Keegan was dead, but it wasn’t over after all.
It had only just started.
Author’s Notes
Behind this story
The characters in this story are all fictional, except for the ones already in the history books. The story itself is fictional, though aspects of it are based quite closely on the experiences of convict women of 1829 to 1830.
Some historical notes for those who quite rightly prefer their history to be one hundred per cent accurate. People who know their early- to mid-nineteenth-century law will be aware that most convicts were not usually transported for committing a first, or often even a second, offence, unless that offence was murder. In this story, two of my characters are transported for first offences. Please turn a blind eye: it works for their character arcs.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to discover whether the conveyance of convict women newly arrived in New South Wales between Sydney Cove and Parramatta in September of 1829 was by road or by river, so I’ve opted for the river route. In Judith Dunn’s Colonial Ladies: lovely, lively and lamentably loose: crime reports from the Sydney Herald relating to the Female Factory, Parramatta 1831–1835 (Winston Hills, NSW, 2008), accounts suggest that road and river might both have been used from 1831 to 1835. For the purposes of this story, the river would have been the more realistic option, given the number of women involved.
With regard to the Parramatta Female Factory mortuary, it may not have existed in 1829, though in this story it does. It is mentioned in a description given by a visitor to the Factory dated 1836, situated near the gatehouse inside the outer wall, as I’ve described, but does not appear on a plan dated 1833, however that plan doesn’t show the outer wall. The presence of a mortuary might be expected, given that there was a hospital, but perhaps in earlier days the undertaker came as soon as an inmate died.
Readers might be surprised by how literate the four main characters in the story are. Well, convict women were a reasonably literate lot. About sixty-five per cent of convict women could read and around half of those could also write. They were also quite numerate. Irish convict women, however, were overall less literate and numerate than English convict women. See Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: the forced migration of women to Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also the fascinating thumbnail sketches of the convict women listed in the back of Babette Smith’s A Cargo of Women: Susannah Watson and the convicts of the Princess Royal (Allen & Unwin, 2008).
The character Rachel Winter’s arrest story is based on the experiences of the real ‘Mary Rose’ described in Sian Elias’s fascinating book The Floating Brothel: the extraordinary true story of female convicts bound for Botany Bay (Hachette Australia, 2010).
And just a point on costume. In 1829 a petticoat wasn’t only something you wore under your dress, it was also ‘an outer garment for working women, like a skirt’ (Margaret Maynard, Fashioned from Penury: dress as cultural practice in colonial Australia, Cambridge University Press, 1994). I’ve attempted to avoid confusion by using the term ‘outer-petticoat’.
I’d also like to tip my hat to some family ghosts, whose lives inspired me to write this series. Thanks for rattling your chains, ladies and gentlemen, both supernatural and the ones the law put on you.
William Standley, marine (Private), arrived New South Wales aboard HMS Sirius on 26 January 1788.
In November 1791 he married…
Mary Ann Anstey (Anster/Astey), convict, arrived New South Wales aboard Lady Julian(a) on 4 June 1789.
In August 1792 they became parents of Mary Standley, who, in September 1805, married…
James Lowe (Low), convict, arrived New South Wales aboard Minorca on 14 December 1801.
In March 1806, they became parents of Anne Lowe, who, in September 1822, married Henry Atkins Bonney, son of…
Joseph Bonney, convict, arrived New South Wales aboard General Hewitt (Hewart) on 7 February 1814, whose first wife and several children, including Henry Atkins Bonney, followed him from Suffolk, England.
In 1827, in Tasmania, Henry and Anne became parents of Christopher Bonney, and so on and so on until it was me.
Parramatta Female Factory Precinct
The original Parramatta Female Factory was located in two long, narrow rooms above Parramatta Gaol, a stone building constructed in 1802 in what is now Prince Alfred Park. There were no cooking facilities or beds, only the nine hand-looms on which the women wove linen, sailcloth and woollen fabrics. By 1818 up to two hundred women were crowded into an area sufficient for just sixty.
