Defiant Women: The Surprising Truth About Australia’s Female Convicts
Around 25,000 female convicts were transported to Australia between 1788 and 1853. Historian Babette Smith has been researching and writing about their lives for more than three decades, beginning with the book, A Cargo of Women: Susannah Watson & the Convicts of the Princess Royal. Her latest book, Defiant Voices: How Australia’s Female Convicts Challenged Authority, is an engrossing look at what life in the colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land was actually like for them.
What do we know about the sort of women who were transported?
They were almost entirely thieves. Some of them were very skilled and had tried and true techniques. Three of them might go into a shop together and two of them distract the shopkeeper while the third stole ribbons or a bolt of cloth, or whatever. Others might be pickpockets, which meant snatching a bag or shawl [from someone] on the street and running off. Others were either regular or casual prostitutes who would pick up a man and take him back to their room and rob him.
Only 1 per cent committed a violent crime, and that was often accidental. There was one woman who threw a kettle of boiling water which splashed on a toddler lying on the bed and the child died. She was found guilty of manslaughter and transported for life.
These women were feisty, and they were proud. They did not cry. The newspapers reported extensively on trials in those days, and there are hardly any reports of women crying. I found one account of two women in the dock for the same crime of theft. When the younger one started to cry, the older one said, “What are you weeping for? I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.” They were stoic.
Is it true that some women actually wanted to be transported?
Oh, yes. When the news, via word-of-mouth from Botany Bay, that a person on the bottom layer of British society might have a chance out here, some of them started to commit crimes deliberately to be transported. One of the women transported in the early period wrote back to her daughter, “This is the garden of the world. Make sure you get here as soon as you can.” Sure enough, the daughter turned up three or four years later.
Many of them seem to have discovered an entrepreneurial flair.
Well, the women from the First Fleet who disembarked and immediately set up brothels certainly did! But yes, many women who had been penniless back home now had opportunities and they used them. Women began to run pubs, they became dressmakers or hatmakers, some of them were farmers. Some ran stores – they might have an arrangement with a sea captain to bring goods from England, or maybe they got down to the ship early to get the pick of the goods.
The women in this book are feisty. They stand up to judges, to employers, they refuse to do work they don’t want to do – sometimes they simply abscond. Did you expect to find that?
The scale of it surprised me. I hadn’t expected the outright confrontation and the sense of entitlement that convict women displayed. [Free women in the colonies] needed the convict women as servants and that gave the [convict] women power. It took a lot of heavy work to run a household – there was soap and candles to be made and those huge colonial dresses that needed washing. They didn’t have to worry about being sacked, there was always another job waiting [because] they were small in number. But it’s too easy to look at records and see that 252 women absconded and read it as some kind of resistance. I’m sure some of the cases were more complex. A very large number of them were [probably] trying to find out where their children [who had been taken by authorities] were, and how they were.
Do we know if there were any interactions between white women and Indigenous women?
The record is very sparse on this topic. [Pastoralist] Elizabeth Macarthur did leave a record of an Aboriginal woman called Da-Ring-Ha bringing her baby to show Elizabeth, but apart from that very explicit incident, we don’t know what contact ordinary convict women had with Indigenous women. I speculate that it would have been children that brought them together, although communication would have been through sign language.
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