The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [96]
Public outrage reached a boiling point with the case of Mary Vowles. The Irish lass had freely immigrated to Van Diemen’s Land in August 1832, two months later marrying an emancipist. In 1835, working as a servant, she was caught stealing a silver plate in Hobart Town and sentenced to seven years at Cascades. In 1838, the twenty-nine-year-old was charged with using bad language toward another woman and sentenced to six weeks’ hard labor at the Female Factory. Appearing before Mr. Hutchinson with her son, Thomas, in her arms, she pleaded to keep the twelve-month-old with her because he was still nursing. Superintendent of Convicts Josiah Spode had already approved the request to keep Thomas with her, but it made no difference. Deputy Matron Cato also implored Mr. Hutchinson not to separate mother from suckling child. Again, he refused.
Five days after her admission to the Female Factory, Mary was allowed to visit her son in the prison nursery. “She did not know her own child, ‘it was so sickly looking, and altered so much for the worse!’”18 A few days later, the nurse sent Mary a message asking for money to buy Thomas sago, a starch derived from palm trees that was mixed with wine to treat ill infants. Upon receiving news of her son’s worsening condition, Mary asked Mr. Hutchinson for permission to visit the dying child. When he said no, the frantic mother ran toward the nursery but was detained and sentenced to solitary confinement. Somehow, she managed a message to her husband, who came to Cascades and left with their child. He purchased medicine from a pharmacist, but by now little Thomas was at death’s door and soon succumbed.
Little Thomas Vowles was just one of hundreds who suffered the same fate at the nursery. Word began to spread throughout Hobart Town that “the corpses of children had been conveyed secretly out of the Factory, without the slightest regard to ceremony.”19 The True Colonist harshly criticized Superintendent Hutchinson’s role in Thomas’s demise, assailing him for an improper use of authority. Such heartlessness prompted Hobart Town’s local newspaper to launch a crusade for change. On May 29, 1838, the Colonial Times reported yet another death inside Cascades and called for the resignation of the superintendent’s wife.
“Where, again, was the matron, Mrs. Hutchinson, that she did not perceive the gradual decay and drooping of this innocent victim? Is it . . . because Mrs. Hutchinson is so habituated to misery and wretchedness, within the walls of that gloomy prison, that she does not recognize its continual existence? At all events, her removal is certainly requisite, immediately and promptly.”20
The article went on to beg Governor John Franklin “to ORDER the immediate removal of the children, and not to stand upon any shillyshally remonstrance as to expense or inconvenience.”21 Despite public outcry about “the perilous and fatal Nursery,” the governor’s wife, Lady Jane, largely ignored the dying babies.22 Constructing a botanical garden, a state college, and a museum of natural history modeled after a Greek temple were the tasks she readily performed from an elite distance. Writing her sister during the time of the scandal, the governor’s wife revealed her true feelings: “As for doing anything with the women here, in the factory, it seems next to impossible huddled as they all are together, and such impudent creatures, almost all of them. . . . I think the whole system of female transportation . . . so faulty and vicious, that to attempt to deal with the women who are the subjects of it, seems a waste