The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (19 page)

Mrs. Hutchinson announced the roll call for the night’s bed check. Following factory regulations, Mrs. Cato designated an overseer for each mess, choosing one of the older women from the
Westmoreland
whom Surgeon Superintendent Ellis had reported as “orderly.” The convict overseer was responsible for the conduct of her eleven peer inmates, a daunting assignment under the best of circumstances.
²⁷

There was never enough space to accommodate the rising numbers of transported girls and women. Sleeping rooms were filled to capacity with hammocks slung in tight rows, leaving no room to walk unless the suspended beds were tipped to the side. It took more than a little spontaneous choreography to get four rows of women in place without tipping someone else to the floor. A single chamber pot sat in the far corner and was very difficult to reach in the darkness. Its distant location explained the dreadful stench beneath Agnes’s boots. She kept them tied close by and pulled both knees to her chest, trying to get comfortable. From time to time, she could still feel the rhythmic rocking of the ship.

Inside her low-slung hammock as she started to doze off, Agnes considered violating the first rule of silence. She knew her eleven bunk-mates well from nearly four months together aboard the ship, but could they really be trusted? What she really needed was to talk with Janet. Her canvas bedding smelled of mildew and crawled with fleas. At least there were no rules against dreaming.

By sunrise, the odor of human waste dominated the cramped space that had no ventilation and no windows. At five thirty A.M. the bells rang, and Agnes was rousted from her hammock for morning muster in the yard. Matron Hutchinson walked the long rows of women and children for morning inspection, making certain they looked somewhat clean and tidy. Today was the day most would be assigned to local settlers who would wield complete control over their lives. Mrs. Hutchinson, herself a parent and descendant of a convict grandmother, informed the mothers what would become of their children. Those younger than three would be housed in a nursery inside the factory. The rest would soon be transferred to the Queen’s Orphanage, where well-behaved mothers could visit them on Sundays if their masters issued a pass.

One mess at a time, Mrs. Hutchinson directed the new arrivals to a very large yard on the other side of the complex. Her purpose was abundantly clear as she showed Agnes and her group what happened to girls who disobeyed rules and were sent to the Crime Class. It was only six A.M., and several hundred girls and women were busy at work. Most were scrubbing clothing inside stone washtubs, while others hung the laundry to dry across wooden rails. Mrs. Hutchinson issued a stern warning as she pointed to the cells for solitary confinement. Pretending to pay attention, Agnes covertly studied a woman with yellow Cs emblazoned all over her clothing. Before long, she and Janet would learn the meaning of the yellow C.

The breakfast bell was ringing by the time Matron Hutchinson finished the Crime Class prison tour, which she hoped sent a warning. Agnes and Janet sat down in their separate groups to a pint of watered-down gruel and a piece of brown bread. Before they were done, each was summoned to Mr. Hutchinson’s office.

A string of settlers made the long walk up the valley and lined up outside Cascades to retrieve their free labor. Turning the transports over to colonists spared the government the expense of funding their food and lodging. The Female Factory was essentially a hiring depot for girls like Agnes. Her fate fell into a lottery. The luck of the draw determined for whom #253 worked and what she might be forced to endure at the hands of her master.

Treatment ran the gauntlet from kindness to torture. Plum assignments went to women with special skills, such as dressmaking or baking. Some girls were allowed to sit at their master’s dining table and were welcomed into a family. More commonly, they were treated like slaves, and many suffered sexual abuse, as evidenced by the number of women who returned pregnant to the factory.

The Assignment Board consisted of the chief police magistrate, the local treasurer, and the superintendent of prisoners. The bureaucracy ran rife with favoritism, which played a major role in their decisions. Military officers and wealthy businessmen were often rewarded with the cream of the transported crop. Women who could read to the colonists’ children or prepare a banquet were most desirable, and a pretty face was also coveted.

There was high demand for domestic help in the colony, so the women of the
Westmoreland
were not expected to stay at Cascades for long. Everyone from the
Westmoreland
, except women showing signs of pregnancy, was automatically “eligible for service.” One by one, they disappeared into Hobart Town, Sandy Bay, or one of the other nearby settlements, each at the mercy of an unregulated, indiscriminant assignment.

