11/9/2007 - BASIL & MELINDA'S MARRIAGE
I offer this extrapolation: Melinda, then twenty years old and not legally allowed to marry without parental permission, and Basil meet at a dance in Sussex Street, Sydney in 1835. They are both fond of a drink and so, under the heavy influence of alcohol they challenge the nineteenth-century taboos associated with sex outside of marriage. A possible consequence of this premarital dalliance is a stillborn daughter, Melinda, born prematurely eight months later. Melinda and Basil wake up next morning and, realizing their transgression through the haze of two mighty hangovers, I hazard to guess, or still intoxicated from drinking all night, head for the nearest church that will marry them with the least amount of formality or documentation. Somewhere in the midst of this haste, Melinda produces a string of fictitious names and parentage, perhaps so her real parents (or the Reverend Hill) can’t be notified. Basil is none the wiser about the deception, as he’s met this woman only the night before. It’s also possible, because Melinda was raised by the Hill family, that in her alcohol-affected state she couldn’t remember her real parents’ names and so concocted a new identity on the spot. The scenario cannot be borne out by evidence, but it is a logical extrapolation from the available clues. Certainly it is no less likely than the Armidale Family History Group’s claim that, of the Kendall twins’ births on April 18, 1839 (see below), one occurred in Ulladulla and the other in Auckland, New Zealand. By the legal standards of today and the nineteenth century, the marriage certificate is not a bona fide document, and the resultant seventeen-year de facto relationship would also not have been recognised as a legal marriage in the nineteenth century, though no comment is made about it by Henry’s biographers.
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