by Anne Summers
A further group of women who were seen as whores were the female immigrants. In 1831 the government began to use revenue from the sale of land in Australia to assist the emigration of single women between the ages of 18 and 30. They were wanted as domestic servants and as wives. But this attempt could not immediately alter either the social mores of colonial society or the dominant view of women. Even if the scheme had been supervised more rigorously, its success under the social conditions prevailing in Australia would have been purely fortuitous. For 40 years the dominant ethos of the colony had been one of individual self-assertion within a framework, first of the military discipline that regulated the penal system, and later of the exactitudes enforced by the opportunistic battle for prosperity. Transportation had created a social system characterised, as Humphrey McQueen points out40, by a self- interest which often manifested itself in brutality and treachery towards one’s fellows. The arbitrary introduction of a few hundred more women was not immediately going to alter this.
Female immigrants* were subjected to the same kind of treatment as the women convicts. Whenever news spread that a ship-load of female immigrants was due to arrive, hordes of men would assemble at the docks, waiting to claim their share of the imported goods. Employers seeking domestic servants had to battle with lustful men who had no intention of paying for the services they required. Some of the women received proposals of marriage before they disembarked, but mostly they had to face proposals of a different nature.
When in August 1834 the Strathfieldsay berthed at Hobart Town, several thousand men were waiting to greet the female immigrants on board.
As soon as the first boat reached the shore, there was a regular rush towards the spot, and the half dozen constables present, could scarcely open a passage, sufficient to allow the females to pass from the boats; and now the most unheard of, disgusting scenes ensued – the avenue opened through the crowd was of considerable length, and as each female passed, she was jeered by the blackguards who stationed themselves, as it were, purposely, to insult. The most vile and brutal language was addressed to every woman as she passed along – some brutes, more brutal than others, even took still further insulting liberties, and stopped the women by force, and addressed them, pointedly, in the most obscene manner … scarcely a female was there, but who wept, and that most bitterly; but this, again, was made the subject of mirth, by the brutes that were present.41
This behaviour was considered reprehensible by the reporter and so it is evident that there was opposition to women being treated in this fashion. But the point is that no one, not even the police, was able to prevent it. The men in this case pursued the women to the house in which they were billeted and remained there for three days, making continual attempts to break in. Although the constabulary was able to maintain a guard on the house, it could not disperse the crowd. Authority was in a defensive and therefore unstable position.
The same incident illustrates the dilatory nature of the arrangements that the authorities made for the arrival of free women. These women had to wait 6½ hours before being given any food and their sleeping arrangements consisted of ‘a few dozen blankets (for nearly 100 women) and as many bed ticks, in which the girls were set to put straw, so that they might have something better than the bare boards to lie down upon.’ By contrast the 320 convicts who had landed that same morning had been immediately provided with clothing and rations. The governor had welcomed them and they were given sleeping berths.42
Ultimately the arrival of free immigrants was going to totally change the social structure of the colonies, but this was to be a slow process and one that met with considerable resistance. The fate of women was, meanwhile, one of exploitation and abuse. While women remained a numerical minority, and the authorities took no special measures for their protection, they had little hope of being treated any differently from female convicts. The population of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1833 was as follows:43
DD Heath, giving evidence on these figures to the Select Committee on Transportation in 1837, claimed that ‘if transportation were abolished, and the free emigration of families encouraged, the effects would soon be sensible’.44 He estimated that if 4000 to 5000 convicts, 85 per cent of them men, were still transported annually, while the free immigrants were overwhelmingly male, ‘it cannot be expected that for a century to come any approximation to equality can be made.’ Without such an approximation, the chances for a change in the treatment of women appeared remote.
The attempts at change instituted by Governor Macquarie during his 11 years in the colony were short-lived. He had hoped to see a society based on the efforts of peasant farmers, independent traders and artisans.45 His policy of promoting the emancipated convicts – by giving them land grants and appointing them to positions of authority – was bitterly resented by the exclusivist and anti-emancipist ‘Pure Merinos’ who wanted a pastoral industry resting on convict labour to form the foundations of the new colony. He received more support for his policy of promoting education and, by the time of his departure in 1820, one-fifth of all local official spending was on education.46 But the comprehensive system of charity schools, which Macquarie instituted, did not long survive the end of his administration. The blueprint for the new society that Macquarie had espoused was implicitly rejected by the recommendations of the Bigge Report, which established the guidelines for the administration of the colonies for the next two or three decades.
Macquarie’s priorities had been thwarted by those who rejected his idealism in favour of a colony based firmly on the principles of punishment and profit.47 For a time at least, Bigge’s general estimations had seemed vindicated. Only 730 free immigrants had come to Australia during the 12 years between 1810 and 1821, and of these, 310 were the wives and children of transported convicts.48 Before 1831 only two types of settlers arrived: those who had no choice in the matter, and those men of property who had the means to extract a quick fortune from the new land. The original land policy was reversed: henceforth only ‘respectable capitalists’ received grants and these were large, in proportion to their available capital.
