The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (33 page)

Sunrise burned off dawn’s heavy fog as noisy black currawongs sporting bright yellow eyes swooped clumsily along the river’s edge and looked for insects. Fairy wrens and white-bellied sea eagles joined in the chorus. Dragonflies danced on ferns, among the oldest known on earth, many unique to the island. Butterflies displayed brightly colored wings, painted with golden eyes and violet pupils. Large moths, most colored in camouflaging browns and greys and some with surprising additions of soft rosy pink, populated the forests and streams.

While William sawed timber downstream, Agnes explored the woods at their rear boundary. A nearly impenetrable treetop canopy cast a brooding stillness over the spongy rain-forest floor, touched by nary a hint of sunlight. Surrounded by the Huon pine, her closest neighbors were the majestic myrtles and September-flowering sassafras covered in lichen. Smells from the hearth and the smokehouse attracted the occasional curious wallaby or echidna, but Agnes rejoiced in a life simple and free.

Heavy with child and blessedly content, thinking back to Glasgow’s stinking streets, the mother-to-be delighted in the fragrance of black peppermint trees. Adding a touch of comfort to the cabin, the couple put up shelves, and William fashioned a table and stools. A rope bed and small crib, crafted with basic tools, added a homey touch to their isolated shack. On a chilly autumn morning in April 1844, Agnes gave birth to a daughter they named Lavinia Louisa; she was joined in 1846 by a brother named after his father. The two were baptized together by a missionary chaplain, who held services inside a modest wooden church built by Lady Jane Franklin. Over the next eight years, Agnes delivered George Henry, Agnes Lavinia, and John Edward. Lavinia and William enrolled in a school that opened in 1848 and helped teach their younger siblings how to read and write.

As the family expanded, the island’s economy sank into a depression. Three-quarters of the men in Van Diemen’s Land were convicts or ex-convicts, and many could not find work on any part of the island.
²⁶
By 1851, a rising tide of hatred directed toward transports and their offspring swept over the colony, further dividing a society already rife with prejudice. Looking toward the Southern Cross so clear above the Huon Valley, Agnes and William whispered excitedly about news they’d heard about golden opportunities in the nearby colonies of Victoria and New South Wales on Australia’s mainland.

Blessings of Abundance

By the time Agnes and William moved from the Huon Forest and set sail for Melbourne, Agnes’s old friend Janet Houston had married a highly successful horse breeder and given birth to nine of her eventual twelve children, including two sets of twins. The couple settled in the lovely township of Richmond, first called Sweet Water Hills and located just fifteen miles from Hobart Town.

At first, Janet’s union with Robert Bailey was fraught with drama following on the heels of tragedy. Robert, a former convict, was probably the father of the ill-fated baby, William. Despite that relationship, he was not free to wed Janet for more than a decade. When he first set eyes on the redheaded Scot, he was married to another convict maid, a volatile gypsy horse thief who deserted him as soon as she was granted a Ticket of Leave. Divorce not being an option, he did the next best thing, posting a desertion notice in the
Colonial Times
in an attempt to absolve himself of responsibility for his wife’s unpredictable behavior:

CAUTION

MARY BOSWELL,
Ticket-of-Leave, wife of Robert Bailey, of Richmond, having left her home without cause, he hereby Cautions the Public from giving her credit in his name, as he will not be answerable for any debt she may contract from this date.
ROBERT BAILEY,
April 19, 1839
²⁷

When Janet secured her Certificate of Freedom in 1843, she ran straight into the arms of the tall Englishman with dark grey eyes and thick chestnut hair. At five feet, eight inches tall, he towered above the petite woman, whom he’d met three years earlier. Thirty-six, a full twelve years her senior, Mr. Bailey certainly had his hands full. In a land where there was only one woman for every nine men, Robert found himself with one too many.

