The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (18 page)

Well-to-do settlers, getting rich on whale oil and wool, resented both convicts and the Crown. A year before Agnes landed, many signed a petition to His Majesty requesting the removal of “unspeakable evils”: “We, the undersigned, feeling that the measures adopted by the British Government, of increasing the penal character of the Colony . . . affix a moral degradation upon us, and our children . . . request you will convene a Public Meeting of the Colonists, for the purpose of addressing the King thereon.”
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Reminders of the Crown’s rule were everywhere on display. British soldiers, pressing muskets against their shoulders, guarded government buildings constructed in soft-brown sandstone and built by the hands of male convicts. Sentries posted at the gates outside George’s Square stood locked at attention under leather shako hats topped with white woolen pom-poms, utterly impractical under the driving rain.
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Scarlet-coated soldiers even guarded a makeshift zoo located behind the governor’s mansion, lest the island’s wildlife forget who was in charge of Van Die-men’s Land. As the prisoner’s parade filed past the governor’s mansion, wild creatures on exhibit in the old paddock came into view. Emus strutted about, standing six feet high on spindly legs and swathed in swirls of soft brown feathers. Agnes looked across the street in amazement at the huge gawky birds and brown-eyed wallabies. If the island’s chickens and rats were this big, what else might be wandering the forests?

The soldier in charge of the human prisoners tolerated not a moment of dawdling. The group of two hundred transports still had a two-mile march uphill before they reached the Female Factory. Agnes and Janet followed a muddy path toward the towering mountain, whose highest elevations were hidden under cloud cover. Shopkeepers leaned out their doorsills to inspect the latest shipment of new maids and helpers. Tucked behind white picket fences, neatly kept brick cottages lined upper Macquarie Street. Summer gardens were lush with raspberries, scarlet geraniums, and the rosy pink blossoms of sweetbriar plants. Ripe apricots and nectarines hung temptingly close along the track.
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The new and distinctive scent of eucalyptus wafted through a valley thick with trees bearing the bluish-green leaves. Here Agnes saw shades of green she had never seen in Scotland. Even the air smelled green.

Agnes’s knees were still shaky from months of walking unsteadily across the ship’s rocking decks. As the bedraggled prisoner approached the Hobart Rivulet, the steady incline grew steeper, and her legs started to ache. The sounds of running water and birds in the bush intermingled with the tramping of feet as her troop made its way along the bank of the tiny river. On the outskirts of town, scattered wooden shanties teetered along the water’s edge. Entrepreneurial settlers built breweries and sawmills next to the rivulet. Rats scurrying through the muddy gully were one of the few familiar reminders of home.

The stream meandered up the valley to the base of the cliff. Gradually the weather cleared, and the features of the summit came into view. The soldiers called it Mt. Wellington, named to reinforce Britain’s claim on the island after the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. It replaced the Aboriginal names—Unghbanyahletta and Poorawetter—given to the mountain layered in dense green forests and rising more than four thousand feet.
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Beneath this towering giant, Agnes shivered as the temperature dropped some ten degrees in the secluded hollow where her group was headed. After nearly an hour of stomping through the mud, a two-story stone fortress revealed itself at the soggy base of Mt. Wellington. Tucked away two miles beyond town, the prison lay hidden from the rising middle-class gentry. The building now used for the Cascades Female Factory began as a rum distillery and was hardly suited to house women and children. Raw sewage drained into the rivulet running next to the prison. Foothills cast long shadows over the institution, rendering it nearly sunless much of the year and damply cold in every season.

The largest of five female factories in Van Diemen’s Land, Cascades opened in 1828. Agnes and Janet waited outside a large wooden gate secured shut with heavy irons. From behind the guard wall, which was at least twice Agnes’s height, they heard the sounds of chopping wood and clanging pots bouncing off the face of the valley.
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As the rest of the tired troop caught up, red-coated soldiers nodded to the constable on duty and lined up the women and children in double file at the yard’s entrance. Stone barricades inside stone walls reinforced the austere greeting that awaited them. Walking under the tunneled entrance, not knowing if they would be separated, Agnes allowed her hand a brush against Janet’s.

