William Redman was a Sydney solicitor who lived in today’s Forest Lodge but also practised in Forbes. He owned a good deal of what had been a Grose Farm paddock ‘opposite the university on the hill’ and, from the early 1860s, his city home was University Cottage ‘at the cut’ of Parramatta Road. This Forest Lodge section of Sydney’s major thoroughfare westward became known as Old Parramatta Road and is today’s Arundel Street. 

At that time the area was largely undeveloped as far as Orphan School Creek; for years Redman’s closest neighbour was blacksmith Christian Fehrenbach. Redman’s primary residence when he died was Greycliff on Arundel Terrace, a six-room (plus kitchen, laundry, bathroom) house with a large yard accommodating stables and a coach house. 

Redman was an alderman on Glebe Council from 1875 to 1877, and his wife’s family was connected with several addresses in Glebe: 47 Wigram Road; Oakwood and Willow Lodge on Pyrmont Bridge Road; and Sverige at 9 Avenue Road. Oakwood (also known as Oak Lodge) and Willow Lodge (also known as The Willows) have been demolished. 

William Redman was born in Sydney on 20 October 1823 to Mary Gibson and John Redman, convicts who married in 1812. John Redman, sentenced to 14 years’ transportation for sheep-stealing, had arrived in the colony in 1790. After being granted a conditional pardon, he was appointed a constable and was subsequently promoted to chief police constable and then governor of Sydney’s gaol. He was awarded government contracts, owned coastal steamers and property including ‘Redman’s yard’ on George Street, and was publican of the Keep Within Compass. Sentenced to 14 years for passing forged banknotes, Mary Gibson had arrived in the colony in 1810 aboard the Canada. The couple, who identified as Church of England, had at least six children: Martha Rebecca (1814-71), John (1815- 88) Joseph Sudbury (1816-69), Edward (1818-29), Robert (?-1864) and William. 

William was educated at Sydney College, its then headmaster the legendary W T Cape. A powerful swimmer, William raced competitively at Robinson’s baths, Woolloomooloo. After qualifying as a solicitor, he took off for the Turon gold diggings near Sofala and laid a successful claim at Lucky Point. Other miners accused him of blocking them from making their own claims. His later gold mining enterprise at Kiandra lost money. A strong supporter of free selection, Redman was elected MLA for Queanbeyan in 1860. In this capacity he soon made new enemies. Public meetings called for him to resign the position on the grounds that he was self-serving and did nothing for his constituents. He lost the seat to pastoralist Leopold de Salis in 1864. In the same year, the funeral of his younger brother Robert (of Cook’s River) left from Redman’s house on Parramatta Road.

In 1850 in Melbourne, Redman married Cecilia Adelaide Mary (1830-1912, also known as Celia), daughter of solicitor Horatio Nelson Carrington who was appointed Crown Prosecutor for Port Phillip. A free immigrant from the Isle of Man, Carrington was declared insolvent during the economic depression of the 1840s and died aged 39 at Windsor in NSW in 1845. Cecilia was close to her younger sister Isabel Annie who married John Elicius Benedict Dwyer in 1859 at Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral. He was a grandson of Irish rebel Michael Dwyer. In 1875 Isabel’s daughter Bernadetta Maria was born at the Redman house.

William Redman died of gout at his St Clair’s Farm in Belmore on 15 September 1882 and was buried in the Redman family vault in Devonshire Street Cemetery. A shrewd speculator, he had amassed a substantial property portfolio valued at probate at over £57 000. Apart from acreage in the country, he owned cottages and land in several Sydney suburbs including Ashfield, Lane Cove, St Leonards, Gordon, Petersham, Newtown and Liverpool.

Immediately after Redman’s death, his will was challenged by his surviving brother John who accused William’s widow and his Dwyer in-laws of exerting undue influence in its framing. The will (dating from 1860) had been made out not in the executor Sir George Wigram Allen’s office as would have been more usual, but in the Redman house and it had been witnessed by a servant, Johanna Maloney, who could not now be found. A flurry of legal notices ensued between Arthur Mansfield Allen acting for the widow and Thomas Marshall acting for the brother. A major complication was the swift remarriage of Cecilia Redman and her settlement of her inherited property.  

Like Charles Dickens’ Court of Chancery in Bleak House, the case dragged on for years. In 1950 the Permanent Trustee Company was still looking for creditors in the estate. Cecilia herself initiated actions in court, especially over disputed land tax charges. 

During the 1880s Isabel and John Dwyer rented Oakwood on Pyrmont Bridge Road where the Olympia Dramatic Club and Minerva Dramatic Society put on shows in a small theatre in the grounds. Living next door at Willow Lodge was Carl Albert Falstedt, a Swedish-born importer. A year after William Redman’s death, Falstedt married his widow, Cecilia, who was 18 years his junior. Carl Falstedt was appointed consul for Sweden and Norway in 1895. He died five years later in Stockholm.  

Cecilia Falstedt set up house at 9 Avenue Road which she christened Sverige, while her sister–the widowed and bankrupt Isabel Dwyer–was at 47 Wigram Road. Isabel’s funeral left Sverige after her death in June 1904, as did that of Isabel’s daughter Bernadetta Johnstone in November 1907. 

Cecilia Falstedt died at Sverige on 11 November 1912. A codicil in her will made a separate provision for valuable inherited real estate at Cook’s River, and arguments about William Redman’s will resurfaced in court. One of the litigants was Etela Joseph Redman, executor of both Cecilia’s will and that of Bernadetta Johnstone, and reputed to be a nephew of Isabel and Cecilia.

Etela Redman was a member of the Minerva Dramatic Society which performed at Oakwood.  He described himself as ‘a strong anti-socialist’. He was also a Theosophist, a supporter of Glebe politician Stanley Llewellyn Cole, and manager of a travelling exhibition of Thomas Edison’s inventions, the Vitascope and phonograph. He was appointed a Justice of the Peace in 1903, by which time he was living at Sverige where he remained until 1916 when he sold the household’s furniture and paintings. Giving his occupation as chemist and nephew Victor Carrington Dwyer as his next-of-kin, he enlisted in the Army Medical Corps in April 1917. Rejected for overseas service because of a heart condition, he was posted to the Field Hospital at Liverpool where he was reprimanded more than once for being drunk on duty. He self-discharged in August 1918.

Who Etela’s birth parents were is a mystery. He died aged 63 on 18 June 1931 at Sydney Hospital where the head porter signed the death certificate, giving their names as William and Isabella. According to a contemporary newspaper notice he was a son of John Dwyer and had been adopted by William Redman, solicitor. The legal firm handling a property claim after Etela’s death surmised that he was a natural son of William Redman, but were unable to find supporting documentation. 

Sources: Australian Archives; Births, Deaths and Marriages Victoria; Dictionary of Sydney; NSW electoral rolls; NSW Registry of Births, Deaths & Marriages; NSW State Archives; peopleaustralia.anu.edu.au; Sands Directories; Trove website.