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A Panoptic Eye

The punishment and reform of female convicts in Van Diemen’s Land
L’Œil panoptique : Punition et réforme des bagnardes à Van Diemen Land
Lucy Frost et Hamish Maxwell-Stewart

Résumés

La gestion des 13 500 femmes transportées à Van Diemen Land au cours des cinquante années qui ont précédé 1853 a été un problème constant pour les autorités. En réponse à l'augmentation soudaine du nombre de femmes dans les années 1820, lorsque les navires ont commencé à arriver directement de Grande-Bretagne, des "usines pour femmes" ont été construites. Ces institutions polyvalentes étaient conçues pour traiter les nouvelles arrivées, réguler l'offre de main-d'œuvre de femmes bagnarde aux ménages de colons et punir les récalcitrantes. Toutes étaient pensées autour des programmes de réforme, ainsi que de punition, et devaient surveiller les corps des criminelles tout en les transformant en citoyennes utiles. De nombreuses preuves montrent que toutes ont échoué dans leurs objectifs. L'absence de tâches appropriées, une gestion inefficace et l'agencement des bagnardes ont fait dérailler les projets administratifs. Contrairement aux pénitenciers britanniques et irlandais, les usines pour femmes n'étaient pas des institutions fermées. Leur rôle principal était de répondre à la demande des colons pour des domestiques bon marché. Un second système de surveillance administrative régissait la circulation plus large de la main-d'œuvre de femmes bagnardes. Ce système était beaucoup plus efficace pour surveiller les détenues, bien qu'il ait également rencontré une résistance considérable. Nous examinons l'impact des systèmes de surveillance architecturale et bureaucratique sur les taux de récidive et de naissances coloniales, illustrant ainsi les effets de la surveillance coloniale sur le travail et la reproduction.

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Texte intégral

Introduction

1Unlike the other Australian colonies, Van Diemen’s Land was an island, with the added advantage of sitting within cold and turbulent waters at the edge of the Great Southern Ocean. Escape, dependent on access to boats, was difficult. For the 13,500 women transported to the colony between 1803 and 1853, it was almost unheard of. Within the confines of the penal isle, it might have been possible to implement Jeremy Bentham’s principles of reform through managed incarceration, creating an institutional network for monitoring the bodies of criminals while grinding them into useful citizenry. A perennial obstacle was expense. Buildings to ensure the surveillance of prisoners were costly, as were the staff required for training in religious and moral precepts, and an economic model in which work performed by prisoners in ‘female factories’ offset the expense of their incarceration proved illusory. In this article we track the on-going struggle with the practical problems of managing convict women, arguing that despite failures of the built spaces in the female factories, a panoptic eye roamed effectively over Van Diemen’s Land.

Improvising: the early days of settlement 1803-1824

  • 1 Reid, K., Gender, Crime and Empire: convicts, settlers and the state in early colonial Australia (M (...)
  • 2 National Archive (UK): HO/10/45.

2For almost two decades there were no institutional buildings for female convicts. In the beginning, the place itself exerted disciplinary constraint. Three female convicts among the small party which set up camp on the banks of the River Derwent in 1803 needed no systematised sight lines to keep them from absconding. Anxious in a strange landscape and fearful of the indigenous people they knew were there even when they did not see them, the women did not stray. The following year, when officials arrived from New South Wales and moved the settlement across the river, they brought with them in their ideological baggage an attachment to what Kirsty Reid identifies as ‘the patriarchal familial ideal as a model of authority’.1 Convict management according to this model would be carried out within households, and reform would be effected by the opportunity for couples to work for themselves after their mandated hours of unpaid labour. They could live where they pleased. David Collins, the first lieutenant governor, offered special privileges for those who married, and at the time of the 1823 convict muster, 45 percent of all convict women were married—the majority being assigned to their husbands.2

  • 3 Colonial Secretary’s Office. Tasmanian Archives : CSO1/746/6110, CSO5/1/130 and CSO49/7.

3Inroads were made into the household model beginning in the 1820s after free immigrants were attracted to the colony by the prospect of cheap labour as well as land grants, and a demand grew rapidly for female servants available to work exclusively for settler households. To meet this demand, permissions to marry decreased at the same time as numbers of female convicts increased. By 1829 just 12 percent of all female convicts were married and this fell further to 8.5 percent in 1831.3 This change in policy, Lieutenant Governor Sorrell warned Governor Macquarie in New South Wales, would require buildings designed specifically for female prisoners:

  • 4 Sorell to Macquarie, 10 Nov 1817. Historical Records of Australia, Series III : vol II, p. 290.

The prospect of receiving Women Convicts in number points out to me the necessity of making some preparation for lodging, employing and keeping them in order. A number in or about this place would be productive of incessant disorders.4

  • 5 Macquarie to Sorell, 10 Jan 1818, in Ibid., p. 292.
  • 6 Ibid, p. 292.

4Sorell had in mind a building removed some distance from town, where women could be housed and put to work (hence the colloquialism, ‘factory’) while they were waiting for employment; were pregnant and awaiting birth; or were undergoing secondary punishment. No, replied Macquarie, there will never be sufficient numbers ‘to have any Public Building erected for the Female Convicts’ in the southern outpost (Van Diemen’s Land was administratively a part of New South Wales).5 The numbers ‘necessarily required for the use of the Settlers’ will be sent to you for immediate assignment as unpaid labour for persons who must feed, clothe, and house them. Any women convicted of serious crimes, any ‘refractory or disorderly ill-behaved Female Convicts’, can be sent to Sydney for punishment at the ‘Factory and Barrack [to be built] on a large Scale at Parramatta for the employment and accommodation of all the Female Convicts victualled at the expense of Government’.6

  • 7 Evidence of A W H Humphries,’ Inquiry of Commissioner Bigge’, 11 Mar 1820, Historical Records of Au (...)
  • 8 Ibid.

5Unsurprisingly, the arrangements proved in practice chaotic. Rumours reached London that transportation was no longer considered either a deterrent to crime or a means of reform, and in 1820 Commissioner J. T. Bigge arrived in Van Diemen’s Land to report on the allegations while also investigating economic opportunities in the colony. He travelled around the island interviewing officials as he gathered evidence. What happens when female convicts arrive in the settlement? he asked the Police Magistrate, how are they distributed and lodged? ‘They are assigned to such married persons as apply for them’, came the reply, ‘and the remainder are suffered to find their own Lodgings’.7 And if they are ill-behaved, how are they punished? ‘Confining them to the Gaols and Hard Labour there such as washing for the Prisoners and cleaning the Gaol’.8 Even before Bigge’s extensive reports were printed as parliamentary papers for the House of Commons, local officials began to bow to the pressures they knew were coming.

  • 9 Convict Conduct Records. Tasmanian Archives : CON 40/1.

6In 1821 Governor Macquarie at last authorised the erection of a female factory in Hobart Town—as cheaply as possible. A small two-storey building was attached to the local gaol, built on to its external wall at the corner of Macquarie and Murray streets in the centre of town. Theoretically, the cost of confining women within the factory would be off-set by their labour, but throughout the history of the female factories in Van Diemen’s Land this never happened. Coarse wool was sent to the factory to be spun into yarn by women crowded together, and at least once the work was sabotaged by collective action. An organised act of defiance on 2 October 1823 led to charges against each of 21 prisoners for ‘Wetting the Yarn Spun by her with intent to defraud by increasing its Weight & thus make her Work less’.9 Options for punishing these culprits were limited. Flogging females was out of the question; putting them in the stocks for an hour or two never seemed to have much effect. They certainly didn’t like having their hair cut off and their heads shaved, but who was going to hold them down in the process? This was a female factory where the superintendent and his family lived within the building and were frequently abused by the inmates. The most straightforward punishment under the circumstances was hunger.

