The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [69]
The breakfast bell was ringing by the time Matron Hutchinson finished the Crime Class prison tour, which she hoped sent a warning. Agnes and Janet sat down in their separate groups to a pint of watered-down gruel and a piece of brown bread. Before they were done, each was summoned to Mr. Hutchinson’s office.
A string of settlers made the long walk up the valley and lined up outside Cascades to retrieve their free labor. Turning the transports over to colonists spared the government the expense of funding their food and lodging. The Female Factory was essentially a hiring depot for girls like Agnes. Her fate fell into a lottery. The luck of the draw determined for whom #253 worked and what she might be forced to endure at the hands of her master.
Treatment ran the gauntlet from kindness to torture. Plum assignments went to women with special skills, such as dressmaking or baking. Some girls were allowed to sit at their master’s dining table and were welcomed into a family. More commonly, they were treated like slaves, and many suffered sexual abuse, as evidenced by the number of women who returned pregnant to the factory.
The Assignment Board consisted of the chief police magistrate, the local treasurer, and the superintendent of prisoners. The bureaucracy ran rife with favoritism, which played a major role in their decisions. Military officers and wealthy businessmen were often rewarded with the cream of the transported crop. Women who could read to the colonists’ children or prepare a banquet were most desirable, and a pretty face was also coveted.
There was high demand for domestic help in the colony, so the women of the Westmoreland were not expected to stay at Cascades for long. Everyone from the Westmoreland, except women showing signs of pregnancy, was automatically “eligible for service.” One by one, they disappeared into Hobart Town, Sandy Bay, or one of the other nearby settlements, each at the mercy of an unregulated, indiscriminant assignment.
Young and healthy, #253 was immediately turned over to a Mr. Donahoo, who lived in Hobart Town. She stole a quick hug from Janet, who stood outside the superintendent’s door, and the two parted ways. Without question, they would find each other, some way, somehow. Taking her by the arm, Mr. Donahoo escorted his new servant back down the hillside she’d trudged all the way up just one day earlier.
Working as a housemaid for the Donahoos was nothing like being a servant in a fine Scottish home, a home like the one she and Janet had burglarized four years earlier. Doing laundry, ironing, scouring pots, scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, and endlessly chopping wood for the stove filled every waking hour of Agnes’s day. Lugging water up and down the Hobart Town hills was the worst of all chores. A pipeline from the Hobart Rivulet connected to a storage tower on Macquarie Street, where a brigade of servants with buckets waited their turn.
Agnes soon discovered an advantage to the work that nearly pulled her skinny arms from their sockets. For a precious few moments, she could sit and gossip with Janet on the Macquarie Street benches and plot their next rendezvous. Church services also provided a divine opportunity to see her friend. Many abusive masters, unrepentant sinners themselves, dragged their young servants to Sunday service under the guise of promoting their salvation. Relegated to the back of the church, the convict maids devised elaborate schemes to pass contraband in the form of tea and tobacco, often hidden under the mob caps issued at the Female Factory.
Most days, the girl from Glasgow