I mean, what fashionable woman about to come into a small fortune would first to cut her hair very short and wouldn't be fashionable in Tasmania at the time, I'm quite sure or carry boomerang.
I'm Jen Kelly from The Herald Son and this is in Black and White, a podcast about some of Australia's forgotten characters. Today we're heading back to the eighteen hundreds to the story of a girl called Leticia Leek, who has a seven year old child. Inherited the vast Glencoe Station in South Australia. She grew up running wild with the local Aboriginal children, but then as an adult, became caught up in a saga of alleged murder, infidelity, corruption
and contested wills. Eventually, Letitia inherited an enormous family fortune, and during World War One she and her husband turned their grand and English a state into a hospital that treated thousands upon thousands of Australian soldiers. Letitia's story has been told in a book called The Accidental Heiress Journey of a Glencoe Squatter's Daughter. It's by John Berger and Professor Carol Gerbich, who are volunteers with the National Trust of South Australia. Carol joins us now to share part
one of the incredible story. Make sure you return on Thursday for part two. Welcome to the podcast, Carol.
Thank you. It's lovely to be here now.
The story that you've uncovered really does have a little bit of everything. It's got last alleged murder, infidelity, corruption, a family fortune, a vicious court case. I mean, you must have thought that you'd struck gold when you began researching this story.
Absolutely did. I had no idea what was going to come out, because I started just writing a little leaflet for the National Trust property, which was just the Glencoe Woolshead, which a beautiful woolshead with a couple of paddocks over from where we just bought a property where we wanted to build this large garden. And I thought, oh, you know, a couple of page pamphlet and then I'll just pull
away from this. And this little girl just sort of popped into the story and disappeared, and then she came back as an adult and then disappeared again, and I thought, good heavens. When I finally finished, I had a book of about one hundred and forty pages rather than a two page leaflet, and it seemed to have become her story, so she took over.
Now, tell us where does Letitia's story begin? In your mind?
I think his story probably begins, have to say with her birth, because that in itself was quite complicated enough, and then things just seemed to go from there.
Yes, well, where and when was she born?
Well, she was actually born in Nelson, just over the Victorian border from South Australia in eighteen fifty nine, and
she was born to two very eccentric parents. Her father was Edward Leek and he was abround about forty five when she was born, and he was one of two brothers that had come from Tasmania, South Australia in order to basically set up a property, a sheep property, and they set up, over a number of years a huge property which was about three hundred and fifty square miles or two hundred thousand acres of for sheep and cattle
and horses and so on. And around about the time of the teacher's birth, the two brothers were not speaking.
King and Edward Leek, who was Letitia's father, it was the reason they weren't speaking was because he just got married, and he just got married to someone who the family disapproved of totally, because not only was she Irish and Roman Catholic, but she had also married to somebody else and pregnant to that other person, and somehow her husband had just vanished and everyone suspected Edward Leek was probably the problem. So that was going to be a bit
of an issue. So the brothers at this point were not speaking, and one of them was living down at Nelson, the other was on the estate, and Edward was being paid about one thousand pounds a year basically to keep away off the property because his brother had just become a member of parliament. So that was a sort of tricky situation. But the mother, this Irish Catholic girl called Amanda, was only eighteen and she was rather happy to marry
a very wealthy man. But then I think she discovered he was not all that nice a person and was very overweight, and she really preferred younger man, so she started having quite a lot of affairs. So it became very interesting to know whether or not this child was the child of Edward Lee, the man with all the money, or whether or not he was perhaps the child of some of the other lovers that she'd been having. So it was a complicated verse. Shall we say.
The scandals come very thick and fast in his story, don't they. It takes takes on the feel of a soap opera very early on.
It does. Well. Things were a little calm for about a year, shall we say? And then the brother died, the one who was still living on property, and left the whole of the Glencoe estate to Edward. So Edward it now moves back on to the Glencoe Estate property with his wife and his daughter Letitia, where he creates this beautiful wall shed which is architect designed, and still lives there under the National Trust. And then he dies
as well. Now she's during that time, from about one till about seven until her father dies, Letitia is pretty much living wild on the estate. The estate employs one hundred and twenty Bo Indick Aboriginal families, actually employs them and pays them. They're not slaves, And she spends most of her time just playing with the bo Anddick children. I understand she learned how to speak the language she
came and went with them. She learned how to fish and catch things in the lakes, and I think she had a really lovely childhood, the sort of childhood you dream about. And then suddenly her father dies of a heart condition and the family from Tasmania immediately hot footed onto the next fairy and come up because this is a very large estate portfolio.
