John Woolley

The Witness Child (1809–1819)

John Woolley entered the world on 6th February 1809 in the cottage on Pound Lane, Wootton, Oxfordshire, arriving during what would prove the family's most desperate period. Thomas Sr.'s cobbling business had contracted to near nothing following grandfather William Woolley's death the previous year, the inherited debts consuming whatever remained of the workshop's reputation. Agnes, at thirty, was exhausted from perpetual pregnancy and the demands of her expanding midwifery practice, which had become the household's primary source of income. Into this atmosphere of quiet crisis, John arrived—the fifth child in a family that could barely sustain four.

His earliest memories were not of comfort but of sound: the rhythmic scrape of his father's knife on leather during the increasingly rare periods when work came in, the muffled arguments conducted after the children were supposedly asleep, and the particular quality of silence that descended when Thomas Sr. retreated into the dark moods that could last for days. Lying in the crowded sleeping space he shared with Henry and Frederick, John absorbed every inflection of his parents' whispered exchanges—bitter recriminations about money, about England's failure to provide, about whose family bore responsibility for their circumstances. These overheard conversations taught him, before he had language for the lesson, that adult life was a negotiation conducted through exhaustion and resentment.

At four years old, John witnessed something that would define the architecture of his inner life, though he would carry the knowledge in silence for decades. On a winter night in 1813, he woke to sounds from his parents' room that differed from the usual arguments—a scuffle, a choked cry, then a stillness more frightening than any noise. Through the gap beneath the door he saw shadows that his child's mind could not fully interpret but his body understood with absolute certainty: his father's bulk pinning his mother, her hands clawing at his grip, then the sudden collapse as Thomas Sr. released her and crumpled into weeping. John retreated without being seen, but the image branded itself into his consciousness—the knowledge that home could become something else without warning, that the man who was supposed to protect could become the thing that threatened.

The next morning carried on as though nothing had happened. Agnes wore a high-collared dress. Thomas Sr. ate his porridge in silence before leaving for three days. Elizabeth managed the younger children with her usual efficient cheerfulness. Nobody spoke of what had occurred, and John understood—with the intuitive comprehension that children in violent households develop as a survival mechanism—that this was family business, sealed by complicity. He noticed things after that night: the way his older siblings moved carefully around their father during his dark periods, the new tension in his mother's shoulders when Thomas came home late, the knife she began keeping within reach at night. Each observation confirmed what he already knew and could never say.

The subsequent arrivals of Thomas Jr. in 1812, George in 1814, and Mary in 1817 pushed the household further into overcrowding and poverty. John, growing through childhood without the eldest's authority or the youngest's indulgence, occupied the middle ground where observation substituted for attention. He became hypervigilant—constantly monitoring his father's moods for the atmospheric shifts that preceded eruption, learning to gauge danger by the set of Thomas Sr.'s jaw or the particular heaviness with which he placed his cup. These skills, honed through necessity, would serve John in certain contexts throughout his life. In others, they would destroy him.

The Voyage and New Ground (1820)

When emigration was proposed in 1819, ten-year-old John understood its necessity differently from his siblings. Henry saw opportunity; Elizabeth mourned the loss of hard-won routines; Frederick treated the prospect as adventure. John recognised escape—not toward something better but away from something that was worsening. He had observed his father's deterioration with the clinical attention of a child who has learned to read violence as weather, and he understood that the pressure building in the Pound Lane cottage would eventually find catastrophic release. Van Diemen's Land was not promise; it was distance.

The Morley departed Deptford on 15th February 1820, and the voyage affected John in ways that surprised him. The ship's rigid structure—watches, bells, rationed meals, enforced discipline—provided a framework that the chaotic cottage had never offered. Naval order prevented the kind of explosive violence that required privacy; Thomas Sr., reduced to one passenger among hundreds, lacked the enclosed space in which his darkness could flourish. John slept better in the ship's crowded hold than he had ever managed at home, protected by the simple mathematics of proximity—too many witnesses for anything unspeakable to occur.

He attached himself to the ship's carpenter, a man named Samuel Morrison who had served time as a convict in the colony and was returning after visiting family in England. Morrison, recognising the boy's hunger for practical competence, taught him to measure, cut, and join timber during the long weeks at sea. More importantly, he introduced John to the idea that a man could reinvent himself in the colonies—that past failures need not determine future possibility, that skilled hands and reliable habits could build a life that transcended origins.

The storm off the Cape of Good Hope revealed in John something that would characterise his adult life: absolute functionality during external crisis, coupled with an inability to manage internal calm. Whilst others panicked, he worked methodically—securing loose cargo, distributing rations, assisting Morrison with emergency repairs. This was not bravery but recognition. External chaos was legible, finite, and could be addressed through action. The domestic terror he had known since childhood was none of these things. The storm would pass; his father's capacity for violence was permanent.

