William Trewin: 'Rhoda Mountjoy is my niece. She has been staying with me on a visit for about three weeks

In 1898, Mary Honeycombe was 45, and her eldest son, Willie, was courting one of Annie Chapman's daughters, Esther. They married in January 1899, a month before Willie's 20th birthday.

There may have been quite a gathering of relatives, neighbours and friends, for the Chapman tribe was fairly extensive, and Annie Chapman's occupation of midwife must have made her locally quite well known. Willie's younger brother, Bob, was 1514 at the time and Lawrie was not yet 11. He and

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Mary Honeycombe enters the records herself in 1900, when court and medical records, unseen for nearly a hundred years, reveal that her manner, behaviour and speech at last led others to certify her as temporarily insane.

On Friday, 17 August 1900, Mary Honeycombe was arrested and appeared before Ernest Eglington at the Court of Petty Sessions in Charters Towers - 'on suspicion of being of unsound mind'. Committed to the mental hospital at Goodna (between Ipswich and Brisbane), she was locked up in the Towers' jail, where she talked incessantly and screamed and claimed that people were going to kill her.

Transported to the Townsville Reception Centre, she was then taken by boat to Brisbane and was admitted to Goodna on 29 August 1900.

It was noted there, presumably from what she said, that her age was 40 (her 47th birthday occurred two weeks earlier); that she had five children, the youngest being six (she had six surviving children, the youngest, Nellie, becoming seven that month); that she was born in Tasmania (she was born in England); that she was a Roman Catholic and the wife of a miner and mine engine-driver and lived in Charters Towers.

This 'attack' (as the hospital termed it) lasted two months, and Mary was discharged from Goodna on 20 October. She made her way back to Charters Towers, to Hodgkinson Street, Queenton. We can't be sure she lived there on her own or with her children. But a month later, on 30 November she appeared once again before Mr Eglington at the Court of Petty Sessions and was again committed to Goodna 'on the suspicion of being of unsound mind'.

Years later her daughter Annie, recalling this or the earlier arrest, would remember the day when, as a terrified nine-year-old, she saw her demented mother being dragged from their home and put in an ambulance, crying and screaming - 'I don't want to leave my children!'

Mary Honeycombe was readmitted to Goodna mental hospital on 12 December. Again, under custody, she and other female 'lunatics' (as they were called) would have been taken to Brisbane by ship, accompanied by a policeman and a nurse.

The nurse who generally travelled with these wretched women, who were locked up in a cabin for the duration of the voyage, was Sister O'Donnell. She was paid six shillings a day. Often she was incapacitated by being sea-sick, and the policeman had to minister to the needs of the female lunatics. Two of Sister O'Donnell's charges jumped out of a porthole en route to Brisbane and drowned. In the ensuing inquiry in 1902 O'Donnell complained that she often had to stay

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Clearly the sea-trip was no holiday for Mary Honeycombe. She may also have had to pay for the several trips she made to Brisbane and back.

On her arrival at Goodna on 12 December the hospital authorities noted that Mary claimed to have been doing shift-work and was exhausted. She also said again that people were going to kill her and that her son (which son?) had been murdered in her house on the night of 26 November. Later reports on Mary's condition said that her memory and intelligence were good, that she was nimble and assisted the nurses in the wards.

After five months she was discharged from Goodna, on 7 May 1901, and returned once again to Charters Towers.

But her delusions and mental instability surfaced yet again, in July, and she was readmitted (as Mary Amelia Honeycombe) to Goodna on 1 August 1901. This time she remained at Goodna for two and a half years.

Mary's children - at least the younger ones - were kept in ignorance about their mother's dementia. They were told that she had gone to live with relatives in Lismore, which was about 200km south of Goodna, in New South Wales. Mary may indeed have had some relatives there, in fact one of her nieces married there in the 1920's. But Willie, Bob, and Jenny (who was 15 at the end of 1900 and probably worked as a domestic in a hotel) must have known something about the reality of their mother's plight. And although Bob would not be 20 until August 1903, he and Willie (24 in 1903) might have protested about their mother's incarceration and tried to do something to effect its prevention or curtailment. Perhaps they did. But they never visited her. Nor, it seems, did they offer to care for her when she was due to be released.

Of course they were poor, and no doubt had domestic and other difficulties of their own - Willie now had a family of his own to support. And then there was the everpresent problem of the youngest Honeycombes. For when Mary the mother was taken away, the two little girls, Annie and Ellen, were taken in by Mrs Annie Chapman - or Granny Chapman, as they were taught to call her - while Lawrie went to lodge with the Naughtons, who ran a bakery at that time. Lawrie (aged 12 in 1900) was put to work to pay for his keep and learned the baker's trade - which he put to good use years later. His younger sisters fared less well.

