I knew I wanted to go on looking for my great-great-great grandfather, and most of all to go again to his house at Wiseman’s Ferry. What I’d learned in London about finding the past in the landscape of the present could be applied to that half-remembered place, too.
But daily life enclosed me like a glove when I returned from London and I couldn’t get out of the city for some months. It was frustrating until I realised that something else was happening. It began to dawn on me that the Sydney I was walking in now was a different city from the one I’d left only a few weeks before. It was still the city I’d grown up in, where I had lived for most of my life. But now I was seeing it as Wiseman’s place as well.
I knew a bit about its past. Third Class at North Sydney Demonstration School had been taken to various historical landmarks: Sydney Cove, where the First Fleet dropped anchor in 1788: eleven ships, around seven hundred convicts and a couple of hundred soldiers to guard them.
We’d seen the area called The Rocks, on the western side of Sydney Cove, where the convicts had lived in caves until there were huts for them. It was all souvenir shops now, but still steep, full of strange tilting dogleg alleys that ended in flights of stone steps.
We’d been taken along Pitt Street and George Street, streets of skyscrapers and brisk men in dark suits. Somewhere under the bitumen, we were told, the invisible Tank Stream still ran. That stream was the reason why Captain Phillip had ordered those eleven ships to come to rest in this cove. There was nothing to see, but we ticked the box on our Excursion Sheet: Tank Stream.
We drew pictures of Cadman’s Cottage, the oldest building in Sydney; of the anchor of the Sirius, flagship of the First Fleet, on its plinth beneath the office blocks; took turns in the seat-shaped stone where the governor’s wife had liked to sit in the evening on the headland beside the Botanical Gardens.
It was all a bit like Mum’s stories: too close to home to be interesting, too often told, too remote from anything to do with us.
One day in August 2000 I had a free afternoon. I decided to go back to the Mitchell Library and make a start in the archives for anything else about Wiseman. I went by ferry because it was convenient: by coincidence, it was called the Sirius. It chugged past Goat Island, past Lavender Bay and beneath the sinister shadowed underside of the Harbour Bridge, then turned a corner in the water and there I was, right in the middle of Sydney Cove: the Opera House on the left, The Rocks on the right, and Circular Quay ahead.
Nothing was as it had been in 1788. And yet nothing had changed. The narrow cove of green water chopped and sparkled under the sun. With a shock I saw how much like the Thames it was: the same width across the cove, the same wash and smack of water against the shore. And the gulls! Like the ones I’d heard at Three Cranes Wharf, that sad mewing again.
The low spit of land on my left pointed into the main body of the Harbour. With my new eyes I could erase the Opera House and the fancy apartments and see it again as a long rocky arm protecting the cove. Ahead of me, the bay had been squared off to accommodate the wharves, but the shape of the land was still there. I could see the dish of the valley sloping up steeply left and right and running all the way back to where Central Station was now. I could imagine the creek—the Tank Stream—winding down the valley to the bay. Scattered along its banks were tents, huts, a few buildings like Cadman’s Cottage, with sagging rooflines and windows that weren’t straight.
This was the place Wiseman had been. The Sydney Harbour Ferry Sirius was idling, waiting for a spot at Wharf 5, near where the Alexander would have dropped anchor with Wiseman on board. They’d have brought the convicts up out of the dark hold—how painfully bright the light must have been! Over to my right, where the cruise ships tied up now, he would have stepped ashore, and glanced up, as I did, at the high ridge of The Rocks. The Harbour Bridge loomed above the whole place now, heroic and overwhelming, but he would have seen the steep hillside, with its angled plates and shelves of rock. He’d have seen the creek, the tents, the raggedy dirt tracks that were about to be named Pitt Street and George Street.
And, up there on the ridge, he might have seen the silhouette of another man, watching.
It was all gone, but it was all here. It had taken a foreign place to let me see what lay underneath my own.
In the library it felt different, too. The Public Record Office in Kew had shown me the power that a piece of paper could hold. It had shown me, too, not to be frightened of those arcane catalogues. I needed help with them, but that was okay. Kew had taught me humility as well.
The librarians walked me through all the catalogues: the Mitchell Library MSS Index Catalogue; the Mitchell Library Leaf Catalogues One and Two; the Sir William Dixson Library MSS Catalogue, including the Archival Estrays and the Supplementary MSS Catalogue; the Contents Lists of MSS Collections and the Small Pictures File. They explained about Webcat and Picman.
The Old Bailey transcripts, in their white boxes on the open shelves, had been beginner’s luck.
As my folders filled with Wiseman references—letters, petitions, lists—I was determined to keep things organised. I drew neat headings, made an index of references with circled numbers in colour-coded pens, wrote down all the call numbers, filed away my Request Slip carbons. I was discovering in myself an obsessive I’d never known was there.
