By Damian John Gleeson
Statue of William Bede Dalley, Courtesy of State Library NSW
Prominent journalist, editor, barrister and politician, William Bede Dalley was also the Premier of New South Wales, and the first Australian appointed to the Privy Council in England. A statue of the man himself stands in Sydney’s Hyde Park, looking down Macquarie Street to the Law Courts and Parliament House. There’s also a stained-glass window and commemorative plaque in St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney, and a plaque in St Paul's Cathedral, London. (1)
While the great man and his achievements are widely known, the same can’t be said about Dalley’s parents, Catherine Spillane and John Dalley, who married in unauthorised circumstances. In fact, like other Catholic marriages involving Irish convict women in early colonial New South Wales, the Spillane/Dalley union appears to have been a bigamous one. Spillane, a married mother from Kinsale, County Cork, was transported to NSW for seven years for stealing clothes (Mariner 1825), bringing with her a young daughter. As was the colonial requirement, serving convicts were required to apply for the Governor’s permission for banns of marriage. In 1829 when Spillane applied to marry an English Protestant, John Dalley, she falsely declared her marital status to be that of a ‘widow’, a detail supported by the Church of England minister, Reverend John Keane of Bathurst, who was strongly opposed to the immorality of cohabitation. (2) Colonial permission was denied because Spillane’s husband was alive in Cork. (3)
Spillane’s quest for colonial remarriage meant more than security and escape from a master. As a prisoner in the western NSW town of Bathurst, she was searching for respectability through marriage after being separated from her daughter, who was housed at the Parramatta Female Orphan School. (4)
Female Orphan School. Parramatta, ca 1824. Courtesy: State Library of New South Wales
Amongst the papers of Irish Catholic chaplain, Father John Joseph Therry, is a crossed-out marriage banns’ notice from around 1828:
John Daley [sic] native Dorsett, General Stewart and Catherine Dobbins, native Cork, Mariner (5)
Therry likely crossed out the entry because he wanted to conceal an intended clandestine marriage from prying colonial eyes. The priest, who’d been at loggerheads with English colonial officials since his arrival in 1820, was removed from the government payroll in 1825 at the same time as losing his official status as chaplain. Despite the official refusal by civil authorities, Therry married Dalley and Spillane in July 1830, but the marriage wasn’t recorded in Therry’s marriage registers at the time, and so the union didn’t make its way into colonial records. (6) A later, likely 20th century entry, in an early Catholic marriage register may have been made to give the marriage a degree of legitimacy in Catholic circles.
So why did Therry conduct the marriage ceremony for Dalley and Spillane? Perhaps Spillane’s first marriage to Dobbins had taken place outside of the Catholic Church? If that was the case, Therry probably drew upon the Catholic marriage policy, known as Tamesti (1563). If Spillane’s first marriage to Dobbins had not occurred in a Catholic ceremony, then the marriage, whilst legal under Irish law, was invalid under canon law, and so in Therry’s eyes, Spillane was free to marry again. There is no evidence, however, that this was the case; furthermore, there was no claim of Dobbins’ death, something convicts often did to gain colonial permission to marry again.
Father Terry, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/therry-john-joseph-2722
Therry’s motivation may have involved a mix of compassion and morality. Spillane’s return to Dobbins in Ireland would have been impossible for a female convict, unless she received the rare granting of an absolute pardon. By the time of the bigamous marriage in mid-1830, Spillane was heavily pregnant to Dalley. Even if she was legally allowed, it’s unlikely she could’ve made the lengthy journey in her condition. Meanwhile, her daughter was being educated in a colonial institution that Therry railed against for allegedly trying to convert Catholic children to Protestantism. (7) Freeing the girl from potential proselytization as well as ending the couple’s cohabitation may have been enough for Therry to perform the marriage ceremony for the pair. A Cork connection may also have played a part, as Therry was evidentially partial to convicts from his own county, having received numerous supporting letters from clergy and from his feisty sister, Jane Ann Therry of Peter Street, Cork on behalf of Cork convicts. (8) If Dalley pledged to convert to Catholicism — as it appeared he later did — this would have certainly pleased Therry, who apart from gaining another ‘soul’, was rubbing his nose against colonial authorities who forbade him from celebrating mixed marriages and conducting religious conversions. (9)
Perhaps, too, there was a broader European context. As American historian, Sara McDougall, has highlighted, bigamy in late medieval Europe was usually prosecuted as a ‘male gendered crime’. Women were rarely prosecuted in Europe for remarrying when their first spouse was alive. (10) Such attitudes also appear to have been common in late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century Ireland, where very few Irish women were prosecuted for bigamy.(11) As a result, no Irish women were transported for the offence of bigamy to NSW. Father John Therry, while not an intellectual, had some exposure to European ideas, which may have influenced him.
