FOUR FOUNDING FELONS:
ONCE PUNISHED, THRICE EXILED
A Family History
Monograph
By
Max Kemp
© Mornington Peninsula, July 2015
FOUR FOUNDING FELONS:
ONCE PUNISHED, THRICE EXILED
Part 1
A wall of silence once hid Australian convict ancestries. A
family’s connection to convicted felons transported to Australia from Great
Britain in the late 18th century are now, however, acknowledged with
pride. We know that in most cases the felonies committed by our Australian
forebears, for which the British Government had sentenced many thousands of
them to transportation, reflected more on the appalling social conditions in
Britain than on an embedded criminality within most of the convicted. The rules
of rough justice and the eagerness of the government to shed responsibility for
its increasing numbers of burdensome law-breakers were just two reasons behind
sentencing to transportation. Britain’s need to establish a new penal colony in
Australia – or anywhere – was just one consequence of the several social and
political forces at work.
So the terms “First Fleet convict” or “Second Fleet convict”
no longer convey the stain[1] with which these settlers
have been historically stigmatised. Instead they proclaim, amongst other
qualities, heroic stamina: that is, perseverance and endurance in the face of
injustice, victimisation and torture; of brutality and fear; of illness,
prolonged seasickness and malnutrition; of exposure, famine and continual
threat. It is now generally agreed that to have survived such conditions of
imprisonment, exile and hardship as the convict settlers had experienced was to
demonstrate toughness and resilience and, in so many known instances, perhaps to
inspire their emulation by generations of their descendants and subsequent free
settlers. Whether or not these characteristics belong to a condition we may
like to think of as ‘Australianness’ is, of course, open to debate.
Four convicts who came together through marriage to generate
the eight past and present generations of my family in Australia were Edward
Risby (First Fleet) who married Ann(e) Gibson (Second Fleet), and James
Morrisby (First Fleet) who married Ann Brooks (Second Fleet). Their lives
through separate voyages to Australia, their known individual early experiences
in exile, and their intertwined lives as colonists would make an apt
centrepiece to the jigsaw of any family history in a new country. They are a
poignant symbol also of families from all points of the compass who have
settled here since.
Eight generations later these English-born convict families’
history in Australia suggests that they were truly punished not once, by being
sent to the ends of the earth on a one-way ticket, but three times, by being
uprooted and resettled twice more in equally primitive circumstances. All that
they and their jailers had, but in unequal measure, were lowly expectations:
with some luck, they might survive. The brief stories that follow are about
these four felons who became the two couples that founded the Kemp family in
Australia.
Edward Risby (1755-1823)
and Ann Gibson (1768-1826)
Edward Risby was born into a family
who lived in Uley in the Cotswolds area of Gloucestershire. Uley was rated an
important cottage industry town, with weaving the main occupation of its bread
winners and Edward, probably following his parents, ultimately became a weaver
also. He married Hannah Manning in Horsley, Gloucestershire, in 1779, and by
1784 they had three children.
In 1780 Risby was arrested for “stealing and carrying away by
force of arms … three yards of broad cloth to the value of thirty
shillings and two other pieces of cloth of the value of two shillings … the
goods of John Holborrow and Thomas Maule.[2]” Stealing
should have been enough for him to be sentenced to seven years transportation,
but when he stole ‘by force of arms’ he should surely have been summarily dealt
with. He seems to have escaped punishment then however and, given the standard
of severity of punishment meted out by the justice system at the time, one
wonders why. There is no available record explaining the delay in his
imprisonment.
Any hope or
intention of Risby’s continuing to earn a living as a weaver at home while the
satanic mills of mass cotton and wool production and processing were gearing
up, would have disappeared during the 1780s. In 1783 he was arrested again, presumably because the
law had caught up with him; there is no evidence that new charges were laid. He
was now sentenced at Gloucester Assizes on 24 March 1784, to transportation to
Australia for seven years.
His crime
saw him banished for life by an increasingly desperate government, exiled not
only from his country[3]
but separated from his wife and three children, including a new-born daughter.
