The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (17 page)

On the third of December 1836, the captain anchored the
Westmoreland
in Sullivans Cove. It was seven months to the day since Agnes and Janet had been convicted of their crimes in Ayr. The two naïvely optimistic lasses had faith that they would brave this strange and mysterious destination together. It was not to be so.

5

More Sinned Against Than Sinning

Birds of a Feather

The stormy heavens exploded in driving rain and spectacular lightning displays over Sullivans Cove. Blustering westerly winds pelted hailstones across the
Westmoreland
’s wooden deck. Surgeon Superintendent Ellis ordered all the prisoners belowdecks. If this was supposed to be summer, Agnes couldn’t begin to fathom what winter might bring. The
Hobart Town Courier
recorded weather so awful in December 1836 that migrating birds failed to stop on the island: “The unusual inclemency of the present season is doubtless the cause of this phenomenon. No inhabitant of the island has any recollection of so long a continuance of cold fluctuating weather, which appears to have affected many other objects of nature besides the swallows, the absence of which our correspondent has so well remarked.”
¹
Even the raucous yellow-tailed black cockatoos avoided Van Diemen’s Land the year Agnes arrived.

The
Westmoreland
anchored off Hunter Island in the River Derwent. Mr. Ellis was immediately rowed ashore to meet with local officials and turn over his now-dog-eared leather ledger along with court records for each prisoner. Because it was Saturday and government offices were closed on Sunday, the transfer of paperwork would take four full days. The gravely ill couldn’t wait that long and were moved to the Hobart Town Colonial Hospital.

Seventeen-year-old Jane Thompson, who’d spent most of the sea journey inside the
Westmoreland
’s infirmary, was lowered into the waiting skiff lashed to a stretcher. After being transported around the world, she died seven days later in a ward full of strangers. Sarah Robinson was also sent to the hospital, suffering from complications after giving birth to her baby girl in the water closet a few weeks earlier. Mary Ring and Sarah Slow, both in the final stages of pregnancy, found comfort in the prospect of giving birth on dry land.
²

Quarantined in limbo on the orlop deck, Agnes and Janet lay in their berths, not daring to contemplate where they’d sleep next. At the unexpected hour of six A.M., shouting blasted from the forecastle. “Rouse out there! Turn out! Turn out! Huzzah for the shore!” screamed the Officer of the Guard.
³
A drowsy Agnes opened her eyes and sat up with a start. She grabbed the little burlap bag given her by Mrs. Fry and tied it tight to protect her small comb and a few stray pieces of colored thread. The remnants of her Bible had turned grey and mildewed, so she left it on the straw mattress and headed under the hatch toward the main deck.

It was Tuesday the sixth of December, and Captain Brigstock awaited the arrival of Josiah Spode, Principal Superintendent of Convicts. He arrived accompanied by Muster Master William Thomas Napier Champ, a British soldier previously charged with the government mission to hunt down Aborigines. The two stern men were rowed from Hobart Town to the
Westmoreland
by male convicts who’d been conscripted into the police force because of a shortage of both funding and able men.

Spode, now a naval officer, had once worked in his grandfather’s famous pottery business in England. He had little tolerance for the women, deeming them “worse in every respect to manage than male convicts. . . . They all feel they are working under compulsion which renders it almost a continual warfare between their employers and themselves.”
⁴
Champ, who later became the first premier of Tasmania, was the record keeper for all convicts and also served as assistant police magistrate in Hobart Town.

Called in numerical order, Agnes and Janet were hurried on deck for inspection. Eyeing the grey-eyed lass up and down, Muster Master Champ compared the surgeon superintendent’s descriptions against the sixteen-year-old standing before him. As he evaluated Agnes’s health and ability to work, Champ considered her skills for assignment to a local colonist. Agnes confirmed that she could neither read nor write. According to indent records, when Muster Master Champ asked, “What is your trade?” she responded, “House servant.”
⁵
Janet gave the same answer when it was her turn.

