The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (31 page)

Though the timing may have been coincidental, Eliza Morgan knew Ann McCarty well from spending nearly four months together aboard the
Westmoreland
. Eliza likely set up Ludlow as payback for testifying against her friend. The court had sentenced the pockmarked Ann to nine months’ hard labor, extending the separation from her child. Surely, the two blamed Ludlow. Developing loyalty during their journey across the sea, women who huddled together belowdecks grew protective of their mates, and when push came to shove, they often relied on them for reinforcement inside the harsh Cascades prison.

Loyalty was important to Superintendent Hutchinson as well. He had assigned the sympathetic widow to her second position of great responsibility. By 1842 he had little tolerance for anything that might further tarnish his record, particularly after the recent avalanche of well-publicized scandals involving infant deaths, the Catos’ dismissal, and the nefarious Flash Mob. As revealed by testimony under the Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline, the aging Hutchinson actively tried to avoid any contact with the prisoners, preferring his managerial distance.

Sentencing Ludlow to twelve months’ hard labor in the solitary working cells, he imposed a punishment quite harsh for a first infraction. Seeing her misconduct as another black mark on his record, he decided to make an example of Ludlow and thereby protect his reputation. Recording his indignation in #151’s conduct record, he “confirmed this female was placed in a situation of great trust under promised indulgence of the Principal Superintendent considering her to be a fit subject.”
⁴²

The last person Agnes and Janet expected to see in Crime Class was the crestfallen Ludlow, who walked through the crime yard that morning sporting an unfashionable prison shift emblazoned with large yellow Cs. The remnants of newly shorn hair peeked from under her mob cap. After all she’d been through over forty-nine years, this minor indignity was the least of her worries.

The formerly impeccably behaved nurse had been thrown to the wolves. Certainly Ann McCarty indulged in spiteful satisfaction watching the widow trudge toward her cell. Like all prison women, Nurse Tedder surely had enemies, but she had also made friends during her time at Liverpool Street. Agnes and Janet knew Ann McCarty from the
Westmoreland
. They may have collaborated to protect Ludlow from further reprisals, but at Cascades they were all in it together, and it was going to be a long chilly winter.

Ludlow had just begun her year of labor inside a solitary working cell. She sat in twilight on her little stool, day after day, pulling apart old rope fibers, with temperatures dipping into the forties. Winter brought long bouts of chilling rain, but the grey days gradually faded away into the lengthening sunlight of early spring.

By the end of August, the two Glasgow maids bid the Female Factory good riddance. Placed back on assignment, they held high aspirations for staying out of trouble. In less than a year, they’d be eligible for Certificates of Freedom. Ludlow received no such reprieve, and her callus-ridden hands continued to work on piles of rope. Summer dragged along like a lazy lizard sunning on a stone. A parade of unfamiliar faces watched the widow wearing large yellow Cs report without fail to morning muster. Nearly nine months into her punishment, Ludlow heard the sound of a familiar Scottish brogue. As she turned around, her eyes met those of another convict with an impish grin, looking back from across the yard and wearing the same drab shift emblazoned with the familiar C. February 22, 1843, the dauntless #253 was back at the washtubs for another three months’ hard labor. So close to the end of her term, if Agnes could avoid a major offense, she’d soon be free.

Ludlow’s future was less certain, but at least she’d soon see Arabella. Over the course of her dark-hued isolation, reduced rations of bread and water caused Ludlow’s grey uniform to fall farther from her frame. At last, the turnkey unbolted the locks on her cage. Ludlow strode proudly from the half-light of the two-story ward and was summoned to the reception room, where paperwork was already completed for her next assignment. A still-perturbed Mr. Hutchinson would allow just one visit to the Queen’s Orphanage, where Arabella, now fourteen, knew nothing of what had happened to her mother and why the Sunday visits stopped so abruptly. Auspiciously, her girlhood chum Catherine Mullins also remained at the orphanage and kept Arabella in good company.

