Australian Dictionary of Biography

Mary Field (c. 1816–1928), Birrbay matriarch, Mary Evans Macquarie (c. 1834–1917), midwife, and Alice Macquarie (1842–?) and Elizabeth Macquarie (1846–1923), domestic servants, were mother and daughters. Mary was born on Birrbay (Birrpai, Biripi) Country near the location of the future settlement of Port Macquarie, New South Wales, in around 1816. Neither her parents’ names nor her Birrbay name are known. She took the surname Field, her eldest daughter’s second married name, sometime after 1864. The establishment of a penal colony at Port Macquarie in 1821 violently interrupted her childhood. She is thought to have been orphaned in 1826, around the time of the Blackmans Point Massacre at which approximately three hundred Birrbay people were killed; whether she lost her family to frontier violence or disease is unknown. Baptised at St Thomas’s Anglican Church, Port Macquarie, at around this time, she may have been one of the first children baptised there.

In the early 1830s Mary was taken in as a domestic servant by Major Archibald Innes, the police magistrate at Port Macquarie, and his wife Margaret. While living and working at the Inneses’s ‘Lake Cottage’ home on Lake Innes, she gave birth to three daughters; the names of their fathers were not recorded. The sisters spent their early years at the Inneses’s estate and, following their baptisms at St Thomas’s in 1849, were given the surname Macquarie after the local settlement. Soon afterwards the Inneses sent Mary’s daughters to live with white families, separating them from her and each other. If Mary consented to this, she would have done so in the belief that it was in their best interests. She is unlikely to have had any choice about where or with whom they were placed.

Mary seems to have remained in the Inneses’s employ until 1858. Major Innes had suffered a decline in fortune during the 1840s depression and, after becoming bankrupt in 1852, was transferred to Nundle, then Newcastle, where he died in 1857. It is likely that Mary returned to Port Macquarie with Margaret Innes, who died there the following year.

There are no formal records for the next seven decades of Mary’s life. Oral histories and records created at the time of her death and later suggest that she remained close to her eldest and youngest daughters, Mary Evans and Elizabeth, and their families. She appears to have joined the Salvation Army and was praised for her ‘splendid’ (Port Macquarie and Hastings River Advocate 1941, 6) charity work in the Hastings Valley. To remain close to her grandchildren, she also worked at Taree, Wingham, Marlee, Bobin, and in the Macleay valley region. Predeceased by two and probably all three of her daughters, she passed away at the home of her grandson, Thomas Field, at Burnt Bridge on 15 August 1928. Her death certificate listed her age as ninety-two; however, according to her family, contemporary newspapers, and a memorial stone at the front of the Port Macquarie Historic Cemetery, she lived until the age of 112. Her longevity was shared by some of her descendants, one of whom, Ada Julia Rothe (1913–2018), survived to the age of 105.

Mary Field’s eldest daughter, Mary Evans Macquarie, was born around 1834, probably at the Inneses’s Port Macquarie property. She was placed with the convicts Thomas and Mary Browning at the age of sixteen. Major Innes had arranged tickets-of-leave for the Brownings and had granted them 2,560 acres (1,036 ha) on the Hastings River on two conditions: that they supply cedar to Lake Cottage and raise Mary Evans as a sibling to their own son, John. Major Innes also wanted her to have an occupation, and the Brownings arranged for her to be trained as a midwife. In 1858 Mary Evans gave birth to a daughter, Julia May Macquarie, whose father’s name is not recorded. Mary Evans married John McKanna in 1859 and they had three children: Margaret, Charles, and Mary. Widowed, she married John Field in 1864, with whom she had six children: Robert, John, Christopher, Susanna, Thomas, and Mary. Her mother took her new son-in-law’s surname during this time, so we can assume they had resumed contact and were close. Mary Evans died on 12 August 1917 at Ellenborough and was buried in the public cemetery there.

Mary Field’s middle daughter, Alice Macquarie, was born in 1842, most likely at the Inneses’s property at Port Macquarie. Her baptism at St Thomas’s Anglican Church in 1849 was sponsored by Jane and Maria Catherine Gray of ‘Huntingdon,’ the wife and daughter of Colonel Charles George Gray. Good friends of the Inneses, the Grays took Alice into their home as a companion for Maria in 1850. In 1853 Gray was appointed police magistrate at Ipswich and he, Maria, and Alice moved north; Jane stayed behind. A year later, when Maria married, Alice lost her job. After leaving the Grays’s employ she worked as a domestic servant for other families in Ipswich and Brisbane. Later it was said that ‘her conduct had been such that none of them had been able to retain her in their service for any length of time’ (Moreton Bay Courier 1857, 2). In July 1856, aged thirteen or fourteen, she was sentenced to one month imprisonment at Ipswich goal. Five months later, in January 1857, she was sent to Brisbane gaol. Released on 31 January, she was charged with vagrancy less than two weeks later and returned to gaol for a fortnight. The ‘Bench thought her an abandoned character’ (Moreton Bay Courier 1857, 2). She was sentenced to a further month in gaol in July 1857. Beyond the troubling and precarious time she experienced in her teen years, nothing further is known of her, as she disappeared from the historical record following her third arrest.

Mary Field’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth Macquarie, was born in 1846. Like her older sisters, she was most likely born at the Inneses’s property at Port Macquarie. Soon after her baptism in 1849 it is believed she was placed with Alexander and Ann Cameron, immigrants from Inverness, Scotland, who had a daughter the same age as her and six older children. When the Cameron family moved to Marlee in 1854, Elizabeth went with them. She gave birth to a son, William H. Macquarie (later Holten), in 1862. While working as a domestic servant for the Camerons, she married Donald Dan Cameron, an Aboriginal employee, most likely a Birrbay man, who, as was commonplace, had taken his employers’ surname. They had three children: Donald Dan, Elizabeth, and Clarice. She remained at Marlee until her death in 1923. William H. Macquarie’s great-grandson William Henry Holten helped found the Birpai Local Area Land Council and many of Elizabeth’s kin have been active members, continuing the legacy of community work set by her mother, Mary Field.

Barraba yitirr Robert G. Gardner. Ngatha djirang Birrbay guri. (My name is Robert G. Gardner. I am a proud Birrbay man.) I was born on Birrbay barray (Country), which has always been my true home. I am the great-grandson of Julia May Macquarie, great-great-grandson of Mary Evans and great-great-great-grandson of Mary Field.

Kiera Donnelly is descended from the Bundjalung and Gumbaynggirr peoples of the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales and also has Anglo-Australian heritage. She grew up on Dharug Country and was living on Ngunnawal Country while working on this article.