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.”30
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.”33 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.”34
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.
Dressed for the Crime Class, Agnes lumbered toward the washing yard, her assigned work station for the next three months. Deputy Matron Cato delivered an armful of dirty clothes. The laundry she scrubbed from townspeople generated income for the prison and punished her for acting out. The hard stone tubs scraped her knuckles, the harsh soap stung bruises, and her bent shoulders and neck ached all the time. Agnes stood ankle deep in water that seeped through her boots and her stockings. Beneath her boots, groundwater overflowed and formed deep pools in the yard. Agnes shivered in the shadows. Because Cascades was built on a rain-forest bog, drainage presented a chronic problem. Dampness crept over the floors and encased the stone walls, seeming to add yet another layer of impenetrability.
March’s days began to shorten and confused the Scottish transport, unaccustomed to seasons that fell opposite to the ones she had always known. Early autumn had arrived in the Southern Hemisphere, condensing a thick layer of dew over the complex and delivering a chilling wind down the valley. As the days blurred one into another, the Goosedubbs Street girl began to look forward to the warmth of the Female Factory’s ox-head soup. Dunking the brown bread up and down to soften the crust, she leaned on her elbow and held up her chin. The broth, reheated from the noon meal, tasted surprisingly good. Following the overseer appointed for her new group of twelve, Agnes sat on a hard chapel pew through another interminable sermon by the lisping and hissing Reverend Bedford. Back in the sleeping room, she settled into her hammock and pulled a thin blanket up around her chin. She tucked her legs in a fetal position trying to warm herself. Would she ever see Janet again?
It seemed like she had just closed her eyes when Agnes heard the ringing of the muster bell at six A.M., providing an extra half hour for sleep because of the autumn schedule. On her feet in the washing yard from sunrise until sunset, Agnes labored three months in Crime Class according to its rules and regulations. Back in the British Isles, King William IV had died on June 20, 1837, and Queen Victoria ascended the throne. Word of the colony’s new queen did not reach Hobart Town until late October, the middle of spring in Van Diemen’s Land.
While Victoria became accustomed to her new throne, Agnes found herself in a cart riding away from Hobart and into the bush. In late June, Mr. Hut
chinson decided to send the troublesome #253 out to Mr. Parker’s farm, ordering that she was “not to be assigned to a town again.”36 Her red-haired friend was not faring much better. On August 12, 1837, a Mrs. Ray brought Janet before the magistrate for “disobedience of orders.” After serving her sentence of three days in solitary confinement, on only bread and water, the eighteen-year-old maid was retrieved by her mistress.
Agnes’s second assignment proved very rustic. While the eighteen-year-old Queen Victoria attended sumptuous state banquets, the grey-eyed Scot dined on what she deemed vermin. Her master called it kangaroo. The “roo” meat tasted gamy and tough, and she had to skin it before roasting. Cooking and cleaning, however, were the least of her worries. Never-ending wood chopping required her to brush away webs built by a wild assortment of spiders colored in red, green, and silver. At least their brilliant markings made them easy to spot. Lizards and frogs, on the other hand, blended into the forest and startled her every time she turned around. And the bloody serpents drove her mad.
Agnes had been warned about the poisonous snakes that killed horses, cattle, and sheep.37 She found the hissing creatures coiled inside the cupboard, under the dining table, and inside the outhouse she was required to clean. Her disgust for reptiles was probably the only passion the Scottish rebel shared with the governor’s wife. In her quest to civilize Van Diemen’s Land, Lady Jane Franklin had offered a reward of one shilling for every snake killed. Over the course of a year, she soon discovered that the fourteen thousand bounties she paid made little impact on the quickly reproducing snake population.
Out in the pastoral rolling hills, Agnes lost track of days except for the monthly wagon ride into Hobart Town to attend Sunday services. She turned seventeen on September 11, 1837, with neither notice nor celebration. The grey-eyed girl had no privacy and rarely a day off. People made fun of her short hair and her accent. Lugging the mistress’s chamber pots into the woods to be emptied, battling snakes, and fighting off loneliness, all of it was more than Agnes could tolerate. Once again, she walked off the job.
On November 3, Mr. Parker delivered his misbehaving servant to the Hobart Town court building. The magistrate pronounced Agnes guilty of “disobedience” and sentenced her to two months in the Cascades Crime Class. Trudging back up the hill toward the shaded morass, Agnes couldn’t help but notice how beautiful Hobart Town looked in the spring, outfitted in lush shades of purple and green.
New residences, built by convict labor, had sprung up throughout the valley, each red brick labeled and numbered to confirm the prisoner’s assigned quota. Imported roses, now in full bloom, tumbled over the painted white fences. Magpies and brightly feathered lorikeets fluttered over her path, and Agnes felt a warm breeze blowing up from the River Derwent. If her presence in Van Diemen’s Land had not been born of punishment, she might have relished this beautiful island, where she breathed the cleanest air on earth. For today, she was assaulted with the stink of the sewers as she approached the top of the town, along with the stone washtubs she knew were waiting for her.
The routine at Cascades was familiar, though no less humiliating, for the troublemaker known as #253. Brow furrowed, Mrs. Cato produced her scissors, clipped Agnes’s hair once again, and handed her more yellow Cs. Bloody hell, back to the washtubs she lumbered. Highly attuned to her surroundings from years on city streets, Agnes spotted a young woman whose eyes sparkled with fiery passion. It was the legendary Ellen Scott, the queen of troublemakers. Queen Victoria ruled the empire, but Ellen Scott ruled the Crime Class.
