William Maum at Clarence Plains

William Maum packed a lot into his early adult years.¹ He was a subaltern United Irishman arrested just before the 1798 uprising. After presenting flawed testimony at the court martial of Francis Arthur, a prominent businessman, William Maum was transported to New South Wales.² He came to the attention of Governor King who made a blunt assessment to Under Secretary Cooke;

Respecting Maum, his atrocious conduct in Ireland cannot be unknown to you. I shall therefore make no other remark on him other than by observing that his principles and Conduct have changed as little as the others, Nor can Time or place have any Effect on such depraved Characters.³

William Maum told both Lord Castlereagh and Lieutenant Governor Collins that such opinions were unwarranted. He got his second chance when he was recruited as an assistant, and subsequently as storekeeper, in the Hobart Commissariat, but in 1816 Governor Macquarie dismissed both him and his subordinate clerk describing them as ‘most improper and unfit Persons to hold their respective confidential and important Offices’.⁴

In 1816 William Maum owned a 30 acre property at Clarence Plains, a rural community separated from the small settlement at Hobart by a wide expanse of the River Derwent. Prior to, or within a short time after leaving the Commissariat, he acquired two adjoining properties and these were to be his home for the next 34 years, half of his entire life.⁵

The loss of a regular salary and the associated benefits was softened when his horse Black Beauty won the prize of 300 pounds at Edward Lord’s Orielton Park, a few months after he had been dismissed from the store. Then within a year his haystacks burnt down, he confronted inebriated bushrangers, his (defacto) wife broke her leg, and he was charged with assault.⁶ It was an eventful, but not necessarily an easy, transition into a life on the other side of the Derwent River.

William Maum struggled with his finances, particularly during the early years at Clarence Plains. During his first eight years, the Provost Marshal or Sheriff advertised the sale of his property five times in order to repay his debts.⁷ In 1827, he told the Surveyor General that he would have to sell 80 acres and work as a tutor for his creditor to repay the money he owed.⁸ Though he continued to borrow money in his latter years, there does not appear to be the same financial pressure.⁹

It difficult to know how much land William Maum owned, let alone cultivated or kept in pasture. Not all the land records have survived, and as the Lieutenant Governor suspected that William Maum overstated the extent of his wheat crop, the acreage recorded against his name in a muster could also be exaggerated.¹⁰ According to the 1819 muster, William Maum had 450 acres, but a search found only 380 acres that William Maum might have owned in 1819.¹¹

Most of the food and income for his family would have come from these properties. He sold meat and wheat to the Commissariat. And over time he supplemented his income by selling, or relinquishing, much of his land. When he died, he probably only owned the two properties (75 acres in total) adjoining his first grant of land at Clarence Plains. There is some evidence that he taught privately for short periods, and Mary Garth, his wife, may have received gifts or money by laying out the dead or being a midwife for the local community.¹² It is not clear whether he followed up Black Beauty’s success by racing more horses, but the prize money would have been more circumspect than when Black Beauty raced in 1816.¹³

William Maum’s predisposition to make dubious claims found an outlet in the land deals and property disputes of the time. He was named as the contact in an advertisement for a land sale, that included two adjoining properties which belonged to someone else.¹⁴ And in 1827, William Maum wrote to the Surveyor General expressing concern that Edward Boultbey had selected land at an undisclosed location without talking to him about it. He had, he said, given Edward Boultbey 80 acres at Clarence Plains in return for Edward Boultbey’s entitlement to select 500 acres of unallocated land. After an investigation, the authorities decided that no agreement was in place and Edward Boultbey was granted the 500 acres.¹⁵

At two hearings before the Land or Caveat Board, William Maum testified that official records were destroyed after Lieutenant Governor Collins died in office. As official returns for a nine month period had disappeared on William Maum’s watch in the Commissariat, he presumably wouldn’t have wanted his case to be an isolated instance. Alison Alexander argues that few, if any, official papers from Lieutenant Governor Collin’s administration are missing and concludes that there was only the customary sorting of possessions and documents after his death.¹⁶

She is also sceptical about William Maum’s claims to have damning records on Edward Lord.¹⁷ These claims were published when Edward's brother, Sir John Owen, claimed one of the properties adjoining William Maum’s first grant of land.

