The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (34 page)

We must petition the throne of Almighty God and pray that the curse be removed; and should all fail, then we must shake off the dust of our feet against our oppressors and depart to place our families where they can form honest associations and earn honest bread.
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The Anti-Transportation League of Van Diemen’s Land, established by Reverend John West in 1849, led to the formation of the Australasian Anti-Transportation League on the mainland. The gold rush in the Colony of Victoria offered further reason to end forced migration, based on concern that people in Great Britain would commit crimes as a way to reach a continent paved in riches.

Pressure from free settlers in Van Diemen’s Land escalated when they threatened to abandon a colony blighted by the “scum and dregs of the offscourings of mankind,” as described by William Ullathorne, a Catholic priest who had served in Australia and a leading critic of transportation.
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Rejecting the possibility of reform and redemption for young mothers like Janet Houston and Agnes McMillan, newspapers on both sides of the world declared: “It is impossible to import the criminal without importing crime.”
⁴⁵
The
Edinburgh Review
, called “the recognized manifesto of the British government” by the
Colonial Times
, asked:

On what grounds . . . does England assume the singular privilege of establishing colonies to be deluged and drowned with the flood of her own wickedness? What right has any country to turn even a wilderness into a school of sin, to create, even at the antipodes, huge nurseries of depravity, to pollute a young nation from its very birth, and to saturate with its own corruption the sources whence countless generations are to spring?
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The
Irish Exile and Freedom’s Advocate
, an 1850 emancipist newspaper published in Hobart Town, disputed such claims by purporting that families who lived alongside convicts for twenty years had suffered no “moral contamination.”
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Hoping to encourage acceptance with the help of Christian compassion, emancipists formed the “Society of the Propagation of the Charities, etc., of the Gospels.” As it celebrated the strength in their numbers, a Society publication denounced the seeds of bigotry that polluted the pristine island they now called home:

“ They” came to make their fortunes and now “They” rail at you who “They” forced to come. “You” outnumber “Them” by many thousands. . . . Have
you
not made the colony what it is? Has not
your
sweat, in so few years, made this land . . . ? Have not
your
labors given these wandering adventurers at least the position of settled abodes . . . ?
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As tension escalated between the free settlers and the freed convicts, antitransportation advocates displayed their vitriol and solidarity by pinning blue rosettes on their well-pressed lapels, flooding the newspapers with lengthy editorials, and hosting public forums about how to oust the convict population. Their quest for social power rested precariously on the perceived horrors of a classless society in Van Diemen’s Land. John Morgan, the head of the Hobart Town Trades Union, penned an editorial outlining his concerns about emancipist “tyranny”:

Presently, we shall have here, not a war of races and colours, but of castes and classes. . . . The convict authorities . . . would have us adopt the red republican, socialist, levelling principles of revolutionary France by which all distinctions are abolished.
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Now neighbors of those who’d been their masters, emancipated convicts countered settlers’ fears and prejudices by lobbying for their rights as citizens. While freed convicts strove toward a democratic society, most free settlers were fiercely committed to stifling the voices of men and women who held Certificates of Freedom. Emancipists responded with organized solidarity in a town where two of every three men had arrived on a convict ship. Their influence did not go unrecognized. By the 1850s, candidates supporting their interests, some former prisoners, were well represented as aldermen for Hobart Town.

The deep schism between the two factions festered, refusing to mend even as they sat side by side at municipal council meetings. Free settlers remained frustrated by their failure to rid Van Diemen’s Land of “the curse, stain, and peril of convictism.”
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Colonists found it impossible to bury the legacy left by a penal colony. Women and men who’d been transported with mental disabilities, who defaulted into alcoholic despair, or who couldn’t endure unjust cruelty lived and died on the fringes of society. Estimates suggest that about one-third of the female transports never married or had children. “They lived out their lives in lonely exile far from their families and childhood friends. Amongst these were the ones who lived out their final days in the pauper institutions and mental asylums of the colonies, who lived isolated lives in small huts on the edges of towns and villages, or who wandered the colony, homeless and friendless.”
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Before transportation ceased in Van Diemen’s Land, a fresh influx of cheap labor, many Irish refugees from the potato famine, reached its shores. The last convicts to arrive in Van Diemen’s Land were not welcomed as cheap labor the way Agnes and Janet were when the
Westmoreland
’s human cargo was paraded through Hobart Town. As anti-transportation sentiment rose, each arrival of new convicts met with increased resentment. The last convicts to arrive in Van Diemen’s Land were expected to serve their sentences, thus extending the penal practices of the previous fifty years. In April 1853, the final female convict ship, the
Duchess of Northumberland
, anchored off Hobart Town and delivered 216 women. Three women and seven children were lost during the rough voyage. One month later, the
St. Vincent
, the last convict ship destined for Van Diemen’s Land, arrived on May 26, 1853, with 207 men on board, having lost seven at sea.

Nearly one-quarter of all transports were Irish: thirty thousand men and nine thousand women. Nearly half were arrested during the famine years, most for larceny. The deep-seated conflict between Ireland and Great Britain escalated with every Irish arrest, particularly when political activists were sentenced to transport.

In 1868, the
Hougoumont
, Britain’s last convict ship to Western Australia, transported 279 male prisoners, including a band of 63 Irish political prisoners known as the Fenians. By this time, the Irish constituted about 20 percent of Australia’s population. Among their ranks were Irish rebels who had emigrated as free citizens, many of whom played a role in shaping workers’ rights and democratic government in the Australian colonies where Agnes McMillan and Ludlow Tedder would settle with their families.

