Hyde Park Barracks, designed by convict architect, Francis Greenway, where Thomas was held before he was assigned to the Hawkesbury area.

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Father:

Thomas BERRYMAN (Sen)

Mother:

Esther/Hester ANDREWS ^[1]

Birth:

1819 in Portsmouth, England^[2][3][4]

Occupation:

Hawker (1835) convict, stock keeper/labourer/farmer (between 1837 and 1872)^{[6][7][8][9][9]}

Convicted:

Jan 9 1835, Southhampton Quarter Sessions Assizes^[11]

Transported:

June -Aug 28 1835 to Australia^[12]on the  second voyage of the convict transport, England

Lived at:

Bundarra, near Armidale^[13]

Death/Burial:

Jan 25 1872 at Torryburn, near Armidale^[14]of “sudden heart disease”.

Marriage:

Catherine STUART/STEWART(Jan 1844, Leets Vale, [Hawkesbury R.] NSW)

Children:

Marianne BERRYMAN (1846-)

Margaret BERRYMAN (b Mar 9 1849 – 1923), married James Gaffey, 1868, Bundarra

Thomas BERRYMAN (Jan 15 1851-1900)

John BERRYMAN (1852-)

Joseph BERRYMAN (1854-)

Henry BERRYMAN (1856-)

Frederick BERRYMAN (1858-)

Elizabeth BERRYMAN (1860-)

Emily BERRYMAN (1864-)

Maria BERRYMAN (1866-1876)

Thomas Berryman was a rebellious young rogue who grew, in time, into a respected member of the society he’d been forced to join as a convict outcast.

Convict records give a comprehensive physical description: Tom was short, only 5'2" (157 cm), with brown hair and blue eyes, with a scar below the right elbow, a small wart on the back of the forefinger of his left hand and a scar on his right knee cap.

Growing up uneducated and illiterate, he'd been in trouble with the law early. In 1835, as a 16-year-old, Thomas, who earned what little he could as a street hawker, was convicted at Southhampton Quarter Sessions Assizes of housebreaking, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. It wasn’t his first foray into a life of petty crime – the court took into account a previous conviction that resulted in a one-month jail sentence. On this subsequent occasion, it appears that young Thomas was accompanying his father, Tom (senior) on a little bit of housebreaking when they were caught.

Convict trial and convict hulk records show that Thomas Berryman Senior, and Thomas Berryman Junior (or 'the Younger') were convicted and sentenced together in Portsmouth in 1835, for "l.arceny of a dwelling house greater than £5". They were both taken to the prison hulk Hardy, moored in Portsmouth Harbour while they waited to be transported to New South Wales.

Tom was kept on the Hardy until June, when he was transferred to the England, for the voyage to Australia. Thomas Berryman Sen was not so fortunate - he didn't survive in the often horrendous conditions on the prison hulk, dying in April, less than four months after his conviction.

On the England, young Tom earned a reputation as something of a troublemaker. Even before the voyage started, he injured his arm in an incident with another prisoner on the vessel taking them from the wharf out to the England.

Once landed in Sydney, his record did not improve. At one stage, he was sentenced to an extra six months in irons for robbery, and on another occasion, one month on the treadmill for insolence. In between these and other transgressions, Tom was held for nine months at Hyde Park Barracks (a wing of which still exists as a convict museum near St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney), until the robbery that led to his stint in irons on a road gang.

(above) The treadmill at Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney – a secondary punishment for recalcitrant convicts. Eighteen- year-old Tom was sentenced to one month working the treadmill for the crime of insolence. The treadmill has been described by a writer of that time as "a very useful piece of machinery for the purpose of correcting the tarnished morals of Botany Bay" ^14a

A painting c1838, shows convicts with ‘a pinched and sallow look’, according
to historian Robert Hughes in his book, The Fatal Shore. Thomas was sent to one such road gang in 1836.

Picture: National Library of Australia, Canberra

When his term on the road gang was up, he was assigned to a farm belonging to the Fleming family on the river flats at Wilberforce in the Macdonald Valley, near Wiseman's Ferry northwest of Sydney. In 1837, the younger Fleming sons had branched out to establish their own properties in the northwest of the state. In those early years, many of the families from the Macdonald Valley developed pastoral links with the area north of Tamworth, and it was not uncommon for new settlers along the Gwydir River and to the west to have come from the Hawkesbury.

Twenty two-year-old John Fleming and his older brother Joseph took up a run, known as Mungie Bundie, on the Gwydir river, 20 kilometres east of Moree, and Thomas Berryman was sent there as a hut keeper. It was in this capacity he was questioned about John Fleming's involvement in the notorious Myall Creek massacre in April 1838^[14b]. According to Roger Millis, in his book Waterloo Creek, Berryman’s “equivocation and dissembling made [another witness] look like a model of candour. He was nothing if not loyal to his absent master”.^[15]

A more kindly interpretation is given by another historian:

While still a convict, Thomas met Catherine (“Kitty”) Stewart, a young woman who came out from Ireland as a child. Kitty’s mother had petitioned theIrish authorities to be allowed to join her husband, a convict assigned to a farm in the Macdonald Valley, less than a kilometre from the Fleming family property where Tom worked. Kitty and Tom were married by special permission in 1844 in a small, now-vanished Catholic Chapel at Leet’s Vale, near Wiseman’s Ferry, northwest of Sydney.

Kitty and Tom had 10 children, two before Thomas officially gained his freedom.^[18] In the 1850s, the Berrymans moved northwards to territory familiar to Tom through his assignment to the Flemings, this time to the Bundarra area, west of Armidale, where the family settled.

(left): Winscomb, a property near Bundarra, where Thomas is thought to have worked in the 1850s.

In 1859, in a petition filed with the Legislative Assembly, Thomas was listed as a freehold land-owner at Winscombe, Bundarra. Winscombe is a large pastoral property, some 15 kilometres south of Bundarra, and it's believed that Thomas may have worked on the property before settling on a selection nearby. Alternatively, the Winscombe property may have given its name to the general area. In records such as his children's baptism and birth certificates, Thomas was variously described as a stockkeeper, labourer, and farmer.

He died of a ‘sudden disease of the heart' (although there had been speculation in the family there was something untoward with his death, as he was reputed to be carrying a large sum of money which wasn’t accounted for, at the time^[19]) at Torryburn, near Armidale, in 1872 aged 54, and was buried in Bundarra cemetery.

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