The Tin Ticket

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Nonfiction

Down Under in the Female Factory
 
THE TIN TICKET:
The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women
By Deborah J. Swiss
362 pp. Berkley

Reviewed by Sue Ellis

For many of us, the history of the British Isles' deportation of convicts to Australia is rouged with romance and misconceptions. Everyone enjoys a story about an underdog, the person who overcomes low beginnings and flourishes in spite of challenges. I had the idea that the convicts were welcome in the land down under, and that their punishment was to fend for themselves in a strange land. I pictured them linking arms as they strode down a gangplank into a rough-and-tumble land of opportunity.

In The Tin Ticket, I learned that Australians of the time hardly welcomed the convict population, or 'stain' as it was known. Many lobbied long and hard for the practice to stop, although judging by its duration, from 1788 and 1868, they may as well have saved their collective breath. It was only after slave labor had served its purpose in helping the British gain a foothold in the new Australian colonies that the exodus was finally halted. And prisoners didn't walk down a gangplank into freedom, but into another miserable prison where they would be farmed out as laborers, or as in the case of the women, breeders.

The first thing to ground me into the reality of what really happened was the description of the destitute women and children who were deported for petty crimes such as stealing food or clothing. After perfunctory trials, they would up in London's Newgate Prison, waiting in dank, overcrowded cells for one of the twice-yearly voyages to Australia, where men outnumbered women nine to one. Those who survived London's prison, a notorious hellhole, were further challenged to survive the journey by sea, closely billeted as they were in the belly of a disease-ridden ship and living on stingy rations of weak broth and bread. Many convict women were impregnated by members of the ship's crew before they set foot in Tasmania.

Deborah J. Swiss, the author, did her homework. For six years she researched original nineteenth-century documents and diaries to recreate the lives of four women who not only survived the experience, but went on to become solid citizens:

Convict #253, Agnes McMillan, age twelve, and Convict #284 Janet Houston, age seventeen, arrested together for stealing clothing at a shop in Glasgow.

Convict #1231, Bridget Mulligan, age twenty-seven, for stealing a dress, a milk tin and a white petticoat in Dublin.

Convict #151, Ludlow Teddler, age forty-seven, a widowed mother of four, for stealing eleven spoons and a breadbasket from her employer in London.

They served their sentences at the Cascades Female Factory, a prison that was located in present day Tasmania--a place where nine-hundred infants and children perished. If a woman survived her stay at the prison and was eventually released, she had no place to turn unless she could attract a man or find work. Many lived in hovels alongside the road, or in public institutions for the destitute or the insane.

By the time Agnes and Janet were arrested, a voice of reason and compassion had intervened on the behalf of the forgotten population of women and children in prison. In 1813, Quaker reformer Elizabeth Gurney Fry, already renowned for her work with the homeless, was visited by American Quaker minister Stephen Grellet, who had just visited the women's ward at Newgate Prison. The conditions he found there had shocked him to the core.

What ensued was a tireless campaign by Elizabeth Fry to ease the misery of the imprisoned women and children in Britain. It was she who issued the identifying tin tickets the women wore around their necks when they boarded ship. They were also supplied with modest clothing and a sewing kit to keep their hands and minds busy on the voyage.

The Tin Ticket reads like a novel but is, in fact, an enlightening and fascinating history that honors the memory of the stalwart women who not only survived the British penal system, but went on flourish in spite of the ordeal. For the many who died, it's a eulogy that speaks to the needless suffering brought about by greed and inhumanity.