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The Clearing: Part 2.3 The Message - The Ferry

  • Dec 27, 2025
  • 9 min read

Updated: Feb 12

When a stranger's question unraveled a century-old secret, I discovered a hidden chapter of my family's history.

Key Theme: Love, Care & Unspoken Bonds

  • Universal Theme: Our deepest human experiences are often unspoken but deeply felt.

  • Focus: The moment of separation is the story’s hinge: not abandonment, but a final act of protection when every other option has failed.

Key Takeaways

  • Acts of love don’t always look like love. Sometimes protection means letting go, even when it breaks the person doing the letting.

  • Objects witness what we cannot speak. A remembered gift, a register entry, a stitched garden—small artefacts can carry tenderness across a century.

  • Family secrets often hide protection, not shame. What appears as erasure may have been a shelter built in a world that punished women and children first.

  • A name can be a lifeline—or a severing. A change on arrival can cut a person off from their own lineage, even when love existed.

  • Material culture preserves what words cannot. Without the objects, photographs, and records we inherit, crucial family stories would be lost forever.


Embroidery of a vibrant garden with colorful flowers, green hedges, and a brick wall.
Wilkinson, M. A. (c.1880s-1900s). Detail: Embroidered garden scene.

The Ferry

In July 1916, she woke him before dawn in the Toronto house. Rain was falling—steady, cold winter rain that had been coming down for days.


He was four and a half years old. He'd lived in this lakeside town for about six months now—since they'd left Maitland. He knew the wharves, knew the boats coming and going, knew the bush paths his siblings showed him.


"We're going on a journey," she told him. Perhaps she'd made it sound like an adventure. Perhaps she'd already been crying. She dressed him carefully against the cold. Packed a small bundle and a meal for the journey—it would be mid-afternoon by the time they arrived.


They walked to Toronto Station through the rain. The lake, grey under low cloud, was always there—but he didn't know this was the last time he'd see it. The train to Fassifern. The change of trains. The long ride south through wet country, rain streaking the carriage windows while his grandmother—who he knew as his mother—held his hand.


At Woy Woy, they transferred to the water. A launch across Brisbane Water pushed through the rain, past mangrove flats and oyster racks, the air smelling of salt and diesel and wet timber. This part—the crossing—would be what he remembered. A short ferry ride. His mother's hand. The water.



The Orphanage

It was the best of the terrible choices she had left.


She'd saved him once in 1912 by claiming him as her own. Now, in 1916, she was losing him because Gallipoli had taken his biological father before legitimation could happen, consumption had taken her husband, and war had taken everything else.


The law offered no help. Under the Legitimation Act 1902, his father could have filed a declaration after the marriage to have the boy recognised as legitimate. But three weeks after his daughter's birth, he was dead. So in the quiet machinery of the law and registry, the boy fell through the gap — socially protected, legally stranded.


She couldn't change that now. But she could still protect him from starvation. From baby farming. From the fate of Reginald Armstrong at the Alma Hotel.


She'd chosen carefully. A place where he might be safe, fed, educated. Where the lie she'd told in 1912 wouldn't follow him. Where he could be given a chance.



At the wharf below St Joseph's Orphanage, the Sisters were waiting.


What did she tell him as they walked up to the weatherboard buildings? That she'd come back? That she'd visit? That this was temporary?


The nuns took his hand. She watched them lead him inside—four years old, carrying his small bundle, looking back, crying.

A traumatic arrival.


Rustic boathouse and wooden dock by a calm river, surrounded by tall trees and distant houses. Black and white, serene atmosphere.
St Joseph's Orphanage, Kincumber South NSW, circa 1900. Macpherson, W. J. (ca. 1900). [Glass photonegative]. State Library of New South Wales, ON 588/Box 06. Digital ID: c071430003.

Then she turned away and walked back to the wharf. On 6 July 1916, the ferry pulled away, carrying her back across Brisbane Water alone, through the rain.


Not long after, a package arrived at St Joseph's. Inside: a sailor suit, carefully sewn. The nuns gave it to him, told him it was from his grandmother.

He kept that memory all his life.



The embroidery piece on the wall looked different to me now.

My great-grandmother's garden scene wasn't just about beauty or skill—it was about resilience. About creating order and grace in a world that had given her chaos and grief.


Those hands — the ones I'd studied in the sepia photograph — had stitched such delicate beauty, had embroidered altar curtains for the Bishop of Maitland, and had tailored clerical garments alongside her husband. Those hands had signed a birth register in 1912 with a protective lie and later held a telegram from Gallipoli in May 1915.


The same hands had held a four-year-old's hand on a ferry in July 1916. And finally those hands had sewn a sailor suit for a boy she'd never hold again.


How many impossible choices had those hands made? How many acts of love looked like something else entirely? How many tears had fallen onto that linen as she worked?


