Recently my husband and I spent a week visiting some of our favourite spots in Tasmania (hello Freycinet, Bicheno, Ross, Richmond, and the beautiful Huon Valley!)

While in Hobart, I took the opportunity to go to the Cascades Female Factory historic site. Around 7,000 women walked through the entry gate during its nearly thirty years of operation in the first half of the 1800s.

The term ‘female factory’ puzzled me when I first heard of it. Essentially, the factories were prisons or barracks to house convicts; but they were also places of work where women laboured at various tasks, depending on which institution they were in and their status in the highly regimented convict system.

For example, they might be set to weaving, unravelling tangled, tarry ships’ ropes for re-use, laundering clothes and sheets from the nearby town, or sewing garments. Hence the term ‘factory’. The women made things or did jobs others didn’t want to do.

In addition, these sites operated as marriage market (free settlers or emancipated men could apply to marry one of the ‘better behaved’ women), maternity hospital, and nursery of sorts (although the infant mortality rate was often horrendous).

I was most familiar with the older Female Factory at Parramatta in NSW, so I was keen to visit the Cascades to compare and contrast the experiences of women there.

I joined an hour-long tour entitled Notorious Strumpets and Difficult Girls. That quote, by the way, comes from the surgeon superintendent’s report on a transport ship about a youngster, Julia Mullins, in 1826.

This is the kind of language that men in authority felt free to use about the women in their ‘care’ if they were unfortunate enough to end up in the British justice system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the guide on my tour remarked, the transportation system was ‘cruel, unfair and arbitrary.’ No one questioned why these women and girls ended up in a crowded, filthy gaol, in a court room, or on a transport ship. The thinking of the time held that there was a ‘convict class’, you were usually born into it, and nothing could change your life trajectory.

As it turned out, for some women, transportation did just that. If they survived the challenges of the system and served their sentence, some were able to make a real go of it in their new home. For most, the idea of returning home was laughable – who had the money for an expensive fare on a sailing ship? So they made the best of it, and some fortunate ones went on to have lives far superior to what they’d have endured had they remained in Britain. Among these were women I have researched and written about in the Travels with my Ancestors series on this blog.

The Notorious Strumpets tour told the story of seven women, all of whom had some experience of the Cascades Factory. Mostly their stories were pretty grim, with a couple who defied the odds and lived reasonable lives afterwards. Many factory women had left family behind when they boarded the transportation ships; lost babies or toddlers on the voyage or in the unhealthy ‘lying-in hospital’ or nursery; all of them experienced trauma of some sort from the time of their arrest and trial.

The strumpets were likely to be those women and girls who were not compliant, who did not keep their mouths shut and their eyes downcast. They spoke out, acted up, made trouble, got drunk, had sex with partners (male or female) not approved of by authorities. For these things they were punished, over and over again. The tour brought them to life in a respectful way, not overly dramatising things (because honestly, their lives were already pretty dramatic) and not glossing over their often troubling behaviours.

Among the saddest stories for me were the women who lived long lives of crime coupled with frequent homelessness. They lived surrounded by violence, both real and threatened. The odds were so stacked against them, yet they continued to defy, choose their own paths, exercise an agency of sorts. But they lived on the edge, among the most vulnerable in a harsh and unfair world. We were shown photos of some women, usually ‘mug shots’ taken when they entered other prisons after the Factory. The harshness of their world was etched in the lines on weathered faces, the rage or defeat in their eyes.

If you are in Hobart I highly recommend a visit to the Cascades Female Factory. While only a small proportion of the built environment of the factory still stands, the interpretive centre, displays and tours are excellent. It is a place to learn, to reflect, to pay respects to the women who lived, worked, suffered and survived.

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One husband and wife in my family tree arrived in Tasmania not as convicts, but as employees in the Launceston Female Factory in the north of the island. They were free settlers and got work at the factory – he as Gatekeeper and his wife as Assistant Matron. These were positions of some responsibility; they were gained (as was so often the case in this era) not through previous work experience or particular skills, but rather by presenting as ‘respectable’ people who would be willing to operate in a regimented and punishing system.

An engrossing book, prepared by the excellent Female Convicts Research Centre and published by Convict Women’s Press in Hobart in 2013, tells the history of this establishment, through the stories of the many women who entered its grounds as prisoners. Edited by Lucy Frost & Alice Meredith Hodgson, Convict Lives: The Launceston Female Factory is divided into a number of themes such as ‘Out of Ireland’, ‘The mixed blessings of motherhood’, ‘Resisting reform’, ‘Family sagas’, ‘Difficult ends’.

Once again, the determination of some women to defy, subvert or game the system is a thread that runs through many of the stories. There is tragedy too – how could there not be? – and a sense of the toughness of these people that British society preferred not to think about.

It’s a slim volume but a terrific read. I felt the coldness within the Factory walls, the longing for home of those inside, the quest for companionship and love, the squalor and overcrowding, the hungry bellies and the aching bones of the prisoners. I celebrated those who survived, who went on to marry, have healthy children, run businesses, find comfort and security in their lives after the Factory.

This book is a valuable little resource for my family history research and writing. It’s also a testament to the lives of the women who came here most unwillingly to take part in the absurd, harsh and quixotic experiment that was the convict transportation system.