There is one story of Marcus Clarke’s anti-Semitism that relates directly to myself. I had already met Clarke and he knew I was Jewish. I was a habitual visitor to the Melbourne Public Library where Clarke, as Sub-Librarian, was second in charge. On this particular occasion I had just crushed my big toe. I limped into the reading-room, removed my boot and lay it empty on the floor. I then elevated the felon, ‘my obscene sock clad foot,’ on an opposite chair. Clarke was informed of this manoeuvre by one of his underlings and approached me. “Brodzky,” he taunted, “it behoves not a Christian gentleman to thus comport himself”. To which I gave the following reply. “Alas dear Clarke, I am neither a Christian nor a gentleman.”
While lodging with Richard Birnie I met and befriended Margie, the young woman who my biographer refers to as Margaret Morris. Ours was a highly intimate tempestuous relationship that lasted several years, always very passionate, sometimes turbulent, and finally on again off again as we tried to achieve a suitable solution. She ignited a spark in my heart, gave me the ability to love again, and became my flame. She made me question the extent to which I valued my Jewish identity. She made me think about life without it. She reinforced my beliefs that man has a common humanity, which should be made to overide the conflicts that cultural differences create. She helped me become a protagonist for the conversion of gentiles into the Jewish religion. I thought it preferable that Jewish people multiply through intermarriage, rather than disappear as a result of it. She inadvertently threatened my livelihood as a Hebrew teacher and I thought of other careers such as writing and journalism. My first such job was as a law reporter attending court for the Age in 1876. She inspired a need from within me to write “Genius, Lunacy and Knavery” in 1876. This told the story of a man for whom Judaism had been the essence of life, but who gave it up for a gentile woman. It was also because of her that I wrote “The Jews in their Dispersions,” an essay which appeared in “Historical Sketch of Two Melbourne Synagogues” in 1877. It was how I convinced myself to remain Jewish. She taught me the wonders of fatherhood and the wilderness of losing a child. And I wrote the unfinished “Ben Israel” in 1878 to remind myself that I had been emotionally traumatised once before and despite this had managed to cope and proceed with the rest of my life.
I never imagined that Margaret Morris would be mentioned in my autobiography. I was wrong. That she does appear is entirely due to my biographer. He is like an investigative journalist who got a lead and followed it up relentlessly. He may tell you everything he knows but I have said enough and will not add to it. I believe that is how Margie would have wished it.
Margaret Morris remains enshrouded in mystery. Few details of her survive. There is nothing written in books and journals and public records concerning her are scanty and inconsistent. The truth remains a secret from even her closest traceable descendants. As for the way she thought only some twenty-five letters remain. A fragment of one, minus its beginning and end, one that she wrote to her eldest child Ada Morris Goodwin Dalton, will now be quoted from.
“….you may have on that score, what Dr. Moss has told you concerning Maurice Brodzky’s private life may be true, but to me he was my world, the father of my child and I loved him passionately, and although he left me to face the world unaided I never complained but just took things as a matter of course, and was always ready to respond to his call, and if there be such a place as heaven and a God above, my greatest happiness would be to be united again, although I have lost faith in that kind of thing many years ago, and to think that he died in poverty and in a far off country, truly Bobby Burns was right when he said….”
In another letter to an obviously questioning Ada, Margaret wrote, “you asked me a question, was so and so Editor of ‘Table Talk’; yes at one time, not when I first knew him, he was on the reporting staff of the ‘Herald,’ our evening paper” . My biographer picked up the error. She should have said ‘the Age, our morning paper’ but that is forgivable. At different times I worked for both and the letter was written half a century later.
The Margaret Morris story re-surfaced in 1988 when my biographer published his book on Horace Brodzky. This book received much attention in the media. It was featured on ABC TV’s “Seven Thirty Report - Summer Edition,” a highly rated news and features programme simultaneously transmitted all over Australia. My grand-daughter Bessie Hosking of Melbourne, and my great-grand-daughter Kathleen Gare of Perth, saw the programme, contacted my biographer and told him about Margaret Morris. Bessie even gave him an old newspaper photograph showing us Brodzkys selling fruit in San Francisco after the earthquake.
My biographer was told that Margaret Morris might have been a member of the prominent Gavan Duffy family, that she was well educated, possibly a teacher, that she had met and fallen in love with me, and that she had born me a child. We never married and our daughter, Ada, was fostered, at eighteen months of age, to a family named Goodwin, and lived with them in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, until her early twenties. She then went to Perth for a holiday, met her future husband, Ernest Henry Dalton, and remained there. This story however had further ramifications. It was suggested that after I married Florence Leon in 1882 I might have re-established my relationship with Margaret Morris and simultaneously fathered two families in Melbourne, a Jewish one and a Gentile one. Futhermore legend had it that both ladies knew each other, indeed liked each other, and that when we Brodzkys left for America in 1904, Margaret Morris came down to Port Melbourne to wave us goodbye.
Imagine my biographer’s excitement at the suggestion that Margaret Morris may have been a Gavan Duffy. He thought he had a scoop. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy was Premier of Victoria when I arrived in Melbourne. He had been politically prominent there for years and prior to his own arrival, had been a member of the British House of Commons. He was even known to be sympathetic to Jews. In 1853 he had voted with Disraeli to introduce a bill to emancipate Jews from all civil disabilities. It passed the Commons, but was rejected, yet again, as several times previously, in the House of Lords. Duffy’s sons were high achievers. John Gavan Duffy became Attorney-General of Victoria. Sir Frank Gavan Duffy became Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia. Charles Gavan Duffy junior was one of the draftsmen of Australia’s Federal Constitution and George Gavan Duffy was Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and after that President of the Irish High Court. And Sir Charles Gavan Duffy had a daughter named Margaret. She was born in 1859 versus Margaret Morris, whose date of birth had been estimated as circa 1858. The investigations continued.
Margaret Gavan Duffy’s full name was Mary Margaret Harriet Gavan Duffy. Mary was shared with two of her sisters Mary Lillian and Mary Mabel and she did not use it. She didn’t use Margaret either, preferring Harriet. Harriet returned to Europe with her father, nursed him there throughout his final years, and was at his bedside when he died on February 9th 1903. The possibility that Margaret Morris was the daughter of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy was thus excluded but she might still have been a more distant relative.
Margaret Morris’s death certificate lists her maiden name as Gaven but that could be a spelling error. The mother of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy was named Anne Gavan and the mother of his second wife, Susan Hughes, the only wife he lived with in Australia, was Anne’s sister Susan Gavan. Sir Charles had married his first cousin. Somebody with the name Gavan could have been related to both Sir Charles and his second wife Susan.
Margaret Morris died at 18 Belmont Avenue, Kew, Melbourne, on July 16th 1947. Her death certificate states her age as 93 years, which suggests she was born circa 1854. It also alleges that she was born in Melbourne, that at twenty years of age she married John William Morris, and that she had seven surviving children, Ada aged 70 years, Alice 62, Albert 60, Ruby 57, twins William and Henry 53 and Andrew 50. But on Ada’s birth certificate dated June 13th 1876 Margaret gives her age as eighteen and on Alice’s birth certificate dated May 3rd 1885 she gives her age as twenty-seven. These two documents are consistent with her having been born in 1858, which would make her 89 years old at the time of her death.
Margaret Morris’