At the soldier’s command, a gatekeeper unlatched the weighty entrance door. Unlike the boisterous clamor inside London’s Newgate Prison, the compound seemed eerily devoid of human voices. A rather imposing figure hurried toward the transports. White bonnet tied in a crisp bow under her wide chin, Matron Mary Hutchinson curtsied and greeted the British officers. A bundle of efficiency at twenty-six, she knew the factory system well, having grown up inside Sydney’s Parramatta Female Factory, run by her father. She was the no-nonsense woman in charge, heavy black dress buttoned tight to the neck. Shuffling behind was her husband, John, with his gaunt face, high cheekbones, and scraggly little whiskers hanging over his neck.

John Hutchinson, a Methodist minister, was seventeen years her senior. He was named superintendent in 1832, but Mary essentially ran Cascades, particularly when her husband’s health began to fail. Elizabeth Cato, who had arrived in 1831, assisted the Hutchinsons as deputy matron and midwife. Her husband, William, served as prison overseer.

The officer in charge of the soldiers observed the brief formality of handing over the women and children in his possession. Superintendent Hutchinson, an efficient bureaucrat, had already organized the conduct records and physical description for each prisoner. A porter opened a small, heavily reinforced door and led the weary transports into a paved yard. Agnes and Janet scanned the enclosure, filled with women busy at work but mum as mutes. They would soon learn the reason for silence. No one spoke, but their eyes told many stories. The two Glasgow lasses stared at the women in dingy uniforms coughing and running their tongues over sore gums and missing teeth. Surely they couldn’t have looked this bad upon arrival.

Gradually, Agnes moved to the front of the line for processing. Surgeon Superintendent Ellis had classified the grey-eyed lass as a troublemaker. She and Janet were listed as accomplices in crime, so Mr. Hutchinson considered it his duty to separate the pair immediately.

Clothes Don’t Make the Woman

Assistant Matron Cato brought one girl at a time into a small reception room, where Mrs. Hutchinson stood next to a tall stack of ugly dresses. Hairstyling was not allowed at the Female Factory, so Agnes was forced to hand over the comb Mrs. Fry had tucked inside her sturdy burlap bag. Mrs. Cato told Agnes she would put it in storage for safekeeping and gave her a nudge toward the washtub. Every prisoner was required to disrobe and bathe upon arrival.

Splashing the cold water over herself was a shock, though Agnes experienced some relief in removing salt and dirt accumulated from nearly four months aboard the
Westmoreland
. Most clothing worn at sea was beyond repair and thrown in a pile for burning. After checking Agnes’s head for lice, Mrs. Hutchinson issued the prison uniform, sewn from low-grade wool and chosen for its coarseness. It would be a constant reminder of the transgressions that brought the grey-eyed rebel to Van Diemen’s Land. Pulling the wool shift over her head, Agnes recalled many unpleasant memories of the days spent in Mr. Green’s Glasgow mill. The fabric was scratchy and the shift had no shape, but at least it was clean. New stockings were a pleasant surprise and, in spite of everything else, felt refreshing on her feet. Agnes received the remainder of the unfashionably dreary wardrobe for her seven-year sentence: a second shift for when she washed the first, two aprons, two caps, two handkerchiefs for her monthly flow, and a second pair of stockings.

Convict dress was meant to be a marker for the wearer, a warning that she was an untrustworthy outcast. The clothes Agnes and Janet wore were so unbecoming as to elicit derision from the highly decorated Colonel Mundy when he visited the Female Factory. After an initial observation that the prisoners appeared deaf and dumb performing their work in silence, he added: “there must be a good deal in dress as an element of beauty—for I scarcely saw a tolerably pretty woman.”
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Ugly attire in tow, Agnes held on to her familiar brown boots now stiffened with salt from the sea, the last remnants of her life in the Glasgow wynds. Officially a member of the Assignment Class, one of three Cascades ranks based on conduct, she joined a group of twelve. Bad behavior carried punishment in the Crime Class, followed by a sentence in Probation Class for those whose conduct improved, and finally return to the rank from which prisoners were assigned to settlers.

Janet underwent the same processing as Agnes, but the Hutchinsons directed her to a different mess. It was noon, and Mrs. Cato rang the bell for dinner, as the midday meal was called. Straggling at the back of the line, Agnes lifted her eyebrows the moment she caught Janet’s eyes.
What in the bloody hell have we gotten ourselves into?

