Chapter 8
THE CONCLUSION
My Dear ****,
I have reached the end of my story on you and my great (many times) grandparents, and I trust that you will have enjoyed reading it, and that you will have found out so much about them which is all new to you. We have it all in our four big volumes of documents and photographs, but I have had to squeeze it down and to take up only as far as Daniel and Ann Brien and their children. The rest is now up to you.
Our Grannie was just a five foot waif in the village of Bow. She had no father, a step father and mother who, like she, could not even sign their own names. For some reason, while down at Tamerton Foliott, near Plymouth, aged 17, she stole those two Bank notes and, in twice two, she was arrested, put in gaol, taken into the Big Court, sentenced to death, put into gaol again, let off with imprisonment on the other side of the world, put into a convict ship and dumped in Sydney. She was a nobody, with no future.
Then Daniel Brien, who had been sent out here as a convict 18 years before, when there was really no proof that he had stolen a bundle of clothes which were intended for a washerwoman, had waited all those years for a suitable girl for his wife. And he picked her, a nobody. Because of Daniel, she had her own home for herself at Seven Hills and, in only three years after being sentenced to death, she was the wife of the first Policeman in Seven Hills, a somebody. She gave Daniel eleven little Aussies.
Then, after 26 years with her second husband, William Smith, she was pushed into the open fire by him while he was drunk, and she suffered dreadful burns for about 27 hours, lying there in agony before she passed away. It was a dreadful death for her and, before I took all this up, all that you had was that paragraph in the "Sydney Morning Herald" of 17th July, 1865. How were you ever to know that the old lady named Mary Anne Smith in that grave was our Ann Parker from Bow, our Grannie, if I had not looked into her story and written it all out for you ?
There is one important date in your calendar - 14th July - the anniversary of the date on which she died in agony in the skillion of that little home on Vardy's Road in King's Langley of today. Grannie deserves a bunch of flowers, don't you think ? All that I suggest that you need to do is to get a plastic soft drink bottle and to cut the top off it to use it for a vase. You cannot leave glass jars in a cemetery. Then with your bunch of flowers, your vase, your bottle of water, your hearth brush for cleaning the top of her grave, you go into the front gate of the cemetery, and there, in the second row, at eleven o'clock, you will see the headstone "Mary Anne Smith". When you place your flowers on the grave, make sure that her name is still uncovered. It will be mid-winter, and the flowers will last for a week, and, if that headstone is covered with a mass of flowers, everyone will inquire why this "Mary Anne Smith" is so honoured, and you will be able to tell them why, with pride.
Over on the hillside, at 11 o'clock, you will see the four headstones of the Gilbert graves. Some of you will be Gilberts as well as being Briens. Mary Gilbert, formerly Amanet, is buried there, and the Gilbert C.D. has already been written by me. Mary Gilbert had five children in England before she came to Parramatta, and six more here. Our Ann Brien had eleven children here at Seven Hills. From these two little girls we have seventeen, yes seventeen, little Aussies, all of whom were your distant cousins, so many time removed.
I hope that you have been pleased with my story. It was not easy for me to write. But if you would like to show your pleasure, now do so on 14th July next and cover her grave with flowers each year.
There is so much of the early history of New South Wales which still has to be written and included in school books, like this little C.D., and this is my contribution.
William J. Cuthill
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria
11 Fairmont Avenue
Camberwell Victoria, 3124
