A River Town

ON A HOT MORNING in the New Year, a black police wagon went rolling along Kempsey’s Belgrave Street from the direction of West Kempsey. All of this in the valley of the Macleay on the lush and humid north coast of New South Wales. The wagon attracted a fair amount of notice from the passers-by and witnesses. Many shopowners and customers in fact came out onto the footpaths to watch this wagon be drawn by, and some of them waved mockingly at the dark, barred window of the thing. Tim Shea of T. Shea—General Store stayed behind his counter but looked out with as much fascination as anyone as the wagon passed, two constables on the driver’s seat, and Fry the sergeant of police riding behind.

The prisoners inside the wagon were being taken to Central wharf for shipment aboard SS Burrawong to their trial in Sydney. They were the abortionist Mrs. Mulroney and her husband Merv, both of them about fifty years of age.

Just before Christmas, Mrs. Mulroney had been visited by a young woman she did not know and who offered only a first name of convenience for the purpose of their transaction. Mrs. Mulroney fed the young woman some of the standard drugs of her trade, but the patient had at some stage, instead of miscarrying her unwanted baby, gone into convulsions and perished.

Panicking, the Mulroneys had cleaned her body, packed her into a large bootbox, and driven her by night upriver to Sherwood, where they had added some stones to the box and released it into the river. The box had perversely floated through, and was found the next day wedged amongst logs on the river bank. It was traced almost immediately to Mrs. Mulroney.

But she and her husband were obviously sincere in their inability to give the woman a meaningful name. A number of other citizens were similarly incapable of putting a name to her. She was said by the police to be no more than nineteen years old.

To help in identification, the Commissioner of Police in Sydney, nearly three hundred miles south, authorised one of the Kempsey surgeons—in accordance with long police practice in such affairs—to separate the head from the rest of the body. The remains were then given burial on the edge of the cemetery in West Kempsey, but to assist the police, the head was preserved in a flask of alcohol.

When the Mulroneys were shipped south, the flask remained to torment the dreams of some, and to shock and chasten even the hardened citizens of the Macleay.

The age to some was otherwise hopeful. Hard times were said to be ending. Within a year the six former colonies of Australia would—to suit the new century—fall into line as a new federal Commonwealth. Commonwealth. A flowering, bountiful word.

But on hearing of this police severing of the unhappy girl, some may have been seized by the superstition that a new spate of barbarities would be let loose.

Despite and because of himself, Tim Shea was one of these.