Read The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women Online

Authors: Deborah J. Swiss

Tags: #Convict labor, #Australia & New Zealand, #Australia, #Social Science, #Convict labor - Australia - Tasmania - History - 19th century, #Penology, #Political, #Women prisoners - Australia - Tasmania - History - 19th century, #General, #Penal transportation, #Exiles - Australia - Tasmania - History - 19th century, #Penal transportation - Australia - Tasmania - History - 19th century, #Social History, #Biography & Autobiography, #Tasmania, #Women, #Women's Studies, #Women prisoners, #19th Century, #History

The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (2 page)

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During the nineteenth century, twenty-five thousand women were discarded by their homeland. For many, that journey began with the accident of being born poor and the crime of stealing food or an article of clothing. Yet by sheer force of will, those who survived forged a promising future and became the heart and soul of a new nation. In marked contrast to Britain’s rigid class system, freed convicts built, in record time, a society that enjoyed a vibrant economy alongside easy mobility between classes. Women who were banished by their home country saved a new colony from collapse, accelerated social change, and were among the first in the world to gain the right to vote and to own property.

Their epic tale reveals universal themes involving the depths and heights of humanity, long-suppressed intergenerational secrets, and the potential for nobility that lies within us all. Though some historians paint women like Agnes, Janet, Ludlow, and Bridget as harlots and criminals of the worst order, they were among the most resourceful and resilient women of their generation. Every breath and every step was a choice to survive rather than succumb to their captors’ cruelty. Theirs is a story of courage, transformation, and triumph.

1

The Grey-Eyed Girl

Bloody Christmas, Bloody Hell

The lush coastal hinterland offered a perfect day for Christmas 1869. The temperature was a lovely seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit. At the head of the table, Grandpa William rose from his seat, cleared his throat, and recited a prayer from the Bible. It was time to carve the traditional mutton and ham. Every December, the red flowers of the native Christmas bush came into bloom just in time for the holiday and filled the vases in the center of the handmade cedar table. On the sideboard, buttery cakes stacked with kiwifruit sat next to the cooling mince pie.

Grandmum Agnes hurried to the kitchen and took a plum pudding out of the wood-fired oven. She brought it straight to the table and, to the delight of the three-generation clan, set it aflame with brandy. Everyone knew what was coming next. A small silver sixpence had been surreptitiously placed inside. Whoever found it on his or her plate would enjoy good luck for the coming year.

Agnes McMillan Roberts already considered herself a lucky woman and counted her good fortune every single day. Just a year earlier, the British government had overturned the Transportation Act, a social engineering experiment that had exiled 162,000 women, men, and children from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Thirty-three years ago, at age fifteen, Agnes had been shipped from Glasgow to Van Diemen’s Land (present-day Tasmania), the small island off the southern coast of Australia. It had proven to be both a curse and a blessing.

After the Christmas feast, Agnes moved to her favorite spot. Sitting on the sprawling porch, she looked out on her seven children and seven grandchildren, who came to visit Lismore every summer. Situated between the sea and the subtropical rain forest known as the “Big Scrub,” Lismore, Australia, had been founded by a Scotsman who had honeymooned on an island of the same name in Agnes’s home country. The family matriarch had grown accustomed to seasons turned upside down from the land of lochs and northern lights where she was born forty-nine years ago. Although she still maintained a hint of the Scottish brogue, her secret past lay securely cloistered in the confidence of her husband, William, and her longtime childhood friend, Janet Houston.

As her grandchildren played hide-and-seek along the banks of the Richmond River, Agnes chuckled at the skinny legs that peeked out from their short pants. She reached for a cup of hot India tea, freshly brewed to wash down the midday feast. Wisps of silver hair blew gently in the seasonable breeze, framing grey eyes the color of steel and a gaze that seemed to go on forever. The same rare color of the eyes of Athena, the Greek warrior goddess known for her strength and wisdom, Agnes’s eyes mirrored these traits. Her Scottish eyes had witnessed the births and deaths of people and nations. Today they sparkled in December’s summer sun.

The content matron, just over five feet tall, rocked back in her chair and considered how far she had traveled. Neither her children nor her grandchildren knew anything about Grandmum’s early Christmases, including the one thirty-seven years before that changed the course of her life and made theirs possible. She started to hum. It was an old melody, one her mother had taught her, one she had sung on the streets of Glasgow so many years ago.