Transported in 1820 aboard the
Guildford
after being sentenced to seven years for petty theft, Robert arrived in Van Diemen’s Land at the tender age of thirteen. He received his Certificate of Freedom on July 23, 1827, and celebrated by getting roaring drunk and incurring a stiff fine. During his twenties, Robert managed to stay out of trouble except for being accused of stealing a sheep—that is, until he met the fiery Mary Boswell. She arrived aboard the
Harmony
on January 14, 1829. The nineteen-year-old from Birmingham was connected to a gang of gypsy thieves and faced a life sentence for “horse stealing.”
²⁸

As Mary strutted through Hobart Town, the dark-complexioned, dimpled gypsy with deep brown eyes would certainly have turned heads, especially at five feet, four inches, which was tall for that time.
²⁹
She’d endured four miserable months at sea and eight days more anchored in Sullivans Cove, because of the time it took to process the first women who were to be incarcerated at Cascades. In appointing staff for the new prison in 1828, Superintendent of Convicts John Lakeland recommended a staunch Methodist couple, stating:

The immoral habits and general bad conduct of the female convicts will require all the energy and nerve that any individual may possess to keep them in a proper state of subordination and discipline.
³⁰

The newly issued rules and regulations for the Female Factory reinforced a strict regime under Esh and Ann Lovell, both former Sunday school teachers. Within a month of Mary Boswell’s arrival, the first of many riots erupted at Cascades. It started after a group of sympathetic soldiers tossed cheese, bread, and butter over the stone wall into Yard One. When a prisoner tried to share the bread in the mess hall, an overseer took it away. The women went wild, stomping and clapping until locked down in their cells, where one lit cloth and pine, setting the yard ablaze. Superintendent Lovell shortly erected a fence around the perimeters of Cascades.
³¹

Mary, the independent firebrand, had no intention of spending a lifetime under the Crown’s stifling rules and regulations. She opted out of her sentence via the fastest escape route from the Female Factory. She got married. Arriving in a wild frontier, the exotic vixen had little trouble finding a spouse, wedding an infatuated Robert Bailey six months after she arrived in Van Diemen’s Land. Released to Robert’s care to serve out her life sentence, Mary found the loophole to early emancipation less than ideal, bristling at the intent to foster “respectable” women.

After eight years of marriage, Mary earned her Ticket of Leave in 1837, shortening her sentence and reducing government expenses. A year later, her union with Robert turned rocky, and on February 21, 1838, she was recorded “Absent from her husband’s premises. Severely reprimanded.”
³²
By 1840, Mary’s Ticket of Leave was revoked, following her arrest for larceny. She faced twelve months’ hard labor back at Cascades.

Abandoned by his wife for the past three years, Robert fell in love with Janet Houston. They met on the streets of Hobart Town, and she somehow managed to live on his farm in Richmond for nearly a year. Returned to the Female Factory and carrying a child, she was separated from the dashing Mr. Bailey until the warm autumn day she held Certificate of Freedom #339. Unfortunately, her grand reunion did not go quite as planned.

In 1842, Mary Boswell had absconded from her assignment in a tiny village called Green Ponds (later Kempton), more than twenty miles from Hobart Town. She was returned to her husband, but by March 1843 she left him once again. Two months later, Janet arrived at Robert Bailey’s home and by the following year was pregnant with twins. John and James Bailey were born in their parents’ cozy stone cottage on May 20, 1845.

Robert prospered breeding horses and developed an upstanding reputation. The
Colonial Times
recommended his farm as one where “good grass and well watered paddocks are provided for mares sent to him.”
³³
He also invested in land to support their expanding brood. William Houston Bailey was born in May 1847 and named after the little boy Janet had lost five years earlier. Twin girls Rebecca and Betsy arrived in 1848, followed by siblings Robert, Arthur, Mary, Kate, Randolph, Wallace, and Samuel, born last in 1860. Janet finally married Robert on March 3, 1852, at Richmond’s United Church of England and Ireland, surrounded by their children and carrying a simple bouquet of wildflowers tied in a ribbon.