After an all-too-brief visit to the orphanage, Ludlow was transferred by open cart one hundred twenty miles north to the Launceston Female Factory, a new facility constructed in 1834. Although the unusual octagonal configuration looked quite distinct from Cascades’ rectangular shapes, little was different inside the prison.

Beginning in 1840, New South Wales would accept no more female convicts. Now all were transported to Van Diemen’s Land by order of the Crown. As a result, both Cascades and the Launceston Female Factory were packed beyond capacity. Following the riots and disturbances that plagued 1842, superintendents tried to use the two locations to separate known collaborators, especially Flash Mob members, all to no avail.

Two months after Ludlow’s admission, the Crime Class women in Launceston locked out the constables and barricaded themselves inside the prison for more than twenty-four hours. “Only after about 30 prisoners from the men’s gaol next door were fetched to assist the constables, was the siege broken.”
⁴³
Five months later, simultaneous riots occurred at both female factories, attributable to either remarkable coincidence or crafty planning by the Flash Mob.
⁴⁴

Ludlow, however, returned to model conduct. Quietly biding her time, she picked oakum and sometimes scrubbed laundry at the washtubs. Under the Ticket of Leave policy, well-behaved prisoners were released on probation after completing at least four years of their sentence. Under watchful surveillance by local constables, convicts were allowed to work and to marry while serving the rest of their time.

Her excellent behavior yielded a harvest of good news for Widow Tedder in autumn 1844. Launceston Superintendent James Fraser submitted the paperwork for her Ticket of Leave, and Ludlow immediately sent for her daughter. Wasting not a moment, Ludlow must have passed Mr. Fraser every coin she had tucked away from underground trade, first on the
Hindostan
and later in the female factories. Her carefully managed stash paid stagecoach fare from the Queen’s Orphanage.
⁴⁵

On a crisp April evening in Launceston’s center, a dusty stagecoach door flew open, and fifteen-year-old Arabella ran into her mother’s open arms. Overhead, black cockatoos squawked a greeting of their own. The reunited pair spoke barely a word as they walked arm in arm along the banks of the Tamar, dotted with wharves, gardens, and lush farmland.

Within weeks of the joyful reunion, Ludlow held her Ticket of Leave. She read aloud the words that justified her early release: “Nearly two thirds of her term of transportation having expired and there being only one offence on record against her.”
⁴⁶
She’d served five years. Though the official document recorded her ten-year conviction delivered at the Old Bailey, the reference to “two thirds” applied more accurately to the seven-year sentence imposed on most transports.

On May 15, 1844, the fresh scent of freedom wafted over a relieved mother and daughter, who began to chart a course for their future. The ever-practical Ludlow Tedder began her search for a new mate. To survive in the colony, she’d need a partner. Taking full advantage of the nine-to-one ratio of men to women in Van Diemen’s Land, she set out to find a healthy younger man. In the end, she had Ann McCarty to thank for this turn of fate. Had she not been punished for helping Eliza Morgan and sent to Launceston, Ludlow wouldn’t have met the free settler who captured her heart.

Widower William Manley Chambers managed a farm just outside town and made a good living raising potatoes and sheep. Like Ludlow, he was literate, and seemed not to mind their difference in years. Though well beyond the bloom of maidenhood, Ludlow looked quite young for her age, and surely her wit and wisdom only made her more attractive. Besides, a woman with experience in cooking, housekeeping, and nursing was highly prized in a remote colony. With Ludlow’s blessing, William applied for permission to marry Widow Tedder. Astute woman that she was, Ludlow lied about her age on their marriage application, declaring herself forty years old. She was, in fact, fifty-one when she married the thirty-four-year-old farmer on July 29, 1844.

Eight weeks after she walked out of prison, Ludlow donned a simple cotton frock and held William’s arm before the altar in Launceston’s Holy Trinity Anglican Church. Arabella stood by her mother’s side, wearing winter-white magnolias in her hair and holding back tears of happiness and relief.