Annie would much later tell her daughter Alma something of what her life then had been like.

For some reason Annie and Ellen were apparently not allowed to see or speak to their older brothers and had to arrange any such encounters in secret and by stealth - although this can't, however, have applied to Willie and his young wife Esther, who was Annie Chapman's daughter after all, and would

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In the absence of both his mother and father Willie was theoretically responsible for his sisters' well-being. But what could he do? His wife Esther had borne him two children by March 1902 and he must have had financial and other worries of his own. Besides, it is said that his father, John, wherever he was, was paying something towards the cost of Annie and Ellen boarding at the Chapman home. So John was theoretically still in charge. And Willie, one imagines, would have been reluctant to accuse his wife's sister of cruelty and lack of care. Nonetheless, both his sisters were badly treated, it seems, being made to do so many household chores each morning before going to school that they had to run to school to avoid a caning for being late. When Nellie died in the 1930's, Ellen said: 'Oh, good! She should have died years ago!'.

Annie once rebuked her daughter, Alma, by saying: 'No, don't laugh. We had a very unhappy childhood!'.

Not surprisingly, neither Annie nor Ellen did very well at school. Annie's grammar was so poor in her letters to her father - and she was the one who wrote to him most - that he complained about it and even paid for her (via Willie perhaps) to attend a private school. But either the money ran out or Annie proved to be no scholar, for she was not there long.

Meanwhile, Bob Honeycombe married Selina Thomas in August 1903, and five months later, on 30 December, his mother Mary was freed from her third confinement in the mental hospital at Goodna, presumably of sounder mind if not altogether cured.

Hospital reports say that relatives kept promising to take her away but failed to do so. And it seems that the length of her final stay at Goodna was determined by the fact that she had not enough money to return to Charters Towers and that her family there were in no hurry to bring her home. In effect, they (that is, Willie and Bob) abandoned her - much as she had been abandoned by John.

How she must have hoped and waited for someone to take her away. How she must have yearned for the sight of familiar, unofficial faces, and to see her children again. But she never did. She humbled herself, and endured.

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In the end it was one of her sisters or a brother who came to take her away. They brought her south, to Sydney, and thence to Nowra - taking her back to her mother and the remnants of the Irish, Catholic Casey family in New South Wales.

After all her tribulations in Queensland, Mary went quietly home.

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It is time to fill in what is known of Mary's background and to say something about who she was and where she came from - to try to explain why after her release from Goodna she decided or agreed (or was compelled), not to return to Charters Towers, but to spend the rest of her life near her mother in New South Wales.

Her parents, Patrick and Winifred Casey, were born in the west of Ireland in County Clare, which is bounded to the north by Galway Bay and by the Shannon estuary to the south. The county derives its present name from the English lord, Thomas de Clare, who subdued its people and seized their land in the time of Elizabeth I. A wild, irregular land, streaked with little rivers and shadowed lakes, it had suffered and continued to suffer from the repressive acts of its Protestant English masters for hundreds of years. Each uprising and bloody rebellion was followed by savage reprisals. Cromwell's troops slaughtered every priest they could find. Marlborough's men in 1690 were less murderous, but the English parliament of that time was assiduous in continuing to deny the Irish Catholics any rights of citizenship and property ownership. Thousands emigrated, most fleeing to the continent, joining those who already served foreign Catholic kings in Catholic courts, churches and armies.

The last national uprising in Ireland in 1798 followed the French Revolution. Only union with England, Scotland and Wales would, it seemed, end the anarchy; and the Act of Union passed in 1800 made the centuries-old overlordship of Ireland at last, as it were, official. However, it was not until 1829 that Roman Catholics were permitted to sit in the House of Commons. In that year, or soon thereafter, Patrick Casey was born.

He was probably born in what was then called a 'cabin', a one-room cottage, with a thatched roof, an earth floor, and a turf fire that burned all year. The meagre furniture would have been made of wood and wickerwork, and the beds, made of straw and rushes, would each have slept three or four. This dark and smoky place was shared by the peasant family's animals: hens, a cow, and perhaps a pig. Their woollen clothes were spartan but colourful: the women's cloaks, stockings, petticoats and skirts in contrasting blues, reds, browns and greens; the men's clothing was more sober: dark blue, black or grey. Shoes were seldom worn, hardly ever by the children. Adults of both sexes let their hair grow long and loose, and both smoked pipes. Potatoes and sour milk formed the basis of their diet, padded out with skimmed milk, oatcakes, cheese, cabbages and onions, and in coastal villages seaweed.