He would see none of them again.
His
next four years would become a struggle against the hell of survival on a
prison hulk, Censor, awaiting
transportation, followed by the First Fleet journey to Australia on the Alexander. The Alexander, the largest of the 11-ship convoy, was the worst managed. Before arriving in Australia Risby would
have to endure eight months on board of neglected and dysfunctional bilges with
repeated accumulations of human excreta, infestation of vermin, the stench of
ill fellow-convicts, of brutality by guards, and awful deaths amongst the
chained and crowded prisoners[4].
The
convicts were regarded as not far removed from the vermin that they in turn
were fighting. No matter how difficult the prolonged procedures and their
consequences were over the next days and weeks after disembarkation at Port
Jackson on 26 January, 1788, being able to put foot on land must have been
welcomed as a miraculous rescue by every survivor of the Alexander’s hell-hole journey.
The
convicts were not to know that the unimaginable relief of being on land in this
pristine if
rugged place after their putrid, violent and hopeless confinement was just a
prelude to the years of isolation, privation and near starvation that were to
follow. They could have succumbed to the hopelessness, and many did, but it
seems that Risby was one of the fortunate who had the instinct, drive,
application and good luck to survive.
Of much
importance for Risby’s later welfare, Governor Arthur Phillip sent an
investigative group to Norfolk Island on the Sirius almost immediately after the First Fleet’s landing at Port
Jackson. He had been instructed to assess the island’s potential for
colonisation with the aims, firstly, of beating the French from settling there
and also for producing flax (for sails and cloth), food (grain crops) and
timber (Norfolk pine, deemed suitable for repairs of ships’ masts and spars). There’s
not much we can say specifically about Risby’s year in Port Jackson except
that, as with every settler and because he was classified as a ‘sawyer’, he had
to assist building shelters for animals and huts for people, guard the sparse,
constantly raided and dying vegetable gardens, act as a vigilante protecting the
always diminishing and vulnerable stores, and generally keep his nose clean.
Beset by
unsuccessful transplanting of seed for crops, by sustained drought then
persistent rain, the loss at sea of urgently needed back-up provisions,
distractions by hungry and predatory convicts and displaced and retaliatory
Aborigines, and the arrival of more transportees without effective
communication to and from England about settlement plans and resources,
Governor Phillip looked to Norfolk Island as a settlement that could provide
various kinds of relief. It was either by good luck or a rewarding of effort
that both Risby and James Morrisby were selected to go, under the stewardship
of Arthur Phillip’s deputy, Philip Gidley King, to help establish the island settlement.
Risby and
Morrisby arrived in Norfolk Island with about 300 other convicts and marines on
the Sirius on 17 March 1790,
disembarking only to see the ship founder on the coral reef then break up while
equipment and provisions were being unloaded and much of the cargo lost.
Risby was
deemed to be a ‘free settler’ on Norfolk Island in November 1790, having
apparently worked through the terms of his sentence. Perhaps this was his
second bit of luck; without access to paper records, such decisions about convicts’
rights could be chancy. He was initially granted an acre of land but for
unknown reasons had refused to clear it.[5]
Despite this apparent reluctance he was given his freedom and a 12-acre lot,
which he cultivated and farmed productively.
In June
1790 a Second Fleet ship, the Lady
Juliana, arrived in Port Jackson containing a cargo of 226 or more female
convicts, most of them former prostitutes, which accounted for the marines and
male convicts naming the ship ‘the floating brothel’. The Lady Juliana was provisioned well however, and conditions on her
were better than had applied to the four accompanying Second Fleet vessels.
On board
the Lady Juliana was 21 years old Ann
Gibson who had been convicted for stealing, not prostitution. She had stolen,
in concert with Sarah Lyon, “ … nine yards of thread lace, value 20 s, the
property of Thomas Hattersley, privily in his shop.” Old Bailey court records suggest that Gibson
was a practised shoplifter, as in her initial trial on 22 February, 1786, she
was interrogated for implication by Lyon as an accessory to Lyon’s theft of the
lace, and was found not guilty. In this instance Gibson had a child with her;
the child (gender not named, but probably her son William) was blamed for
innocently hiding the lace. Lyon was nonetheless found guilty and, lucky thence
to escape transportation, sentenced to whipping and placement in a house of
correction.