9

Flames of Love

Sleeping Beauty

The year 1844 began like a fairy tale for the trio of convict maids. Their lives were woven together by the Fates, as they passed through Liverpool Street and slaved behind the cold stone walls at Cascades. Now they were free and ready to express themselves on a new canvas prepared for hope and promise. The future was surely about to call them in different directions. Though they might never meet again, the women who walked away from Cascades were to be steadfast mates for the rest of their lives.

Ludlow Tedder Chambers, the oldest and still vibrant at fifty-one, contentedly adapted to life around a rustic farm cottage outside Launceston and introduced Arabella to the country roots she’d known as a young lass in Southminster, England. Now freed from her sentence at the Female Factory, Janet Houston escaped her recent painful past in the company of a tall, handsome emancipist. And the spirited Agnes McMillan, the youngest of the three, had fallen madly in love with a mysteriously scarred renegade who caught her attention charging through Oatlands on a runaway horse.

Agnes, twenty-three at the time of her release, had certainly scoffed at rules before. She had no trouble dismissing what the
Colonial Times
considered the “Rules and Regulations for Young Ladies” contemplating matrimony:

At twenty
.—Consider yourself in some danger of remaining single, and suit your conduct to your circumstances.

At twenty-one
.—Be less particular than heretofore, for time begins to wane.

At twenty-two
.—Think seriously of paying a visit to some friend at Madras or Calcutta.

At twenty-three
.—Marry any body that is not downright intolerable.
¹

At the end of 1839, when Superintendent Hutchinson banished the grey-eyed rebel to the most remote outpost accepting convicts, he inadvertently arranged her introduction to William Watson Roberts. William was a scrappy lad from Manchester, with dark brown eyes and a bit of larceny in his soul. As a young man, he tried his hand at pickpocketing, but had little skill. In 1827, he was arrested for stealing one shilling and sixpence, and three halfpence. Because this was the twenty-two-year-old’s second offense, the judge imposed a sentence of fourteen years’ transportation to parts beyond the seas. While awaiting exile, William spent eight months aboard the
Dolphin
, a decommissioned warship turned floating prison hulk.

Stripped bare and scrubbed with a stiff brush, the male prisoners were outfitted in coarse grey shirts and breeches and shackled by heavy rings secured by a steel rivet around both ankles. The rings were joined together by heavy chains, making it virtually impossible for a man to run, flee, or swim. Four hundred men ploddingly marched ashore under the watch of guards armed with whips. Now called by their number at five A.M. muster, the convicts, dragging iron balls at their feet, cleaned sewers, dug ditches, and dredged the River Thames. Returned to the ship at dusk, they were fed gruel and meat, then ordered by their task-masters to clean the old decaying battleship that was their home. The ship slept four men to a bunk in a space seven feet square, and epidemics ravaged the hulks constantly and caused many a man’s bones to be dumped in the swampy marshland following a death during the night.

William Roberts managed to survive his stay on the
Dolphin
, but he wouldn’t escape unscathed. One of many rampant outbreaks of tuberculosis left a permanent mark. Bearing a bluish-purple mass under his chin, he suffered from scrofula, or “king’s evil,” a name tied to the medieval belief that a royal’s touch offered the cure. His clear complexion was further transformed by another plague common to life on the hulks. Hundreds of angry men in chains, packed together like animals, bred gang warfare, especially terrorizing the youngest boys, some barely twelve. Five feet, five inches tall and never one to back down from a fight, William was quickly rewarded with several deep scars across his forehead “protecting himself from the murderous intentions of low-life troublemakers on board.”
²

The rough-and-ready son of a Manchester coach maker was transferred on March 11, 1828, from the hulk to the transport ship
William Miles
. En route to Van Diemen’s Land, seven prisoners died among the 492 on board. Finally, on July 29, 1828, the ship dropped anchor in Sullivans Cove and deposited the brown-eyed Roberts and the rest of the rowdy rabble on the colony’s distant shore.

