Mothers of a nation

Rum, rebels and ratbags. Hardcore history from the Transportation Nation. With Dave Hunt and Dom Knight. Music Welcome to the Australian History Podcast with more irony than Ned Kelly's helmet-y. Today we're trading in Australia's history for its her story, its rum.

rebels and ratbag S's. But let's be honest, women had it pretty tough in colonial Australia. Convict women were isolated from their families back in Britain and had to try and forge new relationships, not all of them savoury. And female free settlers... often experienced isolation and loneliness in an environment that may as well have been another planet. But for many, there was an upside. The new colony could also give women opportunities they couldn't have dreamed of back in Britain.

Today we're looking at a woman's lot in the early days of Australia and dropping in on some of the mothers of this nation. I'm Dom Knight and I'm joined as always by David Hunt.

known blue-stocking wearer, wannabe suffragette, and the author of Gert, the Unauthorised History of Australia. Hello, David. G'day, Dom. So, David, in previous episodes of the podcast, we've... talk quite a bit about the disadvantages in an economic sense that British women endured before transportation started and the fact that that led in many cases to sex work occurring.

regularly among the lower classes that provided most of the convicts. Why was it that lower class women had a tough time, even compared to their male counterparts? It boils down to two things, Dom. Money. and property. And women simply didn't have as much of either of those two things as blokes. Married women had to surrender all of their property when they got hitched, and all of the property went to their husbands.

Females from lower class society had very limited employment opportunities. Often the only choice was a poor paying job. as a servant and female servants had it tougher than male servants they were paid less than the blokes and they had to buy their own clothes whilst if you were a footman or a butler you got provided with livery so we've got poor women

A significant proportion of them are serving girls and many of them have to resort to petty theft and prostitution to maintain a reasonable quality of life. And how did the justice system tend to treat women as opposed to men in those days? Female crime was seen as somehow unnatural. Women were also often not charged for offences and were less likely to be convicted, executed or transported.

So, look, the women who tended to be transported, were they more serious offenders? Some of them were. Often more serious male offenders were hanged whilst more serious female offenders were put on the boat. but you still had your usual share of cheese and bread thieves. Of course. And transportation was often ordered for women convicted of minor crimes who were dissolute and disorderly. So female crime was very much viewed through the lens of morality rather than justice.

Convictions and charge rates were low for many offences. Women were regularly convicted of crimes in a domestic setting against their masters or their husbands. And back in the day, husbands were actually regarded as. masters of their wives and a crime against a husband was seen as similar against a crime against the crown. It was regarded as petty treason.

In these days before no-fault divorce and when husbands couldn't be prosecuted for domestic violence that didn't actually result in death, a large number of women took justice into their own hands. often in the form of a heavy iron poker. So what kind of women made up the convicts aboard the First Fleet?

Drunk and swearing sex workers, or at least about 20-25% of them. There were, out of 775 convicts, 193 of them were women. They were aged between 13 and 82, so you've got a pretty wide range there. Throughout the life of transportation to the colonies... The average age of female transportees was 27. About 62% of them were single, 14% were widowed, and 25% were married, which by my reckoning adds up to 101%, which just goes to show...

why I'm a historian rather than a mathematician. But most Irish women who were sent out, and there were many Irish female convicts, most of them were married. But few of them are allowed to take their husbands and kids with them. Basically, when you've got a large Catholic family and 17 kids turning up on the docks, they were turned away. So... These women were effectively widowed by distance. They were forced to leave their family and their lives behind forever.

How did Captain Philip and the crew of the First Fleet react to the several hundred women that were aboard? The governor and the crew... really look down on these women and there's reams and reams of text about their general wretchedness and their venereal diseases.

Lieutenant Ralph Clark, the First Fleet's resident misogynist, kept this really detailed journal about the behaviour of the convict women that's half country vicar and half pervy stalker. And although he talks about them being... indescribable hussies looling about in their filth and he frequently calls them damned bitches in his diary and his letters to his wife his darling Betsy Alicia

Ralph ends up having a daughter with a female convict on Norfolk Island, and at least he had the decency to name her Betsy after his wife. Hypocrisy really is the white man's curse, says one white man to another. And not everyone even wanted women to be brought to the colony in the first place. The governors didn't know what to do with the women that were shipped out here.

