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The Mitchell Library

The Mitchell Library stands just up the hill from where the convicts were put ashore. It was built in an age when Ancient Greece was the pinnacle of civilisation and Ionic columns announced Culture. Its main Reading Room is a vast lighted box, radiance pouring down from the ceiling.

A week after the walk across the Bridge I climbed its steps and pushed through its big bronze doors. The Mitchell contains most of the documents relating to early settlement in New South Wales. If there were any information about Solomon Wiseman that might start to fill the void that had opened up in me, that’s where I’d find it.

From trips to the library as a student years before, I knew it housed a Family History Centre. I’d glanced in and seen how busy it was. Most of the people there seemed to be middle-aged women, their eyes shining, the thrill of the chase upon them as they went looking for ancestors.

I didn’t go in. I’d always thought they were a bit of a joke, those ladies in their cardigans tracking down every twig of their family tree. Now that I was one of them, I wanted even less to go there.

My mother’s story was full of gaps. That ‘offence we don’t know of’, for example—I assumed that finding out more would involve expert delving into arcane catalogues and long-forgotten documents. So, instead of the Family History Centre, I went to the area within the Mitchell Reading Room where original material was accessed, a silent place behind its own set of glass doors, sealed off from the main part of the library.

The librarian heard me out politely, then pointed to some shelves behind me lined with small white boxes of microfilm. ‘See over there? Old Bailey Session Papers. The transcripts. Just start at 1806 and work backwards.’

There they were, on the open shelves. You didn’t even have to fill out a Request Slip.

I realised that, like Lord Nelson, the family story had been holding the telescope up to its blind eye. It pretended it didn’t know why Solomon Wiseman was sent to Australia. But it made sure that it contained the two details that made it easy to find out: the date of his arrival and the name of the ship he came on.

If it was so easy to discover, why had no one tried before? The first thing on the microfilm for 1804–06 was an index of the trials, arranged by date, everything in solid old type. The ‘whole proceedings’ were ‘Taken down in shorthand by Blanchard and Blanchard’.

I skimmed the list. I wasn’t really expecting to find Solomon. Something about these tidy boxes, these alphabetical lists, sat awkwardly with the family story. It was as if Grandma’s sideboard, blue stain and all, was put on display in a museum.

There was something else, too. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to find him. My hand on the creaking handle of the microfilm reader, the soft sounds of the library around me, I realised that my comfortable ignorance was about to be undone. If I found Wiseman’s trial, I could never tell my children that ‘for some offence that we don’t know of, he was transported to Sydney’.

And what else might there be for me to know? What about that other question, the one about the Aboriginal people? I’d bowled in to the library lightly enough. But my quest was a bit like wanting the doctor to be entirely frank. You only wanted her to be entirely frank if she had good news.

The trouble with knowing was that it wouldn’t end there. What did you do with what you knew? You could hide it away again, but you’d know you’d done that. You couldn’t ever go back to not-knowing.

I was starting to see that, if I went on with this, I’d come up not only with Solomon Wiseman’s place in the scheme of things, but my own. When you were a white Australian, investigating your own history could lead you into some murky territory.

No wonder my hand was turning more and more slowly. When ‘Wiseman, Solomon’ leaped off the page at me, I felt a pulse of fright. Relief, too, as I read: ‘Crime: Stealing on board a Ship or Barge on the navigable River Thames’.

Wiseman’s was quite a long trial. It was complicated in its details, but the outline was simple enough. He was thirty years old, a ‘lighterman’ on the Thames, in the employ of one Matthias Prime Lucas. On April 10, 1804, Wiseman took Lucas’s lighter—some kind of small boat, I assumed—down to a ship at Horseleydown and loaded it with valuable ‘Brazil wood’. He was supposed to take it up-river to Three Cranes Wharf and unload it there.

Around midnight my great-great-great grandfather rowed to Three Cranes Wharf with the wood. It was a very dark night and he didn’t know that Lucas, along with some other men, was following him in another boat. Lucas had obviously been tipped off.

At Three Cranes Wharf, Wiseman tied the lighter up and climbed onto the wharf. Lucas heard him call out ‘Ned!’ and say, ‘Damn your eyes, Ned, why did not you come down to lend a hand with the lighter?’, and someone answered that he ‘could not come any sooner, he come as soon as he could’.

Wiseman and Ned started to unload the Brazil wood—but instead of putting it up on the wharf, they were moving it into another boat.

Lucas and his friends heard it all: ‘The next sound I heard was, apparently to me, as though a log of wood was scraping over the gunnel of the lighter, as if a person was easing it down, we then heard a hollow sound as if it was set down on the floor at the bottom of the barge.’

