The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [98]
Awakening with a melancholy heart on the following morning, Ludlow lovingly stroked her daughter’s grimy cheek, gravely aware of what was about to happen. Heavy footsteps echoed from the far gate toward the women’s ward.
It was time to kiss Arabella good-bye. After reassuring her brave child that she would visit whenever the rules permitted, Ludlow watched Mrs. Hutchinson lead her bewildered ten-year-old away. Only seven days after arriving in Van Diemen’s Land, her youngest child was admitted to the Queen’s Orphanage. Ludlow vowed to get her back, whatever the cost.
Children were separated from their mothers at Cascades for two reasons. First, it was surmised that if a prisoner spent time on parenting, it reduced her hours of productivity and therefore her economic value. Second, separating girls like Arabella from their mothers fell under Britain’s master plan for a pure moral pedigree in the expanding colony. Under the guise of protecting children from “the convict stain,” the government removed them from their mothers, hoping to prevent corruption of young souls in order to gain strong, healthy, and docile workers.
Children like Arabella were pressed into servitude as soon as they learned to sew a jacket or grew sturdy enough to carry bricks, usually by age thirteen or fourteen. From this day forward, Arabella would belong to the state until her mother received a Ticket of Leave, her passport to freedom. Unlike Agnes McMillan, who had long passed the age of innocence, Arabella was considered young enough to meet Victorian standards for a pure moral canvas.
Young Miss Tedder boarded the orphans’ transport cart along with her good chum from the Hindostan, eight-year-old Sarah Smith.27 The two pulled up another young friend, four-year-old Jane Price, and held her between them. Jane’s mother, Ann, was confined to a cell on bread and water for insolence to her master, so the two didn’t even get to say good-bye. Straining their necks for a last look at their mothers’ prison, the three frightened playmates huddled together as the wheels of the cart began creaking away from the factory.
The light cargo jostled down the valley into Hobart Town and then north toward New Town. The tiny cart made steady progress along well-traveled Elizabeth Street, one of the main thoroughfares into the busy little port. Many wagons headed in the opposite direction were loaded with wood, wool, and other products bound for the warehouses by the docks. Several miles outside Hobart Town, the traffic thinned and the prison orphans passed the few homes that constituted New Town’s center. Soon a church revealed itself, centered in what appeared to be a large estate surrounded by fences stretching across the rolling hills. As the cart rattled toward the sternly squared stone spire marking the end of the road, it seemed as if the girls would roll right into what looked like a castle.
This was the gate of the Queen’s Orphan School, housing youngsters whose parents were deceased or had abandoned them, along with a large contingent of children who had been transported with their mothers. Behind stone walls akin to the Cascades compound, more than four hundred children were fed and warehoused. The nearly even numbers of girls and boys were separated by St. John’s parish church in the center of the complex.
The bricks for constructing the orphanage came from the