But do we know any more about these early years of Letitia's life, And do we know any more about her relationship with her father and how close she was with him and whether she was devastated by his death for example, No, we don't.
It's tiny little snippets of information that keep popping in her relationship with her father, I think would have been a good one, because a number of people reported to him they didn't think it was his daughter, and his response always was was his hair. I like her, I'm going to look after her, and that was his line on that argument. Now, there was a second child born two years after Letitia, and it was very clear that
it was not Edward's a son. It was a little boy, and unfortunately he he was looked after, but he was not accepted as being part of the family because it was very well known that Amanda was having a fairly long term affair with the manager of the estate at that time. So she did have a brother, but I mean he got wished away very quickly when she turned seven, So their relationship seems to have been a little bit distant, and her relationship does seem to have been much more
with children closer to her own age. Her mother insisted on sleeping in the children's room, so that at least she shared a room with her mother. But the reason her mother did that was because just to avoid to prevent rather Edward from coming in and having sex with her.
Oh my goodness joy.
Yeah, Aly, we didn't know about that. But the relationship with the parents I would say overall was distant because as she grew up she never seemed to refer to them or to miss them.
And I wonder how unusual it was during this period in Australian history for kids like Letitia to have these really close relationships with Aboriginal kids in this way.
Almost never, I would say, I think the family, the Leak family themselves were a very interesting family because the grandfather, the people who were done in Tasmania were very much anti slavery, anti convicts, and very concerned about the Aboriginal situation. So I think the relationships that started out in South Australia would have been a much more respectful, appreciative relationship.
I remember once when all the men went to the gold Rush and they were looking for sharers to come and share their they actually looked toward the Aboriginal women and decided they were the best at sharing. And then the Aboriginal men were next, and then the German woman from the Bossa came next in the line. So they were actually very open to what was going to work and what was respectful to the people who are involved.
So why were the Aboriginal women the best at sharing? That's fascinating.
Yes, it fascinated me when I read it, because it was in a letter that he wrote to his father in Tasmania saying, I am considering taking on the Aboriginal women as sharers because they are very gentle and very careful, and especially good with the rams, which of course you don't want to cut off an important part of the.
Ramb Amazing Okay, So what has happened now after the father has died.
Yes, well we've got, as I said, one of the uncles, the six males in the family, one of them came hot footing it up from Taz and he immediately passled Letitia off to boarding school in Melbourne. I should her mother and the other little boy off the estate with a very large genuity, and said goodbye. I don't want
to see you again, and didn't. And so she became, in the sense of a property of the Tasmanian family, but particularly of this uncle, who had no children of his own, and who eventually adopted her.
I'm just imagining Letitia in Melbourne at boarding. So she was at boarding school in Melbourne, and this was presumably her first schooling experience whatsoever.
Well, she'd actually had a governess just prior who actually became one of Mary mckillops nuns. So she was a proper good Roman Catholic person, suitable for the mother. And apart from that, and I think that had been very recent. You're quite right, it would have been a very isolated experience. But apparently I picked up a letter that she wrote to her uncle. You know, I'm learning French, I'm learning how to dance, and I am quite enjoying school. It
would be lovely if somebody came and visited me. So you can see she was actually probably feeling quite lonely too.
I'll be back in just a moment to find out what happened next and what happened from there.
Well. From then, as she became a bit older, she had a governess, and the governess became a lady companion, and that lady companion eventually became the wife of her uncle as well. But the three of them did a lot of traveling, and what they were doing were basically filling in time until tis she should be twenty one, in which time the estates then would become available and she could cash in on her inheritance.
Ah.