Colonial Youth and Apprenticeship (1820–1831)

The family's arrival in Hobart Town on 18th June 1820 deposited eleven-year-old John into a settlement raw enough to forgive almost anything except idleness. The Goulburn Street cottage offered more space than Wootton but also more privacy for Thomas Sr.'s dark moods to ferment, and John responded by spending as little time at home as circumstances permitted. He found work as an errand boy for merchants near the docks, contributing his earnings to the family whilst using employment as legitimate excuse for absence. The colony's casual attitude toward child labour suited him perfectly—work provided structure, money provided value, and distance provided safety.

His education came sporadically through the church school, where he proved quick with figures and showed particular aptitude for technical drawing. The schoolmaster suggested apprenticeship in the building trades, and at fifteen John secured a position with Benjamin Fletcher, a master carpenter who specialised in residential construction. Fletcher was a former convict who had earned his ticket-of-leave through his skills with timber, and he understood—without John ever needing to explain—that some apprentices needed the workshop to be more than a workplace. He demanded discipline and precision, working John twelve-hour days in all weather, but he also provided consistency. The tools were always where they should be. The rules did not change according to mood. A joint was either square or it was not, and the judgement carried no violence.

John excelled. By eighteen he could frame a house independently, create complex joinery, and solve structural problems that puzzled journeymen with twice his experience. Fletcher began including him on prestigious projects—government buildings, merchants' residences—where his attention to detail and quiet reliability made him valuable. The other apprentices found him difficult to know. He did not drink, did not gamble, did not join their recreational excursions to the establishments that serviced young men's appetites. This was not moral superiority; it was the specific terror of a boy who had witnessed what alcohol and lost control could produce in a man who resembled him.

During this period John developed the financial secrecy that would persist throughout his adult life. He contributed visibly to the family household whilst concealing the true extent of his savings, maintaining hidden reserves in multiple locations—some with trusted merchants, some buried in places only he could find. This was not greed but preparation. He had learned from childhood that the only genuine safety lay in the ability to leave, and leaving required money that nobody else knew existed.

Marriage to Hannah Lloyd (1831)

John first noticed Hannah Lloyd at St David's Church in the spring of 1830, though "noticed" understates the quiet shock of recognition that passed between them. Hannah, nineteen and unmarried, had spent years caring for her invalid father—a stroke victim who required constant attention—whilst her mother retreated into the religious mania that grief and displacement sometimes produced in emigrant women. The Lloyd family had arrived from Oxfordshire in the mid-1820s with modest savings that evaporated into failed ventures, leaving Hannah as the household's sole functional adult. Her competence in managing chronic domestic crisis was visible in the economy of her movements, the careful way she rationed energy across obligations. John recognised it immediately because he possessed the same skills, acquired through the same kind of necessity.

Their courtship proceeded with a directness that reflected mutual understanding rather than passion. John saw in Hannah someone who comprehended burden without requiring explanation, who had learned to maintain surfaces whilst managing depths. Hannah saw in John a man who worked obsessively but did not drink, who saved rather than spent, who offered the specific kind of security that women from unstable households valued above romance. When he proposed on Christmas Eve 1830, he was remarkably honest—explaining his family's dysfunction in terms careful enough to convey the essential truth without specific detail. Hannah listened, then shared her own burdens with matching candour. They agreed to marry not from love but from the recognition that survival sometimes required alliance, and that two people who understood damage might build something together that neither could manage alone.

The wedding on 12th March 1831 at St David's Church was modest but properly conducted. John had saved enough for respectable ceremony without ostentatious display. Thomas Sr. attended drunk; Agnes arrived with the careful composure that concealed whatever had preceded her departure from the house. Elizabeth and Samuel Brooks stood as witnesses, Elizabeth's sharp eyes absorbing every detail for the family archive she was already compiling. The occasion established John and Hannah as a legitimate Hobart household—the beginning of something that, for a time, would actually work.

Building a Household (1831–1845)

Their first home—two rented rooms above a bakery on Murray Street, perpetually warm from the ovens below—became the foundation for a domestic life that operated through parallel competence rather than intimacy. John worked long hours at whatever carpentry the growing colony demanded, whilst Hannah established their household with the methodical efficiency of someone who had been managing other people's chaos since adolescence. They existed in complementary orbits, sharing purpose without requiring vulnerability, and for several years this arrangement produced something that resembled contentment.