A year later, in August 1853, Janet and her family witnessed the official abolition of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land. Since 1803, sixty-seven thousand convicts had been shipped to this isolated outpost. Now they made up half its population. The older Bailey children attended the Richmond Primary School, built by prisoners in 1834.
³⁴
Convict labor had built most of the municipal buildings in Hobart Town, and chain gangs had cleared the land for roads that now bustled with settlers and commerce.

Each school-age child was issued a medallion, coined by the Royal Mint in London, commemorating fifty years of European settlement and the close of a penal colony.
³⁵
In both Hobart Town and Launceston, jubilee festivals were orchestrated to erase the lingering stigma associated with freed convicts like Janet Houston and William Bailey. The couple probably avoided the celebration, because the Bailey family, and other emancipists, wanted no more than to blend into the fabric of their small farming community, raise their children, make a living, and attend church on Sundays.

For weeks the newspapers touted the jubilee event as God’s answer to their prayers. Finally, on August 10, 1853, the highly anticipated day arrived. At six in the morning, as church bells pealed across the valley, the sleepy town awoke to the rising sun. A thick morning fog quickly retreated from the cliffs hovering over Mt. Wellington—“And then what a lovely prospect was presented! The sun shone in his full strength—the very clouds had taken a holiday, for not one was visible.”
³⁶

When Lieutenant Governor Denison refused to sponsor the jubilee celebration in steadfast allegiance to the economic benefits of transportation, Isaac Wright offered his wool storehouse on the wharf. A brass band serenaded the throng of thousands who pressed into the flag-decorated hall. Schoolchildren marched to the waterfront in groups of five hundred at a time, carrying silk banners at the front of the procession. By half past ten, a giant “Demonstration Cake” weighing 350 pounds, “about fourteen feet in circumference, iced over and most elegantly embellished,” was carried into the room by eight bakers and placed on a raised platform.
³⁷
“Loud huzzas” reverberated across the hall as the festivities began.
³⁸

Celebrants feasted on ham, roast beef, sandwiches, tarts, cake, lemonade, and ginger beer. Special attention was lavished on the children for their role in the colony’s future. Girls and boys were outfitted in white clothing, a symbol of untarnished virtue, and the native-born touted their status with light blue ribbons on their left breasts. Henry Hopkins, a Sunday school teacher, addressed the youngsters and implored them to “become true Christians and good and useful citizens.”
³⁹
Giant cakes were also delivered to the Queen’s Orphan School, though its residents were not awarded the commemorative medallions given to the other schoolchildren.

At noon, ships in the harbor, festooned in bright colors, fired guns into the air. The jubilee’s entertainment concluded with bonfires and fire-works, proclaiming “to all the country around that convictism was dead, and that the loyal and respectable portion of the colonists were rejoicing that their beloved Queen had spoken the word of liberation. . . .”
⁴⁰

Prayer, in fact, had underpinned the Anti-Transportation League’s call for Providence to stop the convict ships from entering the River Derwent. In describing the “Great Demonstration,” the
Colonial Times
announced: “In August, 1803, Van Diemen’s Land was first occupied ‘as a place of exile for the most felonious of felons’ from Botany Bay. . . . But the Supreme Governor of the universe had decreed that ‘the wickedness of the wicked should come to an end.’”
⁴¹

Yet transportation didn’t end for humanitarian reasons. Instead, the British government phased it out after slave labor had served its purpose and free laborers began to fear competition for their jobs. Bitter prejudice about the deep imprint of the convict stain on proper society fueled a rising sentiment to erase the true history of Van Diemen’s Land. The clergy, in particular, incited hysteria about homosexuality among male convicts and heightened the urgency to stop the influx of those they considered breeders of vice.

Both the press and the pulpit called for prayer as a means to rescue the colony “from ruin and degradation.”
⁴²
In its 1849 Christmas edition, the
Colonial Times
appealed to divine intervention to accomplish what a petition to Queen Victoria, signed by six thousand Hobartians, could not: