An historian at the University of New England has finally uncovered evidence that dates the death of the “wife” of the New England bushranger Captain Thunderbolt.

Carol Baxter (pictured here), an Adjunct Lecturer in History at UNE, has spent the past few years tracing the life of the part-Aboriginal woman Mary Ann Bugg, who was born at Berrico outstation on the Gloucester River in 1834.

Mary Ann roamed for many years with the bushranger Frederick Ward – also known as Captain Thunderbolt – living in the bush with him, helping him to evade the police, and bearing him three or four children including a son, Frederick Jnr. Mary Ann, who has become a legendary historical figure in her own right, was long thought to have died in November 1867. However, Ms Baxter’s research has now determined that Mary Ann lived for another four decades. “A few researchers have suggested that the woman who died in 1867 might not have been Mary Ann,” Ms Baxter said. “But until now the actual date or location of her death has not been positively proven.”

In late 1867, reports in Parliament and the Press announced that Thunderbolt’s “half-caste” female companion had died near the Goulburn River. While the Press reports named the dead woman as Louisa Mason, the fact that she was referred to as Thunderbolt’s “half-caste woman” led most Thunderbolt biographers to declare that the dead woman was in fact Mary Ann Bugg and that “Louisa Mason” was one of her nicknames.

Records uncovered by Ms Baxter show that Louisa Mason, also known as “Yellow Long”, was definitely not Mary Ann Bugg. A few months before her death, Louisa, a Scone district resident, married a labourer named Robert Michael Mason, otherwise known as “Cranky Bob”. Soon afterwards she encountered Captain Thunderbolt. “Louisa was evidently smitten with the bushranger – and he with her,” Ms Baxter said. “She abandoned her husband late in 1867 and eloped with Fred into the bush – an unfortunate decision, as it turned out.”

Ms Baxter, who is a professional genealogist and an expert in colonial Australian history, spent months sifting through original records and birth, marriage and death certificates, finally confirming that Mary Ann died as Mary Ann Burrows at Mudgee in 1905. She had borne at least 15 children.

The discovery may go some way towards setting the record straight about the life and times of the notorious New England bushranger, who was fatally captured at Uralla in 1870. Ms Baxter is currently working with UNE’s Senior Lecturer in Australian History, Dr David Andrew Roberts, to investigate claims raised in the NSW Legislative Council in March 2010 alleging a government censorship of secret police records relating to Thunderbolt’s death.

Ms Baxter’s forthcoming book, Captain Thunderbolt and His Lady, to be published by Allen & Unwin in September 2011, will reveal startling new information about the lives of both Mary Ann and Frederick Ward. Some of it is bound to prove controversial.

THE PHOTOGRAPH of Carol Baxter displayed here was taken at Chilcott Swamp, Uralla, where the bushranger Captain Thunderbolt was shot and killed on the 25th of May 1870.

Louise Noble, who has just published a book on the cultural context of “medicinal cannibalism” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, draws important parallels between the trade in human bodies to make medicines during that period and today’s global traffic in body parts.

By “medicinal cannibalism” she means the eating or drinking of medicines containing derivatives of human body parts or excretions.

“As is the case in today’s medical economy, the fragmented human body was a crucial commodity in the business of health in early modern England,” she says in the book, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture.

Dr Noble (pictured here), a lecturer in English at the University of New England, conducted extensive research on the subject in overseas libraries, including the British Library, the Wellcome Library and Cambridge University Library in England, and the Huntington Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library in the United States.

Medicinal Cannibalism outlines the use of “mummy” (a contemporary term for medicinal matter derived from a corpse) in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, and explores the imaginative resonance of this medical practice in some major works of English literature of the period. These works include several of Shakespeare’s plays, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Donne’s Devotions.

“Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pharmacopoeias abound in references to ‘mummy’,” Dr Noble writes in the Introduction to the book. “The term identifies matter procured from both ancient embalmed bodies imported from the Middle East for the purpose, and local bodies – frequently the bodies of executed criminals sentenced to be anatomised and the bodies of those who were socially disenfranchised.” As well as ‘mummy’ itself, medicines included preparations of human urine, faeces, blood, fat and bone.

“A central tenet of this corpse pharmacology,” she explains, “is the perception that the human body contains a mysterious healing power that is transmitted in ingested matter such as ‘mummy’.” The literary imagery inspired by the consumption of human flesh in the pursuit of health – both physical and spiritual – extends as far as the sacrament of the Eucharist itself.

Dr Noble argues  that “what happens to bodies in today’s medical market is one moment – albeit a highly organised and sophisticated one – in a long historical continuum in which the human body and its products are exchanged and distributed in a complex medical economy”. And the fact that “mummy” was still being offered for sale by German pharmaceutical companies as late as 1912 is an illustration of this “continuum”.

Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of their “Early Modern Cultural Studies” series, has been accepted for review in the London Review of Books.