Remembering Rosey
This article is contributed by Dr David Andrew Roberts, Senior Lecturer in Australian History at the University of New England.
On 23 December 1924, a contributor to Tamworth’s Northern Daily Leader recollected an encounter that took place over fifty years earlier with a woman who had identified herself as ‘Thunderbolt’s wife’ (see article). She was alone in the bush, dressed as a man and boiling a billy. Having just been released from Maitland gaol, she was searching for Thunderbolt. Her name, as the writer recalled it, was ‘Rosey’, and she claimed to be the daughter of ‘a half-caste Maori’. The writer encountered her again later at Griffin’s Hotel at Carroll (near Tamworth) ‘where she had taken a situation’. She had, in the interim, found her man, although he was apparently gone again.
This was one of a number of recollections printed in regional newspapers in the inter-war years which purported to offer personal but distant memories of Thunderbolt’s celebrated Aboriginal accomplice. These were examples of a much broader corpus of anecdotal stories concerning identities, events and places from the colonial past. They were a key feature of the production of historical knowledge in the early decades of the twentieth century, bringing forth all manner of local and personal/family oral traditions, now being put on the public record by editors and enthusiasts who were increasingly active in capturing the fast-fading memories of the ‘old days’, as told by an ever-dwindling number of ‘old-timers’ and ‘pioneers’.
This was an era when historical knowledge was largely informal and fluid, being based on recollection rather than records. These reminiscences tended towards distortion and invention. Vaguely known and remembered individuals and events from the remote past were easily infused with wild and impossible elaborations, but the stories were difficult to disprove on the evidence available, and there was not even any great urge to disbelieve them because written documentation was scarce and the stories were compelling anyway. As such, the past was able to enter the realm of myth and legend as an organic and casual form of history-making, quite different from the techniques of critical historical study we understand today.
These were the sorts of oral traditions that both preserved and shaped the legend of Thunderbolt and Mary Ann. Some of these stories remained obscure and were quickly forgotten. Others, after they were published and widely consumed, became fixed in the public imagination, retold and added to by later writers and researchers in a manner that gradually morphed them into established historical fact. It is why historians find it so difficult today to disentangle fact from fiction when it comes researching such legendary and immortal episodes as that of ‘Captain Thunderbolt and his Lady’.
There are only a handful of early-twentieth century recollections concerning Thunderbolt’s Mary Ann. These usually contain information that was well-established on the public record, courtesy of published and popular bushranging histories by Charles White and others. It was widely ‘known’, for example, that she was Thunderbolt’s pretty, educated and faithful ‘half-caste’, who died as ‘Yellow Long’ on the Goulburn River in the Hunter Valley in 1867. This public information was then supplemented in recollections with fantastical elaborations that are unprovable or easily disproven.
The 1924 recollection of Rosey, however, stands out as being quite likely authentic. First, it stands independent of what was publically and popularly known at that time. She was ‘Rosey’, not Yellow Long, and the author, wondering ‘what became of her and her children’, appeared not to know that published histories had pronounced her as dying in 1867 during the height of Thunderbolt’s reign. Second, the story contains particulars that were otherwise inaccessible at the time. For example, it was not widely known in the 1920s that Mary Ann had been incarcerated in Maitland Gaol. The best-selling bushranger histories of the time had not discovered and disclosed this fact.
But most intriguingly, some of the details in this recollection tally with newly discovered information on the life and times of Mary Ann Bugg. That she was encountered at the pub near Tamworth sometime after her release from Maitland Gaol is now supported by the knowledge that there, at Griffith’s Inn in 1868, she gave birth to a son, ‘Frederick Wordsworth Ward’ (presumably Thunderbolt’s child). The existence of that son was first revealed to local historians in the 1940s, but it is now supported by the discovery of the child’s official Birth Certificate. Born nine months after the date on which Mary Ann was commonly thought to have died, the child’s birth upsets one of the fundamental and traditional tenets of the Thunderbolt legend.
A more vital clue to the authenticity of the 1924 recollection is the observation that ‘Rosey’ had described herself, not as an Aborigine, but as the daughter of ‘a half-caste Maori’. Until recently that detail might have been seen to undermine the validity of this reminiscence. But it is now known, as a result of research breakthroughs in the early-1990s, supplemented by recent genealogical investigations, that Thunderbolt’s Mary Ann died in 1905 at Mudgee under the name Mary Ann Burrows, the mother of fifteen children. Her Death Certificate and Obituary, informed by a Frederick Wordsworth Burrows, offered the family’s view that she was born a New Zealand Maori.
