Mark Kluzek‘s project The Doomed Bird of Providence began in London in 2009 with the aim of telling the stories of early colonial Australia. This latest offering, You Brought the Knife, is a haunting five-track EP that recounts the tale of Maria Murray (née Middleton) — a runaway slave, convicted murderer and transportee, largely forgotten by all but a handful of academics.
The story unfolds from Maria Murray’s escape from her slave owners in Belize (British Honduras as it was then), to an altercation with disbanded soldier William Mair upon whom she inflicted the fatal knife wounds, to her transportation on convict ship The Borneo to Van Diemen’s Land. Although ostensibly a sad tale, it is hard to not be inspired by the story of Maria Murray, who appears to have made a life for herself in spite of her past.
If the object of this project is to engage an audience with not only powerfully affecting music but also a thirst for history then, in my case, it succeeds. I found myself scouring the list of transportees from the voyage of The Borneo to Van Diemen’s Land on 7 May 1828 and wondering at how many more of these women’s (for they were all women) stories are out there waiting to be told, how many lives changed forever — if not for better.
-Arwen Xaverine-