Mary Reibey’s Newel Post

Many visitors to the Ryan living room, going back to the early 1960s, would have noticed, conspicuous in a corner of the floor, a heavily weathered piece of dark brown old timber—perhaps a small bit of firewood dropped on its way to the grate? It was about fifteen inches long, and squared off to about four or five inches, and might have been the top of an old fence post, cut into handy lengths to serve the family finally against a winter’s cold.

Closer inspection showed it to be something slightly more elaborate. Over a hundred years ago, a skilful saw had created a flourish of thirteen symmetrical facets at one end, rather like a cut jewel. This, clearly, had been a newel post (Old French: nouel, knob), either the topmost or lowest support post of a stairway.

But it was a very special newel post indeed, from an impeccable pedigree of distinction stretching back to Australia’s earliest settlement and convict transportation. Back, one might almost say, to 1792, when a juvenile criminal named Mary Haydock landed in Sydney to begin her seven-year sentence. Her crime, back in Lancashire, had been to steal a horse. She was then thirteen, and had been disguised as a boy at the time of the offence.

Mary’s case was one where the often cruel and futile convict system both redeemed the transported wretch and also yielded society a valuable ultimate benefit. After brief service as a nursemaid in the household of one of the Rum Corps officers, Mary married a smart and lively Irishman, a free man and experienced businessman, through his earlier employment with the East India Company in Calcutta.

What a partnership began that day! When Tom Reibey died in 1811, it had produced seven capable children and a series of thriving business concerns. They ranged from farms in the Hawkesbury valley to seal hunting in Bass Strait, land development in Sydney Town, a well-managed pub, and a fleet of small sailing ships like a miniature merchant shipping line. Mary, who was now running the hotel and all the other businesses ashore, was well up to dealing with the notoriously tough and tricky Yankee, Chinese and Indian skippers who were her competitors afloat.

Before long, this indefatigable woman was spending generous portions of her time and her money on the public good: on charities such as the hospital, on education and schools, and on the work of the churches. Anglican Bishop Broughton regarded her highly. Governor Macquarie was happy to receive her freely at Government House.

If you, reader, have an Australian twenty-dollar banknote handy in your wallet, fish it out now, and study the likeness engraved there: a direct, firm and open face, I think it, behind the low-worn, round, metal-framed spectacles, and beneath its period lace cap.

Apart from her dignified city mansion, Mary Reibey also had a house out in the sticks at Hunters Hill. An unpretentious cottage with a corrugated iron roof, it was her “retreat”, a place to put her feet up. In those times, Hunters Hill was usually reached from Sydney Town by boat across the water. Several other houses, far grander than Mary’s, lay scattered in this quiet stretch of bush and shoreline. Alas, in 1948, the state government set its doom on all that bucolic seclusion. It announced that the long-discussed North-Western Expressway would be built clean through it. This monster-work would require extensive earthmoving and civil works, with major bridges at Gladesville and Figtree. Redoubtable campaigning by the National Trust, all the way up to the High Court, held back the jackhammers for twelve years, but by 1960 the jig was up.

In Melbourne, where I lived, concern about this apparently relentless advance of the bulldozers and the disappearance of important local history was less immediate than in Sydney. But I had by chance to make a visit north on business, and was confident that I would learn more there. Never was confidence better founded! Within ten minutes of checking in to my Sydney hotel, my old friend Cyril Pearl was on the phone: “Doctor Ryan! Since I hear that happy chance brings you now to the spot, would you consent to join me in a modest private project touching the fame of that truly great early citizen, Mary Reibey?”

“Yes, Cyril. What about lunch tomorrow?”

Cyril Altson Pearl (1904–87) was a remarkable Australian. Fifteen years an editor of daily newspapers and national magazines for the formidable (and occasionally absurd) Sir Frank Packer (progenitor of Kerry); author of some twenty-five published books; gentleman, larrikin, scholar, tease, stirrer, historian, poet and man of courage. As his friend of fifty years, it is pleasing for me to say that Pearl’s entry in Volume 18 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography is “spot on”; Patrick Buckridge (not known to me) depicts all Cyril’s sparkling qualities with a sure touch.