And so what I found when she was twenty one then had little snippets of information. We were always looking for the sort of data which is like letters home or things you can actually hear the voice of the people. But we have the photo which I have of her, and here she is twenty one. It's taken at Lanceston in the studio, and it's the most extraordinary photo. They've
just come back from England and Europe. And she has extremely short hair cut like a boy's, like a young boy's, you know, nothing over the ears, nothing over the neck, and quite high on the forehead. And I hunted and hunted to see if I could find out why would she have done this? You know, was it illness? Was something wrong? Did she have ringworm or something like that?
And there's no evidence of that, but there was evidence that in Europe at the time, when they'd just been traveling, that women who were particularly strong in terms of free thinking or suffragettes had actually cut their hair short. It was actually a sort of signal to the population, you know, this is me and this is who I am. And the other thing she was doing was lost her chest and up to one shoulder was a very large ceremonial
aboriginal I mean boomerang. Fashionable woman about to come into a small fortune, would you know, firstly cut her hair very short and wouldn't be fashionable in Tasmania at the time. I'm quite sure or her carry a boomerang and what she's signaling. Most of the originies have gone from Tasmania
even before she was born. But she's had a lot to do with the bow and deck people in South Australia, so we can only assume that that's what was going on, that she was actually making a fairly strong political statement.
Interesting and that's the photo that you've got on the cover of your book.
Of course, yes, I was so fascinated. But I mean her closes are terribly fashionable, and lots of lovely satin and buttons and things like that and up to the neck and so forth. But her hair and a boomerang, I can imagine people would just go, who is this warman? That's strange. Well, anyway, they did decide to sell the Glencoe estate to the Redock brothers, and the amount, of course was around about twenty five million dollars in our term,
so she was quite a substantial heiress. And the next ten years they probably spent their time mostly traveling in Europe, and also she spent time fighting off hopeful males who wanted to marry her, and she said, no, that I'm not going to marry them. They're just after my money, and that's the end of that. But then, when she was thirty and they've lived like this pretty comfortably, her uncle dies and leaves most of his Tasmanian fortune to her,
to the tune of about fifteen million dollars. So now she's a forty million dollar aires. And this was written up in pretty much all the newspapers along the eastern coast of Australia, and it was taken up by a young man who was also thirty, a young lawyer by the name of Charles Billiard, and his father was the Solicitor General of New South Wales. And he'd just been involved in a very interesting financial project which he had hoped to make a lot of money on, and that
was building a bridge over Sydney Harbor. So he'd set up this company, the North Sydney Investment and Tramways Company, to try and get enough money. And he was looking for about eighty five million dollars to build a suspension bridge over Sydney Harbor. And he had bought lots of land on the North Shore and got together a lot of investors and pretty much covered the money that was required. When the bottom fell out of the economy in eighteen ninety and a lot of the investors withdrew and he
suddenly found he was bankrupt. So he was very much in need of an heiress if he could find one. So he hotfooted it down to Tasmania on the arreas as fast as he could go, and actually managed to persuade Letitia that he was her night in Shining Armor
and they got married, and the wedding again the newspaper. Unfortunately, newspapers never took any photos, so I have no photos of it, but lots and lots of description of all sorts of beautiful gowns and satin and silk and ostrich feathers and jewelry, and a wedding cake about two meters high, and lovely red carpets from the gate all the way to the house, and a special train put on a long system down to Ross for the visitors from New South Wales, and enough entertainment to go on for a
week so the local people about three hundred people attended, could all just stay and have a lovely time for the rest of the week while they went off with their honeymoon in New South Wales where they had a second wedding, this time with eight hundred people, and they went through the whole process again. So it was definitely the wedding of the century.
Absolute goodness, it sounds so extravagant, Carol. One thing I'm interested to know, given what we know about Letitia's philanthropy later on, what has she been doing with all her great fortune up until now, apart from traveling and having extravagant weddings. What has she been doing? Has she been spending some of her great fortune on charity causes for example?
Absolutely not. No, there's no indication of anything like that whatsoever. In fact, it wasn't quite that much later in life, and I think different experiences that perhaps changed to views.
Things to be interesting. So what about is she involved in political causes? I mean, we know she had some pretty strident views.