Governor Macquarie proposed the new Female Factory — the one which appears in this book — that opened in 1821 beside the Parramatta River. The Factory was built on land that has been significant to women of the Burramattagal clan of the Darug, or Eora, nation as a place of ceremony for thousands of years. From the outset it was never big enough to meet demand. By 1823 a two-storey sleeping quarters and yards were added for convict women serving time for crimes committed in the colony, or for inmates transgressing the Factory’s rules.
During his tenure, Governor Darling introduced the three-class system: first-class women were those eligible for assignment plus ‘blameless destitutes’; those of the second class were probationary; and third-class inmates were locally convicted criminals. The criteria for who should be classified as first or second class, however, appears to have blurred and changed over the years.
While waiting to be assigned, recuperating from illness or nursing their babies, first- and second-class women washed, spun and carded wool to be made into Parramatta cloth, a lightweight twill-weave, for clothing or to be sent to England — Australia’s first manufactured export. Life in the Factory was harsh, and tainted with despair, homesickness and disease.
Transportation to New South Wales ceased in 1840 and, in an attempt to clear the Factory of children, the government built an orphanage on adjacent land. This became the Roman Catholic Orphan School when children from the Catholic orphanage at Waverley were transferred there in 1844. The Female Factory continued to accommodate convict women and, by 1846, female lunatics. By April of 1848, however, the institution was home to two hundred and forty male and female ‘invalid and lunatic prisoners of the Crown’. In 1849 the institution was officially gazetted as the Parramatta Lunatic Asylum.
Three wards for the criminally insane were built between 1861 and 1869, all of which were demolished in 1960. Also during the 1860s, the third-class sleeping quarters was remodelled and a verandah built around three sides. A large new wing was added to the building in 1876; this remains standing today.
The main Female Factory building, designed by convict architect Francis Greenway, was approved for demolition in August 1883 and a new two-storey ward built in 1885, partly over the original construction and recycling sandstone and the clock from Greenway’s building.
In 1886 the government evicted the Roman Catholic Orphan School to rehouse girls from Biloela Girls’ Industrial School the following year. The first modification was a new nine-foot wall surrounding the compound.
For nearly ninety years Parramatta Girls Home, as it eventually became known, housed and trained girls up to age eighteen sent there via the Child Welfare and Crimes Acts. The girls were classified as either destitute, abandoned or orphaned and therefore not ‘corrupt’, or having tendencies towards criminal behaviour, but conditions in the institution were brutal for all. Isolation cells for punishment were built in 1897, with more added over the years. Riots over lack of food occurred; accounts of beatings, rape and deprivation were common.
In 1974, Parramatta Girls Home closed after accusations of abuse of inmates were raised, then reopened later the same year under a new name — Kamballa for the girls’ facility, and now Taldree for boys. After the boys’ facility moved to Werrington in 1980, the Department of Corrective Services acquired many of the old orphanage buildings and opened the Norma Parker Correctional Centre for women, where children under three could stay with their mothers in prison, an echo of
the early Female Factory days. Kamballa closed three years later and the Norma Parker Correctional Centre in 2008.
In 2003 former Parramatta Girls Home inmates reunited for the first time, and the following year the Federal Senate’s Forgotten Australians: a report on Australians who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children was released. Much of this historical information and more can be viewed on the Parragirls website (www.parragirls.org.au).
What remains of the Parramatta Female Factory today lies in the grounds of Cumberland Hospital in Fleet Street, Parramatta, and is owned by the New South Wales Health Department. If you know what you’re looking for, you’ll recognise the Factory walls, the hospital building, the third-class dormitory and Matron’s apartments. You might even encounter a few ghosts. Unfortunately you can’t actually go there, because it’s on private property.
When I first started writing this book in 2010 I contacted Bonney Djuric. Ms Djuric, together with Christina Green, Lynette Aitken and Sebastian Clark, a descendant of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, founded the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Association. Established in 2006, the PFFPA is a community-based, non-government organisation that seeks to broaden understanding and awareness of the precinct’s history and heritage, especially in relation to women and the generations of Australians who experienced institutional care as children — the Forgotten Australians — in the precinct’s institutions.