It took nearly two days to examine and interview the prisoners. Neither Mr. Spode nor Mr. Champ wanted to be blamed for disembarking contagiously ill transports. The whole colony had recently suffered from an outbreak of influenza, probably carried by a ship’s passenger from London.
⁶
After consulting with Surgeon Superintendent Ellis, the two bureaucrats finally cleared his charges for landing. The women and their children were rowed ashore to Hunter Island and walked over a muddy convict-built causeway, connecting the isle to Hobart Town. The girls from Glasgow finally heard the annoying toll of the
Westmoreland
bells for the last time. Catcalls from the wharf soon replaced the harsh clanging from the ship. A crowd of scruffy-looking creatures raced toward the waterfront to inspect the Crown’s latest chattel.

While the
Westmoreland
lay at anchor, Agnes had taken a good look at where she was headed. The busy little port of fourteen thousand sat on the river below soft green hills that lay dominated by the cliffs of an enormous mountain. The strangest creatures Agnes had ever seen bounced over the slopes on their huge hind legs and disappeared into the lush countryside. Black swans with bright red beaks floated at river’s edge. Seagulls flying overhead appeared like the ones seen in the British Isles, but their calls were sharply different.
⁷
Everything, even the scavenger birds, seemed topsy-turvy.

Journalist Minister John West offers a clue about how Agnes felt on the day she set foot on the other side of the earth. Eleven years her senior, he lived in Tasmania in 1836 and wrote about the convicts who were among the first transported: “The letters they addressed to their friends . . . were filled with lamentations. They deeply deplored that the distance of their exile cut off the hope of return . . . they expected to be destroyed by savages, or to pine away in want. The females seemed least to fear their banishment; and while several of the men were deeply moved, a spectator, who curiously remarked the mental influence of their prospects, saw only one woman weep.”
⁸

Convict men outnumbered the female prisoners by nearly nine to one, creating an imbalance of uncivilized proportions. The arrival of a boatload of women quickly drew most Hobart Town men toward the wharves. “All kinds of men, except apparently decent ones, would gather round the waterfront and form an almost impossible mob, through which the girls had to make their way, the while insults, lewd suggestions, and all kind of horrible offers were hurled at them to the intense amusement of the crowd and the horror of those who were good among the girls. . . .”
⁹

These days, men queued up at the quayside were still rambunctious, but less barbaric than in the early days of transport, when a man could buy a bonnie lass right on the spot in exchange for a bottle of rum. During the first twenty years of transport, female prisoners were left to fend for themselves. If a settler didn’t choose a woman, she was forced to find lodging on her own.
¹⁰
“There was little delicacy of choice: they landed, and vanished; and some carried into the bush, changed their destination before they reached their homes.”
¹¹

Fortunately, the two Scottish birds in forced exile arrived as a pair. Janet held tight to her friend’s hand, and they both looked straight ahead, ignoring the screaming men who waved hats in their faces. Back on solid ground for the first time in 117 days, Agnes’s not-so-steady land legs took their first rubbery steps onto the shores of Van Diemen’s Land. A contingent of soldiers, dressed in scarlet uniforms, stood stiffly as Muster Master Champ directed the girls to wait for the next group. Under his watchful gaze, Agnes smelled the mud flats and took in the ramshackle riverfront wooden cottages and stone watermills, which created little waterfalls as they turned.
¹²
Wharfside pubs filled with sailors, a bond store, and warehouses for importers and exporters signaled the importance of this shipping port. The
Westmoreland
’s cargo was bound for a warehouse of a different sort, a fortress known as the Cascades Female Factory.

Like livestock on the way to market, the 182 women and 18 children were paraded up Macquarie Street from the turn at the Old Wharf. Several women, in various stages of pregnancy, lumbered up the muddy hill a bit slower than the rest. Lagging as far behind as the soldiers allowed was Anne Sergeantson, the red-haired nursemaid who’d lost her six-day-old infant a few weeks earlier.