And successive governors questioned the value of women convicts on both economic and moral grounds. Governor Hunter insisted that the women convicts were refractory and disobedient. and at the bottom of every infamous transaction in the colony. And he says, I don't want you to ship any more of them out here. He believed that the men spent all of their time trying to look buff, picking flowers for the women rather than working for the common good in the fields.

He also believed that women kept on having kids who were even more economically unproductive than their mothers. So Hunter wants to turn the colony into a giant manshed. Governor Macquarie also had a problem with the female convicts. He said that they were as great a drawback as others are beneficial, basically because he couldn't get them set to work building things for him. Yes, they weren't so good as...

building monuments called Macquarie, as we still have today. So it'd be fair to say that in the colonial days, the administration had a fairly misogynistic attitude to the women under their charge. Once the female convicts actually made it off the boat in Sydney...

What were their lives like? There was a chap called George Thompson who visited the colony in 1792, and he provides the most telling single example of what it was like for life as a woman convict. Thompson writes... women not fortunate enough to be selected for wives, which every officer, settler, and soldier is entitled to, and fewer without. are made hut keepers those who are not dignified with this office are set to make shirts frocks trousers etc for the men at a certain number per day

occasionally to pick grass in the fields and for a very slight offence I kept constantly at work the same as men. So that was your life. for your average female convict back in the day. Fairly harsh. Pretty harsh. Shortly after that, in the 1790s, the assignment system is introduced, where many women convicts are assigned as domestic servants for soldiers and settlers.

Yes, which sounds problematic in various ways. Was there any contemporary criticism of this idea of turning female convicts into domestic servants? Yeah, look, there was a lot. And in 18...

there was the first big review of transportation policy when the British Parliamentary Select Committee on Transportation had a look at how the whole New South Wales experiment was going. It wrote, indiscriminately given to such of the inhabitants as demanded them and were in general received rather as prostitutes than as servants and so far from being induced to reform themselves So there was this terrible concern about...

moral issues of giving women as servants to a whole lot of men. Well, probably delivering them into sexual slavery in some senses. Yeah, in many cases. And so in response, Governor Macquarie... tries to ensure that women are assigned only to married settlers. That was his policy response. Who, of course, were totally respectable at all times. So that's a pretty grim life for the female convicts. But in some senses, David, did the New World...

of Terra Australis offer opportunities that perhaps wouldn't have been available in Britain? Look, women had far greater opportunities than they had back in Britain. And it's basically that old economic law, the law of supply and demand. Women were in short supply, therefore they were in high demand and they could make better bargains with the men in the colony. So there's much more social and economic mobility for female convicts than applied for male convicts.

as they hook up with the officers and free settlers. If they'd stayed back in Britain, they would have had to make do with the local rat catcher or dog poo collector. So they really managed to sort of lift themselves up. out of the lower classes. A number of women also acted as sale agents and distributors for the Rum Corps offices, and they amassed fortunes that they could never have dreamed of back in Britain.

And still others set up businesses of their own that they operated outside the required convict work hours. And one of my favourite convicts is a woman called Sarah Bird. She arrived in 1796.

25 years of age after having been convicted of grand larceny. And on the ship out, she sells her most expensive clothes to purchase goods. And she sells these on the ship and when she arrives in New South Wales. She's a really independent... woman and she writes to her father I live by myself and did not do as the rest of the women did on the passage which was every one of them that could had a husband when she gets out here

Sets up as a saleswoman. She buys a house, which she opens as a pub while still a convict, The Three Jolly Settlers. And that was the first pub owned by a woman in Australia, opened in 1797. The property laws out here were radically different because back in Britain, women couldn't own property when married. But out in New South Wales, men couldn't own property if they were convicts. So if you're a man...

you're a convict and you're married to a woman, that woman actually owned all of the property in the partnership. This was an incredible transfer of economic power into the hands of women. Also male convicts were actually assigned to their wives as servants. Literally there was a master-servant relationship between wife and husband.

And women who wanted out of a relationship because, you know, Jack came home pissed or didn't put down the privy seat regularly in the night, they could return their assigned husbands to the common labour pool and send them back to the chain gate.

