The Terrible Truths: The Letitia Munro Series, #3

By Kev Richardson

…third in the trio after Letitia Munro and To Plough Van Diemen's Land, telling true stories of Australia's founding convicts. It continues the tale of a pioneering family transforming the world's biggest prison into a land of free enterprise and pride.

Having grown up in the shadows of their parents' pasts, children face the traumas of holding heads high in a society of change, a change intent on sweeping convict pasts under carpets as even educators lie to them. Parents agonise over preparing the next generation to cope. Must they deny their children their very heritage?

The Terrible Truths takes you into the hearts of true characters unwittingly creating the culture of today's forthright Australians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781597053259

Book preview

BOOK 1

Farewell, Van Diemen’s Land, with its convict stigma...Welcome, Tasmania, land of the Free!

One

Van Diemen’s Land was dead. But could it ever be laid to rest?

For fifty-two years it had been a prison colony settled by convicts transported from Britain—all serving sentences for petty crimes. Most were ‘transported’ for seven years, some for fourteen, and a comparative ‘sprinkling’, for ‘life’. Life sentences were given those guilty of armed robbery or for stealing or killing livestock; the latter including, if the magistrate on the bench on that particular occasion was having a ‘bad’ day, even for poaching an eel from the Squire’s pond.

As the first of January 1856 dawned, the colony was named Tasmania, the fervent hope being that the change of name would quickly erase the convict stigma attached to residents.

The This Land will yet Forget movement had petitioned good Queen Victoria, and she had responded, no doubt influenced by human rights activists currently decrying the system, even in Britain. But could the change of colony name really make a difference?

Never! proclaimed family matriarch Titia.

Letitia Munro-Goodwin had always proudly upheld the significance of being of the First Fleet convicts, their military guard and a handful of government officials, some twelve hundred souls in all, dumped on the shore at Botany Bay in 1788 to carve a prison settlement out of wilderness.

People can never forget the horrors we lived through in those days, she would tell her children. Maybe memories have dulled as the years passed, but the scars on minds will last as long as the scars on convict backs. Who could ever forget the horrors of those times?

Yet those Titia referred to were, by that time, a dwindling race.

She was but nineteen years old when transported, to be in her ninetieth when convictism was abandoned. She would ever hold her convict chin high, yet grandchildren and great-grandchildren gave little credence to a time before they were born. They could attach nowt but high glee to the advantages proposed by the This Land will yet Forget devotees. They indeed wanted to belong to a clean and righteous society rather than one smudged with the blood of horrendous lashings and memories of ‘bouncing bodies’ on gibbets, the ‘tassels on a blindcord’ as some irreverently referred to them.

Titia’s son-in-law Mark Ashby Bunker, a lifer who had stolen a sheep, was a typical instance of a lag who so self-disciplined himself to follow every dictate the administration demanded of him that no adverse comment was appended to his convict record, who even went as far as insisting within his own household that the topic of convictism, so far as it touched him, was never mentioned. He remained dedicated to distancing himself from pointed fingers for his entire life and actively supported the Forget lobby. He was forever confident that once the Letitias of the world passed on, and that if the colony’s growing children were lied to in respect of their parentage, later generations would grow up in total ignorance of it.

Sarah, Titia’s daughter and Mark’s wife, found herself in quite a no-win situation when daughter Hannah married just two years before the cessation of transportation. Was her husband a son of convicts? It was a question to plague young Hannah for the rest of her long life. Had her Henry, when seeking Hannah’s hand, lied to Mark about his parentage? It was certainly a time when some eighty percent of the population was either still serving convicts or the children of convicts, so the likelihood of Henry having lied was high.

A dilemma indeed for the Mark Ashby Bunkers of the world!

Out on the frontiers, however, where the vast majority were illiterate farmers and consequently divorced from news of what was being said or even thought about in the towns where decisions were made, there was no such dilemma. People woke each morning to go about their routines, blissfully ignorant of social niceties and morès of convention.

