Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  Though chained at wrist, or even at waist or ankle, and guarded by soldiers detailed from the Limerick garrison, the group of felons and children could hardly have seemed much of a threat to the social fabric. The housemaid Catherine Bourke, cloak-stealer, as well as being sixty years of age, was only five feet (152 cm) tall. Rosanna Daly, a nineteen-year-old cook, was four feet ten inches (147 cm). Bridget Lonrigan, a 25-year-old single kitchenmaid and clothes thief, also reached less than five feet.

  It was a harsh business getting to the ship. Shields and the other Limerick women imprisoned with her would be conveyed in bitter air not to Cork, 80 kilometres away, but far across-country to Dublin. From Tullamore in County Offaly, they would have been put on the decks of a barge, and subjected to the mockery and occasional kindnesses of bargees as they traversed the locks along the Grand Canal to Dublin, to august Kilmainham gaol by the Liffey on the edge of the city.

  There must have been gossip about ships and destinations. She would have heard of the notorious Neva, which left Cork in early 1835 with one hundred and fifty Irish women convicts and over fifty of their children. Four months after departure, in July, on the far side of the earth in Bass Strait, Neva struck on an unmarked rock which ripped her rudder out. All but twenty of the female convicts and all their fifty-nine children were drowned.

  Mary’s ship was to be the bark Whitby of 431 tons. Throughout January and February 1839, one hundred and thirty prisoners and twenty-nine of their children were rowed out through the misty estuary of Dublin Bay and arrived in piercing cold on the damp prison deck. In the struggles for space, rations and warmth, Michael was both burden and protection. Not that the other women were hardened criminals. Only three of them had done serious prison time. Whatever their slyness, sullenness, loudness, they were normal, powerless women, most of them in grief.

  On 16 February 1839, Captain Thomas Wellbank signed the Lord Lieutenant’s Warrant, acknowledging the ‘several bodies’ he had received on board, and their prison shifts, jackets, petticoats, etc. The surgeon superintendent on Whitby was the naval man John Kidd, who found Mary to have brown hair, brown or chestnut eyes, ruddy complexion, and ‘marks of scrofula under the chin or right jaw’. Called the King’s Evil because it was believed that the touch of a monarch could cure it, scrofula was something she caught by her parents’ hearth, while drinking the normal staple of buttermilk from a cow infected with bovine tuberculosis.

  Surgeon Kidd would note that like Larkin before her, she had reading but not writing. Thus, as a small girl, she must have attended a hedge school, an unofficial school run in the open or in a barn by Irish itinerant scholars—the only source of learning for her class.

  Many of the children aboard were young and delicate, said Kidd, and ‘several of the women old and infirm’. He kept the women busy with sewing and exercise on deck, and as in most well-run ships, the noise of some crewman’s fiddle and the distant thump of jigs was heard through the mists by occasional winter promenaders ashore. The time of anguish and noise came on 18 February. Whitby left Ireland, as so many transports did, in the midst of the season of storms.

  A veteran surgeon, Peter Cunningham, who made six journeys to Australia, frankly recommended cohabitation between convict women and sailors and guards. He proposed that these sexual alliances were to the benefit of all parties. They provided the women, he said, with extra comforts—tea and occasional spirits—and provided the sailor with washing, sewing and cleaning. It was axiomatic in the case of the Irish that Dublin women were more susceptible to these arrangements than women from the outer counties, and more evangelical surgeons did not approve of the procedure anyhow. Cunningham tells us that the sound of the Rosary recited in Irish was heard each evening from the convict deck of Irish ships—an indication of a muscular morality. But as ever, except in the much earlier and notorious case of the Lady Juliana, the little island of a women’s ship left in the record more questions than answers, carrying within it its own net of accommodating secrets. Kidd’s journal gives not the slightest direct information on what arrangements were permitted or suppressed aboard Whitby.

  Progressive bureaucrats in Whitehall, however, who hoped that these women might become the mothers and improvers of Australia, would have been gratified to hear that only Mary Hegarty, a Londonderry child’s maid, eighteen years of age, had been treated for syphilis, the one case of that nature Kidd found aboard. Hegarty would survive the disease to receive her conditional pardon in 1846.