  • 10 Convict Conduct Records for Elizabeth Boucher, Eliza Brown, Hannah Burton, Elizabeth Bannister, Mar (...)
  • 11 Convict Conduct Records for Ann Riley, Mary Ann Smith, Sydney Williams, Sarah Wilson. Tasmanian Arc (...)
  • 12 Convict Conduct Record for Ann Riley. Tasmanian Archives : CON 40/1.
  • 13 ‘The Female Factory’, Colonial Times, 16 Jun 1826.

7Surveillance in this building meant opening the locked door to communal space and risking verbal attack, or worse. Because the factory had been built without solitary cells, the punishment for 14 women charged with ‘riotous and disorderly conduct’ over several days in June 1826 was to be ‘locked up in the Lower Bed Room’ to endure their diet of bread and water—together.10 The four most ‘outrageous’ offenders ‘were sent to the gaol in handcuffs’ to be confined in the cells, three on a diet of bread and water for 14 days, one for 28.11 Ann Riley, one of the women involved in the riot, had just been arrested after escaping from the factory and remaining free for almost a week. This was her second escape. Six months earlier she had removed bricks from the wall, and crawled through.12 The constable who stood ‘with a drawn cutlass’ outside the factory wall ‘excited much curiosity’ among the passers-by, but as a deterrent was little more than a comic figure of no real relevance to ‘the injudicious imprisonment of near one hundred women in so limited a space, and employed in a manner worse than useless’.13

  • 14 ‘Cimitiere to the Bench of Magistrates,’ George Town 3 Feb 1820, Historical Records of Australia, s (...)
  • 15 ‘Inquiry of Commissioner Bigge’, 8 July 1820. Historical Records of Australia, series III vol. 3, p (...)
  • 16 Ibid., pp. 852-69.
  • 17 Hobart Town Gazette, 16 Mar 1822.
  • 18 See Alexander, Alison, ed., Convict Lives at the George Town Female Factory (Convict Women’s Press, (...)

8On the northern side of the island the situation was no better. Commissioner Bigge had instigated an extensive enquiry into the punishment meted out to a woman named Alice Blackstone who was compelled to wear an Iron Collar weighing 5¼ pounds, ‘a badge of her Infamy and disgrace’,14 as she walked 35 miles from George Town to Launceston, carrying the baby she was breast-feeding.15 Behind this barbaric punishment lay the scandalous tale of a convict husband who violently beat his wife, and of an official who sent the husband out to work in the bush while he conducted a public affair with the wife in town.16 Bigge, by the very act of investigating disorder and corruption, exerted pressure for change. The first female factory in the north opened in 1822 when a wooden structure within a lumber yard was converted into a workplace for producing cloth from the local wool.17 But once the women had finished their work, they still went off to lodgings of their own, and it was not until 1825 that a factory with accommodation opened in a re-vamped parsonage with fenced-in outbuildings at the back.18

1830s plan for refurbishing George Town Female Factory

1830s plan for refurbishing George Town Female Factory

Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/1284

  • 19 Correspondence, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Drabble to Montague, 4 Oct 1825. Tasmanian Archives : (...)

9The problems facing the factory in Hobart Town were repeated for nine years in this re-modelled house where overcrowding again precluded any serious attempt at reform. As the Superintendent of the Hobart Town Female Factory complained, ‘combined with the increase of its inmates, especially pregnant women and children’, it was impossible to accomplish ‘any more than the cooking and washing required for the institution and keeping them in safe custody and a state of tolerable quiet and subjection’.19

10Change was on its way, however. In May 1824 Lt-Gov George Arthur took charge of the colony and over the next twelve years the precepts of Bentham’s panopticon would permeate the penal system of Van Diemen’s Land. Transformation began with record-keeping.

The Paper Panopticon

  • 20 Shoemaker, Robert and Ward, Richard, ‘Understanding the Criminal: Record Keeping, Statistics and th (...)

11Paperwork had formed an important part of the transportation process stretching back to the eighteenth century. Each sentence gave the state property rights in the labour of the convict. Prior to the American Revolution those rights were assigned to contractors who profited from the sale of the labour of convicts to New World employers. Since age and occupation influenced price, such details were committed to paper.20 Although the convicts transported to Australia were not sold to the private sector, paperwork remained important. This was particularly the case after the end of the Napoleonic Wars when the numbers of convicts arriving in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land increased substantially. From 1816 information committed to file included height, eye and hair colour and place of birth—the later providing a reliable indicator of accent. Such details were important in a system that largely lacked institutional walls. Since most convict workers were loaned out by the state to the private sector, it was important to commit accurate descriptions of each prisoner to file. Although escape from the colony itself was difficult, runaways could pass themselves off as members of the free colonial lower orders. Shortages of workers meant that many employers were prepared to risk harbouring runaways. Chronic sex imbalances also meant that female runaways often found men who would shelter them.

12While paperwork was important in policing the clandestine movements of convicts it was also used to manage administratively sanctioned mobility. From 1816, a summary of every magistrates’ bench encounter was entered onto each convict’s conduct record—a bureaucracy of surveillance that was substantially overhauled by Arthur’s administration. From 1824 an elaborate system of records cross indexed via police numbers informed administrative decision making. Duplicate copies of these voluminous series were maintained as an added incentive against fraud—a precaution deemed necessary in a place where the clerks charged with maintaining official paperwork were themselves serving convicts. All applications for indulgences, such as tickets of leave (an early form of probation) or permission to marry, were evaluated in the light of the applicant’s recent prosecution history. Similarly, decisions about the severity of punishment and the place of labour were also informed by the record of past court encounters. Paperwork thus determined where each woman was located as well as dictating their suitability for early release or prolonged punishment.

A Rectangle for Classification: the Cascades Female Factory (1828)

13Such regulation, it might be argued, ensured that punishment functioned as a step towards reform, rather than an end in itself. The sentence served by each woman was thus a staged process designed to convert criminals into citizens. Yet, in practise colonial reformation differed markedly from its metropolitan counterparts. Institutional confinement was expensive. A stay in a British or Irish house of correction could be measured in weeks rather than years—a reflection of the not inconsiderable costs associated with incarceration. Even a stint in a county gaol was unlikely to be a prolonged affair. Most gaol terms were limited to a few months. By contrast, the minimum sentence to transportation was seven years. In marked contrast to Britain and Ireland, labour shortages rendered colonial convicted labour valuable. The longer the sentence the greater the opportunities to profit from the toil of those ‘sent from their country for their country’s good’.

14Free migrants with capital were attracted to the colonies by the prospect of handouts of land and cheap labour. Female convict labour was particularly valuable as each propertied family required domestic servants. A transportation sentence guaranteed a supply of labour of house maids, laundresses and needlewomen, but it did not guarantee their compliance. Female factories were needed to socialise new arrivals and discipline the recalcitrant. Thus, the purpose of the colonial version of the house of correction was to manufacture docile workers. Suitably reformed, the erstwhile criminal might be expected to obey the commands of master and mistress, especially as compliance was likely to be rewarded with a return to full citizenship.

  • 21 Frost, Lucy, Footsteps and Voices: an historical look into the Cascades Female Factory (Hobart, Fem (...)

