The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (35 page)

Just four feet, seven inches tall, with a ruddy complexion covered in freckles,
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the diminutive lass with a squinting right eye didn’t look like a criminal, nor had she intended to become one. But in 1850, she made a big mistake. She and Mary Rennicks stole a one-gallon milk tin, a gown, and a white petticoat from Susan Brady. Each was summoned before the Court of County Cavan in the province of Ulster. Despite no prior record, both Bridget and Mary were sentenced to ten years in “parts beyond the seas.”

After Bridget was sent to an island smaller than Ireland, her Roman Catholic religion placed her in a tiny minority. Women from Ireland’s western counties also faced a language barrier. Many spoke only Gaelic and did not understand the commands given by their captors.
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Shipped in the final years of transportation, Bridget benefited from some improvements in shipboard captivity. “Perhaps the most important of these gave each convict a separate sleeping-berth place which could be converted in the daytime into seats and tables.”
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Although Elizabeth Fry passed away in 1845 at age sixty-five, the work in her final years also eased Bridget’s journey on the
Blackfriar
. By 1842, Mrs. Fry had lobbied successfully for the addition of matrons to the all-male ship crew. The
Blackfriar
sailed from Dublin with a cargo of 260 female convicts, 59 children, and 7 free settlers who booked passage on the barque. Though the prisoners were better supervised than those of earlier transports, barbaric medical practices had hardly changed at all. Surgeon Superintendent John Moody treated the insane on board with a straitjacket or a cold bucket of water, later reporting the results of his methods:

Under the head Hysterical Mania . . . a case is given by no means uncommon in female convict ships and in the Penitentiary in the Colony, caused no doubt in nervous temperaments by the heat of climate, indolent life. . . . Nothing appeared to have a better effect than a shower bath or a few buckets of water thrown over them when first attacked.
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Bridget Mulligan’s companion, Mary Rennicks, bore the impact of primitive shipboard treatment, arriving in Hobart Town bearing the X mark from blood purging on her right arm. She’d also lost a front tooth.
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Bridget stayed healthy during the 125 days at sea, and Surgeon Superintendent John Moody recorded her behavior as “very good.”
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Under a new penal system, convicts did not proceed directly to Cascades but were housed in the Brickfields Hiring Depot, opened as an annex to the Female Factory in 1842. Designed to keep new arrivals isolated from the entrenched Crime Class, especially the Flash Mob, a probation system introduced in 1839 was meant to hasten reform. On paper, it recommended skill training and the opportunity for well-behaved prisoners to earn a small wage, but in bureaucratic reality, progress was held in place.

Arriving two years before transportation ceased in 1853, Bridget faced the full force of prejudice against convict arrivals, more toxic still because she was Irish and because she was Catholic. Lieutenant Governor Denison pleaded for fewer Irish prisoners, declaring: “Their general want of industry, their insubordinate habits, their subservience to their religious instructors, render them particularly unfitted for settlers in a country like this.”
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Denison also lamented the lack of energy for hard labor among those weakened by the potato famine.
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Rural Irish women, in particular, were ostracized for being “unfitted to engage in domestic service.”
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Stigmatized by her heritage, her religion, and her country roots, the resourceful Bridget Mulligan took full advantage of the one opportunity for early release from the Female Factory. She managed to shave eight years off her sentence the day she married John Wild, a freed convict from Cheshire, England. At twenty-seven, he’d received a sentence in 1841 of fifteen years for getting into a bar fight and stabbing a “spoon forger.” Only five feet, two inches tall, he’d lost some front teeth, his visage was rather sallow,
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but he was an excellent businessman. Once freed, Mr. Wild opened a store selling tobacco and candles in New Norfolk, located on the banks of the River Derwent twenty-two miles northwest of Hobart Town. He also ran a catering service and sponsored lunches for the New Norfolk regatta and Odd Fellows meetings held in Kensington Park.

Bridget had been sentenced to a New Norfolk family in March 1853, so she was put on a cart and sent north just as the trees were turning colors. Golden poplars had been planted all along the river and displayed themselves in bright autumn yellows. Her romance began with a purchase for her master in Mr. Wild’s well-trafficked Charles Street store. The two married in a Catholic Church on July 24, 1853, in the midst of a frosty winter, one month before the official end of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land. Bridget gave birth to a daughter named Hannah on November 20, 1855.

