One of the only surviving images of Mary Braidwood Mowle, nee Wilson. Photo: Braidwood Museum.
Mary Braidwood Mowle should have, like most colonial Australian women, been forgotten to history.
Arriving in Australia in 1836, age nine, she was proficient in piano and well educated in astronomy, botany, chemistry, languages, dancing and drawing, and like many women of her time, she was dead by age 30, after bearing her sixth child.
In those short 30 years she didn’t fight in the Napoleonic War, nor did she ride a horse through India, become a member of the Royal Geographic Society or make a record number of crossings between England and Australia. Those achievements were the sole privilege of men, and her father Thomas Braidwood Wilson ticked them all off his personal bucket list before passing at age 51.
In comparison, what Mary was allowed to achieve in life seemed, in her own opinion, unremarkable, and we know that because Mary kept a personal diary that has preserved her thoughts for future generations.
That diary, written between the years 1850 and 1855, is a rare firsthand account of the life that colonial women led, and without it, a piece of our history would be missing.
A short-sighted family member redacted large sections of Mary’s diary after her death. Image: National Library of Australia.
With the diary only spanning five years of her life, the entries form a surprisingly tangible bridge to the past, and it’s a rare opportunity to hear a woman’s voice narrate the day-to-day happenings in colonial Australia, and they aren’t always as you expect.
As a child, Mary was on a trajectory for a comfortable life. From a privileged life in England, followed by a comfortable life on 13,000 acres of property in Braidwood, Mary had the benefits of money, servants and boarding school. Some extra responsibilities came her way when her mother died in childbirth when Mary was 10, but the real crash that changed the course of her life came when Mary was 16 with her father committing suicide after being declared bankrupt, leaving her and her brother James with a good reputation but no money.
Despite an uncertain future, Mary was already secretly swept up in a romance with Stewart Mowle at the time of her father’s death, and they had been tentatively courting from the time she was 14 and he 18. Stewart felt that the pair were ‘made for each other’, and his diaries and memoirs paint the picture of love and a fair dose of lust being well and truly alive in colonial Australia.
Stewart came from a good family, but with no inheritance after his uncle’s death, he had no money to his name, making the marriage to Mary in 1845, aged 17, a brave move on her behalf.
With the resilience that could only be attributed to a pioneering spirit, Mary left everything she knew embarking on married life in a rudimentary bark hut with a dirt floor at Mannus near Tumbarumba, a far cry from her upbringing. From there they later made their way to the Queanbeyan region where Mary gave birth to her first child, and then as Stewart moved up in the world, he landed a position at Customs House and they made their way to Eden, the place that Mary loved most of all.
Through Mary’s diaries you can feel the adventure mingled with the hardship. She wasn’t accustomed to poverty but seemingly took it in her stride.
When she does complain, she is largely ‘vexed’ by her husband or laments their lack of money. It’s at this point that Mary becomes a very relatable figure, and you realise no matter where you are in life or what point in history, people were distracted or burdened by similar issues.
Mary’s diaries regularly cross into the mundane, and she often remarks that she doesn’t know why she is even keeping them when her life is so dull. What she doesn’t realise is that by narrating those mundane tasks like gathering apples, baking cakes, and feeding poultry, she is writing her life, and many other colonial women’s lives into history, something she had no premonition of when she recorded her thoughts.
Through her words you get the sense that Mary hasn’t considered there could be any other path in life for a woman, likely because for most, there wasn’t. But given half the chance, it feels as if she would give it a crack.
Her tales of traversing the countryside on horseback from Bungendore to Yass to attend a ball in which they dance all night to then ride all through the day the next day to return home, show a woman of incredible spirit and shatters the idea that women sat around darning all day long, although there was a lot of that too.
Her accounts of life are often humorous and she’s exceedingly critical of the appearance of other women, referring to a ball attendee as a “little suet dumpling” and showing no more mercy on a visiting family that she describes as an “elderly broken down little woman in appearance with very lackadaisical manners – the housekeeper and governess are both oddities and the children all plain”.
Mary took great joy documenting the comings and goings of the whaling fleets in Twofold Bay. Painting: Oswald W Brierly.
When her thoughts veer away from her every day tasks and documenting the weather, which she did most days, she expresses well-founded fears of childbirth, fascination at the whaling industry happening on her doorstep in Eden, a reliance on written correspondence that largely formed her social life and a love for not only her children but the children of a widowed Captain that she takes into her home as she raises seven children while still in her 20s.
Unaware of the future historical importance of her musings, Mary’s diaries abruptly end when her husband runs into legal trouble surrounding land sales in Eden, which is followed by the death of her fifth child at 22 months old and culminates in her own death weeks after giving birth to her sixth child.
After Mary’s death on 15 September 1857, correspondence between Stewart and their eldest daughter Florence, who was 11 years old at the time of Mary’s death, highlights the maturity often forced upon young girls in colonial Australia on account of deaths in childbirth.
As Florence steps into her mother’s place, her written words as she checks on the welfare of her father are almost haunting, like an inescapable cycle starting over again as our young women bravely faced the lives they were born into and largely left again with minimal recognition both then and now.
For a full and wonderful account of Mary Braidwood Mowle, her diaries and all the surrounding research can be found in A Colonial Woman, The Life and Times of Mary Braidwood Mowle, by Patricia Clarke, available at The Braidwood Museum.
Original Article published by Tenele Conway on About Regional.
