Thomas Hastings/Faithful Ebzery/Andrew Farrelly, Basis of my book, The Irish Constable.

Thomas Hastings and Faithful Ebzery were born to farmers in the small village of Shanagolden, County Limerick. They married in April 1850 in Mitchelstown, County Cork, three days before boarding the ship, Emigrant which left from Plymouth bound non-stop for Moreton Bay. He was 32 and she, 26. He gave his profession on their marriage certificate as being “late of the Irish Revenue Police” and she, a domestic. He resumed the title “farm labourer” label on his entry into Australia.

They were most likely part of the Monteagle migration, Shanagolden being part of the estates of Thomas Rice in Western Limerick. They most likely took advantage of the altruism of Lord Monteagle and his second wife who saw migration as a solution to the plight of the Irish during the Potato Famine. Migration appealed to the adventurous and the desperate.

As a Revenue policeman, Thomas would have trained in Dublin before being posted outside of his Limerick locality. The Revenue police were loathed as they were responsible for eliminating the distillation of “poteen”, the fuel that not only fired the “faction fighting” prevalent on fete days and festivals throughout Ireland, a sort of “fun” free-for-all whereby whole villages took sides and fought violently for the sheer fun of fighting; but also escaped English imposed taxation.

Thomas Hastings would have been able to read and write as well as ride a horse. Faithful was literate also. He would have carried a firearm. On his acceptance into the colonial police force in 1852, his height is given as five foot nine inches.

Emigrant’s voyage proved to be traumatic to say the least. Typhus was confirmed on May 8. The Irish called the disease “Black Fever” as, besides fevers, chills, vomiting and diarrhoea, haemorrhages caused dark rashes on the body with the skin breaking and bleeding. Periods of violent delirium were common. Many died at sea. Ironically, the first to have shown signs of the disease, Mary Maunsell, survived and later married a crew member in 1854.

On its arrival in Moreton Bay in August 1850, Emigrant became the first ship to be quarantined on Stradbroke Island. By then, little remained there of the original convict settlement of Captain Logan. Lacking tents, the arrivals had to use the ship’s canvas sails and build their own hospital and shelters. Guards separated them from the aboriginal population in order to prevent spread of the disease. The healthy made camp up the hill away from the sufferers. Thomas Hastings was witness to a suicide of one young girl whose entire family had been affected. She simply lay down in shallow water and chose to die. As coincidence would have it, Thomas’s fellow witness at the subsequent inquest, one Thomas Perkins, was the great great grandfather of my best friend’s husband. Such are the coincidences of history.

Heavy rains in October, the leaking shelters, the heat of an approaching Queensland summer, the mosquitoes and sandflies of Straddie…the desperation of disease and death….not quite the honeymoon that either Thomas or Faithful would have intended, I am sure.

The passengers and crew remained on Stradbroke till November when the outbreak was considered to be over. Today, if you take the Catamaran from Cleveland to Stradbroke, glance up towards the cemetery and you will see 26 white crosses commemorating those who died in quarantine. Doctor Barlow and several Brisbane nurses had come over from Brisbane to tend the sick but remained in the Stradbroke cemetery. Give a thought to his sacrifice as you enter Barlow Chambers on Wickham Terrace en route for your specialist appointment.

The survivors were transported to Brisbane where employers would have been eagerly awaiting their long overdue arrival. Labourers were much needed in the fast expanding northern part of the colony of New South Wales.

According to Faithful’s second son, Edward, the couple worked at Myall Creek outside of Dalby during 1851. Their first child, Mary Jane Hastings, was born that year. Thomas appears in the Records of the Court of Petty Sessions, Gayndah in June 1852. He is now a policeman. The shanty town of Gayndah known to the Hastings would have been worlds away from the brick and stone buildings of their Irish past, the Gayndah district being only recently opened to graziers since 1847. Aboriginals were water carriers; a substantial Chinese population from Amoy in southern China worked as shepherds on sheep stations; drunkenness and recalcitrant workers seem to have been the main chargeable offences…it was an offence to disobey one’s employer or break the work contract; the power of the squatters ruled; no church but lots of pubs; men outnumbered women three to one.

Twins, Thomas and Anne, were born in 1852 and then another two girls, Elizabeth and Dorah by 1854. Thomas participated in the Gayndah Council meeting to petition the colonial government to enable locals to purchase their own properties. On August 21, 1854, he buys a house on Baronne Street on the banks of the Burnett River. He assisted at an attempted suicide when a mother walked into the Burnett River carrying her child. Life must have been hard for women especially with young children; more so with a difficult, drunken, dead or absent spouse.

