The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (32 page)

William’s brassy humor and working-class roots made him a fine match for the bonnie beauty with the Scottish brogue. He taught Agnes to read, to shoot a gun, and to use his well-worn ax. He was skilled, ambitious, and full of adventure and vitality. Like Agnes, he cast off limitations, living with abandon and buoyant good hope. She’d found her wild colonial boy and knew he’d be her mate for life.

Descendants of this well-timed union describe their meeting as fated. William had grown up with a mother and father and lived with them as a young adult, an apprentice at his father’s side. For Agnes, his compassion “was her first experience of any love and care in her whole twenty years.”
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Transported beyond the seas for the temptation of a few coins, the strong and rugged woodsman had survived some of the worst hellholes in the empire. As he worked free in the forest, shirt tied around his waist, Agnes found her eyes drawn to the heavy scar tissue crisscrossing William’s back, the signature of the cat-o’-nine-tails. “Old residents speak today of having seen these convicts, in the days of their youth, peel off their shirts to wash, and their backs were cut and marked so that there was not a piece of skin unscarred and scarcely a ridge of the flesh left free of marks of the scourge.”
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Speaking not a word, the typically gregarious Scot conveyed what she felt for William with a simple touch. She understood his journey and shared his resiliency, yet tears still welled up in her eyes when she placed a gentle palm against the thirty-seven lash scars crossing his back.

With her best intentions now focused on romance and passion, a love-struck Agnes soon found herself climbing the cold stone steps into the Oatlands gaol. She’d been insolent to her master and was to be confined to two weeks in solitary confinement, but her only regret was time away from dear William. Probably aware of the reason for her distraction, Magistrate John Whitefoord put Agnes on the first police cart headed back to Hobart Town. Though a Scotsman himself, he could not be charmed by a familiar brogue.

Over the next three years, the incorrigible Scot stayed in contact with William, twice absconding for the comfort of his arms. Surrendering any opportunity for early release with a Ticket of Leave, Agnes served her entire sentence. Seven years to the day of being found guilty by Ayr’s Court of Judiciary, she held Certificate of Freedom #388, dated May 3, 1843. True-blue mate Janet Houston was freed the same day, which was the last time they would see each other.

Head held high, Agnes left Cascades behind her and headed north. Hitching a ride on an Oatlands-bound cart and humming her favorite tunes once again, she felt as though she were looking at the world for the first time. Traveling as a free woman, Agnes breathed in the island’s mysterious beauty. Gum trees, their bark stripped stark-white bare in the annual molt, danced over the hills like human skeletons. Decaying eucalyptus appeared like gnarled and twisted fingers trying to scratch their way out of a grave. The wildness of the landscape only excited the wildness of her heart. As she traveled through the interior and approached the outpost, Agnes passed huge groves of bushy honeysuckle shrub, their gigantic yellow cones in full autumn bloom and a welcoming sight that marked the entrance to Oatlands.

William had diverted himself with hard work while he waited for the woman he intended to marry. Convict #253 had finally reclaimed her name and now willingly added William’s to hers, though no records indicate an official union. For the next several months, the Robertses saved every penny and plotted their future together. Anxious to make a fresh start and put the past behind them, the determined couple headed south to the Hobart Town docks in the spring of 1843. William’s work on Mr. Calder’s chain gang ten years earlier had introduced him to the prosperous possibilities for settlement along the Huon River.

These same prospects had not gone unnoticed by the ambitious and entrepreneurial Lady Jane Franklin. Seeing potential in attracting free immigrants with an interest in farming, the governor’s wife made an investment she thought wise for the colony’s future and her own. In 1838, she purchased 640 acres of fertile land in the Huon Valley, twenty-eight miles southwest of Hobart Town.
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She subdivided the large tract and sold parcels to God-fearing immigrants who denounced liquor and sin, passed her interview, and met with her approval. Eager tenants, many of the Methodist faith, agreed to her lease-to-buy arrangement, requiring full payment within seven years. In 1843, Her Ladyship left Van Diemen’s Land with a tidy profit for land sold at fair value and returned to England following her husband’s removal as the colony’s governor.

