Behind the Sun (44 page)

It was simple and it made sense: Friday stepped back and raised her hands in a gesture of surrender.

Harrie aimed another kick at Keegan: he’d attempted to crawl away and it landed against his ribs. She tried again, connecting solidly with his spine, and followed up with another to his shoulder.

And then they were all doing it, a flurry of boots driving into him, no noise except for muffled thuds that grew increasingly wet, and the occasional breathed-out grunt.

At last, long after he’d stopped moving, they stood back, panting and gazing down at him. He was on his side and his eyes were open. Or one was: the other was a mass of pulp. He stank like shit and his pale trousers were stained.

Then Sarah went out onto the street, fetched his hat and cane, and left them with the cosh beside his body.

There didn’t seem to be much to say. Together they walked down Phillip Street and along Hunter Street, where they splashed in the stinking shallows of Tank Stream to wash the gore off their boots. Sarah veered off and followed the stream until she came to the rear of Adam Green’s shop, and at the George Street intersection Friday and Harrie turned right and headed towards the Rocks.

Above them, a lone bat swooped and soared.

In the alleyway a bull ant crawled over Keegan’s head, its feet sticking to the blood congealing in the hair and in the shattered hollows of the skull.

Candlelight suddenly flickered in the shed next door, a door opened and a figure descended the wooden steps. Crossing to
Keegan’s body the woman prodded it with her boot, watching as it rolled part way over before flopping heavily onto its side again. She crouched, holding the candle close to the ruined face, examining it for signs of life and finding none.

Bella Jackson straightened, thought for a moment, picked up the cosh then walked away.

Sarah climbed stealthily over the fence at the rear of Adam Green’s yard and, keeping to the shadows, crossed the rough cobbles to the back of the shop. There she removed her boots, sloshed them about in the overspill from the rain barrel, tied the laces together and slung them around her neck. She had always known Keegan would go unpunished by the authorities for what he had done to Rachel, but now that had been addressed. She had no regrets.

On her way out earlier in the evening she’d climbed down the drainpipe — now she spat on her hands for grip and began to climb back up. Curling her feet around the pipe, she worked her arm and shoulder muscles as her hands pulled upwards. It was easy going, especially now she was getting fit again, and certainly something she was familiar with, due to breaking into houses in London.

When she reached the level of her bedroom window she extended one foot to rest on the sill, a hand to grip the window frame, then launched herself across the two-foot gap and ducked through the open lower sash.

She landed with a light thump on the bare floorboards and remained still, listening for signs that her return had been detected, but nothing stirred in the house.

She checked to make sure her bedroom door was still locked — it was — set her boots on the floor by her bed then lit the candle. And that’s when she saw them: a fancy drinking glass and a plate on her bedside cupboard. The plate contained three biscuits and the glass some sort of cordial. There was also a note. It read simply:
A
.

Harrie felt sick and light-headed; and coming up the stairs she’d been struck by the horrible notion there might be spots of blood — or worse — on her face or clothes.

It wasn’t the right or wrong of what they’d done, or even the violence of it, because he’d deserved every painful second. She hadn’t meant for him to die — she knew none of them had — but Rachel had died, so in a way he actually had paid a just price.

Still, she couldn’t believe she’d done it.

She opened the door on the landing, hoping everyone had gone to bed and the parlour would be empty.

Rachel stared back at her from the sofa.

Harrie’s knees buckled and she clung to the door knob.

Mrs Barrett said, ‘Harrie? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

It was the hair, the hair and the big belly. Nora Barrett had honey-coloured hair streaked with grey and in the lamplight it looked silver-white.

‘Harrie?’

Harrie closed the door behind her, moving on legs that felt like jelly.

‘Are you all right? You don’t look well.’

‘I’m a little tired, but thank you.’

‘Where are your boots and stockings?’

‘Downstairs. I slipped in a drain.’

Mrs Barrett put aside her embroidery. ‘How was your friend? Not suffering, I hope?’

‘No,’ Harrie replied. ‘Not now.’

Friday didn’t go straight home. She dropped her boots into the cesspit behind the Bird-in-Hand on Gloucester Street, then went inside and proceeded to get drunk.

Harrie’s behaviour had shocked and frightened her. But, thinking about it, she realised this wasn’t a new Harrie made hard and vicious by a year spent with felons, lunatics and London street dross, this was just a side of Harrie they’d never properly seen before. This was the side that had driven Harrie to work for a bitch of a boss for years just to keep her family fed, that had compelled her to steal a bolt of cloth against all her principles, and that had inspired her to care for Rachel so lovingly and so ferociously. This was the side that Keegan had finally pushed too far. And look what had happened. He’d pushed them
all
too far.

