I am getting on in years and would like to write and publish a book based on this blog and other discoveries I have made and insights I have had that do not appear here. But I am a pensioner and do not have the money to do so. If anyone reading this post is able to assist me with this project, please get in touch with me via my email address.
mawbeyfamilyaustralia@gmail.com
It was about now, around 11 o'clock on a cold winter's night on 20th of July 1900, the brutal revenge murders of four members of the Mawbey family and their schoolteacher were almost a fait accompli.
The killings had started about an hour ago when Jimmy knocked on the front door of the Mawbey's new farmhouse and his accomplice, Jacki Underwood, entered it through the back door.
The school teacher, Ellen Kerz, opened the front door and when she saw it was Jimmy, she levelled some insults at him. Mrs Mawbey who was with her, was hit on the head with a tomahawk or a wooden club.
Meanwhile, at the back of the house, 14 year old Percy Mawbey had challenged the hard to see in the dark intruder with a rifle that had no ammunition. For his trouble, he had had his head bashed in and his head almost severed from his body by a tomahawk. As Mrs Mawbey was reeling backwards from the blow to her head, she fell on her dead almost decapitated son.
Blood was flowing. Streaming in red rivulets across the brown wooden floor and spattering the wooden walls. Screams of terrified victims of the carnage were renting the air. But the farm was isolated and no one willing and able to come to help them could hear. And if there had been, they may have felt too much fear.
The two Mawbey girls, Grace and Hilda, had taken off with the schoolteacher to get help from their father who was packing wheat in the old inn where they used to live some distance away. But Jimmy saw them, said to have been alerted to them running away and trying to escape, by his wife. He took after them and smashed their skulls in with a club.
Mr Mawbey found them on his way to the farmhouse after one of the other children had managed to get to him and tell him the terrible news. He told his father they were killing Percy.
I am the third generation of the Mawbey family still carrying this intergenerational trauma. Felt but unrecognised and untreated by the motherless boys who survived, who were there on the night, and the eldest who was in Sydney who was to become my grandfather.
