“ They” came to make their fortunes and now “They” rail at you who “They” forced to come. “You” outnumber “Them” by many thousands. . . . Have you not made the colony what it is? Has not your sweat, in so few years, made this land . . . ? Have not your labors given these wandering adventurers at least the position of settled abodes . . . ?48
As tension escalated between the free settlers and the freed convicts, antitransportation advocates displayed their vitriol and solidarity by pinning blue rosettes on their well-pressed lapels, flooding the newspapers with lengthy editorials, and hosting public forums about how to oust the convict population. Their quest for social power rested precariously on the perceived horrors of a classless society in Van Diemen’s Land. John Morgan, the head of the Hobart Town Trades Union, penned an editorial outlining his concerns about emancipist “tyranny”:
Presently, we shall have here, not a war of races and colours, but of castes and classes. . . . The convict authorities . . . would have us adopt the red republican, socialist, levelling principles of revolutionary France by which all distinctions are abolished.49
Now neighbors of those who’d been their masters, emancipated convicts countered settlers’ fears and prejudices by lobbying for their rights as citizens. While freed convicts strove toward a democratic society, most free settlers were fiercely committed to stifling the voices of men and women who held Certificates of Freedom. Emancipists responded with organized solidarity in a town where two of every three men had arrived on a convict ship. Their influence did not go unrecognized. By the 1850s, candidates supporting their interests, some former prisoners, were well represented as aldermen for Hobart Town.
The deep schism between the two factions festered, refusing to mend even as they sat side by side at municipal council meetings. Free settlers remained frustrated by their failure to rid Van Diemen’s Land of “the curse, stain, and peril of convictism.”50 Colonists found it impossible to bury the legacy left by a penal colony. Women and men who’d been transported with mental disabilities, who defaulted into alcoholic despair, or who couldn’t endure unjust cruelty lived and died on the fringes of society. Estimates suggest that about one-third of the female transports never married or had children. “They lived out their lives in lonely exile far from their families and childhood friends. Amongst these were the ones who lived out their final days in the pauper institutions and mental asylums of the colonies, who lived isolated lives in small huts on the edges of towns and villages, or who wandered the colony, homeless and friendless.”51
Before transportation ceased in Van Diemen’s Land, a fresh influx of cheap labor, many Irish refugees from the potato famine, reached its shores. The last convicts to arrive in Van Diemen’s Land were not welcomed as cheap labor the way Agnes and Janet were when the Westmoreland ’s human cargo was paraded through Hobart Town. As anti-transportation sentiment rose, each arrival of new convicts met with increased resentment. The last convicts to arrive in Van Diemen’s Land were expected to serve their sentences, thus extending the penal practices of the previous fifty years. In April 1853, the final female convict ship, the Duchess of Northumberland, anchored off Hobart Town and delivered 216 women. Three women and seven children were lost during the rough voyage. One month later, the St. Vincent, the last convict ship destined for Van Diemen’s Land, arrived on May 26, 1853, with 207 men on board, having lost seven at sea.
Nearly one-quarter of all transports were Irish: thirty thousand men and nine thousand women. Nearly half were arrested during the famine years, most for larceny. The deep-seated conflict between Ireland and Great Britain escalated with every Irish arrest, particularly when political activists were sentenced to transport.
In 1868, the Hougoumont, Britain’s last convict ship to Western Australia, transported 279 male prisoners, including a band of 63 Irish political prisoners known as the Fenians. By this time, the Irish constituted about 20 percent of Australia’s population. Among their ranks were Irish rebels who had emigrated as free citizens, many of whom played a role in shaping workers’ rights and democratic government in the Australian colonies where Agnes McMillan and Ludlow Tedder would settle with their families.
An Gorta Mór: Let Them Eat Grass
While Janet, Agnes, and Ludlow lived out the life of the freed, a new crop of women was targeted for transport half a world away. One was named Bridget Mulligan, from County Cavan. Her passage aboard the Blackfriar had everything to do with being born Irish. A writer traveling to Australia in 1847 made this observation about the transported: “A man is banished from Scotland for a great crime, from England for a small one, and from Ireland, morally speaking, for no crime at all.”52
Bridget’s journey to Cascades began in the blackened potato fields of Ireland in 1849. Her brothers—John, Charles, William, and Patrick—had left their homeland for the promise of work in America. The youngest of the clan, Bridget, remained behind with her mother, Catherine, and sister Bessy.
