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The State Library of New South Wales dates back to 1826
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The majestic building you see today was knocked up in the early 1900s
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when the library grew an extra wing, the Mitchell. Today, this TARDIS of a building houses five million items
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and every one of them has a story to tell. I'm reading. T-A-S
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Here's a word for you. Tasiomancy, the art of reading tea leaves
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OK, it's not a precise science, but it has a certain mystique about it. And while the true believers use it to predict the future
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there are tea leaves here in the State Library that unlocks some amazing secrets from the past
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Hidden deep inside this box is the last remaining link to the only woman to have escaped the convict colony of New South Wales
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Have a look at them, they're just two dried out wrinkly brown leaves
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It's a bit nerve-wracking sitting next to them because they're more than 220 years old
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and if I just touch them they disintegrate in my fingers To a botanist there Smilax glycifila or sweet sarsaparilla But to our early colonial ancestors
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these leaves were the nearest thing they could find to a good cup of tea. They were once owned by one of Australia's greatest escape artists
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Her name was Mary Bright, and she too was a tea leaf
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Which of course is rhyming slang for thief. In 1786, Mary was sentenced to seven years' transportation
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to New South Wales for stealing jewellery. There, she married convict William Bryant
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She was obviously a woman who could not be cooped up and she decided to escape
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It was she who was the mastermind behind this, not William. It was she who made friends with a visiting ship's captain
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so that she could acquire from him a quadrant and a sextant
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It was she who seems to have organised the fact that they would leave on a moonless night
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They then journeyed on this incredibly dangerous journey in an open boat all the way to Timor
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Travelling with Mary and William were their two kids and seven other convicts
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They survived on stolen flour, pork and water. But curiously they also carried a bunch of the native sarsaparilla leaves the convicts use for tea 69 days and over 5 kilometres later
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Mary, her family and the other convicts all arrived alive and well in Dutch Timor
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This journey, to put it in some perspective, just two years before
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William Bly had his famous voyage in a longboat after the mutinies
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In fact, Mary Bryant's trip was only marginally shorter than Bly's. And Bly said of Mary later that her journey
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was one of the greatest journeys ever undertaken in an open boat
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When Mary and her party eventually arrived in Timor, they told the Dutch authorities they were survivors
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from a shipwreck off the Australian coast. And if they'd have stuck with drinking tea
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they might have got away with it too. Unfortunately, one night, William goes out
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and he gets on the Terps and he starts bragging about their incredible adventure
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The next thing you know, they're clapping irons and they're on their way back to Britain to stand trial
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And then things took a tragic turn. First, Mary's husband and her one-year-old son succumbed to disease
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Five months later, Mary's daughter also died at sea. In England Mary was thrown back into jail But there her fortunes began to change Well she was a hero I mean Bly had received an extraordinary welcome
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and now this woman had come back doing a similar feat. She was known as the girl from Botany Bay
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Mary's incredible story of survival reached a noted lawyer called James Boswell
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He used his influence to secure a royal pardon for Mary and from that point she disappeared altogether
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Except that she left one thing behind. Perhaps to thank James Boswell for his support
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she gave him the only thing of value she had, her last few tea leaves from Botany Bay
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Boswell must have slipped them inside one of his many books and there they stayed for the next one and a half centuries
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They turned up at Yale University in the USA amongst Boswell's personal papers
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Yale gave two leaves to the State Library of New South Wales. 160 years after these leaves left to Strain and Shores
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they had finally come home. Hello, time travellers. Thank you so much for watching this video
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If you enjoyed it, leave a comment below and don't forget to subscribe to the channel. Until next time, remember, history doesn't repeat, but it certainly echoes
