From convict to heroine: the fall and rise of Mary Bryant

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/13/meg-keneally--father-thomas-inspired-story-of-mary-bryant-botany-bay-escape

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She is celebrated as the first woman to escape from life as a convict in Australia, a fearless Cornishwoman who stole a boat in 1791 with her family and other convicts and sailed to East Timor in search of a new life. Now Mary Bryant and her remarkable journey – which ended in her being recaptured and sent back to England – has inspired a historical novel, Fled, by Australian author Meg Keneally.

Keneally, daughter of Booker prize-winning Thomas, who wrote the novel on which Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was based, said it was her father who first introduced her to Bryant’s astonishing story.

“It being the days before iPads, he used to spend the time on long road trips telling stories to stop my sister and I murdering each other,” she said. “Some of those stories were completely fantastical and drawn from his imagination and others were true. For years I thought that the story of Mary Bryant and her adventures was one he had made up – I was amazed to discover that not only was it based in fact but he hadn’t really embellished much when telling it to us.”

Aware that Bryant’s origins remain shrouded in mystery and keen not to embellish too much, Keneally decided to name her heroine Jenny, making it clear that, while her book, Fled, is inspired by Bryant’s story, it is still a piece of fiction.

“Mary was illiterate, which means that while you can get a sense of her personality through the surviving records, you still don’t know how she felt about things, and it seemed wrong for me to attribute thoughts to her that were not there,” Keneally said. “Plus, there are times when I departed from the established facts – for example, there were 11 people in the boat for the escape but that’s too many for a novel if you want them to be more than cardboard cut-outs so in my version there are only six.”

Keneally, who made her name for herself with the Monsarrat historical crime series, co-written with her father, includes an afterword elaborating on the differences between Bryant’s life and the novel. But she admits that many of the most unlikely moments are in fact true.

Most notably, on Bryant’s return to England – tragically, she was one of the few escapees to survive the long sea journey back – she was seen as a celebrity and her case was taken up by James Boswell, biographer of Dr Johnson, who put her up in a house and on her release from prison paid her a stipend until his death.

“I think her story is one of courage, bravery and tenacity under extreme circumstances,” said Keneally. “And its appeal is all the greater because it has a woman at its heart. There is a lot of evidence that Mary was crucial to, and even masterminded, the escape – for example, while the other convicts involved in the escape had partners, she was the only [single] woman to join, which suggests that this is more than simply a case of her being on the boat because of her husband. She appears to have had great strength of character and a real survivor’s instinct.”

Her next novel is called The Wreck and draws in part on the infamous Dunbar shipwreck in 1857, which saw 121 of the 122 people on board die. She is also planning a book based on the life of Australia’s first woman pirate, Charlotte Badger.

“There are so many interesting women’s stories that haven’t been told, in part because there used to be a real stigma surrounding the convicts and a sense that there was something shameful in being descended from them,” she said. “When I was writing Fled, one of the things I most hoped for was a great recognition of the role of these women in our history. You read about them and think why didn’t I know that? These are the sort of stories that should be heard.”