Elizabeth Throsby

Elizabeth Isabella Throsby (née Broughton; 4 February 180714 January 1891) was an Australian survivor of the 1809 Boyd massacre. Born on Norfolk Island, Throsby was two years old when she and her mother left Sydney on the Boyd, bound for England via New Zealand. During the voyage, a dispute broke out between the ship's English captain and a Māori passenger returning to his home at Whangaroa Harbour. Once there, his tribe learned of the captain's ill-treatment of him, and sought revenge by murdering and cannibalising most of the 70 passengers and crew, including Throsby's mother. Throsby and three other survivors were rescued a few weeks later by merchant and explorer Alexander Berry, who took them to South America. Throsby remained there for almost a year until a whaler took her to Sydney to be reunited with her father. She went on to marry in her late teenage years and raise a large family at Throsby Park south of Sydney, where she remained for the rest of her life. Birth and family Elizabeth Broughton was born on 4 February 1807 on Norfolk Island—then a satellite penal station of New South Wales and now an external territory of Australia—as the youngest of five children to Englishman William Broughton and his common-law wife, London-born convict Ann Glossop, of Welsh descent. Born in Chatham, Kent in 1768, William travelled to New South Wales in 1787 aboard the First Fleet convict transport Charlotte, as a free servant of John White, the colony's first Surgeon-General. Upon arrival in Botany Bay, Sydney on 20 January 1788, Broughton and White commissioned a convict on the ship, Thomas Barrett, to strike each of them a medallion to commemorate the voyage. Broughton supplied Barrett with the metal and engraving tools, as well as the ship's coordinates for recording. Both medallions are regarded as the first works of Australian colonial art.