Cyril believed in the power of relics. Not in the religious sense that, say a nail from the True Cross, or an authentic chip from it, might embody in itself some immanent power actually to affect the course of events happening in the world before our eyes. Nothing so transcendental. But Cyril thought it would be a good thing if we were more generally inclined to collect and to display all sorts of objects, sometimes quite commonplace things in themselves, but which had connections with interesting historical persons or events.

On ready view on all our mantelpieces, hall tables and hearths, they would inevitably be discussed; new facts would emerge, errors would be exposed. There would certainly (he hoped above all) be arguments. The grassroots grasp by ordinary citizens of their own history would be immensely strengthened. Too-facile acceptance of the clever books written by the clever people in university history departments would attract sterner scrutiny before being swallowed whole.

Cyril cherished no grand delusion that some lone, late intervention by him might avert the North-Western Expressway. But he had no private relic of Mary Reibey or of her cottage, and he wanted one.

He recalled to me another “relic operation” which he and I had shared years before, when he too lived in Melbourne. One day, after lunch at the Italian Society Restaurant, near the top of Bourke Street, we turned right to walk the short distance to the corner of Spring Street, where Victoria’s majestic Parliament House stood grandly just over the road. Most of the intervening street front we would have to traverse was occupied by the very grand high-colonial period White Hart Hotel. We found that while we had lunched, all unsuspecting, the wrecker’s men had started work on the old White Hart, and had already reduced the handsome ground floor bar—all massive mahogany counters, polished cedar joinery, gleaming brasswork and elaborate glass—to a shattered shambles of shards and splinters. But through the choking clouds of dust we could see four tall cedar, glass-panelled doors, apparently unharmed and propped against the wall. These we bought for a trifling five pounds, but we took the precaution of getting a proper receipt from the new owners, the Windsor Hotel, nearby.

With two doors each, Cyril and I had our relic of the fine and famous White Hart Hotel. He later moved back to live again in Sydney, where I noticed that his White Hart doors were safely hung in his vintage colonial house in Ferdinand Street, Hunters Hill. Back in Victoria, my doors were positioned to become the closures of two main passageways, highly visible and much in use. We were forever retailing to visitors—as Cyril foresaw we would be—the tale of their acquisition, and the moral story that lay in their background—a relation which might have tempted the pen of Gibbon himself. The great historian often proclaimed the inevitable conjunction between corruption and democratic forms of government—that you can’t have one without the other. That sardonic mind could hardly have resisted the temptation to describe the scenes that followed the safe passage in Victoria’s parliament of—say—a lands bill for which the squatters had bribed honourable members for their votes. Those members who had so obliged would later put on their hats and troop down the lofty steps of Parliament House, across Spring Street and into the bar of the White Hart. There, upon the shiny mahogany counter, would lie the bags of gold coin, from which the bagmen would count out sovereigns into grubby parliamentary hands.

Our newel post, so fully described already, says all that is necessary about the results achieved after the several reconnaissance visits Cyril and I made in 1960 to the now-desolate site of Mary Reibey’s cottage. Our family is now raising our relic’s dignity and identity by affixing a discreet metal plate setting out its provenance. Brass, silver, bronze? is a hot topic at this moment. Cyril’s role is recognised.

Meanwhile, in quiet moments, I ponder the general validity and the utility of Cyril’s doctrine of private relics. There is little doubt that the quality and depth of our social context would gain, and would gain today even more than in Cyril’s day. The gee-whiz nature of modern instant-and-everywhere communications progressively leaches warmth, depth, subtlety and wonder from human relations. Cyril’s private relics might well do a little—I make no exorbitant claims—to slow the awful dehumanisation of our world, perfectly described by our great poet Alec Hope as a place where we are all “drawing closer and closer apart”.