Less than a month after his arrival, William walked off a convict labor crew. He was punished with two days on the tread wheel, a device dubbed “the everlasting staircase” and the “cock-chafer” because “the stiff prison clothes scraped one’s groin raw after a few hours on it.”
³
Steadying himself against the handrail, he lifted his leg and placed his feet on the rotating steps of the large wheel used to grind wheat. Left, right, left, right, the weight of his footfall caused the creaking mill to slowly revolve while his ankle irons clinked the cadence of his steady, rhythmic pace. Step by heavy step, he worked off his punishment, ten minutes on and five minutes off for up to ten hours each day.

Six weeks later, the strong-willed transport from a gritty industrial town skipped mandatory church muster and was punished with two more days on the giant circular tread wheel in the Hobart Town penitentiary. Colonial society relied heavily on fear to pave the path toward redemption. These devils were to be reformed by the word of God or the kiss of the lash. Extremes of all dimensions ruled an expanding populace caught between medieval practices involving subjugation and torture and rising emancipist sentiments favoring suffrage and freedom.

Great Britain sent prisoners to Botany Bay, Australia, beginning with the First Fleet in 1788. When William arrived forty years later, the ten thousand convicts in Van Diemen’s Land were expected to cower and submit to the rule of the master, just as those before them had done. This mission supported the goal of a docile labor class serving at the whim of the wealthy. The cheeky Manchester transport was twice punished with a whipping by leather cat-o’-nine-tails. The first time he’d returned to the barracks one hour late, twelve lashes shredded his bare back that night.

A year later, while working in a road gang, William was taken aside and punished with twenty-five strokes for insolence toward Mr. James Calder, the Surveyor General for Bruny Island. Nine knotted leather strips with lead weights fastened to the end were deliberately designed to rip and tear into the skin, thus prolonging his suffering. Salt, rubbed into the wounds to prevent infection, heightened the pain and the punishment.

His back still bloody from deep lacerations, William was immediately returned to felling huge trees and cutting tracks through dense scrub, as the land was cleared for new roads and settlements. Despite a run-in with Surveyor General Calder, the now experienced ax-man was chosen for a ten-day exploratory trip up the Huon River and its heavily forested, undeveloped, and yet untamed shores.

For the next two years, William’s transgressions were minor until he disobeyed direct orders and was sentenced to spend twelve months on a road gang outside the tiny settlement of Oatlands, breaking rocks and hauling them from the quarry. Marked for the Crime Class, he was made to wear the convict arrow of shame. The “pheon,” or broad arrow, found its roots in seventeenth-century markings on British property labeled to prevent theft. Petty thieves like William were considered property of the Crown and forced to wear coarse black-and-mustard-yellow “magpie” uniforms. Reinforcing public humiliation with no semblance of subtlety, one trouser leg was yellow and the other black, each emblazoned with three large arrows. His captors had cut back his shoes low on the sides, right at the point where irons would bruise and scrape his shins.

William’s sentence dragged on under the threat of the lash and the press of the pulpit. In unwavering attempts to reform convicts through religion, Oatlands’ chief magistrate required even Ticket of Leave holders’ attendance at church, posting this notice:

Chief Police Magistrate.
POLICE OFFICE, OATLANDS.
District of Oatlands Tickets-of-Leave.
ALL male prisoners holding the above indulgence,
and residing within two miles
from the Court-house, are ordered to attend
church muster in future every Sunday.
Also those residing upwards of two miles,
and not exceeding five miles, are ordered to
attend church muster, the first Sunday in every month.
⁴

Benefiting from its location midway between the island’s chief ports because of its growing wool trade, Oatlands in 1835 had a free population of 598, plus 695 convicts. It had expanded from twenty dwellings to more than two hundred over the past eight years.
⁵

Still, Oatlands remained an outpost marked by contradictory components. The construction of convict-crafted Georgian homes and tree-lined avenues conveyed the superficial appearance of a civilized society. Yet the fringes of town defined its true outlaw flavor. Wide-open country offered fertile ground for marauding bandits who rustled cattle, robbed travelers on the lonely roads between Hobart Town and Launceston, and battled one another in the brutal fashion from which many legends were born.