On 25
October 1786, Gibson was on trial again, this time with Lydia Levi “ … for
feloniously stealing … one piece of silk containing twelve handkerchiefs, value
48 s, the property of Henry Als.” She was found guilty and sentenced to a house
of correction, while Levy was found not guilty. In both trials the techniques
of shoplifting involved hiding the goods in or under clothing, voluminous for
women at that time, while the accessory distracted the shopkeeper. For reasons
unknown, on 25 June 1788, both Gibson and Lyon had their comparatively light
sentences overturned and they were each sentenced instead to transportation for
seven years. This perhaps begs the question: why or how did they fail to meet
their initial conditions of correction?
After
arriving in Port Jackson, Gibson was transferred to Norfolk Island on Lady Juliana with 114 convict women. On 17
November 1791, while Rev. Richard Johnson was briefly visiting Norfolk Island,
it is assumed – because no marriage records have survived – that Ann Gibson
married Edward Risby in one of Johnson’s marriage rituals for 100 eager
couples. Marriage in the two colonies was officially recognised despite it
being known that many transportees had families back in Britain. Edward and Ann
subsequently had six children on the island and another later in Van Diemen’s
Land; six of them survived: Thomas (b.1792), Hannah, Susannah, Joseph,
Benjamin, Charles (b. Sep. 1804; d. Mar., 1805) – all born on Norfolk Island –
and Edward (b. Jan. 1810), born in Hobart.
Having
settled his apparent dispute with the island’s authorities, Risby joined the
Norfolk Island farming group where on six acres of a 12 acres grant he grew
maize and wheat and raised pigs, eventually becoming a leaseholder. Later he
was in the employ of, and being ‘victualled’ by, the government as a watchman
while still farming a smaller allotment of five acres. In Colleen McCullough’s novel, Morgan’s Run,[6] Ed Risby
is mentioned a few times as a friend of Richard Morgan, also a survivor of the Alexander and a successful Norfolk
Island and subsequent Van Diemen’s Land farmer.
In 1807
Edward and Ann and their five children were relocated to Van Diemen’s Land. The
growth of Port Jackson and the opening, meanwhile, of Van Diemen’s Land as a
settlement initially for intractable convicts made continuing the settlement of
Norfolk Island economically unsustainable and also redundant to fulfilling a
transportation and incarceration role. It was also understood that the French
were no longer interested in colonising it. Port Jackson and British government
authorities officially abandoned the first settlement of Norfolk Island on 15
February 1814. (Transportation there resumed however, in 1825.)
But the
Risby and all other families’ resettlement in Van Diemen’s Land cannot be
glossed over as merely an administrative measure by a British government that
seemed either to be aimless or very changeable in its idea of how an
out-of-sight and apparently out-of-mind permanent resettlement or colonisation
or penal establishment should be planned and managed. After more than 20 years
of settlement and despite upheavals with each ship arrival bringing more
convicts in their hundreds, Norfolk Island had become a generally established
and productive community, cohesive enough for its inhabitants to appreciate
their gradual if slow progress through one crisis after another towards
self-containment and mutually dependent support.
Suddenly,
however, these emancipist islanders’ and convicts’ lives were once again turned
inside out. As Calvert[7]
has described it:
When the British government decided it was no longer
economically desirable to
maintain the island settlement only five settlers volunteered for relocation in spite of tempting
offers of recompense. The rest were rounded up and
herded onto a series of embarkations. Their homes, barns, and gardens were destroyed (and) their livestock and domestic
animals were shot, except for the few
cows taken on the ships to provide milk. Each family was allowed one trunk or chest of possessions; everything else
was burned. (An) ancestor (of the writer) Robert
Nash and a friend 'went bush' to try and avoid relocation. They were hunted down
by the crew and thrown onto the deck of City
of Edinburgh 'like a couple of dogs.'
