Successful ironmonger, land speculator and member of parliament William Perry built Miegunyah for his eldest son William Herbert and his new wife, Leila. And so the story goes… But what do we know about Leila, the 17-year-old bride who moved into Miegunyah in 1886?
When researching women in history, we often have to read between the lines and make inferences about their lives through the lens of the men around them and the scant traces they left behind. Leila left no diaries or letters, so what we know about her beyond the basic facts of her life comes from contemporary newspaper reports. The rest is up to our understanding of the historical context and our historical imagination.
Early life and parents
Leila Elizabeth Markwell was born on 24 January 1868 at Moorlands Villa in Toowong. Queensland at that time had only been a separate colony for nine years, and Brisbane was still a frontier town with questionable sanitation. Leila was the ninth child born to her mother Georgina Markwell (née Edmonstone). Georgina was the daughter of George Edmonstone, who had come to Brisbane in 1842 as an early ‘free settler’. He opened a butcher’s shop and soon became an active member of the new city’s elite, becoming an alderman of the Brisbane City Council and assisting with the planning of the first Brisbane bridge and the town hall.1
When Georgina married William John Markwell (known as John) at the age of 16, George gave his son-in-law an extensive property at Toowong on which John later built Moorlands Villa. The land holdings covered 21 hectares, including a portion which later became the Auchenflower Estate. The house was described as ‘a large bungalow residence’ with a garden that was a ‘wilderness of flowers and shrubs’.2 This was the house that Leila would grow up in.
John Markwell had come to the colony of Queensland in 1849 at the age of 26 on the Chasely, which was one of the Reverend John Dunmore Lang’s immigrant ships. He had brought with him his first wife Mary Ann and three children, one of whom (an infant) had died on the voyage out. Mary Ann died in 1853 and John married Georgina eight months later. She was thirteen years his junior.
John’s profession when he emigrated from Lincolnshire was listed as ‘tailor’, but in the new colony he established an ironmongery business in Queen Street, just near Perry Brothers’. The Perrys had arrived in Brisbane in 1860 and established their ironmongery business soon after. We can assume that the Perrys and Markwells knew each other and probably socialised. John Markwell was also a land speculator, alderman and had aspirations of joining the squattocracy.
The Markwell family, like many families during this era, suffered a number of tragedies, which reflects the precarious nature of life in the nineteenth century. In 1868, the year Leila was born, they lost two sons. Frederick, her brother (who was 7 at the time), drowned in February while crossing a bridge near home and Henry her half-brother (aged 25), died after a fall from his horse. At least two other children died in infancy. Sadly, Georgina also died in October 1870 at the age of 33 when Leila was just 2 years old. John married for a third time in 1872. His new wife Harriet Hunt Davis would have been the only mother Leila remembered. Harriet would go on to have five children. In all, John Markwell fathered nineteen children!
John sold Moorlands Villa to Mary Emelia Mayne in 1876, but the family continued to live in the Toowong area and at a property in Beaudesert. John died in 1881 at the age of 57, leaving Leila officially an orphan at the age of 13. To be continued…
References
1 Australian Dictionary of Biography. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/edmondstone-george-3469
2 ‘Historic Auchenflower’, The Brisbane Courier, 21 February 1931, p. 19.
Kommentare