Activity

While today’s children are serious about Sugar Plum fairies and Santa Claus, the ideas of ten year previous Mary Wade should have been vastly totally different. At Christmastime in 1789, Mary was the youngest convict aboard a ship sure for Australia: certainly one of 2 hundred and fifty or so girls, half method to a strange land. Their female convict ship The Lady Juliana, a part of the Second Fleet, had set sail from Portsmouth in July.

Months earlier Mary, (born in England in 1778), had been arrested and found guilty of stealing one other child’s garments. Her dying sentence, commuted to transportation for life, was bitter candy. Mary had escaped the gallows but would never see her household once more. She spent the spring of 1789 in horrendous circumstances at Newgate Prison. Mary was one of fifty girls fed bread and water in a cell that had neither beds nor lavatories. However, as soon as aboard The Lady Juliana, her scenario improved. All convicts have been fairly fed and given heat beds. Only five ladies and two youngsters died through the eleven month voyage and the condition of those who arrived within the colony in 1790, had improved.

To relieve the strain on Sydney Cove, Governor Phillip sent many new arrivals together with Mary, to a place described by Captain Cook as, ‘a Paradise’ – Norfolk Island. There, at age fourteen, Mary gave birth to a daughter. She had two more children with emancipated Irish transportee, Teague Harrigan and by 1806, the household was dwelling in a tent on the banks of the Tank stream in Sydney. Harrigan joined a whaling ship but by no means returned.

By 1809, Mary had married and set up house close to the Hawkesbury River with convict Jonathan Brooker. Emancipated circa 1812, the pair took possession of a thirty acre farm in Airds, Campbelltown and lived happily until Harrigan’s demise in 1833. Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict in 1859, eighty 12 months previous Mary died at home. She had given delivery to twenty one youngsters. In her lifetime, her household had grown to incorporate five generations and over 300 descendants. Now, Mary’s descendants quantity within the tens of 1000’s, including Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia.

At Christmastime in 1789, ten year previous convict Mary Wade was facing an unsure future. Today, she is recognized as considered one of Australia’s founding moms.