As I sat on that floor, holding a 1990s embroidery magazine, trying to comprehend what she'd endured, the message on my phone glowed, waiting for a response.

The researcher had contacted me on behalf of the boy's daughter — his descendants, carrying his story forward.


He had spent twelve years at St Joseph's Orphanage. Government reports from the time described the institution's routines: boys in coarse uniforms, learning to farm, bake, tailor. Early prayers, manual work, lessons, chores, silence at night. It wasn't warmth, but it was order — a kind of safety, hard-edged and dependable.


At sixteen, he'd left for farm work—the only path the orphanage prepared boys for. He'd married at thirty, raised four children, built a good life.


His descendants knew he'd been raised in an orphanage. They knew there was a break in the family tree. A name change recorded at the orphanage—whether clerical error or deliberate—made the family line even harder to trace.


One detail survived in family memory: a sailor suit. He remembered it all his life—that carefully sewn sailor suit. Proof that she hadn't forgotten him.


But what the researcher and his daughter wanted to know was - why?

Why had he been given away? Why had no other family members taken him in? Why had this part of the family tree been severed, the connection lost?


I stared at the embroidery on the wall, at the garden my great-grandmother had stitched with such care, and I finally understood what they were really asking:

Had he been unwanted? Unloved? Discarded?

And I could tell them: no.


He had been claimed. Protected. Saved from filius nullius and everything that status meant in 1912. Raised for four years as my great grandmother's son. Let go only when Gallipoli and consumption and poverty had left her with nothing but impossible choices.


She hadn't abandoned him. She'd run out of ways to keep him.



But the questions kept leading backward — past the orphanage, past Gallipoli, past 1916. Where had her skill come from? Why had her grandfather brought the family to Australia in the first place? And what had that journey cost them?


Those answers were waiting for me, buried in shipping records and historical paintings. Understanding her impossible choices meant understanding the voyage that had brought her father here nearly eighty years before — and everything that journey had taken, and made possible




Sources / notes

Part 2: The Message

This three-part instalment draws on: Trove newspaper notices (National Library of Australia), Maitland City Council heritage material, NSW Registry of Births Deaths & Marriages index entries, relevant NSW legislation (e.g., Legitimation Act 1902), and archival images credited in captions. Details about his admission date, the sailor suit, and later life come from family correspondence with a researcher who accessed records and from descendant memory; I’m currently seeking copies of the original archive entries where possible.


References and Further Reading

Books

  • Bean, C. E. W. (1921). The story of Anzac: From the outbreak of war to the end of the first phase of the Gallipoli Campaign, May 4, 1915 (Vol. 1). Angus & Robertson.

  • Cossins, A. (2013). The baby farmers: A chilling tale of missing babies, family secrets and murder in 19th century Australia. Allen & Unwin.

  • Dickey, B. (1987). No charity there: A short history of social welfare in Australia. Allen & Unwin.

  • Reiger, K. M. (1985). The disenchantment of the home: Modernising the Australian family 1880-1940. Oxford University Press.

  • Swain, S., & Howe, R. (1995). Single mothers and their children: Disposal, punishment and survival in Australia. Cambridge University Press.

Family Records

Historical Artworks and Images

Image References and Credits

  • Google. (n.d.). Google Maps: Street View imagery of High Street, Maitland NSW [Map]. Retrieved December 15, 2025, from https://maps.app.goo.gl/ThqP9ssbFAMDbU3r9

  • Wilkinson, M. A. (c.1880s-1900s). Embroidered garden scene [Photograph] by Meg. © 2025 Heart's Lore Stories, 2025.

Journal Articles

  • Barbalet, M., Quartly, M., & Swain, S. (2014). The market in babies: Stories of Australian adoption. Monash University Publishing.

Legislation

Military Records

Newspapers

Online Sources

Authors Note: Some names and identifying details have been withheld or altered to respect the privacy of living relatives. Historical sources are cited where possible.

© 2025 Heart's Lore Stories. All rights reserved.

All text and images are copyright of Heart's Lore Stories and may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission, except for brief quotations in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. You may link to these articles but may not use the photographs or text without written permission. In the case of images used here with permission, the copyright resides with the original photographer. For permission requests, please contact us.

margott7532_Create_a_simple_elegant_illustration_for_an_icon_fo_89cdb03e-52e2-4840-8d39-4a

Hi, thanks for dropping by!

I'm Meg - artist, curator, educator, and storyteller based in Fremantle, Western Australia. Through Heart's Lore Stories, I explore the intricate relationships between objects, memory, and human creativity.

​

With a background in art education and object-based inquiry, I bring a thoughtful lens to vintage and artisan pieces - each one a window into history and connection.

 

Join me as we uncover the stories woven into the things we create, use, and treasure.

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