(Hobart Mercury, 2 April 1880)
The Risby
family must have taken up the offer of recompense by acreage. They sailed as
free settlers to Van Diemen’s Land on the City
of Edinburgh and were granted 30 acres in New Town on Tasmania’s Clarence
Plains, where they pursued mixed farming, growing beans and potatoes and
raising pigs and a small flock of sheep. This was a successful venture for them
and they became self-sufficient.
The Risbys
maintained close contact with the Morrisbys. There is evidence of a financial
loan being transacted and paid off from one to the other. The families’
closeness is further evinced in Henry Morrisby, James’s son, naming the second
of his 14 children as Ann Gibson Morrisby (b. 29 March 1835, d.1908).
Of greatest
import for the Kemp family however, Edward Risby’s eldest child Thomas Risby
(born on Norfolk Island in 1782) married James Morrisby’s eldest daughter,
Diane Morrisby (born on Norfolk Island in 1792). Thomas and Diane’s daughter,
Mary Ann Risby (born in 1821) married John Kemp. Kemp is the artist and mariner
who, as my great-grandfather, became the focal subject of an earlier study in
the continuing pursuit of this family’s genealogical history[*].
The
extended Risby family evolved into an established farming family in Tasmania
prior to the sale of the farm by Edward. That he had survived at all after his
experiences on the Censor and the Alexander is testimony to his apparent strength
in many aspects of character and determined endeavour, and also possibly physique
as a younger man, although in that last case he was probably badly affected
constitutionally by the traumas of his transportation. He died an invalid aged
68, in 1823. Regrettably there is no official record of Ann’s death but 1826 is
suggested in one family tree.
Thomas went into business building or buying
boats to be deployed in carrying timber along the Derwent River. His son Joseph
founded Risby Brothers Saw Millers in Hobart.
Edward’s sons, grandsons, then great-grandsons
developed Risby Timber Industries into a large company with timber importing
and exporting and river transport interests that survived in Hobart and
south-western Tasmania in various guises and activities until the 1950s.
Thomas Risby retired from the Risby boat
building and timber business and moved to Melbourne, where he built the Grace
Darling Hotel in Smith Street, Collingwood, in 1854. This was where the
foundation meetings were held for the formation of the renowned Collingwood
Football Club. The strikingly handsome, two-storey, bluestone Victorian-era
building is Victorian-Heritage-listed and functions now as a band venue and
restaurant.
Joseph, Edward’s second eldest son, became a
member of the Tasmanian parliament, but he also moved away from the family
timber business that he had jointly founded, enabling it to be taken over by
his three sons. He settled in West Maitland, New South Wales, building a small
brick-making plant and also a two-storey home near the Hunter River, which became
the Rose Thistle and Shamrock, the
first hotel in Maitland. It was renamed 10 years later as The Falls and continued to operate as a Risby family business until
1923.
Notes:
1 Hughes, Robert, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to
Australia, 1787-1868, Vintage Books, London, 2003 (First published by
Collins Harvill, GB, 1987)
2 Gloucester
Records Office; (2) P.R.O. Assizes
5/104, Part 2
3 Melleuish, Greg. “A More Nuanced
National Story”, The Australian, 11
January, 2011. The author posits that convicts sentenced to transportation were
committed to exile rather than imprisonment.
4 Tench,
Watkin, A Narrative of the Expedition to
Botany Bay (1789) and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port
Jackson (1793) are primary sources republished under the title 1788 Watkin Tench, Text Publishing
Company, Melbourne, 2012 edition.
There
are numerous secondary sources describing the First Fleet incarceration and sailing
conditions. See for example Hill, David, 1788:
The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet, William Heinemann Australia, Sydney,
2008. This draws on numerous primary sources including the Tench journals cited
above, but numerous secondary sources also, including Hughes, Robert, op cit. Novelist
Colleen McCullough, cited below, also provides a well researched and graphic description
of the First Fleet ships’ voyages.
