Against the rugged mountain ranges of southern NSW and inspired by a true story, The Woman from Snowy River sets out the journey of a teenage girl from New York in 1855. Photo: Publicious Book Publishing.
Did you ever wonder if The Man from Snowy River ended up with a wife? And if so, would she be The Woman from Snowy River? When Ann Connelly began researching her family’s history for her debut novel, she found her great-great-grandmother’s husband George Hedger was one of 12 stockmen formally listed who may have inspired Banjo Paterson’s immortal poem.
“Although having done a lot of research myself, I feel Banjo Paterson met so many stockmen that they all probably inspired his poem,” Ann said.
In any case, an even more inspirational figure than George Hedger leads this ambitious story. That is Ann’s great-great-grandmother Caroline Hedger who is called Carrie in her page-turner novel, The Woman From Snowy River.
Worthy of a Snowy legend, Carrie’s journey at age 16 sailing from refined New York to Australia is repeated years later with a perilous return voyage with her six children and husband whom she married at age 17.
Based on years of research, Carrie’s factual life raising her family in the boulder-strewn landscape between the Snowy River and Snowy Mountains is adorned with heartwarming detail, bringing to life a courageous young mother.
An avid reader passionate about women in history, Ann’s curiosity in her family’s history deepened during conversations with her mother Helen, who grew up in Crookwell until she married.
When Helen gave her a companion book to the Bible passed down from Carrie to Ann’s grandmother, the idea of writing a novel began to take hold.
Helen, who died three years ago aged 95, would say she didn’t know much about their family until Ann prompted her with specific questions that elicited amazing stories.
Ann became hooked. She researched sources in the National Library, Trove, NSW State Archives, the Victorian Museum, Ancestory.com, NSW Register of births, deaths and marriages, Cooma and Goulburn libraries and ships’ logs. People’s local knowledge from the Monaro Pioneers website was also helpful.
“I found I had three second cousins through my research who all had information that they were happy to provide to me,” she said.
Carrie’s mother Louisa, a widow in New York who owned an apartment in Brooklyn, had lost her first husband and later married a grocer, Amos Vince. A convict from England who was transported to Australia and fled to New York, Amos was much older than Louisa. Finding himself in trouble again in New York he is forced to leave and set sail to Australia with Louisa and Carrie.
Author Ann Connolly overlaid her mother’s stories with meticulous research of birth and baptismal certificates and websites to bring to life the courage of a teenage mother in the mid 1800s. Photo: Ann Connolly collection.
Whether Louisa knew he was an escaped convict is open to speculation, although much information on his identity, Amos Crisp senior, is in the public domain. Arriving in Melbourne, they sailed once more to Twofold Bay (now Eden) and then continued overland by bullock dray to a property near Dalgety, Jimenbuen, which was owned by the convict’s son, also named Amos Crisp.
In no time, 16-year-old Carrie’s heart is set racing under the strong hands of George Hedger, Jimenbuen’s head stockman who teaches her to ride a horse.
Marrying secretly in Cooma a year later, Carrie and George weather the outrage from her parents and are raising three boys and three girls by the time they sail from Sydney in 1874 aboard the Windsor Castle. They strike atrocious weather almost immediately. Six weeks later their badly damaged clipper is declared a shipwreck.
The Woman from Snowy River reflects life on the sparsely settled Monaro in a feminine light. An urgent romance is followed by adventures that reveal the painful vulnerability of a stockman’s wife who prevails with underlying strength borne of necessity.
Ann’s novel is ‘faction’, a combination of real people and events and imagined characters and happenings.
“For the historical side, just about everything is fact and then I have used my imagination to build around it,” Ann said. “For example, on the first page you get the prologue, the location, dates, names – they are all real.”
The novel has a dual timeline and story thread featuring a fictional great-great-granddaughter’s research in a contemporary setting. Consequently, the lives of women across several generations emerge.
In between her research Ann attended an intense, five-day master class in writing with best-selling Australian author Fiona McIntosh in Adelaide, and online courses through the Australian Writers Centre, learning how to structure a novel correctly with plot points.
Now living at Murrumbatemen, Ann studied zoology and wildlife ecology and worked for the ACT and Australian governments in natural resource management comprising biodiversity conservation, sustainable agriculture and landcare.
The Woman from Snowy River is available online through Amazon, Dymocks, Wheelers and other distributors.
