Daring Escape: Fled

Fled is based on the life of Mary (Dabby) Bryant, the woman behind one of history’s most daring escapes. Sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia, she escaped from the colony and sailed over 3,000 miles for 66 days in a stolen open boat with her husband, two children and other companions to West Timor (Coepang as it was then called). Here she was discovered, arrested and returned to Britain to be incarcerated until she was taken up as a cause célèbre by James Boswell who set her up in a house and sent her a stipend after she returned to Cornwall. In an Author’s Note, Meg Keneally stresses that this is a work of fiction, which is why she has changed some elements of the story, including names of the characters – Mary Bryant becomes Jenny Trelawny, later Gwynn after marrying Dan Gwynn.

The first part of the novel concerns Jenny’s route to crime and the highway robbery for which she was transported to the other side of the world. There is a detailed account of that trip on the Charlotte, on which she conceives and after which her daughter is named. She befriends Captain James Corbett, whose character is based on that of Watkin Tench, who tells her, “We don’t need to remake Newgate on the other side of the world. Well, I imagine there will be a guard house, or something like it. I’m sure that not everybody has left their criminal disposition back in England. But the entire place is intended as a prison. We’ll have no need of walls for the most part, it is to be hoped. We’ll have the ocean.”

The Charlotte at Portsmouth, May 1787 from Frank Allen's The Ships of the First Fleet

Life in this colony is brutish and cruel, as it is intended to be, in a land that must seem upside-down. The triangle that is used for the floggings is “an ominous symbol, a profane and subverted trinity.” To save herself from rape and degradation by the male convicts and soldiers, she marries Dan and has another child, Emmanuel (these were the real names of Mary Bryant’s children). Married couples are given separate quarters but others, jealous of what they perceive to be her advantages, strive to bring her low. When their actions result in Jenny being expelled to the women’s camp, she reflects, “While space was the only blessing this colony provided in abundance, it was one of the many denied to the hut convicts. Jenny now lived in a place of wails and screams and sobs and fights, of stench upon stench, of dangers buried in innocent conversation.”

From the moment she lands in Botany Bay, Jenny knows she wants to leave, and it soon becomes apparent that their best chance of survival is escape. Food is scarce, supply ships are absent, farming is in its infancy, and provisions are rapidly dwindling; making theft of food a hanging offence and starving to death a distinct possibility. Perhaps if the settlers had collaborated with the local people they might have had better chances of survival, but there is limited interaction between the white settlers and the Indigenous tribes. Jenny encounters an Aboriginal woman who shows her what leaves to chew or to brew to avoid scurvy. Although these are plentiful, Jenny guards this knowledge as currency, as she does when the Indigenous people take her fishing and share their methods with her.

Questions have been asked as to why Mary Bryant would risk a journey for herself and her children on the ocean and potential drowning. As well as starvation, the new colony is rife with disease (particularly smallpox) and the dangers to the women convicts are manifold. “Emmanuel’s death at sea is a possibility. His death here is nigh on certain.”

1930s era illustration of the convict escape

Much of the action of the novel takes place on the water, either in the Charlotte, or the cutter in which Jenny and her companions make their escape. These seafaring experiences are described in some length, which is both terrifying and tedious as indeed it must have been in reality. When they land, Dan’s bragging of his expertise at sailing the boat back to Coepang, leads to them being discovered and their subsequent arrest. The governor who had supported them and admired their skill and courage when he thought they were shipwrecked, turns against them when he learns they are escaped convicts, because he is angry that he has been cheated and make to look a fool; he fears for his reputation and “Laughter, laughter on the seas as the story spreads about the dupe of a governor.” Jenny is frequently at the mercy of men and their egos.

Eventually she returns to her family in Cornwall. She had been afraid of their reaction, but they are thrilled to see her and welcome her back, so the story has come full circle. This is one of the bits that the author has invented, but it makes for a satisfying conclusion. Mary Bryant’s adventure is a fascinating story and, although she has changed the names to compensate for lack of certain facts, Meg Keneally has told it with drama and compassion.

