Molly Morgan, redoubtable pioneer
Of the people who were granted small plots of land to farm at Wallis Plains in 1818, we know most about Molly Morgan. Born Mary Jones in Corfton, in the western Midlands of England in 1762, she was to become a major figure in early Maitland. Her pioneering contribution was enormous.
Early life and transportation to New South Wales
Molly’s father was a labourer and rat-catcher, perhaps also a fox-catcher. His daughter learned to read, write and develop needlework skills, and she became a dressmaker. She had an illegitimate child at 20 before marrying William Morgan (not the father of her first-born) and having two more children with him.
In 1789 she and her husband were arrested for stealing hemp yarn: with very little sense of honour, he absconded and left her to deal with the charge alone. She tried to commit suicide by cutting her throat but was treated for her injuries, tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. Fortunately her punishment was commuted to transportation to New South Wales for 14 years.
Her voyage was on the Second Fleet’s Neptune with at least 500 other people. Their vessel was a true ‘hellship’ thanks to a tyrannical captain, Donald Trail. The convicts were virtually starved, kept in chains and rarely saw the deck, and the mortality rate among them was high. Nearly 40 per cent died on the voyage and many had to be hospitalised on arrival only to die shortly afterwards.
Drawing of the Neptune
Molly, presumably fit and healthy at the beginning of the voyage, survived in relatively good shape, arriving in Sydney in mid-1790. She was eventually reunited with William who had been caught, tried and sentenced to transportation after her. The pair may have operated a shop for a time, but she sought a means of returning to England. She achieved this probably by becoming, in 1794, the mistress of a ship’s captain.
Back in England and reunited with her children, Molly set up as a dressmaker in Plymouth, Devon, and in 1797 she married a Thomas Mears. No divorce from William had been obtained. She and Thomas quarrelled, their house burned down and Molly was blamed. Separately she was tried for stealing a petticoat, handkerchief and napkin, found guilty and transported to New South Wales once more.
Her ship, Experiment, arrived in Sydney in mid-1804 and she was sent to the Female Factory at Parramatta. Soon she had a ‘protector’, probably a soldier, and they were given some land nearby and a few cattle. Now in her mid-40s, Molly had become a farmer.
But her troubles were not over. Accused of stealing and rebranding government cattle, she was tried again and transported once more ꟷ this time to Newcastle’s penal camp for repeat offenders. A recidivist with a string of convictions behind her, she would have been seen as amongst the most intractable convicts in the colony. Newcastle had been set up precisely for ‘the worst of the worst’.
The Maitland chapter
In 1818, at the age of about 56, Molly’s luck changed. Governor Lachlan Macquarie decreed the establishment at Wallis Plains of a farming colony based on ‘well-behaved’ serving convicts, and she was granted about 30 acres to farm on Horseshoe Bend. There, with assigned convict help, she grazed cattle and grew crops. She also established a shanty to sell rum and wine and accommodate travellers moving up and down the valley.
The Wallis Plains holdings as surveyed in 1823. Molly Morgan’s (listed here under her final married name of Hunt) is number 12.
(Reproduced from Cynthia Hunter’s Bound for Wallis Plains, p 21)
By 1822 Molly Morgan had turned her life around. Her existence had been one of great difficulty and no great promise: she had had an illegitimate child, married three times (twice bigamously) and been transported three times. But her strong work ethic saw her develop her holding (including building fences) and achieve success with crops and cattle at Wallis Plains.
Probably to improve her chances of gaining title to her land, she then married a much younger man, Thomas (Joe) Hunt, one of her assigned servants. This was a response to her inferior legal status as a woman: being married would give her benefits she would otherwise not have been able to access, potentially including title to the land she was occupying.
In 1823 Molly was granted a new holding of 159 acres in exchange for her original one. On it she built a more substantial pub, the Angel Inn, on the increasingly busy, well-travelled main road to the interior, soon to become known as High St, and she made money by subdividing her holding to people who set up businesses on it. Soon she was free, a successful businesswoman, a substantial landholder in Maitland and Greta and a pillar of the local community.
