The Horse Who Bit a Bushranger (17 page)

Billy (William) Marks and Ann Lamb were my great-great-great-grandparents. I am descended from the Elijah in this book, who married Sarah Quince. My mother remembers Elijah as an old and slightly spooky man, living with his daughter. (If anyone is trying to do the maths, it’s worth knowing that members of my mother’s family usually live to a very ripe old age and the women don’t start to grow grey till their seventies.) Elijah had lost an arm. Family legend differs on how he lost it: one story says it shrivelled in the cold when he was gold-panning in the river; another says it was amputated after an infection.

Sarah passed on the story of the dance with Ben Hall to her daughter, Emily, who married Gilbert Sheldon. I was only three when my great grandmother Emily died, but can remember her telling me the story. Emily’s daughter Thelma was my grandmother. She told me the story often too. Thelma’s daughter Valerie is my mother.

The only thing I’ve inherited from Ann Lamb (except perhaps a slightly olive skin colour and the love of cooking much too much) is her recipe for plum pudding. Even my mother—who is decidedly not a cook—makes a stunning plum pudding. Every
generation has changed it slightly—my mother adds grated carrot instead of grated apple, and I use glacé pineapple as well as sultanas and currants—but it still is, and always will be, our ‘family Christmas pudding’.

I haven’t inherited Sarah’s talent for painting, although my grandmother did. Or perhaps that came from yet another ancestor. There is so much about the people in this story—and the ones who aren’t—we will never know for sure.

William Marks was a convict. Ann Lamb was a free settler, who was paid a bounty to come to Australia, where there were few women and many men who needed wives. That is about all I can be certain of.

This is a story made from scraps and whispers. Most of it comes from stories my great grandmother and my grandmother told me about their family. Other bits I’ve found in letters, diaries—and history books, the past dug up by other people.

Both the dates of Billy and Annie’s births and the places where they were born are unknown—they gave different versions at different times, almost certainly to hide their true past. I’m pretty sure both kept other details of their past deliberately vague too. Ann may not have been an indigenous person from what is now Canada, but I do have a photo of her children, and they all have dark hair, dark eyes, and the high cheekbones that support the legend. I have wondered for many years where the slightly brown skin in my mother’s family comes from. It’s certainly possible it comes from Ann. One thing we do know is that she was an extraordinary cook, who loved feeding lots of people lots of food.

Mostly, though, this book comes from my own imagination, taking the few facts I have and trying to make them fit together. This is the first of the Animal Stars books where I have changed dates deliberately. I have even left out major events, to make the book simpler. Sometimes you can convey a better idea of what things happened, and why, by removing pieces that make the story too complex to easily understand.

William and Ann arrived in Australia in 1825 and 1833 respectively. I changed the dates to make it possible to tell their stories through the lives of two horses. Ann worked for at least one other employer before she met William. William worked for at least one other settler before he was assigned to the Reverend Hassall, and he worked at several of Hassall’s properties. He also bought and leased several properties before he bought the large farm called Slete’s Gully, which he renamed Markdale.

William and Annie’s relationship was also far more complex than I have made it in this book. I’m not even sure how many children they had together, either before or after they were married. Many of the records of the 1800s are inaccurate, or simply not there. Families didn’t immediately make an official record of marriages, births or deaths. They waited till they had to go to town—and sometimes never bothered. Many families, like the Markses, called children after other children who had died. In those days, when nearly a third of children died before their fifth birthday, you might have three or even four children with the same name, often the name of a parent or grandparent.

The story my grandmother told me was that while working for the Reverend Hassall Billy Marks tamed a great white stallion that no one else could touch. He rode the horse in a race and won so much that he was able to buy Markdale from Mrs Moses, who sold it to him cheaply—or loaned him the money—because he had said a prayer for her husband.

There is nothing in any source I’ve found that backs that story up; there’s nothing that contradicts it, either. William did win a race on a horse called Conservative a few years after he bought Markdale, but I have no idea if that was the horse he originally made his money from—or even if that first, almost miraculous race actually happened.

The same is true with the story of the dance with Ben Hall. It is a strong piece of our family’s folklore, but there are no records to back it up.

However, when I started to hunt, I did find many small corroborative details: there really was a Mrs Moses whose husband was a prominent member of the Jewish community of Sydney and Goulburn. The prayer that was so important to her may have been Kaddish. William wasn’t christened till many years after his marriage and, despite working for the Reverend Hassall, wasn’t married in a church, though there were several nearby. My great grandmother Emily kept a kosher house, in her old age at least (she and her husband lived apart for much of their married life).

And when I found evidence that the horseracing, the balls, the inn really happened, suddenly the far-fetched stories looked like they might be true.