An Gorta Mór: Let Them Eat Grass

While Janet, Agnes, and Ludlow lived out the life of the freed, a new crop of women was targeted for transport half a world away. One was named Bridget Mulligan, from County Cavan. Her passage aboard the
Blackfriar
had everything to do with being born Irish. A writer traveling to Australia in 1847 made this observation about the transported: “A man is banished from Scotland for a great crime, from England for a small one, and from Ireland, morally speaking, for no crime at all.”
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Bridget’s journey to Cascades began in the blackened potato fields of Ireland in 1849. Her brothers—John, Charles, William, and Patrick—had left their homeland for the promise of work in America. The youngest of the clan, Bridget, remained behind with her mother, Catherine, and sister Bessy.

Thousands began to flee the island. The blight escalated tensions between Ireland and England, and nothing could stop the export of grain. Upper society carried on with usual fare. As starving peasants with sunken eyes stepped over decaying corpses, local lords prepared a sumptuous feast for the visiting Queen Victoria and her assemblage of portly aristocrats. While the servants cleared the silver for the next setting of the banquet’s twenty-three courses, the lords happily discussed profit from grain exports. Victoria, soon labeled the “Famine Queen” among the Irish, made a personal donation to alleviate suffering but quietly turned down higher contributions from other countries to protect both her pride and the Crown’s image.

An Gorta Mór, “The Great Hunger,” arose from the blight on potato crops and worsened in the wake of society’s decay. Greedy landlords and a greedier government were the harbingers of famine, together carrying the cruel countenance of inhumanity. Mass evictions in a single year accounted for two hundred fifty thousand Irish left with nowhere to sleep and no way to make a living. Taking advantage of skyrocketing agricultural prices during the Napoleonic War, landlords supplemented their income by leasing small plots, where families built their croft huts and farmed the land. When prices plummeted after the war, landlords aggressively evicted tenants, destroyed their huts, and converted the land into more lucrative livestock grazing. As a final burden, Ireland, normally known for mild winters, experienced abrupt blasts of weather, bringing freezing sleet and snow.

As a black mold crept across the fields, the British government responded with lethal disregard for children, women, and men who lay dying in the dirt with nobody to bury them. Mr. O’Shaughnessy, an assistant barrister who worked in Ireland, pleaded for help before the House of Commons:

It was quite afflicting to see the state of the children. They were nearly naked, with a few rags upon them; their hair standing on an end from poverty; their eyes sunken; their lips pallid, and nothing but the protruding bones of their little joints visible. I could not help exclaiming as I passed them, “AM I LIVING IN A CIVILIZED COUNTRY AND PART OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE?”
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One million perished and at least another million were forced to leave the Emerald Isle for Europe, the United States, and Australia. As one tragedy bled into another, an additional eleven thousand were arrested and readied for transport, as crime escalated among people desperate for survival. A total of 3,687 Irish girls and women were shipped to Van Diemen’s Land, most sent after 1840, when transport to New South Wales ceased.
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The majority of Irish transports were convicted of larceny, many for rustling livestock. Among those convicted for petty theft, more than half had stolen clothing.
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For the empire, the Transportation Act was especially helpful in disposing of the Irish, a group supremely disdained throughout England. Illustrations in British newspapers of the day portrayed them as subhuman and simian in nature. Even the open-minded Elizabeth Fry had difficulty, at first, understanding and accepting the Irish she visited in prison. Describing women awaiting transport, she wrote: “The greatest number appeared to me Irish, a very few Scottish; the former are always ignorant, and preserve the peculiarities of their national character, even in this abode of sorrow and captivity. . . .”
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So fragile was life on the edge of disaster that entire Irish families chose transport over the likelihood of starvation. For some, exile to Van Diemen’s Land was their only chance for remaining a family. Arson was the safest bet. It was an offense guaranteeing immediate transport. Light an oily rag or set a bale of hay on fire. Burn a barn to the ground. Everyone knew there was no way back, yet 242 women from Ireland committed arson, many to escape the famine.
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Propelled by love of family, Bridget Butler and daughter Anne Corry, age sixteen, hatched a plan to be reunited with the rest of their kin. Bridget’s husband had died, and her children were the only family left in Killard, County Clare. As they looked out the grimy window of a boardinghouse room, rain bore down on what were once green hillsides, now plucked bare by the starving for their evening meal.

On January 11, 1849, armed with red-hot coal in a skillet, Bridget and Anne set fire to Mary Hickey’s house, down the lane from the dingy lodging they called home. Mother and daughter prayed they’d be caught, and their prayers were soon answered. Each received a sentence of seven years to Van Diemen’s Land.

A year earlier, Anne’s sister, Margaret, and her brothers, John and Patrick, had been arrested for stealing a sheep. Margaret was shipped out right away. While her brothers awaited sentencing, Patrick was found dead in Dublin’s Smithfield gaol. Not knowing they’d lost Patrick, Bridget and Anne boarded the ship
Australasia
to repeat the journey Margaret had made a year earlier. On March 27, 1849, they escaped the ravages of the potato famine. Every week spent on the
Australasia
brought mother and daughter closer to the chance for survival as a family. Just one day before their ship anchored, Bridget died from dysentery at age sixty, following several days of suffering from griping and purging.
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Happily, Anne found her sister, Margaret Quealy, who attended Anne’s wedding and the baptism of her children.
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Many stories were less outwardly dramatic than Bridget Butler’s and Anne Corry’s, though no less tragic. Bridget Mulligan was another country girl named after Ireland’s St. Bridget, a patron saint. Like many, she relied on otherworldly strengths to survive the hard times in County Cavan. Still suffering the famine’s aftershocks, Bridget was on her own at twenty-three and shared a small room with her “cara,” or best friend, Mary Rennicks.