The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [125]
A year later, in August 1853, Janet and her family witnessed the official abolition of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land. Since 1803, sixty-seven thousand convicts had been shipped to this isolated outpost. Now they made up half its population. The older Bailey children attended the Richmond Primary School, built by prisoners in 1834.34 Convict labor had built most of the municipal buildings in Hobart Town, and chain gangs had cleared the land for roads that now bustled with settlers and commerce.
Each school-age child was issued a medallion, coined by the Royal Mint in London, commemorating fifty years of European settlement and the close of a penal colony.35 In both Hobart Town and Launceston, jubilee festivals were orchestrated to erase the lingering stigma associated with freed convicts like Janet Houston and William Bailey. The couple probably avoided the celebration, because the Bailey family, and other emancipists, wanted no more than to blend into the fabric of their small farming community, raise their children, make a living, and attend church on Sundays.
For weeks the newspapers touted the jubilee event as God’s answer to their prayers. Finally, on August 10, 1853, the highly anticipated day arrived. At six in the morning, as church bells pealed across the valley, the sleepy town awoke to the rising sun. A thick morning fog quickly retreated from the cliffs hovering over Mt. Wellington—“And then what a lovely prospect was presented! The sun shone in his full strength—the very clouds had taken a holiday, for not one was visible.”36
When Lieutenant Governor Denison refused to sponsor the jubilee celebration in steadfast allegiance to the economic benefits of transportation, Isaac Wright offered his wool storehouse on the wharf. A brass band serenaded the throng of thousands who pressed into the flag-decorated hall. Schoolchildren marched to the waterfront in groups of five hundred at a time, carrying silk banners at the front of the procession. By half past ten, a giant “Demonstration Cake” weighing 350 pounds, “about fourteen feet in circumference, iced over and most elegantly embellished,” was carried into the room by eight bakers and placed on a raised platform.37 “Loud huzzas” reverberated across the hall as the festivities began.38
Celebrants feasted on ham, roast beef, sandwiches, tarts, cake, lemonade, and ginger beer. Special attention was lavished on the children for their role in the colony’s future. Girls and boys were outfitted in white clothing, a symbol of untarnished virtue, and the native-born touted their status with light blue ribbons on their left breasts. Henry Hopkins, a Sunday school teacher, addressed the youngsters and implored them to “become true Christians and good and useful citizens.”39 Giant cakes were also delivered to the Queen’s Orphan School, though its residents were not awarded the commemorative medallions given to the other schoolchildren.
At noon, ships in the harbor, festooned in bright colors, fired guns into the air. The jubilee’s entertainment concluded with bonfires and fire-works, proclaiming “to all the country around that convictism was dead, and that the loyal and respectable portion of the colonists were rejoicing that their beloved Queen had spoken the word of liberation. . . .”40
Prayer, in fact, had underpinned the Anti-Transportation League’s call for Providence to stop the convict ships from entering the River Derwent. In describing the “Great Demonstration,” the Colonial Times announced: “In August, 1803, Van Diemen’s Land was first occupied ‘as a place of exile for the most felonious of felons’ from Botany Bay. . . . But the Supreme Governor of the universe had decreed that ‘the wickedness of the wicked should