Liam and Maggie Woolley, grazing a thousand sheep on Longbottom, had maybe heard about the likelihood of Van Diemen’s Land changing its name yet would have found this but of passing interest. And be quite confused over the reason.

Why on earth would anybody be bothered about parents having been convicts?

Their attitude was more one of... Weren’t everybody’s?

‘END OF AN ERA’ IS WHAT The Gazette proclaimed only six months after the colony changed its name. Tasmania’s sole surviving First Fleeter was laid to rest in a public ceremony.

‘Decay of nature’ they wrote on old Titia Munro’s death certificate, as if believing that ninety was beyond the age of usefulness.

Yet there is no reference to her having arrived as a convict, Mark noted on reading the article. It says here... ‘she was of the first settlers to arrive’. They seem to indicate, Sarah, that it is behove on readers to now refrain from making any other sort of statement.

Sarah looked him in the eyes, hoping he might read her mind.

I wonder if that is really what they infer, or if, my dear Mark, that is simply what you hope people will read into it?

However, she would comply. She doubted her ma would be happy about her complying, yet she was practical enough to accept that old Titia could now never know one way or the other. And Sarah also had to accept that the indication was that, in future, news would always refrain from making mention of people having been convicts.

They interred old Titia alongside her Andy in the St. David’s burial ground.

A huge crowd attended the service, and there was hardly a dry eye, Sarah noted.

It’s the end of an era in my life too, Ma.

ROSY AND FRED, NEIGHBOURS from across the creek dividing their spread from Longbottom, arrived at the Woolley home for supper, a meal to celebrate the sitting room Liam had added to the cookhouse. Tonight Maggie would serve up a juicy veal roast, a treat that for hours had had the children’s tastebuds twitching.

Throughout the day, every child pitched in, knowing that along with the juicy joint and Ma’s perfect gravy would be piles of steaming onions and glistening, golden spuds. And thick wobbly custard on preserved apricots would surely follow. Nor was there doubt about Rosy and Fred arriving with fresh lemonade and a flagon of beer. The girls had swept and dusted, milked both cows, and helped in the cookhouse while the boys split firewood and helped old Sam tend the flocks. Yesterday they’d helped Liam butcher the carcass and hang joints to drip clean, ready for the meat-safe. Rosy and Fred would take what the Woolleys couldn’t eat within two or three days, its worth to be paid in needlework or saddlery when needed. The little money any farmer had since the fires of ’53 was kept for trading in the village.

Wattle Hill was no village. It was merely a frontier district given a name that strangers could be told if they ever got lost on the way to where they headed. What constituted the name ‘village’ in those parts were Copping and Forcett, a handful of miles from Longbottom, each big enough to boast an inn, smithy and produce merchant.

The new Woolley sitting-room had walls of sawn planks, wattle and daub filling at the corners, board floor and shingle roof. Only jute sacking stretched in window frames betrayed the impression that it yet lacked anything. It was graced with a proper stone chimney and generous hearth. Liam had not even considered making the living room in the main house, for every room both up and down served as bedrooms. All family social life was concentrated around the cookhouse.

He had fashioned a large table with stools and benches for all, and a sofa from a willow he and Sam had taken from the creek when clearing a path for upstream jetsam, always comprised mostly of animal carcasses dumped by up-stream neighbours, that they now the more easily drift on. Rosy had helped Maggie make the cover and cushions.

When the sun drifted low in a red-tinged sky and the day’s heat had begun to wane, when Maggie’s chores had eased to periodic basting and children were freshly bathed, rosy of cheek and uncomfortably clean, the adults sat in the shade of Ephraim’s arbour. Rosy clasped four-year-old Alf to her cleavage such that Maggie feared he might smother—and the tot seemed somehow fearful to struggle should he end up crushed. Rosy, oblivious to his suffering, cradled him with frustrated ardour. The other children romped about—intent, it seemed, on muddying their pristine appearances that normality be restored.