We cannot know why Mary Ann misidentified herself as ‘Rosey’, if indeed she did – it may be a lapse in memory by the person who related the story fifty years after the event. But we do know that Mary Ann not only misreported her racial identity on occasion but did also, for whatever reasons, repeatedly modify her own surname, alternating between Mary Ann Bugg, Baker, Burgess and Ward, as well as other variations, in documents she signed herself, or according to numerous marriage and death certificates signed by or on behalf of her many children.
We can never be certain that the 1924 recollection of Rosey was not concocted or entirely imagined, but that would have required knowledge of circumstances and evidence not available or accessible at the time. One also senses a core truth in the 1924 reminiscence, in that Mary Ann would have been eager to relate her situation to almost anyone, even a stranger, while disguising her real name. Recently released from gaol and seeking to reunite with the elusive bushranger in hiding, she would have relied on word spreading that she was at large and looking for her man.
If the 1924 recollection of Rosey is authentic, then it is a remarkable and vital observation of Mary Ann at a pivotal stage in her history. In between the moments when she was first encountered boiling a billy in the bush, and then later working at the Carroll inn, she had found Thunderbolt, only to lose him again. We now know that in that time they conceived a child – a child that Thunderbolt would never come to know. It was in all probability the last time they ever saw one another.
Three years later, Thunderbolt was dead, shot by police at Uralla. But Mary Ann lived on, raising a boy who bore the name of her infamous paramour, and who buried her, thirty-six years later, seemingly or at least officially unaware of his mother’s history and his own paternity. She died in obscurity, in privacy, under the false identity of being a New Zealand Maori, claiming the surname of a man named Burrows whom she never married.
At the very time that Mary Ann died, a new generation of historians were beginning to puzzle over the identity of the woman who once rode with Thunderbolt. In their earliest speculations they were wide of the mark, mistaking her with another woman, ‘Yellow Long’, whom Thunderbolt had apparently taken up with as his next lover.
But at least one old-timer, anonymously airing memories to a small regional newspaper many years later, paused to recollect his meeting of Rosey. His evidence was missed or ignored by later historians who sought to weave their own fantastic versions of the Thunderbolt legend. But in remembering Rosey, that old-timer might have known, from personal experience, a vital truth that would remain concealed to historians for another century.
Dr David Andrew Roberts
University of New England
December 2011
This was one of a number of recollections printed in regional newspapers in the inter-war years which purported to offer personal but distant memories of Thunderbolt’s celebrated Aboriginal accomplice. These were examples of a much broader corpus of anecdotal stories concerning identities, events and places from the colonial past. They were a key feature of the production of historical knowledge in the early decades of the twentieth century, bringing forth all manner of local and personal/family oral traditions, now being put on the public record by editors and enthusiasts who were increasingly active in capturing the fast-fading memories of the ‘old days’, as told by an ever-dwindling number of ‘old-timers’ and ‘pioneers’.
This was an era when historical knowledge was largely informal and fluid, being based on recollection rather than records. These reminiscences tended towards distortion and invention. Vaguely known and remembered individuals and events from the remote past were easily infused with wild and impossible elaborations, but the stories were difficult to disprove on the evidence available, and there was not even any great urge to disbelieve them because written documentation was scarce and the stories were compelling anyway. As such, the past was able to enter the realm of myth and legend as an organic and casual form of history-making, quite different from the techniques of critical historical study we understand today.
These were the sorts of oral traditions that both preserved and shaped the legend of Thunderbolt and Mary Ann. Some of these stories remained obscure and were quickly forgotten. Others, after they were published and widely consumed, became fixed in the public imagination, retold and added to by later writers and researchers in a manner that gradually morphed them into established historical fact. It is why historians find it so difficult today to disentangle fact from fiction when it comes researching such legendary and immortal episodes as that of ‘Captain Thunderbolt and his Lady’.
There are only a handful of early-twentieth century recollections concerning Thunderbolt’s Mary Ann. These usually contain information that was well-established on the public record, courtesy of published and popular bushranging histories by Charles White and others. It was widely ‘known’, for example, that she was Thunderbolt’s pretty, educated and faithful ‘half-caste’, who died as ‘Yellow Long’ on the Goulburn River in the Hunter Valley in 1867. This public information was then supplemented in recollections with fantastical elaborations that are unprovable or easily disproven.