Let's talk about one of the best-known ex-convicts who made a new life for herself here in Australia, Mary Reby, who appears on the $20 note as a kindly... old bespectacled grandmother, but before that point had quite an interesting backstory. How did she end up coming to Australia? Mary is our first horse-thieving, cross-dressing, seal-clubbing convict entrepreneur and standover woman. And only, perhaps.

And only. An incredible character. She was originally known as Mary Haydick, and at the age of 13 years, she elopes with another girl. She dresses as a boy, assumes the name James Burrow. She steals a horse and is sentenced to death. And James, as Mary was known, went through the entire British legal system and spent months in a crowded prison cell without anybody realising that he was a she. And so after the sentence of death is commuted...

her gender is actually revealed during the compulsory pre-transportation bath. Only then do you get a bath. Only then do you get a bath. And that was one bath too many as far as many British people were concerned, let me tell you. And so an appeal is lodged. for Mary's pardon. This appeal was actually a pretty dangerous legal tactic and it falls on deaf ears because dressing as a man, if you're a woman, was a capital offence. It was seen as a crime of women.

trying to act above their station in the position of men. That's in line with Deuteronomy 22.5. The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man. So you have this biblical... laws getting transplanted into the British justice system. The Bible tough on cross-dressing. So she's transported to New South Wales, but you mentioned that convicts...

Women could often make an advantageous marriage. Was she one of those? She was. She goes from being a 13-year-old escapee dressed as a bloke to a 17-year-old bride. She marries Thomas Reby, who's a junior East India Company officer, who's actually the first non-military settler in the colony to engage in trade. So when Thomas dies young, Mary inherits this vast...

pastoral, hotel, shipping and sealing business. And she expands that empire through canny investments and a single-mindedly vicious approach to anyone who owes her money. all the while caring for the seven kids that she's had with Thomas in quick succession. And in what way vicious? There's this one case that was brought before Macquarie where somebody owes Mary money.

So she knocks on his door, he opens the door and she beats him like he's her redheaded stepson and is brought before the courts for assault. But despite that... Mary remained a firm Macquarie favourite and prospers under his rule. She helps him establish the Bank of New South Wales, the first bank in the colony, the Convicts Bank as it was known, and she leases him her house to serve as its first branch.

What an extraordinary progression from a teenage cross-dressing horse thief to one of the wealthiest people in Australia. Look, in 1816, just after a few years really in the colony, she's worth an incredible £20,000. And she becomes this... She's a philanthropist. She's a prominent donor to charity. She's the governor of the Free Grammar School, the first school established in Australia. So she's become a respected institution.

But David, there weren't too many women, I suspect, who were as successful as Mary Reby. How did the average woman fare? There were many women who in the early days of the colony were completely destitute. And before Governor King comes to power, they lived on the streets. Governor King is the first to introduce social services in New South Wales. is a family man, so much so that he actually has two of them. He shacks up with his convict housekeeper in Norfolk Island and produces two kids.

Norfolk and Sydney. He then goes home and Norfolk and Sydney are raised by his very tolerant and patient wife. So Governor King is passionate about the rights of little bastards. So in 1796, he opens the orphan school for females at Norfolk Island. And in 1801, he opens the orphan school in Sydney, which was designed.

to protect young girls from prostitution. So he actually converts Sydney's most expensive house into an orphanage for girls and he funds it with an import duty on spirits, that traditional Aussie way of funding. social services and infrastructure. So, look, if you're going to have that double sanity, you may as well spread the welfare around. How did older women fare, though, as opposed to the sweet little orphan girls who had this lovely house?

King extends the same sort of principle to unassigned women with the opening of the first female factory at Parramatta in 1805. This is a space above the jail outlet. Parramatta which was generally for the most disorderly women and King was concerned that these women were thoroughly depraved and abandoned, particularly those from London and most of those from Ireland. So he sets up this place where they can be accommodated.

Our old friend from Parramatta, the Reverend Samuel Marsden, is initially opposed to the factory, which he regarded as a grand source of moral corruption, insubordination and disease. But he becomes an enthusiastic supporter when he realises that, A, the factory had the largest collection of spinning wheels in the colony, and, B, he had the largest collection of sheep. That was a match made in heaven.