  It was surprising how many of the prisoners were going to a reunion. Amongst others, Eliza White of Dublin travelled in hope to her convict husband, Christopher Reilly. Jane Ramsey, a Protestant kitchen maid, was also on her way to her husband, and Mary Carroll, a 39-year-old dairymaid wanted to show her convict husband her two and a half year old son whom he had never seen. A sixty year old, Ann Murray, also had a relative on his way to New South Wales: her son, aboard the Waverley, a ship for males which left from Dublin a week after the Whitby.

  Sir George Gipps, a studious army engineer with a taste for research who had taken over from Governor Bourke the previous year, had written to Whitehall about the inferior quality of rations on ships coming from Ireland. Early in his New South Wales career, he had ordered a more modest study made of the rationing of two Irish ships. ‘A simple perusal of this report will, I hope,’ he wrote to Colonial Secretary Glenelg, ‘induce Your Lordship to cause an inquiry to be made into the mode of victualling these ships . . .’ But plain tastes and the fact that hunger was no stranger to them, equipped most of the Whitby women to survive be-weevil-ed flour and the rancid barrels of bony and unsavoury beef and pork.

  In late June 1839, Whitby at last sailed through the sandstone headlands of Sydney Harbour. The drag of sea slackened. Mary heard raucous Australian birds call from the bushy heights above Watson’s Bay.

  The skills of the Whitby women, advertised by government, brought relatively light demand, and none for women with children. So, with perhaps this or that sailor dwelling on a woman’s face and fearing her loss, on 1 July the women and their infants were rowed down-harbour and landed on the western side of Sydney Cove. Lined up unchained, they were lectured by a number of colonial wives, members of the Ladies’ Committee, who gave them sisterly, evangelical advice on the perils and possible rewards ahead of them.

  Five Irish nuns of the Charity order had come from Cork the previous December to look after and protect their convict sisters. There were two or three of them at the women’s section of the Hyde Park barracks in Macquarie Street. The others Mary Shield would encounter at Parramatta, acting as visitors at the Female Factory, which was to be her home. Detention in Sydney was brief. The Whitby women and children were brought back down to the water, put into whaleboats by constables, and rowed up the Parramatta River, a broad waterway with islands, inlets and fine juts of sandstone, and, further up, mangrove swamps.

  It could be a pleasant journey in Sydney’s mild winter. In the intimacy of a whaleboat, something like normal male society was now temporarily restored to Mary. The constables and oarsmen were all former or serving convicts, some honourable men, some rascals. The journey was only 23 kilometres as the crow flies, somewhat more by the bends of the river, and many fine picnic places lay along the way. Until the 1830s the trip to Parramatta had sometimes taken constables and women three days. Liquor travelled with the parties, and in camps set up early—so it was surmised by the Colonial Secretary of New South Wales—evening bush orgies had been the pattern. By the Whitby women’s time, the journey was meant to take only one long day, or in exceptional circumstances two, and the presence of children would have helped mute wilder behaviour. Boats still generally stopped for refreshments at Squire’s Public House, a large slab-hut inn at Kissing Point, above a beach surrounded by sandstone ledges and bush. Here was a sandbar which boats kissed against, but it had a repute, too, for convict sexual recreation. Squire’s Inn provided Mary with her first Australian drink and social occasion, and she was partia
l to both.

  The Female Factory for which the women were bound was built in 1821 at Parramatta on 1.6 hectares on the riverbank, and was judged necessary because of the perceived fallen nature of the women, but also because of the degraded nature of society. The disproportion of males to females in convict society— one hundred male convicts to every seventeen women, had called the place into being, to save females from prostitution. At first the factories produced cloth known as ‘Parramatta’ or ‘Georgetown’, after the respective Female Factories. But by the time the women of the Whitby arrived, there was no consistent work done at the Parramatta site. Its reputation was questionable but not as bad as that of the Cascades Female Factory, which was seen as a de facto brothel for the town of Hobart. The Cascades Factory was certainly the scene of scandalously high mortality amongst infants and young children who inhabited the place with their mothers and, like the Parramatta Factory, it was now continuously overcrowded. The Parramatta and Cascades Factories were not the only ones in the colony—there were at this stage or later similar Factories at Newcastle, Port Macquarie, Moreton Bay, and at Launceston and Ross and elsewhere in Van Diemen’s Land. But the Factories would always have an ambiguity of intent— were they a haven or a gaol, a workshop, hospital, marriage bureau?