Such immigrants saw little advantage in altering the role of women. They wanted to employ men ‘with no encumbrances’49 so they would not have to provide rations for unproductive women and children. They were happy with the existing situation whereby there was a supply of whores who could keep their men from becoming too restless and whose offspring could be supported by the government.
Bigge, it will be remembered, had criticised the treatment of convict women but he also supported the exclusivist view of the immediate future of the colony. He did not, therefore, advocate either the abolition of transportation of women or that they no longer be used as sexual fodder. Rather he implicitly endorsed the views of the Select Committee on Transportation, which had reported a decade earlier. It had said that the convict women were ‘of the most abandoned description and that in many instances they were likely to whet and to encourage the vices of the men, whilst but a small proportion will make any step towards reformation’.50 The Committee took a ‘realistic’ view of this behaviour; ‘But yet, with all their vices, such women as these were the mothers of a great part of the inhabitants now existing in the Colony, and from this stock only can a reasonable hope be held out of rapid increase to the population; upon which increase, here as in all infant colonies, its growing prosperity in great measure depends.’ In keeping with Castlereagh’s instructions to Macquarie, all that was done was to build a new Female Factory so that the women would be accommodated and not forced to prostitute themselves simply to get a bed for the night.
In 1821 the new Female Factory at Parramatta was opened; it was a three-storey stone building designed by Francis Green-way to accommodate 300 women. It was both a prison and a place of employment; until 1835 women were employed spinning and weaving. (There were two similar factories in Tasmania: one at Launceston and the Cascades Factory in Hobart.) Women in the factories wer
e divided into three classes. The first class consisted of women who had recently arrived from England, women who had been returned from service with good character reports, and women who had undergone a probationary period in the second class. Women in the first class were eligible for assignment and to marry. In the second class were women who had been sentenced for minor offences and who could, after a period of probation, be transferred to the first class. The third, or crime, class consisted of women who had been transported a second time or who had been found guilty of misconduct during the voyage out or since their arrival. Convict women who became pregnant, and female immigrants convicted of vagrancy or other offences, were also confined in the factories.
But while the Female Factories would appear to resemble conventional imprisonment, they did not abate the enforced whore-dom of the convict women. Rather they removed the women from the sight of the free population – so that they could ignore the ill-treatment and degradation of the convicts – and enabled their systematic abuse to be conducted more efficiently. Even within the new factory, conditions were appalling and, as the number of women transported grew, very overcrowded. The infant mortality rate at the factories, especially at the Cascades Factory, was high, in contrast to the low rate for the colony generally. Life at the Cascades Factory has been described as follows:
Situated in a morass, surrounded by lofty hills, the sun’s rays bringing with them health and cheerfulness do not penetrate into the yards of that miserable prison for a great portion of the entire year. The capacity of the building is so unequal to the number of the wretched inmates, that their working rooms resemble the hold of a slave-ship … So foetid, so wholly unfitting for the human being is the atmosphere after the night’s halations, that if we are correctly informed, the turnkeys when they open the doors in the mornings, make their escape from the passages with the utmost expedition to escape semi-suffocation.51
Within the factories, women were subjected to punishment as well as incarceration. Most despised by the women was the shaving of their heads as punishment for refractoriness. Women were supposedly not allowed to be flogged, but the Rev. Samuel Marsden, a member of the Managing Committee of the Parramatta Factory, had one woman, Susanah Denford, flogged and then dragged through the streets of Parramatta behind a dray.52 In 1836, 100 small dark cells were built at the factory ‘in order to try the effect of solitary confinement on recalcitrant females’.53 A frequent form of punishment in Van Diemen’s Land prior to Governor Arthur’s administration was to force around the women’s necks an iron collar, which had a long prong on each side of it. This, says Robson, ‘gave them the appearance of horned cattle’.54 Evidently this was considered an eminently suitable mode of apparel for what was, in the 1812 Select Committee’s opinion, a herd of prime breeders. In 1837 a treadmill was erected at the Cascades Factory; such punishment had been meted out to women in Sydney since 1823. This horrendous form of torture had especially deleterious effects on those women sentenced to periods on it. An English surgeon, Dr John Goode, who reported on its effects found that its main consequence was ‘a very horrible pain in the loins’ which precipitated a greatly intensified menstruation.55
The factory at Parramatta functioned as a brothel and as a marriage mart. James Mudie told the 1837 Select Committee that many more women were retained in the first class than was necessary for the size of the establishment. He recounted that Ms Gordon, the matron, had several times refused to allow him to take as servants women he had selected. It appears that Ms Gordon unofficially employed the women herself and that she had made ‘thousands of pounds’ from her enterprise. Mudie intimated that she had acquired influence with the authorities by the late 1820s and thus ensured that all reports made of her management of the factory would be favourable. She was, he evinced, ‘notorious’.56
Any man, emancipist or free settler, could visit the factory and choose a wife:
[The eligible women] are turned out, and they all stand up as you would place so many soldiers, or so many cattle, in fact, in a fair; they are all ranked up … The convict goes up and looks at the women, and if he sees a lady that takes his fancy, he makes a motion to her, and she steps to one side; some will not, but stand still, and have no wish to be married, but that is very rare. Then they have, of course, some conversation together, and if the lady is not agreeable, or if the convict does not fancy her from her conversation, she steps back and the same ceremony goes on with two or three more.57
It is not known how many women secured husbands in this manner, although in 1830 Governor Darling attributed the marriage of 163 women prisoners during the first half of that year to ‘the system of management which has been pursued’.58 But even if some women could leave the factory by this respectable route, they left behind them many more in miserable conditions. Little was done to help them, and some of the attempts that were made were subjected to ridicule or criticism. The female convicts were so universally despised that any effort to alleviate the conditions that led to their wild and licentious behaviour was held to be suspect. It should also be remembered that the male colonists had a definite interest in seeing that the female convicts were not allowed to change their ways.
