William Woolley

The Third Child (1843–1855)

William Woolley arrived on 18th May 1843 at the Liverpool Street house in Hobart, the third child and second son of Frederick Woolley, postmaster, and his wife Elizabeth, née Turner. His position in the family placed him from the beginning in a category that offered neither distinction nor indulgence. Eliza, at nearly five, was the competent eldest daughter already assuming quasi-maternal responsibilities. Thomas, at three, was the precious first son upon whom his father's ambitions for continuation naturally settled. William entered the household as an addition rather than an event—healthy, unremarkable, and immediately absorbed into routines that had been established around children who preceded him.

His earliest years unfolded within the specific atmosphere of a postmaster's household: the smell of ink and sealing wax that clung to his father's clothes, the enforced quiet during certain hours when Frederick worked at home, and the careful domestic economy that his mother maintained with an efficiency so thorough it appeared effortless. William was a vigorous child—louder than Thomas, more physically restless than Eliza, inclined to test boundaries with a persistence that his mother recognised, with private unease, as an echo of her own father's impulsive temperament. The comparison with James Turner was one Elizabeth kept to herself, but the recognition informed her particular attentiveness to William's development, the effort she invested in channelling his energy constructively rather than allowing it to find its own, potentially destructive, outlets.

Mary's arrival in December 1845 pushed William further into the family's undifferentiated middle—no longer the baby, not the eldest, not the first son, occupying the position where parental attention had exhausted itself without yet discovering the renewed tenderness that youngest children sometimes attract. He responded to this invisibility with the only tool available to a small child: noise. He was the loudest of the Woolley children, the most demanding, the most likely to provoke confrontation simply to be noticed.

The scarlet fever epidemic of 1847 struck William at four with particular severity. Whilst his siblings recovered within weeks, his fever persisted, accompanied by delirium that had him calling out for people who were not present and fighting threats visible only to himself. Elizabeth nursed him through weeks of crisis, applying cold compresses and spooning barley water between cracked lips with the determined competence she brought to every emergency. The illness left him weakened and partially deaf in his left ear—a disability he would spend his entire life attempting to conceal and that would shape, more profoundly than anyone at the time could have anticipated, the trajectory of everything that followed.

The Apprentice (1855–1865)

William's formal education began and ended in disappointment. At Mr Hutchinson's day school, where Thomas had performed adequately, William proved a mediocre student whose struggles with languages and uneven performance in arithmetic baffled teachers who did not know about, and would not have fully understood, his partial deafness. Instructions he missed, questions he misheard, the accumulated confusion of a boy processing classroom information through equipment that operated at reduced capacity—all of it was interpreted as inattention, stubbornness, or wilful defiance. The labels attached themselves and became self-fulfilling: difficult, obstinate, unlikely to amount to much.

Where he excelled was in everything the school did not value. He could repair broken items that others discarded, demonstrated an intuitive grasp of mechanical principles, and showed genuine skill during the limited craft instruction the curriculum grudgingly provided. His hands understood what his ears missed, and when working with physical materials he achieved a focus and precision that his academic performance would never have suggested possible. But these were merely "trades"—inferior, in the educational hierarchy of the 1850s, to the intellectual accomplishments that marked a young man as promising.

Frederick's disappointment was the wound that would not heal. His father—who had built his own career on precisely the kind of quiet, methodical competence that deserved recognition—could not extend the same respect to his son's different but equally legitimate capabilities. Family conversations orbited around Thomas's prospects in government service, Eliza's social development, Mary's education. William's presence at the dinner table felt incidental even to himself.

He abandoned formal schooling at fifteen, to his parents' dismay but not their surprise, and secured an apprenticeship with a carpenter and joiner who operated a workshop near the docks. The work suited him in ways that school had not—physical, tangible, yielding results that could be measured by the straightness of a joint or the soundness of a repair rather than by examinations designed around skills he did not possess. The apprenticeship also introduced him to a rougher element of colonial society than the Liverpool Street household had prepared him for: the pleasures of rum, the excitement of harbour-front entertainments, and the unwritten codes that governed working-class masculine life.

An arrest in 1859 for brawling outside a public house forced the confrontation that had been building for years. Frederick's influence secured William's release with only a warning, but the episode crystallised a mutual incomprehension that would define their relationship for its remaining decade. Frederick saw his son's behaviour as deliberate rejection of everything the family had achieved. William experienced his father's intervention as both hypocritical and humiliating—the postmaster's authority deployed not from concern but from embarrassment, protecting the family's reputation rather than the boy who bore its name.

