By Michaela Ann Cameron

Part of “Life and Death at the Parramatta Female Factory: The St. John’s Dataset,” a dual publication on St. John’s Online’s sister-site The Female Factory Online.

On the basis of current knowledge, a grand total of 561 confirmed factory deaths were registered in the parish of St. John’s, Parramatta. According to the St. John’s dataset alone, the vast majority of those confirmed Factory deaths (86%) were children—a statistic that was, admittedly, predictable given the poor conditions in the Factory combined with a generally lower survival rate for infants in the nineteenth century, regardless of status.

But the Factory children were especially at risk, as newspaper reports of coronial inquests relating to the Female Factory reveal.

In June 1832, for instance, a reader of The Sydney Monitor going by the nom de plume ‘JUSTITIA’ wrote to the Editor requesting that readers be ‘furnish[ed] with the necessary information’ regarding a recent inquest.[1] The inquest had been ‘on the body of a male child, six weeks old, that had been born within [the Factory’s] walls, and whose death, if not occasioned, was accelerated by its being infected with a disease, which delicacy forbids me to name.’[2] The child was Charles Dixon, who died at the Factory and was buried in the parish of St. John’s on 10 June 1832 with a recorded age of 45 days, the son of convict Ann Dixon per Grenada (4) (1827).[3] The disease that so offended JUSTITIA’s delicacy was probably congenital syphilis:

It appeared in evidence, that the mother of the child, who is a married woman, had been infected with the disease alluded to, some time previously to her delivery, and that in consequence of her being enceinte, she did, on her re-admission to the Factory, receive the same medical treatment which other patients, labouring under a similar disease do; that the child appeared healthy at its birth, and for five or six days afterwards; that there then appeared certain indications, that the deceased had become infected with the mother’s disease, and that the mother was allowed to suckle the deceased from its birth up to the time of its death. The question I have now to propose is—is it usual in medical practice, to allow a mother infected with the disease in question, to suckle her infant?[4]

Just two days after Charles’s burial, James Connell also died at the Factory aged four months and three weeks.[5] Not so inclined to mince his words as the delicate ‘JUSTITIA,’ the journalist for The Sydney Gazette bluntly stated that Connell’s mother had been ‘infected with the itch,’ (the slang term for genital scabies), ‘which was caught by the child from her about three weeks ago, since which period he lingered in excessive pain, accompanied at intervals, with strong convulsions, and expired on the evening of Sunday last.’[6] Scabies is not fatal in infants nor does it appear to be associated with seizures, so the other symptoms the child displayed were probably the result of his mother also being unwittingly infected with a second, more dangerous venereal disease, colloquially known as ‘the pox’ (syphilis), which when passed on from a mother to a child in utero results in congenital syphilis and is known to cause miscarriage and stillbirth, seizures and death in newborns, as well as skeletal and facial deformities, deafness and blindness and other health complications in those who do survive infancy. Although ‘several women and children in the factory were labouring under the same disease’ (the author was perhaps referring here to the ‘itch’ rather than the ‘pox’), ‘they were confined in the same ward with other females who were not infected with it, but were under medical treatment for various other complaints.’[7]

At Connell’s subsequent inquest, the Jury viewed his ‘emaciated’ remains, which had been ‘laid out…from 6 o’clock Sunday evening till half past eleven on Tuesday morning…in the lying-in-ward,’ a roughly ‘20 feet by 15 wide’ room ‘where numbers of sick females were lying,’ specifically ‘nine women and their infants.’[8] The Jury expressed ‘their great disapprobation of women infected with this loathsome disease being confined in the same ward with others who are free from it,’ and requested that they ‘be kept apart,’ whilst likewise recommending that ‘dead bodies should, in future, be removed to their proper place—the dead-house, which now seems to be used for some other purpose—and not suffered to remain in the sick-room, as had been the case in this instance.’[9] The Jury returned a verdict of ‘Died by the visitation of God,’ and JUSTITIA, one of the Jurors, picked up his pen a third time, demanding, à la Marsden, that the authorities employ better medical practices, properly utilise the dead-house already on-site, improve conditions and provide more accommodation if need be ‘in this already large pile of buildings’ for the women and especially the children of the Factory who appeared doomed to have their names added ‘to the long lists of infants that die in this prison.’[10] By the end of the month, Elizabeth Flood, aged two years, also joined that long list, having died of ‘the worm fever,’ the obsolete medical term for febrile children when infested with intestinal worms.[11]

