The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (29 page)

All went smoothly at Liverpool Street save the death of one toddler in September 1841. The climate remained relatively mild after a freak snowstorm on September 13. By October, spring unfolded its arms in earnest as the days grew longer and temperatures climbed into the sixties. Janet, William, and Agnes spent the next few months together under Ludlow’s watchful eye. The two young women felt like girls again, and their exuberance lifted the spirits of everyone in the nursery. It was going to be a bloody good Christmas—and baby William’s first. Agnes could sing the little lad a right fine version of “Auld Lang Syne.” The weather was clear and a balmy seventy degrees for the Scots’ Hogmanay toast in 1842. With pubs located around the corner from the nursery, spirits easily found their way into the dilapidated kitchen.

As they headed through the warm January summer, Janet could not hold back the dreadful future that lay ahead. Forced to wean William in early February, precisely six months from the day he was born, Janet at first refused to leave the nursery. With the onset of six months’ hard labor for the crime of unwed pregnancy, she’d be allowed to visit her infant son only once a week. Ludlow tried to comfort the loving mother, reminding her that she could visit William the following Sunday, and Agnes would rock him to sleep once the kitchen was clean and tidy at night. Still inconsolable at being separated from her son, Janet trudged down Liverpool Street, a watchful magistrate at her side.

Janet’s Sunday visit never happened. Baby William Houston died on Wednesday, February 9, 1842. Over the next six weeks, Ludlow and Agnes were present at the deaths of six more children, ranging in age from seven to fifteen months. Janet’s sweet son must have succumbed to one of the deadly outbreaks that struck the overcrowded little house with neither warning nor recourse. Now it was Agnes’s turn to assume the role of protector for the loyal mate who’d always watched out for her. Somehow she persuaded nursery matron Mrs. Slea to allow her to tag along and retrieve Janet from the washtubs at Cascades. It was the worst moment the two childhood friends had ever faced.

Back at Liverpool Street, Nurse Tedder gently washed little William and wrapped him in a layer of off-white muslin. Numb with grief, Janet hurried into the nursery and snuggled her son against her heart one last time before his final passage toward the harbor. Mrs. Slea lined a wooden box with scraps of cloth before she placed the infant inside. Agnes held tight to one arm and Ludlow the other as they helped Janet down Liverpool Street to Harrington, walking the three blocks in silence. Onlookers fell to deferential quiet as they viewed the common sight of a roughly hewn gumwood crate turned tiny makeshift coffin.

As they neared the town’s oldest burial grounds at the corner of Harrington and Davey Streets, a summer breeze off the River Derwent spread the essence of eucalyptus over the ragged funeral procession. A bit run-down, St. David’s Cemetery was set on a quiet plot surrounded by twisted gum trees, their leafy branches cradling the edges of the burial plots.

Situated near the busy harbor, the cemetery was visible to many passersby who witnessed the two or three prisoner burials nearly every day of the week. So common were Hobart Town funerals that citizens spoke of the rare “maiden day” when not a soul was buried. Hugh Hull, a former Londoner and now government official, observed convict burials about the same time as William’s passing: “A few words are mumbled over the body by the purse-proud Clergyman, who as he receives nothing for the business, very soon hurries it over . . . and the hole is not filled up for two days. . . . The thistle takes the place of sweet, lowly flowers which usually bloom in churchyards and there is no one to cut them down. . . .”
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The occasional goat would slip through a hole in the stone wall and graze over the graves until someone shooed it away.
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On a bright and clear February morning between the summer storms, three women wearing the telltale Cascades grey shuffled across the cemetery to St. David’s far corner. An unpaid and uninterested minister joined the three prisoners and Mrs. Slea on the lush green near a freshly dug shallow grave. He opened his Bible and began to recite the words he already knew: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. . . .” Janet heard nary a word, as her eyes remained fixed on the smooth grey bark covering her son. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. . . .” Under the scent of blue-green eucalyptus trees, two friends who’d shared so many sorrows watched little William unceremoniously lowered into the ground. Leaning tight against each other, together they shouldered the grief and pondered its senselessness. Janet spent a last moment bidding her firstborn farewell. Just as the small group turned away, they heard the hollow scraping sound of the groundskeeper’s shovel as he scattered a few piles of dirt over the tiny coffin.