By the late 1880s most of Markdale was sold away from the Marks family, except for forty acres that was kept by Elijah. William Junior and his sister Martha left for Queensland, where they were prosperous and I hope happy. The others married locally. All, except for Richard, were well-off, respected and unusually long-lived.

In 1865 Ann Lamb married Francis Campbell, the man she had left William for. I know nothing else about him, not even when and where he died; but by the time Annie died, in her early eighties or late seventies—no one was sure exactly how old she was, and possibly she wasn’t herself—she had been living as a widow for many years, and was remembered principally as the widow of William Marks. Francis Campbell seems to have just evaporated, leaving her with another one, two or three children (records vary), none of whom I mention in this book. Like many incidents in Annie and William’s life, they would have helped make this book far too long and complicated. At least one of the three children survived, the daughter Ann was living with when she died.

The ‘Mattie Jane’ of this book lived to eighty-eight—I think. There is also a record that says either a Martha or a Mathilda died at sixteen. Was there another child called by either of those names? I don’t know. But the uncertainty did prompt me to give Mattie her illness, which might have been tuberculosis, or consumption as it was called then, though it might also have been asthma after a bad case of flu.

Perhaps a third of Australia’s population in that era had tuberculosis. (It is still common in many
other parts of the world, but children here were vaccinated against it until it became very rare.) In those days before antibiotics the usual way of treating it was rest and good food and fresh air. Many who were infected still had long and healthy lives.

Tuberculosis and diseases such as influenza decimated the indigenous population in Canada, as they did throughout the New World. Annie’s family probably died from influenza, but as flu and TB have coughing and fever in common, and there were no blood tests or chest X-rays to help diagnoses and understanding, Annie and many others could easily have confused the two.

Both my grandmother and great grandmother told me that Markdale was the happiest house in the colony, with William bringing home presents, and Annie leaning over the front gate urging travellers to come in and taste her cooking. Grandma told me how the storeroom always smelt of jam and honey, how all the neighbours came to join in the singing around the piano. (All the women in my mother’s family played the piano and sang, until my generation. I play the violin.) It’s good to think that many of Billy and Ann’s descendants inherited their capacity for happiness.

I don’t know. I do know that she seemed to show extraordinary dedication to her children when she came back. She also seemed to regard herself as the widow of William Marks, not Francis Campbell.

Did she love Campbell too? Or was it just impossible for a woman in those days to leave without protection from a man?

Perhaps the reason in this book is the true one—she wanted to try to shield her family from the social effects of her darker skin. It is almost impossible to understand the stigma that dark skin or ‘native blood’ carried even a few decades ago. My grandmother went to extraordinary lengths to try to cover up the fact that she had convict, and perhaps darker skinned ancestors. She would never even let me go into a shop if there were dark-skinned customers, in case ‘they think you are one of them’, especially when I was tanned in summer. Even today, some family members may be embarrassed by the possibility of Ann not being Caucasian. Ann’s heritage—and William’s past—must have been an extraordinary burden for their children.

When I first read the account of Billy/William Marks’s death in a
Goulburn Post
of 1861, I was immediately suspicious. The report says that his head struck the tree so hard it left a mark, as though it had been hit by an axe. Human heads just don’t leave a big gash like that.

I suspect the journalist who wrote that account was suspicious about the ‘axe mark’ too, and so were the police, as there was an inquest into William’s death.

But Richard Marks was never convicted of his father’s murder. Whatever happened, there wasn’t enough evidence even to bring him to trial.

William’s property was made over entirely to his widow, Ann, rather than shared among his sons as was the norm, which would indicate that the magistrate also thought something was odd.

This was very unusual for the time—married women weren’t even able to own property in their own names. It also indicated that Ann was not only highly regarded, despite the fact that she’d left her husband, but also capable, determined, and probably very, very charming.

Ann appears to have then divided the property among William’s children, giving William Junior, Billy’s oldest (legitimate) son, most of the land. She also appears to have provided for her daughters.

It is easy now, as then, to look at that one piece of evidence and say Richard was a murderer—and a clumsy one, hacking into a tree with an axe to make it look as though his father’s head had hit the trunk.

But if the police couldn’t find enough evidence to charge him, then neither can we. The mark may already have been there when William’s head hit it—trees were often ‘blazed’ in those days of few roads to show routes through the bush. Or perhaps William was carrying something that made the mark, or his horse might have kicked the tree. There are many possible answers.

Instead of a man who murdered his father, Richard Marks might well have been a loving son who had the horror of watching while his father was killed before his eyes. Richard would have carried the stigma of people’s doubt about his actions all his life—and now after his death, as well. He may have been a tragic victim, not a criminal.

We simply do not know.

In 1872 Richard was listed in the census as the owner of Markdale. He presumably bought part of the
property from his brother William when William decided to move to Queensland, taking his wife, his sister Martha and his brother-in-law with him.