The Noon Lady of Towitta (3 page)

It was said that when Mary and her older sister, Pauline, were young girls they created their own world of make-believe and acted out fairytales that reflected the reality of their lives. They dressed up in old clothes of their mother's or aunts'. Crowns and veils were made to turn them into princesses and queens, or the lovely daughters of a peasant or wicked parent. Their brothers, August and Wilhelm, roped in to be monsters, beasts, dwarfs or huntsmen, revelled in their odd roles. They were naturally ghoulish and loved any excuse to act out the brutal killings that were a part of many fairytales.

When not playing these roles, Priest was informed that the younger brothers loved killing whatever moved, whether birds or animals. They enjoyed dissecting the animals and generally scaring everyone with hoaxes and tricks that included animal blood and offal. He knew living in a dreary and isolated place such as this was partly responsible for the bizarre behaviour that several of the Schippans' neighbours had mentioned. Some folk in the nearby township were convinced the boys were the devil's work. But to be fair, it was probably because they were not the full quid.

Priest turned his attention to Mary Schippan and the possible motive of revenge. Did she have feelings of resentment against the actions of a girl not quite fourteen, an innocent girl? Or was she innocent? He'd already heard from an outspoken farm labourer that the young Bertha, a rising beauty and far prettier than her older sister, was rather precocious. Bertha did not share the family's fair complexion. Mathes Schippan told Priest, ‘Berta inherited her striking dark looks vrom her long dead großvater, you know – and her gypsy character.'

Priest asked him to continue.

‘Ov all my kinder, she vas the most difficult. Always spoilt rotten by Pauline, my oldest tochter, when she was alive. Don't know how she did it, but I can see she had me round her little vinger. My vife used to wring her hands in despair when Berta vas bedevilled because she knew I should lock her up or give her a touch of the whip, but I never did. I just couldn't.'

Priest considered whether Mary, ten years older, had been jealous of Bertha's youth? And Mary had a sweetheart. What had been going on there? Did her sweetheart, Gustave Nitschke, look in Bertha's direction and Mary found out? Priest had been told that Bertha had been forbidden from attending the New Year's Eve dance in Sedan. Had she set up a constant cajoling, perhaps threatening to tell her father of Mary's indecent behaviour with Gustave? If the inevitable punishment of a sound whipping by her father was simply too humiliating for Mary to contemplate, revenge could have been a possible motive. And the father's violent past provided reason for suspicion too, yet he was away in Eden Valley.

Priest could see that Mathes Schippan's control over his children was all but total. He treated his family as his property, preventing them from having lives of their own. The two eldest sons had run away from home, and the eldest daughter had died of tuberculosis. Being afflicted, the youngest brother was cursed to remain forever an ageing child. The youngest of the children, probably the smartest, had been brutally murdered. And then there was Mary, the tuberculosis she had suffered for several years sapping her energy, leaving her to accept her lot. Her one possibility for escape, if she was well enough, was Gustave Nitschke.

Priest knew it was crucial to get to the bottom of what had gone on between these two sisters between eight and eleven o'clock on the evening of the murder. They were referred to as ‘loving sisters'. Surely Mary would not have resorted to murdering her sister?

The Schippans' house had been left unattended after the murder until the following morning when Constable Lambert and his mother and the three Schippan siblings returned. Mrs Ann Lambert then laid out the body before returning home. Certainly there was plenty of evidence of blood all about the house, over the floors and up the walls. With so much animal butchering going on around the farm it was hard to tell what blood was what.

On the Sunday after Priest and his company of men had arrived, Tommy King, the famous Aboriginal tracker from Gladstone, joined them. Originally from Alice Springs, he had earned an outstanding reputation on the trail. Accompanied by Corporal Finch he soon made a circuit of the Schippan house at the distance of about half a mile, but failed to find any trace of footprints other than those of the police and other visitors. Even with gales blowing throughout the day it was hard to baffle an expert tracker. Tommy told Priest with conviction, ‘No fella come along there. No tracks here, Boss.' But Priest had a suspicion that even supposing foreign footprints had been made in the vicinity of the house, they would now have been blown away by the terrific dust storms. Perhaps Towitta itself had disappeared?