Yard Two

Other than Agnes’s arm draped over her shoulder, the luxury of comfort remained out of Janet’s reach. After a last moment with Agnes and Ludlow at the nursery, the weeping mother was returned to Yard Two’s stone washtubs, where she’d complete her six-month punishment for giving birth to a baby now deceased. As she scrubbed in the half shadows of Yard Two, a deadened Janet felt neither the stone scraping her skinny elbows nor the muddy groundwater seeping over her toes.

Slowly, as summer faded into fall, Janet began to feel again. Numbness wore away and exposed a rage on the edge of eruption. The grieving mother seethed with fury toward a system that forced early weaning and placed baby William in the overcrowded infant ward, where he received insufficient nourishment and little attention. For a time, she dutifully carried out twelve-hour work assignments, collapsing in her low-slung hammock for fitful sleep. Every night at mandatory chapel, the mourning mother faced Holy Willie, the reverend who had successfully lobbied for the punishment she now endured for unwed pregnancy. Janet’s emotions certainly ran full bore as she damned Heaven and the Fates for their cruelty. Above all, she must have detested the Reverend Bedford from the depths of her soul. On his recommendation, Superintendent Hutchinson condemned and punished all pregnant convicts, regardless of the circumstances.
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On March 17, five weeks after she’d buried her son, Janet lashed out against the convict system. Her refusal to leave her hammock and get to work brought six days back in solitary confinement.

The bloody bastards, what more can they take away?

Godfrey Charles Mundy, a colonel in the British army, toured the Female Factory and recorded his observations about solitary confinement in the book
Our Antipodes
. At first, he applauded “bread-and-water discussed in silence and solitude—things that no woman loveth,” deeming it “merciful” and “discreet” punishment.
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But the colonel would later eat his own words when he asked the turnkey to unlock a series of massive doors in the solitary ward. After inspecting two cells where women sat glumly at work, they pried open a third cell door. Mundy described what he saw:

It looked like the den of a wolf. . . . From the extreme end of the floor I found a pair of bright, flashing eyes fixed on mine. . . . It was a small, slight, and quite young girl—very beautiful in feature and complexion—but it was the fierce beauty of a wild cat! . . . I fear that the pang of pity that shot across my heart when that pretty prisoner was shut again from the light of day, might have found no place there had she been as ugly as the sins that had brought her into trouble. I had no more stomach for solitary cells this day.
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Janet’s solitary chamber held a mildewed mattress on the floor, a stool, and a bucket for waste. But no punishment could be worse than the loss of her child. The despondent mother quietly curled up against the cold stone, drawing herself into the fetal position.

One week after her release from solitary, up to her elbows in dirty washtub water, a despairing Janet heard the whisper of a familiar voice. A cheeky Agnes had simply walked out of the Liverpool Street nursery and represented herself as a free woman when stopped by a suspicious constable. For this, a magistrate escorted her back to Cascades to begin four months once again in Yard Two. Since the passing of William, whom she’d come to adore like a nephew, she’d seen in rapid succession six more children carried from Liverpool Street to St. David’s Cemetery. At an age at which she had good reason to think about a family of her own, Agnes couldn’t face another infant death.

Reunited with Janet back in the valley, Agnes tried to cheer her mate, regaling her with tales about the dark-haired dashing prince she’d spotted on the night he galloped through Oatlands on a wild horse. Janet found a bit of comfort in her friend’s girlish giggle as she described a freed convict named William Roberts, who sported dark bushy eyebrows and a smile full of mischief. Agnes had fallen deeply in love.

The Glasgow lasses were nearing the end of their seven-year sentences. They probably knew their paths would part as they approached the day each would hold a Certificate of Freedom. There was no sense thinking about Scotland anymore. Those days were over. In spite of the suffering they’d been forced to endure, they found love and a sense of belonging in the colony down under.