The governor’s wife had conducted her business more honestly than certain wealthy landowners who employed a lease-to-buy scheme as a way to avoid the backbreaking work of clearing swamps and felling giant trees. Setting rents that few could afford, these greedy land barons held back eviction notices until after the land was cleared.
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Instead of paying to have the forests leveled, they collected rent money from hopeful settlers until it ran out. When the owners reclaimed the land, it was more valuable and often resold or used as pasture for sheep or cattle.

During his sixteen years on the island, William Roberts had grown wise to corruption and graft. Carrying coveted skills as a pit-sawyer and carpenter, he’d find honest work crafting durable, seaworm-proof Huon pine into fine sailing vessels for the colony’s trade. The water-resistant wood was used on the decks of the empire’s finest sailing vessels and was in huge demand. Bringing only what was essential, William and Agnes left Oatlands and headed for the Huon Valley. They may have walked to Hobart Town, then boarded a cart. The former city lad wrapped his ax and sharpening file in canvas sail that would double as a tent. He had a rifle to hunt for food, ammunition, and everything he needed to make a good living. Seated by his side, his smiling common-law bride wore a wool hat and scarf, and a blanket layered over her shawl. Two small possum rugs rested over her lap. They used the fur sides for cool seasons and the reverse for summer.
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A cloudless sky looked clearer than ever on this windy September morning. They’d need the lengthening daylight to set up camp and build a permanent shelter before summer’s end. Agnes held tight to a tin cup and a cooking pot with some spoons jingling inside. William confidently fingered the coins he’d stashed away for rent and passage up the river. Waterways offered easier travel than overland routes where no roads existed. To reach the Huon River settlement, the freed couple probably took a lighter, a barge headed upriver for a load of timber. Or they might have boarded the forty-ton vessel Lady Franklin had commissioned to service the community now named in her honor.
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The growing town of Franklin lay twenty-eight miles southwest of Hobart Town, and traveling overland was reserved for only the heartiest of explorers willing to navigate on foot the slippery mountain slopes and confusingly dangerous tangle of forests.

Only the sorrowful ghosts of Aborigines knew the secret paths through sacred ground now on the edge of modern civilization. Once part of Australia’s continent, Van Diemen’s Land separated from the mainland when sea levels rose during the last major ice age and formed the Bass Strait. Starting in 1803, British rule set in motion a systematic eradication of those deemed to be “savages,” the earliest settlers who had inhabited the island for some forty thousand years. Fifty indigenous tribes with a total population estimated between five thousand and ten thousand were scattered across Van Diemen’s Land when the English first landed. By the time Agnes arrived, that number had been reduced to less than two hundred, who lived in exile on Flinders Island off the northeast coast. Isolated from the rest of the world for about ten thousand years—the longest known isolation in human history—the Aboriginal people of Van Diemen’s Land were completely exterminated in less than seventy-five years.