Nevertheless, in some other cases, Therry intervened and separated bigamous couples, where the male was the offending party, forcing him to make a public announcement in newspapers like the Sydney Monitor. John Ready, for example, issued a statement in May 1830, advising creditors’ caution that his colonial wife, Elizabeth Curtis, had abandoned their home. After Therry’s intervention, a month later, Ready renounced his colonial marriage because his first ‘wife was alive in Ireland at the time the marriage ceremony was performed between Elizabeth Curtis and me in the colony’. (12)
Sydney Monitor, 5 June 1830.
But, when it came to women, Therry displayed a different mindset, as Catherine Spillane’s case suggested. Perhaps it was indicative of an emerging Australian pragmatism: ex-convict women were almost certainly never going to return to Ireland. Colonial NSW offered a new husband and a second family.
Not only was William Bede Dalley’s mother a bigamist, but suspicion hung over his godmother, Catherine Miles. In 1808 Miles married William Davis at Parramatta in a clandestine marriage solemnised by Fr James Dixon, a convict priest. In 1825 Davis used the allegation of bigamy against Miles as a pretext for permanent separation (13), despite her strenuous denial that she had a first husband living in Cork. (14) The complex story of early colonial bigamy amongst the large Irish community awaits to be fully told.
REFERENCES
1-Martha Rutledge and Bede Nairn, ‘Dalley, Willam Bede (1831-1888), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 4, 1972, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University.
2- New South Wales Convicts’ Applications for the Publication of Banns, Bathurst, 25 July 1829, John Dalley, Catherine Spillane alias Dobbins, Reel 716, State Records of New South Wales (SRNSW).
3-Convicts’ Applications to Marry, 1825-1851, Dalley, John, Spillane, Catherine, Refused, 22 August 1829, NRS 12212 [4/4511, p. 130] Reel 714, SRNSW.
4- 1828 New South Wales Census. Dobbins, Catherine, aged 29, and Catherine (junior), 7.
5-Reverend John Joseph Therry Papers, ML MSS. 1810, Vol. 114, p. 141, State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW).
6- Fr Therry marriage register, SAG Reel 6, SLNSW.
7-See for example, Therry’s correspondence to the Colonial Secretary, Therry Papers, ML MSS. 1810, Vols. 47-51, SLNSW.
8- Therry Papers, ML MSS. 1810, SLNSW.
9-Governor Macquarie’s October 1820 marriage regulations restricted the role of Catholic clergy in mixed marriages, but Whitehall later overturned this.
10- Sara McDougall, ‘Bigamy: A Male Crime in Medieval Europe’, Gender and History, Vol. 22, No. 2, August 2010, pp. 430-446.
11- Maria Luddy, “Marriage, Sexuality and the Law in Ireland” in Marriage in Ireland 1660- 1928 , eds Maria Luddy and Mary O'Dowd, (Cambridge University Press: 2020) p.348
12- Damian J. Gleeson, ‘Wealth without happiness: Catherine Miles and William Davis of Charlotte Square, Sydney’, Part 1, Australasian Catholic Record, Vol. 99, No. 1, 2022, pp. 3-17.
13- Sydney Gazette, 15 March 1826, p. 3; The Australian, 5 April 1826.
14- Sydney Monitor, 5 June 1830.
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