Tag: white wives

‘Conversion and perversion’, 1839

Mary Rapley from Shipley, Sussex, arrived in Sydney at the end of August 1838. A ‘nursery girl’ by calling, she had been convicted of shoplifting at the Sussex Quarter Sessions on 7 January and sentenced to seven years. Mary was one of 172 female convicts to arrive on the John Renwick, having left the Downs, off the Kent coast, in late May.

‘Shipping intelligence’, The Colonist, 29 August 1838, p. 2

Mary was single, Protestant and aged twenty-four. She could read but not write. Mary’s convict indent described her as being 4 foot 10 1/2 inches tall, with brown hair and hazel eyes. Her complexion was ‘fair, ruddy and freckled’, and she was missing one of her front upper teeth.

Mary became an assigned servant to James Henry, in Cumberland Street in the Rocks, but within a year of her arrival in New South Wales she had married. Her new husband, James Tim (or Jim), aged 27 in 1839, was Chinese – one of a very small number of Chinese men in the colony at the time.

In late July 1839, Mary and James’s marriage banns were published at the Scots Church, Sydney, where they were wed by the Rev. William McIntyre on Friday, 9 August. Neither Mary and nor James could sign their name, and so made their mark in the marriage register with an X. Mary’s employer, James Henry, had consented to her marriage, but the couple had not applied for permission from the Governor, which was usually required if either the bride or groom were still serving their sentence.

Marriage banns of Mary Rapley and James Tim, Scots Church, Sydney, July 1839

It seems that married life did not suit Mary, as at the end of September she found herself before police captain Joseph Innes facing an accusation of having run away from her husband. James claimed that Mary had left him after twenty-five days to live with another man. The case was reported in the colonial press under the headline ‘Conversion and Perversion‘:

Yesterday a Chinese gentleman named James Tame, appeared before Captain Innes at the Police-office, to complain of his wife, an English woman, whose maiden name had been Mary Rapsey, for running from his protection to that of another person. Upon stepping into the witness box, Mr Tame stated himself to be a Chinese catechist in his own coountry, that he was of the Roman Catholic persuasion, and was converted by the Portuguese. He said that he read the bible and believed that he read, but would rather be sworn on a saucer which was the way he had been accustomed to. He had been married by agreement with the prisoner, who had been an assigned servant to a person named James Henry, in Cumberland-street. They were married by the Rev. Mr McIntyre, and had been united but twenty-five days when the lady left her lord for the protection of another. Captain Innes said, that this case required investigation as he could not understand how permission had been obtained for the marriage, and he conveived that there had been some irregularity in the matter. The prisoner was remanded until enquiry should be made.

So many interesting things to think about in their story! When and why had James come to New South Wales? Was he from Macau? If he was a Catholic catechist in his own country, what did he do in Sydney? How had he and Mary met? In what circumstances had they married? Who was Mary’s paramour and was she compelled to return to her husband?

I have had trouble finding any further reference to Mary or her Chinese husband after this hearing before Captain Innes in September 1839. All the references to the surname ‘Rapley’ (or similar) I located in the convict indexes at State Records NSW are to Mary’s uncle, Daniel Rapley, who was sent to New South Wales in 1818. I also didn’t find any references to the surname Jim or Tim or Tame (or similar). And I can find no further Trove or BDM references either.

Any clues or further information would be very welcome!

Sources

‘Conversion and perversion’, The Australian, 24 September 1839, p. 2, <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article36861109>.

‘News of the day’, Sydney Monitor and Commercial Advertiser, 27 September 1839, p. 2 (morning edition), <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article32165693>.

NSW BDM 526/1839 V1839526 73A, marriage of James Jim and Mary Rapley, Scots Church, Sydney.

‘Shipping intelligence’, The Colonist, 29 August 1838, p. 2, <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31721608>.

SRNSW, Reel 735, 4/2436.95.

SRNSW, Reel 908, Shelf X641, NRS 12189, Annotated Printed Indents (John Renwick, arr. 31 August 1838).