5 Gillen, M., The Founders of Australian History: A Biographical Dictionary of the
First Fleet, Library of Australian History, Sydney 1989, p308
6 McCullough, Colleen, Morgan’s Run, Pocket Books, Simon and
Schuster Inc., NY, 2000.
7 Calvert, Lois, Griffith Review: griffithreview.com/articles/digging-for-yams/
FOUR FOUNDING FELONS:
ONCE PUNISHED, THRICE EXILED
Part 2
This story began in Part 1, where aspects of the lives of two First and Second Fleet convicts, Edward
Risby and Ann Gibson, were described. Risby and Gibson married and after
participating in Australia’s first white settlement at Port Jackson they were
transferred to Norfolk Island, thence Van Diemen’s Land. They, with the
subjects of this second part, became a quartet of founding Australian ancestors
of scores of other families including my own, either through direct descent or
marriage.
James Morrisby (1757-1823) and
Ann Brooks (1752-1813)
Edward Risby and James Morrisby became
close friends because of the
alignment of their histories as convicts. After separate sentencing in
Gloucester Assizes and The Old Bailey they were incarcerated for years on the
hulk, the Censor, anchored in the Thames, thence
were separately transported to and settled in Australia and Norfolk Island. But
they and their families were drawn together subsequently by their marriages and
propinquity as farmers in both Norfolk Island and later on the Clarence Plains
in Van Diemen’s Land/Tasmania throughout their middle and later adult lives.
Their transportation to Port Jackson however, saw Morrisby survive in
relatively easier circumstances than Risby. Whereas Risby had been transported
on the notoriously dysfunctional Alexander,
Morrisby was sent away on the scrubbed, well-drilled Scarborough.
James was born in Carwood,
Yorkshire in 1758. He became a blacksmith. At his Old Bailey trial on 7 July 1784, when he was 26,
it was said that Morrisby had levered from a house a ten pound (4.5kg) iron bar
securing a window, to the value of 10 pence, with intent to make off with it. When he was convicted he
claimed that he had been for 10 years a private in the Scots Guards. As a
blacksmith his employment opportunities would have been as dire as Edward
Risby’s; the onset of the industrial revolution saw Morrisby in a financial
state as perilous as Risby’s.
Morrisby also claimed in court that he was married
with five children but it has been posited that he inflated the number to
garner the judge’s sympathy. Records suggest he had one child or perhaps two.
It would have been a risky plea attempt; it had had little success in the past
in modifying the threat of any sentence to transportation. With 41 other convicted
men on that day he was sentenced to transportation and so confinement to
Australia for a minimum of seven years – in reality, for life.
Morrisby’s history as a convict suggests that the iron
bar theft was an aberration, as he subsequently acquired a spotless record and
was selected like Risby for the Norfolk Island settlement in 1789. In Norfolk
Island his adaptation to farming was obviously more deft and dutiful than was
Risby’s, as he cleared and worked his initial small acre grant while Risby
failed to make much of his, apart from reluctantly clearing some timber. In
1791 Morrisby was recorded as sharing his lot with Ann Brooks who, like Ann
Gibson, had been transported to Port Jackson on the Juliana and thence sent directly to Norfolk Island.
Ann Brooks, nee
Ann Lavender, was also known as Ann Larsom. She had lived off Drury Lane in
London, where she ran a ‘rag fair’, or stall of used clothing, while also
caring for her young son, William. In April 1787, she was tried for shoplifting
some clothes but found not guilty, seemingly on rare humanitarian grounds
because of the need to care for her son. But she came before the court at Old
Bailey again in December that year, this time on theft charges. She was
arraigned for stealing a pair of sheets hanging from a line in company with
another woman who was assumed to be an accomplice, but the latter avoided any
charge. Brooks was found guilty and sentenced to seven years transportation.
She spent 15 months in the notorious Newgate Gaol before being sent by dray to
board the Lady Juliana, destination Australia.