Margaret Jane Foster (1863–1865)

William first encountered Margaret Jane Foster at a church harvest festival in September 1863, where she was visiting from Launceston with a cousin who attended the same church as the Woolleys. Margaret was two years his junior, neither particularly beautiful nor possessed of obvious charm, but something in her steady gaze and absolute refusal to be impressed by his cultivated roughness arrested his attention. He was accustomed to women who were either intimidated by his manner or attracted to it for the wrong reasons. Margaret was neither. She assessed him with the practical intelligence of someone who understood exactly what she was looking at and had decided to continue looking anyway.

Their courtship, conducted through awkward encounters at church events and properly chaperoned walks, proceeded with a gracelessness that became, in retrospect, its own kind of honesty. Margaret's father, a modestly successful Launceston merchant, opposed the match, viewing William as beneath his aspirations for his daughter. Margaret's mother recognised that limited beauty and modest dowry constrained the available options, and that a Woolley—son of the respected postmaster—provided just enough respectability to make the alliance defensible.

William's proposal, delivered during a church picnic in March 1865, became family legend for its characteristic absence of romance. His sister Mary, who overheard and reported the exchange, preserved a version in which he said, "I suppose you'll marry me then?" and Margaret replied, "I suppose I will"—an account neither principal ever confirmed but which captured something essential about a relationship built on pragmatic recognition rather than passionate illusion.

The wedding on 22nd July 1865 was modest by deliberate choice. Margaret wore practical grey rather than fashionable white. William appeared in a suit that fitted imperfectly and which he would subsequently wear only to funerals. His mother Elizabeth attended with cautious optimism—she had recognised in Margaret the steady temperament that might balance her son's volatility, and the early evidence suggested the instinct was sound. Frederick was more reserved, his relationship with William still carrying the weight of accumulated disappointments that neither man possessed the emotional vocabulary to address.

Harbour and Household (1865–1893)

Their first home—a three-room cottage on Goulburn Street, in a neighbourhood that straddled respectability and working-class pragmatism—established the domestic territory that Margaret would manage for the next six decades. She proved an exceptional household administrator, transforming modest space through the same combination of economy and effort that William's mother had deployed in earlier Liverpool Street years. She understood, with the intuitive precision of someone who had observed her own parents' marriage, that William's pride required the appearance that he was the household's provider and decision-maker, even as she quietly managed everything that actually mattered.

Children arrived with the regularity that characterised their generation. Frederick James in April 1866, Elizabeth Ann in 1868, Albert William in 1870, Margaret Rose in 1872, Thomas Henry in 1874, and Catherine Jane in 1877. Six children in eleven years tested finances that harbour work could stretch but never make comfortable, and Margaret supplemented their income through sewing and taking in washing—activities William forbade her from publicising, maintaining the fiction that his wages alone sustained the family.

Margaret Rose's death from croup in December 1872, at six months, broke open something in William that he had no mechanism to process. He had allowed himself unusual tenderness with this daughter, perhaps recognising in her smallness a vulnerability he could protect without the complications that attended his relationships with older children. She died gasping in his arms whilst they waited for a doctor who arrived too late, and the guilt of inadequacy—of not earning enough for a better neighbourhood with quicker medical access, of being unable to prevent what competent hands should have prevented—expressed itself not as grief but as anger directed at everything except its actual source.

His work at the harbour provided the structure that domestic life, with its emotional demands, could not. He had found employment with the Hobart Harbour Board after his apprenticeship ended, initially as a general labourer but gradually assuming more skilled responsibilities as his capabilities became apparent. The harbour master, Captain Richard Henley, served as the mentor Frederick had never managed to be—recognising William's practical intelligence without requiring it to conform to academic standards, teaching him reliability and strategic patience alongside the technical skills of harbour management. By the 1880s William had risen to foreman, a position of modest authority that he exercised with the unpredictable arbitrariness of someone who had spent his youth being told he would never amount to anything and had not entirely stopped believing it.

A workplace accident in 1876—a failed cargo net dropping a tea chest on his right foot—left him with a permanent limp and reduced earning capacity. The injury compensation was minimal, and the family endured months of genuine hardship that Margaret managed through the hidden sewing and washing William had forbidden her to acknowledge publicly. His response to the compounded pressures of reduced income, chronic pain, and the frustration of physical limitation included increased evenings at the Ship Inn, where he could maintain the persona of a respected tradesman among men who did not know or care about his family's middle-class aspirations.