It was December 27, 1832. The gas lamps glowed in icy orbs that ran in crooked rows throughout the sleepy town. Even by Scotland’s standards, the weather was horrid. Gale-force winds from the west pelted heavy downpours onto the small faces that bobbed in and out from the protective doorways in the wynds by the Green. It had been raining for days and days. Temperatures hovered just above freezing. “Bloody Christmas, bloody hell,” muttered the street people.

In a dense alleyway along the River Clyde, twelve-year-old Agnes McMillan shivered and huddled close to her friend Janet. Her breath billowed white and frosty, and she pulled what was left of a scarf over her nose. The two girls had eaten nothing for days but “Irish apricots” and had a taste for something other than potatoes. Some nights, even in the wettest winter months, they slept in a doorway, other nights in an outhouse. Pilfering a slice of bread from a street vendor was commonplace, but that didn’t pay for lodging. For homeless waifs like Agnes and Janet, sleeping in a bed, typically with several others, was a luxury they could seldom afford.

At this time of year, there were only seven hours of daylight, and nightfall arrived by four in the afternoon. Under the cover of Glasgow’s darkest recesses, the fated duo hatched a plan to celebrate the holidays with clean clothes and fresh lamb. Theft had become their lifeline. Four friends from the streets were in on the plan, and together they targeted a gabled mansion in the rich part of town, where for several days not a single candle had flickered. The owner, a widow named Elizabeth Barbour, had likely traveled from her Fife Place home for holiday merry-making at a country estate.
1
After all, it was bloody Christmas.

As the clocks marked midnight, every ounce of Agnes’s cunning centered on the task at hand. It was time to accomplish something more than mere survival in Scotland’s toughest town. Since her father had disappeared and her mother had basically abandoned her, Agnes had managed to get by and make a few coins singing ballads near the Glasgow Green. Although she could neither read nor write, she’d remembered the songs her mother taught her and put together a repertoire for impromptu street performances. At twelve, the lithe lassie with a bit of a voice often attracted a small crowd of passersby, but the day had been too miserable to sing.

Friend and protector Janet Houston had taken the ever-hopeful ballad singer under her wing because she knew firsthand what it took to survive in Glasgow’s unforgiving alleys. Both Janet’s mother and father had passed away. The thirteen-year-old sometimes slept at her aunt Gibson’s flat, but that was not always an option; Janet also relied on a network of small-time neighborhood thieves who managed to steal enough to pay for food and shelter. They often banded together to pilfer food from street vendors, but tonight they gathered around the Glasgow Green to gamble on the higher stakes of a house break.

Creeping along the ghostly edges of the tightly built stone structures, the co-conspirators made their way through the wynds, the winding passages that would deliver them to the city’s upscale West End. The girls approached the mansion’s iron gate and gave a quick glance up and down the lane. This was the moment when they would make their move. The neatly swept neighborhood seemed nearly deserted. Looking skyward toward the graceful lancet windows, Agnes paced nervously and pulled her wet shawl tighter. This had to be easier work than picking the pockets of a “groggified” pedestrian or pilfering meat from a sharp-eyed butcher. It seemed simple enough. Breaking a rear kitchen window provided the typical point of entry for small-time burglars. A quick smash of the pane and they’d be in, out, and gone. The scraggly housebreakers held their breath as the sound of shattering glass settled into the night. They waited for a moment, ears tuned, hearts pounding, ready to flee at the first sound of a footstep.

The older, more street-savvy Janet reached through the jagged glass. She lifted the bolt and unlatched the door. Ever so carefully she leaned her shoulder into the heavy ash frame and cracked it open, sending the smoky smell of mutton into the damp night air. The well-stocked larder was bolted shut to prevent the maids from stealing. Hunger, all too familiar, would need to wait. Out of the wind in the still of the mansion, fully charged with adrenaline, the girls set to work. Gold watches, silver spoons, silk scarves, and fashionable gloves were the prime targets for young thieves. There was no time to ponder how much the wealthy could afford to lose. The gang of six quickly snatched up items they could hide inside their shawls and sell unquestioned at the pawnshop. They had ten minutes, at most, to complete the heist.