Friday Five: Books Read in August

Once again it turns out that I have (conveniently for blog purposes) read five books in a month. These are they.

5 Books Read in August:

1. Chatter: The Voice in Our Head and How to Harness It by Ethan Kross (Vermilion) - We all have voices in our head; some supportive and encouraging; others belittling and disruptive. Kross provides pop-scientific reasons for why and which ones count. Talking to ourselves and others can be beneficial to help us distance ourselves from traumatic experience, but it can also lead us into a vicious cycle of repetition, particularly in the echo chambers of social media. This book presents ways to normalise and contextualise confronting events and suggests methods that enable us to take back 'control'. Easy to read and with a practical 'toolkit' of strategies, this is recommended for anyone struggling with daily overwhelm. 
2. Cow by Susan Hawthorne (Spinifex) - A sublime book of poetry inspired by the humble (or scared in some societies) bovine beast. From ancient aurochs to nursery rhyme moon jumpers; cattle chattel of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth and good fortune to the shape-shifting Io of Greek myth who became a white heifer due to Zeus' lust and Hera's rage, there are cows, "at the edges of every known world/ like it or not we are everywhere."
3. The Club: Johnson, Boswell and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press) - Named one of the ten best books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review, this is the story of the phenomenal London club, established in 1764, and the men (and it was only men) who comprised it. It was established in a tavern and was the meeting place of writers, thinkers, economists, philosophers, artists, actors, playwrights, politicians, historians, lawyers, doctors, musicologists, poets, clergymen, botanists, chemists, scholars and statesmen - a who's who of the mid-late eighteenth century. Told mainly through the eyes of James Boswell (he wrote a lot), it captures the characters and the events of the times, such as the cultural climate and political happenings, but, "Above all the Club existed for conversation: not just small talk, but wide-ranging discussion on topics of all kinds."
4. Fled by Meg Keneally (Echo Publishing) - This novel tells the story of Mary (Dabby) Bryant, who was transported to the fledgling colony of New South Wales for highway robbery. Once there, she manipulated the system as much as possible until she escaped to make her way back to  England, where she thought she had a better chance of survival for herself and her children. She is renamed Jenny Trelawney for the purposes of fiction, and while the 'real' Mary Bryant was illiterate and never wrote down any thoughts or feelings, many of the facts are true and make for an incredible historical adventure. In the Mobius strip-like way that art can unfold, Meg Keneally's father, Thomas wrote a book, The Playmaker, based on the story of the first play ever performed in Australia, with Dabby Bryant being one of the actors - this book was the basis for a play by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Our Country's Good, in which I am currently performing (as Dabby Bryant) at Canberra Repertory.
5. The Secrets of Strangers by Charity Norman (Allen & Unwin) - When a bloke marches into a café in London and shoots the proprietor, several of the patrons get caught up in the cross-fire and the ensuing hostage situation. We learn about them all individually in a highly stylised manner that makes the novel seem more like a stage play or a series of TV episodes. Among those captive in the café are a grandmother looking after her grandson, a lawyer who is meant to be defending her client in court, a former teacher who is now homeless due in part to a gambling addiction, and a waitress who is hiding in the cleaning cupboard, her presence unknown to the gunman. Their stories all wrap up neatly - everyone has to have a backstory to provide context for their actions, many of which are glossed over or shoehorned into the story as the cause du jour (coercive control; refugee experience; infertility obsession) - and the reader has very few gaps to fill, removing any tension necessary for a thriller. We also hear from Eliza, the police negotiator who is talking to the gunman and trying to secure the release of the hostages - hers is the most interesting and realistic voice in the novel. While the pace is fast enough that one does want to keep turning the pages, there are no surprises and the need to keep everything tidy and completed is distancing and unsatisfying to the point of triteness.