The Remarkable Mrs Reibey by Grantlee Kieza
About the author
Award-winning journalist Grantlee Kieza OAM held senior editorial positions at The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Courier-Mail for many years and was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for his writing. He is a Walkley Award finalist and the author of more than twenty acclaimed books.
Review
From noose to NSW, a woman of note. The Australian, June 10 2023. Grantlee Kieza
One of the most influential women in our early colonial history began her journey to the colonies disguised as a boy, writes Grantlee Kieza. Mary Reibey is the face you see smiling benignly from Australia’s $20 note – a contented matriarch who was one of the most enterprising figures in Australian colonial history.
How much do you know about this extraordinary businesswoman? She was a shipping and trading magnate, and a property developer whose real estate holding stretched across much of what is now Sydney’s central business district, and included large slices of Newtown and Hunter’s Hill, and large farms along the Hawkesbury and Shoalhaven rivers, and in the colony that would become known as Tasmania. One of her grand Sydney homes became the original headquarters for Australia’s first financial institution, the Bank of NSW.
Yet her remarkable life in Australia began with transportation as a convict. In August 1791 the English market town of Stafford was bathed in a soft evening glow as Mary, then a 14-year-old girl from Lancashire, cantered a stolen horse along a country lane.
In England in 1791, horse thieves could be hanged by the neck until dead, 14 years old or not.
This high-spirited orphan was wearing the clothes of a teenage boy and going by the name of a dead male friend. In this guise, Mary thought she might evade the law, at least in the short term.
Appearing as a boy would make it easier for her to blend into her surrounds. And there was less chance of a boy being robbed or raped by the pistol-toting highwaymen who preyed on travellers throughout England.
As Mary cantered the horse below the beech and elm trees, her small, slight, flat-chested frame was garbed in a baggy labourer’s smock. On her feet were tattered leather boots, and a cloth cap was pulled low over her cherubic round face and reddish-brown hair.
Her hopes of evading the law proved fruitless when she tried to sell the horse for survival money in Stafford. Still in the disguise of a boy, she was thrown into a filthy cell with 50 male prisoners, many of whom were awaiting execution.
Alone, trembling and terrified, and still dressed as a boy in the hope it would protect her in jail, she faced the feared Mr Justice John Heath, known as a “hanging judge” for the harsh sentences he imposed.
When the capital case was held in Stafford on August 25, 1791, Mary was asked to state her name and age.
“James Borrow,” she said, though her Lancashire accent made it sound like “Burrow”. She told the judge she was “14 years” and, in a quaking voice, claimed she was not guilty.
But the evidence against her was overwhelming.
Her knees knocked as a bailiff placed a piece of black cloth on the judge’s bewigged head, and Heath uttered lines he knew by heart. “The law is that thou shalt return to the place whence thou camest,” the judge declared, “and from thence be carried to the place of execution where thou shalt be hanged by the neck ’til thy body be dead. And the Lord have mercy upon thy soul.” The judge’s words hit like the crack of Mary’s neck breaking. The chill of the grave ran through her body. A gaoler’s hand clutched at her shoulder and, as her knees gave way, he half threw her out of the dock.
On a parchment charge sheet, a bailiff wrote, “Guilty”. Later, a court clerk added, “To be hanged: No goods.” Poor little Mary, terrified and apparently friendless, had not a single possession to leave behind except the boy’s clothing on her scrawny back.
While Mary waited, petrified, in the days after the verdict, she watched as condemned men were dragged away to hang before jeering crowds. But in the darkness and torment of her stinking communal cell, there emerged a ray of hope.
Justice Heath reconsidered the verdict given the “tender age” of the offender he still knew as James Burrow. He commuted the sentence to seven years’ transportation to the new penal colony at Sydney Cove.
Mary was breathing easier, but she knew she still had a cruel journey ahead to New South Wales – a place the prisoners had heard was a godforsaken hellhole.
Nine months after she had been sentenced to death, an English newspaper reported that on May 14, 1792 prisoners were loaded on to the convict ship Royal Admiral, lying at Gravesend, “and bound for Botany Bay”.
The report related how Mary was “an active lass … capitally convicted at the last Stafford assizes for horse-stealing” under the disguise of a boy.
The convicts were packed in tight for what would be an arduous voyage that lasted five months. Five of the convict women and girls were pregnant. Governor Arthur Phillip later reported that 10 convict men and two women died on the passage, and four children were born, one of whom died.
When the Royal Admiral arrived in Sydney Harbour in October 1792, Mary was able to scratch out a note that one of her jailers said he could send back to England for her. Now 15, Mary promised an aunt in Lancashire that she would make herself as happy as she could, despite her present “situation”.
As she surveyed the magnificence of Sydney’s wide harbour and looked at the ships bobbing about on it, she knew that having escaped the noose in England, she had a second chance at life. This vast waterway was her route to a whole new world of opportunity, and she intended to grasp it.