SRNSW, Reel 5027, NRS 12937, Registers of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1787–1856, vol. 73.

Going against the grain

I’ve just begun writing a book chapter about the travels of white wives of Chinese men from Australia/NZ to China in the period 1880 to 1930. It’s a topic that I’ve been gathering material on for years and years, but now it’s down to actually writing something concrete and (hopefully) intelligent, it’s proving difficult to work out how exactly I’m going to frame their stories.

What’s troubling me most right now is the overwhelmingly depressing tales that emerge from the sources, like this one that I found this morning, titled ‘Harbor Bridge Suicide’  from the Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 17 January 1933:

Sydney, Tuesday.

At the inquest yesterday into the death of Mary Anne Mee Hing (62), who jumped off the Harbor bridge on January 5, it was stated that she was an Australian woman who had married a Chinese store-keeper with whom she went to China.

Her husband’s people disowned her, and she returned to Australia, where her parents refused to have anything to do with her. She returned to China and found her husband married to a young Chinese girl.

The woman thereupon came back to Australia, where she took to drink and subsequently ended her life.

The coroner returned a verdict of suicide.

I will see if I can get the full records of the inquest, in the hope that there are more subtle shades to the story, but The full records of the coroner’s inquest into Mary Anne’s death no longer exist, and from the other little bits and pieces I’ve found about her, it seems quite possible that Mary Anne’s life was as full of disappointment and heartbreak as this short report suggests. So many reports tell of marriages that have broken down, of women returning to Australia in financial and emotional distress, of illness, death or separation from children. The nature of these sources is something that I’ve tackled before, in my work on Agnes Breuer’s visit to China with her husband in 1933, but as I look over the bits and pieces I’ve assembled I now wonder if I’m wrong in wanting to assert that the difficult and unhappy times related in the sources are not a fair representation of how white wives experienced China.

At the heart of my response to the sources is my own response to life in China, most particularly as part of a Chinese family there. I went to China more or less on a whim, and it overwhelmed my life, both personally (I fell in love and married there – a relationship that, like many of my subjects’, has not endured) and intellectually (it sparked my passion for Chinese Australian history). There were and are aspects of life in China that I love, and aspects that I find so very difficult to deal with. It is a place where I have been both my happiest and my most unhappy.

If you caught me in the right mood I could paint a picture of my time as Chinese wife and daughter-in-law that was as sensational or pathetic as any that appear in my 19th and early 20th century sources. From seemingly small things, like not being allowed to wash my hair on feast days or to use a needle and thread while pregnant, to bigger things, like the idea of letting my parents-in-law raise my baby or meeting women in the village who had effectively been bought by their husbands. There were many things that contradicted my own (university-educated, Western, liberal, feminist) sense of how the world should work and ultimately how I wanted my own life to be.

At the same time though, spending time in China both as an independent entity and as part of a family has brought me a richness of experience and knowledge, a strength of character and sense of self, and many memories and stories that I would never had if I had stayed safely home in Australia. So if you asked me on another day, I might rave about how wonderful China is and how much I miss being there.

Couldn’t this also be the case for my white wives of a century ago? I know of wives who made short uneventful trips (happy holidays, even?) to China with their husbands and children. And I have scant detail about perhaps half a dozen white wives who stayed living in their husbands’ south China villages for long periods, like one who was described by New Zealand Presbyterian missionary Alexander Don as being ‘far more important in [the] Chinese village than she would have been in her own country’ (Otago Witness, 11 April 1906).

I don’t want the focus of this chapter to be on the biases and prejudices of the missionaries, newspaper reporters and government officials who recorded the experiences of my white wives, rather I want to think about the lives of the women themselves. But with a growing amount of evidence to suggest that my sources are going to remain weighted to the negative, I’m going to have to think about how or if it might be possible for them to reveal a more balanced account. If ever were a time for reading ‘against the grain’, I think this might be it.