So Marsden's attacks on the colony's concubines, as he referred to unmarried women, becomes far less strident when they provide him with a useful source of cheap labour. What Marsden does is all of this carping about female morality and all of his letter writing back to Britain about depraved harlots and concubines.

it's actually terribly effective in having resources allocated to women. So although he seems like a terrible misogynist today, he was actually incredibly influential in improving the lot of the lowest classes of women. in Australia.

Now you might have seen the female factories in the news actually in the past few weeks. There's a discussion of whether or not to keep these buildings, which are still there in Parramatta, as part of a heritage project. Dave, what was it like to actually work in this female factory? The factories are expanded in the 1820s and 30s as part of this new prison reform movement. Previously they'd been seen as places just to house Australian women who couldn't get a job.

But now they emphasize discipline, order and reformation. So they're seen as places to... improve the lives of women rather than just holding pens. And eight of them pop up across New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, now known as Tasmania. So it was pretty tough in the female factory. You could be punished for bad behaviour in a range of ways. You could have your rations reduced, you could be put in solitary confinement or sent to hard labour.

or labelled. So labelling was common. If you stole something, you'd have to wear a big sign around your neck saying thief. But the punishment that really upset the women there... was a punishment proposed by a woman, the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, specifically designed to humiliate women, and that was shaving their heads. And for women who had no control over...

most aspects of their lives, their appearance was something that they took great pride in. So actually stripping them of the outward signs of their femininity was a huge humiliation. was a very controversial punishment of the day. So it was a factory. What kind of work did they actually do in the factory?

Generally, there were lots of sheep in Australia. That meant there were lots of wool, and that means they needed lots of people to spin that wool. So in the Cascades female factory down in Tasmania, which was a former distillery, the women had to spin a certain weight of wool every day. and the women being clever and cunning would wet the wool with water to make it heavier and try and knock off early. But these were fairly dark, wet, dank places.

Health was a continual problem and women lost contact with their own kids because children were removed from female factory mums as infants or young kids and placed in orphan schools. So you've got... Poor people having this incredible sort of sense of social dislocation from their own families. So what was the best way out of the female factory? You could either get a job or get a bloke.

and those who found it difficult to get a job went for Plan B. Many of the convicts wanted to marry women and would hit on women in the female. factory specifically. So you've got these great stories of the women being unloaded in Sydney and the convicts taking three days to row them up the river to Parramatta. This voyage should only take a few hours, but they'd spend three days trying to chat them up and find a wife. There's this great description.

of women in the female factory ranking up, as it was known, by a chap called James Moody. And this is from his report to the Select Committee on Transportation in 1837. He wrote... The convict goes and looks at the women, and if he sees a lady that takes his fancy, he makes a motion to her, and she steps on one side. Some will not, but stand still, and have no wish to be married, but this is rare.

So you had this sort of early days, the convict wants a wife sort of show where men who can't get a woman out in normal society go to female factories that actually operate as marriage factories as well. All they needed was Dexter the robot. So, look, how did the female convicts react to this, David? Did they just go along with the system or did they protest?

The factories were really like a sort of 19th century prisoner cell block H, or for the younger folk out there today, Orange is the New Black. Contemporary reference. Nice one. I may be in my 40s, Dom, but I'm hip to the beat. Cool people don't say hip to the beat, do they, Dom? How would I know? So rioting is incredibly common. In 1827, you've got this big riot at Parramatta. where the women whose rations had been reduced broke out of the female factory, and a hundred of them...

march on Parramatta, they attack the shops, they steal food, and they only return when the soldiers turn up. And so they return back to the female factory with aprons loaded. with bread and meat. And there was actually a particularly memorable protest I think. This is actually one of my favourite events in Australian history and one of the things that made me want to write about Australian history.

You've got 300 women all lining up in front of the stage. And as the governor gets up to speak, this is what the eyewitness said. The 300 women turned right around and at one impulse pulled up their clothes, showing their naked posteriors, which they simultaneously smacked with their hands, making a loud and not very musical noise. So, why don't we celebrate this quintessentially Australian event in our history?