And so, it was clear now, had Bella Jackson.

After an hour or so she picked up a sailor and took him around the back and had sex with him against a wall, charging him a pound, which he thought was a bit pricey for a pub whore who could barely stand up. He paid it, though, because he liked her hair and she made him laugh. She did it not because she wanted the money or the sort of comfort a man could give, but because her own behaviour had frightened her and she needed to feel she was in charge of herself again, even if she was mashed.

At midnight she staggered back to the Siren’s Arms, her bare feet filthy, reeking of alcohol and pipe smoke and missing her shawl and jacket.

Mrs Hislop fined her three pounds for coming home drunk.

May 1830, Sydney Town

Reading from the newspaper, Sarah said, ‘Listen to this.
Foul Murder Remains Unsolved. Sydney constabulary regret to report that no arrest has yet been made regarding the disgraceful and cowardly murder of Gabriel Ambrose Redman Keegan, late of Knightsbridge, London, discovered bludgeoned to death in Phillip Street on 6th April. However, the Superintendent of Police has stated that Sydney’s public may rest assured that robust inquiries
will continue into this heinous crime for as long as necessary until the killer is safely behind bars.
’

Friday threw a piece of bun at the pair of crows loitering hopefully on the plaza. Soon, someone would come along and tell them they weren’t allowed to sit on the steps of St Philip’s Church on a Sunday afternoon, but until that happened it was a nice sunny spot. ‘He’ll be bloody busy.’

‘Who?’

‘The superintendent. There’s been three murders since then.’

Harrie pulled her shawl closer around her shoulders. ‘Will they have found anything, do you think? During their inquiries?’

‘Hard to say,’ Friday replied.

They watched the crows attempting to steal the bun off each other.

‘Are you worried?’ Harrie asked.

‘A bit,’ Sarah admitted.

‘A bit?’ Friday muttered. ‘I’m crapping myself. Every time someone knocks on the door at Mrs Hislop’s, I think it’s the beaks.’

Harrie nodded. ‘I am, too. I dream about it.’

‘Well, don’t,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s not good for you. Take a sleeping draught or something. Look, there goes your Mr Downey.’ She gestured towards James Downey as he walked up George Street on the far side of the plaza, head bowed, still traipsing around in mourning black.

‘Stop
saying
that,’ Harrie said sharply, deliberately not looking. ‘I don’t even want to hear his name.’

Anticipating her response, Sarah sighed. ‘Go and say hello.’

‘
No.
’

‘For God’s sake, Harrie, you’ll have to one day. You’re bound to run into him. Sydney’s a small town.’

‘No, I won’t.’

‘You will. We’re looking at him now!’

‘I won’t,’ Harrie replied stubbornly.

Sarah shook her head. She knew Harrie liked James Downey very much. She also knew that what he’d done had hurt her deeply and that Harrie just couldn’t forgive him. It was a prickly thing to watch, because she was clearly unhappy about the situation, but would not allow herself to change it. ‘Shall we go and have a cup of tea?’ she suggested, wishing now she’d let the subject lie.

‘Not me,’ Friday said. ‘I have to start work soon.’

‘I will,’ Harrie said, ‘if you promise to shut up about that man.’ She finally dared to look in the direction Sarah had indicated, but James Downey had disappeared, swallowed by the afternoon’s lengthening shadows.

Friday hurried down George Street past Middlesex Lane, the autumn wind gusting off the harbour, tangling her skirt around her legs and whipping her hair in all directions. At the sound of approaching hooves she moved onto the footway: the road wasn’t wide, the ironstone surface badly potholed, and not really suitable for vehicles moving at speed.

The curricle rattled past. Then slowed. Then stopped.

Friday, of course, recognised it and the familiar acid of hatred flooded through her. But now was not the time for settling scores, not in full view of dozens of witnesses. She could say her piece, though. She had always said her piece.

Fists clenched, she strode towards the gig.

Bella’s painted face was turned towards her, waiting. But before Friday could spit out a single word, the whoremonger gave a smirk of such reptilian triumph that Friday stopped dead. And then Bella slowly raised into view an object that at first Friday didn’t recognise. When she did, her blood turned to ice.

It was Sarah’s cosh.

Then, with a snap of the reins, the horses surged ahead, scattering loose ironstone with their hooves, and the curricle was gone.

Friday stood frozen, her heart racing, blood roaring in her ears, drowning out all other sounds.

Keegan was dead, but it wasn’t over after all.

It had only just started.

