r class' of convicts, many of
whom, having received their emancipation papers, had settled in the
vicinity, and had become prosperous and, in a measure, respected
settlers, though my father, who had a somewhat bitter tongue, said that
no ex-convict could ever be respected in the colony until he had lent
money to one or other of the many retired military or civil officers
who held large Crown grants of land in the district and worked them with
convict labour; for, while numbers of the emancipists throve and became
almost wealthy, despite the many cruel and harassing restrictions
imposed upon them by the unwritten laws of society (which yet
academically held them to be purged of their offences), the grand
military gentlemen and their huge estates generally went to ruin--mostly
through their own improvidence, though such misfortunes, our minister,
the Reverend Mr Sampson, said, in the sermons he preached in
our hideous, red-brick church, were caused by an 'inscrutable
Providence'--their dwellings and store houses were burnt, their cattle
and sheep disappeared, and their 'assigned' labourers took to the bush,
and either perished of starvation or became bushrangers and went to the
gallows in due course.

My mother, who was a gentle, tender-hearted woman, and seemed to live
and move and have her being only for the purpose of making happy those
around her, was, being English-born (she was of a Devonshire family),
a constant church-goer, not for the sake of appearances, for her
intelligence was too great for her to be bound by such a shallow reason,
but because she was a simple, good and pure-minded woman, and sought by
her example to make a protest against the scandalous and degraded lives
led by many of the soldier officers and officials with whom she and her
children were brought in almost daily contact, for my father, being
an all too generous man, kept open house. But although she was always
sweet-tempered and sometimes merry with the hard-drinking old Peninsular
veterans, and the noisy and swaggering subalterns of the ill-famed 102nd
Regiment (or New South Wales Corps), she always shuddered and looked
pale and ill at ease when she saw among my father's guests the coarse,
stern face of the minister, and her dislike of the clergyman was shared
by all we children, especially by my elder brother Harry (then sixteen
years of age), who called him 'the flogging parson' and the 'Reverend
Diabolical Howl.' This latter nickname stu