Not only did William Maum consider the land claimed by Sir John Owen his, he took umbrage at the way the claim was handled by the Surveyor General’s Department.

In the annals of petifogging chicanery practised by the prostitute and degraded off-scourings of the legal profession to obtain a hold of a tenement, in such is there any recorded baseness to be placed in competition with the deception practiced by the Surveyor General's Department to obtain ...a temporary posession by its surveyor of one of Maum's farms.¹⁸

His earlier clashes with Governor King and arrest in Ireland seem to have done little to deter him from attacking the establishment again, and fortunately the response was more benign this time round. The Caveat Board concluded that Sir John Owen had not substantiated his claim and William Maum retained possession of the land.¹⁹

William Maum had been charged with writing a handbill in Ireland under the name ‘An Avenger’ and he could have seen fit to promulgate his ideas anonymously again. Letters in the local newspapers written under the pseudonym ‘Rusticus’ bear some similarities to letters written by William Maum and reflect an anti-clerical sentiment that was attributed to him in Ireland.²⁰ Rusticus accused the Rev Bedford of inappropriately using convict labour and the district pound, neglecting to visit schools, and erroneously claiming additional land. Although it didn’t address the individual accusations, a letter from Lieutenant Governor Arthur professing full support of the Reverend was eventually published.²¹ On another occasion, Rusticus expressed outrage at the Rev Grange’s denigration of the Irish from the pulpit. ‘What does he know about sermons?’ was one response. ‘He may perhaps be acquainted with sermons on the merits of a rebellion, but as regards the Rev. Messrs. Knopwood's, Fry's, and Grange’s sermons, he knows nothing at all. I heard for myself the sermon of the tenth of October last, and “Rusticus” heard of it only.’²²

It is easy to imagine that William Maum would have been a polarising figure within his own community. While he was making life difficult for some people, he also tried to help others. He asked for a reduction in the punishment of one of his assigned servants, and gave a good character reference to the court for a former servant who was charged with theft. When asked by the prosecution whether he had said that it [the arrest] was no more than he expected, William Maum replied that, if he had said that, it was ‘on account of the censorious character of the small community’.²³ The prosecutors in Ireland could only rue that there wasn’t such quick thinking at the trial of Francis Arthur.

William Maum emerges from the pages of history as an extroverted and passionate Irishman who didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. Governor King might have been right in thinking that time and place wouldn’t change him, but time and place still shaped the last half of his life. Clarence Plains was an out of the way place where William Maum’s responsibilities were limited to his farm and family. He wasn’t entrusted with government stores and no-one was concerned about a local Irish uprising. At such a time and place, his idiosyncrasies could be tolerated, and he pretty well kept out of trouble. While he didn’t exactly thrive as a farmer, he and Mary Garth scraped together enough to raise their children and live out the remainder of their days on their own property.

Postscript: Dum facet clamat

How would William Maum want to be remembered?

Quite possibly as an Irish rebel or perhaps as a government official, in fact, he might have liked to be remembered along the lines of this gem published in 1921. The information was sourced from “the historian of the Norfolk Islanders and Pitcairners”.

Maum received his education at Trinity College in Dublin, where he was placed by his uncle, Counsellor Kellor, better known as Jerry Kellor. He quitted the college at the age of 18, and joined the insurgent forces. After the revolution was put down he endeavoured to escape recognition by joining Abercrombie's army, then proceeding to Egypt to expel the French; but the vessel in which his corps or detachment had sailed, meeting with very tempestuous weather at sea, returned to port. Before sailing again Maum's secret was discovered, and he was taken ashore, tried, and sentenced to be shot as a rebel... he was twice led out for execution, but on each occasion the soldiers refused to fire, saying ‘that they would not act as executioners, now that the excitement caused by the rebellion had subsided’...His sentence was then commuted, and he was sent to Sydney by the ship Minerva, Salkeld master. From Sydney he proceeded to Norfolk Island as a settler and was transferred to Tasmania in January, 1808, where he resided until his death on 26th September, 1850. It may be added that sixty years before his death Maum was an assistant in the King’s Stores at Hunter Island.²⁴