Women who had money or evidence of property were usually given their ticket-of-leave on arrival—at least up to the early 1820s and the departure of Macquarie. So were married women joining their husbands in Sydney; if the husband was a convict, he too would generally get his ticket, “as affording greater facilities of support.” A female convict could also secure her ticket-of-leave on the dock if she had a special recommendation from the captain or surgeon of the transport ship—an arrangement that gave the ship’s officers a great deal of sexual leverage, although most refrained from using it.30
All the others—those pregnant or with children born on shipboard, the rejects from the “market,” the poor, the ugly, the mad, the old, the wizened—were sent to the Female Factory in Parramatta. They travelled by barge, along the long crinkling silver arm of Sydney Harbor, up the Parramatta River: a stately progress through that wild and exquisite landscape between banks lined with ancient eucalypts, where sudden green clouds of budgerigars whirled over the water and the white cockatoos flapped, shrieking like colonies of lost souls, from tree to tree. If the wind set fair, the trip took all day, but sometimes it used up the night as well; then they had to bed down at one of the ramshackle inns, mere huts with straw in back, along the river. The innkeepers—not jolly publicans, but hard-eyed ex-convicts who had got their little corner of the rum trade—plied them with liquor until they were stupefied and then robbed them of their small possessions. The barge constable did nothing to protect them.31
What greeted them the next day, as they floundered blearily into Parramatta, was a scene of disgusting squalor. The Female Factory was a loft above a jail, some sixty feet by twenty. This loft was filthy and its floor could not, in any case, be washed, since its boards had warped so much that water went straight through the cracks onto the heads of prisoners in the cells below. The roof leaked, the privies stank, and the kitchen was just a fireplace. Here, the women were expected to card and spin wool into yarn, and from the yarn weave the coarse “Parramatta cloth” from which convicts’ winter clothes were made. Those who had not managed to bring their bedding from the transport ship had to sleep on piles of scungy raw wool, full of ticks and dags; the government did not give mattresses or blankets to Parramatta women.32
The Factory had room for only a third of the women prisoners. The rest had to lodge on whatever terms they could get with the local settlers. The cost of “lodging and fire” was usually about four shillings a week, a sum which most women could only raise by “buttock-and-twang.” Their main clientele consisted of the male convicts, who had no money either and had either to steal it or work for it in their own time after they had done their “government task” for the day. Most preferred the former; and so, one irritated colonist pointed out, more than £1,560 was stolen every year in Parramatta to pay the “whores.” Macquarie reported that almost any night one could see up to three hundred convicts of both sexes roaming the town “at full liberty.”33 And the Reverend Samuel Marsden complained that
there is not a bushel of wheat or maize in the farmer’s barn, nor a sheep in his fold, nor a hog in his stye—nor even a potatoe, turnip or cabbage in his garden—but what he is likely to be robbed of every night … to supply the wants of these abandoned women, to whom the men can gain access at all times of the night.34
Meanwhile the superintendent of the Female Factory did nothing for his prisoners except give them their rations and reassure the government that all was quiet among the women. One of these incumbents, an oily Emancipist named Durie, went so far as to admit in 1811, after a testy memo from Macquarie, that he had let women sleep outside the Factory; but now he had abolished “this indulgence” and in future they will all sleep inside the Factory walls. Actually, it had no “walls,” except the ones that held up its roof, and convicts of both sexes came and went as they pleased.35
In 1819 Macquarie had his ex-convict architect Francis Greenway design a new Female Factory, a pretty three-story Georgian structure complete with clock, cupola and security wall. But the social conditions inside it were still imperfect. Thomas Reid, surgeon on the female transport Morley, visited his former charges there early in 1821 and found it hard to describe their “miserable state.” They gathered around him, weeping incoherently, and he learned that when they had arrived there the previous evening they had been surrounded by hordes of idle fellows, convicts … provided with bottles of spirits … for the purpose of forming a banquet according to custom, which they assured themselves of enjoying without interruption, as a prelude to excesses which decency forbids to mention.”36
In the new Factory, the women were sorted into three classes: “general,” “merit” and “crime.” The “crime” class of incorrigibles wore no badge, but their hair was cropped, as a mark of disgrace. The “merit” class was made up of those who had sustained six months’ good behavior. The “general” class was by far the largest, and it resembled a nursing-hospital, being mainly composed of unlucky girls who had been sent back to the Factory when they got pregnant on assigned service. They were not compelled to reveal the father’s name, and when asked they usually said he was the Reverend Samuel Marsden.
