The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (30 page)

Somehow managing to quiet the mob, Mr. Hutchinson left the room, only to be followed by a fresh outburst of clapping and cheering. Tension reached the boiling point, and he called in the town police. The women greeted the officers with a solidarity chant: “We are all alike, we are all alike.”
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The stalemate lasted four hours until the now-crumbling and defeated Ann Maloney turned in the insurgent ringleaders. Her fun and games inside the Female Factory were over, and solidarity was not enough to keep her strong. Although she’d joined Ellen Scott’s infamous 1839 revolt and reveled in the wild sisterhood, Ann descended ever deeper into drunkenness and violence as her life sentence endlessly unraveled. The optimistic lass who’d so lovingly inscribed two hearts and two doves on a coin had long since departed.

The sisterhood of rebellious unity was not enough to counteract the darkest side of life inside the Female Factory. Hunger, malnutrition, filth, exhaustion, alcoholism, and a lack of personal space contributed to riots, fistfights, and incidents of sexual assault among the women. All sorts of scandals and uprisings kept the Flash Mob on the lips of many colonists. Lady Jane Franklin, though aloof from the prisoners she had promised Mrs. Fry she would help, bristled at Mob headlines splashed across the newspapers she perused every day.

Earlier in the year, an extension of the Female Factory opened in New Town. Known as the Brickfields Hiring Depot, it became the assignment center for transported women. Lady Franklin wasted no time in launching a campaign to institute harsher penalties for the Crime Class at Brickfields. The
Colonial Times
reported that she had taken over “management of the Female Convict Establishment, in conjunction with a committee of ten other ladies.” On the ladies’ recommendations, “those in the lowest crime yard are to be employed in breaking stones for the finishing course on the roads, not larger than the yolk of an egg, to be passed through an iron riddle according to Macadam’s plan.”
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The newspaper article concluded with a wholehearted endorsement of Lady Jane’s approach: “This is delightful. We shall soon hear no more of ‘send me to the Factory,’ from those heroines, where at present they are engaged in little else than studying how to concoct mischief, and render themselves unworthy the name of WOMAN.”
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Not surprisingly, Lady Jane informed Mrs. Fry that picking oakum or scrubbing at the washtubs was too easy a punishment for the unwed mothers at Cascades. While Franklin’s attitudes toward the transported women grew ever harsher, Elizabeth’s Fry’s views about reform evolved toward a less punitive approach. In 1842, she described her change of heart in a letter to Lady Jane: “With respect to cutting off hair we have not found its effect good in England, for whilst the poor prisoner should be humbled by her faults she should not always carry about it in the view of others the crime she has committed, it hardens and makes them worse than before.”
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Concerned about the separation of convict mothers from their children, Fry continued: “. . . I am of opinion that it would not be right according to the laws of God and nature not only to preclude the mothers of illegitimates from seeing their children or taking them out when able to maintain them. . . . Of course the mothers of the legitimate children should be very differently treated.”
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Even Fry, holding tight to her upper middle-class British upbringing, failed to fully understand the plight of transported women who suffered rape or abandonment by the fathers of their children. Yet at sixty-two, she persisted in radical ideas for prison reform that defied rigid Victorian sensibilities. Informed of plans for new prisons in the colony, she made this recommendation to Lady Jane: “I think your Factory capable of great improvement by being made more a house of correction and I think there might be added to it something of house of refuge for hopeful characters that may arrive in the ship or be anxious to improve in the Colony.”
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Coupling her model behavior aboard the
Hindostan
with exemplary work in the nursery, Arabella’s mother personified the “hopeful character” inspiring Fry’s optimism. Yet even the perfectly proper and contained Ludlow Tedder would get into trouble. By 1842, the Liverpool Street nursery was packed far beyond capacity. One hundred fifty-three women and children were crammed into a house so dilapidated Mr. Hutchinson feared it might fall down.
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Superintendent of Convicts Josiah Spode finally approved the opening of a larger nursery inside Dynnyrne House, located in a converted distillery down the rivulet from Cascades.