Even a schoolmaster ate frugally. One such in Killarney noted in his diary in July 1830: 'This is what we eat, my family and me: we have a hot meal, oatmeal porridge with milk in the morning, then wheaten bread and milk at one o'clock. This mid-day meal is a cold one. Then potatoes and meat or butter in

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the evening.' He also noted in 1828: 'I recall the time, around 35 years ago, when every able-bodied farmer had peas and beans, but they're outdated now because of potatoes, and few sow them except the well-born'.

'It is well known,' wrote a social commentator in 1845, 'that the great body of the people pass through life without ever tasting beef or mutton'. But he added: 'There are to be found in all fairs what the people term spoileen tents -that is, tents in which fresh mutton is boiled and sold out, with bread and soup'. Much beer was drunk at fairs and festivities, and whiskey, which WM Thackeray in 1843 described as 'a very deleterious drink... Two glasses will be often found to cause headaches, heartburns and fevers to a person newly arrived in the country'. A brew called scailtin was popular: hot whiskey, spiced or flavoured. Thackeray also remarked: 'Nor can anyone pass through the land without being touched by the extreme love of children among the people: they swarm everywhere'. A female visitor in 1841 wrote: 'It is impossible to overrate, in describing, the devoted attachment of Irish mothers to their children - to their sons especially'.

Young Patrick Casey must have been well loved. And Mary Honeycombe's anguished cry - 'I don't want to leave my children!' - makes even sadder sense.

Henry Inglis wrote a few years earlier: 'The lower orders of Irish have much feeling for each other. It is a rare thing to hear an angry, or contemptuous expression, addressed to anyone who is poor... and it is a fact, that they are most exemplary in the care that they take of their destitute relatives'. And William Carleton, observing revellers at Christmas, wrote: 'Many a time might be seen two Irishmen, who had got drunk together, leaving a fair or market, their arms about each other's necks, from whence they only removed them to kiss and hug one another the more lovingly'.

Is it improbable that a version of such male affection was transmuted by the Irish emigrants, along with their close family concern and loyalty, into the Australian mateship of today?

Certainly Mary Honeycombe's ancestors were a happy people, despite their poverty, rejoicing when they could in dancing (to fiddle or flute), in singing, in fun and games; and because a large majority were illiterate, they delighted in the spoken word, in proverbs, quips and sallies, and the telling of tales around the fire. Nothing was more Irish and more ancient than the keening over a corpse at the wake preceding a funeral. In an Irish dictionary of 1768, the keen or keening is described as 'a cry for the dead, according to certain loud and mournful notes, and verses, wherein the pedigree, land and property, generosity and good actions of the deceased person, and his ancestors, are diligently and harmoniously recounted'.

This was all a part of the early life of Patrick Casey and his wife, Winifred, and in their teenage years that keening over the dead would cut through the Irish

air and assail their ears a thousand times before they lost all hope of happiness in their native land and crossed the sea to England.

Patrick was born at Rath in County Clare about 1829. His birthplace was later noted as such by the Immigration Board in Sydney on his arrival. But according to his death certificate it was 'Rohan, Clare'. Winifred was born, apparently in 1833, at Clunes in County Clare. Neither Clunes nor Rath nor Rohan exist in Clare today in a modern map of Ireland. More than likely both hamlets waned and disappeared in the terrible years between 1845 and 1851, when the potato crop failed in successive years, resulting in widespread famine and disease. Tens of thousands of the Irish poor, the peasantry, died.

Two years before the start of the famine, in 1843, an early Sunday morning in a coastal village in the south-west of County Cork was described by Thackeray. The village was called Skibbereen, and must have been similar in many ways to Clunes and Rath.

'The people came flocking into the place by hundreds, and you saw their blue cloaks dotting the road and the bare open plains beyond. The men came with shoes and stockings today, the women all bare-legged, and many of them might be seen washing their feet in the stream before they went up to the chapel. The street seemed to be lined on either side with blue cloaks, squatting along the doorways as is their wont. Among these, numberless cows were walking to and fro, and pails of milk passing, and here and there a hound or two went stalking about... The chapel-yard was filled with men and women: a couple of shabby old beadles were at the gate, with copper shovels to collect money; and inside the chapel four or five hundred people were on their knees'.

Within five years, most of these people that Thackeray observed that Sunday morning would be dead.

In 1846, a magistrate from Cork, Nicholas Cummins, visited Skibbereen, and wrote about 'the appalling state of misery' that the potato famine had wrought. He was there in mid December.

