William Kermode, a leading pastoralist in early nineteenth-century Tasmania, is arguably a gratuitous selection for the streets of Adelaide, covering a somewhat thinly veiled attempt by the Street Naming Committee to be seen as democratic. Or so it would seem! His nomination was almost certainly put forward by the intellectually superior, fast-talking and surprisingly persuasive Judge John Jeffcott, and all because he wished to ingratiate himself with the Kermode family of Van Diemen’s Land, into which he hoped to marry.
Jeffcott first arrived in South Australia just days before the Committee met in May 1837. He had spent the autumn courting Kermode’s daughter, Anne, of Mona Vale, near Launceston, instead of sailing directly to the colony on the Africaine as expected by the Colonial commissioners. All the others appointed by the South Australian Commission had arrived in the colony by December 1836. Jeffcott accompanied the newly appointed Governor, Sir John Franklin, and Lady Franklin to their vice-regal posts in Van Diemen’s Land as a supernumerary on the voyage from London on the HMS Isabella. When they arrived in Launceston, Kermode took the opportunity to linger there, rather than immediately venture on to Adelaide where he had been expected earlier to take up his new role as the first Chief Judge of the new colony. He was warmly welcomed to Mona Vale by William Kermode, to whom he was related, and immediately fell under the charms of Anne, who swept him off his feet. He couldn’t bring himself to break away and take up his appointment. A degree of procrastination followed and he argued his way out of venturing to Adelaide on the pretext that he needed to know how the judiciary operated in other colonies.
With hindsight, including a Kermode Street on the Adelaide street plan seems to be entirely circumstantial. The nomination was probably only reluctantly supported by some of the Committee members, but there were enough votes for it to be agreed. Kermode was definitely known to Jeffcott and probably to John Barton Hack, as they had been together with him in Launceston only weeks before. He may also have been known to Robert Gouger, whose brother Henry, like Kermode, had conducted business in India for several years.
Kermode for some of this time was trading out of Liverpool to Africa, India and Australia as a ship captain. It is also known that several months later, when Governor John Hindmarsh had the temerity to dismiss Robert Gouger as Colonial Secretary, Gouger left South Australia for England to plead his case with the commissioners and en route he stayed for a short time with the Kermodes at Mona Vale. So they were either known to each other or hospitality had been extended to him ahead of time.
William Kermode may also have been known to Hindmarsh through Governor Franklin. Both Franklin and Hindmarsh had served together in the British Royal Navy against Napoleon and it is known that Sir John Franklin and Lady Jane Franklin were received in Tasmania with great enthusiasm by both Thomas Archer and William Kermode. Given that they were both newly appointed governors in the Australian colonies, there is a chance that through Franklin both Archer and Kermode, who were the two largest pastoralists on the island, were induced to send over breeding sheep for the new Governor of South Australia.
Whatever the facts, it is clear that Kermode certainly had the support of Thomas Bewes Strangways, Jeffcott, Hack and Hindmarsh on 23 May 1837. Only three more votes were needed for a majority, and since the colony was being supplied with important and high-quality breeding stock, such generosity probably deserved a favourable disposition. Good breeding stock was crucial to a good beginning in the colony.
Of course it is not beyond the realms of possibility that Kermode Street was named after Anne Kermode, rather than her father. Some have even said that it was named after Anne’s brother, Robert Quayle Kermode. However, with the kind of insight which R.M. Hague affords us in his book on Jeffcott, there seems little doubt that Jeffcott’s desperation to improve his lot by marriage was aimed squarely at William Kermode. In a letter to William dated 5 November 1837, just days before Jeffcott drowned, he carefully explains his dissatisfaction with matters in South Australia and implores Kermode for permission to resign the Chief Judgeship of South Australia.
William Kermode was a Manxman from the Isle of Man. He was the son of Thomas and Elizabeth Kermode, nee Killey of the Darrag. He was born in 1780 at Port Erin, as was his son, Robert Quayle (1812) and daughter Anne (1814), who did later become Judge Jeffcott’s fiancée, albeit very briefly betrothed.
William married Anne Quayle Moore (1790–1852) in the Parish of Malew at Port Erin on 17 December 1810. As a young man he took to the sea, leaving his wife and two young children at home in Port Erin.
With the support of his mother’s family, who was in shipping, Kermode’s first voyage was as supercargo on the Robert Quayle, trading in the south seas. The ship anchored in Hobart Town in November 1819, where Kermode became aware of the system of land grants being awarded to free settlers who met certain conditions acceptable to the Colonial Office. To a Manxman this was an opportunity not to be missed and Kermode hastened to prepare the necessary evidence required by the Colonial Office to be considered. According to Neil Chick he embellished his application somewhat, claiming that he had £10,000 worth of animal husbandry implements and a quantity of working capital. This was an exaggeration, but he was obviously a determined man. Sir John Cameron says Kermode left the Robert Quayle in Sydney with his agents and returned to his wife and children on the Admiral Cockburn.
