In April 1855, newspapers throughout the Australian colonies reported the brutal murder of a woman and two of her children at a sheep station in northern New South Wales. Three years later, after a series of investigations, husband and father Joseph Wilkes was eventually convicted of committing this heinous crime, purely based on circumstantial evidence. The former convict maintained his innocence as he waited to be taken to the gallows.
Joseph Wilkes was born around 1795 in Birmingham. Following a larceny conviction in 1817, the former silversmith and sailor arrived in Hobart in 1820. There, Joseph committed forgery and he was promptly sent to Newcastle to serve out the rest of his original seven year sentence. He obtained his ticket of leave, but some years later he attempted forgery again, which earned him a stint on notorious Norfolk Island.
In the 1840s, when he was finally a free man, Joseph moved to the recently settled Northern Rivers area in New South Wales, where he worked as a shepherd and raised a family with his Irish wife Honora, until the tragic events in 1855 that led to his final conviction. Was he really guilty, or was he the victim of a monumental failure of the justice system?
Joseph Wilkes was one of tens of thousands of Australian convicts, but he seems to have had an extraordinary knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time throughout his life.
I have been researching his trials and tribulations with the aim of writing a biography on this man.
Can you assist?
Finding out more about Joseph’s early life and his birth family has been challenging. Though Wilkes is not a common name, several men with the exact same name were born in Birmingham at the end of the 18th century. And, incredibly, there were two men called Joseph Wilkes transported on the same convict ship (Dromedary). Both were from Birmingham, and both were about the same age.
I am also hoping to find out more about Joseph’s wife, Nora Carew/Carey/Cary from Tipperary, who came to Australia as an assisted immigrant probably in the early 1840s.
Two young sons survived the 1855 tragedy, one a toddler, the other just a few months old. I would love to talk to any descendants, in the hope of potentially discovering more about Joseph, Honora, or their surviving sons.
If you are interested in this project, especially if you have any facts you can share, please get in touch.