Two months after settling in Port Jackson she was sent
with William on the Surprise to the
newly established Norfolk Island settlement. There she would meet James, the
man with whom she would spend the remainder of her life. But first, in 1791,
she gave birth to a son, Richard Lavender, who later had his family name
changed to Larsom in keeping with a family of Ann Brooks’s acquaintance by that
name and, of course, denoting that one of them was probably Richard’s father.
But by July of that year Ann was on the brink of cohabiting with James Morrisby
and was said to be, at that time, sharing a sow with him on their farm of 12 acres.
She married Morrisby in late 1791 and went on to have five children by him.
Of immense significance to the Kemp family’s claiming
rights about a First and Second Fleet convict heritage was the birth of Diane.
As explained in Part 1, Diane married Edward Risby’s first son, Thomas, thereby
completing the quartet of relationships (with Edward Risby and Ann Gibson) that
led ultimately to my great-grandfather’s twice marrying into their family (see
below).
By1805 the Morrisby acreage on Norfolk Island had
rapidly increased to 27 cultivated acres out of the 30 leased, along with
ownership of 15 swine. James was also appointed special constable and it is
recorded that on one occasion in 1807 he apprehended four escaped prisoners and
returned them to custody by holding them in a commandeered boat. Although
special constables were not well-judged by their fellow ex-convicts, James must
have fulfilled all aspects of this constabulary role well; he was reappointed
special constable again when the family was later resettled in Van Diemen’s
Land.
At the closure of the first settlement in Norfolk
Island at the end of 1807, Morrisby was forced, like Edward Risby - but with a
much more established farm than Risby’s - to relinquish his holding comprising
55 acres of grain, pasture and fallow paddock, a store of maize and a run of
pigs, two barns and a small residence in (eventual) exchange for 80 acres in
Clarence Plains in Van Diemen’s Land. He accepted the proposal and sailed there
with his family on the Porpoise in
December.
When so arbitrarily resettled by the authorities,
Morrisby had to once more begin from the beginning. This must have been
heartbreaking. Reconciled now, perhaps, to never again returning to or even
visiting England and (as far as we can tell) resigned to never seeing his once
loved wife Elizabeth Donaldson and child (or perhaps children), he had to watch
the results of his work in an idyllic sub-tropical island evaporate. In this exchange
he had to restart on virgin soil on another island in what must have seemed to
him almost sub-arctic conditions. All this and much more had become repeated
punishment for filching a piece of iron.
Anderson3, in her description of the first
settlers’ farming on the Clarence Plains, just east of Hobart, says this:
For
ex-convicts this must have been daunting. Their land, virgin bush, had to be cleared, ploughed and sown with crops, and
they had to build some sort of house and
establish a water supply. Clarence often lacked water in summer as there were few streams, and … farmers had to rely on
wooden tubs to hold rainwater, or the chance
that if they dug deeply enough they could establish a well.
She went on to examine critically
the Norfolk Islanders relocated to Clarence Plains:
They received
little help from the government. The Norfolk Islanders were regarded as a shiftless lot, ‘hopeless and dissipated’,
who generally failed to make good in Tasmania;
given their situation and background, this is not surprising. But many did do remarkably well in Clarence.
Amongst those who did well was James Morrisby. His
grant of 80 acres in Clarence while Edward Risby received 30 acres in Argyle
seems to reflect either the differential in effort made by each of them in
their work on Norfolk Island or simply their worked acreage ownership on their
departure. After describing the farming accomplishments of several ex-Norfolk
Island settlers, including Richard Morgan of Morgan’s Run fame4, Anderson says of Morrisby:
When
they arrived in Clarence in 1809 they established a farm … and prospered. James … sold salt in Hobart,
became a constable and in 1817 helped to
capture bushrangers. The Morrisby family flourished, with two sons and a daughter settling on farms in the
district, and there are many Morrisby descendants
in Clarence today, some on the original properties.