15In the first years of Arthur’s government, the model designed to produce this result was known as classification, its principles governing the conversion of a whiskey distillery on the outskirts of Hobart Town into the Female House of Correction, commonly known as the Cascades Female Factory. The distillery site provided a rectangle of high stone walls which could be divided into smaller walled areas, three used for classifying prisoners according to their progress towards reform. At the bottom of the rung in the third or ‘Crime Class’, women on a meagre diet wore clothes branded with a large yellow ‘C’ on their petticoats and both sleeves of their jackets. After serving their time under this regime, they progressed to the second or ‘Probation Class’ where the diet improved and only the jacket’s left sleeve bore a ‘C’. From there they entered the yard of the first class, the ‘Assignable Class’, available for work in the private houses of free settlers.21

  • 22 Correspondence, Colonial Secretary’s Office. Tasmanian Archives : CSO 1/1/365/8341.

16On paper the distinctions were neat and clear-cut, as was the work performed in each class. A report on ‘Labour performed at the Female House of Correction Hobart Town’ detailed the weekly output from each class during six weeks in August and September 1829. In the week of 22 August, women in the first (Assignable) class had done the ‘cooking and the subordinate works of the Establishment’ and made a total of 12 caps. In a prison complex with few paid staff, these ‘trusty’ prisoners acted both as servants and as warders—the turnkeys were themselves prisoners from this class. In the second (Probation) class, women were busy sewing. They attached the letter ‘C’ to 135 jackets, reeled wool into yarn, made 34 pairs of trousers and 81 caps. In the third (Crime) class, women sorted 37½ pounds of wool which they picked, carded, and spun for use in the second class, but most of their effort went into washing ‘88 dozen articles’ (1,056 pieces) of laundry from the Army Barracks and the Orphan Schools.22 On paper the productive labour of classification was a success.

17In reality, classification would never produce the hoped-for reform. The architectural history of the Cascades Female Factory exposes the flaws in the classification system as officials tried again and again over a period from 1828 to 1853 to make the compound serve its intended purpose. Chinks in the model of reform were apparent from the earliest architectural drawings. The shape of the factory was already determined by the distillery’s existing perimeter walls which were used to enclose the compound and to provide external walls for new buildings around the edges. In a plan signed by the Colonial Architect John Lee Archer and dated 5 September 1827, the compound includes the three yards required for classification; a series of solitary confinement cells entered from the Crime Class yard; and another three yards for the kitchen, the hospital, and the nursery. Classification as a model for reform did not account for the reality of convict motherhood. Some two thousand children sailed to Van Diemen’s Land with their mothers, and thousands more were born to women under sentence. The problem of what to do with these children and how to incorporate their existence into the reformation of their mothers was never-ending—as was the problem of punishment indicated by the solitary dark cells in the upper left-hand corner of the architect’s drawing.

1827 Plan for Ground Floor of the Cascades Female Factory

1827 Plan for Ground Floor of the Cascades Female Factory

Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/389

18Punishment in the Crime Class was intended as a first step towards reforming women through ‘hard labour’, but the inclusion of solitary cells acknowledged continued recalcitrance.

  • 23 Colonial Times, 2 Jan 1829.
  • 24 Correspondence, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Burnett to Clifford 21 Jan 1829. Tasmanian Archives : (...)
  • 25 Hobart Town Courier, 24 Jan 1829.
  • 26 The Courier, 31 Jan 1829.

19The cells would be needed within a matter of weeks. In late December 1828, the decrepit Hobart Town Female Factory was emptied of the hundred women with their children ‘removed to the New Factory, near Cascade’.23 On 22 January they were joined by another hundred convicts disembarked at 4am from the Harmony to walk through town with their 24 children before the locals awoke to watch the spectacle.24 For the first time, space was available for the orderly distribution of female prisoners to their approved masters, and although the location was not ‘so convenient’ as the factory in town, half the women had been sent to their assignments within a week of arrival.25 Having a designated nursery was proving a great advantage: in the past ‘many of the best servants’ were kept in the factory because ‘there was no means of disposing’ of their children, whereas the ‘large proportion of the prisoners by the Harmony ‘who had children with them, and who on the former system must have remained a charge on the public, have been assigned to service’.26 Praise by the local press for such improvements was seriously undermined by an incident on 8 February. In the Crime Class, where the most resistant prisoners were grouped together under the classification system, fire broke out which might easily have caused a conflagration throughout the entire compound.

  • 27 Statement of Jesse Pullen, 9 Feb 1829. Tasmanian Archives : CSO1/365/8341.
  • 28 Ibid.
  • 29 Ibid.
  • 30 Ibid.
  • 31 Ibid.
  • 32 Ibid.
  • 33 Correspondence, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Principal Superintendent of Convicts to Colonial Secre (...)

20The drama began at 6am on Sunday morning when the Factory’s overseer heard men on the hill shouting back and forth to women in the Crime Class. About 8am the overseer watched as ‘a Bundle was thrown over the Building; I saw it fall and ran to take it up, at the same time several of the women ran to take it up but I secured it; it contained cream and Butter’.27 Then came a loaf of bread caught by women who refused to give it up. The overseer, making for the door to get help, was followed by 30 or 40 women ‘clapping their Hands and hooting me out of the yard.’28 He alerted the superintendent who eventually managed to lure the two ‘Ringleaders’ who had caught the bread into his office where he kept them for hours until the other women in the Crime Class could be locked into their sleeping room for the night. When he tried to take the two identified culprits through the third-class yard to the solitary cells, they protested loudly and were heard by the women in the sleeping room who ‘commenced shouting, swearing, and making use of the most abominable Language’.29 For an hour they beat on the locked door and then ‘thro’ the Vent Hole over the Door’ they threw down the stairs ‘a large Piece of Cloth in a Blaze of Fire’.30 The women set fire to their caps and threw them at stairs which being made of pine ‘would certainly have set the whole Building on fire’ if the superintendent had not managed to get water quickly from the second yard.31 Turmoil reigned throughout the prison, the ‘yells and screams were indescribable, from all Parts of the Building’.32 The Female Factory had not been designed for secondary punishment of groups of women already in the Crime Class, and with few solitary cells available, only a handful of the prisoners involved in the riot and fire could be punished. Authorities turned their attention, as they would again and again, to modifying the building. A high fence would be erected around the perimeter to prevent outside contact with the women in the Crime Class (conveniently located on the hill side of the compound).33

  • 34 Frost, L., Footsteps and Voices, p. 15.

21Security was not the only problem at Cascades. The Building—as it was known in official correspondence—was also unsuitable as the workplace required as catalyst to reform. Attached to the ‘dead’ (perimeter) walls of the original distillery were rooms designated as workshops. The rooms were used for picking, carding, and spinning wool, and sometimes for needlework, but with no regular supply chain or customer base, textile production at Cascades would never be a viable industry. The real work performed here was laundry. The Hobart Town Rivulet running in front of the Building provided a source of water, and demand was unceasing. Dirty laundry came from the colonial hospital, the male prisoners’ barracks, the convict ships arriving in port, and the orphan schools. The vile condition of clothing, blankets and bedding washed by the women at Cascades can be imagined, and magistrates intent on seeing that delinquents were severely punished sentenced them specifically ‘to the wash tubs’. Wet laundry required long lines for drying, and because the authorities feared offering inmates any opportunity to escape, a walled laundry yard was imperative. It quickly became apparent that more space was needed for laundry—and for cells—and in 1832 the footprint of the establishment doubled in size with the addition of ‘the washing yard’. Women scrubbed at wash tubs in sheds running down the long walls, and laid the laundry out to dry across posts and rails in the middle. At the back of the yard, and separated by another wall, a double-storey row of solitary cells was constructed. The ‘light cells’ added on the street side were also known as ‘solitary working cells’ because an opening over the doors let in just enough light for women to sit at oakum-picking, untwisting salt-encrusted fibres from the old ropes of ships to be re-used as caulking, a dreaded punishment because the salt and the tar from the ropes were savage on hands.34