For the last decade, their unwavering friendship provided each other with just enough sustenance to endure another year, always holding out hope that the next would be better. The petty theft that transported them to Van Diemen’s Land paled in comparison to the crimes they saw nearly every day, which went, for the most part, unpunished. Girls raped by their masters, Holy Willie’s hypocrisy, bribes taken by the Catos and others—so much seemed unjust. Angry frustration ebbed and flowed for both Janet and Agnes, though their misconduct was relatively tame compared to the records of many transported with them.

There was all manner of mayhem and insurgency as 1842 unfolded. It began building in 1839, when Ellen Scott and other members of the Flash Mob attempted to throttle Mr. Hutchinson. The night after Janet was released from solitary, just a week before Agnes’s latest infraction, the rebels at the top of the valley decided to throw a party. It was precisely the type of disobedience that drove the aging superintendent to tear at his whiskers.

The weather was perfect, mild and dry, and for three weeks not a drop of rain had fallen. Under a bright moon, shortly after eight o’clock on the evening of March 24, Superintendent Hutchinson heard a ruckus coming from one of the wards. He hurried out of his second-floor quarters across the yard to investigate. As he drew closer, the disturbance grew louder. Stopping outside the ward, he peered through the grates and saw a group of prisoners cavorting in a state of wild abandon. Horrified, he waited silently until he could identify at least five of the women who’d joyfully removed their shapeless grey shifts and tossed them in a pile. Singing, cursing, and dancing naked with one another “in imitation of men and women together,” they barely noticed the skinny specter of a man whose mouth flapped agape.
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Among the bawdy performers were two well-known Flash Mob members who’d assisted with Ellen Scott’s 1839 turbulentinsubordination. There was raven-haired Eliza Smith and the fierce green-eyed Mary Devereux.
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Devereux also sported a tattoo, two small blue dots between the finger and thumb of her left hand.
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Frances Hutchinson from County Kerry, another known troublemaker, displayed the same emblem, along with rings tattooed on her first two fingers.
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Among the twenty-five thousand women transported, eight other Irish females etched nearly identical blue dots between their fingers.
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Each encoded a message, perhaps of solidarity or shared heritage, one that could be neither stripped away nor removed by their captors.

This night, each naked dancer received a sentence of either six or twelve months’ hard labor for her final curtain call. Mr. Hutchinson, a Methodist minister by training, could tolerate no more of their saucy insurrection and made it a point to separate the five rebels and house them in separate wards. After release from hard labor, Eliza Smith continued her rebellion, thumbing her nose at authorities through foul language and absconding with great regularity. Finally, in February 1845, she was punished once again for misconduct. Only this time, she was dead within the month. The last entry in her conduct record was scribbled haphazardly over other entries: “Died in Factory Launceston, 5 March 1845.”
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She was twenty-seven.

Punishment rarely stopped merriment when it erupted behind the Female Factory walls. In fact, it sometimes encouraged elaborate schemes designed to torment Superintendent Hutchinson and the others in charge. Repeat offenders harbored no fear for what they’d face in the Crime Class, as explained in the
True Colonist
newspaper: “Many women prefer this class to the others, because it is
more lively
! There is more
fun
there than in the others; and we have been informed, that some of the most sprightly of the ladies divert their companions by acting plays!”
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The always simmering readiness for revolution, fueled by absolute disdain toward their captors, persisted throughout the year into winter’s long nights. Under the big bright moon of August 23, 1842,
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the Flash Mob was at it again. Mr. Hutchinson sent his wife to investigate the boisterous sounds of song and dance, undoubtedly fearful of what he might see. The instant Mrs. Hutchinson opened the latch to the crime ward, it fell quiet, and she was unable to tell where the noise had originated. By the time she returned to her residence, the clamor started all over again. Back to the ward she trudged, only to face silent women sitting in their hammocks doing nothing at all. This went on for some time before Mr. Hutchinson made an appearance. In a feeble attempt to end the standoff, he demanded the names of the ringleaders. Without a word, he later reported, the women squatted down, “shouted and clapped their hands, stamped and made noise with their feet and this took place to such an extent that I conscientiously say it was a riot.”
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