Ned’s Story

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Eliza Before Ned

Before Ned, there was Eliza: a mother, a wife, and a woman with hopes, dreams and desires. Local folklore has reduced the story of Eliza/Ned to the ‘she-man’, a reductive term which we believe minimised a grand and fascinating story of resilience, hardship and survival in a harsh and brutal world in Australia in the mid 1800s.

It’s taken many months of intensive research for us to uncover the long and complex story of Ned/Eliza: who s/he was, where s/he came from, what happened to her/him, why s/he became Ned, and how s/he ended up in Bright.

We hope you enjoy this condensed retelling of Ned’s and Eliza’s story.

There are many conflicting records and published documents regarding the story of Eliza’s life, but the more we uncovered in our research, the more we were able to settle on one that made sense, both in a timely and factual way.

Eliza Lynch was born in County Carlow, Ireland in 1827, who, at the age of 26, emigrated on the ship Midlothian to Van Diemen’s Land, arriving in 1855 to begin a life of indebted bondage.

Soon after, Eliza married Richard Moate, and they had two children, George in 1857 and Edward in 1859, and settled in the Victorian Goldfields area. When Edward was two years old, and in the absence of his father – who was being pursued by the police for the crime of desertion – Edward fell ill with syphilis. Eliza treated him with a well-known remedy – a mercury rub – but subsequently, Edward died of mercury poisoning: a potentially and unknown deadly side-effect of the remedy.

Life Lived as Ned

Ned was then employed as Dr Warren’s manservant and lived happily with him for the next five years. But when the doctor died suddenly in 1884, Ned was so overcome with grief (and no doubt terror) that she began wandering the streets of Bright in a state of madness.

Ned was subsequently arrested and taken to the Beechworth Lunatic Asylum, where, upon admission, was diagnosed as suffering ‘Religious Mania’ and sent to the men’s ward. Not long after, though, they discovered that Ned was, in fact, a woman: Eliza Moate (nee Lynch).

Despite this revelation, and consequent move to the women’s section of the asylum, Ned retained a masculine identity until a painful and untimely death from gangrene at age 59 in 1887, less than three years after admission to the asylum.

You might wonder why such a story matters to us. Why concern ourselves with the past, particularly a complicated one that sometimes doesn’t paint its protagonist in the best light? We had questions too.

Was Ned the doctor’s secret lover? Was Eliza transgender? Did the doctor know Ned was a woman? (How could he not know?) Did Eliza have something over him? Perhaps they all had secrets…

Whether Ned was any or all of these things, we may never know, yet one thing is clear to us: Ned was simply doing the best to survive. As Eliza, her courage during the hardships of life in the late 1800s, of motherhood, womanhood, and of loss, danger, and brutality, meant that her best course of survival was to change her appearance and live as a man. These facts alone, we thought, made her someone whose memory should be resurrected.

Legacy, Memory and Meaning

One wonderful story that we stumbled across in a book titled Echoes From the Mountains – a history of the Omeo Shire Council (1969), when Ned was working as a groomsman for Mr Phipps in Omeo (where Dr Benjamin Warren also practiced) is quoted here:

“A story of the period associated with the name of Dr Warren should be recorded. E. J. Johnson used to employ packers to pack goods out to the miners. One packer, who went by the name of Ned Moate, was loading the packhorses one day and E. J. was watching. He became impatient and told Ned he was nothing but an old woman. People who overheard the remark laughed, but not Ned. He took action against E. J. and made a fuss over being held to public ridicule. The case came before Thomas Easton, JP, who seemed to think such an insult was worthy of a severe penalty, and fined E. J. five pounds.”

Touché, Ned. We love this story, as it paints a picture of Ned’s strength and determination to take a place in the world of men, doing ‘men’s’ work and standing ground.

One ‘Eureka!’ moment we had in researching the story of Eliza/Ned Moate was when we discovered Eliza’s son George’s diary/memoir, which he wrote up until his death in 1940.

Sadly, George believed his mother had died when his father took him away at the age of six, and he also recalls a horrific life of brutality and struggle when, at the young age of 13, George did as his mother did: flee to survive (in his instance, to escape from the physical abuse of his father, never to return).

Of course, there is much more to the story of Eliza Lynch/Moate/Edward (Ned) Moate, but for now, we hope we have painted a picture that reveals more than the reductive term ‘She-Man’.

Until then, we hope that when you stay at Ned’s you are reminded of the strength of women who carved a life on foreign land amidst brutality and hardship, and of those in the margins who have been vilified for being themselves.

And as you relax, surrounded by Ned’s architectural and aesthetic beauty and the comforts it contains, we also hope you take some time to think of Bright’s rich history and the characters of Ned’s past.

The design and building of Ned’s have been our way of honouring the story of Ned/Eliza, and of paying homage to the will, determination, and strength to survive in the world, come what may.

Welcome to Ned’s.

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