I found dozens of references to Wiseman and slowly pieced together a life for him in Sydney.
He was sentenced in October 1805, sailed on the Alexander in January 1806, and arrived in Australia in September of that year. His wife Jane and the four-year-old William came out on the same boat as free settlers. (This wasn’t as unusual an arrangement as it sounds. The ratio of men to women in the colony resulted in a fair amount of what the authorities called ‘unnatural acts’. From time to time official policy was to increase the number of women, and allowing spouses to emigrate was an efficient way of doing that.)
The first mention of Wiseman after his arrival was in a list of prisoners granted their tickets-of-leave (a kind of parole) in 1810, followed in February 1812 by an Absolute Pardon.
I scratched out a little tally on my notepad, adding up how long he’d been a convict. Six years and six months. Not bad for someone who was to be punished for the term of his natural life—although a long stretch for stealing some timber.
Over the next twenty-five years Wiseman produced a mass of documents, mostly petitions to the governor (whose permission was needed for most things) and business correspondence. I was puzzled, because I’d always got from Mum the idea of him being illiterate. One of the documents explained it: he employed a clerk who lived as part of his household and, according to one account, was ‘in a permanent state of inebriety’.
The documents showed the path from penniless convict to wealthy landowner over a period of ten years. He began with an inn and became the owner of two boats in which he traded up and down the coast. Then his boats went further afield to New Zealand for the lucrative seal trade.
Meanwhile Jane Wiseman was having babies. Between 1806 and 1816 she gave birth to five more children—an average of a baby every two years. I was curious about Jane. Had she come willingly to Australia with Solomon? Or was it a matter of choosing between the streets or the workhouse, and going aboard the Alexander? What was it like for her, caring for a brood of infants in a settlement of hovels and huts?
But my curiosity had nothing to work on. Beyond the record of the children’s births, Jane was mentioned in the documents only once: in a begging petition of 1817 to the Governor she was described as being ‘in an actual state of invalidity’.
No wonder, with five children under ten to care for.
All these records were on microfilm, in tidy clerk’s copperplate. Then I filled out yet another request slip: Promissory Notes 1814/1815, AW47, expecting another white box of microfilm. What came back was a brown folder holding three flimsy slips of paper. They were printed, with spaces where you filled in the blanks. The first was dated October 15, 1814:
Four months after date I promise to repay Alexr Riley Esq, or order the Sum of Three Hundred and Sixty-One pounds, Nine shillings and Five pence Sterling.
Solomon Wiseman.
The signature was a compressed squiggle, a shape like a spring lying on its side. The ink was faded, like those I’d seen at Kew, pale brown on the yellowed old paper. But Wiseman’s hand had held the pen that made those marks. His hand had taken this piece of paper from someone, Alexander Riley perhaps, laid it on the table, steadied it while he inscribed the shape he’d learned, picked it up and given it back to Riley.
I wanted to rush over to the librarian, his head in the card catalogue. Look! I wanted to shout. His signature! He held this piece of paper in his hand!
There were three of these Promissory Notes, totalling around six hundred pounds. I guessed that was a massive sum for someone in his position.
Around the same time, I learned from another document, he mortgaged his inn. This was a man taking a big financial risk.
In 1817 he was unable to redeem the mortgage on the inn and had to surrender it. Of his debt to Alexander Riley I could find no record. Around the same time he was granted 200 acres of land on the Hawkesbury. Against this entry, the record noted ‘he has recently sustained great loss’.
I read on, hoping to find out what had happened.
He settled on that land and built what he described as a ‘farmhouse’. He went on trading up and down the river, carrying other people’s crops to the store in Sydney. Each year he applied for convict servants—every settler’s source of free labour—and was usually granted half the number he’d asked for. His farm flourished—his speciality was ‘hogs’ for the salt pork trade. When construction on the Great North Road began, running right past his land, he supplied the lucrative government tender to ‘victual the convicts’ who were building the road.
But why had he moved to the Hawkesbury? What had happened with the mortgage and all that money he’d borrowed?
The answer came when I went to the Sydney Gazette, Sydney’s first newspaper. In 1817 it reported that both of Wiseman’s boats—trading up and down the coast—were wrecked, within three months of each other. They were his main source of income. With them gone, he had no hope of repaying Alexander Riley or discharging the mortgage on the inn. Whether to escape his debt or simply to start again, he settled on the Hawkesbury.
In 1821 Jane Wiseman died ‘after a lingering illness’. She was about forty-five years old. I scoured the records for the slightest hint that her illness might have lingered because she was pushed down the stairs by her husband. I would have loved to find some tiny thread to start tugging on—all those petitions and letters about importing this, that and the other weren’t especially dramatic. But there were no clues.