Thousands began to flee the island. The blight escalated tensions between Ireland and England, and nothing could stop the export of grain. Upper society carried on with usual fare. As starving peasants with sunken eyes stepped over decaying corpses, local lords prepared a sumptuous feast for the visiting Queen Victoria and her assemblage of portly aristocrats. While the servants cleared the silver for the next setting of the banquet’s twenty-three courses, the lords happily discussed profit from grain exports. Victoria, soon labeled the “Famine Queen” among the Irish, made a personal donation to alleviate suffering but quietly turned down higher contributions from other countries to protect both her pride and the Crown’s image.
An Gorta Mór, “The Great Hunger,” arose from the blight on potato crops and worsened in the wake of society’s decay. Greedy landlords and a greedier government were the harbingers of famine, together carrying the cruel countenance of inhumanity. Mass evictions in a single year accounted for two hundred fifty thousand Irish left with nowhere to sleep and no way to make a living. Taking advantage of skyrocketing agricultural prices during the Napoleonic War, landlords supplemented their income by leasing small plots, where families built their croft huts and farmed the land. When prices plummeted after the war, landlords aggressively evicted tenants, destroyed their huts, and converted the land into more lucrative livestock grazing. As a final burden, Ireland, normally known for mild winters, experienced abrupt blasts of weather, bringing freezing sleet and snow.
As a black mold crept across the fields, the British government responded with lethal disregard for children, women, and men who lay dying in the dirt with nobody to bury them. Mr. O’Shaughnessy, an assistant barrister who worked in Ireland, pleaded for help before the House of Commons:
It was quite afflicting to see the state of the children. They were nearly naked, with a few rags upon them; their hair standing on an end from poverty; their eyes sunken; their lips pallid, and nothing but the protruding bones of their little joints visible. I could not help exclaiming as I passed them, “AM I LIVING IN A CIVILIZED COUNTRY AND PART OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE?”53
One million perished and at least another million were forced to leave the Emerald Isle for Europe, the United States, and Australia. As one tragedy bled into another, an additional eleven thousand were arrested and readied for transport, as crime escalated among people desperate for survival. A total of 3,687 Irish girls and women were shipped to Van Diemen’s Land, most sent after 1840, when transport to New South Wales ceased.54 The majority of Irish transports were convicted of larceny, many for rustling livestock. Among those convicted for petty theft, more than half had stolen clothing.55
For the empire, the Transportation Act was especially helpful in disposing of the Irish, a group supremely disdained throughout England. Illustrations in British newspapers of the day portrayed them as subhuman and simian in nature. Even the open-minded Elizabeth Fry had difficulty, at first, understanding and accepting the Irish she visited in prison. Describing women awaiting transport, she wr
ote: “The greatest number appeared to me Irish, a very few Scottish; the former are always ignorant, and preserve the peculiarities of their national character, even in this abode of sorrow and captivity. . . .”56
So fragile was life on the edge of disaster that entire Irish families chose transport over the likelihood of starvation. For some, exile to Van Diemen’s Land was their only chance for remaining a family. Arson was the safest bet. It was an offense guaranteeing immediate transport. Light an oily rag or set a bale of hay on fire. Burn a barn to the ground. Everyone knew there was no way back, yet 242 women from Ireland committed arson, many to escape the famine.57
Propelled by love of family, Bridget Butler and daughter Anne Corry, age sixteen, hatched a plan to be reunited with the rest of their kin. Bridget’s husband had died, and her children were the only family left in Killard, County Clare. As they looked out the grimy window of a boardinghouse room, rain bore down on what were once green hillsides, now plucked bare by the starving for their evening meal.