In January of 2011 Bonney Djuric and I went to Cumberland Hospital to have a look at the remaining Factory buildings. At the time, the Health Department was in the middle of installing air conditioning units in the sandstone walls of the original 1823 third-class dormitory building so it could be used as a computer data room. There was a lot of protest by the PFFPA and others and media attention about it. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, we were told fairly bluntly to leave. Since then, because of that protest action, the work has stopped.
The PFFPA’s campaign to have the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct recognised as a site of national heritage continues to gain momentum, but the greatest threat to the precinct’s preservation is the disparity concerning women’s history and heritage. Parramatta Female Factory was the first female convict factory to be built in Australia. Twenty per cent of Australians are descended from the women who went through those Factory gates. Approximately thirty thousand girls spent time in the Parramatta Girls Home. The precinct has immense historical and cultural value to Australians. It should be preserved as a place of memory and of conscience.
If you’d like to get involved with the campaign, visit the above website. See also www.heritageparramatta.org
Thank you very much to Bonney Djuric and her team for the time and research material contributed to this book and future volumes in this series. Much appreciated.
Bibliography
Some useful primary sources have been: the descriptions of trial procedures, and actual trial transcripts, available online at www.oldbaileyonline.org; the journals of Royal Navy medical officers serving on navy, convict and emigrant ships available online via the (British) National Archives at www. nationalarchives.gov.uk/surgeonsatsea/; Susannah Place Museum, 58–64 Gloucester Street, The Rocks — four working-class terrace houses and a corner shop built in 1844, preserved to showcase different historical periods (www.hht.net.au/museums/susannah_place_museum); the Australian National Maritime Museum also had loads of fascinating ship-type resources, not least the replica HMB Endeavour, which while not strictly like a convict ship because of the way her lower decks are arranged is similar in size to the Isla (www.anmm.gov.au); The Maritime Centre at Newcastle for similar material — thank you especially to researcher Peter Smith, who sent me some very helpful information (www.maritimecentrenewcastle.org.au/); and of course the collections in the New South Wales State and Mitchell libraries.
Some useful secondary sources have been: Jonathon Green, Slang Down the Ages: the historical development of slang (Kyle Cathie Ltd, 2005); London’s Underworld: being selections from ‘Those That Will Not Work’, the fourth volume of ‘London Labour and the London Poor’, by Henry Mayhew, edited by Peter Quennell (Spring Books, 1966); Catherine Arnold, Necropolis: London and its dead (Pocket Books, 2007), and City of Sin: London and its vices (Simon & Schuster, 2011); JJ Tobias, Crime and Police in England 1700–1900 (Gill and Macmillan, 1979); Arthur Griffiths, The Chronicles of Newgate (Chapman and Hall, 1884); Charles Bateson, The Convict Ships 1787–1868 (Library of Australian History, 1983); Robin Haines, Life and Death in the Age of Sail: the passage to Australia (University of New South Wales Press, 2003); Annette Salt, These Outcast Women: the Parramatta Female Factory 1821–1848 (Hale & Iremonger Pty Ltd, 1984) — an indispensible source; Jordie Albiston, Botany Bay Document: a poetic history of the women of Botany Bay (Black Pepper, 2003) — enough to make you cry; Kay Daniels, Convict Women (Allen & Unwin, 1998); Grace Karskens, Inside the Rocks: the archaeology of a neighbourhood (Hale & Iremonger, 1999); John Birmingham, Leviathan: the unauthorised biography of Sydney (Vintage, 2000); and Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: a history of the transportation of convicts to Australia 1787–1868 (Vintage, 2003).
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Anna Valdinger, commissioning editor and partner in crime at HarperCollins Australia, and freelance editor Kate O’Donnell for loads of encouragement, excellent ideas, lovely comments and fabulous manuscript-polishing skills. It’s been fun. Thank you also to Shona Martyn, publishing director at HarperCollins Australia, for championing me. A big thanks, too, to my agent Clare Forster, for support, wise words and insightful comments. Also much deserved is a thank you to the team at HarperCollins New Zealand for their ongoing commitment, and one also for Kate Stone for the cheering up (and of course Mr Robinson), and to my writing group Hunter Romance Writers for the clever idea of switching the bit at the end around. The most heartfelt ta goes to my friends and family and to my husband Aaron Paul, for keeping me sane. More or less.