22The limits of classification became more and more apparent as the factory filled. While overcrowding reflected the increasing numbers of convict women transported to Van Diemen’s Land, the problem was exacerbated by the dual role that factories played. As they operated as both houses of correction and depots for processing recent arrivals, spikes in the number of inmates followed in the wake of each transport vessel’s arrival. While initiates to the penal colony were only temporarily housed in the Cascades, it still took days to arrange for each to be delivered to their place of assignment. In the meantime, the need to find temporary berths for up to 200 women and their children challenged attempts to keep inmates in the different yards segregated. The problem was compounded by the geography of female convict employment. While two thirds of all male convicts were deployed in rural areas, the reverse was true of the distribution of female convicts. According to the 1843 census only a third were located outside of the conurbations of Hobart and Launceston. As all women sentenced to solitary in a town served their sentence in a factory, a constant stream of assigned servants circulated through the factory gates. Thus, while it is tempting to think of houses of correction as closed institutions separated from their environs by imposing walls, they operated more as labour hubs. They are perhaps best seen as nodes in a wider landscape of unfreedom.

Weekly numbers of inmates in the Cascades Female Factory plotted against female convict vessel arrivals

Weekly numbers of inmates in the Cascades Female Factory plotted against female convict vessel arrivals

Sources: Hobart Town Gazette 1832-47. Australian Bureau of Statistics; Australian Data Archive; Smith, Len; Rowse, Tim; Hungerford, Stuart, 2019, "Historical and Colonial Census Data Archive (HCCDA)", doi:10.26193/MP6WRS, ADA Dataverse, V4

  • 35 ‘Statement of Grace Heinbury,’ Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discip (...)
  • 36 ‘Statement of Mary Haigh,’ in Ibid.
  • 37 Frost, Lucy, ‘Standing up to a Postcard: resistance inside the Female Factory’, in A. Alexander and (...)

23Even at the best of times, separating women into three classes created large groups who milled around with little or nothing to do when they weren’t working. In 1842 a convict named Grace Heinbury told an enquiry into female prison discipline that while she was in the Probation Yard she had to pick wool for about an hour each day, and ‘could then sing sew run about and do anything to pass away the time. Some of the Women would act Plays dress themselves up’.35 Mary Haigh told the same enquiry that when she was in the Crime Class Yard the prisoners worked for ‘about an hour and a half and then we had the rest of the day to ourselves. The time was passed in singing dancing playing cards and talking over the different services in the Colony. The women named the bad services and advised each other not to go to them.’36 During the late 1830s a network of women emerged within the Crime Class Yard who were known as the ‘Flash Mob’. Creators of their own counterculture, they undermined the dour dress code with their brightly coloured silk handkerchiefs and embroidered caps, their fancy buttons, the rings they wore in their ears and on their hands. They had their dark side too. As power brokers within the prison they were not averse to thuggery, and some were sexual predators who made life miserable for anyone who resisted their advances. 37 The more crowded Cascades became, the less control the authorities wielded.

Introducing the Octagon: the Launceston Female Factory (1834)

24On the north side of the island, pressures continued to replace the female factory which ironically had opened in the converted George Town parsonage in the same year the seat of government had moved with its court system up the River Tamar to Launceston. A few months after the Cascades Female Factory opened in Hobart Town, an architectural design was submitted ‘for a Small Female Factory intended to be erected at Launceston’.

Design for a small Female Factory at Launceston

Design for a small Female Factory at Launceston
Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/883A

25Nothing came of this 1829 plan, which did not even divide space into the three categories of classification.

26The next plans, signed off by John Lee Archer in July 1832, were in radically different shape. Instead of the rectangle of the earlier plan and of the Cascades Female Factory, a compound capable of holding 200 women was designed with perimeter walls in the shape of an octagon enclosing another octagon at the building’s centre. These plans are the first evidence of architects in Van Diemen’s Land encountering the influence of Jeremy Bentham’s penal philosophy, although the influence seems to be coming through the structure of London’s Millbank Prison rather than through the philosophy itself because the Civil Engineers’ Office entirely missed the concept of unobserved surveillance as key to the disciplinary modality of reform. Instead of a central tower from which to observe the radiating arms, this drawing envisaged a chapel (as in Millbank Prison) occupying the central hub of the upper floor with four rooms for the accommodation of the superintendent and his family beneath.

Plan of ground floor for Female Factory at Launceston

Plan of ground floor for Female Factory at Launceston

Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/892

Plan of upper floor for Female Factory at Launceston

Plan of upper floor for Female Factory at Launceston

Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/898

  • 38 Port Arthur Separate (Model) Prison Conservation Project (2008), p. 13.

27The more closely one looks at the plans, the less radical they seem. Within the perimeter walls of the octagon sits a cruciform building. Three wings correspond to the three classes in the classification system, with the fourth wing an entrance accommodating the office, hospital dispensary, and a two-room apartment for the gatekeeper. The problem of moving through the building from one wing to another was solved on paper by drawing two passages bisecting the four rooms of the superintendent’s accommodation. In practice, this would mean that either the passages were closed off at the four entrances to the accommodation (thus blocking movement from one wing to another on the ground floor) or the passages were wide open and the superintendent and his family had no privacy in moving from room to room. Dotted lines on the drawing leave the resolution unclear. Windows in each room of this domestic space further blurred the private and the carceral by opening directly into courtyards where prisoners in a reverse surveillance could keep an eye on the Superintendent’s ‘private’ world as readily as he could observe them in their prison. Lacking the individual cells and clear observational sight lines that would distinguish the Separate Prison at Port Arthur seventeen years later,38 surveillance in the octagonal factory was no better than in the rectangle of Cascades. Women again congregated during the day in their classification yards between the wings, and at night—as indicated by the hammock rails shown on the plan for the upper floor—they slept in crowded dormitories, with locked doors the only security. This octagon, drained of its potential power as an architectural surveillance mechanism, was no panopticon.

  • 39 Numbers for 2 to 8 Nov 1834, Hobart Town Gazette, 13 Nov 1834.
  • 40 Parker, J., ‘An Institutional Failure: the Launceston Female Factory’ in L. Frost and A.M. Hodgson, (...)
  • 41 ‘Gunn to Spode,’ 17 Nov 1834, Correspondence, Colonial Secretary’s Office. Tasmanian Archives : CSO (...)
  • 42 Ibid.

28In November 1834, more than two years after the plans for the octagon were submitted, 69 women with 11 children entered the Launceston Female Factory.39 After years of travelling up and down the river to the George Town Factory, the citizens of Launceston now had very convenient access to servants (and could easily return them for punishment) because the new Factory was built in the middle of town within a growing convict and military precinct.40 Within weeks the problems faced a decade earlier in the similarly located Hobart Town Female Factory recurred. On 17 November the convict administrator in the north reported to his superior in Hobart Town that two women ‘absconded yesterday from the House of Correction for Females at Launceston, by making a hole through the Wall in one of the Privies’.41 Other women will follow them, he warned, and because ‘it will be out of the power of the Superintendent by the utmost vigilance to prevent it’, he was appointing three watchmen in shifts to stand guard until these and ‘other alterations much required’ can be made.42 As usual, initial cost-cutting meant forever patching-up.