Entrepreneurial in spirit, the lass from County Cavan set up a Dutch oven at the back of her husband’s store and charged townsfolk a penny to bake their dinners. Hannah grew up inside the family store, learning the business and developing one of her own. When Bridget retired, she took over her mother’s oven and, according to descendants, “was remembered for always wearing a snowy white apron.”
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When people came to collect their cooked dinners, she offered a plate of freshly baked scones and expanded her baking empire. With her husband, Henry Laskey, she bought every house on Charles Street, where the two raised nine children in a home named “Tara,” after Ireland’s mythical seat of power. Hannah became a wealthy woman.

Bridget Mulligan’s dear “cara,” Mary Rennicks, didn’t live long enough to be freed. Shortly after being processed at Brickfields, she struck a fellow prisoner and was sentenced to hard labor. The next year, five months pregnant, she was committed to trial for the “willful murder of a newborn child” under her care at Cascades. Four months later, she delivered her stillborn baby boy inside the Female Factory. This only deepened her anger, and she was soon cited for an incident of insubordination. In February 1856, a highly unusual notation appeared in her conduct record, recognizing “meritorious conduct on the occasion of fire at Brickfields.”
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Two weeks later, the twenty-six-year-old accused murderer, troublemaker, and proclaimed hero died alone inside the stone walls at Cascades, suffering from burns from her selfless actions to save others from the fire.

The year Mary died was the same year Van Diemen’s Land was renamed Tasmania, after first explorer Abel Tasman. As many citizens hoped to erase the “convict stain,” the women and men who’d suffered forced migration forever changed the complexion of the growing population in Tasmania and New South Wales, becoming the heart and soul of a unique cultural identity.

Bridget received her Certificate of Freedom shortly before the Christmas holidays in December 1862. Like Janet Houston, she lived in Tasmania for the rest of her life. However, when Bridget first arrived on the
Blackfriar
in 1851, people were leaving the island in droves. Nearly eight thousand people, most of them former convicts, had left Van Diemen’s Land over the previous three years.
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Something quite spectacular had been discovered across the Bass Strait.

10

Bendigo’s Gold

Canvas Town

Gold was discovered in 1851 at Summerhill Creek and Bendigo, two small towns in a new territory on the mainland, the Colony of Victoria. Among those credited as the first to find Bendigo gold were Margaret Kennedy and Julia Farrell, when postings announced that “women were getting quart-pots of gold on Bendigo Creek.”
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The shape of modern Australia began to take form at the same time the promise of gold electrified imaginations around the world. When news spread of the riches lying just inches beneath the thick scrub, a huge confluence of hopeful and often hapless immigrants headed for Australian shores. For many, Port Phillip and the township of Melbourne was their first destination.

One man, in particular, took credit for starting the gold fever that first swept over the continent and then around the world. Born in Hampshire, England, Edward Hargraves arrived in New South Wales on a merchant marine ship in 1832. He married in Sydney but was unable to earn a living. In 1849, hoping to change his luck, he set off for the California goldfields. While there, Hargraves noticed a striking similarity between the hills surrounding his home in the Macquarie Valley and the claims that were yielding so much gold near Sacramento. Before boarding his ship to return to Australia in 1851, an American digger admonished the British dreamer: “There’s no gold in the country you’re going to, and if there is, that darned Queen of yours won’t let you dig it.”
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The quickwitted response from the egocentric Hargraves became legendary, soon reaching mythic proportions. Answering the American digger, he reportedly removed his hat and struck a well-rehearsed pose of triumphant confrontation, proclaiming: “There’s as much gold in the country I am going to as there is in California; and Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, God bless her, will make me one of her gold commissioners.”
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Hargraves’s confident statement proved prophetic. Anxious to collect a reward from the government for locating a goldfield, he shortly found the bounty he anticipated and received the commission he sought. The announcement of his discovery in the newspapers started a deluge of enthusiastic, and mostly inexperienced, treasure hunters from adjoining colonies into New South Wales.

A May 1851 news release in the
Bathhurst Free Press
was reprinted in newspapers with broad distribution:

DISCOVERY OF AN EXTENSIVE GOLD FIELD

The existence of gold in the Wellington district has for a long time been an ascertained fact, but public attention has never until now been seriously drawn to the circumstance. . . . Mr. Hargraves states . . . that from the foot of the Big Hill to a considerable distance below Wellington, on the Macquarie, is one vast gold field, that he has actually discovered the precious metal in numberless places, and that indications of its existence are to be seen in every direction. Ophir is the name given to these diggings.