For me, Thomas Hastings’ police career was eventful in two ways: firstly, he “lost” a Chinaman whilst marching him and two of his fellow Chinese prisoners from Gayndah to Maryborough some one hundred plus kilometres as the crow flies; he on his horse, they on foot in the stifling heat of February 1855. And secondly, his death when he fell off his horse whilst on duty leaving Faithful with five children all well under the age of 6, twins to boot.

Normally he would have been accompanied by a fellow constable on the long trip to Maryborough. However, his fellow constable, Gilshenan, subsequently dismissed for drunkenness and dereliction of duty which included firing a pistol in the main street at 2.00 am, had been after Hastings’ blood. He wanted to “thrash him”. Ordinary Constable Hastings had thought it wiser to undertake the journey solo.

The Chinamen in question Loe, Pang and Tou Liang, had been sentenced to three months in Darlinghurst gaol, Sydney for supposedly refusing to wash sheep on the demand of his employer, James Cruickshank Mackay. Language difficulties must not have helped.

The Gayndah chief constable, Bartholomew Banister, had decided the weather being “very warm” and the prisoners being very slight in build, not to shackle them for the long march to Maryborough. Pang (alias Que…pronounced Chay?) escaped at Degilbo on the first night. Hastings was fined some 40 shillings for “losing his prisoner”, a week’s pay at least.

Ordinary Constable Hastings advertised in both the police gazette and the Moreton Bay Courier offering a reward of five pounds for his prisoner’s recapture. No small amount for one paid around five shillings per day. Perhaps Thomas was conscious of this affecting his chances of promotion. He had six dependants to consider. As I read the Records of the Court of Petty Sessions, I found myself wanting said Chinaman, “Pang” alias “Que” to escape definitively. However, Thomas “found” him again some months later as Pang had returned to Gayndah!! He was sentenced to further time in Sydney gaol. Both the names Ping and Chay survive in the Burnett district today. I traced the names of his fellow prisoners to Darlinghurst Gaol in Sydney where they served their time and were subsequently released. Pang’s fate remains a mystery as the volume with his records is “missing”! I am left willing his long survival.

Thomas Hastings died five days before Christmas 1856 taking two painful and possibly smelly days to die. “I consider him to have been a steady sober man during his 4 ½ years as a policeman at Gayndah”, testified Chief constable Bartholomew at the enquiry into his death, two weeks after his eldest daughter’s fifth birthday; three days after the second birthday of his youngest daughter. Faithy was given a pension.

She had another child, Edward, in 1859 whose father is unnamed. Goodness knows what happened there. She now had six children under the age of eight! As Andrew Farrelly, her second husband whom she married in 1862, was ensconced in Sydney at the time dealing with legal proceedings against him for insolvency (twice), he is not the biological father.

Edward Hastings became a so called “horse whisperer” and a much respected citizen in Maryborough. His children were unaware of his illegitimacy as was Edward, if the information on his death certificate is anything to go by. His family stated Thomas Hastings, constable, to be the father. Not possible!

Andrew Farrelly had migrated to Sydney with his wife, Jane, from Cavan, Ireland in 1848. There he went into the construction business. He had been the pound keeper in Gayndah. He said he was single when he married Faithy in 1862; he was 42, she 38. Faithy and he had three children, Francis Andrew, Rose and Bridget Delia and moved to Maryborough where Andrew resumed his building and contracting ambitions. He and his stepson, Edward, developed the Maryborough suburb of Newton and “cut out” Corser Hill, a part of Kent Street, apparently no mean feat in those days as it rates a mention in his obituary on his death at 77 in 1898. Presumably he had acquired better business acumen or had better luck in Maryborough…or a practical wife?

Faithful died in 1915 at the age ninety-one. Her funeral was attended by two local councillors attesting to either the couple’s good standing in the Maryborough community or that of her son, Edward. She is buried in the Maryborough cemetery along with her eldest daughter, Mary Jane Mortleman.

Their genes are mixed in the following families:

Barker, Barsby, Baxby, Bell, Binnie, Boulter, Butcher

Callaghan, Campbell, Cooper, Cran

Dittman, Donnelly

Ellwood

Farrelly, Frizzell

Gadsby, Greitschus

Harte, Hastings, Hubbard, Hyne

Jabs

Ingram

Lancaster, Lewis

Nissen, Norman

McKenzie, McPhee, Mathieson, Medill, Mortelman, Murdoch, Murphy

Price

Young

Readdy, Reed, Roberston, Robson

Sinclair, Stiler

Whelan, Williams