For three years, the compassionate Nurse Tedder had cared for her little charges as if they were her grandchildren. Ludlow’s record had not a single black mark. She took pride in a frequently heart-wrenching though rewarding assignment. Shortly before the Liverpool Street quarters were shut down, Ludlow was privy to several incidents her conscience simply wouldn’t allow her to condone. Convict worker Ann McCarty was housed in the nursery with her nine-month-old child, from whom she’d soon be separated. At this time, mothers were allowed to nurse their babies for nine months rather than six. In an effort to keep each prisoner productive and out of trouble, Mrs. Slea assigned Ann the care of two children who’d been weaned and whose mothers had been returned to the Female Factory. One of Ludlow’s mates from the
Hindostan
, Mary Larney, reported Ann for abusing the two-year-old under her watch.

Bread and Water

Nurse Ludlow found herself in an impossible predicament when called as a witness before the Hobart Town Lower Court. She was well aware that if she informed on a fellow prisoner, she’d be made to pay one way or another. However, if she lied for the woman who abused a child, she’d face Mr. Hutchinson’s outrage and lose a plum assignment that allowed occasional visits to Arabella. Mothers sent out to settlers at distant locations rarely saw their children while they lived in the Queen’s Orphanage. Ludlow couldn’t risk this.

Standing tall before the magistrate, Ludlow refused to lie for Ann McCarty. On June 14, 1842, she offered the following testimony:

Mary Larney fetched me this morning stating that McCarthy [McCarty] had beaten a child in an improper manner. I went and saw the child. She had beaten it severely across the bottom and back, and it is about 2 years old. . . . She stated that the child had dirtied itself, she gave no other reason. There were marks of the hand across the back and bottom. I have never heard of her doing so before. . . . I also saw her take the child of Marg North out of bed and throw it on the floor not very violently.
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Ludlow was returned to Cascades, but not for punishment. Given her experience assisting Surgeon Superintendent McDonald and her fine work in the nursery, Superintendent Hutchinson saw fit to appoint her to work in the Female Factory hospital. Here babies were delivered, the mentally ill restrained, and prisoners with rheumatism and epilepsy admitted.

Ludlow hadn’t spent much time inside the Female Factory since her arrival in Van Diemen’s Land, but she knew that Ann McCarty was back in the Crime Class, smoldering in anger over the widow who had spoken the truth in court. The levelheaded nurse walked a tightrope every time she strolled through the yards. Her survival (and Arabella’s, too) depended on understanding what went on behind the stone walls and using it to her best advantage. She faced her first test within days of her return. Eliza Morgan, a patient missing a front tooth, persuaded the widow to do her a favor.
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She’d slip Ludlow a few coins in return for the nurse using her position to pick up a bundle in town. Unfortunately, Ludlow failed to realize she was helping a former shipmate of her nemesis, Ann McCarty.

Seizing what appeared to be an opportunity for building the nest egg she’d need to retrieve Arabella and make a fresh start, Ludlow joined the underground subculture at Cascades. Although marriage allowed a woman early release from her sentence and was the fastest way to regain custody of Arabella, it seemed a far-fetched proposition for the forty-nine-year-old widow. Still, Ludlow dared to dream of her future. If she didn’t pursue the matrimonial path, she’d have to be prepared. Once free, she’d need lots of money to prove she could provide for Arabella. Currency, in a corrupt and distant colony, bought just about anything, including a daughter. Whatever it took, that was her plan.

Many at the Female Factory surrendered to temptations that offered a lifeline in miserable waters. Convict maids learned the ropes by secretly shadowing their captors and listening for how deals were negotiated and sealed. With her position in the center of Hobart Town, Ludlow certainly understood the fine line that often separated criminal from official.