The Female Factory was the colony’s main marriage-market, and settlers took themselves to Parramatta to find a “Factory lass” (the Australian equivalent of the mail-order bride). All it took was a written permit from Marsden, written notice to the matron and enough phlegm to endure the teasing and taunts of the women. “It requires the face of a Turk to come on such an open and acknowledged errand.” A bizarre scene: The women lined up in their coarse flannel dresses, some scowling and others hopefully primping; the “Coelebs” or bachelor, often an elderly and tongue-tied “stringybark” from the back country, hesitating his way along the rank; the matron reeling off the women’s characters and records. “After uttering the awkward ‘yes,’ ” recalled one witness to this colonial mating ritual in the 1820s,
the bride-elect flies around to her pals, bidding hasty adieus, and the bridegroom leads her out. “I’ll give you three months before you’re returned!” cries one, and “It’s a bargain you’ve got, old stringy-bark!” cries another. Hubbub and confusion mark the exit of the couple.… The clothes of the convict are returned to her, and dressed again like a free woman she hies with her suitor of an hour to the church. Government gives her a “ticket of leave” as a dower, and she steps into her husband’s carriage to go to his farm.37
These unions were not guaranteed to last. The “Factory lasses,” one ex-convict thought, only wanted to get back to Sydney and “dress themselves up and go to the flash houses, and at night to the dancing houses, then they are happy”:
I have known … very nice young women as you could wish to see, actually marry an old man, as ragged as possible, and perhaps he lives 20 or 30 miles up in the country, and no house within 5 or 6 miles of him, right up in the bush, where you can see nothing but the trees; but there is a policy in that, this man is a free man, and when they are married it makes her free, then after she has stop’d a day or two she will make some excuse which a woman is never at a loss for, to come down to Sydney; she will get what money she can of him (the Old Fool!) but she don’t return again.38
Punishments for the “crime” class at the Parramatta Factory—and at its no less disagreeable southern cousin, the Female Factory in Hobart, which was built in 1827 and was so overcrowded that it stank like the hold of a slave ship—were not as severe as for the men. By the 1820s, female convicts in New South Wales could no longer be seen hauling big baskets of earth for bridge construction; nor, as a rule, did “refractory” women have to wear spiked iron collars, or be whipped to the beat of a drum. However, a treadmill was put in the Parramatta Female Factory in 1823, and in 1837 another was installed in Hobart; women condemned to it suffered “a very horrible pain in the loins.”39 And there was punishment by humiliation, whose most hated form was shaving the woman’s head. This could produce rebellions, as the superintendent of the Hobart Factory found in 1
827 when he told the assigned convict Ann Bruin that she was to be shorn for spending a night away from her master’s house:
She screamed most violently, and swore that no one should cut off her hair.… She then entered my Sitting Room screaming, swearing, and jumping about the Room as if bereft of her senses. She had a pair of Scissors in her hand and commenced cutting off her own hair.… Coming before the window of my Sitting Room [she] thrust her clenched fist through three panes of glass in succession.… With a Bucket [she] broke some more panes of glass and the Bottom Sash of the Window Frame.40
Naturally, this was seen as the action of a crazed termagant, not the protest of a woman whose physical rights were brutally transgressed. There were several riots and near-breakouts at both factories, including one in 1827 when the soldiers had to be brought in because the “Amazonian banditti” stood together, “declaring that, if one suffered, all should suffer.” In 1829 the women in the Hobart Factory tried to burn the whole place down with “Parcels of fire” thrown through their ventilation-hatches.41
iii
“WHORE” AND “PROSTITUTE,” then, were bandied about to serve the moral views of middle-class ideology; and neither the male nor the female convicts thought it disgraceful, or even wrong, to live together out of wedlock. However, female convicts in Australia were all to greater or lesser degrees oppressed as women—as members of an inferior sex. The sexism of English society was brought to Australia and then amplified by penal conditions. A convict woman needed unusual strength of character not to be crushed by its assumptions. Language itself confirmed her degradation, and some sense of this may be gleaned from the slang and cant words applied to women in Georgian times—a brusque, stinging argot of appropriation and dismissal.