  The Parramatta Factory had been designed for all possible purposes by the talented convict Francis Greenway, the Bristol architect transported for forging a contract. Behind its 2.7 metre walls, it was three storeys high, and was meant to house three hundred women. Within a year of Mary Shields’s arrival there, it held 887 women and 405 children. Since free immigration for deserving poor spinsters from the British Isles was taking jobs once given to convict women, women accumulated in the Factory. In some ways the Factory was an extended, land-based version of the convict deck. ‘Major’ Mudie, the severe Hunter Valley magistrate, disapproved of the Parramatta Factory on the grounds, as he would ultimately tell the Molesworth parliamentary committee, that ‘So agreeable a retreat, indeed, is the Factory, that it is quite a common thing for female assigned servants to demand of their masters and mistresses to send them there and flatly, and with fearful oaths, to disobey orders for the purpose of securing the accomplishment of their wish.’ By contrast, reformers said that many convict women arrived with ‘good resolutions’ at the Factory, making their imprisonment unnecessary and degrading. ‘The assigned servant of Mr Keith was charged by her master with refusing to obey her mistress’ orders. The woman would deck herself out with lace on Sundays and when desired to remove so many furbelows refused to do so. For this disobedience, she was sentenced to three months in the Third Class [the penal wing] of the Female Factory.’

  A master’s complacency over an assigned convict’s sexual behaviour could also lead to the cancellation of the right of assignment and the woman’s at least temporary transfer to the Factory. This occurred with Mary Ann Waters, for example, who was encouraged by her master and mistress to accommodate other lodgers sexually to help support the master’s family.

  In the dormitories, women competed for space through sly stratagems and by maintaining a phalanx with those from the same ship and county. Whitby women stuck together against women from earlier arriving ships such as Lady Rowena, Diamond, Sir Charles Forbes, Surrey and Planter. The English women from these last two ships had their own encampment in the Factory’s long dormitories, but the Irish had a larger one, and many of the arguments over space and food were conducted with that Irish raucousness which would become an Australian characteristic, but which polite people mistook for lowness of soul. The Sisters of Charity did their best to mediate, and may have understood better than male officials that the Factory made a woman edgy and assertive. Those who lost the fight would wither under melancholia, die, or be sent to join the mad at Tarban Creek.

  A few months before Shields’s arrival at Parramatta, Governor Gipps had as part of his new initiative dismissed a tipsy matron and a strait-laced and incompetent superintendent. All Gipps could fall back on was a pragmatic but venal couple who had earlier been sacked from the post—the Bells, George and Sarah. During Shields’s time at the Factory, the Bells were its day-to-day managers. They had in their care three categories of women. Category 1 consisted of women like Mary who were eligible for assignment, had the right to go to church on Sundays, receive friends at the Factory, and earn wages if there was something for them to do. Category 2 were returned assignees, and Category 3 those undergoing punishment. The Category 1 single women were sometimes ‘drawn up in a line for the inspection of the amorous and adventurous votary, who, fixing his eye on a vestal of his taste, with his finger beckons her to step forward from the rank’. There was a colonial song about this extraordinary process.

  The Currency Lads may fill their glasses,

  And drink to the health of the Currency Lasses,

  But the lass I adore, the lass for me,

  Is a lass in the Female Factory . . .

  It was often with no previous acquaintance with the man at all that a young woman would choose an unpredictable marriage over life in the Female Factory.

  The Factory’s Sunday clothes were designed perhaps to attract the attention of a newly pardoned drover or shepherd in church: a white cap, straw bonnet, long dress with a muslin frill, a red calico jacket, blue petticoat, grey stockings, shoes, and a clothes bag to store all these in between Sundays. For weekday wear the women had plainer garments: calico caps, serge petticoat and jacket, and an apron.