Mission completed, the nervous trespassers darted through the swinging back gate, confident that this was going to be a holiday they would enjoy. They were wrong, terribly wrong. Agnes McMillan, Janet Houston, and the rest of the troop charged straight into the grasp of a waiting constable, who knew all too well what the sound of breaking glass meant. They must have been novices. Experienced thieves took the time to learn the regular route for police patrols and took advantage of a force too lean to keep up with the rising tide of Glasgow crime.

Flushed and gasping for air, Agnes “lied with a latchet,” the Scottish term for telling a big fib. She did her best to talk her way out of being trapped with the others, but there was no escape. According to Glasgow court records, the grey-eyed waif told the officer that her name was Agnes Reddie, perhaps out of shame, or out of naïve desire that a different name would protect her from wearing the chains that rattled in his pocket. This was the first arrest for the pink-cheeked street urchin, but she had already faced off against bad tidings more times than she could count. She would confront this latest predicament with Janet at her side.

Goosedubbs Street

Agnes McMillan was born to an age of extremes in social class, politics, and physical environment. The years leading to her parents’ marriage had been tangled in one national disaster after another. As Mary Henderson and Michael McMillan moved into adulthood, climate, political upheaval, and geography conspired against their future.

The year 1815 opened with the promise of peace when Britain ended its three-year war with America on February 18. Any euphoria, however, was short-lived. That March, Napoleon returned to power and terrorized Europe yet again. Michael McMillan, like thousands of young Scots, was conscripted under the command of the Duke of Wellington and the Seventh Coalition. Thankfully, by June the coalition had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. Unfortunately, as one war ended, a battle of a different sort exploded.

On a remote Indonesian island called Sumbawa, the jungle grew silent and the ground began to shudder as Mt. Tambora spewed its molten heart into the atmosphere. Though it occurred five years before Agnes’s birth, the most powerful eruption in ten thousand years, and the largest ever recorded, changed the world’s climate and magnified the struggle her parents would face to put bread on the table. The massive surge of volcanic ash circling the globe could be neither stopped nor controlled. When Michael McMillan returned to Glasgow from the Belgium battlefields in 1816, brown snow fell throughout Europe. It was “the year without a summer.” Birds fell frozen from the sky. Crops failed all across the British Isles, and families went to bed hungry night after night. “Bread or blood” became their battle cry as food riots broke out, protesting the skyrocketing price of wheat.

Amid this chaos and uncertainty, Mary Henderson fell in love with Michael McMillan. Many young women, including Mary, married after the return of the soldiers, prompting a baby boom. This population explosion was ill-timed to coincide with an implosion of the British economy, but Michael was lucky and found a steady job working for the railroad.

Scottish citizens were part of Great Britain’s kingdom, joined by the Act of Union in 1707 and subject to the laws of Parliament. Mary and Michael McMillan would certainly have despaired over their daughter’s future had they known how people like themselves were described in a report to Parliament on administration of the Poor Laws in Scotland: “The people who dwell in those quarters of the city are sunk to the lowest possible state of personal degradation in whom no elevated idea can be expected to arise, and who regard themselves, from the hopelessness of their condition, as doomed to a life of wretchedness and crime. . . . They nightly issue to disseminate disease and to pour upon the town every species of abomination and crime.”
2
Agnes’s parents were likely spared this prediction because nearly all the poor were illiterate.

Agnes was born on September 11, 1820, in a tenement flat on Goosedubbs Street, a narrow lane in the center of Glasgow’s worst slum. It was a gruesome affair, assisted by a midwife who would not have washed her hands nor cleaned the dingy muslin in which Agnes was wrapped. A woman’s strength in surviving childbirth bode well for a baby born in the pre-Victorian era. Twenty percent of mothers died in labor.

In stark contrast to most new citizens, the future Queen Victoria was birthed with the assistance of a female obstetrician and several attending doctors. Baby Victoria entered the world “as plump as a partridge”
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the year before Agnes was born and held the honor of being the first member of the royal family vaccinated against smallpox.

As a parent, Mary McMillan carried the additional responsibilities of a factory laborer and was expected to be on her feet for fourteen-hour shifts throughout her pregnancy. A woman who worked in a mill since childhood commonly paid the price of a narrow and deformed pelvis, which made labor difficult and increased infant mortality. This deformity was caused by the stress of standing without movement coupled with malnutrition. As Mary stumbled toward what she hoped would be a better future, the only work available endangered her health and the life of her unborn child.

BOOK: The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women
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