Expressed as a figure rather than a percentage, current statistics provide us with 481 children who are known to have died while in custody at the Parramatta Female Factory between 1821 and 1848, and went on to have their burials registered in the parish of St. John’s, Parramatta. Although their individual stories would not reach the newspapers, most if not all likely suffered similar fates as Dixon, Connell and Flood. Emphatically, this figure of 481 excludes a further 45 children who are ‘tentative inclusions’ in the ‘Child Burials’ list, as they are ‘ambiguous’ and require further research. Most of those ‘tentative inclusions’ were logged between 1822 and 1826, a period for which we have no explicit references to the Factory in relation to child burials, as the graph immediately below shows:

Even so, what these incomplete statistics indicate is that the gender ratio was roughly even, with 246 of those confirmed burials being female children and 235 being male children, or to express it as a percentage, 51% female to 49% male:

This ratio remains steady, even as we examine the gender of child burials on a year by year basis at the Factory in the parish:

As Marsden feared, far too many of the children whose names appeared on the Factory baptism list ended up on the Factory burial list. In St. John’s alone, 156 (35%) of the 451 baptisms recorded resulted in a St. John’s burial. Were we to have a complete set of Factory baptisms and burials from across the various parishes, that statistic of 35% would undoubtedly be much higher. Among the 156 children who are verified as having appeared on both the St. John’s baptisms and burials lists, often the baptism date proved to be tellingly close to the date of the child’s passing—a hint that the chaplain hastened to the Factory to christen the child lest they depart this life without receiving this blessing.

Ages recorded at death for all the Child Burials range from merely hours old, days or weeks, to a year or 18 months in most cases, but there were a few recorded as old as two and four.

Status afforded children no special protection against the dangers of early childhood in the colony within the Factory environment. Two Kingaby girls, Clarissa and Maria Sarah, would die at the Factory in infancy during their parents’ tenure as Superintendent and Matron of the Factory.[12] In addition, although it is unclear whether either child was actually residing at the Factory at the time of their deaths, John Ford (II), noted as the son of John Ford (I), a Factory Overseer, died aged five months, while Harriet Tuckwell, sister of the previously mentioned Lucy, and daughter of Factory Superintendent and Secretary William Tuckwell and wife Elizabeth, passed away aged just three months.[13]

A smaller portion of the confirmed Factory burials in the parish of St. John’s, Parramatta, of course, belong to convicts. Current statistics of confirmed Factory burials provide us with the names of 74 convicts who died whilst in custody at the Parramatta Female Factory.

The following pie chart and table provide statistics regarding the origin of convicts who died whilst serving a custodial sentence at the Factory and whose burials were subsequently registered in the St. John’s parish register. Though a set of 74 provides us with only a very small cross-section of the convict population, the predominantly English and Irish demographic is probably fairly representative of the Female Factory population specifically and the wider population of the Colony of New South Wales generally.

