The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [64]
Conditions were even worse before Cascades opened. Women were imprisoned in an overcrowded holding area tacked onto the Hobart Town male prison and overlooking the execution yard, loosely guarded by male convicts; “trafficking,” or contact with the outside world, was all too easy. In 1827, a concerned citizen wrote a letter to the local paper expressing his consternation over the “immorality of the lower class of people in Van Diemen’s Land.” He offered the following details: “I remember one night walking by the building . . . at the time the females were confined there; when I saw the place surrounded by many fellows, who were feeing the constables and sentries to gain admission, while language and imprecations the most disgusting and appalling issued from within. The next day I mentioned the circumstances to several persons, who said it was useless to kick up a stir about it, for no notice would be taken of it.”16
As the demand for female servants grew and transport numbers rose, Lieutenant Governor Arthur responded in December 1828 by opening a new gaol in a converted rum distillery well outside the town. It was christened the Cascades Female Factory, belying its true purpose. Five years prior, Elizabeth Fry had approached Britain’s Under Secretary of State for the Colonies with recommendations that he passed on to the governor. Her ideas for prison reform included specific plans for a new women’s gaol, and Governor Arthur adopted most of them. Once again, the timely intervention of the Angel of Newgate saved Agnes, Janet, and many others from a fate even worse than the frightening scene they now faced.
In 1830, the gaoled women had witnessed the hanging of Mary McLauchlan, who had been transported from Glasgow for theft by housebreaking. Forced to leave her husband and two young daughters behind, she found herself pregnant by a man in Hobart Town who refused to recognize his paternity. As was often the case for convict maids with child, the father was likely her master. The baby either was stillborn or died soon after birth, and Mary was convicted of killing him. A large crowd gathered to witness the hanging of the woman who wore a white dress tied with a black ribbon.17 Mary McLauchlan was the first woman executed in Van Diemen’s Land.
Agnes stared at the tall gaol barricade along Macquarie Street, a monument of the penal colony’s history and the first transport of three women in 1803. By the year the Westmoreland disembarked, public spectacles in Hobart Town were less gruesome. Freed convicts and settlers who were arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct spent a few hours in the town stocks, located prominently in front of the Macquarie Street Treasury. Female prisoners who acted out were punished away from town, unseen behind the thick stone walls of Cascades.
Well-to-do settlers, getting rich on whale oil and wool, resented both convicts and the Crown. A year before Agnes landed, many signed a petition to His Majesty requesting the removal of “unspeakable evils”: “We, the undersigned, feeling that the measures adopted by the British Government, of increasing the penal character of the Colony . . . affix a moral degradation upon us, and our children . . . request you will convene a Public Meeting of the Colonists, for the purpose of addressing the King thereon.”18
Reminders of the Crown’s rule were everywhere on display. British soldiers, pressing muskets against their shoulders, guarded government buildings constructed in soft-brown sandstone and built by the hands of male convicts. Sentries posted at the gates outside George’s Square stood locked