Eventually the women left the men to their ales and went to the cookhouse to serve up.

Learning is what the boys need, we reckon, Rosy, Maggie said as she worked—bookwork to think about, even worry about, is what they need, especially young Will. We’ve simply got to find something to turn their minds to thinking on a course before simply rushing at things.

Rosy had been aware of their problem with young Will and his obsession about Aboriginal spirits.

There’s a lady teaching in Sorell now, Maggie. She holds classes.

So Pa told us. But she asks money. We have to find a free school.

In Richmond.

Might as well be on the moon. We can’t get the boys to Richmond every day any more than to the moon.

The Forcett smithy’s wife’s got letters. She wrote a receipt for Fred’s plough. He even showed it me when he brought it home.

She’d want coin. A ten-mile round trip twice a week, I reckon we could manage if it’s going to help the boys. But again, where do we find the coin?

Out in the arbour the men were engrossed in the same conversation.

Old Sam sat with Liam and Fred, somewhat chastened on the matter of Abo spirits since Liam had taken him to task on it. He had come to realise how serious was Liam about young Will taking the stories too much to heart, so now saw his welfare better served by joining forces with Liam in converting the lad. So here he now sat sharing Fred’s beer and Liam’s concern.

Liam had just held up a hand while he cast about, eyes betraying a man with guilt on his mind—but Maggie was safely busy with dinner...

Sometimes I look at young Will in confused bloody wonder. My fear is that even if he don’t rush headlong into some harebrained scheme with no bloody caution like his brother Ephraim there— and all eyes briefly scanned the mounds and wooden crosses by their arbour bench —he’ll at best end up on the same bloody path his grandpa Newitt got on to, probably at about the same age, hurtlin’ hell-for-leather into chaos with ignorant gusto and never findin’ the bloody sense to get off. I swear, mates, with two boys now buried, I gotta quickly find a bloody way to have those left get some education, learn the common bloody sense my pa had in abundance. Maybe it’s havin’ letters and numbers that gives one the better power to think and plan. Young Will is already chasin’ along old Adam’s reckless bloody path. And, I guess, same way as I used to look up to my brother George to see a sort of God, little Alf now follows whatever Will does like he’s a bloody shadow. So he’ll soon be on that same reckless path.

Liam sat despondent, Fred and old Sam doing the head shaking for him.

Seems me and Ma are raisin’ two more Adam Newitts lest I find how to bloody stop it.

Two

Mud Walls Road, 1856 ...

The several daughters of the now fragmented Bunker family and husbands, along with Mark and Sarah’s by now several grandchildren, gathered at Mud Walls Road for the christening of Mark Bunker junior.

Bestowed on Hannah and Henry Lewis’s first son were the given names ‘Mark Edward Bunker’.

Mark was ecstatic.

It was custom in the colony to name a first son after his paternal grandfather, and Mark had followed the tradition by giving his father’s name to his own first son, first that is, if ignorant of the fact he left a Mark Ashby Bunker Jnr in England near forty years since, the ignorant embracing not only the entire family now gathered, but all the rest of the world save a corner of Bedfordshire. Today’s Edward Bunker, now long ensconced across the strait in Victoria, had in turn not only given his first son Mark’s name but followed that compliment by naming his first daughter Sarah.

Hannah and Henry now honoured Mark quite particularly, not only naming their first after Hannah’s father rather than Henry’s but also giving him the Bunker name.

Mark was so delighted that he failed to wonder the reason for Henry’s departure from tradition. Had he done so he might have wondered if Henry were unsure who his own father might be. Or wished to hide the fact if he did know?

However in those days of changing attitudes, it was too sensitive a question to ask.

Sarah surveyed her daughters, their husbands and their many children.

How Ma would have loved to be here now. What caustic remark might that old dear have made to Mark on this occasion?

Sarah was now sixty-five herself...

