Chapter 3: The Andromeda | Inventory of a Woman
The Silence is Part of What Happened: Ellen Monks, the Archive, and a Family Reckoning
Ellen’s crossing on the Andromeda was not a date. It was a run of days you could count like entries in a ledger: departure, latitude, complaint, treatment, outcome.
In Henry Kelsall’s medical journal, the ship is a workplace and a ward. The women are “cases.” The sea is “boisterous.” Health becomes a column. Death becomes a line that can be closed.³
The Andromeda sailed from Cork on 25 May 1834.³ On board: 175 female convicts, and twenty-one infant children under five, “most of them suckling,” alongside free women and children.³ That is the ship’s first inventory: bodies counted, categories assigned, all of it moving.
Then comes the state’s inventory of Ellen. On the indent she is not a voice, but a profile: Roman Catholic; married; native place County Cork; “Education: none”; “Needlewoman, allwork”; offence “Stole sheep”; sentence seven years; former conviction none.¹ Her body follows, reduced to colour, height, and the marks that would make her legible to a clerk who had never met her.¹
And then there is the third inventory, the one the columns cannot hold. What she carried that never appears in any form: a remembered face, a prayer learned by ear, a scrap of thread, the ache of leaving, the fear that arrives in waves.
This part is conjecture. It is also the truest part of any voyage.
Before we go any further
This is Chapter 3 of a book serialisation, published here on Substack one chapter at a time, and planned in roughly fifteen chapters.
I’m choosing serialisation as both form and discipline. It lets me move slowly, stay close to the record, and show my workings as I go. I will do my best to walk on what holds: ship indentures, the surgeon-superintendent’s journal, parish registers, and what history can tell us about this period in Ireland and Australia. When the ground turns to rumour, I’ll say so. When the record falls silent, I’ll give it space.
If you’re new here, the prologue, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2 will take you to the beginning.
KPH Field Notes: Meeting Ellen in the gaps
While I’ve been writing this chapter, I’ve been reading The Way of the Fearless Writer.⁶ One line from the author, Beth Kempton, reminded me why I want to unravel Ellen’s story.
Remember, you are the one holding the pen. You get to decide which details matter.⁶
I have a strong sense there is more to this story than what I’ve found in the archives so far. I can’t shake the feeling that if I could reach what was left unsaid and unrecorded, a different version of the night Thomas Monks died might come into view.
The more I uncover about this case, the more the neat version of it frays at the edges. Was there an accomplice? Was Ellen protecting someone? Why didn’t her two adult daughters make it to their mother’s execution? And why does the “famous historical chair”, an artefact at the heart of the local telling, present details that don’t quite align to what I found once I began to scratch beneath the surface?
I can feel myself running ahead, as I tend to do when a distant ancestor’s life catches my sleeve and tugs. Curiosity is not a straight line. It is a trail of questions.
This chapter won’t answer them, because for now we are still at sea. We are still in the ship’s ledger, the medical notes, the rolling days of the Andromeda. Future chapters will bring us back to the ground, and back to those questions, with steadier footing.
Forming a picture of Ellen Monks
Let’s return to another line in the archive, one I’ve thought about often: Ellen’s physical description in her convict indenture.
Lately, I’ve been carrying a quiet sadness about how little I can truly know of her beyond the documents and the circumstances that pinned her life in place. I want more than the outline. Part of me hopes that by tracing her life patiently and honestly, I might come to know her in a way that is more than forensic.
During my visit to Goulburn, the historian at the Goulburn Historical Society described the Monks women as feisty.⁷ When we’d first introduced ourselves, he looked straight at my sister and said, simply, “You look like a Monks.” Once we’d settled into our seats and begun working through the documentation he’d prepared for us, we started talking through the circumstances of the case. Then he shared a running joke, one that has apparently travelled down the Monks male line, surviving the way jokes often do: by being repeated.⁷
Don’t get on the wrong side of a Monks woman, or she might hit you on the head with a hammer.⁷
He also suggested that the murder weapon may still be in the possession of the Monks family.⁷ On the same day, when we visited the isolated paddock where Ellen and Thomas Monks once lived, we met a Crookwell local who was a descendant of the McKinnon family, Ellen’s neighbours at the time of the murder. He believed there may still be Monks descendants living and working in Goulburn.
Since that Family History Road trip, I’ve continued corresponding by email with the Local Studies Officer at Goulburn Mulwaree Council. She volunteers at the Goulburn Historical Society, and the historian introduced us on our second visit. After reading the Prologue: The Silence is Part of What Happened and Chapter 1: A Simple Cross, she asked whether I’d be interested in speaking at the Goulburn Mulwaree Library during Family History Month in August, about this story and the process of writing the serialisation.⁸
I said yes for a very particular reason.
Talking about Ellen in Goulburn, in front of local history buffs and family researchers, might flush out what the archives cannot. The half-stories. The inherited sayings. The details that never made it into ink. The undocumented stories, passed hand to hand, voice to voice, and somehow kept alive.
It might also help me get to know Ellen better.
For now, though, I have to live with the limits. I have the records. I have my imagination.
Then this week, a client showed me a caricature that generative AI had created of her, based solely on her social media profiles. She felt it was surprisingly accurate. Later, I received a LinkedIn connection request from someone whose profile picture resembled the stylised image my client had briefly flashed before me on her phone.
It made me pause. If an algorithm can assemble a likeness from digital traces, what might the technology now available to me do with the fragments I hold of Ellen? What would it render from shipping records, and the sparse facts of her life? And what would that image reveal - or obscure - about the woman I am still trying to meet?
I’m not entirely at ease using generative AI for this. It feels clever, but also oddly intimate. Still, I couldn’t help watching my own response as the image began to form.
The portrait emerged in three stages. When the first wash of pink appeared, my heart skipped a beat. I am going to meet her, I thought. As the blurred image began to take shape, I felt unexpectedly tentative, almost wanting to look away. The sensation was familiar, like the instinct to cover my eyes during a tense scene in a thriller.