When clouds thundered down the valley and let loose a drenching rain, the leering welcome party began to disperse. The shift given to Agnes by Mrs. Fry’s volunteers in Newgate had worn quite thin, and she shivered under the soaking onslaught. Giant leafy ferns trembled in the wind gusts, like another group of mocking spectators along the route.

The well-guarded entourage marched past Government House, the courthouse, and St. David’s Church. The stucco and painted brick cathedral was crowned by a black lead-covered dome known as the “pepper pot.” When the pepper pot’s three-faced clock chimed the hour, it resounded all across the valley.
¹³
If Agnes thought she had heard the last of ringing bells, she was sadly mistaken.

St. David’s was one of several churches where settlers, soldiers, and convicts gathered Sunday morning, the prisoners seated separately. Sometimes blurred but never forgotten, lines of class distinction followed Agnes to Van Diemen’s Land. Few settlers could avoid mingling with the transports who kept the economy afloat, but the “convicts sometimes appeared like a pariah caste rather than a lower class.”
¹⁴
Under his scruffy hair and unkempt beard, Muster Master Champ sat proudly in a front pew. Slayer of Aborigines in the Black War, the future premier condemned the petty thieves, who were more sinned against than sinning.

An 1838 Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Transportation summarized the welcome extended for Agnes and Janet: “For want of servants a settler must apply to Government for convicts. He then becomes a slave-owner, not like the planters of the West Indies, or of the southern states of America, whose slaves, if not by nature, by education in bondage at least, are an inferior race, and having from youth been ignorant of freedom, consider it almost an honour to serve the white. On the other hand, the Australian settler has a property in men of his own race, hardened, desperate, and profligate ruffians, who have been nurtured in vice and crime, and have given way to the vilest passions.”
¹⁵

Conditions were even worse before Cascades opened. Women were imprisoned in an overcrowded holding area tacked onto the Hobart Town male prison and overlooking the execution yard, loosely guarded by male convicts; “trafficking,” or contact with the outside world, was all too easy. In 1827, a concerned citizen wrote a letter to the local paper expressing his consternation over the “immorality of the lower class of people in Van Diemen’s Land.” He offered the following details: “I remember one night walking by the building . . . at the time the females were confined there; when I saw the place surrounded by many fellows, who were feeing the constables and sentries to gain admission, while language and imprecations the most disgusting and appalling issued from within. The next day I mentioned the circumstances to several persons, who said it was useless to kick up a stir about it, for no notice would be taken of it.”
¹⁶

As the demand for female servants grew and transport numbers rose, Lieutenant Governor Arthur responded in December 1828 by opening a new gaol in a converted rum distillery well outside the town. It was christened the Cascades Female Factory, belying its true purpose. Five years prior, Elizabeth Fry had approached Britain’s Under Secretary of State for the Colonies with recommendations that he passed on to the governor. Her ideas for prison reform included specific plans for a new women’s gaol, and Governor Arthur adopted most of them. Once again, the timely intervention of the Angel of Newgate saved Agnes, Janet, and many others from a fate even worse than the frightening scene they now faced.

In 1830, the gaoled women had witnessed the hanging of Mary McLauchlan, who had been transported from Glasgow for theft by housebreaking. Forced to leave her husband and two young daughters behind, she found herself pregnant by a man in Hobart Town who refused to recognize his paternity. As was often the case for convict maids with child, the father was likely her master. The baby either was stillborn or died soon after birth, and Mary was convicted of killing him. A large crowd gathered to witness the hanging of the woman who wore a white dress tied with a black ribbon.
¹⁷
Mary McLauchlan was the first woman executed in Van Diemen’s Land.

Agnes stared at the tall gaol barricade along Macquarie Street, a monument of the penal colony’s history and the first transport of three women in 1803. By the year the
Westmoreland
disembarked, public spectacles in Hobart Town were less gruesome. Freed convicts and settlers who were arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct spent a few hours in the town stocks, located prominently in front of the Macquarie Street Treasury. Female prisoners who acted out were punished away from town, unseen behind the thick stone walls of Cascades.