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with well-watered meadows and a great assortment of flowering shrubs and spreading trees.
The town sits on the upper reaches of a pleasant little river, Broughton Creek, which winds
south to the broad Shoalhaven River. Nowra stands on the river's southern bank.
Broughton Creek in the 19th century was navigable to its junction with Broughton Mill Creek,
and it was here, in November, 1825, that seven sawyers set up a camp. A tannery followed,
then a saw-mill. The sawyers were employed by a well-educated Scotsman, Alexander Berry,
who with his partner, Edward Wollstonecroft, had been given 10 thousand acres in the area in
1822, on condition that they maintained and employed 100 convicts. The whole estate was run
from a homestead and settlement below the 302 meter Mount Coolangatta, and west of the
present-day community of Shoalhaven Heads at the mouth of the river. Also called Coolangatta,
the homestead grew into a self-supporting village, with its own plumbers, blacksmiths,
coachmen, carpenters and other tradesmen, and its own workshops and mills. It was lorded
over by
247
The Tasmanian Mary had two children - Mary Lee Palmer, born in February 1872, and
Charles Thomas Palmer, born in December 1874. Both were born in Hobart. The family then
disappears from the Tasmanian records and none of them is recorded as having died there.
But in the 1890's a Charles Palmer dies in Charters Towers. Could he have been the sailor who
married Mary Casey in 1871? If he was, and he married our Mary, we have an explanation for
her presence in Queensland in 1879. But what happened to the little Palmer boy and girl?
The fact that Mary herself chose to colour her history after her marriage -as it seems she did -
implies that her life before she married John was either rather dull or discreditable. It is quite
possible that our Mary had a past, as they say, which might have included an earlier marriage
(to the sailor, Charles Palmer, in Hobart in 1871), even other children. And what was she doing
in hottest Queensland, in a rough gold-mining settlement, apparently alone and unwed, at the
age of 28? Up there, only Mary knew where she had been and what she had done. And why
should she tell the truth?
We know she lied about her age and place of birth, and may indeed have dreamed up a
completely fictitious account of her origins and first 25 years. She was probably the originator
(and who could disprove it later in Queensland?) of what was remembered later by her
descendants about her alleged early life, before she met and married John Honeycombe in
Charters Towers. She is said to have been a ballet dancer. She is said to have been a beauty
and the Belle of the Ball at a big function in Melbourne. She is said to have been related to Lord
Casey (who died in 1976). None of this, alas, has been confirmed or is likely to be true. The
stories may have sprung from fantasies dreamed up by Irish Mary to romanticise a dubious past,
or out of a natural inclination to fabricate events for the sake of a better story - which may have
led to her losing her grip on reality later in life.
It /s possible that she, not her family, lived for a while in Tasmania; she might also have lived in
Melbourne. But she was not a cousin of Lord Casey -although her grandfather Michael Casey
might have been related to Lord Casey's great-grandfather - Bartholomew Casey.
Who was Lord Casey? He was Australia's first life peer, and was ennobled as Baron Casey in
1960. He went on to become Governor General of Australia and died in 1976. Born in
Brisbane in 1890, he was the son of Richard Gardiner Casey, a Queensland pastoralist and
politician, who was chairman of the Mt Morgan Gold-mining Company, about the time the
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