Young and healthy, #253 was immediately turned over to a Mr. Donahoo, who lived in Hobart Town. She stole a quick hug from Janet, who stood outside the superintendent’s door, and the two parted ways. Without question, they would find each other, some way, somehow. Taking her by the arm, Mr. Donahoo escorted his new servant back down the hillside she’d trudged all the way up just one day earlier.

Working as a housemaid for the Donahoos was nothing like being a servant in a fine Scottish home, a home like the one she and Janet had burglarized four years earlier. Doing laundry, ironing, scouring pots, scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, and endlessly chopping wood for the stove filled every waking hour of Agnes’s day. Lugging water up and down the Hobart Town hills was the worst of all chores. A pipeline from the Hobart Rivulet connected to a storage tower on Macquarie Street, where a brigade of servants with buckets waited their turn.

Agnes soon discovered an advantage to the work that nearly pulled her skinny arms from their sockets. For a precious few moments, she could sit and gossip with Janet on the Macquarie Street benches and plot their next rendezvous. Church services also provided a divine opportunity to see her friend. Many abusive masters, unrepentant sinners themselves, dragged their young servants to Sunday service under the guise of promoting their salvation. Relegated to the back of the church, the convict maids devised elaborate schemes to pass contraband in the form of tea and tobacco, often hidden under the mob caps issued at the Female Factory.

Most days, the girl from Glasgow was isolated and lonely. Walking through town, Agnes could sense dirty looks and not-so-furtive head shaking from citizens who resented her presence. Not every settler could afford the expense of feeding another mouth in return for free labor. Hobart’s struggling poor deemed the gruel and ox-head soup served at Cascades an unfair government handout. The convicts were perceived as taking their jobs. “Far better it is to arrive in this colony as a Prisoner of the Crown, than as a poor Free Settler!” blared a headline in the
Colonial Times
.
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This angry, rising sentiment ignited the beginnings of an anti-transportation movement.

On her feet, worked to exhaustion six days a week and half the day on Sunday, Agnes had lots of time to think about the seven years ahead. Out on legitimate errands, she’d been down nearly every street and alley in Hobart Town. There was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide on this upside-down island surrounded by sharks. But without a doubt, she would find an easier way to do her bloody time.

Nearing the last day of December, Agnes hummed “Auld Lang Syne” under her breath, thinking about the Hogmanay celebration back in Scotland. The steady rain and stormy grey heavens sometimes reminded her of home, though there was a frightening unpredictability to the weather here. As the squalls reached gale force rumbling through the valley, Agnes put down her chopping ax and bolted inside for cover.

It was evening on Friday, December 30, when multihued streaks of lightning crashed across Mt. Wellington, with wind gusts reaching sixty miles an hour. The “hurricane” was described in the
Hobart Town Courier
as “a most awful storm unprecedented in the memory of the oldest settler”; chimneys crashed down on Macquarie Street, windows blew to bits, and several roofs collapsed. “The weightiest articles of timber were lifted up and blown about like straws. . . . Large, gigantic trees in all directions were thrown down, their power of withstanding the blast being weakened, from the unusually moist season having relaxed the roots.”
²⁹
The storm’s course of destruction rivaled the worst winter blizzard back in Glasgow. This was certainly no way to welcome in the new year.

Holy Willie

Shortly after the worst storm on record, another event dominated the
Hobart Town Courier
’s feature page. The island’s new governor and his wife had arrived. It was the same day the
Westmoreland
departed for Calcutta to pick up its return cargo of raw materials for London’s factories. On January 5, 1837, Sir John and Lady Franklin stepped off the passenger ship
Fairlie
onto the shores of Van Diemen’s Land. A naval officer known for his Arctic expeditions, Sir John was nicknamed “the man who ate his boots.” While mapping the Northwest Passage, his poor planning led his crew toward starvation along with reported cannibalism and eating of the leather from their boots. Knighted by George IV in 1818 despite his failings in the Arctic, Sir John was hailed as a hero by the London elite and given the assignment he wanted in the new British colony.