A year after Jane’s death, in 1822, Wiseman married the widow of one of his farm-workers, a man named William Warner. His bride’s name was Sophia. Now the obsessive-compulsive researcher, I went back to the Old Bailey records and found the trial of a William Warner—perhaps the same one, perhaps not—at about the right time. Like Wiseman, Warner had been a Thames lighterman and had stolen some timber.
Wiseman could have known Warner back in London. It made me wonder if he had known Sophia then, too.
In spite of the lesson I thought I’d learned from all those scrawled family trees I’d dreamed up, I found myself leaping to fill in the blanks. Wiseman grows up knowing Sophia. He comes to love her and plans to marry her. But he’s tempted by Jane and she falls pregnant. He has to marry her, even though he’s still an apprentice. Sophia marries William Warner and comes out to Australia with him when he’s transported. Warner comes to work for Wiseman. Sophia is with him and the childhood romance is rekindled. There’s an argument with Jane, who’s jealous. She falls down the stairs. Warner conveniently dies too. Wiseman and Sophia marry and live happily ever after. I had to remind myself that, although this was a good story, that’s all it was: a story I’d made up out of almost nothing.
After their marriage, Wiseman and Sophia built an extension on their house and called the place Cobham Hall, the name of a stately home in Kent. The section of the river where they lived was known as The Branch, because the first branch or tributary of the Hawkesbury joined the main river at that point. There they lived grandly and entertained the gentry, including—according to the Gazette—the governor himself.
Right at the end of my list of references from the catalogues was one just called ‘Wiseman, S., MLMSS 3795’. I filled out the request slip without much interest—probably another business letter.
On the contrary, MLMSS 3795 was the only personal letter from Wiseman that I unearthed. It was written in 1828, when he was rich and respectable, to Sophia’s brother in England. I gulped it down.
Lower Branch, Hawkesbury, New South Wales
22nd May 1828
Dear Sir and brother,
I have now the unbound pleasure to inform you that I have married your sister Sophia Widow of the late Mr Wm Warner, our marriage took place about two years after the death of her late husband, and since our Union I have learnt to feel her inestimable value, and must acknowledge she is a Woman of Sound Sense, Prudence, and reflection, of a mild temper and accomplishments—therefore to all her relatives I wish to pay a due attention and respected regard as I sincerely feel it the happiest moment of my life, and am daily raising from threatning pain (by continual losses) into affluence and increased wealth, and my future expectations in life, I trust through Divine Providence will never more be blithed especially as I am joined to a Woman capable of having an opinion of her own; and if agreeable to you I shall correspond at convenient opportunity with you by letter as it is my intention to visit England in the course of 3 years—There was a Captain Pierce who came to this colony about 12 months ago, with a letter to my wife, but did not see the gentleman, nor receive the letter untill after he had sailed from Port Jackson when I was given to understand that such a person had arrived; I did without delay despatch a Couple of Horses to Sydney, in order to convey himself and another gentleman to my residence, but the Ship had left the harbour, the distance from Sydney to my place of abode is 60 miles, and, but 1 mile within these few months almost impassible, at present, Government has several working gangs, called road making parties employed making high roads in that direction, and I victual them by Contract.
To give a candid description of this Colony (‘infant’ as it is), its surprising rise and progress, would exceed the limits of my present correspondence, suffice to say its a wholesome climate, and every individual may, if his inclinations lead him towards industry, obtain a livelihood—and when infirmities—decease, and incripid old age incapacitates them from industrious earnings, there is an Assylum for them, let their conduct be ever so imprudent or mischievous—christian humanity is become the prevailing motto—Dear Sir I cannot conclude this letter without once more mentioning your sister, she has a conjugal and maternal heart, she is a Wife and a Mother continually preparing the way for my childrens independence and respectability, by teaching temperance and frugality, so to all her relations I beg leave with heartfelt affection to be remembered.
I remain yours with firm affection,
Solomon Wiseman
I found myself feeling sorry for him: the grovelling tone to his brother-in-law, the straining after the grand phrase, the elaborate strings of sentences! The way he betrayed himself at every turn—the words not quite right, the sentences trailing along with no grammar to hold them together, the innocent vulgarity (what gentleman would admit that he ‘victualled the convicts by contract’?).
And what did he really think about Sophia? ‘Sound sense, mild temper and accomplishments’ sounded cold-blooded, as if he might have wanted nothing more than a housekeeper and child-minder. But was there the flicker of another kind of feeling, more heartfelt, in ‘I feel it to be the happiest moment of my life’? And what about his appreciation of Sophia being ‘capable of having an opinion of her own’? What sort of relationship did that suggest? What sort of man?
The letter might have been what every ‘family historian’ longs for, to understand their ancestor. But it was also a mass of possibles, maybes, perhapses, as every other document had been.
Whatever the words meant, though, they were his. In two hundred years, the email I wrote yesterday might be hard to interpret too. Human beings were slipperier than the ones I was familiar with on the page: the creatures of fiction. This was the muddle of real life.