'I provided myself with as much bread as five men could carry, and on reaching the spot I was surprised to find the wretched hamlet apparently deserted. I entered some of the hovels to ascertain the cause... In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth... I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive -they were in a fever, four children, a woman and what had once been a man... In a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe, either from famine or from fever. Their demonic yells are still ringing in my ears... My clothes were nearly torn off in my endeavour to escape... My neckcloth was seized from behind by a grip which compelled me to turn, and I found myself grasped by a women with an infant just born in her arms...'

Frank Murphy, in his book, The Bog Irish, says: 'One person in ten, or more than 800,000, died of hunger, or more commonly, of typhus, cholera, or another attendant disease. In the space of seven years... more than a million

and a half people emigrated. Thousands of bog Irish, many of them Irish-speaking, were to be found in the second half of the 19th century sweating in the textile mills of northern England, or navvying in New South Wales, or serving in the Indian Army, or building the railways of North America. It is perhaps the supreme irony of their nation's history that... these Irish played a vita! part in building the British Empire, and in helping to make the language of their ancestral foe so widely spoken'.

Somehow the teenage Patrick Casey of County Clare and Winifred McCormack, his wife-to-be, survived. It seems that both his parents (Michael Casey, labourer, and Mary Casey, nee Flanagan) died in the famine years, as both are recorded on Patrick's arrival in Sydney as being dead then. So they must have been dead when he sailed from England. Winifred's mother was also dead by this time, although her father still lived in Clunes.

She and Patrick married in Clunes before they left for England. The ceremony took place in 1853, with the sound of keening still rank in the air and a mournfulness in their hearts. But whatever jollity could be found in Clunes or thereabouts must have been theirs on their wedding night. The famine years were over: they were alive. Did anyone dance, or bear to dance, at their wedding? Probably not Winifred. For it seems she was already pregnant. This perhaps prompted the marriage, as it often did in those days, as well as the Caseys' departure for England, with Patrick resolutely turning his back on his home, his family, his parents' graves, and seeking a better life for himself and his future children, away from the bitter earth of Ireland.

They crossed the Irish Sea and came to Wigan, and there the Caseys' first child was born, on 11 August 1853. They called her Mary. What else? For both their mothers, now dead, had also carried the name.

Patrick was a labourer when Mary was born. But he gave his trade when he stepped ashore at Sydney as 'coal miner1. Clearly he must have toiled for all or part of 1854 in one of the pits of the south-west Lancashire coal-field.

Wigan's industrial prosperity was built on coal, as well as on engineering, machine-making, brick and drain-pipe making, on chemicals, castings, breweries, printing and dyeing, timber and saw-mills, cotton and clothing, and the manufacture of oil and grease. Wigan was a whirlpool of activity and noise. Black trains and wagons steamed and whistled, clattered and clanked, carrying and fetching raw materials and manufactured goods, as did the long barges on the grimy canal linking Liverpool and Manchester. Wigan, with its warehouses, wharves and piers, was the halfway house. The city was booming, belching steam and smoke. How far removed it must have seemed to the young Irish couple from the misty hills and the little lakes of Clare. How confined, squalid and raucous the little room that was their home. It must have seemed to the Catholic Caseys like an ante-room in Hell; and in the summer of 1854, a few weeks before the Crimean War began, they entered a ship in Liverpool, to lodge for five months on the rolling sea. Mary was one year old.

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What happened to the Caseys after their arrival is a matter of much conjecture and more research.

We know that Patrick and Winifred Casey produced many children, 13 at least. Mary, the eldest, was followed by four other girls and eight boys. They are listed on Patrick's death certificate. But none, as far as we know, was born in Tasmania, where Mary, in later life, said she had been born, in Launceston. Tasmania appears as her place of birth on her children's birth certificates. But on her death certificate it is given, presumably from information provided by a younger brother or sister, as County Clare. Wigan was long forgotten. Either Mary was disseminating a falsehood about her place of birth - but why? - or had been misled by family information. Again, why? For surely every child knows where it was born. There is also no reason to suppose that Patrick and Winifred Casey, who were poor Irish immigrants, moved away from New South Wales once they had got there - and where they both eventually died.

In fact, the records show that eleven of their children were born in New South Wales between 1855 and 1870: Honoria (Norah) in 1855; George in 1857; Peter in 1858; Margaret in 1859; David in 1861; Patrick in 1863; Ellen in 1864; Elizabeth in 1865; Daniel and James in 1868; and Elizabeth (Lizzie) in 1870. Nearly all of them also died in New South Wales; David in 1861; the first Elizabeth in 1866; Peter in 1878; and Patrick junior in 1889. There is no evidence to suggest that any of them was ever in Tasmania.