Eliza’s Story

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Who is Eliza?

One night around a campfire, we first heard the story of ‘The Doctor’s Manservant’, Edward Moate (Ned), who resided with the local doctor in Bright in the late 1800s. Upon the doctor’s sudden death, Ned was reported to have become ‘temporarily insane’ and was arrested and sent to the Beechworth Lunatic Asylum.  Soon after being admitted to the Male Division, it was established that Ned was, in fact, a woman.

Her name was Eliza 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.

…And so it was from this story that we were inspired to research and write about the courageous and tragic life of Eliza/Ned. This led to the design and building of Eliza’s (and then Ned’s) to pay respect to an extraordinary woman, and to acknowledge the difficulties that faced all women in those tough years on the goldfields of Bright in the mid-1800s. 

 

The story continues…

 
In search of a better life

Eliza Lynch was born in County Carlow, Ireland in 1827, who, at the age of 26, arrived in Australia as an ‘Irish bond girl’ to meet the demand for domestic servants and wives.

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 young Edward was merely 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 of a mercury rub, but as a consequence, Edward died of mercury poisoning: a then unknown potentially deadly side-effect of the remedy.

Upon her husband’s arrest and return, Richard Moate accused his wife of poisoning Edward and promptly took their six-year-old son George to live in Melbourne, leaving Eliza penniless and defenceless. 

Eliza becomes Ned

After taking on various aliases and doing whatever she could to survive – resulting in various convictions such as prostitution and larceny – Eliza, now known as Ned, arrived in Omeo as a hard-working labourer, eventually securing employment as live-in groomsmen for the highly regarded Clerk of Courts, Mr William Phipps. Phipps also housed, on occasion, Dr Benjamin Warren, from Bright.

After the death of 68 year-old Phipps in 1879, Ned was then employed as Dr Warren’s manservant in Bright, and lived at the residence until the doctor’s sudden and untimely death. Ned was 54.

Stories and secrets

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 Mr Phipps Ned’s lover, or simply a good man offering Ned shelter and safety? 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…

History and Herstory

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.

Sadly, 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. We hope we have rectified that.

Afterall, ‘You don’t know anyone, till you know their story’.