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By Root 1615 0

Hobart, and the ruins of the Cascades Female Factory. Once I finished my research in Hobart, I set out across Tasmania and then went on to mainland Australia, following the journey of the freed convict women portrayed in The Tin Ticket. I walked along the docks on Macquarie Street, where the women were paraded through crowds of hooting colonists. Under the shadows of Mt. Wellington, I placed my hands on the prison’s cold stone walls and viewed artifacts that offer a glimpse into the everyday lives of those who were transported: a tiny barred window that allowed only a sliver of light into the women’s ward, the damp solitary cell remains lying next to the Hobart rivulet, a stone washtub from Yard Two, perhaps the very one at which Agnes, Janet, and Ludlow spent their punishments and scraped their hands and elbows. Standing in the yard at midnight, I felt the chill left behind by the women and children who could not survive Cascades.

My initial research led me to descendants of the women featured in The Tin Ticket. After corresponding with them for several years, I was graciously invited into their homes on my return trip to Australia. They shared extensive collections of family history, granting me access to information and secrets that, for some, had been suppressed for generations. In a remarkable coincidence, the three women whose lives I chose to study were at the Cascades Female Factory at the same time. Their lives intersected in ways that surprised me as well as their descendant families.

As the paper trail unfolded, I began to see through Agnes McMillan’s eyes as her world changed from the black and white of the Glasgow woolen mills and Newgate Prison to the bright greens of untamed Tasmania, the Huon Forest, and later the dusty goldfields in Victoria.

In following the paths of the women and traveling with their descendants, we unearthed new facts about their lives that had been tucked away in used bookstores, small museum resource rooms, and the Archives Office of Tasmania. We discovered that Agnes McMillan’s family had witnessed an event that shook the continent, the Eureka Rebellion. A former female convict helped sew the well-known blue and white Southern Cross flag raised during this workers’ revolt. The rebellion would come to be known as the birth of Australian democracy, ignited by a furor over taxation without representation.

It is estimated that at least one in five Australians (and two million from the United Kingdom) share convict ancestry. This has recently become a source of pride for many. When I asked ten-year-old Keely Millikin what she knew about her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Ludlow Tedder, she stood up very straight and replied: “She was a very strong woman.” Father Peter Rankin, parish priest in Kilmore, Victoria, also expressed his admiration for the resourceful and enterprising women “who had nothing and yet had it all,” and emerged “from the darkness of the ship’s hold to become the light of Australia’s future.”

The legacy of the transported women, once referred to as the “convict stain,” reveals new truths about a social engineering experiment that, for nearly a century, was covered up by both the British and the Australian governments. Not until the year 2000 was the practice of systematically destroying convict census records overturned by the Australian legislature. Fortunately, key records are intact for each woman featured in The Tin Ticket. In the final years of transportation, the after-math of the Irish potato famine led to a marked increase in women and men from Ireland who were exiled for stealing food, livestock, and clothing. Often overlooked, the Irish had a profound effect on early colonial history. To help tell their story, I chose Bridget Mulligan. Had Bridget not survived the harsh sentence imposed because she was Irish, her great-granddaughter Mary Binks would not be running Gran’s Van in 2010. Gran’s Van is a mobile soup kitchen for the homeless and the needy in Devonport, Tasmania. Former mayor of Devonport and a finalist for Australia’s Local Hero Award