Van Diemen’s Land welcomed its new governor with a twenty-one-gun salute and cheering crowds along Macquarie Street. Later in the evening, the entire capital lit up for him. The
Hobart Town Courier
reported: “It was really amusing to witness the preparations, which even the humblest Hobartonian was busily making for the occasion: those who could not obtain lamps procured candles. . . . Almost every house . . . displayed its loyalty in some shape, and a general feeling of good will and amity seemed universally to prevail.” The newspaper also announced that “His Excellency . . . appeared in good health.”
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A male convict sentenced for being a political activist saw Governor Franklin quite differently, as he later wrote in a book: “Clad in his official garb, adorned with his star, and covered with his cocked cap and feather, no nabob of India could affect more dignity and importance. He appeared to feel, as he strutted about, that he was the only man on earth. His height was . . . about five feet nine inches; his circumference quite out of proportion, and clearly indicating, that however starved he might have been as ‘Captain Franklin,’ in his northern expedition . . . that here there was no scarcity of grease and good foraging.”
³¹

Standing beside her portly husband, Lady Jane, the governor’s second wife, drew notice for the tight ringlets around her face and her custom-made lavender Burmese silk dress. Back in London, she had already met some of the convict women. A politically ambitious social climber, Jane Franklin visited Newgate Prison to observe Elizabeth Fry as one of London’s revered celebrities. After seeing the prisoners, Lady Jane wrote in her journal, judging almost all of them as “strapping ugly women with the most low-life air and impudent expression of countenance.”
³²

In London, Elizabeth thought she’d found an ally in asking the newly appointed governor’s wife to write about conditions in the Female Factory and to visit the women. It would be four and half years before Lady Jane found the time to send her first letter to Mrs. Fry. In the meantime, Fry had received news from some of the many thousands of women she had comforted inside Newgate. One letter from a mistress in Hobart Town was written on behalf of a convict maid assigned her: “She begs I will offer her grateful recollection of your kindness, and that of the other Ladies, and hopes never to forfeit the good opinion you have been pleased to bestow upon her.”
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Reassured that her work made a difference, Mrs. Fry wanted Lady Jane to take up her cause.

Elizabeth had asserted hands-on influence in mainland Australia, which she planned to extend to Van Diemen’s Land. Earlier in 1836, she sent Charlotte Anley, one of her volunteers, to inspect the conditions at the Parramatta Female Factory in New South Wales. The conditions she witnessed represented the more common experience for convict maids: “They told me of wrongs which no one heeded, or seemed to care for: that bad masters and cruel mistresses, often made them worse than they were; that in service they were treated ‘like dogs,’ and seldom spoken to without an oath, or ‘as devils,’ more than human beings.”
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A convict lass couldn’t escape an assignment unless she acted up. Three and a half months into her seven-year sentence, Agnes couldn’t take her indentured servitude any longer. On March 22, 1837, Mr. Donahoo dragged #253 before the Hobart Town magistrate for being “absent without leave and insolent.”
³⁵
Immediately declared guilty, Agnes was returned to Cascades, the punishment factory. She was sentenced to three months in the Crime Class.

The most dreaded punishment came first. Mrs. Cato went to her drawer for a pair of scissors. The deputy matron’s mood was stern when she approached the girl, whose grey eyes looked straight into hers. Not a word was spoken. The sheers clipped across the nape of Agnes’s neck and above her ear, cropping her hair like a boy’s. Donning the cap of humiliation, Agnes would soon wear the color of disgrace. Mrs. Cato handed her a needle, thread, and yellow fabric cut in the shape of a C, for “Crime Class.”

Having seen the woman in the washing yard, Agnes knew what was coming next. Forced to confirm her degraded status stitch by stitch, she sewed three large yellow Cs: one on her right jacket sleeve, another on the back, and a third on the hem of her petticoat. Displaying yellow, recognized as a color of infamy throughout Europe, she was meant to suffer shame and humiliation.