Prisoners rotated the duty of serving the meal to those seated on wooden benches at long tables. The menu remained the same, every day, every week. The two Glasgow lasses sipped their first taste of watery ox-head soup, garnished with a big hunk of brown bread. Prepared without regard for nutritional value, the recipe called for twenty-five pounds of meat for every one hundred quarts of broth. When the ox head wasn’t all bone, each girl received about four ounces of gristly protein a day.
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After the meal, Agnes and Janet milled about aimlessly until everyone was bathed and checked off the roster list. With a clap of her hands, Matron Hutchinson corralled the assembly of newly uniformed women and shushed their restless children. It was time for the first of many lectures by Superintendent Hutchinson. He opened his black leather book to the page inscribed “Rules and Regulations for the Management of the House of Correction for Females.” Rule Number One: No talking, no laughing, no whistling, no singing. No singing? The ballad crooner was appalled. Even London’s Newgate allowed song and conversation.

The governor of Van Diemen’s Land from 1824 to 1836, Colonel George Arthur, was a consummate bureaucrat. He wrote the Cascades rules and regulations himself. With military precision he demanded of “all the Female Convicts on their admission . . . the utmost cleanliness—the greatest quietness—perfect regularity—and entire submission. . . . If these be observed . . . patient industry will appear, and reformation of character must be the result.”
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The rules were printed everywhere, including in the
Hobart Town Courier
because “so many of our readers having expressed a desire that they should be printed. . . .”
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Yet most of the women at Cascades couldn’t read a word.

The Female Factory’s strict regulations relied on the presumption that if prisoners weren’t allowed to converse, disruptions and bad influences could be controlled. What the authorities never anticipated was how quickly creative measures arose among women who were told they couldn’t talk.

Not surprisingly, Reverend Hutchinson warned the
Westmoreland
transports about punishments suffered for smoking tobacco and using profanities. When the straight-laced superintendent read the rule that forbade bringing poultry, pigeons, or pigs into Cascades, several of the youngest prisoners let out a giggle. How in the bloody blazes could a girl get a pig over the top of these thick stone walls? Their merriment was quickly extinguished when Mrs. Cato hustled over to the troublemakers and hissed a stern warning from behind their shoulders.

Standing himself a bit taller, Superintendent Hutchinson concluded his monologue with a review of the daily routine, including mandatory chapel attendance twice a day, after breakfast at half past eight and after supper at eight P.M. The little church was designed to double as a school between services and provide space for quiet study. Although superintendents were supposed to teach prisoners to read, it rarely happened. The reality of managing more than three hundred women and their infants allowed Mr. Hutchinson little time to do anything beyond managing the paperwork it took to run the institution. Though Mrs. Fry argued fervently for a school within the female factories, Governor Arthur had largely ignored her recommendation, concentrating instead on bureaucratic details, such as the degree of roughness in the fabric for convict garb.

Indoctrination complete, Agnes and Janet followed the line of two hundred back into the main yard. The twenty-foot-high walls of the Female Factory cast long shadows across the interior yard when the sun dropped behind Mt. Wellington. Light faded quickly in the valley, and the temperature dipped yet again. Time took on another dimension inside the unforgiving fortress encased in double stone walls. The women who had arrived on earlier ships appeared to move in slow motion, looking more like chalky zombies than industrious workers. For some, Cascades chipped away humanity piece by piece.

At half past seven o’clock, Mrs. Cato clanged the supper bell. It was a repeat of the noontime repast: brown bread and a pint of ox-head soup. At five minutes to eight, the new congregation was ushered into the chapel, lit by two small candles on the altar. Mothers tried in vain to quiet their children until a distraction, entering from the back of the chapel, caught their attention. The Reverend William Bedford had arrived. Fancying himself a regal figure as chaplain for the Female Factory, he strutted by the pews filled with potential converts. His beak of a nose and protruding lower lip grew more prominent as his fire-and-brimstone preaching rose to a crescendo. By the end of the reverend’s half-hour rant, Agnes had a stiff neck from trying to hold her head up. At last, it was over.