With winter settling over Wilberforce in May 1813, William and Mary Mason were sowing their wheat on their purchased acres.
Neighbours in 1810 who believed William ‘very Honest, sober and Industrious’ from his arrival as a convict in 1800 in the Royal Admiral 2, had signed a petition to reduce Mason’s life sentence.
It must have been effective as in February 1812, Mason received an absolute pardon.
His wife Mary Smith had arrived with a seven-year sentence in 1806, and had been freed. Mary and William maintained a faithful partnership into old age. Their lives were peaceable. They had good relations with their neighbours, James Attenborough and Mary Cooke/Kirby upstream, William [Thomas] Able downstream and William Marsen (also a Royal Admiral 2 man) and his wife across the river.
With Attenborough and Mary Kirby lived and worked William Davis, and 10-year old Thomas Riley.
At the Masons, worker Edward Toon slept in the house and another labourer, James Betts and his partner, Rose Riley, slept in the attached skilling. William Davis and Mason appear to have been friends.
One evening the Attenborough household came to dinner at the Masons’. Some of the party took corn across the river to the Marsens to exchange it for rum. As the evening wore on, the drinking continued, but by 8pm Mary and William Mason had gone to bed.
Mason got up again when he heard ‘an affray’ in the other room. As he was walking out of the bedroom, he was set upon and wounded with a knife. Astounded at the unprovoked attack by Davis, he cried out to his wife for help.
In the front room Mary Mason discovered Edward Toon lying dead, also stabbed. Distressed, Mary Mason went to the door to raise the alarm only to receive a blow to the head herself. She raised the cry of “Murder!” from the back door, and eventually neighbour William Marsen went to Windsor for help.
William [Thomas] Able became involved when Mary Kirby arrived late that night and left a slightly blood-stained nightgown in his house the following morning.
Windsor doctor James Mileham found a stab wound to the heart had killed Toon, and an inquest sent the case through to a court trial.
No-one would say what had happened, so Davis, along with James Attenborough, James Betts and Mary Kirby, who had not gone to the aid of either Toon or Mason, were all found guilty of “feloniously ... slaying Edward Toon” and sent to Parramatta gaol for a year. Davis was tried again for attempting to murder Mason, and found guilty.
Mason was in disbelief at the devastating turn his party had taken. He told how they had all been drinking ‘very cheerfully without any quarrels’, as it seems they had often done before.
This time the party toll was more than sore heads: one dead, one hanged, one badly wounded, one with a head injury and the rest in gaol. Only Mary and William Mason recovered and went back to their farm.
References:
Sydney Gazette, 15, 29 May, 1813; 5. 12 June, 1813.
C. Baxter, (ed), Musters of New South Wales and Norfolk Island, 1805-1806, ABGR in association with the Society of Australian Genealogists, Sydney, 1989.
Memorial of Mitigation of Sentence, William Mason (Royal Admiral 2), Colonial Secretary’s Papers, 1788-1856, NRS 900, Fiche 3163-3253, 12 February 1812; NRS898, Fiche 3260-3312, Special Bundles, 1794-1825, in Ancestry.com.au, accessed 8 July, 2016.
Court of Criminal Jurisdiction, SRNSW, Reel 2390, Reference, 5/1121, pp. 17-28, 28 May 1813.
