The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [109]
Reunited with Janet back in the valley, Agnes tried to cheer her mate, regaling her with tales about the dark-haired dashing prince she’d spotted on the night he galloped through Oatlands on a wild horse. Janet found a bit of comfort in her friend’s girlish giggle as she described a freed convict named William Roberts, who sported dark bushy eyebrows and a smile full of mischief. Agnes had fallen deeply in love.
The Glasgow lasses were nearing the end of their seven-year sentences. They probably knew their paths would part as they approached the day each would hold a Certificate of Freedom. There was no sense thinking about Scotland anymore. Those days were over. In spite of the suffering they’d been forced to endure, they found love and a sense of belonging in the colony down under.
For the last decade, their unwavering friendship provided each other with just enough sustenance to endure another year, always holding out hope that the next would be better. The petty theft that transported them to Van Diemen’s Land paled in comparison to the crimes they saw nearly every day, which went, for the most part, unpunished. Girls raped by their masters, Holy Willie’s hypocrisy, bribes taken by the Catos and others—so much seemed unjust. Angry frustration ebbed and flowed for both Janet and Agnes, though their misconduct was relatively tame compared to the records of many transported with them.
There was all manner of mayhem and insurgency as 1842 unfolded. It began building in 1839, when Ellen Scott and other members of the Flash Mob attempted to throttle Mr. Hutchinson. The night after Janet was released from solitary, just a week before Agnes’s latest infraction, the rebels at the top of the valley decided to throw a party. It was precisely the type of disobedience that drove the aging superintendent to tear at his whiskers.
The weather was perfect, mild and dry, and for three weeks not a drop of rain had fallen. Under a bright moon, shortly after eight o’clock on the evening of March 24, Superintendent Hutchinson heard a ruckus coming from one of the wards. He hurried out of his second-floor quarters across the yard to investigate. As he drew closer, the disturbance grew louder. Stopping outside the ward, he peered through the grates and saw a group of prisoners cavorting in a state of wild abandon. Horrified, he waited silently until he could identify at least five of the women who’d joyfully removed their shapeless grey shifts and tossed them in a pile. Singing, cursing, and dancing naked with one another “in imitation of men and women together,” they barely noticed the skinny specter of a man whose mouth flapped agape.15
Among the bawdy performers were two well-known Flash Mob members who’d assisted with Ellen Scott’s 1839 turbulentinsubordination. There was raven-haired Eliza Smith and the fierce green-eyed Mary Devereux.16 Devereux also sported a tattoo, two small blue dots between the finger and thumb of her left hand.17 Frances Hutchinson from County Kerry, another known troublemaker, displayed the same emblem, along with rings tattooed on her first two fingers.18 Among the twenty-five thousand women transported, eight other Irish females etched nearly identical blue dots between their fingers.19 Each encoded a message, perhaps of solidarity or shared heritage, one that could be neither stripped away nor removed by their captors.
This night, each naked dancer received a sentence of either six or twelve months’ hard labor for her final curtain call. Mr. Hutchinson, a Methodist minister by training, could tolerate no more of their saucy insurrection and made it a point to separate the five rebels and house them in separate wards. After release from hard labor, Eliza Smith continued her rebellion, thumbing her nose at authorities through foul language and absconding with great regularity. Finally, in February 1845, she was punished once again for misconduct. Only this time, she