Not surprisingly, given the setting of the ‘Female’ Factory, 73 of these convicts were female and only one was male: Thomas Sharp Burkitt per England (1) (1826). Regarding the exceptional male convict burial, Burkitt, the parish register actually had nothing to say about his Factory association whatsoever, remarking only that he died in ‘Hospital.’[14] While many such markings actually indicate a death at the nearby Parramatta Colonial Hospital, this was not the case with Burkitt: the Convict Death Register more informatively notes ‘Burkitt, Thos. S’ [sic] died on 25 October 1836, and was ‘l[ate] of Fem[ale] Fac[tor]y Hos[pita]l, Parramatta, M. Anderson, Surgeon.’[15] So why was Burkitt at the Factory? Curiously, Burkitt, a clerk and servant in his pre-convict life, had received his Certificate of Freedom four years earlier in 1832, but was gaoled again for undisclosed reasons on 30 December 1835 and forwarded along with a large number of fellow prisoners to the ‘Parramatta Stockade’ the following day.[16] Perhaps Burkitt and company had all been sent to the stockade together that day to work as convict labourers on the new Parramatta Gaol, which began construction in 1835. In any case, his transfer to the stockade certainly places him in a location that was but a stone’s throw from where his life would end only ten months later in the Parramatta Female Factory hospital under the care of the surgeon Dr. Matthew Anderson.[17] It may be that Burkitt suffered some sort of accident on site at the stockade, and was rushed to the nearest hospital for medical aid, to no avail.

For the female convicts on our list of custodial deaths registered in St. John’s parish, we rarely learn what befell them specifically, because not every burial has a corresponding coronial inquest that received significant column inches in the newspapers (and there was an allegation in March 1831 by a member of the public that not every Factory death received the requisite coronial investigation at all).[18] Even when inquests were reported by journalists, the deceased Factory women often remained anonymous.[19] From the few inquests that are available in the ‘Coronial Inquests’ index, though, some of which involved deceased people who went on to be buried in the parish of St. John’s, we obtain a more general sense of the kinds of things that afflicted them and ultimately stole their lives.

For Anne Russell per Elizabeth II (1828), the dangers of the long sea voyage to the colony were presumably enough to finish her. The inquest found that she ‘arrived at Parramatta by the boat, was unable to stand, and had to be conveyed in a cart to the Factory, where she survived just a few hours.’[20] We can only wonder what mysteriously struck down Judith and Mary, two young Irish women surnamed Walsh, possibly sisters, aged 29 and 19 respectively, who both died at the Factory within two days of each other, almost a year to the day since they disembarked from the City of Edinburgh I (1828).[21] Another Factory inquest that reached the newspaper involved a suspected ‘Death by starvation’ in 1826, which was then corrected to ‘consumption,’ perhaps because it genuinely was found to be the more accurate diagnosis once Mr. Carter and Dr. Harris made a ‘minute inquiry into the economy of the Factory,’ or, more conspiratorially, because it covered up improper practices at the Factory.[22] Despite accepting the less scandalous diagnosis of consumption, the reporter also noted that Commissioners had found the Factory was ‘a bad system generally’ in need of reform.[23]

Newspapermen, however, were not universally sympathetic to the plight of the Factory women.

Not even the sudden death of Harriet Gilbert aka Harriet Collins per Competitor (1828), servant to Mrs SMYTH, the Matron of the Factory, from a suspected stroke could save the departed from a Sydney Morning Herald columnist’s snide remarks about her lack of work ethic.[24] The unfeeling reporter quipped: ‘as it appeared in evidence that the deceased had little else to do than to assist Mrs. SMYTH’s seven or eight other servants to do nothing, her work could have done her little harm.’[25]

Jane Costello is one of the unusual characters who pop up on occasion in the St. John’s Factory dataset, because she had sailed not as a convict but as a free person aboard the convict ship Thomas Harrison (1836), only to apparently fall afoul of the law and become an inmate of the Factory.[26] When the Sydney Free Press covered her inquest, though, there was no mention of her having arrived free; instead, like Harriet Gilbert, 21-year-old Jane Costello, as an ex-inmate of the Factory, was painted in the most unfavourable light; specifically as ‘an habitual drunkard’ who was, ‘when laboring [sic] under the effects of her dreadful propensity,…subject to fits, and was at such times unconscious of her acts.’[27] Allegedly, following one month’s confinement in the Factory, Costello had ‘hardly been liberated a day, when she returned to her old habits. The excessive use of raw rum, added to the heat of the weather, and the circumstance of her having been deprived of all stimulants for a month, entirely deprived her of reason, and proved conducive to turn her mental faculties so far, as to lead her to plunge herself into the river close to the town.’[28]