Frederick's death on 5th January 1870 had affected William less than his family expected. They had been effectively estranged for years, maintaining civil contact at family gatherings where avoidance would have been conspicuous but never recovering the relationship that the 1859 arrest had fractured. The funeral brought the siblings together in the particular discomfort of shared grief unevenly distributed—Thomas and Eliza mourning the father they had known, William mourning the father he had wanted but never received.

Elizabeth's increasing frailty through the 1880s stirred emotions William had not anticipated. He began visiting the Liverpool Street house regularly, these Sunday calls representing the only occasions when he voluntarily entered the respectable neighbourhood of his childhood. Margaret managed these family encounters with diplomatic skill, preventing several potential confrontations between William and his siblings through interventions so subtle that their subjects rarely recognised they were being managed. Elizabeth, watching her difficult son arrive each Sunday with his boisterous family, experienced a contentment she confided to no one—William's visits, chaotic and loud and entirely lacking in the social polish she had spent her life cultivating, filled the house with a vitality that respectability alone could not generate.

Elizabeth's death in July 1893 marked the severance of William's last connection to the generation that had produced him. The modest inheritance she left was divided equally among her children, providing William with enough to purchase outright the cottage they had been renting on Goulburn Street. This security—property ownership achieved at fifty, the first real asset he had possessed—stirred feelings about success and failure too complicated to resolve and too private to discuss.

The Twentieth Century (1893–1923)

The new century found William sceptical of the enthusiasm that federation and technological progress generated in younger men. At fifty-seven, he had survived enough proclaimed transformations to distrust any promise that the future would differ materially from the past. His work at the harbour continued in increasingly supervisory capacity as age reduced the physical contribution he could make. Younger workers called him "Old Bill" behind his back, though none tested the name to his face—his temper remained formidable, and the partial deafness that had shaped his life now served the additional function of making it genuinely unclear what he had and had not heard.

Margaret's steady presence through these years provided the continuity that William's temperament alone could not have sustained. Their relationship, which had never traded in romance or even much visible affection, had achieved through decades of shared difficulty the particular durability that develops between two people who have survived each other's worst qualities and decided to continue regardless. She managed his moods, concealed his drinking from their children's increasingly disapproving scrutiny, and maintained the household with an efficiency that age diminished but could not eliminate.

Grandchildren provided unexpected solace. William proved a more indulgent grandfather than he had been a father—mellowed perhaps by age, or freed from the pressures of direct responsibility that had made his own parenting so inconsistent. He carved wooden toys with the precision his hands had always possessed, told stories of harbour life edited to remove the rougher elements, and produced peppermints from his pocket with a gruff affection that his grandchildren would remember long after they had forgotten the details of his face.

The Great War took Albert, their third child, killed at Gallipoli in 1915. The telegram arrived and William read it repeatedly, as though different readings might alter the words. He disappeared for three days, returning drunk and incoherent, and never spoke of Albert again. The grief was not absent but unspeakable—lodged in the same inaccessible interior where Margaret Rose's death and his father's disappointment and the partial deafness that had bent his life's trajectory resided, accumulating without outlet in a man who had never learned to translate suffering into language.

His forced retirement in 1910—new harbour management deeming his methods too antiquated for modern operations—had already stripped him of the identity that work provided. The small pension and Margaret's secretly accumulated savings ensured bare sufficiency, but the days that had been structured by tides and shipping schedules now stretched empty. He filled them with carpentry projects nobody needed and a vegetable garden whose produce mostly rotted, the activity's purpose being occupation rather than production.

Death and Burial

William Woolley died on 22nd August 1923, a stroke that left him briefly paralysed before a second ended his life within hours. He was eighty years old, and he had spent most of them in the same city, within walking distance of the harbour that had given his life whatever shape it possessed.

The funeral drew a modest gathering—family members whose attendance was obligatory, former harbour colleagues who remembered better years, neighbours who came from the mixture of curiosity and habit that motivates attendance at any local death. Margaret, informed of his passing, received the news with the composure of a woman who had spent fifty-eight years expecting the worst from this particular man and had learned to accommodate whatever actually arrived.

He was buried in Cornelian Bay Cemetery, the headstone recording his name and dates without elaboration. Margaret would outlive him by four years, dying in 1927, and would be buried beside him—their shared plot as modest and unadorned as the marriage it commemorated, a partnership that had endured not through affection's warmth but through the accumulated weight of shared experience, shared children, shared losses, and the particular stubbornness of two people who had agreed, on a church picnic sixty years earlier, that they supposed they would.