In 1841 Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the Governor of Tasmania, tried to form a ladies’ committee to visit the women in the Cascades Factory. Lady Jane had been commissioned by Elizabeth Fry, the reformer of women’s prisons in England, to try and do something for the female convicts. When the proposed committee was announced in the press, it was mercilessly ridiculed and was attacked because there were some unmarried women among its members.59 The press attacks were so fierce that the committee disbanded, much to Lady Jane’s chagrin. She wrote:
[I]t has been the one object I have thought most about, and cared for most, since I have been in this Colony – yet what have I done – what have I been allowed to do? … These women, these outcasts, for whom no man careth, how willingly would I spend my life in their service, how ardently would I devote the remnant of health and strength I yet possess to their amelioration. It would be worth living for to have such a work before me. I could wish to be the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land for that alone, but with anything short of his power … there will be nothing done.60
Lady Jane made frequent visits to the factory to speak to the women and she was publicly criticised for this. Her efforts appear to have been grounded on a realistic appraisal of the female convicts’ situation. She did not attempt to moralise to the women nor, like Governor Darling’s wife in Sydney, try to bribe them to reform. Her concern was that they receive some education and better food and clothing and that conditions within the factory be improved. She criticised the benevolent reformers:
There are many good but weak people who think if you only read to and pray with [the female convicts], they must be amended by it – will it do any good to pray amidst the howlings and blasphemy of a brothel or what is worse hushed for the moment you are there, but recommencing before you are out of hearing? – The weakness of some of these excellent people is astonishing.61
Even though the factories were crowded and oppressive places, they afforded the women some measure of protection from the vagaries of being a lone woman in the rough colonial society outside. There is evidence that many of the women looked upon the factories as their home and did their best to remain in them. There at least they had the companionship of other women in similar circumstances and, together, they were in a better position to protect themselves or to initiate things, than if they were isolated within a household as servant and sexual fodder. James Macarthur gave evidence to the 1837 Select Committee that the medical officer who attended the factory had told him that the women would rather be there than out on assignment.62 James Mudie claimed that when women were assigned to someone they did not like, they would commit any offence so they would be sent back to the factory. In his capacity as magistrate he had one such woman come before him. She thanked him profusely for sentencing her to Parramatta and begged him to increas
e her term of incarceration. When he realised her intention, he said, ‘I must make an example of that woman, and I must return her to her master’.63 Such attempts to determine one’s own fate were intolerable as far as Mudie and his ilk was concerned: a constant supply of whores was necessary to maintain a quiescent male workforce.
Within the Cascades Factory was a group of women known as the ‘Flash Mob’. They apparently stood up to the authorities within the factory and would leave the factory whenever they chose to visit nearby inns and taverns. Instances of revolt among the united women within the factories were quite common. A group of visitors to the Cascades Factory one day comprised Sir John and Lady Franklin, the Aide-de-Camp and several ladies, as well as the Rev. Bedford, the man who had been recommended by Commissioner Bigge as a suitable person to try and infuse some morality into Van Diemen’s Land. The women convicts listened patiently to addresses from Lord and Lady Franklin but not to Rev. Bedford:
These women had had quite enough of Mr Bedford; they were compelled to listen to his long stupid sermons, and knew his character, and that he loved roast turkey and ham with a bottle or two of port wine much better than he loved his Bible, and when he commenced to preach they with one accord endeavoured to cough him down, and upon the warders proclaiming silence they all with one impulse turned round, raised their clothes and smacked their posteriors with a loud report. The Governor was shocked, and the parson was horror struck, the Aide de Camp laughed aloud, and even the ladies could not control their laughter.64