A woman was a bat, a crack, a bunter, a case fro, cattle, a mort, a burick, or a convenient. If she had a regular man, she was his natural or peculiar. If married, she was an autem mott; if blonde, a bleached mott; if a very young prostitute, almost a child, a kinchin mott; if beautiful, a rum blowen, a ewe, a flash piece of mutton. If she had gonorrhea, she was a queer mort. This language was the lower millstone; the upper was the pompous moral phraseology of the Establishment, the good flogging Christians. Ground between the two, a woman would need unusual reserves of tenacity and self-esteem to resist the pressure of the stereotype. The pervasive belief in their whorishness and worthlessness must have struck deep into the souls of these women. The double-bind to which they were condemned was piercingly illustrated by the remark of one Scottish settler, Peter Murdoch (who had more than 6,000 acres in Van Diemen’s Land and had helped set up the penal station on Maria Island), to the 1838 Select Committee in London. “They are generally so bad,” he said, “that the settlers have no heart to treat them well.”42
The brutalization of women in the colony had gone on so long that it was virtually a social reflex by the end of the 1830s. The first full account of it was given by Robert Jones, Major Foveaux’s chief jailer on Norfolk Island in the early 1800s, who thought the lot of the women prisoners there “must surely have been greater than the male convicts.… Several have not recovered yet from their treatment at the hands of the Major.” Passages in Jones’s memoir show how absolute the chattel status of women was. “Ted Kimberley chief constable considered the convicts of Norfolk Island no better than heathens unfit to grace the earth. Women were in his estimation born for the convenience of men. He was a bright intelligent Irishman.”43 Jones’s sentiments are echoed in a fragmentary letter from a free settler on Norfolk Island, an ex-missionary turned trader named James Mitchell. “Surely no common mortal could demand treatment so brutal,” he wrote around 1815.
Heaven give their weary footsteps their aching hearts to a better place of rest for here there is none. During governorship of Major Foveaux convicts both male and female were held as slaves. Poor female convicts were treated shamefully. Governor King being mainly responsible.44
The rituals of courtship on Norfolk Island were, to put it mildly, brusque. We see the “bright intelligent” Kimberley pursuing a married convict woman named Mary Ginders with an axe, shouting that “if she did not come and live with him he would report her to the Major and have her placed in the cells.” Major Foveaux got the woman of his choice, Ann Sherwin, away from one of his subordinate officers by throwing him in jail on a trumped-up charge “so that,” claimed the Irish rebel leader Joseph Holt, a Norfolk prisoner at the time, “the poor fellow, seeing the danger he was in, thought it better to save his life, and lose his wife, than to lose both.”45 (At least their union lasted: Foveaux married Ann Sherwin in England in 1815.)
In such a moral environment, although male convicts had some rights (however attenuated), the women had none except the right to be fed; they had to fend for themselves against both guards and male prisoners. “England for white slaves, why were they sent here,” Jones scribbled in one of his outbursts of delayed guilt, while reflecting on the fate of three women sent to Norfolk Island for the “crime” of abortion,
for crimes that required pity more than punishment. Heaven forbid [sic] England if that is her way of populating her hellholes. What would our noble persons think of our virgin settlements and their white slaves. In every case the women treated as slaves, good stock to trade with and a convict having the good chance to possess one did not want much encouragement to do so.46
Thus the women were prisoners of prisoners. The price of a young, good-looking girl, fresh off the ship from Sydney, was “often as high as ten pounds.” The island’s bellman or beadle, Potter by name, had acquired the right to sell them. The same woman might be sold several times during her Norfolk Island sentence, with Potter “in most cases reselling them for a gallon or two of rum until they were in such a Condition as to be of little or no further use.” The sales would be held in an old store where the women had to strip naked and “race around the room” while Potter kept up a running commentary on their “respective values.”