  • 43 Total numbers for 25 to 31 Dec 1841: 167 women and 29 children. Hobart Town Gazette, 7 Jan 1842.
  • 44 ‘Examination of Robert Pearson,’ Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Disc (...)
  • 45 Ibid.
  • 46 Ibid.
  • 47 Ibid.
  • 48 Ibid.
  • 49 Ibid.

29The Launceston Female Factory proved a disaster, if its Superintendent was to be believed when he gave evidence to the enquiry into female prison discipline in January 1841. Robert Pearson and his wife as superintendent and matron of the Launceston Factory were assisted by a gatekeeper and his wife the sub-matron, and these four were the only paid staff for an institution housing 200 women and children.43 The perimeter walls were no impediment to contact with the outside world: ‘I cannot prevent things from being thrown over the wall which adjoins the public street’.44 The submatron, living at the entrance to the building, was supplementing her £ 20 per year salary by trafficking: ‘I have every reason to believe that the submatron introduces things for the women. I have repeatedly found tobacco etc in the yards that has been thrown over the wall and I have seen some of the women in the wards drunk’.45 None of the prisoners ‘have any description of employment except the billet women (cooks, nurses etc) and those at the wash tub. I have no means whatever of employing them’.46 Life for the prisoners was a breeze, complained Pearson, ‘I do not consider that being in the factory here at present is any punishment at all, and I do not think that the women consider it a punishment. I have known repeated instances of women going out and committing crime on purpose to get back in a day or two with supplies of tobacco, tea & sugar etc for the others.’47 Power had shifted from the officials to the prisoners. ‘At present’, said Pearson, ‘if anything is wrong it is dangerous to go among the large number in one room’. The women defied him, and he feared for his very life: ‘I am obliged to carry pistols, I have had my shirt torn from my back.’48 Instead of bodies policed by the state, prisoners in the Launceston Female Factory were using their own bodies as they pleased. They had taken over and it was they who were imposing their will: ‘unnatural intercourse between them is carried on to a great extent, under the present system a girl coming into the factory however virtuous or modest she may be on entering, must inevitably become corrupted in a short time’.49

  • 50 Launceston Advertiser, 27 Oct 1842.
  • 51 Ibid.

30As a place where women through the daily discipline of work gained control of their unruly habits and bodies and became reformed members of society, the Launceston Female Factory was a failure. No one was safe inside its walls, neither inmates nor staff. A few months after Superintendent Pearson’s testimony, a Launceston newspaper reported that the prisoners had ‘revolted’ and had taken ‘possession of the establishment’, turning ‘the whole place’ into ‘such an uproar as was never heard since the confusion of tongues in the tower of Babel’.50 The ‘insurrection’ continued until thirty male convicts ‘aided by an equal number of constables, made a breach through the wall, and came to close quarters with their Amazonian captives’ who ‘fought like demons’ until ‘finally overcome by superior strength, and compelled to capitulate’.51 Walls of another design had become imperative.

‘Separate apartments’ at the Cascades Female Factory

31Discussion about walls of a different design was in fact was well under way, and a week after the Launceston riot, plans were approved for adding a courtyard of cells to the Cascades Female Factory. This yard of ‘separate apartments’ would prove the closest the female factories of Van Diemen’s Land ever came towards Bentham’s panopticon.

Plan for additional cells at Cascades Factory

Plan for additional cells at Cascades Factory

Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/397

32Lieutenant Governor Sir John Franklin signed off on the architect’s drawing on 3 November 1842, while the Committee he had appointed the previous year to enquire into female convict prison discipline was still collecting evidence. The Committee’s final report, together with 400 pages of documentation, was submitted to Franklin in February 1843, damning the current system of prison discipline and commenting more generally on the management of female convicts. The question of whether to repair or replace the existing system of assignment had already been canvassed in London by an enquiry into the effectiveness of transportation. Chaired by William Molesworth, for whom its report would be named, the Committee was devastatingly critical of the system under which women were ‘assigned’ as soon as they arrived in the colony to work without wages as domestic servants. The system of ‘probation’ proposed as a replacement aligned closely with Benthamite principles for the panopticon. Rehabilitation would be effected through a radical inward change achieved through solitude, work, and regimented routines. During the first part of the sentence, the aim would be to separate a woman from the person she had been, and to forge a new self through work accompanied by moral and religious instruction. She would be under constant surveillance during this period and punished for any back-sliding. If she progressed satisfactorily through this phase, she would be employed by contract to work for the settlers, with inducements of remission of sentence and payment of wages. The initial phase required isolation in individual cells—like those in the 1842 plan approved by Franklin.

  • 52 ‘Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline.’ Tasmanian Archives: CSO (...)
  • 53 Ibid.

33While this approval suggests that Franklin was bending towards the pressures for a system of probation, the committee of locals he had appointed to look into female convict prison discipline were staunchly protective of the existing system of assignment. They adamantly rejected the theory of reform through an initial period of separation: ‘however conducive solitude may be to reflection and to the forming of resolutions of amendment, religious principle itself does not often take deep hold of the mind except when it is worked into the affections through the trials—the disappointments and the vexations—the tear and the wear of everyday life’.52 The Committee’s report quoted a former Principal Superintendent of Convicts who was asked whether it would be better to ‘treat them under the separate system for, say two years?’ No, came his ‘very decided’ answer: ‘They would lose all the advantages which they derive from the good example of Masters and Mistresses, and also from their control. They would lose all the advantage of association with free servants and persons of good character. They would lose the chance of bettering their own condition by advantageous marriages. In short they would lose all the advantages of their arrival in a new colony and removal from their old habits and associations.’53 It was not the assignment system that needed overhaul, but the practice of concentrating returned prisoners in large Crime Class yards where control was impossible. Classification remained the key principle in the lexicon of the locals. It would work, they argued, if prisoners were divided into smaller groups of ten or twelve—and if there were plenty of solitary cells for locking up the recalcitrant.

  • 54 Daniels, Kay, Convict Women (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998), p. 126.

34The voluminous report of Franklin’s Committee of Enquiry was never published and made no discernible impact. Probation for male convicts had already begun, and instead of paying any attention to local scepticism about how the system would work for women, the authorities in London took control and sent out detailed architectural drawings and instructions for a building based on the Parkhurst prison ‘which specialised in educating its inmates in both trade skills and religion. Costs were estimated at between £ 34,000 and £ 35,000’.54 Here newly arrived prisoners would serve a six months’ period of probation before they were hired into private service for wages. As an interim measure—given an anticipated construction period of three years for the elaborate building—a naval ship would be converted into a penitentiary staffed by appointees sent from England. Local experience and expertise were bypassed entirely, and in April 1844 370 female prisoners were crowded into the H. M. S. Anson, moored upriver from Hobart Town. The functions of the Cascades Female Factory were split up, and by the time the yard of ‘separate apartments’ opened in July 1845, its function was restricted to secondary punishment.

  • 55 ‘Examination of Robert Pearson,’ Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Disc (...)

35Ironically, this third yard offered the only space ever available for implementing the Benthamite concept of deploying incarceration as a reformatory experience for convict women. Visual control was maximised through sightlines running unimpeded down the straight rows of cells in two long double-storied buildings. Each row was constructed according to an ingenious plan of alternating doors which maximised the distance from one entrance to another as an impediment to the problem reported by the superintendent of the Launceston Female Factory: women confined to solitary cells ‘are close to each other and the occupants can talk to each other without raising their voices’.55 Exercise yards were also divided, with only three women from each row allowed out at any time. The ‘separate apartments’ were themselves divided into spaces for sleeping and working, each with its own door. Sufficient light came from an opening above the outer door for the woman to work at her assigned tasks, or to read a bible or some morally uplifting publication. At night she was locked into the back of the cell to sleep. With two locked doors for each apartment, none of the earlier escapes from female factories would be possible. This architecture might have supported a Benthamite project for rehabilitating prisoners by stripping them of their identities and contacts and suppressing their individual rights, and through productive work and moral instruction shaping new selves. Instead, the separate apartments were used for solitary confinement as a mode of secondary punishment.