A native of Limerick, Ireland, Ellen was sentenced to transport for life because she had stolen a watch chain and had been arrested before on vagrancy charges. A hero among the Female Factory women, she affronted and provoked the Reverend William Bedford when he least expected it. Nicknamed “Holy Willie” by the prisoners, Bedford was charged with raising moral standards for the colony. Perhaps the biggest hypocrite ever to step foot inside Cascades, he was despised bitterly by the women for forcing himself on many of them. An impostor of all sorts, he had no theological training, though he’d received an honorary degree. Holy Willie was a married man, the father of two sons and a daughter, but that didn’t stop him from taking advantage of the women he was supposed to guide and protect. The self-important hypocrite was the first voice they heard in the morning and the last at night.
In October 1833, Ellen delivered her own message to the lecherous, grinning, always supercilious preacher. Her cheeky response to another condescending lecture was the ultimate working-class insult. The petite Irish prisoner turned around in her pew, lifted her skirt, and, wearing no undergarments, loudly slapped her bare behind. She was charged with “indecent behavior during the performance of divine service” and sentenced to an additional two months in Crime Class, commencing with thirty days in solitary confinement.38
Ellen was a charter member of the Flash Mob, a Crime Class subculture named for “flash” language, or the jargon of thieves. The now notorious Flash Mob reveled in tormenting their captors at every opportunity. They took special pride in “debagging” Holy Willie as he waddled down the chapel steps, where “some dozen or twenty women seized upon him, took off his trousers and deliberately endeavoured to deprive him of his manhood. They were, however, unable to effect their purpose in consequence of the opportune arrival of a few constables who seized the fair ladies.”39
The wash yard was a school of sorts. Under the corrupt tutelage of the cleverest, most resourceful women she’d ever met, #253 learned many tricks that undermined her captors’ control. With the help of their mates, prisoners retrieved locks of shorn hair from the trash. Weaving the strands together and placing them strategically under the gathered prison caps, the crafty lasses created the illusion of a full head of hair.
In the dark of the night, the Flash Mob dressed for merriment, silk scarves saucily tied over their heads, earrings dangling fashionably, sparkling rings displayed on their fingers. Thriving underground trade provided the means to decorate their bland uniforms with forbidden ornaments. After the Hutchinsons retired for the evening, a new society took hold, and the Mob set the rules. Sneaking out the front entrance posed little challenge. Cascades guards, easily bribed with rum or coins, let the women slip into town, where they danced with abandon at a rowdy tavern of their choice. According to a male convict who arrived shortly after Agnes, “the ‘tip,’ it was said, was taken by every government officer in the colony, from the governor down to scavenger, and was what, in civilian countries is called bribery.”40
Trafficking and illicit commerce between turnkeys and prisoners enabled the women to purchase food, tea, tobacco, sugar, and liquor. The Mob broke even the unwritten rules, defying strict Victorian notions concerning sexuality. Some, including Ellen Scott, were punished for an “unnatural connexion” with another woman, although Ellen later married a freed male convict.
Both fearful of and fascinated by the Flash Mob, the local press described “women, who, by a simple process of initiation, are admitted into a series of unhallowed mysteries, similar, in many respects, to those which are described by Göethe, in his unrivalled Drama of Faust. . . . Like those abominable Saturnalia, they are performed in the dark and silent hour of night, but, unlike those, they are performed in solitude and secrecy, amongst only the duly initiated. With the fiendish fondness for sin, every effort, both in the Factory, and out of it, is made by these wretches, to acquire proselytes to their infamous practices . . .”41
The advantages amassed by members of the Flash Mob were later revealed in testimony by a Cascades prisoner assigned work as a guard: “I was once turnkey over the Crime Class and used to sell and buy on my own account Tobacco, Tea, Sugar, Meat etc. Two women after Muster were released, by me or by Mrs. Hutchinson’s servants, from the Cells as I managed to abstract the keys I wanted and we were supplied from over the Wall with what we wanted.”42
This sturdy Crime Class subculture, founded on rebellion and solidarity, managed better
food, new clothing, and more merriment. The Cascades rebels drank, smoked, talked all night, played cards, exchanged ribald jokes, and put on elaborate theatrics that mocked the authorities. They danced in the moonlight, pretending to be goddesses at the base of Mt. Wellington, and they belted out bawdy songs night after night.
Many were punished for singing obscene lyrics. Others found protection in this rebellious sisterhood of solidarity and devised a myriad of schemes to try the pious patience of Matron Hutchinson. In one well-practiced stunt, the rebels sang at the top of their lungs. The minute they heard the matron’s heavy steps, their chorus fell silent. By the time Mrs. Hutchinson returned to her housing on the second floor of Cascades, the musical entertainment commenced all over again. Testifying before an inquiry into convict discipline, Mrs. Hutchinson admitted: “Their songs are sometimes very disgusting. They leave off when they know I am coming. When they do not (which is sometimes the case in a wet night when they do not hear my foot on the pavement) I turn out the whole ward till I get at the woman whom I send to a cell.”43
Agnes met members of the Flash Mob as she toiled along the washtubs. As a new arrival to the Crime Class, she may have been recruited into their fold, because the Mob would have welcomed the young Scot’s musical talent and her feisty disposition. After serving the second of her eventual twelve trips back to the Crime Class, Agnes was released in early January 1838 at summer’s peak in Van Diemen’s Land.
For eight months, she dutifully fulfilled her sentence until returned by her new master on September 8 for “refusing to return to her service.” 44 She was sentenced to ten days on bread and water. Three days later, Agnes spent her eighteenth birthday in solitary confinement, branded yet again with yellow letters on her clothing. Recalling her days in the mill, she’d spent the morning picking oakum, pulling apart coarse rope so that the recycled fibers could be used to caulk ships like the Westmoreland. Handed a hunk of bread and a bowl of water for dipping, she eagerly put aside the work assignment that had already bloodied her hands.
The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women Page 16