northey to be sent into the deeper exile of Wellington Valley? Inmates here were denied all the things that ameliorate a convict’s lot, such as ‘better employment, the possible patronage of a generous master, the associations and networks formed with other prisoners and civilians and the company of women … Nearly all had at some time been disciplined by a superintendent or magistrate for theft, insolence, drunkenness, gambling or being absent from muster.’2 It was a place of despair. We don’t know specifically what Samuel had done to warrant being sent there, but it was the beginning of a pattern: for every step forward there was a step backwards.
He got his ticket of leave (a document a convict had to carry, signifying he was no longer imprisoned but was free to work on condition he turned up to monthly musters) on 28 March 1835, but by 22 July 1840 it was cancelled when he was found to be ‘absent from muster’. A month later he was charged with forgery by the Bathurst Bench — he had been ‘illegally at large’. Three months later he was ‘apprehended after absconding’.3
Sergeant John Northe arrived in Bathurst with the army in 1838. Did Samuel Northey go walkabout in an attempt to see a family member? It seems a human enough motive. He got a second ticket of leave on 25 April 1846 after a petition was sent to Governor FitzRoy. (Was this John Northe’s work?) Finally, on 3 September 1850, he was granted a conditional pardon: he was free but could not leave the open prison that was Australia. The official record of his body — he was still regarded as a form of human livestock — registers his rough existence inside the prison system.
In addition to the tattooing and scars he had when he first arrived, there were now ‘[t]wo powder marks under the inner corner of his right eye, near inner corner of the right eyebrow’ — more tattooing — and under his left jaw there were five crosses. These tattoos are like signs of his tribal identity — convict. That is how he ‘speaks’.4 There was a scar on the heel of his left hand, and another on the top of the middle finger of his left hand. (His conditional pardon lists these characteristics, in case the pardon needs to be withdrawn: he can still be identified.)
Twenty-five years into his term was very late for a convict to get a conditional pardon, and it reflects his recidivism — he couldn’t keep out of trouble. He finally did so on 15 March 1860 when he died in Wellington, New South Wales (360 kilometres inland from Sydney), apparently without a common-law wife or children. I do not know where he is buried.
One document, however, gives us a flavour of his life. A handwritten document sent as a letter, titled Journal from Memory of a Journey by Land from Wellington Valley to Port Macquarie Performed by Overseer Oliver and five men with Govt Stock from the 3rd of February to 27 May 1831, records a geographical misadventure, an example of how these immigrants had no real knowledge of the land they set out intrepidly to cross, driving 113 cattle (100 oxen, seven pack bullocks, six pack horses) before them. ‘Sam Northey Mangles’ was part of the prison party, possibly chosen because of his skill with oxen. Ahead of them lay the kind of disaster that Patrick White might have written about.
The surveyor of the convict settlement had given the overseer, Alex Oliver, directions to head due north-east when the party left Wellington Valley, but this led them into a maze of landscape that was almost biblical in its extremity. February, of course, is high summer in Australia. They wandered, lost, the animals slowly dying of exhaustion and thirst. In the end they had to eat seven of the animals to survive. Others were abandoned as the party took ten days to cross a mountain range — ‘the most barren I ever saw’ wrote the overseer, in this document which is essentially a long letter of apology and exculpation. Three pack horses ‘[d]ied on the Barren Mountains’. One bullock ‘[ f]ell down a precipice’. ‘Both Horses and Cattle were almost reduced to a State of Starvation; Three of the Horses being Old, and totally unable to withstand the fatigue died.’ But on the other side of the mountains was a river, ‘the most beautiful I ever saw’, coursing through ‘fine and delightful Country’. It must have seemed like paradise to the gaunt, thirsty and probably freaked-out men.
But Oliver then decided to right their course by going in a south-easterly direction, which led them into ‘a thick Scrub by which I was soon entirely surrounded’. They could find no way out so just had to keep going forward. They had to then abandon ‘[n]ine Head of Cattle through absolute fatigue and starvation’ — there was no feed in the scrub and ‘three of the Pack Bullocks … laid down quite unable to proceed any further’. There is such despair in that simple sentence. Once again, however, the men reached ‘a fine and fertile valley profuse with pastorage of the finest quality and a fine Stream of Water … Had we not come to this Valley at this time, the Whole of the Cattle must have inevitably have Perished.’
From here Oliver set out to find an escape, leaving the cattle behind. After a fortnight he knew it was hopeless. He made a decision to abandon the cattle in this valley — ‘knowing that the Cattle could not get away’ (he underlined this in his letter) — and to ‘proceed with the Men to Port McQuarrie’. If this sounds simple, his final paragraph underlines how even this was trial by landscape: ‘During the latter part of our Journey our Provisions became entirely exhausted, in Consequence of which, and to keep ourselves from a State of Starvation we were necessitated at intervals to kill [Seven] of the smaller and Inferior Cattle.’5
They arrived at Port Macquarie after three harrowing months in the wilderness. They had lost the entire herd of cattle. It was a disaster.