The best efforts of a private in the 80^th regiment who witnessed ‘her rash act, and used every praiseworthy exertion to save her’ proved in vain, and Costello drowned, the inquest concluded, as a result of ‘acting under a temporary deprivation of reason.’[29] Costello may have been an alcoholic, as the coroner so confidently declared and the newspaper dutifully reported—goodness knows that a month in the Factory would have provided her with ample reason to drink herself into a stupor at the first opportunity! And she would not be the first or last to think a swim was a jolly good idea after getting well and truly ‘tossicated’ [sic] on a hot day.[30] At the same time, this was the age of the temperance movement, when newspapers were all too ready to pounce on a story of the evils of alcohol.[31] In the absence of a full account of her inquest, (we only have the summary of the coronial finding and the newspaper’s rendition), and no indication that the information relayed came from anyone who knew her well, therefore, one pauses to consider: what if some or even much of what was said of Costello was merely the result of ‘respectable’ onlookers who barely knew her seeing her conduct and assuming the worst of a newly-released Factory inmate?[32] Whatever brought Jane Costello to her tragic and premature end, the young woman was laid to rest the following day, on 16 November 1841, with her true age of 21 years recorded, and her name was added to the list of the Factory’s ex-inmates whose burials were registered in the parish of St. John’s.[33]

Mental illness could just as easily have played a part in Jane Costello’s untimely demise, as it allegedly did for Maria Murray and, no doubt, many other Factory women.[34] In 1834, Murray ‘appeared very ill’ whilst confiding in a fellow servant ‘that her heart was breaking’ and ‘expired’ just twenty minutes later.[35] The Sydney Gazette recounted that Murray had ‘been sent to the factory, and fretted at the consideration of having lost her hair, which afflicted her very much.’[36] Of course, merely ‘fretting’ would not have caused her to die so suddenly, so if there was a link, it may have been that she starved herself in her distressed state, probably not merely over the loss of her hair but an accumulation of traumatic experiences associated with convict life, or ingested something poisonous; if so, (and I should note the inquest did not find evidence of poison), Murray’s actions would have been a permanent solution to a very temporary problem, since all she had to do was wait for her hair to grow back. In any case, a week later, her death had evidently inspired an article entitled ‘Cutting of Womens Hair in the Factory’[37]; in it, the columnist railed against ‘The abominable system of depriving women of their greatest ornament, the hair, on being sentenced, aye even for three days to the third class of the Factory’ as a way of visibly leaving a long-lasting trace of their shameful conduct and punishment, which ‘came in vogue with many other like abominations during the reign of terror under Darling,’ yet had failed to effect any reformation of their conduct.[38] ‘[F]rom the most remote antiquity to the present day; in every quarter of the globe, and among all races of mankind, the hair of woman has been her greatest pride, esteemed and cherished as such; then deprive her of it by force, under the plea of reforming her, and what must be the result but desperate and reckless conduct…Other punishments may reform, but this totally places her out of the pale…Oh, reform it altogether.’[39] A more fitting and humane punishment for the Factory’s third-class or ‘prison-class’ inmates, the author suggested, was solitary confinement! Unfortunately, this wish was granted, as solitary cells were constructed at the Factory only four years later and, initially, those on the lower level breached British penitentiary rules by being completely ‘dark cells.’[40]

Complications during pregnancy and during or after childbirth were undoubtedly also major causes of death among the Factory women who died in custody, given the high number of children born to convict women there in the country’s first dedicated women’s hospital at a time when prenatal care and life saving medical interventions were limited. The risks of pregnancy in the nineteenth century exacerbated by an overcrowded penitentiary in a far flung penal colony, with the addition of compromised immune systems following periods of incarceration in filthy gaols and on long sea voyages were common problems that likely played a role in the demise of a very uncommon convict: the French-speaking Mauritian Josephine Mercelin.