Behind this story

The characters in this story are all fictional, except for the ones already in the history books. The story itself is fictional, though aspects of it are based quite closely on the experiences of convict women of 1829 to 1830.

Some historical notes for those who quite rightly prefer their history to be one hundred per cent accurate. People who know their early- to mid-nineteenth-century law will be aware that most convicts were not usually transported for committing a first, or often even a second, offence, unless that offence was murder. In this story, two of my characters are transported for first offences. Please turn a blind eye: it works for their character arcs.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to discover whether the conveyance of convict women newly arrived in New South Wales between Sydney Cove and Parramatta in September of 1829 was by road or by river, so I’ve opted for the river route. In Judith Dunn’s
Colonial Ladies: lovely, lively and lamentably loose: crime reports from the Sydney Herald relating to the Female Factory, Parramatta 1831–1835
(Winston Hills, NSW, 2008), accounts suggest that road and river might both have been used from 1831 to 1835. For the purposes of this story, the river would have been the more realistic option, given the number of women involved.

With regard to the Parramatta Female Factory mortuary, it may not have existed in 1829, though in this story it does. It is mentioned in a description given by a visitor to the Factory dated 1836, situated near the gatehouse inside the outer wall, as I’ve described, but does not appear on a plan dated 1833, however that plan doesn’t show the outer wall. The presence of a mortuary might be expected, given that there was a hospital, but perhaps in earlier days the undertaker came as soon as an inmate died.

Readers might be surprised by how literate the four main characters in the story are. Well, convict women were a reasonably literate lot. About sixty-five per cent of convict women could read and around half of those could also write. They were also quite numerate. Irish convict women, however, were overall less literate and numerate than English convict women. See Deborah Oxley,
Convict Maids: the forced migration of women to Australia
(Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also the fascinating thumbnail sketches of the convict women listed in the back of Babette Smith’s
A Cargo of Women: Susannah Watson and the convicts of the Princess Royal
(Allen & Unwin, 2008).

The character Rachel Winter’s arrest story is based on the experiences of the real ‘Mary Rose’ described in Sian Elias’s fascinating book
The Floating Brothel: the extraordinary true story of female convicts bound for Botany Bay
(Hachette Australia, 2010).

And just a point on costume. In 1829 a petticoat wasn’t only something you wore under your dress, it was also ‘an outer garment for working women, like a skirt’ (Margaret Maynard,
Fashioned from Penury: dress as cultural practice in colonial Australia
, Cambridge University Press, 1994). I’ve attempted to avoid confusion by using the term ‘outer-petticoat’.

I’d also like to tip my hat to some family ghosts, whose lives inspired me to write this series. Thanks for rattling your chains, ladies and gentlemen, both supernatural and the ones the law put on you.

William Standley
, marine (Private), arrived New South Wales aboard HMS
Sirius
on 26 January 1788.

In November 1791 he married
…

Mary Ann Anstey
(Anster/Astey), convict, arrived New South Wales aboard
Lady Julian(a)
on 4 June 1789.

In August 1792 they became parents of Mary Standley, who, in September 1805, married
…

James Lowe
(Low), convict, arrived New South Wales aboard
Minorca
on 14 December 1801.

In March 1806, they became parents of Anne Lowe, who, in September 1822, married Henry Atkins Bonney, son of
…

Joseph Bonney
, convict, arrived New South Wales aboard
General Hewitt (Hewart)
on 7 February 1814, whose first wife and several children, including Henry Atkins Bonney, followed him from Suffolk, England.

In 1827, in Tasmania, Henry and Anne became parents of Christopher Bonney, and so on and so on until it was me.

Parramatta Female Factory Precinct

The original Parramatta Female Factory was located in two long, narrow rooms above Parramatta Gaol, a stone building constructed in 1802 in what is now Prince Alfred Park. There were no cooking facilities or beds, only the nine hand-looms on which the women wove linen, sailcloth and woollen fabrics. By 1818 up to two hundred women were crowded into an area sufficient for just sixty.

Governor Macquarie proposed the new Female Factory — the one which appears in this book — that opened in 1821 beside the Parramatta River. The Factory was built on land that has been significant to women of the Burramattagal clan of the Darug, or Eora, nation as a place of ceremony for thousands of years. From the outset it was never big enough to meet demand. By 1823 a two-storey sleeping quarters and yards were added for convict women
serving time for crimes committed in the colony, or for inmates transgressing the Factory’s rules.

During his tenure, Governor Darling introduced the three-class system: first-class women were those eligible for assignment plus ‘blameless destitutes’; those of the second class were probationary; and third-class inmates were locally convicted criminals. The criteria for who should be classified as first or second class, however, appears to have blurred and changed over the years.