So, David, we've been talking a lot about convicts so far. What about the female free settlers? What were their lives like? Initially, middle-class women found coming out here incredibly difficult because they were isolated from other women of their class. So Elizabeth MacArthur, when she came out, it was just her and the Mrs. Reverend Johnson. They were the only two.

women of, in inverted commas, breeding within the colony. So Elizabeth MacArthur, when she's staying out at Elizabeth Farm, complains of... No female friend to unbend my mind to. nor a single woman with whom I could converse with any satisfaction to myself, the clergyman's wife being a person in whose society I could reap neither profit nor pleasure. David, did any women manage to take advantage of the isolation?

For many free women, that isolation ends up working out in their favour. So Elizabeth MacArthur's a great example. Whilst MacArthur is back brooding in Britain, she's out here managing the Merino flocks. She's doing all of the heavy work in building his Merino empire. She should have been on the banknote alongside him. Absolutely. And without her...

the agricultural industry would not have been established as strongly as it was. Another example is Elizabeth Macquarie herself. She's really keen on horticulture, landscaping and architecture, and she brings out her architecture books from England. and she is suspected as being the architect of the Rum Hospital. She also oversees the turning of the domain into parklands, and she plans the road that runs around the inside of the domain.

to the point which, like the road, is named after her, Mrs Macquarie's chair. And she's also appointed a director of the Bank of New South Wales. She's actually up there making decisions about the running of a bank, quite possibly. She's the first female bank director in the world. So these are not opportunities that women would have had of any class had they stayed back in Britain. Now, another prominent woman in early New South Welsh society, of course.

was Caroline Chisholm, and people might remember her face on the old paper $5 notes. If you're as old as we are, Dom, yes, yes, you might. Caroline Chisholm is my favourite. Australian. She's the champion of women's welfare and the mother of Australian immigration and industrial relations. She's known as the emigrant's friend. And she inspired Charles Dickens as well.

She did. Dickens bases the character of the philanthropic Mrs Jellaby in Bleak House on Carolyn Chisholm. And so Carolyn comes out in 1838 and she sets up at Windsor, her husband who was a soldier. rejoins the regiment and leaves her there after a couple of years. But she stays on for seven years and makes an incredible difference to Australian society. She also worked alongside many of the sex workers, aka fallen women of New South Wales. This is how she came to prominence. When women...

young women got off the ships at Sydney, they were met by pimps and they were met by Carol and Chisholm, who didn't like the pimps at all. Chisholm is really desperately sorry for... for single girls, and she has a particular focus on single mothers who'd come to the colonies after hearing these tales of opportunity and easy money. But when they came out here, jobs were scarce and many did turn to prostitution.

So Chisholm helps these fallen women find respectable paid jobs and she would market the girls she rescued as respectable, well-trained girls. I only ask to be enabled to keep these poor girls from being tempted from their mortal sin. In 1841, she starts the female immigrant home. She goes to Governor Gipps, who provides her with this old army barracks. And Governor Gipps, when he meets Chisholm...

admits to being pleasantly surprised that she was a young, attractive lady. So he's not terribly interested in these reforms she's proposing. He just says that she's a good sword. Sound familiar? So Chisholm is in this barracks. It's full of rats. And she's a practical woman. She feeds them with bread and butter on the first night she's there. She sits there, sits up all night with bread and butter. Feeding the rats. Feeding the rats.

And the next four nights, she laces the rats' bread and butter with arsenic. And that's the way she clears the rats from... the home that she's established for fallen women. Not a woman to be trifled with, clearly. Not if you're a rat. And she establishes other homes throughout the settlements. And in seven years, she placed 11,000 people, mostly women and children,

in homes and jobs. She tried to place them with married families with a focus on getting girls out of Sin City and into the country. And this is really significant for our rural development. You have... country which was the last male frontier, suddenly women are going out there, working in the communities, building families. Incredibly important figure. You mentioned as well, David, that she did things in the area of

industrial relations and immigration reform. She establishes a central employment office in Sydney after the government refused. It's sort of Chisholm Link to place women and some men in employment. And she draws up standard contracts of employment for those that she places, which set out minimum wages and conditions, including a minimum wage that she recommended be enough to cover the food bill.

of five people for a week so she's this incredible figure in terms of labor reform she ends up going back to england in 1846 and she sets up a family reunion scheme for the Australian colonies, the Colonisation Loan Society, to lend money for people to come out to Australia. So she runs the first organised mass immigration program to Australia.