The first pregnancy ended in miscarriage at four months in December 1831. Hannah haemorrhaged badly, and John stood beside her through a night that cracked the careful distance between them. Shared grief opened channels that caution had sealed, and in the weeks of her recovery they spoke truths previously hidden—John's childhood terrors, Hannah's mother's insanity disguised as prophecy, the specific fears each carried about what they might have inherited. This unexpected intimacy produced not the romance of courtship but something more durable: the understanding that they were both damaged, both functional, and both willing to continue.

Children arrived with colonial regularity thereafter. Thomas John in 1833, healthy but demanding. Sarah Agnes in 1835, delicate but determined. William James in 1837, stillborn—a grief Hannah bore with characteristic composure, returning to household duties within the week. Elizabeth Hannah in 1839. Frederick George in 1841. Mary Margaret in 1843, who survived six months before fever claimed her. Each pregnancy weakened Hannah incrementally, though neither she nor John possessed the medical understanding to connect cause and consequence. They grieved their dead children with the restrained efficiency that characterised everything in their household—properly, briefly, and without public display.

By the early 1840s, John had established himself as one of Hobart's most reliable carpenters. His work appeared in government buildings, churches, and the homes of the merchant class that was solidifying around Hobart's expanding harbour. He specialised in complex roofwork, creating structures designed to withstand Tasmania's violent weather whilst maintaining the aesthetic standards that wealthy clients demanded. His reputation rested not on brilliance but on reliability—projects completed on time, within budget, without the disputes that plagued contractors dependent on convict labour. He employed two assistants by 1842, teaching them with quiet thoroughness, though they found him impossible to know beyond professional parameters.

The family moved to a proper house on Bathurst Street in 1843, purchased with savings accumulated over twelve years of disciplined self-denial. Four rooms, a kitchen, a small garden where Hannah grew vegetables. John spent his weekends improving it—building shelves, adding windows, crafting furniture with the same precision he applied to paid work. The house represented everything he had lacked in childhood: order, ownership, the assurance that no one could take it from him. For a brief period it was enough.

Fractures (1845–1855)

The seeds of decline were planted so gradually that neither John nor Hannah noticed until the ground had already shifted beneath them. Hannah's persistent cough, present since the mid-1840s, worsened each winter without ever fully clearing during summer. No doctor would confirm consumption in a woman of respectable standing, but the evidence accumulated in bloodied handkerchiefs hidden beneath mattresses and the increasing frequency with which she needed to pause on staircases. John responded as he had been trained by childhood to respond to situations beyond his control: he worked harder, earned more, provided more comprehensively, as though financial security could purchase what medicine could not.

The children developed within an atmosphere of competent dysfunction. Thomas John, the eldest, inherited his father's intensity without his discipline—an increasingly reckless temperament that manifested in gambling and poor judgement. Sarah Agnes assumed the maternal duties Hannah could no longer sustain, her own childhood compressed into domestic service. Elizabeth Hannah found refuge in books, constructing interior worlds that offered what the Bathurst Street house could not. Frederick George gravitated toward the rougher elements of Hobart's street life, finding among other boys the warmth and chaos that the Woolley household had trained out of its children.

The cholera scare of 1850 brought particular terror to a household already managing illness. Frederick George contracted the fever and died within days, his twelve-year-old body unable to resist what stronger constitutions survived. John built his son's coffin himself, measuring the boy's dimensions with the same precision he applied to any commission, unable to permit grief until the work was complete. Hannah, already weakened, contracted the illness but survived in diminished form—bedridden for months, her recovery incomplete, her periods of lucidity increasingly interrupted by confusion and exhaustion.

Thomas Sr.'s death on 22nd May 1853 severed the last thread connecting John to the father whose violence had shaped him. He attended the funeral in Hobart but stood apart from his siblings, unable to grieve a man he had never forgiven and could not now confront. The gathering revealed how far the Woolley children had dispersed: Elizabeth presiding over proceedings with characteristic authority, Henry prospering in Launceston, Frederick established in the postal service, Sarah managing Joseph Barnes's inadequacies, Thomas Jr. withdrawn to New Norfolk. Each sibling had found their own accommodation with the family's complicated inheritance; John's accommodation was distance maintained through politeness.

Agnes's death on 9th August 1855 struck harder, though John struggled to articulate why. Perhaps he grieved not the mother she had been but the protector she had failed to become—the woman who had endured what he had witnessed but never acknowledged his witnessing, leaving him isolated in knowledge they shared but could not discuss. At her funeral he stood closer to the family group than he had at Thomas Sr.'s, but the proximity was geographical rather than emotional. The distance had calcified into something permanent.

The Turn to Farming (1855–1864)

The mid-1850s brought a convergence of pressures that redirected John's life along paths he had not anticipated. Hannah's condition required increasingly expensive care. His carpentry business, though still functional, suffered from the tremors that had begun appearing in his hands—subtle at first, barely noticeable, but growing in frequency and severity until precise joinery became unreliable. Whether the cause was physical deterioration, the modest drinking he had begun in the aftermath of Frederick George's death, or the accumulated stress of decades spent managing surfaces, the result was the same: the skill upon which his livelihood depended was eroding.