The regular social pleasure of Norfolk Island under Foveaux, however, was the Thursday evening dance in the soldiers’ barracks where, Jones wrote,
all the women would join in the dances of the Mermaids, each one being naked with numbers painted on their backs so as to be recognized by their admirers who would clap their hands on seeing their favorite perform some grotesque action … with the assistance of a gallon or two of Rum. Such amusements were the talk of the soldiers for days before and after the performance.47
Such dances commonly took place in London brothels, where they were known in flash-talk as “ballum rancums.” In these scenes, with the drunken, lurching bodies of women numbered like sides of beef, we see the epitome of sexual politics in early Australia. Women had to adapt as best they could; the system of sexual exploitation provoked competition among them, and they would fight like cats to stay in with the guards. Mary Ginders, the chief constable’s woman, was “the leader of all the dances in the barrack Room and was well liked among the soldiers”; when Bridget Chandler, another convict woman, challenged her as favorite, Ginders broke her arm. James Mitchell, despite his moral disapproval of Norfolk Island promiscuity, gave up his missionary work and acquired a mistress, rather to Jones’s envy,
a beautiful young woman named Liza McCann who was as cunning as himself, who could drink more rum than most of the Hardened Soldiers, and took every opportunity to make herself disagreeable to the other females who would never dare venture within her store. Her greatest pride was to be clothed in silk and a bonnet with feathers.48
Women on the mainland or in Van Diemen’s Land were rarely flogged, but such punishment was common on Norfolk Island and, indeed, appears to have been Major Foveaux’s special treat. “To be remembered by all there,” Mitchell alleged, “was his love for watching women in their agony while receiving a punishment on the Triangle.… [I]t was usual for [him] to remit a part of the sentence on condition that they would expose their nakedness it being considered part of the punishment. And poor wretches were only too
glad to save their flesh and pain.”49 With his pistol in one hand and cutlass in the other, Foveaux would muster the male convicts in a semicircle; the naked woman was compelled to walk past them before she was trussed up to the triangle and the “skinner” or “backscratcher” (Norfolk Island cant for the flogger) went to work. The usual sentences were 25 lashes, the “Botany Bay dozen,” but they could go as high as 250. The last Norfolk Island woman to be flogged on Foveaux’s orders, in 1804, received such a sentence, but the flogger was squeamish about it; he said he was sick and Kimberley had to take the cat-o’-nine-tails, “upon which,” as Jones described it, “[he] cried out that he did not flog women. This reply made the Major furious. He then asked one of the soldiers, Mick Kelly by name, to take the tails and go on with the punishment, which he immediately proceeded to perform in such a manner that not one mark was left on her back. This made the Major so wild that he ordered the woman to be placed in the dark cells for a fortnight.”50
This was the man whom Ellis Bent, Macquarie’s deputy judge-advocate, found “attentive and obliging.” Foveaux’s amusements may suggest how much of the true nature of the British regime in early Australia lies hidden under the smooth language of administration. Crimes die with their witnesses, and so, no doubt, did most of the crimes against women in the early colony. Yet there is no lack of evidence that women continued to be treated as a doubly colonized class throughout the life of the penal system. Almost four decades later, the fate of women excited the horror and contempt of François-Maurice Lepailleur, one of the fifty-eight Canadian patriotes who had been transported for political rebellion against the English colonial authorities in “Lower Canada” (Quebec). Arriving in 1840, these Canadian exiles were confined on a penal farm in the forest at Longbottom, halfway between Sydney and Parramatta. All of them, and especially Lepailleur (who was able to keep a journal in secret), were disgusted by the way the local free men, Emancipists, guards and police treated their women. “A farce,” Lepailleur called the New South Wales police force. “Drunks and scum.”51 At night, the huts around the stockade would resound with the shrieks of women being thrashed. The forest warden at Longbottom, a man named Rose, tied his wife to a post and gave her 50 lashes with a government cat-o’-nine-tails; another settler, a Portuguese, stabbed his wife and hung her on a gum tree, with complete impunity. Not surprisingly, most of the women Lepailleur encountered in his Australian exile were alcoholic sluts, broken down by abuse, wife-beating and rum:
The Fatal Shore Page 38
