THIS rare military sword (pictured) was a fearsome battlefield weapon more than 200 years ago.
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Hugely popular among British forces in the Napoleonic era, the curved, single-edge blade was brutal and cutting, ideal for slashing through enemy ranks.
It once belonged to former Lieutenant Jonathan Warner (1786-1843), a significant character in Lake Macquarie history with Warners Bay today named after him.
Now the sword has found a permanent new home with Lake Macquarie City Council and is on public display until March inside Speers Point Library.
Known as the Pattern 1796 light cavalry sabre, it was once manufactured in large quantities.
For Jonathan Warner’s actual sword to have survived at all though seems nothing short of a modern miracle. After all, very few artefacts relating to Warner remain.
No known portrait of the pioneer even exists, for example.
The prized sabre, measuring 82.5cm long and encased in a wooden scabbard with a wooden lining, is impressive.
Referred to as a backsword, for slashing downward, the sabre’s striking feature is its substantial hand guard, covering the knuckles as well as the thumb and forefinger.
And it comes with an odd pedigree.
A Newcastle historian remembers it once being on display with other related items about 30 years ago.
Back then it was loaned to a curious small museum in a Hunter Water Board cottage behind what is now Newcastle East School on The Hill.
The back story is that when Warner died in 1843 aged 57 at his home called Biddaba at Cockle Creek (now called Warners Bay), the sabre was passed down to his granddaughter, Rosa Ellen Warner.
He would have been a courageous man, aggressive even when he felt he had to make a stand, or been wronged.
Lake Macquarie City Council Community Historian Ann Crump said the sword then ended up sitting for decades wrapped in calico on top of a cupboard on a property in Tamworth.
Ms Crump said the relatively dry environment there helped preserve the weapon.
The original scabbard was also largely intact, reinforcing the sabre as an important local heritage item.
Along with the weapon, there’s a single ornamental shoulder piece (or epaulette) from one of Warner’s uniforms on show.
Some letters and a historical photo of Biddaba, Warner’s former hilltop home, complete the current exhibition.
Margaret Brown (nee Warner) and Max Brown donated the sabre and family items to the council last year.
The sword is a timely reminder of the overlooked background of some of Lake Macquarie’s European pioneers.
For many of these hardy settlers had once been at the sharp end of battle and in middle-age were weary of war and seeking a new, and hopefully better, more peaceful life, in colonial NSW.
Warner had fought the French as a British officer during the Napoleonic Wars, mainly seeing service in the West Indies, especially during an action to seize the French-occupied island of Guadeloupe in 1810.
He would have been a courageous man, aggressive even when he felt he had to make a stand, or been wronged.
Warner had always had to make his own way in the world, only eight years old when his father died in 1794.
His career route was through Britain’s Royal Navy, then through various military units before he came to Australia at age 40 with his large family on the ship Orpheus in 1826.
Not long after, he retired from active duty and later tried his luck (unsuccessfully) as a farmer by Lake Macquarie.
Initially after retiring from military service, Warner found work as assistant surveyor of roads and bridges in the Wisemans Ferry district.
He even checked out a proposed road from the Hawkesbury to Maitland in 1828.
But life as a gentlemen farmer remained his dream, despite the unpromising light, sandy soil on his new land grant. Crops failed.
A biographer, one Frederick J.Weedman, writing in 1993, said early lake settlers like Warner did it incredibly tough.
Even with help from assigned convicts, it was a life of backbreaking toil, using very crude ploughs to break up the stubborn soil and grow grain.
To make ends meet, the frustrated Warner became a travelling magistrate to Brisbane Water (Gosford) in 1833, risking regular attack by bushrangers or hostile Aborigines.
Before that post, Warner built a two-storey, timber home called Biddaba on a hill near the present Warners Bay Public School on today’s Mills St. (The home became a local landmark for 100 years until finally demolished about 1932.)
In 1840, Warner subdivided part of his land grant, advertising it as the proposed township of Lymington (some sources say Warner was born at Lymington, in England).
The allotments remained unsold. It wasn’t until a third attempt in 1888 that lots started to sell.
By then, Warner had been dead for 45 years, dying in 1843 and leaving his widow to manage the estate.
An orange orchard became a success though and was a showplace as late as 1870.
By 1895, there were said to be only 18 permanent residents living in Warners Bay.
There also may have been up to nine attempts (up to 1924) to auction all of Warner’s original land grant.
By then, any early graves of the pioneers, marked with wooden crosses, had long since decayed or were lost.
But now, let’s return to Warner’s now-vanished Bidabba homestead at the top of the hill. The Indigenous name was once thought to mean ‘place of shells’, but actually means ‘silent resting place’ or ‘burial place’.
And now, here’s an odd postscript.
A well-known lake identity I’ll call X recently passed this tale he heard in the 1980s on to me.
“There’s supposed to be a family graveyard down the slope from Biddaba, the old homestead. Jonathan is said to be buried there, along with perhaps four or five children," X said.
“By the 1950s all nearby land had been subdivided. The overgrown family burial plot by then was on land partly occupied by a brick house owned by an Italian lady.
“One day, a handyman working to clean up a patch of the lady’s yard is said to have kicked over a gravestone.
“Some time later, just after the woman had a shower, as the mist started to clear in her bathroom, she looked in the mirror and saw standing behind her a stern figure in military uniform. Then it disappeared. True or not, this story always stuck with me,” X said.
Well, we’ll probably never know now if the story has any connection with Jonathan Warner unless, of course, the spectral figure happened to be missing an epaulette.