The 1924 recollection of Rosey, however, stands out as being quite likely authentic. First, it stands independent of what was publically and popularly known at that time. She was ‘Rosey’, not Yellow Long, and the author, wondering ‘what became of her and her children’, appeared not to know that published histories had pronounced her as dying in 1867 during the height of Thunderbolt’s reign. Second, the story contains particulars that were otherwise inaccessible at the time. For example, it was not widely known in the 1920s that Mary Ann had been incarcerated in Maitland Gaol. The best-selling bushranger histories of the time had not discovered and disclosed this fact.
But most intriguingly, some of the details in this recollection tally with newly discovered information on the life and times of Mary Ann Bugg. That she was encountered at the pub near Tamworth sometime after her release from Maitland Gaol is now supported by the knowledge that there, at Griffith’s Inn in 1868, she gave birth to a son, ‘Frederick Wordsworth Ward’ (presumably Thunderbolt’s child). The existence of that son was first revealed to local historians in the 1940s, but it is now supported by the discovery of the child’s official Birth Certificate. Born nine months after the date on which Mary Ann was commonly thought to have died, the child’s birth upsets one of the fundamental and traditional tenets of the Thunderbolt legend.
A more vital clue to the authenticity of the 1924 recollection is the observation that ‘Rosey’ had described herself, not as an Aborigine, but as the daughter of ‘a half-caste Maori’. Until recently that detail might have been seen to undermine the validity of this reminiscence. But it is now known, as a result of research breakthroughs in the early-1990s, supplemented by recent genealogical investigations, that Thunderbolt’s Mary Ann died in 1905 at Mudgee under the name Mary Ann Burrows, the mother of fifteen children. Her Death Certificate and Obituary, informed by a Frederick Wordsworth Burrows, offered the family’s view that she was born a New Zealand Maori.
We cannot know why Mary Ann misidentified herself as ‘Rosey’, if indeed she did – it may be a lapse in memory by the person who related the story fifty years after the event. But we do know that Mary Ann not only misreported her racial identity on occasion but did also, for whatever reasons, repeatedly modify her own surname, alternating between Mary Ann Bugg, Baker, Burgess and Ward, as well as other variations, in documents she signed herself, or according to numerous marriage and death certificates signed by or on behalf of her many children.
We can never be certain that the 1924 recollection of Rosey was not concocted or entirely imagined, but that would have required knowledge of circumstances and evidence not available or accessible at the time. One also senses a core truth in the 1924 reminiscence, in that Mary Ann would have been eager to relate her situation to almost anyone, even a stranger, while disguising her real name. Recently released from gaol and seeking to reunite with the elusive bushranger in hiding, she would have relied on word spreading that she was at large and looking for her man.
If the 1924 recollection of Rosey is authentic, then it is a remarkable and vital observation of Mary Ann at a pivotal stage in her history. In between the moments when she was first encountered boiling a billy in the bush, and then later working at the Carroll inn, she had found Thunderbolt, only to lose him again. We now know that in that time they conceived a child – a child that Thunderbolt would never come to know. It was in all probability the last time they ever saw one another.
Three years later, Thunderbolt was dead, shot by police at Uralla. But Mary Ann lived on, raising a boy who bore the name of her infamous paramour, and who buried her, thirty-six years later, seemingly or at least officially unaware of his mother’s history and his own paternity. She died in obscurity, in privacy, under the false identity of being a New Zealand Maori, claiming the surname of a man named Burrows whom she never married.
At the very time that Mary Ann died, a new generation of historians were beginning to puzzle over the identity of the woman who once rode with Thunderbolt. In their earliest speculations they were wide of the mark, mistaking her with another woman, ‘Yellow Long’, whom Thunderbolt had apparently taken up with as his next lover.
But at least one old-timer, anonymously airing memories to a small regional newspaper many years later, paused to recollect his meeting of Rosey. His evidence was missed or ignored by later historians who sought to weave their own fantastic versions of the Thunderbolt legend. But in remembering Rosey, that old-timer might have known, from personal experience, a vital truth that would remain concealed to historians for another century.
Dr David Andrew Roberts
University of New England
December 2011