  The continued existence of the Factories as part women’s refuge and part-prison was never resolved into the one reality under any administration.

  Gipps had been horrified to find that the women of the Factory were completely idle, apart from cooking and washing for themselves. The year before Mary Shields’s arrival, the Governor decided that he would introduce a supply of New Zealand flax which could be picked by the women and turned into mesh for fishing nets and screens for fruit trees. From 18 October in the year of Mary’s arrival, the public was informed too ‘that needlework of all sorts is performed at the Female Factory in the best possible manner and at very moderate charges’. The Colonial Secretary set a scale of prices—slips 1 shilling and sixpence; shirts from 1 shilling and 10 pence; baby’s gowns upwards of sixpence. None of the Factory’s operations was particularly profitable for the government, but Gipps favoured them for their rehabilitative aspects.

  Lady Elizabeth Gipps, daughter of a British major-general and a woman of progressive mind, had the best behaved thirty or so of the Factory women visit Government House, Parramatta, to receive lessons in needlework. Mary Shields walked up the driveway of the vice-regal residence to attend these sessions, and breathed the urbane air of a civilised household. In the parlour, the women awed to reticence for once by this elegantly genial British lady in her thirties who sat down amongst them along with her housekeeper, the classes proceeded, though they were interrupted in the early 1840s by Lady Gipps’s bad health.

  With whatever skills she possessed, Mary was motivated to maternal vigour to ensure her son’s rations. When he reached the age of five, some time in 1840, Michael was taken from her and sent to one of the orphan schools in Parramatta, probably the one founded by the Sisters of Charity. Contact between Mary and Michael was permitted, especially on Sundays. The boy was growing up amongst the children of other convicts, yet the orphanages of Parramatta did not seem to be schools for criminality. Michael would not come to manhood lawless.

  Mary spent a largely unrecorded four years in the Factory’s rowdy sorority. Though no notable misdemeanour or illness raised Shields to public notice, she suffered from the way the prison-cum-refuge was run. Embezzlement of funds, over-ordering and short-rationing were the modus operandi of steward and matron, Mr and Mrs Bell. News of Factory dissatisfaction eventually reached Governor Gipps, and he agreed to meet a delegation of convict women. ‘They represented that they’d been sentenced to be transported, but not to be imprisoned after transportation . . .’ They contra
sted, ‘I must say, with great force and truth’, their treatment with that of women in prison in Britain and Ireland.

  About the time of the appeal to Gipps, two women detained in a small cell started a fire, and their screams were heard throughout the Factory. One hundred women packed into one of the dormitories broke their door down to get to their threatened sisters. But the constables and the Bells got there first and freed the two women. Abuse and recriminations were exchanged between the two sets of rescuers. Bell used colourful insults, and the women began breaking doors and windows. A detachment of military arrived at the double, but the insurgent women subjected them to a volley of stones and pieces of broken furniture. Eighty of the rioters were arrested and confined at the Factory or Parramatta gaol. Since Mary Shields was soon to be included in a list of the ‘best conducted’, she was obviously not one of those imprisoned after the riot.

  By now the commissary officials of the colony were investigating Bell, and found that for the past two years, ‘Mr Bell’s expenditure appeared to be inconsistent with any means he was known to possess.’ The Bells and Mrs Corcoran, the sub-matron, had also been depositing money in the Savings Bank beyond their means. Mrs Corcoran, however, was now willing to give evidence that Bell had been withdrawing rations for one hundred more children than the Factory contained and selling the excess to Parramatta innkeepers, and that Mrs Bell had needlework done on her own account, and often kept money paid for needlework. Corcoran claimed the prisoners were never issued meal, and the supply of bread to the children was intermittent. She said Mr Bell liked the women’s company too, and took a number of the prisoners to town on drinking sessions, and so on. The matter of the Bells, reported now to the Home Secretary Lord Stanley, drew a passionate response. But the Bells survived in the job because, after a trial with other managers, it was found that they were the only ones willing to endure the running of the place.