Several samples of fine gold were shown to the company by Mr. Hargraves, weighing in all about four ounces—the produce, he stated, of three days digging. The amount thus earned by each man he represented to be £2 4s. 8d. per day. . . . From the nature of some of the country explored by him, he is of opinion that gold will be found in mass, and would not be surprised if pieces of 30 or 40 lbs. should be discovered. He had seen no country in California which promised metal in such heavy masses.
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With golden visions dancing before their eyes, men deserted farms, crews abandoned their ships, and husbands left wives in a blind rush for the promise of prosperity. Shovels and picks in hand, laborers walked off their jobs, grabbed a wheelbarrow, jumped on a cart, or threw a sack over their shoulders. They streamed out of Victoria to the digging fields in New South Wales to a little patch of ground called Ophir. In hopes of drawing people back to the newly formed Victoria, the colony’s governor offered a reward to the first person who found gold in the territory. Within the first month, three claimants presented specimens, vying for the prize. The rush was on. By Christmas 1851, two hundred fifty thousand ounces of gold had been pulled from the Victoria goldfields.
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News reached Van Diemen’s Land shortly after the initial finds, in a rather unremarkable announcement, buried on page three of the
Colonial Times
, May 23, 1851: “Gold—We understand that Dr. George Bruhn, the celebrated German mineralogist, on his mineralogical excursions from Mount Macedon to the Pyrenees, has been fortunate enough to discover the existence of gold.”
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These initial reports were greeted with skepticism in Hobart Town and Launceston, but more and more stories touting stupendous windfalls began to appear. Word of mouth delivered the news up the Huon River and to campfires around the forests of Franklin. Supper conversations inevitably turned to gold—gold for the taking along a fast road to riches.

In 1852, Ludlow and Arabella Tedder joined the fortune seekers exiting Van Diemen’s Land, each in the company of a new husband. For a few years after her release from the female factories, Ludlow’s life had seemed settled. Then suddenly she lost another husband. William Manley Chambers either died or deserted her, most likely the latter. A few years later, a man by his name applied for a Hobart Town liquor license for a pub on Old Wharf called Sailor’s Return.
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Soon after William’s departure, Ludlow met John Atterwell, an ambitious “hawker” who peddled his wares from house to house in Launceston. Still determined to live a full life at fifty-three, she married John on January 20, 1847. A year later, Ludlow had good reason to celebrate the holidays with abandon. On December 21, 1848, ten years after the Old Bailey judge sentenced her into exile for stealing eleven spoons and a bread basket, prisoner #151 held her Certificate of Freedom. The next year, Ludlow became a proud grandmother when nineteen-year-old Arabella gave birth to a son she named Henry James Tedder. The family of four lived together in Launceston. In 1851, Arabella delivered another son called Benjamin Waters, his surname taken from the man she planned to marry, a freed convict from England.

Following news of gold fever, Ludlow’s husband, John, and Arabella’s fiancé, Isaac Waters, sailed from Launceston to Melbourne aboard the
Shamrock
. Their eyewitness assessment of the diggings was better than imagined, and the two men quickly returned to Launceston, eager to return to Bendigo’s goldfields. In the autumn of 1852, Arabella married Isaac, twenty-six years her senior and full of plans for the move to Victoria. Now business partners, John and Isaac sold everything lock, stock, and barrel, booked passage, and headed straight for the diggings. The new bride and groom, their two young sons, Ludlow, and her third husband, John, journeyed across the Bass Strait to try their luck with the thousands of others headed for the shores of Victoria. Torrential rains signaled an inauspicious beginning to their transport aboard the
Sphynx
, a barque about half the size of the
Hindostan
. The journey that typically took one day lapsed into three as the small ship fought heavy seas and driving winds. Carrying thirty-five passengers, the
Sphynx
landed in a flooded Melbourne packed with timber, tobacco, tea, flour, rum, ivory, and apples.
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News from the mainland traveled a bit slower to the southern tip of Van Diemen’s Land. Agnes and William were preoccupied with four children and another on the way. Even so, by the time Christmas breezes blew through the Huon pines at the close of 1853, they, too, had been bitten by the gold bug. Over the next year, they scrimped and saved for what they’d heard was a costly excursion. Before they left, it was essential that William purchase additional firearms for a dangerous journey and a new and different rough-and-tumble frontier.