Both prison constables and their unpaid convict policemen took advantage of profiteering. For a fee, the supervisor turned his back when the convict on his force committed an offense that jeopardized his Ticket of Leave, the probationary period at the end of his sentence. Though the government relied heavily on the police to maintain order in the penal colony, “they used their brief of keeping close surveillance over convicts to cloak dubious and illegal practices that offended the rule of law.”
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Some constables accepted hush money from sly-grog shops, took convicts off duty to chop their wood and clean their stables, and struck back at those who exposed their breach of public trust. During the year Agnes arrived,
Colonial Times
editors Henry Melville and Gilbert Robertson reported on the Political Association, an organization that addressed police abuse at its first meeting. In retaliation, a police informant lured two of Melville’s convict printers to a pub, got them drunk on illegal rum, and then turned them in. The two yokels were sentenced to four months on a chain gang. As expected, without his printers, Melville’s ability to produce his newspaper was seriously undermined.
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So widespread was this corruption, it sank to the ridiculous in a dog-nabbing racket, in which one dog was used to entrap another. Under the guise of enforcing leash laws, constables seeking a few extra coins found ready targets for extortion and immediate payment:

In Hobart Town constables allegedly walked down the street, each with a bitch on a lead and a number of ropes with nooses, which they threw around the neck of any dogs that stopped to make acquaintance with the bitches. After thirty minutes, the constables had caught thirteen dogs. Their owners preferred to pay the constables £1 or £2 rather than appear in court, where they could not prove their dogs had been “
seduced
” by the policemen’s bitches.
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Back at the Female Factory, few risked such blatant graft, but at nightfall the yards came alive with secret bargaining and trade. During daylight hours, boxes made of wood and tin lay safely stashed behind a loose brick or buried next to a washtub. Shortly after evening muster, the goods went up for auction. Tea, sugar, tobacco, pipes, spirits, and fried meat from the kitchen exchanged hands and were quickly consumed or hidden in the unseen corners of Cascades.

Bribing a convict turnkey was an easy transaction. More often than not, she ran an underground business of her own. She’d happily look the other way or leave a door unlatched in exchange for the currency of the day: tobacco, liquor, coins, and even buttons taken from the laundry and prized because prison uniforms had none.
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Ludlow’s new assignment placed her inside “the nerve centre for illicit commerce.”
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A glimpse into this subculture comes from Eliza Churchill, transported two years after Ludlow for stealing a cloak and a silk umbrella. She spent three weeks in the infirmary at the Launceston Female Factory and offered this testimony before the government’s Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline in 1841: “I have seen tobacco constantly brought in and given to the nurse who used to supply the crime class with it. The nurse Mrs. Benson gets money from the prisoners and gives it to Mrs. Littler the sub-matron who gets tobacco & tea & sugar in the town and gives it to the nurse.”
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The thriving smuggling operation that Eliza observed from her hospital bed included creative techniques for transporting the illicit goods, like watching the submatron stuff tobacco inside her corset. Capitalizing on high illiteracy among her patients, the enterprising nurse also charged them for penning letters and even for the paper they used.
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For an older convict with few options ahead, Ludlow took a gamble. Just as she never intended to steal silverware from Barrister Skinner, Widow Tedder now swam in a cesspool of corruption, making her choices as a matter of survival. Like the Catos’ message-delivery-for-a-chicken scheme, the offer from patient Eliza Morgan seemed too good to resist. Because Mr. Hutchinson trusted Ludlow to procure hospital supplies in town, Eliza innocently asked her to pick up a few goods from a Mr. Smith on Elizabeth Street and smuggle them back into Cascades. In return, Ludlow would pocket a few pennies she could spend on soap for Arabella or save for their future.

If only she had known it was a trap. On June 21, 1842, Ludlow’s fate took an abrupt turn for the worse. Constable Goodwin caught her “obtaining goods under false pretenses.”
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She had violated Article 9 of the Female Factory “Rules and Regulations,” which stated: “No Officer or Servant of the Establishment shall supply any Female Convict with other provisions or comforts of any kind than those allowed by the Regulations. Neither is any clothing,
nor other articles whatever
, to be delivered to any Convict in the House of Correction.”
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