Priest told his troops, ‘I don't care if all the dust storms of the Sahara have swirled to the Murray Flats, we will not abandon the enquiries, meaning none of you are going home until I am satisfied that all avenues have been pursued. Is that clear?'

Corporal Finch went with Tommy into the farmyard as he continued his meticulous search for tracks, but to no avail. There was no trace of bloodstains beyond the kitchen door and they were certain no one left the house at the time of the murder. The search by the troopers, a two-mile wide sweep, was extended beyond the farm. All that was found was the print of an old boot of Mr Schippan's in a dried-out puddle from long ago. The hopes that had relied on Tommy's skills blew away with the dust and left Priest frustrated and baffled.

The inquest had to consider these facts, of course. The evidence from inside the farmhouse directed suspicion to Mary. Priest was convinced that the father could not have committed the crime. His men rode from Eden Valley in daylight to see how long it took. They concluded that attempting it at night was simply not possible. One of the troopers volunteered to try but had to abandon the attempt. The evidence was pointing to Mary, and Priest was finding it hard to accept.

1

Mary

April 1919

I have consumption. For eight years after my father's death I thought I was getting better because I felt free from his tyranny. How wrong I was. After Christmas, when I had several serious fits and bleeding bouts, Mother was so alarmed at the thought of losing me, her last remaining daughter, that she brought me for treatment at the Adelaide Consumptive Home. I'm told that once you come here you don't leave – except in a box. My prospects are hopeless.

Apart from its lovely but neglected gardens, the place has little cheer. According to the nurses, the hospital was once a lunatic asylum; that is perhaps why there are so many tiny cell-like cubicles with big iron locks on the doors. I have one of these old cells to call my own with a tiny window overlooking a shady garden. The rooms are in the long narrow building which everyone calls ‘the corridor'. And it is here that other women patients like me will die.

Amid such gloomy surroundings, one of the nursing sisters almost half my age has befriended me. Although she's not from a German family like ours, Sister Kathleen tells me her family comes from the Barossa Valley, near where I have lived for most of my life. She understands my situation and we have become friends. She tells me of her sorrow for her sweetheart who was killed fighting near the end of the war in Europe. She bears this loss alongside the day-to-day squabbles between her, another nursing sister, seven nurses and the matron. The daily shenanigans provide us with much amusement; there isn't much else here to make us laugh. Without Sister Kathleen, I would have no idea of the ‘goings on' in the hospital.

For my part, I tell her of the hardships of living on a farm for years dogged by drought, and something of Father's harsh treatment of my brothers and sisters and myself before they either died or ran away from home. I tell her that both my sisters died young, but I have not said how. It is touching that she is treating me as an equal. In the Barossa Valley and on the Murray Flats, where so many families of German descent settled, it is our lot to be treated as inferior or foreign because of our so-called peculiar customs and a foreign language and church. As for ‘blocker' families like ours mixing, it simply wasn't done. Then, as now, it is always them and us – the British and the Germans.

We sit on the tiny verandah shaded from the warm sun with Sister Kathleen holding out her arms with my skeins of wool wrapped around her wrists as I wind balls. I pass much of my time knitting baby clothes for a church orphanage. When Sister Kathleen sweet-talks me into yarning about my life I find telling my own brand of tales still comes easy to me. We might spend just ten minutes together or as much as two hours, but these longer periods are rare as she is kept very busy.

After years of not saying much to anyone, I found it wasn't hard to tell tales in the way I once used to. So I began to look forward to her visits. I can't do much else now anyway, I have plenty of time to think of the tales I will tell her. Not long after we met she asked me straight out if I was that woman in the Towitta tragedy. She was plumping up my pillow at the time and asked, casually, ‘Miss Schippan, I know you'll think I'm nosey and you can tell me to mind my own business if you wish, but Schippan is not a common name. I can remember our family talking about a murder in a family that had that name when I was a girl, and I'm sure there was a woman called Mary. Was that your family?'

I was caught off guard and hesitated. It may have been only seconds before I replied, but my whole life flashed before me. I liked Sister Kathleen for she made a point of coming to see me whenever she was on duty, even when she wasn't rostered for duty to the ‘corridor'. You couldn't ignore her because, despite the recent loss of her sweetheart in the war, she was bright and cheery. People like her make all the difference in a place where so many have low spirits, and she lifted mine without really trying. I made a hasty decision to answer her question honestly. What did I have to lose?