What did Samuel Northey Mangles make of this experience? One of the striking features of this long litany of misfortune is that the party of convicts and overseers seem to occupy a psychological terra nullius. Not a single Aboriginal is sighted, spoken to, or offers any directions or help. Or was it that their presence was invisible or discounted?
The narrative is as much a psychological account of being profoundly lost as a recitation of an actual journey. Oliver never speaks of his companions. The entire narrative is delivered in the first person as if he were alone and the six men were non-beings — humans who, strictly speaking, did not exist.
There’s a sense of parallel, disconnected realities when Captain Smythe of the 39th Commandant at Port Macquarie, writing to the Colonial Secretary about the disaster, ends his report on some runaway convicts who have been
returned to the prison system — they were ‘on the road in parties of twos and threes, some are said to have died on the way from fatigue … the state of the unfortunate wretches [who reach us is that they] are invariably stripped soon after leaving Moreton Bay, in other respects The Natives are said to be kind to them until they reach Trial Bay.’6
How to relate this non-being to the cheerful ‘Brother Sam’ of Elizabeth’s chirpy letters, a man who might be lucky enough to discover gold? Significantly Elizabeth’s letter was written in 1852, by which time ‘Brother Sam’ was two years into his freedom. It implies they were in contact somehow, either through Sergeant John meeting his brother in person or Sergeant John being in touch with people who knew of ‘Brother Sam’.
There is a feeling of being up to date with news about him, possibly through the ‘Sidney merchant’ Elizabeth mentions, who could well have been a convict made good. (In the 1846 census the population of New South Wales was approximately 118,000. From 1780–1840, around 80,000 convicts were sent to the colony and so the chances of the ‘Sidney merchant’ being an ex-convict were high.) Perhaps there were underground connections of feeling and thoughts. But without written language, which has an obsidian-like way of persisting through time, we do not know. There is only an obdurate, even resentful silence. Silence like a bruise.
THIS CONNECTS US WITH ANOTHER actor in our drama: Nancy Northe, born Anne Sophia O’Donnell, who married Sergeant John Northe in 1838 in Bathurst. From this union came every member of the Northe and Northey families in New Zealand.
Nancy O’Donnell was born in 1819 in New South Wales, and for a long time I believed she was the author of the four letters written in Napier between April 1869 and August 1871 signed ‘John and Ann Northe’. (Nancy and Ann seemed to be interchangeable names.) The letters, collected by the family historian Percy Northe, who collated a family tree in the 1950s, are full of information on pregnancy: ‘Mrs W. Northe is expecting an increase in the family every day and Mrs Ben Johnson is talking about it.’7 This is more usually the province of women.
It was only when I got John Northe’s will from Archives New Zealand that I discovered a vital piece of evidence: a sharp, even emphatic cross placed where Nancy should have signed the document.8 The cross is fascinating, almost a haiku in the way the nib seems to have dug savagely into the paper. Beside it is written ‘her mark’. Nancy was illiterate — she could not even sign her name, though this was something many illiterate people trained themselves to do in the nineteenth century. This makes her even more of an enigma. Who was the mark otherwise known as Nancy or Ann Northe?
Not even her name is straightforward. I am calling her Nancy Northe, but her name has a curious fluidity. Her birth certificate of 21 March 1819 lists her as Anne Sophia, but by her baptism on 6 June 1819 she is Nancy, which is probably the name she was called within the family. The letters are signed ‘John and Ann Northe’ — the name used on her death certificate.
Her headstone in Napier cemetery, shattered by the 1931 earthquake, has yet another version — ‘Ann Northey’.
I’ll call her Nancy, because this seems to fit her demotic Irish background. Nancy was the daughter of Hugh O’Donnell, an Irishman from County Sligo. He was also illiterate. His surname had a parallel instability to his daughter’s Christian name, moving constantly between O’Donnell and O’Donald. The two names sound approximately the same, and a literate person was often left to choose which variant to write down. Hugh was a Catholic, working as a labourer until he went into the British Army. He had come to Australia in February 1810 on the Anne II as part of the 73rd Royal Highland Black Watch Regiment, and he acted as a guard on the ship which carried 197 convicts. Also on board were the missionary Samuel Marsden and the very first missionaries to New Zealand, William Hall and Thomas King. The boat also carried Ruatara, nephew of Te Puhi, under whose auspices the first Christian missions were established in Aotearoa New Zealand. This link gives some context for the O’Donnells as an early Australian colonial family.9
There was a thin but all-important membrane between convicts and the people who kept them imprisoned in the essentially open-prison state of New South Wales. Hugh, as a free man, was rewarded with 100 acres in Liberty Plains, Parramatta, which he seems to have been slow to develop. (This was after his discharge from the army.) In 1828 only 20 acres were cleared and he had seven cattle. Two convict servants worked in his house, which would seem to point to a modicum of comfort.
