Love letter from another world

A museum curator hopes to discover more about the man who wrote this letter to his wife, who was deported to Tasmania for stealing a piece of wool. Rosita Boland reports

Three years ago, an envelope with a stamp postmarked Clonmel and dated 1843, came up for auction in Sydney, Australia. It was a specialist philatelic auction, and all the lots on offer came from an American-owned private collection. Although the focus of the auction was stamps, the 1843 franked envelope from Co Tipperary attracted attention in Australia for quite different reasons.

The envelope contained its original contents: a letter written from James Walsh in Clonmel, to his wife Mary, who had been deported to Tasmania the previous year for theft. Mary Walsh had stolen a piece of cashmere wool. For this, she was sentenced to be deported to Tasmania - Van Diemen's Land as it was then known - for seven years. Mary, then aged 30, had three children, the youngest a year-old baby, also named Mary. Despite petitions and formal correspondence between her husband and the Lord Lieutenant, protesting at the severity of the sentence, the sentence held. She left Dublin for Hobart on a ship called Hope, on April 10th, 1842, taking the baby with her.

On August 17th, 1842, mother and baby arrived in Hobart. Since she was deemed to have behaved well, she was apparently assigned to work for a free settler as a housemaid. Her baby went to an orphanage, where she died less than two years later. Mary herself is on record as receiving a conditional pardon in 1846 and then a Free Certificate in January 1849. After that point, there are no known records of her: of where she went, what happened to her, or where she is buried.

What is known is that in July 1843, her husband James employed a professional letter-writer to write to her. In it, he tells her repeatedly how much he misses her, and communicates news of other family members and friends. It is highly unlikely Mary ever received this letter, having possibly moved on to another in-service job and another address.

Surviving letters written to female convicts are extremely rare, and of immense social and historical interest. Australia Post bought the James Walsh letter for the Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) for Au$70,000 (€42,000) in 2003. The provenance trail of the letter is not clear: the museum does not know how the letter, sent from Ireland, to Tasmania, ended up in America. All is known is that it had spent 30 years in a private stamp collection in America, the owner of which shunned all publicity. Where it was between 1843 and 1973, the museum doesn't know.

"We think that it was never delivered, because Mary had moved on," explains Elspeth Wishart, curator of history for the TMAG. "It may have sat somewhere, in a dead letter office, for years." Wishart is in Ireland this week, in a research project funded by An Post, trying to discover more about the Irish side of the story. There is no record of Mary requesting passage back to Ireland. "It is unlikely she would have been able to afford it, and it was very uncommon for convicts to return. She possibly married again, quite illegally, but it was quite common to do so, " says Wishart. Two years after James Walsh wrote his heartfelt letter, the Famine settled on Ireland.

Wishart, who will be visiting the National Archives, the National Library and local history societies in Tipperary, will be attempting to piece together the fate of the husband and two children whom Mary Walsh left behind in 1842. She is hoping that parish records will at least reveal Mary's maiden name. The best result would be to trace ancestors: the letter states several names and places where family members lived. At the least, she will go back with an idea of place and context where the recipient of this rare letter came from.

Meanwhile, the letter, which has been on display most of the time in Hobart since it was acquired, is now "resting in the dark" in the museum's archives, to preserve the fragile paper it is written on. Wishart hopes it will go on display again in the future - this time, with a much fuller family history alongside it.

Anyone with information about the Walsh family, or the contents of the letter, can contact Elspeth Wishart of the Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery (www.tmag.tas.gov.au) at elspeth.wishart@tmag.tas.gov.au