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.21
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.22 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.”23
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.24
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.”25 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. . . .”26 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 allowe
d 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.
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.28 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.
The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women Page 15