Co-opting private houses in the service of punishment and reform

36Bentham situated punishment and reform within the walls of large institutions, and while the female factories of Van Diemen’s Land did serve as places of punishment, the primary space for reform was the private house. The work available to women left no other choice. As the female factories demonstrated again and again, nothing except laundry provided a reliable and uninterrupted work flow. If a textile industry had developed in the colony, factories could have used female labour, but the wool clip was shipped almost in its entirety to the mills of England, leaving the colony with a cottage industry. On the Anson, where insufficient work impeded any prospect of creating an effective probation system for women, the Matron suggested making locally the shoes and convict clothing which continued to arrive from English factories as finished products. Aside from laundry on an industrial scale in the female factories, the work available for female convicts was limited to domestic service.

  • 56 Quoted Reid, K., Gender, Crime and Empire, p. 83.
  • 57 Examination of William Gunn, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipli (...)
  • 58 Anna Maria Turner to Stephen Bumstead, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Priso (...)

37Under the assignment system, therefore, private houses were co-opted as carceral space where female prisoners served their sentences under the control of their masters as surrogate gaolers responsible for their reform. Influenced by the examples of their masters and mistresses, and with what Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur described as ‘patient management’,56 the female convicts would mend their ways and emerge from their sentences as good and useful citizens. Associating with persons of good character might also improve their post-sentence ‘chance of bettering their own condition by advantageous marriages’.57 Some assignments undoubtedly went according to plan. In an intercepted letter in 1841, a female convict in Launceston assured her lover: ‘I have a good misis and master they have fought many battels for me and kept me out of trouble’.58

38Most convict women were prosecuted in the colony and 15 percent were dragged before the courts on 10 or more occasions. A sizeable minority, however, escaped the humiliation of colonial conviction altogether. Almost 20 percent have no record of prosecution suggesting that many struck deals with employers, trading compliance for better conditions. This was particularly the case for those that had skills that were in demand.

Number of Colonial Charges Brought Against Convict Women

Number of Colonial Charges Brought Against Convict Women

Sources: Con 40 and 41 series. Tasmanian Archives. Women who arrived before 1816 or died within one year of arrival omitted.

39Convicts who confessed to having previously worked as governesses experienced the lowest levels of colonial prosecution. Female convicts who claimed to have worked as shoemakers, dressmakers, needlewomen, cooks, domestic and country servants were in turn less likely to be prosecuted than those who had been employed in factories or as street dealers. Prior experience in some trades aided bargaining power in the colonies, exposing a problem at the heart of transportation. While it claimed to be a system designed to reform criminals, in practice the weight of punishment fell disproportionately on those who were of little worth to masters and mistresses.

Occupational Colonial Prosecution Rates for Convict Women

Occupational Colonial Prosecution Rates for Convict Women

Sources: Con 14, 15, 19, 40 and 41 series, Tasmanian Archives.

  • 59 ‘Statement of Mary Haigh,’ Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline (...)
  • 60 ‘Examination of John Price,’ Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipli (...)

40The crowded Crime Class yards of the female factories were evidence that these co-opted reformatories in private houses often failed to produce the intended results. Women were in the Crime Class because their employers, who were not allowed to punish their own convict servants, had brought them before magistrates who sentenced them to punishment which meant time in a female factory. Many of the charges brought by employers were petty—‘insolence’ was common—and were reminders yet again of female convicts exerting agency. These women were never simply passive victims of the penal system, or passive receptacles for reform. They learned early on how to manipulate the system, as Mary Haigh told the Committee of Enquiry. During the week she spent in the Assignable Yard at the Cascades Female Factory after disembarking from the Arab, she was educated in the ways of the colony by women allowed in from the other yards by a prisoner turnkey. They came in to ‘traffick with us giving us in return for our clothes or other articles in our possession tea meat sugar tobacco etc eight pence per fig was given for this latter article. The women with whom we trafficked told us the “ways” of the Colony and how to manage if we got into bad places, telling us that we must be insolent, disorderly or must run away.59 This practice was no secret to the authorities, as the Police Magistrate told the Committee: ‘I believe that the internal arrangements of every house in Hobart Town are known to all the women in the Factory, & women are prejudiced against places before leaving the House of Correction.’ They spent their time discussing ‘the facilities that exist in different families for pilfering’ and ‘the different points of weakness in their Masters’ & Mistresses’ char[acters]’.60

  • 61 Reid, K., Gender, Crime and Empire, p. 81
  • 62 Correspondence, Colonial Secretary’s Office CSO 1/1/562/12462.

41By exchanging information within the female factories, the convict women subjected their employers to a surveillance system of their creation, but its intrusiveness was nothing in comparison to what Lieutenant Governor George Arthur himself imposed upon the settlers. Unpaid labour was a gift in the hands of the colony’s chief administrator was determined, as Kirsty Reid has said, to use the assignment system as ‘a key mechanism for the discipline and control of settlers’.61 The Assignment Board was charged not only with the distribution of convict labour but also with investigating employers whose character was called into question in any way, including on the word of their female convict servants, as Sarah Bromley discovered to her consternation and outrage in 1831 when her assigned servants were all removed from her farm after female convicts had testified in damning detail to her sexual relations with her son-in-law.62

  • 63 Examination of John Price, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline (...)
  • 64 Examination of John Price, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline (...)

42Bureaucratic surveillance through resources available to the Assignment Board, comprehensive and encompassing as it might appear on paper, was in practice patchy and unreliable. To ensure morality within private households was unrealistic, in the opinion of the Police Magistrate of Hobart Town, ‘it would be very inquisitorial’.63 Some persons, he told the Board of Enquiry, ‘are totally unfit’ as employers, ‘not from any immorality in their own conduct, but from a perfect disregard to the morality of their female servants, provided the required work is done’.64 Instead of the stick of discipline, some employers offered the forbidden carrots of freedom—paying money to unwaged servants to spend as they liked, giving them time (especially on Sundays) to join companions in places other than church, and even ignoring a prisoner of the Crown who appropriated space even fleetingly as her own, a space for the private life of her body where she might deploy her body to suit her own desires, having sex with either women or men. If with men, she might become pregnant. A pregnant woman was visible evidence of the panopticon’s failure, but in some households—especially in the country—pregnancies remained invisible to the disciplinarians of the Convict Department because employers did not return their assigned servants to the female factories charged as ‘useless being pregnant’ and sentenced to punishment in the Crime Class. Overall, however, the disciplinary measures put in place to control the behaviour of convict women were sufficiently powerful to impact upon reproduction. The number of births recorded for convict mothers were much lower in the first four years after arrival than would have been the case if convict sexual relations had not been policed.

Colonial Birth Rate for Transported Convict Women

Colonial Birth Rate for Transported Convict Women

Sources: Con 40, 41, Tasmanian birth registers, RGD 33 series, Tasmanian Archives.