They waited until a few pieces of wood had been moved, then they rushed out of their hiding-place. Lucas described what happened next: ‘I struck at Wiseman with a small hanger; he retreated back from me, and said, pray do not, for God’s sake, or words to that effect; I did not attempt to pursue the blow, but thought of closing with him, and taking him by the collar; I sprang towards him, the oars of the barge were then lying sloping from the fore-beam, and…I did not observe the oars; I fell over the oars, and he jumped into a little boat.’

But Lucas had laid his plans well, and had an employee, Richard Rowey, waiting in a small boat nearby. Rowey recalled: ‘I heard Mr Lucas’s voice calling out, Rowey; after which I discovered a boat coming from where the lighter lay… I followed them, and when they came to Crawshay’s wharf…I got on board of theirs; one man jumped overboard; I told him I would shoot him, if he attempted to make his escape. Not hearing any more of him, I supposed he was drowned.’

I laughed aloud at this matter-of-fact tone. In the hushed air of the library it seemed a loud noise, rupturing the calm of books and papers with rude life. At his desk the librarian lifted his head and looked at me, and the woman at the next table gave a little cough.

Rowey was still talking. ‘I turned my attention to the prisoner at the bar; he exclaimed, for God’s sake, Mr Rowey, have mercy, you know the consequence, or something to that effect; he then stepped on the aft athwart of the boat, and made a spring into the river; he got hold of my boat, which I had left, and made his escape.’

Like everyone else, Wiseman got his moment to speak in his own defence. ‘After I brought that lighter up, I left her, I did not see her afterwards; I meant to come to her at high water; I left her when…I heard there was such a piece of work about her, I was afraid to come back; Mr Lucas knows no lighter upon the river could come to her.’

My great-great-great grandfather’s voice, speaking directly across nearly two centuries! The actual phrases he used! And all those others: Lucas with his pompous rehearsed account, Rowey rattling off something as if learned off by heart, Ned whining his excuses. They leaped off the page, these people—their words, their tone! They crowded around me, their voices singing out clearly into my ear, indignant or strident or pleading.

It was as if I’d opened the bronze doors under the classical pediment and released a crowd of people into the demure Mitchell Library: shouting and sweating, galloping along the floors, insisting on having their say.

The prisoner called seven witnesses who gave him a good character, but the verdict was Guilty and the sentence was Death.

When I’d finished reading Solomon’s trial, I sat for a long time in front of the machine. The yellow light poured down onto the screen, an island of light in the darkened microfilm corner. I felt as if I’d just seen a snake or narrowly avoided being run over: in shock.

He was so alive, a person frightened of death, flustered by the court so that his Prisoner’s Defence came out in a muddle. I could hear him breathe, feel the heat of his body as he stood in the dock of the Old Bailey.

In an hour I’d learned more about him than Mum had ever known. I’d burst out of the sealed capsule of the story she’d so carefully transmitted. I was on my own now: on my own, with this man I hardly knew.

I had a huge hunger to know more. What sort of life did he have in London? Why did he steal when he knew the consequence? Was he desperate, or greedy?

I decided to spend some time on the internet. The Mormons—for whom genealogy is important—have a massive database of births, deaths and marriages. It’s all online: you type in a name and a date and, bingo, there’s your ancestor.

The name was easy. The date wasn’t quite so certain: at the trial his age was given as thirty, but I thought this might have been approximate, so I searched a few years either side.

It was a shock to find twenty-nine Solomon Wisemans. I decided to ignore the ones not born in London (although my Solomon Wiseman might not have been born there) and weeded out the repetitions. Even when I’d done that, there were still seven.

I printed out the search results and began to study them.

Several Soloman Wisemans were born—in different years—in Bermondsey. Several had parents called William and Elizabeth, one had parents called William and Catherine. One had parents called Richard and Jane. Two were born—in different years—in Bermondsey and had a spouse called Jane. One was born in Essex and had a spouse called Jane. One was christened at St Mary Mounthaw, wherever that was, another at St Mary Somerset. One record asserted that Solomon Wiseman had married Jane Middleton at Spitalfields Christ Church in 1799. Another gave him an address—Butler’s Buildings, Bermondsey—and a son baptised at St Mary Magdalene, Southwark.

I already had two Solomon Wisemans: my mother’s and my own. From this search I now had nine. But somewhere behind my sources—the family story, the Old Bailey records, and these terse and perhaps unreliable entries on the Family Search site—was the real man. He had lived and died not as a story or a set of entries on a website, but an individual as precisely himself as anyone I knew. I hungered to find out who he was.

The search for him pointed towards London and, by a stroke of extraordinary luck, at just that time I had the opportunity to go there.