No, she was interested in education. She was interested in the possibility, I think of setting up at universities in Tasmania. She was interested in art galleries and she often donated family portraits or pieces of art that they might have collected for them, particularly one in Mount Gambia. And but
apart from that, there's no real evidence. But in fact, finding evidence on Letitia right up until quite late in her life has been it's been you know, it took me a couple of years of digging to actually find it. And I'm sure there's a lot more there, but unfortunately the few remaining members of the family are not very interested in supplying it, so we don't have it.
Ah, that's interesting, Okay, I'll look forward to hearing more about that later and what did she and her husband get up to after this incredible wedding.
Well after this incredible wedding, they returned to Tasmania to live in a rather gorgeous house that her uncle had left her called Ashby, And I think Charles was a bit bored, and so he started having a look at her fine answers to see if everything was as it should be, and found that, in fact, there was some serious anomalies that the trustees of the Glencoe estate and the local bank had for over the last twenty years been investing a lot of the interest from the estate
in their own little projects, and they were very reluctant to agree that that's what they've been doing, or to release the money. So Charles immediately sets in place a court case and then starts going around the pub saying, you know how terrible these people are. Until they got an injunction to keep them silent. But the court case continued, and then I think something happened, which it was very sad. Very few people left of the Leak family down in Tasmania.
There was the uncle's wife who'd been the companion and governess for Letitia, and there'd been a wife of one of the other brothers, so there really only two women, and this other woman had been almost like a mother to her, as you'd come up gone from boarding school.
So they decided to side with the bank and the trustees and told them, which must have been a real slap in the face for Letitia, terribly hurtful because he seemed like a very gentle kind person as far as we can work out, and anyway, yes, and what they decided to do was to tell the other people that there had been rumors for many years that in fact Lea Titia might not be legitimate, that her father was possibly a murderer, and the marriage was probably beggary, and
therefore La Titia probably wasn't entitled to all the money that she already had. So you can imagine, you know, how this went on in the papers for weeks and weeks, and it was very unpleasant.
What were the allegations about her father being a murderer? Who was he meant to have murdered?
Well, the situation was that the first husband of an Amanda, the woman who became his wife and Letitia's mother, was a bullocky, a bullock driver, and he used to drive huge loads of things from the ships down to Portland to the Glencoe estate and then carry wool and so forth back to Portland. So he actually was attached to the Glencoe estate. And one day he came in to the Glencoe estate and Edward went down to meet them.
He was a very sociable sort of man. He took one look at Amanda and said to himself, I suspect this is a woman I find very attractive. And she was a very sprightly, feisty Irish woman, and I think they probably fell in love. It was suggested that they flirted outrageously, which I'd love to know what that meant, but they didn't go into detail. And unfortunately, the next she traveled with him a bit, and obviously Amanda and
would sort a fair bit of each other. And then one trip that the Bulaki made he disappeared under very suspicious circumstances. They'd stopped for the night halfway. He had gone to collect some money. Money of course, wasn't left with banks by any sensible people. It was actually left with friends, and so they looked after it, and you gave them a bottle of something when you picked it up, and he had gone off to do that, to collect
quite a large sum of money, and never returned. Whether he was murdered, whether someone took the money, whether he was paid to go away by Edward is very unclear. But as all the local people got on their horses and along with the troopers started looking for the body, or looking for the man or whatever and found absolutely nothing, they were fairly convinced that some foul play had occurred, and particularly when they overheard Edward saying to Amanda, don't
worry about it, He's not coming back. Marry me. I'll look after you, and two months later she did.
We'll leave part one of the story of Letitia Leek here, so come back on Thursday for part two to hear how she survived the scandal and went on to create a new life for herself in England, including turning her grand estate into a hospital for many thousands of Australian soldiers during the Great War. Thanks for listening. This has been in Black and White a podcast about some of Australia's forgotten characters, written and hosted by me Jen Kelly,
edited by Nina Young and produced by John Tiburton. You can find all the stories and photos associated with our episodes at Heraldsun dot com a slash ibaw. If you've enjoyed this podcast, we'd love you to leave a five star rating on Apple Podcasts. Even better, leave a review. Any comments or questions please email me add in black
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