A ‘handsome age’ people called it when one was past being considered ‘comely’.

And certainly a long way past ‘pretty’!

Hannah had been pretty, she mused, but has let her preening go, twisting the tresses, of which she’d once been so proud, into a tight bun as do women twice her age. I have ever believed that when a young woman begins taking less interest in herself as far as looks and grooming are concerned, it is usually because she is tied to a man who doesn’t care how his woman looks, or when no longer the subject of any other eligible man’s attention to make her feel proud or wanted.

And Hannah had chosen, if it were hinted at, to always hedge around the subject of her marital happiness, even on occasions to deliberately change the subject—which inclined Sarah to believe that there was something averse enough for Hannah to want to hide.

Yet she seems not unhappy at having had three babies to the man in their five years. In fact she never offers any indication that things between them are anything but reasonable.

But it was typical of Hannah to hide what might indicate she couldn’t handle a problem.

Would that old Titia had met him before she died. That old dear was so astute she could read people’s very thoughts—as Mark continued to find to his chagrin.

Titia had once even said to Sarah, having heard Hannah tell of her betrothed, In my opinion, Hannah has always seemed more proud to be a Miss Bunker, than she now does a Mrs. Lewis.

And the names of Hannah and Henry’s babies—firstly Edith Sarah, then Hannah Letitia, and now Mark Edward Bunker—little margin there for any but Goodwin and Bunker names. Could Henry’s mother have been an Edith?

Sarah teased out the folds of her skirt as she sat on the sofa, an unconscious habit.

I shall dig further on all this, unearth the reason our darling Hannah spends all her attention on her babies and so little on herself.

Sarah then turned attention to Meg, whose nose, she could tell, was more than a little twigged by Hannah’s intrusion on the attention Mark usually directed towards Meg when the family assembled.

Four Briscoe step-daughters Mark inherited before siring seven of his own, and of them all it was Meg alone who acquired his grand manners—to fail miserably in the eyes of most in carrying them off. Seven children she now had, with already an eighth starting to show.

Yet like Hannah, she seems content enough. Always been the one to side with her father she has, whatever the issue, ever craving his attention, and getting it at the expense of sisters.

A mother’s intuition told Sarah what ruffled Meg’s senses right now, though—it was a sense of loss in her ‘right of partiality’ in her pa’s eyes.

She gave none of her four sons Mark’s name, and now she is suffering a twinge of guilt. I reckon her scheming mind is right now pledging that her next son will be named Mark.

Then her eyes turned to her Mark, strutting about like a lord, nursing his new grandson with obvious pride...

...obviously unconscious of how his every prancing step is only further needling Meg.

LONGBOTTOM, 1858...

Rosy stood arms akimbo, inspired not by triumph, but helpless despondency.

Her shoulders drooped, her head hung in exhaustion and her heavy folds of chin dripped tears. Her midwifery duties had her, in the moment, in a ‘fit of the doldrums’.

Oh how I hate to lose a little one.

She picked up the lifeless little body to croon gently, rocking it in her beefy arms.

The older girls stood quietly by, watching, wondering what would happen now.

Louisa knelt on the board floor, elbows on the edge of the bed gently touching her mother’s shoulder. It was the first time the girls had attended a birth. They had waited anxiously in the next room for the telltale cry, and when it came had rushed to the door, hoping to be told they might come see. Yet even as they had waited, Rosy called that she needed help—a second babe was on its way. So all were privy to the second and difficult birth. Amidst the excited melee, Rosy had given the wailing firstborn, a wrinkly, rosy-faced boy, in care of MaryAnn to wrap in a blanket, sit in a chair and nurse, while Rosy tended Maggie. The other two, agape in wonder and fear at the state of their ma and the bed, seemed in shock at the realities facing them.

Help MaryAnn, darlin’s, leave your ma to me, Rosy then said. And their fears mounted as their ma screamed louder by the second, each far more frightening to the littlies than when heard through the door.