In 1828 she and her husband were listed in the colonial census as cattle holders and tanners but not as innkeepers because she had been unable to obtain a licence. They were living on her property with 20 other people in various huts she had had built. She was employing and supporting other people and was thus furthering former governor Lachlan Macquarie’s goal of promoting economic development and taking convicts and former convicts off the government’s hands. She helped sick people, treated ill men in her home (usually with ‘medicinal’ rum) and travelled to Sydney by horse to plead with the governor for the lives of convicts who had been sentenced to death.
Her philanthropy late in her life was marked by her granting of £100 ꟷ a huge sum around 1830 equivalent to thousands of dollars today ꟷ for a school in East Maitland. This act showed both her generosity and the wealth she had accumulated. Sadly, in her later years she lost that wealth and died poor in relative obscurity on her farm near Greta in 1835, probably having been too generous to those around her. She was buried on the farm, but her grave’s precise location is not known.
Judgements about Molly Morgan
Molly Morgan had a strong personality and she was resourceful and entrepreneurial. Most importantly she was indomitable and bounced back from adversity. She impressed colonial governors and repaid their faith. Intelligent and compassionate, she was without doubt a positive influence in Wallis Plains as it grew from a collection of small farms to a bustling town.
Molly was clearly successful and respected, whether as a farmer, landholder, cattle dealer or businesswoman operating mainly as an innkeeper and sometimes trading land for hogsheads of rum: this was not uncommon in her day. Moreover she was said to be generous and fair in her treatment of others, including her assigned convicts.
She was a much-admired woman in Wallis Plains during the 1820s. Samuel Clift, a contemporary settler who built Toll House and Walli House next to Wallis Creek, called her a ‘wonderful settler’. John Eckford, an original Wallis Plains resident, considered her ‘honest and industrious’, and an obituary in the Australian newspaper lauded her philanthropy.[1] Molly Morgan was, by any reckoning, one of the most worthy and important people in the infant settlement during the 1820s. Nineteenth century records about her life and character are entirely positive.
Pawel Zawislak’s gentle imagining of Molly Morgan in Cynthia Hunter’s Bound for Wallis Plains, 2012, p 55
In the twentieth century another, less favourable version of her became the dominant one. She was treated as wanton and promiscuous and became the subject of salacious gossip. Judgements were made that understate the difficult situations in which women other than the high-born lived in her time and the suffering she endured from men, British justice and (until 1818) the colonial administration. Yes, she was wilful, she stole, and she used her ‘feminine charms’ to advance her interests. She had several male ‘protectors’ in her life. But it was all for survival in a world that was hard for women.
A recent article by Narissa Phelps argues that Molly’s reputation was sullied in the popular press during the 1950s and 1960s. In Truth she was portrayed as a ‘wanton temptress and seducer of men’, and a ‘female Casanova who loved both men and rum’. She had ‘broadminded ways’ and an ‘intimate knowledge of men and their wants’ and ‘more men in her life than a Hollywood modern’. The Sunday Mirror called her a ‘love huntress who lured men and told bawdy stories’.[2]
In drawings accompanying these stories she was portrayed dancing on bars, provocatively hitching up her skirt, while drunken men drooled lustfully. Her cleavage and thighs were prominently depicted. This was sexualisation and objectification. Molly’s considerable accomplishments were subordinated to an image of promiscuity. Her imagined looks (we have no contemporary physical description) and allegedly flirtatious, ‘come-hither’ behaviour became central to a morally diminished version of her that has taken root in the popular imagination. Sex was made the key to her success ꟷ not her industry, determination, entrepreneurial ability and kindness. Tellingly, she was depicted in the Truth and Sunday Mirror sketches as much younger than she was in her Maitland days.
Left: Molly Morgan as imagined in Truth (1951), young and buxom (illustration by Dan Russell)
Right: Molly Morgan depicted dancing provocatively (Dudley Lewis’s The Life and Legend of Molly Morgan, illustration by Joseph Cross)
(From Jude Conway, ‘The infamous Molly Morgan’, 2016)
The differences between the accounts of long ago and more recently are striking. The two Mollys are far apart. Both depictions cannot be accurate.