Mercelin was pregnant when she disembarked from the Dart (1833) on 31 December 1833, and it was ‘[p]resumably…on this account that she ended up in the Female Factory at Parramatta rather than being immediately engaged for domestic service, which was the usual fate of transported female convicts.’[41] The St. John’s parish register shows Josephine died at the Factory only six months later, roughly within the timeframe she would have been either in the advanced stages of pregnancy or giving birth, if her pregnancy had indeed progressed that far.[42] After all, assuming her recorded age of 38 is correct, even by today’s standards, this would have been a high risk pregnancy, adding weight to the theory that her death was related to pregnancy or childbirth. Notably, though, a baby surnamed Mercelin is absent from the parish register’s baptisms and burials, but may appear in another parish if the child did, by some miracle, survive birth.

Free immigrants who found themselves at the Factory hospital likewise appear to have died from complications relating to childbirth. Among them were mother and child Mary and Lucy Leeche, who died at the Factory and were buried within days of each other in the parish of St. John’s.[43] Twenty-two-year-old Charlotte Quiggan, a free bounty immigrant who arrived in May 1839 per Formosa (1839), suffered the same fate: after giving birth at the Factory she died there on 13 December 1839, followed by her newborn and newly baptised son John seven days later.[44]

As the following graph makes plain, the overwhelming majority of convict women’s deaths at the Factory in the St. John’s register were of women of reproductive age (approximately 15–49 years). While this may add weight to the theory that childbirth was probably a major cause of death, it is not outright confirmation. By the same logic, these women would also have been likely to have contracted and died from a venereal disease such as syphilis; also, the female convict population would have been unnaturally comprised of mostly women of childbearing age anyway since, as others have argued, convict women were likely not merely arbitrarily punished with transportation but deliberately selected for it over incarceration in their native clime on the basis of possessing trades and skills needed in the colony, as well as for their perceived childbearing ability in a colony where the gender ratio had been significantly out of balance, that is, predominantly male, since the First Fleet’s arrival. Another noteworthy point to be made here on the subject of age is that 21 years old was the ‘age of majority’ at the time, so seven of the 73 female convicts in the table below were legally ‘minors’ at the time of their deaths in the Parramatta Female Factory.[45]

While the St. John’s burial register can only ever offer a cross-section of the Factory statistics, and the present dataset is incomplete in itself, we cannot help but notice the most lethal periods logged in its records. The 1830s emerges as the worst time to have been a Female Factory inmate, with 419 burials taking place in that decade alone; a whopping 75% of all 561 known Factory burials logged at St. John’s between 1821 and 1848—the entire period during which the second Parramatta Female Factory was in operation at its Fleet Street site in North Parramatta. The spike in these burial figures correlates with the rising statistics of the overall Factory population in the 1830s and early 1840s, which reveal how unbearably overcrowded the Factory had become in this period. The year 1835 specifically goes down in St. John’s parish history as both the most lethal at the Factory overall, with a total of 84 confirmed Factory burials in St. John’s records, and the most lethal for Factory children specifically, who made up 81 of those burials. Coincidentally or otherwise, this was a year when there was an outbreak of an illness that appeared to some medical practitioners to be measles, although there was considerable disagreement about the identification of the disease, with some believing it may have been scarlet fever.[46] At any rate, the measles-like disease was particularly and indiscriminately destructive to children of all social classes and among Aboriginal communities.[47] For the convict element of the Factory, though, 1829 had the highest number of burials at St. John’s, with ten women’s burials that year alone, followed closely by 1830 and 1833, which both recorded 9 burials each. Other notable years regarding St. John’s Factory burials include 1836, with a total of 68 burials and 1833, with a total of 66. The year 1834 also gets a dishonourable mention with 49 burials. In the 1840s, the worst years for the Factory on record at St. John’s were 1841, with 39 burials, and 1842 with 32 burials. A mere inkling of what might have caused such a high number of deaths in this period comes from a single, brief line, buried deep in a ‘Summary of Public Intelligence’ in the Sydney Gazette on 24 July 1841, that ‘the fever prevails in the Female Factory, to a considerable extent,’ but it is exceedingly rare to find any open commentary on the illnesses that periodically invaded the Factory and were likely responsible for carrying off so many of its inmates to premature graves.[48]