The roving Panoptic Eye

43Although panoptic discipline was never fully implemented in any of the female factories the panoptic eye ranged across the entire island. Van Diemen’s Land constituted a peculiar form of gaol as a result—one that straddled both the public and private sector. This was a genuine innovation that facilitated a complex geography of confinement encompassing hundreds of workplaces and institutions within in its disciplinary embrace. The system was designed to facilitate labour mobility because circulation of labour was crucial to the maintenance of work. In order to co-opt the services of their unpaid prisoner servants, masters and mistresses needed to ensure that the recalcitrant, work-shy and useless could be removed, just as assuredly as the compliant and useful could be rewarded. The magistrates’ bench made this possible. Tellingly, the colonial laws used to police workplace discipline were modelled on the Caribbean slave code. They provided the bench with the power to condemn those that refused to work, impeded production or were not sufficiently exploitable, sending them back into the service of the state. Those spirited behind the walls of the factory could be replaced by fresh arrivals or docile workers, remodelled—or so it was hoped—as a result of hard labour on reduced rations.

  • 65 Tuffin, R., Maxwell-Stewart, H. and Quinlan, M., ‘Reintegrating Historical Records through Digital (...)

44Paper played a crucial part in that process. Records indexed via ship of arrival and police number were used to track the physical and social movement of prisoners across both sites and states of incarceration. Charge- and bench-books, passes, identification documents and conduct records were used to distinguish and manage ticket-of-leave bearers, passholders and assignees, who were in turn marked out from those undergoing probation or punishment labour.65 This was a form of panoptic power that used an archival central observation tower to extend the reach of the state. Any attempt to test the bounds of these bureaucratic controls could lead to physical repercussions that would in turn generate further documentation. It was a system of surveillance that went far beyond anything experienced by prisoners incarcerated in British and Irish penitentiaries.

  • 66 Analysis of a total count of punishments listed in the Con 40 and 41 series and a four percent samp (...)

45Convict managers argued that these controls were both necessary and effective. Discipline was required to reform criminals, to set them on a path to good and useful citizenship. Such rhetoric masked the extent to which the labour performed by convicts benefitted colonial households and businesses. The costs of maintaining a convict fell considerably short of a free wage. While private sector employers enabled the state to enact its ‘reform’ agenda, they benefited from participation in this process. The vast majority of offences for which female convicts were punished while under sentence were work related, rather than constituting crimes such as theft and assault. Moreover, those punishments and the associated systems of surveillance had negative impacts upon both the bodies of female convicts and their ability to form colonial families. Life-course analysis reveals that every day spent in solitary confinement in a dark cell reduced life expectancy by ten days. What is particularly worrying, is that female convicts were disproportionately subjected to this form of punishment. On average they spent 20.9 days in solitary over the course of a sentence compared to 9.3 for men.66 Birth rates were also low by early nineteenth-century standards.

46Masters, mistresses and convict administrators certainly did not have everything their own way, however. While the power of the state was considerable, it did not go unchallenged. Convict women combined to circulate information about employment practices, agitate for better rations and working conditions and protest when they judged allotted punishments unsafe. While the colonial panopticon constituted a formidable machine, its grinding power was blunted by the agency of those whose lives it sought to control.

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Bibliographie

Archival Sources

Conduct Registers for female convicts arriving in the period of the assignment system, Convict Department. Tasmanian Archives: CON40.

Conduct Registers for female convicts arriving in the period of the probation system, Convict Department. Tasmanian Archives: CON41.

General Correspondence records, 1824-36, Colonial Secretary’s Office. Tasmanian Archives: CSO1.

List of Convicts, Van Diemen’s Land, 1823, National Archive (UK), HO/10/45.

Plan for Cascades Female Factory, ground floor. Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/389.

Plan for Cascades Female Factory, additional cells. Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/397.

Plan for refurbishing George Town Female Factory. Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/1284.

Plan for small Female Factory, Launceston. Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/883A.

Plan for Launceston Female Factory, ground floor. Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/892.

Plan for Launceston Female Factory, upper floor. Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/898.

Plan for Port Arthur separate prison. Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/1822.

Register of baptisms in Tasmania 1803-1933, Tasmanian Archives: RGD 32.

Register of births in Hobart, Launceston and Country Districts 1838-1899, Tasmanian Archives: RGD 33.

Report of the Committee of Inquiry into female convict prison discipline, Legal Branch. Tasmanian Archives: CSO22/1/50.

Printed Sources

Alexander, A., ed., Convict Lives at the George Town Female Factory. Convict Women’s Press, Hobart, 2014.

Daniels, K., Convict Women, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998.

Frost, L., ‘Eliza Churchill tells . . .’, in L. Frost and H. Maxwell-Stewart, Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001.

Frost, L., Footsteps and Voices: an historical look into the Cascades Female Factory Female Factory Historic Site, Hobart, 2004.

Frost, L., ‘Standing up to a Postcard: resistance inside the Female Factory’, in A. Alexander and A. M. Hodgson, eds., Convict Lives at the Cascades Female Factory, vol. 2. Convict Women’s Press, Hobart, 2018, pp84-91.

Inwood, K. and Maxwell-Stewart, H., ‘Solitary confinement and health and other life course outcomes for convict women’, History Australia, 19, 2022, pp.13-33.

Maxwell-Stewart, H. and Quinlan, M., Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, London, 2022.

Maxwell-Stewart, H. and Quinlan, M. ‘Female Convict Labour and Absconding Rates in Colonial Australia, Tasmanian Historical Studies 22 (2017): 19-36.

Parker, J., ‘An Institutional Failure: the Launceston Female Factory’ in L. Frost and A.M. Hodgson, eds. Convict Lives at the Launceston Female Factory, Convict Women’s Press, Hobart, 2013, pp. 15-23.

Reid, K., Gender, Crime and Empire: convicts, settlers and the state in early colonial Australia. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007.

Shoemaker, R. and Ward, R., ‘Understanding the Criminal: Record Keeping, Statistics and the Early History of Criminology in England, British Journal of Criminology, 57 (2017): 1442-61.

Smith, L., Rowse, T. and Hungerford, S., 2019, ‘Historical and Colonial Census Data Archive (HCCDA)’, doi:10.26193/MP6WRS, ADA Dataverse, V4, Australian Bureau of Statistics; Australian Data Archive.

Tuffin, R., Maxwell-Stewart, H. and Quinlan, M., ‘Reintegrating Historical Records through Digital Data Linking: Convicts Prosecuted for Collective Action in Van Diemen’s Land’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 22, n° 2 (2020): 55-60.

Watson, F., ed., Historical Records of Australia. Series 3: Despatches and papers relating to the settlement of the states. Sydney: the Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1914-25, Volumes 1-6.

Newspapers

Colonial Times

Hobart Town Courier

Hobart Town Gazette

Launceston Advertiser

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Notes

1 Reid, K., Gender, Crime and Empire: convicts, settlers and the state in early colonial Australia (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007), p. 10.

2 National Archive (UK): HO/10/45.

3 Colonial Secretary’s Office. Tasmanian Archives : CSO1/746/6110, CSO5/1/130 and CSO49/7.

4 Sorell to Macquarie, 10 Nov 1817. Historical Records of Australia, Series III : vol II, p. 290.

5 Macquarie to Sorell, 10 Jan 1818, in Ibid., p. 292.

6 Ibid, p. 292.

7 Evidence of A W H Humphries,’ Inquiry of Commissioner Bigge’, 11 Mar 1820, Historical Records of Australia, Series III: vol III, p. 278.

8 Ibid.

9 Convict Conduct Records. Tasmanian Archives : CON 40/1.

10 Convict Conduct Records for Elizabeth Boucher, Eliza Brown, Hannah Burton, Elizabeth Bannister, Mary Ann Cardin, Mary Ann Lacy, Bridget Langham, Susan Marr, Hannah Noon, Elizabeth Painter, Elizabeth Slater, Ann Walker, Ann Wilson, Ann Wright. Tasmanian Archives : CON 40/1.

