From the archive: Cumberland Argus, Friday 11th June 1926.

THE PLATERS OF PARRAMATTA
Polish Family’s Romantic History
Story of Hardship and Persecution

The deaths of three old and highly respected residents of Parramatta, Emily Laura Plater, Rachael Kosciuszko Plater, and Emilian Paul Casimir Plater, which were referred to last week, revives a romance of a Polish family who lived in seclusion in the district for nearly a century.

Their father, Count Lucien de Broel Plater, revolted against the truculent tyranny of Russia in 1830, when he was ordered to fight against his countrymen; and deserted from the army of which he was an officer.

Count Plater was a wealthy nobleman; and when forced to flee, he left to the mercy of the enemy all his estate, and most of his personal belongings.

In the year to which we refer, the whole of Poland was stirred. The nation was in the throes of a huge revolt. Women and girls fought beside their husbands and brothers. And most prominent among the amazons was Emilia Plater, cousin of the father of the three veterans whom death claimed last week.

In Polish history she is to the nation what Joan of Arc was to the French. Her valor was a theme for numerous poems.

Emilia Plater lived in a wild part of the country, near the Lithuanian forests, where for years she had practiced riding and shooting so as to be ready when the moment of rising came.

At the first sign of revolution she dressed herself as a colonel, and, hastening from village to village, armed the peasants. Side by side with a girl friend she fought, and eventually she set out for Warsaw, hoping to join the Polish forces there; but after a perilous journey, she fell, exhausted, at the door of a peasant’s hut. She was hidden and cared for, but a few days later the news of the fall of Warsaw reached her, and she died of a broken heart.

Thus, probably, she avoided the long journey to Siberia, where one of her relatives and the relatives of Lucien, Count the Broel Plater, then a refugee in England, had been driven.

But her name will always be the rallying call for the Polish patriot, and her example fired her cousin, the Count Lucien, who gave her name to one of his sons, Emilian Casimir, and to his eldest daughter, Emily Laura, who died last week.

But he had other examples near to his heart to inspire him, for “The Lithuanian Maid” was but one of the long line of noble scions of his family who had striven to unmould the said destiny of Poland. The most famous of them, to Australians at any rate – because one of our mountains has been named after him – was Kosciuszko, his uncle, who in 1794 stood before the peasants whom he had armed with scythes, and declared that he would never rest until he had delivered Poland from her masters.

He had already made himself famous by his activities in America, where with Washington, Franklin, and Lafayette, he had fought the war of independence. He died in exile in Switzerland at a great age, but in Cracow. A huge mound, nearly 100 ft high, was built of earth taken from all the places where he had fought. Men and women from all parts of Poland brought mould to raise the monument, and to-day it stands, overlooking his famous city.

At this period, with a heavy and remorseless hand, Russia was wreacking a terrible retribution, and its spies watched closely the young Count Lucien, for the moment safely guarded in England – the refuge and sanctuary of the persecuted and outcast from all corners of the Continent.

Count Lucien was a much-wanted man, for his family had been deeply involved in the revolutions. How famous and important he was, one realises when one hears that Miss Emily Plater had collected an enormous number of letters from such notable Englishman as Lord Palmerston, afterwards Foreign Secretary, welcoming the young nobleman to England, and offering him assistance.

Many of these letters, it is interesting to notice, arrived 70 years late, after having followed Count Lucien over the world.

English society welcomed the distinguished refugees, and at a reception he met an English lady, a miss Charlotte Price-Duffus, whom he married.

When their child (the late Miss Emily Plater) was less than 2 years old they decided to leave England and seclude themselves in Australia; and in the Thirties they settled at Parramatta. Already the brother of Miss Duffus, the Rev. John Duffus, had preceded them, and at St Luke’s, Liverpool, had become a valuable curate.

Lucien was well attuned to suffering by this time, but of his hardships in the Australia of those desperate days he often spoke sadly. What equipment has he for life in a country where everything was raw and uncultivated? He had been trained as a nobleman, and could not even speak English. He struggled desperately, turning his hand to a multitude of tasks, but generally teaching French in the schools, until he fell in with the Macarthur family, the members of which helped him. They became his friends, and when he decided to accept the amnesty offered him by the Russian government they advanced him the money to make the trip.

Count Lucien Plater lived in this rented house at 90, George Street, Parramatta (Sydney). Photographed by Andrzej Kozek, 25th January 2006.

Remembering, however, the fate of those of this family and friends who had fallen into the hands of the enemy, he decided not to go back to Poland, and settled definitely in Parramatta.

Lucien Platter raised a large family of 10 sons and daughters, of whom only four now remain – Messrs: Lucien (85), Louis (76), and Michael (70), and Mrs. Andrew Jones (79) – and nearly 60 years ago, while comparatively young, he died.

Miss Emily Plater was a countess of the blood, but the family hid its identity behind unpretentious title of the commoner, and few knew that the descendants of the Polish patriots, Kosciuszko and Emilia Plater, lived modestly in Parramatta.

They were prominently associated with St John’s Church of England, Parramatta, and Miss Emily and Miss Rachael taught for some time in private schools there and at Auburn.

Mr. Emilian Plater was for many years manufacturing confectioner in Parramatta, a work which he had learnt from his father, who had practised the art as a pastime while he studied at Paris during his university days.

The families relationships with other families and famous men are intensely interesting, and papers tracing these connections were collected by the late Miss Emily Plater. It is interesting to observe also that Mr. Andrew Jones, husband of Miss Josephine Hedwiga Plater, who lives at Westmead, is a son of that Jones, of Paternoster Row, publisher who was closely associated with the publication of the early works of Charlotte Bronte, and a relative of Burne-Jones.

There are other branches of the famous and widely-scattered Plater family on the Continent, and one of them instituted not very long ago an interesting action to recover from the United State Government compensation totalling £ 21,000,000 for the land on which Chicago has been built. This, they say, Washington gave to their ancestor, Kosciuszko, as a payment for his services in the war against England.

The Parramatta family made no such sensational disclosure of its identity and it was only the three deaths from old age and influenza last week which lit up for a moment its romantic and historic past.

Text: courtesy Dick Pyke of Macarthur House, Parramatta, February 2006.