The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [101]
The women’s routine changed abruptly on a foggy autumn morning in April 1841, when Mrs. Cato failed to appear at morning muster. Typically she met Ludlow and Ann immediately after breakfast and issued daily orders for nursery duty. The night before, however, Police Magistrate John Price arrested both of the Catos and charged them with trafficking. During the initial phase of his investigation, Mr. Price confronted the overseer and his wife with the news that he’d seen a letter written by a prisoner, Ellen Watkins, “in which she requests certain articles be sent under cover to Mrs. Cato for her, here accompanied by a fowl for the use of Mrs. Cato.”36 When he requested the Catos turn over both the letter and the chicken, Mrs. Cato responded that “the contents of the letter was too horrible and indecent and that she had thought fit to burn it.”37 Having read the letter himself, Magistrate Price countered her assertion, later noting in his report to Superintendent Josiah Spode: “I must here remark that not an indecent allusion was introduced into that letter.”38 But the excuses were quick and well prepared when Price inquired about the messenger bird. Yes, they were given the fowl for reasons unknown, and “it was a pity it should stink and so I had it plucked.”39
The two senior officials had contrived a scheme wherein convicts were allowed messages from outside the prison if delivered to Mrs. Cato along with a chicken. It was just the tip of a pervasive and thriving underground economy at Cascades. This relatively small extortion delivered notes between the female prisoners and their paramours in Hobart Town, providing many chickens for the Catos. The overseers and the deputy matron either ate the fowl or traded them for other items available via the illicit marketplace.
For years, the local government ignored the corruption inside Cascades as well as the abuse of prisoners who were mismanaged and mistreated. Word of inhumane conditions reached England and prompted Elizabeth Fry to beg for intervention. Four long years passed before Lady Jane responded to Mrs. Fry’s impassioned plea for an investigation into conditions at the Female Factory. In July 1841, shortly after the Catos’ indictment, Elizabeth’s emissary Miss Kezia Hayter arrived on the Rajah and presented Lady Jane with a quilt made by the convict women aboard ship. An embroidered inscription on the fabric rendered it impossible to ignore Fry’s mission:
TO THE LADIES
of the
Convict ship Committee
This quilt worked by the Convicts
of the ship Rajah during their voyage
to Van Diemans [sic] Land is presented as a
testimony of the gratitude with which
they remember their exertions for their
welfare while in England and during
their passage and also as a proof that
they have not neglected the Ladies
kind admonitions of being industrious
June 184140
On August 3, 1841, Lady Jane penned a note to Fry, offering an excuse for failing to write sooner: “I had little to tell you respecting the conditions of the female prisoners population here, which . . . would give you any satisfaction to hear, and I shrank from the painful task of being the reporter of evil, and of confessing how little I had personally done. . . .”41
The word “evil” was applied liberally to descriptions of the girls and women exiled “beyond the seas.” The Courier announced the arrival of the Rajah in the paper’s local news section with this warning:
The female prisoners brought out in this ship appear to be of much better character than usual; their behavior during the voyage was very good, doubtless in a great degree the result of the indefatigable care which appears to have