In the Anderson text endorsing this comment, there is
a photograph of the Clarence Council in 1912 with 13 upstanding and
intimidatingly postured men, including two Morrisbys: William, who was Council
Clerk, and George. They were James’s great-grandsons. A scan of headstones and
memorials erected to commemorate the lives of Morrisby generations indicates
how large and widespread the Morrisby clan became, and is still, in Tasmania.
James Morrisby’s success was built upon farming and
selling beef and grain to the government and salt in the streets of Hobart Town
where, in later life he became the owner of a house. Fortune favoured James’s bravery because in 1828 Rev.
Robert Knopwood, an influential man in the new colony and one with whom James
seems to have engaged in running disputes over small matters, was moved to
observe: “I never see so fine crops
(sic); the season has been so very fine and plenty of grass.” 5 Morrisby
was moved to petition Governor Arthur for an additional land grant, saying that
his family was large and dispersed by marriage and he was less able on his own
to produce enough to satisfy government demand. The petition was unsuccessful
until Arthur checked Morrisby’s impeccable farming and personal histories and, obviously
finding them worthy, changed his mind and granted him another 320 acres.
Ann
Brooks-Larsom, James’s wife, died in 1813. Three years later James married
Irish woman Eleanor (Alice) Murphy; she was an ex-convict also, who arrived at
Port Jackson on the Catherine in May
1814 and was later sent to Van Diemen’s land. She died in 1821. They had no
children.
James and Ann
had founded a Morrisby dynasty and there are now many memorials spread
throughout Tasmania commemorating the various Morrisby families and their descendants’
lives. There is also a species of eucalypt named Eucalyptus morrisby; it was found on a Morrisby property and
commemorates James’s grandson Arthur. The tree was once common in southeast
Tasmania but is now endangered.
It was these
Risby and Morrisby families into which my great-grandfather John Kemp married.
Mary Ann Risby, widow of a sea captain, Joseph Young, became Kemp’s wife and
bore him four children, two of whom survived. Mary Ann died in Montreal of
diphtheria, leaving two stepchildren to be raised by John and two surviving
children of hers with John. One of the stepchildren was Emma, who took her
father’s family name of Young. She was 16 when she married my widowed
great-grandfather, and he was 40. They had 12 children, one of whom was my
grandfather, Charles Leslie Kemp.
Whatever may be
said of the Risby-Morrisby quartet’s appearances and convictions for theft at
the Old Bailey or Gloucester Assizes, they became survivors of
institutionalized summary justice, torture, privation and unimaginable loss.
There are scores of families living throughout Australia who have every reason
to be thankful that these Kemp ancestors were tough and resilient enough to
build and rebuild new, productive lives out of the debris that remained after
the 18th century industrial revolution had all but destroyed them
and their families.
Endnotes
[*]
Kemp, Max. John
Kemp (1821-1823): Scion, Seafarer and Artist, self-published, Mornington
Peninsula, Dec 2014; revised June 2015.
2 Gillen, M., The Founders of Australian History: A Biographical Dictionary of the
First Fleet, Library of Australian History, Sydney 1989, p308
3 Anderson, Alison, The Eastern Shore: A History of Clarence, Clarence City Council,
Tas., 2003. Chapter 2. Available on
line.
4 McCullough, Colleen, Morgan’s Run, Pocket Books, Simon and Schuster Inc., NY, 2000.
5 Anderson, op cit.
Acknowledgments
Special
thanks are accorded Chris Cumming and Roger McDonald of Mornington Peninsula
Family History Society Inc. for their identification and opening of my access
to the Kemp family’s First and Second Fleet Australian ancestral history.
Dr Frank
Coulter and Diana Coulter contributed invaluably to my understanding and
appreciation of the Risby and Morrisby families’ Norfolk Island period as well
as in situ photographs of landmarks
and artifacts. I am greatly indebted to them for their interest and enthusiasm
in the investigation of my family’s history as well as their care in checking
my distant interpretations of Norfolk Island information.
© Copyright, Max Kemp, Mornington Peninsula,
July 2015