Despite her father being described as ‘a devout Catholic’, Nancy O’Donnell was brought up Protestant. Her mother, Mary Lakeman, was a Devonshire lass who managed to bring up every one of her children as Protestant. Nancy herself was always identified as Protestant in official documents. In the 1828 census she was listed as being P (Protestant) and BC (born in the colony). Her death certificate lists her as being Protestant. Hugh chose to be buried completely separately from his Protestant family in the Catholic cemetery at Parramatta. Where your bones lie, or rather under which faith, was important.
The brief romance of Nancy O’Donnell and John Northe is startling. He arrived in Australia on 1 September 1838, and had married her two months later. He may well have decided that at age thirty-nine time was running out; he would marry the first suitable woman who came along. (The British Army permitted six members per hundred of ‘other ranks’ the opportunity of marrying. It was a kind of ballot. Up until then it was taken for granted that single soldiers would use prostitutes for sexual pleasure. Perhaps Sergeant Northe’s number had at long last come up on the ballot and he hastened to make good on the opportunity.)
Nancy was nineteen. Although she had a malformed hand and was plain, she would have been regarded as good child-bearing stock: her mother had suffered through a marathon ten births. Nancy would also go on to have ten children, the last of whom was born when she was forty-five.
Nancy O’Donnell also came from an army family, so by marrying Sergeant Northe she had married ‘in’. One of her sisters, Elizabeth, also married an army man, a sergeant like John Northe: Francis McSorley, colour sergeant in the 57th Regiment. John and Nancy’s wedding took place in the handsome sandstone Presbyterian church of St Andrew’s, Parramatta, on 17 November 1838. Nancy’s sister Mary, a housemaid who worked at Government House, and her husband-to-be, a footman named Robert Green, both acted as witnesses.10
But what was Nancy like? Here is a family story, for what it’s worth. Governor Darling’s wife is out in her carriage. The horse is startled and bolts. Nancy somehow manages to grab hold of the reins and bring the out-of-control horse to a halt. The Governor’s wife’s life is saved. Apocryphal or not? When? Where is the newspaper report? Where was Nancy that she managed to control the bolting horse? Was she inside the carriage? Still, the image of a young woman capable of subduing a runaway horse is apt for one who is going to mother a brood of sons and a brace of daughters and keep them in order. She needed to be strong.
Here is another story. She used her malformed hand to clip her children painfully when they attended church. It was how she got them to keep quiet. One might say she was very much a sergeant’s wife.
COMPARED WITH THE ABUNDANCE OF names and identities by which we know Anne Sophia/Nancy/Ann, there are very few photographs. This is by no means unusual. To go into a photographic studio was a significant and relatively costly undertaking. It is fitting to Nancy Northe’s modest place in the world that the earliest photo we have of her is a tin-type, a budget form of photograph, tiny in circumference even if sharp in its portrayal of detail. She looks out at the world over the photographer’s shoulder, her eyes slightly averted to the left; her hair is combed back in a severe mid-Victorian style (unusually, she does not wear a hat). But she has dressed up for the photograph. She has a soft scarf and some flowers around her neck, and she wears what looks like a large locket. Her granddaughter Grace Northe is so like her that Nancy O’Donnell seems to have established a strong genetic brand. She looks formidable. She is not pretty. Possibly she is ev
en a battle-axe. But that is presuming a little too much, because the immobility required of early photography demanded a set expression.
The image is a cut-price one and if you turn it sideways you get a sheen of use, of endurance through time. It is the only image we have of Nancy O’Donnell as a relatively young woman — and I always feel we need photographs of our ancestors as young people starting out so we can get some sense of them as adventurers. Mostly we end up with the rather deadening images of aged respectables draped — or is it entombed? — in black tassels and fringes and feather and jet. All sense of adventure and hot promise has gone.
I do not know where the tin-type was taken. It bears no identifying marks. She left her family behind in Australia forever aged twenty-eight. It may well be at this fracture point that she had the modest portrait done, to send back to her favourite sister Mary in Parramatta.11
The second portrait, shown at the start of this chapter, is fascinating. A large crease runs right across the face, seeming to delete her personality. She wears an elaborate outfit, with its lovely mid-Victorian combination of busy checks, plaids, flounces, tassels and veils. Nancy looks richly dressed, like a lady in a fashionable bonnet. But there is, I am theorising, a reason for this.
The life of the wife of a sergeant was by no means easy. Earlier she would have had to live in communal barracks, which lacked privacy and would not have sheltered her from everyday male brutality. The wife of a sergeant was also expected to do the duty of a lady’s maid to the wife of an officer. It was her job, for example, to wash and clean and tend to the elaborate business of a Victorian lady’s dress, at a time when dress and clothing still displayed the differences in rank. (You could tell at a glance at a person’s clothing where someone belonged — higher than you or lower — and you reacted accordingly.)