‘Yes, it was my family. And if you don't mind me pointing it out to you, you're a brave one asking questions that don't really concern you, Sister. I hope you don't go about asking other women such personal questions. You'd be told you were nothing but a sticky beak. But I know that since arriving here a few weeks ago you've done your best to make me comfortable as well as make me laugh. So please, don't keep calling me Miss Schippan, just call me Mary.'

Sister Kathleen came round to the front of the day bed, grabbed my hands and looked straight into my eyes. She told me she had grown up knowing of the Towitta tragedy, as it was referred to in the newspapers of the day. Once we started to talk about this part of my life she enjoyed revealing to me what a thrill it was to talk to someone like myself, though I failed to see why. So yes, I admitted, I was notorious for being put inside a prison awaiting trial for murder. Prison was a world she knew nothing about and she was curious. She asked me if I was willing to share such memories. Well we will see how we go. I told her she would have to be patient with me as I needed time to think about what tales I would share.

I found that after keeping secrets for so long, being asked to talk of this time was like someone taking the stopper out of the bottle containing an impatient genie. And so we always spoke about my life and family, rarely hers I noticed. I let her rush on with her own views about the Schippans, because until now I'd never discussed them. The trouble was where to begin. I thought the next time we met and if she had enough time, I would tell her about the life of a Wendish family in South Australia. It would take time to explain how one family came to suffer so much misery. I thought of keeping her interest by telling her a little at a time of our family, unfolding our story like a fairytale. This would give her a background to my life and how I ended up in this prison of a hospital. It would also help to make the days go by, though I know there are few left for me. But from the night following that first talk the nightmares returned.

2

My father had told me and my brothers and sisters the story of his life many times as we sat around the kitchen table in the evenings. What he didn't remember or chose not to tell, his sister, Aunt Giscelia, told us when we stayed with her. Like Father she was a good storyteller and made the family's trials and tribulations sound more like nightmarish fairytales. From these tales I thought I had learnt all there was to know about Father's and Aunt Giscelia's life in Germany, their journey to South Australia, and their life when they arrived.

But that night, after the first probe by Sister Kathleen, my peace of my mind was spoiled by having to think again about my family's past. I lay awake reliving the events that befell my parents, my brothers and sisters, my grandparents and myself, pondering on the life of my father. From the time we were old enough to listen he told me and my brothers and sisters chilling tales of his early life in the Fatherland, intending them as a warning. He told us they were true stories that we should believe and learn from. But fact was twisted with fiction making it difficult for us to tell what was real and what was make-believe.

When Sister Kathleen next visited I was impatient to tell her about my father's and his sister's early life in Germany. ‘I know you said you wanted to hear my family's story but I don't know if you will believe me because it was so tragic. Are you sure you really want to hear all this?'

‘Of course I do, Mary.'

‘All right, but it is a long story and will take many days to tell.'

So I started to tell Sister Kathleen a story of events that happened long before I was born, so bizarre that it seemed not connected to me in any way.

Mathes – my father – and his sister were rescued from a bleak forestry life and adopted by their uncle and aunt when he was about ten. My grandmother and grandfather endured great hardship in their foresters' life. According to the family legend, my grandparents had met at the annual Cottbus May Day fete. After catching the roving eye of the gypsy-like musician, Josef, who was travelling with a group of troubadours, Mascha had run away with him when they moved to the next town. They travelled as entertainers until Mascha fell ill shortly before her first baby was due and they settled near his parents' homeland on the borders of Bohemia and Silesia. Josef became a forester and they lived in a hut on the edge of a dark medieval forest. They never found time for a wedding; snow, mud, rain and new babies seemed to delay all their good intentions. While my grandmother was in labour giving birth to Giscelia, her firstborn son, barely able to walk, tottered off into the forest and was lost. Only after the dramas of the birth did they miss him. Weeks later when they found his remains they deduced he was killed by a wolf. This tragedy put the young couple on their guard and made the long black nights fearful and menacing for their two surviving children, my Aunt Giscelia and Mathes, my father. They were forever wary of marauding wolves, creatures of the night and other threatening shadows of the forest.