Twentieth century male commentators created a character who threatened to overrun the person Molly’s contemporaries knew. Strategic selection of facts ꟷ the bearer of an illegitimate child, somebody who twice married bigamously and who had calculated affairs with men to advance her goals ꟷ has seen her judged harshly and unfairly.
Because of her assumed moral ‘deficiencies’ (and with no consideration of the great difficulties she had to surmount to survive in a harsh, male-dominated world which for many years treated her without sympathy) she has been positioned between the prostitute and the promiscuous woman. Long after her time, her place in history was damaged by this treatment.
Thus was a character created by manipulation. The re-interpretation was misogynistic and based on lurid and prurient imaginings, not evidence: an audience is guaranteed when a woman’s behaviour is represented as ‘loose’. Ask Maitland people today who Molly Morgan was and her sex life, not her pioneering role in Maitland’s development, will probably dominate the response. An unflattering version of her character has taken hold in people’s thinking.
The Molly we have been told about in relatively recent times is more invented than real. She deserves better than the version of her that was put together more than a century after her death. What happened is a lesson in how history can be manipulated for sensationalism in the selling of newspapers.
The real legacy
Molly Morgan lived a worthy life from which many others drew benefits. She was successful materially and cared about others. Because of these things she has probably had more things named after her than almost any of her Australian contemporaries except Lachlan Macquarie. There is a Molly Morgan Ridge near Allandale and a Mount Molly Morgan nearby, a drive and a motel in Maitland and a Rothbury vineyard and wine labels.
In her lifetime she was known as ‘the Queen of the Hunter’ and the track from Maitland to Singleton was sometimes called ‘Molly Morgan’s Line of Road’. Wallis Plains itself, growing into the tiny town of Maitland, was referred to frequently as ‘Molly Morgan’s’ and the Horseshoe Bend portion as ‘Molly Morgan’s Bend’ and ‘Molly Morgan’s Swamp’. That so many places and landmarks were named after her while she was alive implies that she had earned the respect of her contemporaries. The term ‘Queen of the Hunter’ was a particular accolade. She might have been the most admired person in the tiny community of Wallis Plains during the 1820s and merits fame rather than infamy.
Maitland has no statue of Molly. Rectifying that would help to recognise a well-lived Maitland life.
Endnote
[1] Joseph Clift, son of Samuel, quoted in Newcastle Morning Herald, 8 August 1936; John Eckford, Historical Record Collection of Cynthia Hunter, Maitland City Library; Obituary, Australian, 3 July 1835.
[2] Frank Driscoll and Dan Russell, ‘Molly Morgan: Queen of the Hunter Valley’, Truth, 14 January 1951, p 31; and Sunday Mirror, 23 April 1963, p 32.
References
‘Bold Molly, the Love Huntress’, Sunday Mirror, 23 April 1967.
Conway, Jude, ‘Histories of Hunter women: the infamous Molly Morgan’, Hunter Living Histories, University of Newcastle, 20 September 2016.
Hill, David, The Making of Australia, Random House, North Sydney, 2014
Hunter, Cynthia, Bound for Wallis Plains: Maitland’s convict settlers, Maitland City Council, Maitland, 2012.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: Molly Morgan’s amazing journey, from twice-transported thief to pillar of society’, Maitland Mercury, 5 July 2020.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: Molly Morgan - thief, prisoner and bigamist, but also strong, generous and kind’, Maitland Mercury, 12 July 2020.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: Was Maitland’s Molly Morgan sinner or saint?’ Maitland Mercury, 17 September 2021.
Lewis, Dudley, ‘The life and legend of Molly Morgan’, from the exhibition Telling Tales: Hunter History told through simple stories and perfect pictures, Newcastle Library Lovett Gallery, 2014.
Phelps, Narissa, ‘Maligning Molly Morgan: a convict woman of “dominant influence”, sexualised and stereotyped’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 21, 2019, pp 169-194.