On January 11, 1849, armed with red-hot coal in a skillet, Bridget and Anne set fire to Mary Hickey’s house, down the lane from the dingy lodging they called home. Mother and daughter prayed they’d be caught, and their prayers were soon answered. Each received a sentence of seven years to Van Diemen’s Land.
A year earlier, Anne’s sister, Margaret, and her brothers, John and Patrick, had been arrested for stealing a sheep. Margaret was shipped out right away. While her brothers awaited sentencing, Patrick was found dead in Dublin’s Smithfield gaol. Not knowing they’d lost Patrick, Bridget and Anne boarded the ship Australasia to repeat the journey Margaret had made a year earlier. On March 27, 1849, they escaped the ravages of the potato famine. Every week spent on the Australasia brought mother and daughter closer to the chance for survival as a family. Just one day before their ship anchored, Bridget died from dysentery at age sixty, following several days of suffering from griping and purging.58 Happily, Anne found her sister, Margaret Quealy, who attended Anne’s wedding and the baptism of her children.59
Many stories were less outwardly dramatic than Bridget Butler’s and Anne Corry’s, though no less tragic. Bridget Mulligan was another country girl named after Ireland’s St. Bridget, a patron saint. Like many, she relied on otherworldly strengths to survive the hard times in County Cavan. Still suffering the famine’s aftershocks, Bridget was on her own at twenty-three and shared a small room with her “cara,” or best friend, Mary Rennicks.
Just four feet, seven inches tall, with a ruddy complexion covered in freckles,60 the diminutive lass with a squinting right eye didn’t look like a criminal, nor had she intended to become one. But in 1850, she made a big mistake. She and Mary Rennicks stole a one-gallon milk tin, a gown, and a white petticoat from Susan Brady. Each was summoned before the Court of County Cavan in the province of Ulster. Despite no prior record, both Bridget and Mary were sentenced to ten years in “parts beyond the seas.”
After Bridget was sent to an island smaller than Ireland, her Roman Catholic religion placed her in a tiny minority. Women from Ireland’s western counties also faced a language barrier. Many spoke only Gaelic and did not understand the commands given by their captors.61 Shipped in the final years of transportation, Bridget benefited from some improvements in shipboard captivity. “Perhaps the most important of these gave each convict a separate sleeping-berth place which could be converted in the daytime into seats and tables.”62
Although Elizabeth Fry passed away in 1845 at age sixty-five, the work in her final years also eased Bridget’s journey on the Blackfriar. By 1842, Mrs. Fry had lobbied successfully for the addition of matrons to the all-male ship crew. The Blackfriar sailed from Dublin with a cargo of 260 female convicts, 59 children, and 7 free settlers who booked passage on the barque. Though the prisoners were better supervised than those of earlier transports, barbaric medical practices had hardly changed at all. Surgeon Superintendent John Moody treated the insane on board with a straitjacket or a cold bucket of water, later reporting the results of his methods:
Under the head Hysterical Mania . . . a case is given by no means uncommon in female convict ships and in the Penitentiary in the Colony, caused no doubt in nervous temperaments by the heat of climate, indolent life. . . . Nothing appeared to have a better effect than a shower bath or a few buckets of water thrown over them when first attacked.63
Bridget Mulligan’s companion, Mary Rennicks, bore the impact of primitive shipboard treatment, arriving in Hobart Town bearing the X mark from blood purging on her right arm. She’d also lost a front tooth.64 Bridget stayed healthy during the 125 days at sea, and Surgeon Superintendent John Moody recorded her behavior as “very good.”65
Under a new penal system, convicts did not proceed directly to Cascades but were housed in the Brickfields Hiring Depot, opened as an annex to the Female Factory in 1842. Designed to keep new arrivals isolated from the entrenched Crime Class, especially the Flash Mob, a probation system introduced in 1839 was meant to hasten reform. On paper, it recommended skill training and the opportunity for well-behaved prisoners to earn a small wage, but in bureaucratic reality, progress was held in place.
