Marriage: Love and Law exhibition catalogue - Flipbook - Page 55
Such circumstances meant that those cases that did come before the law did
so because the prosecuting party was prepared to suffer significant injury
to see justice done. After all, a guilty verdict might be the only way of restoring
a family’s fortunes and perhaps also eventually, a woman’s reputation. This was
certainly so with the Regina v. Meehan (1851) trial. Involving the gullible young
heiress, Emmeline Blake, and the family trio Patrick Meehan, Mary Oates and
Mary Ryan, the case was one of the most well covered abduction trials of this
era. The court, newspapers and public all shared Thomas Blake’s outrage and
indignation. Blake was not only able to secure the conviction of those involved,
but to also annul his daughter’s marriage via an expensive and time consuming
process of securing an Act of Parliament. When it comes to abduction,
the stakes were certainly high. While winning a wealthy wife continued
to tempt many a bounder and cad, as Patrick Meehan and his associates
discovered, the costs of a thwarted abduction could also be considerable
for those involved.
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As a young woman dressed in a white bridal gown free-falls from
a great though undetermined height she appears in a dream-like
state that suspends time and motion. We feel a sense of impending
disaster. Where has she come from? What fate awaits her?
1 The first case to come before the courts in Sydney was in 1832. It involved a young woman, Margaret
Sullivan, who organised three men to abduct her from her employment so she could work elsewhere
for better terms and wages. See ‘A Case of Abduction’, Sydney Morning Herald, 31 December 1832.
2 The court dealt unsympathetically with a father who attempted to prosecute two brothers who ‘abducted’
his daughter after ‘he put her on the road’ in the hope of making money from her. See ‘James & Robert
Cadby’, Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser, 10 November 1847. Likewise, the court
suspected financial motives were at the heart of the case again Francis Cassidy who had been ‘unable
to produce the promised funds for the marriage contraction’. See ‘Supreme Court: Francis Cassidy’,
Courier, 29 July 1857.
This work from Rosemary Laing’s flight research series—which was created
through her desire to find a new relationship with the land in which we seek
to belong—metaphorically connects with the figure of the bride and more
broadly, the concept of marriage.
40 Rosemary Laing
flight research #2a
Type C photograph
1999
Art Gallery of NSW, 151.2011
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