As we look upon the sheer numbers of Factory burials recorded at St. John’s, we obtain a greater sense of just how much suffering and death was contained within the Factory walls, and why ‘JUSTITIA’ had been so outraged and Marsden, who observed even more of it firsthand, was seemingly troubled by it to the very end. On his own deathbed in May 1838, Marsden’s mind reportedly ‘wandered amongst the scenes to which his life had been devoted, and he uttered a few incoherent expressions about the factory, the orphan school, and the New Zealand mission.’[49] Perhaps even then he was still thinking, in his delirium, ‘A little longer, yet a little longer…’ was needed for him to try to elevate the most vulnerable members of his parish in this world, the women and children of the Factory and Orphan School, so their souls—and his—may be better prepared for the next one.[50]

But countless more women and children would be subjected to the worst that the Factory system had to offer for another ten years after Marsden’s death: the last Factory death recorded in the parish of St. John’s, Parramatta, being the dubious honour of Sarah Adams, a ‘Prisoner’s Child,’ who was buried 5 January 1848.[51]

Yet, even as we view these statistical visualisations, we must bear in mind the more shocking reality that these figures, staggering as they are, do not constitute a full dataset of Factory-related deaths: they are only the Factory deaths that happened to be registered in the parish of St. John’s, Parramatta. There is no single volume containing all Factory deaths. As is the case with the Factory data in general, the burial data was cast to the four winds, because while Marsden and other St. John’s incumbents, like H. H. Bobart, dealt with the majority of Factory burials, there were a number of visiting chaplains who officiated then returned to their own parish and recorded the death in their local parish register.

In fact, even the St. John’s register does not supply a complete Factory subdataset in its own right, for a number of reasons.

First, the information recorded in the register was not consistent over time. From the 1830s onwards, Factory burials were usually explicitly recorded in the St. John’s register, with only a few exceptions resulting from multiple chaplains recording information in the St. John’s register in an idiosyncratic way. In the 1820s, by contrast, the note ‘Factory’ is, for the most part, frustratingly absent from the burial entries. While other details that typically featured in later, verified Factory burials are present in those ‘ambiguous’ earlier entries of the 1820s, for example the notes ‘Convict,’ ‘Prisoner’ or, in the case of children’s burials, ‘Convict’s child,’ and therefore strongly indicate the possibility of a Factory burial, such details in isolation are not automatic proof of a Factory-related burial. More extensive research beyond what the burial register has to offer, cross-referencing the burial with other dispersed fragments of evidence, including the convict or child’s mother’s date of arrival in the colony, any gaol admission records she may have had, police reports and coronial inquests covered in colonial newspapers and even the St. John’s baptism register, can help to determine whether the individual, be it an infant or an adult, was likely a Factory inmate at the time of his or her demise. Until such extensive research can be completed for each and every ambiguous burial, the statistics provided here can only reflect the burials that were explicitly recorded in the register as ‘Factory’ burials and a minority that have been otherwise verified with such time-consuming research to date.

Even when an entry is clearly marked as a ‘Factory’ burial, the rest of the information it supplies about the individual may be unreliable, preventing us from gaining accurate and more detailed statistical insights into age, gender and status across the entire dataset. For example, one must contend with the difficulty of positively identifying the individual in the burial register in the first place. Many names were spelt rather ‘creatively’ by the scribe to the point of being unrecognisable, while those with common names, aliases and possibly incorrect ship details supplied by an informant at the time of death continue to evade identification. Cross-referencing children’s burial entries with the baptism entries reveals that a number of Factory children were baptised or buried under their mother’s name, sometimes obscuring the very gender of the child in question. One chaplain recorded a number of Factory mothers merely as ‘Spinsters,’ and in an institution where both convicts and free women gave birth, this falls well short of providing sufficient information to determine a reliable set of statistics regarding status. Again, further research is required in such cases before we will have a definitive set of statistics for this dataset.