Even fare-paying passengers weren’t guaranteed access to the diggings because of the ever-festering prejudice against former convicts. The Anti-Transportation League sponsored the Convicts Prevention Act, enacted into law in Victoria in 1852. In an attempt to stop “Vandemonians” from entering the mainland, convicts who held a Ticket of Leave were denied, and only those with Certificates of Freedom allowed. The act added to the challenges of those unable to find work upon release from prison. Bigotry based solely on appearance motivated the law’s passage. One lawmaker offered his view of the freed convicts: “Square of jaw, shaggy of eyebrows, low in the forehead, with strongly marked bumps beneath the closely cropped hair, their very appearance was a source of alarm to the respectable citizens.”
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Before entering Victoria, Agnes and William would have to prove they were unconditionally free and present Certificates of Freedom for #253 and #510. Still, the notion of shedding the past and creating a new future were goals too tempting to resist. In 1854, the plucky couple packed up what they could carry. Baby at her breast, Agnes left Franklin with her family and boarded a small ship destined for Melbourne.

Sitting at the top of Port Phillips Bay at the mouth of the Maribymong River, Melbourne had been chosen as the capital for the new Colony of Victoria. Now, it was the jumping-off point for newly discovered goldfields. When Agnes and William arrived, the harbor was jammed with vessels, many stranded because their crews jumped ship to try their luck in the goldfields.

To the Roberts brood, accustomed to years of living quietly in the wide-open woodlands of the Huon Valley, Melbourne presented a disturbing scene. “Slaughterhouses lined the river—wooden buildings with fenced yards to one side, holding the wretched beasts standing among the decapitated heads of their kind. . . . On the riverside entrails, blood, gore and the stripped carcasses of rotting animals trailed into the river creating a filthy malodorous welcome to the newly arrived immigrant.”
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Even Agnes, who knew well the seamy urban underside from her days as a Glasgow street urchin, must have been horrified by what her little ones were walking into.

The rustic family deposited on the new capital’s streets was instantly presented with unanticipated challenges. Compared to the pristine air and water along green rain forests, a city nicknamed “Marvellous Smellbourne” required some getting used to. The roads, though laid out in a well-ordered grid, were largely unfinished and unpaved. When it rained, they turned into impassable bogs and, when dry, into windy dust bowls. Broken bottles, garbage, and decaying animals littered the streets. Carrying everything they owned, the newly arrived couple with five children did their best to navigate a path through the confusion.

The huge influx of gold created a highly inflated economy and drove up prices on everything a family needed. Finding lodging in the city was out of the question for a large group on a tight budget. Upon entering the port, William scanned notices advertising tents for rent just outside the city in Little Adelaide, where temporary shelter could be secured for five shillings a week.

Entering the tent city, Agnes, William, and five wide-eyed children were thrust into a hodgepodge of newcomers speaking in foreign tongues of all flavors. This was the staging area for hopeful miners preparing to fan out across the goldfields. Adventurers from China, France, Italy, Germany, the West Indies, and the Americas joined in the melee caused by gold fever.
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A rural family was better prepared than most for the spartan facilities in the temporary village. Agnes and the children were accustomed to hauling water and scrounging wood for a fire. The dirt floor in their riverside cabin was not much different from the dusty ground they laid their blankets on now. Mosquitoes and flies plagued the camp. The worst of their worries, however, were sideward glances from neighboring tents, from those suspicious of Vandemonians.

When night fell on “Canvas Town,” a thousand fires sprang to life, and motley human creatures gathered round in a chorus of singing, swearing, and carousing. Armies of dogs barked incessantly, and revolvers crackled everywhere until sunrise brought some semblance of silence.
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It’s doubtful the tight-knit family from Franklin got much sleep their first night under the stars in Little Adelaide.

William easily found employment as a craftsman in the bustling, expanding Melbourne. His expertise in woodcutting, carpentry, and building was in high demand because so many skilled laborers had fled to the goldfields. Reports of incredible finds further fanned the fevered flames.

As people sat around blazing fires in the tent city and digging camps, they told and retold tales of incredible luck. In January 1853, a French sailor unearthed the 132-pound “Sarah Sands” nugget (so named for the ship carrying it back to England). Within sight of Melbourne, he had jumped ship with the rest of its crew and, on a whim, persuaded his mates to lower him on a rope into the first abandoned hole they encountered. A few minutes of working his inexperienced pick, with peals of laughter echoing from his chums aboveground, yielded the unmistakable sound of metal on metal. Leaning into the hole, he spied gleaming yellow just below where previous diggers had given up. As he shoveled deeper, his naïve tenacity paid off. The monster nugget sold for two hundred thousand francs, a hefty profit for two days’ work. Word of the lucky Frenchman’s find created a frenzied return to this once-abandoned patch of mines. Two more giant chunks were found within a week, “including one nugget weighing 94 lbs and another of 78 lbs.”
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