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The Story of the Mount Rennie Outrage

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The Story of the Mount Rennie Outrage Frenzy: The Story of the Mount Rennie Outrage Tom Gilling DCA 2012 CERTIFICATE OF AUTHORSHIP/ORIGINALITY I certify that the work in this thesis has not previously been submitted as part of requirements for a degree except as fully acknowledged within the text. I also certify that the thesis has been written by me. Any help that I have received in my research work and the preparation of the thesis itself has been acknowledged. In addition, I certify that all information sources and literature used are indicated in the thesis. Contents Introduction p1 1. Come with me p3 2. The Outrage p8 3. Oh Christ, here’s a policeman p25 4. For God’s sake, save me from these men p39 5. Not one should be allowed to escape p45 6. A simple confiding girl p59 7. I swear to him by his big coat p66 8. The noseless chimpanzee Howard p83 9. I’ve got the prettiest garden in Paddington p91 10. Most of the prisoners were mere boys p102 11. Noose South Wales p129 12. She is of idle, uncleanly, and untruthful habits p143 13. Nine human dingoes have been found guilty p156 14. At night the warders hear them singing psalms p166 15. We are a great people p185 16. The flowers are gay by the hangman’s track p193 17. I’d sooner be hung along with the rest p204 18. Each of the hanged lads kicked off one shoe p215 19. They looked such children p223 20. All is well that ends well p231 Afterword p241 Dissertation No end of a yarn: Reading the Mount Rennie Outrage p242 Bibliography p322 Abstract This thesis consists of two parts: a creative project, entitled Frenzy: The Story of the Mount Rennie Outrage, and a dissertation, entitled No end of a yarn: Reading the Mount Rennie Outrage. The first part is a narrative history of events that occurred in Sydney over a period of four months, from 9th September 1886, when 16‐year‐old Mary Jane Hicks was raped by members of a larrikin mob near Waterloo, until 8th January 1887, when four of the teenage rapists were hanged. Most of the material I have researched to write this history is derived from three key sources: original records of the crime and subsequent trial held at State Records in Western Sydney; original records from the archives of the New South Wales Department of Corrective Services at Silverwater Jail; and contemporary newspaper reports held in various forms at the State Library of New South Wales. My dissertation is a study of how the Outrage has been interpreted, both directly and indirectly, by participants, journalists, politicians, novelists and others. It suggests the existence of two contradictory impulses ‐ a desire to sensationalise the facts and a contrary desire to suppress them – that, to varying degrees, have shaped every reading of the Outrage. It examines these impulses in the light of social and sexual anxieties of the period as reflected, especially, in journalism and popular fiction. It proposes two “authorised” readings of the case — as the tragedy of Mary Jane Hicks or, alternatively, as the tragedy of the youths hanged or imprisoned for raping her — and asks whether other, more flexible, interpretations are possible. It ends with some reflections about the wider processes by which history is read and written. Introduction The story of a crime has no beginning and no end. There is often a moment, however, when a crime becomes – or seems to become – inevitable. One such moment occurred late on the morning of Thursday 9th September 1886, when sixteen-year-old Mary Jane Hicks stopped to speak to a hansom cab driver in Sussex Street, Sydney. Newly arrived from the country, Mary Jane was looking for work. Instead of taking her to the employment exchange in Castlereagh Street, the cabman took her to a patch of waste ground on the eastern outskirts of Sydney nicknamed the “Rubbish heap”, not far from a hill called Mount Rennie. The crime that took place that afternoon became known as the Mount Rennie Outrage and would dominate the headlines of all the city’s newspapers for the next four months. The prosecution of the so-called “Mount Rennie boys” would be the most divisive in the colony’s hundred-year history. At the end of the trial nine of the accused were sentenced to death. Few believed that all nine were guilty. Four were eventually hanged; the eldest was nineteen years old. The executioner’s name was Robert Rice Howard. In his will he described himself as “Robert Howard, late of Bondi, freeholder”, although the public knew him as “Nosey Bob”. In the carnival world of J.F. Archibald’s weekly Bulletin, both Mary Jane Hicks and Nosey Bob were central figures: one an emblem of female