Girl of Shadows
BOOK TWO
Deborah Challinor
1830: Convict girls Friday Woolfe, Harriet Clarke and Sarah Morgan have been settled in Sydney for almost a year. Sarah has been assigned to jeweller Adam Green, Harriet is a maid for the Barrett family, and Friday is working as a prostitute in a brothel. Each of them is struggling to forget the brutal crime they committed.
But their fate is no longer theirs to control. Vicious underworld queen Bella Jackson holds the girls’ futures in the palm of her hand, biding her time until she exacts payment for what she knows about their misdeeds — payment that will ruin them.
Harriet, racked with guilt and slowly losing her mind, is convinced that their lost friend is haunting them, and while Friday succumbs to the bottle, Sarah has to fight for everything she holds dear. Once again, the girls must join forces to save one of their own. But which one?
And in the background Bella Jackson waits and watches…
Read on for a sneak peek at Girl of Shadows…
September 1830, Sydney Town
As a lurid dawn broke over Sydney Harbour, the sun a slash of fire on the horizon, a handful of tardy bats straggled homewards across the shadowed land on a warm, salty breeze to seek dark shelter in trees and caves. Below them folk awoke — free men and women and convicts alike — stirred blearily in their houses, and set about preparing for the day ahead.
The weather promised to be fair after a week of almost constant pelting rain, and housewives and servants built fires beneath coppers for a long day of boiling mouldering laundry. Lags from Hyde Park Barracks looked forward to time outside the walls, even if it was only working on the roads or the tunnel from Lachlan Swamp, and ladies relished time in the shops unhampered by heavy capes and umbrellas. In paddocks horses squelched morosely in steaming puddles, while their better-heeled, more highly strung counterparts kicked out at stalls and ostlers’ boys. After a quick breakfast, market gardeners out towards Parramatta rushed to check that their recently planted vegetables hadn’t been washed right ou
t of the ground.
Sydney Town was finally beginning to dry out, but at least everyone’s water barrels were full, and the Tank Stream may have been cleansed of a fraction of its filth. The day that Mr Busby announced the completion of his water bore would be a day to celebrate indeed.
Those abroad by the time the sun hung free of the eastern horizon noted the change in the taste of the wind and agreed that spring had definitely arrived.
Sarah Morgan sat with her back against the sandstone wall, wrapped in a cloak of fear and gazing sightlessly at nothing, not even moving when she heard the rattle of keys.
There was little point. From outside came the clank and bang of the gallows being prepared: she knew very well who was coming for her.
The heavy door creaked open and the priest asked, ‘Are you ready, Sarah?’
She didn’t respond.
He tried again. ‘Sarah, have you made your peace with God? Would you like to say a final prayer? It is not too late for redemption.’
Slowly, hearing her neck bones scrape as though her vertebrae had rusted, she moved her head to face him. ‘I don’t want redemption. I don’t regret what I did. I’m glad I killed him.’
The turnkeys peering over the priest’s shoulder stared at her.
As though he hadn’t heard, the priest insisted, ‘God will offer you forgiveness if you repent.’
‘No. I refuse to. I hate spiders and that’s what your God is.’
Shocked at her blasphemy, one of the turnkeys backed out of the cell, rapidly crossing himself. The other, evidently not so superstitious, fastened Sarah’s hands behind her back with wrist-irons, then they were all in the corridor, their footsteps echoing hollowly off the flagstones. The passageway was cool and dim, and for several seconds a pair of sleek rats kept pace with them, scampering along the base of the wall, their pale faces those of the two young girls belonging to the reverend on the convict ship Isla. What had been their names? Sarah struggled to remember: Eudora and Jennifer? No, Geneve, that was it. And then the rodents vanished.
Behind the Sun Page 44