While waiting to be assigned, recuperating from illness or nursing their babies, first- and second-class women washed, spun and carded wool to be made into Parramatta cloth, a lightweight twill-weave, for clothing or to be sent to England — Australia’s first manufactured export. Life in the Factory was harsh, and tainted with despair, homesickness and disease.

Transportation to New South Wales ceased in 1840 and, in an attempt to clear the Factory of children, the government built an orphanage on adjacent land. This became the Roman Catholic Orphan School when children from the Catholic orphanage at Waverley were transferred there in 1844. The Female Factory continued to accommodate convict women and, by 1846, female lunatics. By April of 1848, however, the institution was home to two hundred and forty male and female ‘invalid and lunatic prisoners of the Crown’. In 1849 the institution was officially gazetted as the Parramatta Lunatic Asylum.

Three wards for the criminally insane were built between 1861 and 1869, all of which were demolished in 1960. Also during the 1860s, the third-class sleeping quarters was remodelled and a verandah built around three sides. A large new wing was added to the building in 1876; this remains standing today.

The main Female Factory building, designed by convict architect Francis Greenway, was approved for demolition in August 1883 and a new two-storey ward built in 1885, partly over the
original construction and recycling sandstone and the clock from Greenway’s building.

In 1886 the government evicted the Roman Catholic Orphan School to rehouse girls from Biloela Girls’ Industrial School the following year. The first modification was a new nine-foot wall surrounding the compound.

For nearly ninety years Parramatta Girls Home, as it eventually became known, housed and trained girls up to age eighteen sent there via the Child Welfare and Crimes Acts. The girls were classified as either destitute, abandoned or orphaned and therefore not ‘corrupt’, or having tendencies towards criminal behaviour, but conditions in the institution were brutal for all. Isolation cells for punishment were built in 1897, with more added over the years. Riots over lack of food occurred; accounts of beatings, rape and deprivation were common.

In 1974, Parramatta Girls Home closed after accusations of abuse of inmates were raised, then reopened later the same year under a new name — Kamballa for the girls’ facility, and now Taldree for boys. After the boys’ facility moved to Werrington in 1980, the Department of Corrective Services acquired many of the old orphanage buildings and opened the Norma Parker Correctional Centre for women, where children under three could stay with their mothers in prison, an echo of the early Female Factory days. Kamballa closed three years later and the Norma Parker Correctional Centre in 2008.

In 2003 former Parramatta Girls Home inmates reunited for the first time, and the following year the Federal Senate’s
Forgotten Australians: a report on Australians who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children
was released. Much of this historical information and more can be viewed on the Parragirls website (
www.parragirls.org.au
).

What remains of the Parramatta Female Factory today lies in the grounds of Cumberland Hospital in Fleet Street, Parramatta,
and is owned by the New South Wales Health Department. If you know what you’re looking for, you’ll recognise the Factory walls, the hospital building, the third-class dormitory and Matron’s apartments. You might even encounter a few ghosts. Unfortunately you can’t actually go there, because it’s on private property.

When I first started writing this book in 2010 I contacted Bonney Djuric. Ms Djuric, together with Christina Green, Lynette Aitken and Sebastian Clark, a descendant of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, founded the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Association. Established in 2006, the PFFPA is a community-based, non-government organisation that seeks to broaden understanding and awareness of the precinct’s history and heritage, especially in relation to women and the generations of Australians who experienced institutional care as children — the Forgotten Australians — in the precinct’s institutions.

In January of 2011 Bonney Djuric and I went to Cumberland Hospital to have a look at the remaining Factory buildings. At the time, the Health Department was in the middle of installing air conditioning units in the sandstone walls of the original 1823 third-class dormitory building so it could be used as a computer data room. There was a lot of protest by the PFFPA and others and media attention about it. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, we were told fairly bluntly to leave. Since then, because of that protest action, the work has stopped.

The PFFPA’s campaign to have the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct recognised as a site of national heritage continues to gain momentum, but the greatest threat to the precinct’s preservation is the disparity concerning women’s history and heritage. Parramatta Female Factory was the first female convict factory to be built in Australia. Twenty per cent of Australians are descended from the women who went through those Factory gates. Approximately thirty thousand girls spent time in the Parramatta Girls Home. The
precinct has immense historical and cultural value to Australians. It should be preserved as a place of memory and of conscience.

If you’d like to get involved with the campaign, visit the above website. See also
www.heritageparramatta.org

Thank you very much to Bonney Djuric and her team for the time and research material contributed to this book and future volumes in this series. Much appreciated.