duplicity and sexual risk, the other a metaphor for the atavistic horrors of “Botany Bay justice”. The story of the crime and its aftermath is preserved in two cardboard boxes, one at State Records in western Sydney, the other at the archives of the New South Wales Department of Corrective Services at Silverwater Jail. The collection ranges from witness depositions to letters 1 written by the condemned men from their cells. It includes the Death Register from Darlinghurst Gaol, the handwritten police histories of the accused, and Judge Windeyer’s trial notes. But the primary sources tell only half the story. If the Mount Rennie Outrage was a private tragedy, it was also a public sensation. Like the Jack the Ripper murders and the trial of Lindy Chamberlain, the crime became a cultural phenomenon, exposing deep moral anxieties and enacting illicit fantasies across many levels of colonial society. I have not attempted the impossible – and, arguably, futile – task of trying to find out the “truth” about the Mount Rennie Outrage – of analysing every alibi and cross-checking every witness statement in order to discover exactly who was guilty of what. My aim, rather, is to explore the half-truths, to piece together the story as it was articulated in a multiplicity of voices both inside and outside the witness box, and in the process to offer a fresh reading of the Outrage. In the late nineteenth-century newspapers were more diligent in the way they reported trials and parliamentary debates than they are today. Long-winded speeches and even entire debates were often reported verbatim in the next day’s papers. Wherever possible I have gone back to handwritten statements, court depositions and sworn affidavits stored at State Records and the Department of Corrective Services. 2 1. Come with me On the morning of Thursday the 9th September 1886, Mary Jane Hicks, a sixteen-year-old domestic servant, left her lodgings to look for a job. She had arrived in Sydney about three months earlier from Bathurst. Since then she had been in and out of work. For the past week she had been living with a woman named Mrs Anderson in Dixon Street, Haymarket, in what is now the heart of the city’s Chinatown. The weather was warm and dry, with a morning haze that would scarcely lift all day. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the temperature that afternoon in Sydney was a mild 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Leaving the house in Dixon Street, Mary Jane set off up the hill towards the city. She was heading for the registry office in Castlereagh Street and could have taken any one of several routes. Rather than the major thoroughfare of George Street, she chose to walk along Sussex Street. Running parallel to the harbour foreshore, Sussex Street thronged with commercial traffic. According to a tourist guide published two years earlier, “a constant stream of traffic pour[ed] into it from all directions” (Gibbs 1884). The eastern rim of the harbour consisted of “a mass of wharves, with behind them a maze of iron and wooden warehouses and shipping offices, courts and passageways, stables, timber and coal yards, sawmills, foundries, steam mills and other manufactories” (Mayne 1982, p. 11). Sussex Street was the site of Sydney’s only woollen mill, as well as various biscuit and confectionary factories, the Colonial Sugar Refinery and Tooth’s Brewery (Fitzgerald 1987, p. 24). The air was fouled by chemical works and by the tobacco factories in neighbouring Kent and Clarence Streets. By day the area seethed with the poor and the itinerant, respectable working men and women and disreputable criminals. By night 3 men lined up at the soup kitchen in Dixon Street, tumbled out of sawdust pubs and trawled for prostitutes in the neighbouring lanes and alleys. Even on a sunny Thursday morning, it was not a salubrious choice for a sixteen- year-old girl walking alone. Mary Jane had barely walked the length of a block when, near the crossroads with Goulburn Street, a hansom cab pulled over. The time, she said later, was between half past ten and eleven o’clock. The driver asked her where she was going. His name was Charles Sweetman. He was thirty- six years old, from the English county of Kent. Mary Jane told him she was looking for a “situation” and was on her way to the registry office in Castlereagh Street. Sweetman replied that he was going that way on business for his brother-in-law and offered Mary Jane a lift. He would take her anywhere she wanted to go, he said. She turned him down. Sweetman, still sitting on his seat outside the cab, asked again, and again Mary Jane refused. Sweetman got down from his seat and joined her on the footpath.
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