The dense forests of the Huon Valley, first inhabited by the indigenous Nuenonne tribe, was where Agnes and William began to erase their shared history in Van Diemen’s Land. Immigrants who arrived of their own free will voiced an ominously rising prejudice against an expanding population they needed and despised at the same time. Comparing the island’s beauty to the hideousness of those transported to its shores against their will, a male settler wrote that “the inhabitants are like a set of vultures . . . defacing one of the finest countries in the world.”
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And a female settler similarly observed that the convict, “like an ugly nose, spoils the face of the country.”
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As he began to write
On the Origin of Species
, Charles Darwin visited Van Diemen’s Land and termed the colony “a festival amongst the lowest barbarians,” writing: “. . . I was disappointed in the state of society. . . . There are many serious drawbacks to the comforts of a family, the chief of which perhaps is being surrounded by convict servants. How thoroughly odious to every feeling, to be waited on by a man who the day before, perhaps, was flogged, from your representation. The female servants are, of course, much worse: hence children learn the vilest expressions, and it is fortunate, if not equally vile ideas.”
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Offering less understanding still for Aborigines, he echoed a sentiment shared by many: that “Van Diemen’s Land enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population.”
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An attempt to gloss over the penal colony’s past was yet another cause adopted by Lady Jane Franklin. About the time she purchased the Huon Valley land, she spearheaded a campaign to change the island’s name to Tasmania, a name first printed in an 1808 atlas and then bandied about in newspapers beginning in 1823.
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Following the coast down the River Derwent and passing Bruny Island, William and Agnes sought a fresh start. Though they were legally free under the terms of the Transportation Act, the heavy chains of their convict past still rattled ominously against the promise of their future. Much of the far southeast remained untamed in 1844, though the island’s total population had grown to about fifty-eight thousand. It was a region greener and wetter than Oatlands and Hobart Town, fertile for living off the land and water, and for blending into a quiet wilderness, where the couple could together shed their convict stain and start afresh.

Agnes found herself in high spirits as they sailed through the magical valley. Enchanted forests carpeted in velvety moss and giant leafy ferns revealed layers upon layers of deep green density. In the runoff of spring, streams rushed toward the river, and waterfalls cascaded over jagged cliffs. Ancient trees of gigantic proportions, some measuring ninety feet in circumference, pushed their lofty crowns toward a perfectly pristine blue sky.
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The river rippled with silver ribbons of light as the bloodred sun slipped below an endlessly green horizon. Looking north, Agnes spied a gently muted mountain range aptly named Sleeping Beauty. Remains of a harsh winter lingered in the snow, atop graceful slopes mirroring the silhouette of a princess who reclines peacefully on her bed, hair flowing along her side.

Crossing the Tasman Sea, heading upriver, and fighting the current required at least a day and a half from Hobart Town, depending on the winds and the tides. Buoyant with excitement as they hoisted their worldly possessions onto their shoulders, the couple was rowed ashore to a timber camp on the outskirts of Franklin. Traveling with only what they could carry and the clothes on their backs, William steadied his wife’s arm as they waded through the marshy mudflats and up the steep hillside banks. The sturdy thirty-nine-year-old knew hundreds of other free men on the island: acquaintances from the hulk in England, the sea voyage, the prison tread wheels, and his sentence to the chain gangs. Even in this remote place, William found familiar faces happy to offer the couple a place at the fire, along with a little rum and cooked eel to welcome their old mate.

Women were still rare in the male-dominated backcountry, so news of the grey-eyed Agnes accompanying her rugged husband ensured plenty of help stringing a canvas awning between trees and settling in that first night. Within the week, William purchased a good saw and paddled upstream to a small riverside plot they’d clear for their future. He gathered kindling wood for a fire and set traps for fish while Agnes prepared supper from the provisions they’d packed from Oatlands. For the time being, they’d sleep in a tent. Using a whetstone, William honed his ax’s blade and set to work removing dense tea tree scrub and felling Huon pine.

A simple hut at the river’s edge, built from “split timber and clay reinforced with wattle twigs,”
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seemed a fine spot to raise their brood. The small bulge in Agnes’s belly carried a child conceived soon after their reunion in Oatlands. Fresh fish from the river and potatoes from nearby farms offered thetwenty-three-year-old and her developing child many a bountiful feast. Crayfish and eels were roasted on an open fire and seasoned with spicy berries from wild pepper plants. Rushing streams provided an abundant supply of crystal-clear water. The water’s edge was eerily quiet save for croaking frogs, buzzing mosquitoes, an occasional owl’s call, and the sound of the river lapping against the shore. Their new home shielded the couple from the harshness they’d always known and offered a safe place to drift off to a deeply sound sleep. A fine mist embraced this ethereal landscape, as vibrant rain-forest spirits prepared to spring into life.