The statistics supplied in this dataset, therefore, will be revised periodically to reflect any new information gleaned from ongoing research. In the meantime, imperfect and incomplete as this dataset must be at present, there is much to be gained from the improved accessibility of the St. John’s Factory dataset by virtue of having been transcribed, digitised and shared on a non-commercial, open access platform, enabling the previously separate Factory baptisms and Factory burials to be brought into alignment through research, standardised spelling and verification of identities—a painstaking, time consuming and laborious process that allows Factory babies to be digitally reunited with their Factory mothers at long last.

<< PART I     ♦       CONTENTS >>

Citation

Michaela Ann Cameron, “Life and Death at the Parramatta Female Factory: The St. John’s Dataset Part II: Deaths in Custody,” (Version 1.0), St. John’s Online, (2018), https://stjohnsonline.org/female-factory/part-ii-deaths-in-custody/, accessed [insert current date].

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NOTES

[1] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: CHARLES DIXON,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18320613/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[2] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: CHARLES DIXON,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18320613/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[3] Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of CHARLES DIXON,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1832/bur18320610/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[4] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: CHARLES DIXON,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18320613/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[5] Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of JAMES CONNELL,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1832/bur18320612/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[6] For more on the use of slang to represent different types of venereal disease see Noelle Gallagher, Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018); Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Letter to the Editor: Coronial Inquest of JAMES CONNELL,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18320620/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[7] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: JAMES CONNELL,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18320706/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[8] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Letter to the Editor: Coronial Inquest of JAMES CONNELL,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18320620/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[9] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: JAMES CONNELL,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18320706/, accessed 22 March 2018; Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Letter to the Editor: Coronial Inquest of JAMES CONNELL,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18320616/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[10] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Letter to the Editor: Coronial Inquest of JAMES CONNELL,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18320620/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[11] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: ELIZABETH FLOOD,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/coronial-inquests/c18320630/, accessed 22 March 2018; Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of ELIZABETH HOOD [sic],” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1832/bur18320626/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[12] Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of CLARISSA KINGABY,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1834/bur18341112/, accessed 22 March 2018; Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of MARIA SARAH KINGABY,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1833/bur18330415/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[13] Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of JOHN FORD,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1829/bur18290618/, accessed 22 March 2018; St. John’s Online, (stjohnsonline.org), “Burial of HARRIET TUCKWELL,” https://stjohnsonline.org/burials/year-1828/bur18280824/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[14] Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of THOMAS BURKET [sic],” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1836/bur18361027/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[15] New South Wales Government, Convict Death Register, Series: 12213; Reel: 690, (State Records Authority of New South Wales, Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia).

[16] New South Wales Government, Gaol Description and Entrance Books, 1818–1930, Item: 4/6531; Roll: 174, (State Archives of New South Wales, Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia).

[17] The stockade, also known as the ‘New Gaol Stockade’ is believed to have been captured in an 1846 plan as a structure located to the south of the Parramatta Gaol. See TKD Architects (Tanner Kibble Denton), Parramatta North Historic Sites Consolidated Conservation Management Plan: Part B—Norma Parker Centre/Kamball Site, Heritage Significance Assessment, prepared for UrbanGrowth NSW, Issue: E; Project Number: 13 0934,(March 2017), f.n. 151, p. 160.

[18] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Unidentified Women,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18310304-2/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[19] See, for example, one notable ‘anonymous’ case in Catie Gilchrist, “Mystery Always Begets Suspicion Defending the Open and Public Nature of the Coronial Inquest,” Female Factory Online, (2018), accessed 16 September 2018.

[20] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: ANNE RUSSELL,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/coronial-inquests/c18280130/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[21] Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of JUDITH WALSH,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1829/bur18291116/, accessed 22 March 2018; Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of MARY WALSH,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1829/bur18291118/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[22] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: Unidentified Woman,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/coronial-inquests/c18260316/, accessed 22 March 2018. For more on Dr. Harris, see Alexander Cameron-Smith, “‘A Raw Ignorant Boy’: John Harris, Esquire,” St. John’s Online, (2020), https://stjohnsonline.org/bio/john-harris/, accessed 30 July 2022.