Rosy became increasingly agitated.

It’s turned about, she told the panting Maggie.

Louisa darlin’, run fetch your pa, I need him to lift. Hurry now.

But by the time a sweating Liam arrived from the far paddock, Tom, young Will, young Alf and puffing Old Sam close behind, it was over.

You young ’uns wait with me, Old Sam cautioned on arrival, but Louisa darted between his legs and up the stairs as if earlier attendance gave her the right. She had seen the state of her ma and was anxious.

Liam found the ponderous Rosy, the bun atop her head half broke, long strands of hair wrapped around her face and neck plastered down by a cocktail of sweat, blood and the fluids of afterbirth. She’d wiped them in wide swathes with the back of a hand, sponging a distraught Maggie in the chaos of the bed.

MaryAnn cried in fear, sitting in a chair nursing the wailing firstborn.

Jemmy was in tears by the crib, a hand gently touching the inert second babe.

Will and Louisa stood together at the bedside, hand in hand, feeling helpless, the dishevelled Maggie’s so recent bloom of pregnancy now but a memory as her face streamed sweat from the efforts of the difficult birth. Rosy took her arm from under Maggie’s shoulders.

I’ve not been able get so much as a squeak from the second one, Liam.

She then picked it up to nurse it.

Only cuddle this one’s ever gonna get, I reckon.

Then she whispered, Take him now, Liam, bury him quick.

She then took the wailing firstborn from MaryAnn to place by Maggie.

All you out now, she then told the girls. I got cleanin’ up to do, and your ma’s got your new brother to tend. You girls make your Aunt Rosy a cuppa, eh? That’s me darlin’s.

And you can give me a hand, Tom, said Liam once outside.

Dig your little brother a grave by the others. You young ’uns come help me fashion a small box for ’im, eh?

And when the rude box was made and the grave dug, Liam had the children help lower it. And cover it. And put flowers on the mound. And whisper words of family welcome. And goodbye.

Then he went to Maggie, deep in exhausted sleep, a stoic Rosy watching like the most faithful of loving hounds. He tipped her a wink and crept out to have the girls make her another cuppa—and to tend the infant Susannah who had slept through it all. Then he went to the barn to repair the hoarding.

Yet a soft voice stayed him. It was a strange sound. Young Will, usually ever heard only excited, strident, now almost cooed. Liam crept forward to hear more clearly.

Perched on the cow-rail was little Alf, agog as usual at what his brother was saying. Will had a hand on Alf’s knee, confiding in the uncustomary tone...

And when upset, Alf, spirits can bring great mischiefs on people. This spirit must have been from some man wot died of rotten stomach or such to have took such a little baby.

Liam smiled. William the Third, so convinced of his spirit world yet no longer brave enough, it seemed, to test his pa’s goodwill, and with Old Sam nowadays silent on the subject, had enlisted little Alf as captive audience, outlet for his creative mind.

Liam shuffled feet enough to announce arrival and entered the suddenly silent stall. The boys looked up, a touch of fear in young Will’s eyes. But Liam smiled.

Heard what you was sayin’, boy.

Which was too much for young Will, who burst into tears, Liam unsure whether out of fear, disappointment at being caught out or simply unleashing tension from the stress of burying the baby.

He lifted Alf down, and the three nestled close in the hay.

You can cry a whole creek-full of tears, boys, he told them gently, "but they won’t bring the baby back. And they won’t wash away the fact that I’ll keep tryin’ to make you realise some things is different from what you think. All this nonsense about gooks and ghosts and bad luck just ain’t true. You got to get your mind on what’s real in life and face them square. Some bad things happen, they always do. Bushfires and floods, sickness and death happen all the time to people whoever they are and wherever they are. Particular people aren’t chosen, picked out by some bloody spirit. Such things strike all what are in their path. The fire we had, hit everyone in the district. Floods do the same. Diseases too. Every one of us can get