Elizabeth, observing his situation with the comprehensive awareness she applied to all family matters, offered a loan for the purchase of farmland in the Huon district, south of Hobart. The offer was characteristic Elizabeth—practical, generous, and structured to preserve John's dignity by framing charity as investment. John accepted because the alternatives were worse. Farming required physical stamina rather than fine motor control, and the Huon's expanding agricultural sector offered possibilities that Hobart's saturated carpentry market no longer provided.

He purchased twenty acres of partially cleared land near Franklin in 1857, and the family's relocation marked a decisive break from the life John had built in Hobart. The farmstead was modest—a timber cottage he improved with his remaining carpentry skills, outbuildings constructed from local materials, fenced paddocks carved from the bush. He grew apples and vegetables for the Hobart market, kept a small number of livestock, and supplemented the farm's income with occasional building work for neighbouring properties. The labour was punishing for a man approaching fifty, but it offered something the carpentry workshop no longer could: a margin for imprecision. Trees did not care whether his hands shook. Fences did not require the tolerances of fine joinery.

Hannah's death in early 1862 arrived with the quiet inevitability of a long-expected outcome. The consumption had been advancing for years, and her final months were spent in the confused territory between awareness and withdrawal. John nursed her through the ending with the practical competence he brought to every task—changing linens, preparing broth, sitting beside her through the nights when breathing became the only remaining labour. Her death left him not devastated but emptied, as though the structure of obligation that had organised his days had suddenly been removed, leaving nothing to arrange himself around.

The surviving children dispersed after their mother's funeral. Thomas John had already left for the Victorian goldfields years earlier, sending occasional letters that requested money but offered no return date. Sarah Agnes had married young to escape, choosing a husband whose long absences at sea provided the space she craved after a childhood spent managing parental dysfunction. Elizabeth Hannah had found work as a governess in Launceston. Only Robert Charles, the youngest surviving child, remained near enough to visit, though his own apprenticeship in Hobart limited the frequency.

John continued farming alone through 1862 and 1863, the physical demands of solitary agricultural work compounding the toll of decades spent pushing past exhaustion. He had always been strong rather than careful, and farming without assistance meant accepting risks that prudent men would have avoided—felling timber alone, managing livestock without help, operating equipment designed for crews of two or three. His drinking, which had increased after Hannah's death from modest self-medication to something closer to dependence, further compromised the judgement that dangerous work required.

Death and Burial

On 19th March 1864, John Woolley was found by a neighbouring farmer pinned beneath a fallen tree he had been felling alone on the upper boundary of his property. The details reconstructed afterwards suggested that the tree had kicked back from its intended direction of fall—a common hazard when cutting timber in the steep terrain of the Huon, and one that an experienced bushman working with a partner would likely have avoided. John had been working alone, probably since dawn, and the injuries to his chest and legs were extensive. He was carried to the farmhouse but died before medical assistance could arrive from Franklin. He was fifty-five years old.

The coroner recorded death by misadventure—injuries sustained in a farming accident. The verdict was accurate in its facts but incomplete in its explanations. The accident was the consequence of a solitary man performing dangerous work without assistance, his judgement compromised by grief, exhaustion, and the particular recklessness that develops in people who have spent their lives managing fear and have finally stopped caring whether the next moment holds danger or deliverance.

Elizabeth, informed of her brother's death by letter, absorbed the news with the composed practicality she applied to every family crisis. She arranged for the farm's immediate management, ensured that John's modest debts were settled from the sale of livestock and equipment, and provided discreet financial support to Robert Charles, the only child who had maintained regular contact. The land, purchased with Elizabeth's loan, was eventually sold at modest loss—John had improved it sufficiently to retain most of its value but not enough to generate profit.

The funeral at St David's Church in Hobart drew a small gathering: Robert Charles, several former carpentry colleagues who remembered better years, Elizabeth and her daughter Agnes, and a few Huon neighbours who had known John as a reliable if distant presence. The eulogy was brief and generic, carefully avoiding specifics of a life whose complexity would have embarrassed those connected to it. He was buried in Hobart's Cornelian Bay Cemetery, the headstone marked simply with his name and dates.

Among his possessions, Robert Charles found a letter begun but never completed, addressed to no one in particular. The single legible line read: "I witnessed—" The rest was lost to the tremor that had taken his precision years before his death, or perhaps to the difficulty of finding words for knowledge that had been carried in silence for fifty years. Robert destroyed the letter along with his father's other papers, continuing the Woolley family tradition of protecting the living from what the dead had known.