In 1821 he again returned to Tasmania, this time as supercargo on the Mary. Not long afterwards he was declared bankrupt as a result of the negligence of his agents in Sydney, but fortunately the Colonial Office had already granted him 2,000 acres on the Salt Pan Plains near Ross, adjoining the Macquarie and Blackman rivers and not far from Launceston.
With a well-conceived plan to fulfil the obligation to settle, Kermode returned again to England and by 1827 had been plying back and forth between the Isle of Man and his expanding pastoral enterprise south of Launceston. In 1823 he was elected a director of the Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land Packet Company and became foundation shareholder of the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land. His stature in the community was growing, and so by 1828 his wife and children were able to join him on his greatly improved ‘sheep walk’. Through careful planning and great enterprise he drained the marshes to reveal and enjoy some of Tasmania’s most fertile country. He had great vision. By the mid-1830s the modest timber dwelling on his property was replaced with a grand edifice which he called Mona Vale after the Duke of Atholl’s impressive seat in the midst of the Irish Sea.
William Kermode built his pastoral empire on good soil, in good conditions and with the propitious use of assigned convict labour. Apparently the convicts assigned to him held him in high esteem. The convict mason Daniel Herbert certainly did, for he carefully fashioned Kermode’s visage in stone relief on the façade of the Ross Bridge; a truly wonderful piece of cultural heritage which remains as strong as it ever was today.
By the time Judge Jeffcott arrived in 1837, Mona Vale was well in excess of 5,000 acres. With careful management and clever engineering, Kermode captured the waters of two passing streams and the property was put to sufficient clover and high-quality pasture to make it among the best livestock properties in Tasmania. In 1829 Kermode purchased a quantity of high-quality Saxon sheep from the Van Diemen’s Land Company, and by the time of settlement in South Australia his property had evolved into a pastoral showcase.
In 1840 it was even further improved by adopting the sound advice of Count Paul Edmund Strzelecki and H.C. Cotton, who at that time were in Australia advising on soil analysis and irrigation respectively. Kermode benefited greatly from Strzelecki’s knowledge and the Mona Vale property became a beacon as bright as Thomas Archer’s Woolmers estate.
What kind of man was William Kermode? There are a few references which suggest he was quite a complex individual. At the time Sir John Jeffcott came into his life, he was approximately 60 years of age and obviously more mature and perhaps not so rash as he might have been in his younger days. His words, in a letter to Jeffcott’s cousin after the fateful drowning show that he had restrained his daughter from marrying the judge in haste during the autumn of 1837.
On 16 June 1824, not long after settling at Mona Vale, Kermode was subpoenaed to appear in the Supreme Court. He was about 44 years old at the time. Lieutenant Governor Sorell, a friend of the Kermodes, had been slurred by a William Talbot and to this Kermode and his friend Samuel Hood took great offence. Through Hood, Kermode is said to have challenged Talbot to a duel; hence the charge because duelling was already illegal in Van Diemen’s Land. Twice the jury was unable to reach a verdict, and when called for a third time they declared both men ‘not guilty’. What is especially significant in this case is that Adelaide’s own Judge Jeffcott – Kermode’s one-time prospective son-in-law and a blood relative – is the only judge ever to stand before the bench accused of murder by duelling.
Chick claims that Kermode ‘was not averse to colourful language’. In fact, there seems to be enough circumstantial evidence to suggest he was a law unto himself and at times irascible, if not a little precious. He had a close and, one dares to suggest, profitable relationship with some of the convict community, both assignees and others who were floating by. He also fell out with the pedantic Governor George Arthur.
When Sir John and Lady Franklin arrived to replace Governor Arthur, Kermode was immediately elevated to a higher level of respectability in the colony. In fact, the new Governor became a close friend and a frequent visitor to Mona Vale, which by then had become among the most stately homes in Tasmania.
In 1842 Kermode was appointed to the Legislative Council. However, ‘when the financial crisis in the colony deepened in the early 1840s he was one of the so called patriotic six who walked out of the Council in protest against Eardley-Wilmot’s handling of the annual estimates’.
William Kermode was headstrong to the end in what can only be described as appealing frontier wilderness which he massaged into a ‘Capability Brown’ idyll. The DNA of his breeding stock probably still runs in the veins of South Australian livestock. Kermode died at Mona Vale on 3 August 1852. His wife Anne died four months later.
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