SUSAN CARLAND: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this series
may contain images, voices or names of deceased persons.
BRUCE SCATES: Welcome to ‘Susan Carland: In Conversation’. This interview is a supplement to
Episode 6 in the Australian Journey series, ‘Captivity Narratives’.
SUSAN CARLAND: I’m standing here in the Convict Female Factory in Hobart, Tasmania.
This place is in ruins now and this site is so significant it’s listed as a World Heritage site by UNESCO.
These tall walls tell the tales of the
many thousands of women who were incarcerated in this space between 1828 and 1856.
I want to find out more about this so I’m going to speak to Professor Rae Frances,
Dean of Arts at the Australian National University
and an expert on the experiences of colonial women.
Rae, why were the convicts sent here to the female factory?
Was it as an additional punishment on top of transportation to Australia?
RAE FRANCES: No, it wasn’t an additional punishment usually, although in some cases it was.
Most of the women who came through here came
when they were transported. They got off at the port in Hobart and they walked up
the road here to the Cascades Female Factory and it was where they were processed.
They were sorted into classes – first class, second class, third class
depending on their behaviour and from there they were – if they were considered
suitable they were assigned – they were sent out as servants to the settlers.
So it was – it was really a holding kind of prison for much of its operation.
But you did have women who had offended once they’d been assigned, and they could sent back in here
for additional punishment. So it was both.
SUSAN CARLAND: So were the conditions like for the women while they were here?
And what were they doing?
RAE FRANCES: The conditions here really varied depending on how you were classed.
If you could be first-class, you were considered much more responsible and you were given
lighter duties, different kind of clothes, more responsibility.
If you were third-class, you were the worst, you were the ‘crime class’ they called those ones.
And you were given hard work. You were put in the laundries, you were put to work,
you know, often for 12 hours a day. It was hard work but regardless of what kind of
work you were doing you were in overcrowded
conditions most of the time. Sometimes there were three times as many women in
this factory as was intended to be. So there were women having to share hammocks.
It was really very unpleasant, and it was stuffy, it was cold.
They weren’t given adequate food and what they were given was really not very
nutritious or interesting. So for a lot of the time they were hungry, malnourished, they were cold,
as well as the ones in the third class were working very hard so
that was a pretty grim existence for them. For the others, in the
second class, they were put to work doing lighter works, such as sewing,
and for them it wasn’t so bad and quite often they didn’t have enough work to do so
so their problem was often boredom as with the women in the first class.
So I was a hard one, I think, which was worse, being overworked or being bored. SUSAN CARLAND: Right.
RAE FRANCES: And how you experienced being in the factory depended not just on what kind of class
you were in, but on whether or not you were a mother. So women were sent in here
who were pregnant or had small children and those children were usually taken
away from them. So they were separated from their children which was, must have been,
very hard, I think, if you were one of those women. And quite often those
children died because they again weren’t cared for properly, they weren’t properly
fed and being in the close confines and unhealthy conditions, there was a
scandalously high infant mortality rate in the factory. And all of the women when
they came in from the boats had to endure the kind of stigma that was
associated with being a convict woman. When they came through those gates they
had their head shaved as a marker that they were convict women and it was
obviously a sanitary measure as well to get rid of the lice but it was something
the women felt very keenly because it was an assault on their femininity.
So regardless of what class you were in, you know it’s never nice being in a prison
but for some women it was much worse than others.
SUSAN CARLAND: Punishing, if not a punishment. RAE FRANCES: But having said that, even though
the conditions were pretty awful, it’s all a matter of relativities and a lot of the women
actually preferred to be inside here in the prison than to be outside.
And it's partly because they made really strong friendships with the other women and
they felt in many cases much safer being in here amongst a group of women
than being outside where they’re exposed to an overwhelmingly male population –
where they were vulnerable to all sorts of sexual assault, and so on.
So a lot of them deliberately reoffended so that they could be sent back in here.
SUSAN CARLAND: Rae, I’ve heard a lot about protests by the male convicts. Was there ever any
instances of rebellion by the female convicts here?
RAE FRANCES: Yes, there were lots of instances actually. It ranged from pretty
sort of low-key disrespect, like they would make up songs about the
supervisors for example and that really annoyed them, but in other cases they would light fires.
There was a notorious incident where the men had sent food over the wall.
They’d thrown bread and cheese and so on and the authorities had confiscated it.
And the women were so annoyed with that that they went to
their rooms and set fire to their clothes. So that’s just one little act of protest.
And there, there’s another really famous episode where the Governor and
his wife were inspecting a group of convict women and they are upset about
something so as a group they turned around, lifted up their skirts, and bared their bottoms.
So it’s a different sort ofprotest to the men's. [Laughter]
SUSAN CARLAND: A big ‘moon-in’.
Convict women have often been called ‘the mothers of this nation’. Do you think they’ve left any legacy
in Australia and what would that legacy be?
RAE FRANCES: That's a really interesting question because it used to be that this was a very shameful part
of our history that for most of the 19th century, well into the middle of the 20th century,
people were really hung up on the ‘convict stain’ and the fact that this
had left a really terrible legacy for Australia. And the women were considered
by and large to be whores, to be prostitutes.
That was the language of the time and it’s only been in the later decades of the 20th century
that there’s been a much more sympathetic view of convict women and
they’ve been appreciated, I think, for the contribution they made to establishing
white settlement in Australia. So they’ve been appreciated for their labour,
and as you said for their reproductive labour, for bearing the children.
So I think that’s a really important shift in the legacy and people today see them, I think,
more commonly as victims, as more sinned against than sinning, but also as women
who were resourceful, assertive, resilient – as survivors.
And it's something that I think a lot of people who have traced their own family histories actually draw
strength from, as a kind of model of femininity for modern Australian women.
SUSAN CARLAND: What became of the convict women once they left this place?
RAE FRANCES: Well, that’s again hard to generalise about because there many different routes
and destinies that women had. A lot of them, they left, they were assigned to setllers.
A lot of them got married and once they were married they effectively became free,
at least from the law. They were then, you know, bound to their husband.
A lot of them became independent women who set up their own businesses so
they contributed as entrepreneurs to early colonial society and there are
famous cases not just in Tasmania but in Sydney as well of people like Mary Reibey,
for example, who ended up on one of our banknotes: a very famous early entrepreneur.
So they did contribute either as wives and mothers or as workers or entrepreneurs.
Some of them saved enough money and went back to England, and some of them decided,
when they got back to England that actually they were better off in Australia and came back again.
So they were very mixed destinies
and there of course there were the others who were never going to succeed,
and just kept reoffending and ended up here or in poverty.
SUSAN CARLAND: Professor Rae Frances, thank you so much for joining us today at the
Cascades Female Factory here in Hobart, Tasmania.
RAE FRANCES: My pleasure, Dr Carland.
[Music]