Factory Girls

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HEARTS IN CHAINS: A photo of convict Emma Mayner and her children with a letter to her grandson and a hand-sewn "forget-me-not"

George Fetting for TIME

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Maureen Upfold was a child when she piped up with the classic existential query, "Dad, why are we here?" Behind the question was not a spiritual crisis but puzzlement over why so many pale-skinned people like herself dwelled in a country once solely occupied by Aborigines. "I think our ancestors were convicts," her father, Thorvald, told her. "Let's find out." So began an investigation that led Upfold first to some basic Australian history and then to the story of her great-great grandmother, Anne Dunne, an Irishwoman convicted of stealing linen and sentenced to seven years in the penal colony of New South Wales.

Gazing now at a 150-year-old ambrotype photograph of her convict forebear, Upfold sounds proud and protective. She will not brook any suggestion that Anne Dunne was other than a brave soul who endured a myriad of hardships while at the female factory in the settlement of Parramatta, now a commercial center in western Sydney. Dunne eventually married a lifer named James Tompkins and experienced, Upfold speculates, times of joy in a land where she chose to live out her post-convict years. "In life, you've got to go forward," Upfold says, "and she did."

The lives of women like Dunne are the subject of an exhibition, "Women Transported: Life in Australia's Convict Female Factories," whose national tour opens Aug. 2 at the Parramatta Heritage Centre. Between 1804 and the early 1850s, some 10,000 British women served in one of the 12 female work houses — known as factories — in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). Theirs is a tale of dislocation and suffering of which few Australians have more than the sketchiest knowledge, yet it's hardly stretching things to call these women the mothers of a nation, or to suggest that it was partly through their struggles that elements of the archetypal Australian character were forged. Testament to how blurred this chapter of history has become is the difficulty curator Gay Hendriksen had in sourcing items for an exhibition which, though three years in the making, is a trifle light on astonishing artefacts. "I still believe the objects are out there," says Hendriksen, who suspects many convict descendants "don't want to talk about the skeleton in the closet."

A common misconception is that most of the convict women were illiterate whores from the criminal class. Not so, according to documents of the time. Prostitution wasn't illegal in Britain in the early part of the 19th century, so it wasn't grounds for transportation. The convicts were no more likely to be illiterate than the Britons who were coming to Australia by choice, and more than 60% of them were transported for a first offence, usually theft. Between them, they brought some 180 trade skills.

For the most part, in other words, these people were not horrible. But the conditions they faced often were. In Parramatta, by the 1840s, a Francis Greenway-designed factory built to accommodate 300 was holding 1,200 women, who worked from dawn to dusk on tasks that included stone breaking, spinning, needlework and laundry. Unlike their male counterparts, they were spared the lash. But they were not spared solitary confinement or the indignity of being gagged or having their head shaved for serious misconduct. Parramatta hosted Australia's first act of industrial defiance in 1827, when hundreds of convict women rioted over food.

That the majority managed to stay sane and build a new life fascinates curator Hendriksen. In her own dark times, she says, she draws inspiration from the convict women, who would have thumbed their nose at authority and used humor and friendship to ward off despair. Writing for the catalog, she wonders why she and others are so interested in the convicts' stories: "Is it a sense of impotence of our effect, of our power to act in the world in a meaningful way? Are these women's stories a life affirmation to counteract the existential abyss that can sometimes fill our horizons in our time?" For Maureen Upfold, the message is simpler: Know who you are and where you came from, and don't waste a second being ashamed of what you find out.