Notorious bushranger Richard Lemon defined the settlement’s early history before its link to other towns, encouraged after a visit by the governor of New South Wales in 1811. Exploring the northern jungles of Van Diemen’s Land on horseback, Governor Macquarie proposed a road linking Hobart Town to the settlement he named Oatlands because it looked similar to an area that grew oat crops in his native Scotland.
⁶

Until then, Richard Lemon, the leader of the first well-known bushranger gang, had terrorized the area. Between 1806 and 1808, Lemon ran wild and was the namesake for Oatlands’ Lemon Springs and Lemon Hill. Living his mocking creed “a short life and a merry one,” the ferocious murderer hid in a bark hut along the shores of Lake Tiberias until another ex-convict delivered his head in a sack and collected a bounty from the island’s Governor Collins.
⁷

Following Lemon’s marauding lead, escaped convicts held hostage large tracts of the island’s interior, still largely untamed and teeming with indigenous wildlife. Local herdsmen battled with carnivorous marsupials stealing from their flock, including the nocturnal Tasmanian devil and the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), nicknamed for its stripes.
⁸

A different form of wildlife congregated on the fringes of the settlement, outside the order and control of the wardens and the church. Sly-grog shops, “notorious haunts of vice and immorality,” opened in secluded shacks and barns in the bush.
⁹
Inside these treasured haunts, convict women and men re-created the working-class entertainment of their homeland, as they swapped tall tales, smoked tobacco, drank rum, played cards, gambled, and danced with reckless abandon. A lifeline to personal identity and good old-fashioned fun defined the after-dusk subculture from which convict solidarity prospered and dissidence brewed. In remote, predominantly male outposts like Oatlands, bare-knuckle boxing matches and cockfighting also filled the dark recesses of popular underground entertainment, which may have also filled the dark holes in many a lonely heart.
¹⁰

The petite renegade named Agnes McMillan had no trouble adapting to this rustic lifestyle, though she never forgave Superintendent Hutchinson for assigning her to the middle of nowhere. Despite the occasional gunshots and bushranger sightings, it was a rather boring town, with more sheep than settlers. The former street urchin, accustomed to big-city bustle and excitement, found little amusement in this dreary outpost until a certain William Roberts crossed her path.

Twelve years into his sentence, at age thirty-six, after a long day laboring in the summer heat, #510 celebrated his probationary Ticket of Leave in a secret Oatlands grog shop. As he waved the parchment marked January 22, 1840, in front of his mates, beer after beer was passed through his gleeful hands. Perhaps on a dare or merely a celebratory whim, William jumped atop a horse, hooting and hollering his way through the midlands town for all to see. The sleepy citizens who lived securely inside the village’s neat orange-brick homes were not in the least amused.

An Oatlands constable pulled the completely inebriated Englishman from his horse and dragged him down Barrack Street through the arched entrance to the old stone gaol. Staggering up the stairs, William stared down at the porous stone steps stained deeply red from blood running down the legs of men who’d been whipped earlier that day.
¹¹
Now that he’d been released from convict status, his sentence was lighter this time, a mere fourteen days in a solitary cell and a fine of five shillings. And the news was about to get better.

On this very night, a spirited Scottish lass must have had a good laugh as she peeked through her master’s curtained window and took notice of a dark prince riding wildly through the streets in the bright moonlight. His behavior was comical when compared to the antics of the bushrangers and fugitives who lived in the surrounding woods, where outlaw justice ruled. In this midlands community, a rather clumsy and unexpected courtship ignited between the spirited Agnes and a Ticket of Leave holder with a roguish smile and a wink cast her way.

Fifteen years her senior, William was not the handsome prince of fairy tales. His face featured high, square temples and prominent lips. His unruly black eyebrows nearly met in the center, and he bore the heavy blue mark of the “king’s evil” (tuberculosis) on his neck.
¹²
He had endured the gauntlet of imprisonment, and it was time to settle down and start a family. Nearing the end of his sentence, the lucky expatriate found work as a timber cutter and builder.