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Bridget Mulligan’s companion, Mary Rennicks, bore the impact of primitive shipboard treatment, arriving in Hobart Town bearing the X mark from blood purging on her right arm. She’d also lost a front tooth.64 Bridget stayed healthy during the 125 days at sea, and Surgeon Superintendent John Moody recorded her behavior as “very good.”65

Under a new penal system, convicts did not proceed directly to Cascades but were housed in the Brickfields Hiring Depot, opened as an annex to the Female Factory in 1842. Designed to keep new arrivals isolated from the entrenched Crime Class, especially the Flash Mob, a probation system introduced in 1839 was meant to hasten reform. On paper, it recommended skill training and the opportunity for well-behaved prisoners to earn a small wage, but in bureaucratic reality, progress was held in place.

Arriving two years before transportation ceased in 1853, Bridget faced the full force of prejudice against convict arrivals, more toxic still because she was Irish and because she was Catholic. Lieutenant Governor Denison pleaded for fewer Irish prisoners, declaring: “Their general want of industry, their insubordinate habits, their subservience to their religious instructors, render them particularly unfitted for settlers in a country like this.”66 Denison also lamented the lack of energy for hard labor among those weakened by the potato famine.67 Rural Irish women, in particular, were ostracized for being “unfitted to engage in domestic service.”68

Stigmatized by her heritage, her religion, and her country roots, the resourceful Bridget Mulligan took full advantage of the one opportunity for early release from the Female Factory. She managed to shave eight years off her sentence the day she married John Wild, a freed convict from Cheshire, England. At twenty-seven, he’d received a sentence in 1841 of fifteen years for getting into a bar fight and stabbing a “spoon forger.” Only five feet, two inches tall, he’d lost some front teeth, his visage was rather sallow,69 but he was an excellent businessman. Once freed, Mr. Wild opened a store selling tobacco and candles in New Norfolk, located on the banks of the River Derwent twenty-two miles northwest of Hobart Town. He also ran a catering service and sponsored lunches for the New Norfolk regatta and Odd Fellows meetings held in Kensington Park.

Bridget had been sentenced to a New Norfolk family in March 1853, so she was put on a cart and sent north just as the trees were turning colors. Golden poplars had been planted all along the river and displayed themselves in bright autumn yellows. Her romance began with a purchase for her master in Mr. Wild’s well-trafficked Charles Street store. The two married in a Catholic Church on July 24, 1853, in the midst of a frosty winter, one month before the official end of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land. Bridget gave birth to a daughter named Hannah on November 20, 1855.

Entrepreneurial in spirit, the lass from County Cavan set up a Dutch oven at the back of her husband’s store and charged townsfolk a penny to bake their dinners. Hannah grew up inside the family store, learning the business and developing one of her own. When Bridget retired, she took over her mother’s oven and, according to descendants, “was remembered for always wearing a snowy white apron.”70 When people came to collect their cooked dinners, she offered a plate of freshly baked scones and expanded her baking empire. With her husband, Henry Laskey, she bought every house on Charles Street, where the two raised nine children in a home named “Tara,” after Ireland’s mythical seat of power. Hannah became a wealthy woman.

Bridget Mulligan’s dear “cara,” Mary Rennicks, didn’t live long enough to be freed. Shortly after being processed at Brickfields, she struck a fellow prisoner and was sentenced to hard labor. The next year, five months pregnant, she was committed to trial for the “willful murder of a newborn child” under her care at Cascades. Four months later, she delivered her stillborn baby boy inside the Female