And so this scheme helps people like Peter Lawler of Eureka Stockade fame come out and Sir Henry Parks, the father of Australian Federation. But the people who really benefited were the Irish girls. who had been devastated by the potato famine back in Ireland. And she arranges for large numbers of Irish girls to come into the colony.

All right, so Carolyn Chisholm, as you said, went back to England to advocate there. Did she ever make it back to Australia? Yep. Come the gold rush, there's no need to promote immigration anymore because... Tens of thousands of people are looking for the nearest boat to come out here and strike it rich. So she returns to Australia to lobby for safety houses on the routes to the goldfields. Things go badly for Carolyn after that.

In 1857, she has an accident. She's left bedridden, and she's now so poor she can't actually pay to see a doctor. She's giving English lessons to Chinese migrants who come for the gold rush and works as a cake decorator. So it's a fair fall down for this great woman. And Australians do pride themselves, of course, on being the first people in the world to introduce women's suffrage. A round of applause, except for the New Zealanders.

They don't really count. They could have been part of Australia if they wanted to. Is there a link between that bit of social progress and tradition founded by Carolyn Chisholm? Definitely. The advantages that women had in the colony and the increased bargaining power they had, I think were instrumental in the women's suffrage movement. And we talk about South Australia giving women the vote in 1894.

and they were beaten by the New Zealanders by one year. But South Australia had really led the debate in this area through champions like Catherine Helen Spence, who actually has replaced Carolyn Chisholm on our current $5 note. And the South Australians were terribly upset that they spent all of this time holding committees and parties and rallies to talk about women's suffrage and the New Zealanders then beat them to it by a year.

It's a little known fact that Victoria accidentally gave women the vote.

in 1863. So we were number one. We were. Victoria was the first place to give women the vote when it passed a law allowing for all persons who paid rates to vote. And the legislators were absolutely shocked when it was pointed out that women... were persons and some of the canny politicians loaded up carts full of women and dragged them out to the 1864 election and their votes were taken and their votes were counted and the men who were sitting in parliament were so horrified.

that they amended the legislation after that election to replace the word persons with all male persons. So I can be very proud, the very first place in the world to give women the vote briefly by accident. How progressive. But look...

As we can gather from that story, David, the fight for suffrage was not an easy one. It was certainly much easier than the United States and Britain, where suffragettes had to resort to violent protests, and they didn't actually achieve the vote until 1920 in the US. in 1928 in the UK. So you have women achieving the federal vote in 1902 and Victoria, the last state to give women the vote after accidentally being the first to do so.

granted full suffrage in 1908. So we were still, at that time, early leaders in the suffrage game. And David, we know that female representation in Parliament is an ongoing issue, even today, and I guess there would have been... some pretty heated debates about women's suffrage once upon a time. My favourite during the debates in Victoria were the words of David Gaunson, MP, and he opposes women's suffrage. And he says in his speech...

They come to us and say, oh, Mr. Gaunson, do on this occasion let us have the franchise. But I say to them, get out, cook a chop and learn to dress your baby if you have one. cooking skills, and whether or not you choose to have children. It reminds me of some of the comments made about Julia Gillard. Some things don't change all that quickly here in Australia, do they? All right, so David, that's the end of this season of Rum Rebels and Ratbags.

And if your thirst for gonzo, Aussie history is not yet quenched, check out David's book, upon which we've based many of the tasty morsels in this podcast series. It's called Gert, the Unauthorised History of Australia. Big thanks to all at the ABC who've made this podcast happen, in particular our series producer.

Caitlin Sorry. Remember, if you want to stay abreast of all the latest audio adventures from ABC Radio, point your web browser to First Run ABC and you can sign up, subscribe or leave us a review on iTunes. The ABC has many other bundles of podcast joy you can discover. Science vs. Witch Pits Science vs. Well, not science. The Raw Truth Bombs of Confession Booth or the Earshot podcast RN's take on culture, history, people and...

And if you want to hear more of me asking questions of people who know more than me about things, listen to Evenings on ABC Radio in New South Wales and the ACT. Until next time, may all of your rebels be rum-soaked ratbags. Goodnight, gentle listener.