Arriving two years before transportation ceased in 1853, Bridget faced the full force of prejudice against convict arrivals, more toxic still because she was Irish and because she was Catholic. Lieutenant Governor Denison pleaded for fewer Irish prisoners, declaring: “Their general want of industry, their insubordinate habits, their subservience to their religious instructors, render them particularly unfitted for settlers in a country like this.”66 Denison also lamented the lack of energy for hard labor among those weakened by the potato famine.67 Rural Irish women, in particular, were ostracized for being “unfitted to engage in domestic service.”68
Stigmatized by her heritage, her religion, and her country roots, the resourceful Bridget Mulligan took full advantage of the one opportunity for early release from the Female Factory. She managed to shave eight years off her sentence the day she married John Wild, a freed convict from Cheshire, England. At twenty-seven, he’d received a sentence in 1841 of fifteen years for getting into a bar fight and stabbing a “spoon forger.” Only five feet, two inches tall, he’d lost some front teeth, his visage was rather sallow,69 but he was an excellent businessman. Once freed, Mr. Wild opened a store selling tobacco and candles in New Norfolk, located on the banks of the River Derwent twenty-two miles northwest of Hobart Town. He also ran a catering service and sponsored lunches for the New Norfolk regatta and Odd Fellows meetings held in Kensington Park.
Bridget had been sentenced to a New Norfolk family in March 1853, so she was put on a cart and sent north just as the trees were turning colors. Golden poplars had been planted all along the river and displayed themselves in bright autumn yellows. Her romance began with a purchase for her master in Mr. Wild’s well-trafficked Charles Street store. The two married in a Catholic Church on July 24, 1853, in the midst of a frosty winter, one month before the official end of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land. Bridget gave birth to a daughter named Hannah on November 20, 1855.
Entrepreneurial in spirit, the lass from County Cavan set up a Dutch oven at the back of her husband’s store and charged townsfolk a penny to bake their dinners. Hannah grew up inside the family store, learning the business and developing one of her own. When Bridget retired, she took over her mother’s oven and, according to descendants, “was remembered for always wearing a snowy white apron.”70 When people came to collect their cooked dinners, she offered a plate of freshly baked scones and expanded her baking empire. With her husband, Henry Laskey, she bought every house on Charles Street, where the two raised nine children in a home named “Tara,” after Ireland’s mythical seat of power. Hannah became a wealthy woman.
Bridget Mulligan’s dear “cara,” Mary Rennicks, didn’t live long enough to be freed. Shortly after being processed at Brickfields, she struck a fellow prisoner and was sentenced to hard labor. The next year, five months pregnan
t, she was committed to trial for the “willful murder of a newborn child” under her care at Cascades. Four months later, she delivered her stillborn baby boy inside the Female Factory. This only deepened her anger, and she was soon cited for an incident of insubordination. In February 1856, a highly unusual notation appeared in her conduct record, recognizing “meritorious conduct on the occasion of fire at Brickfields.”71 Two weeks later, the twenty-six-year-old accused murderer, troublemaker, and proclaimed hero died alone inside the stone walls at Cascades, suffering from burns from her selfless actions to save others from the fire.
The year Mary died was the same year Van Diemen’s Land was renamed Tasmania, after first explorer Abel Tasman. As many citizens hoped to erase the “convict stain,” the women and men who’d suffered forced migration forever changed the complexion of the growing population in Tasmania and New South Wales, becoming the heart and soul of a unique cultural identity.
Bridget received her Certificate of Freedom shortly before the Christmas holidays in December 1862. Like Janet Houston, she lived in Tasmania for the rest of her life. However, when Bridget first arrived on the Blackfriar in 1851, people were leaving the island in droves. Nearly eight thousand people, most of them former convicts, had left Van Diemen’s Land over the previous three years.72 Something quite spectacular had been discovered across the Bass Strait.
10
Bendigo’s Gold
Canvas Town
Gold was discovered in 1851 at Summerhill Creek and Bendigo, two small towns in a new territory on the mainland, the Colony of Victoria. Among those credited as the first to find Bendigo gold were Margaret Kennedy and Julia Farrell, when postings announced that “women were getting quart-pots of gold on Bendigo Creek.”1
The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women Page 28