11 Convict Conduct Records for Ann Riley, Mary Ann Smith, Sydney Williams, Sarah Wilson. Tasmanian Archives : CON 40. ‘The Female Factory’, Colonial Times, 16 Jun 1826.

12 Convict Conduct Record for Ann Riley. Tasmanian Archives : CON 40/1.

13 ‘The Female Factory’, Colonial Times, 16 Jun 1826.

14 ‘Cimitiere to the Bench of Magistrates,’ George Town 3 Feb 1820, Historical Records of Australia, series III vol. 3, p. 862.

15 ‘Inquiry of Commissioner Bigge’, 8 July 1820. Historical Records of Australia, series III vol. 3, pp. 407-8.

16 Ibid., pp. 852-69.

17 Hobart Town Gazette, 16 Mar 1822.

18 See Alexander, Alison, ed., Convict Lives at the George Town Female Factory (Convict Women’s Press, Hobart, 2014).

19 Correspondence, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Drabble to Montague, 4 Oct 1825. Tasmanian Archives : CSO1/1/32/753.

20 Shoemaker, Robert and Ward, Richard, ‘Understanding the Criminal: Record Keeping, Statistics and the Early History of Criminology in England, British Journal of Criminology, 57 (2017): 1442-61.

21 Frost, Lucy, Footsteps and Voices: an historical look into the Cascades Female Factory (Hobart, Female Factory Historic Site, 2004), p. 11.

22 Correspondence, Colonial Secretary’s Office. Tasmanian Archives : CSO 1/1/365/8341.

23 Colonial Times, 2 Jan 1829.

24 Correspondence, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Burnett to Clifford 21 Jan 1829. Tasmanian Archives : CSO 1/368/8375/42.

25 Hobart Town Courier, 24 Jan 1829.

26 The Courier, 31 Jan 1829.

27 Statement of Jesse Pullen, 9 Feb 1829. Tasmanian Archives : CSO1/365/8341.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Correspondence, Colonial Secretary’s Office, Principal Superintendent of Convicts to Colonial Secretary 9 Feb 1829. Tasmanian Archives : CSO1/1/365/8341.

34 Frost, L., Footsteps and Voices, p. 15.

35 ‘Statement of Grace Heinbury,’ Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline. Tasmanian Archives : CSO 22/1/50.

36 ‘Statement of Mary Haigh,’ in Ibid.

37 Frost, Lucy, ‘Standing up to a Postcard: resistance inside the Female Factory’, in A. Alexander and A. M. Hodgson, eds., Convict Lives at the Cascades Female Factory, vol. 2. (Hobart, Convict Women’s Press, 2018), pp84-91.

38 Port Arthur Separate (Model) Prison Conservation Project (2008), p. 13.

39 Numbers for 2 to 8 Nov 1834, Hobart Town Gazette, 13 Nov 1834.

40 Parker, J., ‘An Institutional Failure: the Launceston Female Factory’ in L. Frost and A.M. Hodgson, eds. Convict Lives at the Launceston Female Factory (Hobart, Convict Women’s Press, 2013), p. 15.

41 ‘Gunn to Spode,’ 17 Nov 1834, Correspondence, Colonial Secretary’s Office. Tasmanian Archives : CSO1/541/11746.

42 Ibid.

43 Total numbers for 25 to 31 Dec 1841: 167 women and 29 children. Hobart Town Gazette, 7 Jan 1842.

44 ‘Examination of Robert Pearson,’ Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline. Tasmanian Archives : CSO22/1/50.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 Launceston Advertiser, 27 Oct 1842.

51 Ibid.

52 ‘Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline.’ Tasmanian Archives: CSO22/1/50.

53 Ibid.

54 Daniels, Kay, Convict Women (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998), p. 126.

55 ‘Examination of Robert Pearson,’ Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline. Tasmanian Archives : CSO 22/1/50.

56 Quoted Reid, K., Gender, Crime and Empire, p. 83.

57 Examination of William Gunn, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline. Tasmanian Archives : CSO 22/1/50.

58 Anna Maria Turner to Stephen Bumstead, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline. Tasmanian Archives : CSO 22/1/50.

59 ‘Statement of Mary Haigh,’ Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline. Tasmanian Archives : CSO 22/1/50.

60 ‘Examination of John Price,’ Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline. Tasmanian Archives : CSO 22/1/50.

61 Reid, K., Gender, Crime and Empire, p. 81

62 Correspondence, Colonial Secretary’s Office CSO 1/1/562/12462.

63 Examination of John Price, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline, Tasmanian Archives : CSO 22/1/50.

64 Examination of John Price, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Female Convict Prison Discipline, Tasmanian Archives : CSO 22/1/50.

65 Tuffin, R., Maxwell-Stewart, H. and Quinlan, M., ‘Reintegrating Historical Records through Digital Data Linking: Convicts Prosecuted for Collective Action in Van Diemen’s Land’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 22, n° 2 (2020): 55-60.

66 Analysis of a total count of punishments listed in the Con 40 and 41 series and a four percent sample of Con 31 and 33, Tasmanian Archives.

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Table des illustrations

Titre 1830s plan for refurbishing George Town Female Factory
Légende Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/1284
URL http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/docannexe/image/9802/img-1.png
Fichier image/png, 2,4M
Titre 1827 Plan for Ground Floor of the Cascades Female Factory
Légende Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/389
URL http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/docannexe/image/9802/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 459k
Titre Weekly numbers of inmates in the Cascades Female Factory plotted against female convict vessel arrivals
Légende Sources: Hobart Town Gazette 1832-47. Australian Bureau of Statistics; Australian Data Archive; Smith, Len; Rowse, Tim; Hungerford, Stuart, 2019, "Historical and Colonial Census Data Archive (HCCDA)", doi:10.26193/MP6WRS, ADA Dataverse, V4
URL http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/docannexe/image/9802/img-3.png
Fichier image/png, 130k
Titre Design for a small Female Factory at Launceston
URL http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/docannexe/image/9802/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 515k
Titre Plan of ground floor for Female Factory at Launceston
Légende Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/892
URL http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/docannexe/image/9802/img-5.png
Fichier image/png, 3,1M
Titre Plan of upper floor for Female Factory at Launceston
Légende Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/898
URL http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/docannexe/image/9802/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 426k
Titre Plan for additional cells at Cascades Factory
Légende Tasmanian Archives: PWD266/1/397
URL http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/docannexe/image/9802/img-7.png
Fichier image/png, 3,7M
Titre Number of Colonial Charges Brought Against Convict Women
Légende Sources: Con 40 and 41 series. Tasmanian Archives. Women who arrived before 1816 or died within one year of arrival omitted.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/docannexe/image/9802/img-8.png
Fichier image/png, 51k
Titre Occupational Colonial Prosecution Rates for Convict Women
Légende Sources: Con 14, 15, 19, 40 and 41 series, Tasmanian Archives.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/docannexe/image/9802/img-9.png
Fichier image/png, 72k
Titre Colonial Birth Rate for Transported Convict Women
Légende Sources: Con 40, 41, Tasmanian birth registers, RGD 33 series, Tasmanian Archives.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/docannexe/image/9802/img-10.png
Fichier image/png, 113k
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Lucy Frost et Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, « A Panoptic Eye »Revue d’études benthamiennes [En ligne], 21 | 2022, mis en ligne le 30 mai 2022, consulté le 06 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudes-benthamiennes/9802 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudes-benthamiennes.9802

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Auteurs

Lucy Frost

University of Tasmania

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart

University of New England

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