[23] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: Unidentified Woman,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/coronial-inquests/c18260316/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[24] St. John’s Online, (stjohnsonline.org), “Burial of HARRIET GILBERT or COLLINS,” https://stjohnsonline.org/burials/year-1844/bur18440530-2/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[25] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: HARRIET GILBERT,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/coronial-inquests/c18440604/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[26] Jane Costello née Hammond’s status as a free person aboard the convict ship was gleaned from the ship’s Medical Journal: Henry Gordon Brock, M.D., Surgeon, “Journal of His Majesty’s Female Convict Ship Thomas Harrison between the 25^th day of January 1836 and the 23 day of June 1836,” Admiralty and Predecessors: Office of the Director General of the Medical Department of the Navy and Predecessors: Medical Journals (ADM 101, 804 bundles and volumes). Records of Medical and Prisoner of War Departments. Records of the Admiralty, Naval Forces, Royal Marines, Coastguard, and related bodies, (The National Archives. Kew, Richmond, Surrey), pp. 10, 35. The only evidence obtained thus far of her status as a recent inmate of the Female Factory, however, is the newspaper reporting her death and inquest, which notes that she had just been released from a one-month stint in the Factory: Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: Jane COSTELLO aka JANE HAMMOND,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/coronial-inquests/c18411120/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[27] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: Jane COSTELLO aka JANE HAMMOND,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/coronial-inquests/c18411120/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[28] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: Jane COSTELLO aka JANE HAMMOND,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/coronial-inquests/c18411120/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[29] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: Jane COSTELLO aka JANE HAMMOND,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/coronial-inquests/c18411120/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[30] The ‘tossicated’ reference is a humours phonetic rendering of ‘intoxicated’ and comes from the police report of another Female Factory inmate: “POLICE INCIDENTS,” The Australian (Sydney, NSW : 1824 – 1848), Saturday 3 June 1826, p. 3.

[31] Starling writes, “The temperance movement emerged in the early nineteenth century as a result of concerns that had been building up for almost a century about the adverse social and moral effects of distilled spirits…In Sydney, the first preliminary meeting with a view to establishing a temperance society occurred in October 1833, with the first official meeting in 1834.” Nicole Starling, “‘Victims of Intemperance’: Status Politics and Clerical Drunkenness in the Second-Wave Temperance Societies of Colonial Sydney,” Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 53, No. 1 (2022): 46 doi: 10.1080/1031461X.2021.1999995.

[32] “Jane CASTELLO [sic]; [Died] 16 November 1841, Parramatta; [Finding]: Drowned herself while Intox.d [sic],” in New South Wales Government, Registers of Coroners’ Inquests and Magisterial Inquiries, 1834–1942, Series: 2921; Item: 4/6612; Roll: 343, (State Records Authority of New South Wales, Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia).

[33] Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of JANE COSTELLO,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1841/bur18411116-2/, accessed 22 March 2018; see also St. John’s Online, (stjohnsonline.org), “Burial of JANE COSTELLO,” https://stjohnsonline.org/burials/year-1841/bur18411116-2/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[34] In 1830, 55-year-old Emma Armstrong could not bear the thought of a six-month stint in the Factory’s third class and attempted to hang herself ‘by fastening a silk handkerchief to a cross bar over the…door, at the other end making a sailor’s know and then mounting a bucket, which enabled her to slip the noose over her head’ before kicking the bucket away.’ A ‘fellow prisoner’ raised the alarm and a sentinel ‘cut the silken destroyer of life’ and ‘down plopped the deluded creature’ still ‘in the land of the living.’ See Female Factory Online (https://femalefactoryonline.org/, 2018), 20 August 1830, “ATTEMPT AT SUICIDE,” (p18300820), https://femalefactoryonline.org/law-reports/p18300820/, p. 3.

[35] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: MARIA MURRAY,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/coronial-inquests/c18340417/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[36] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Coronial Inquest: MARIA MURRAY,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/coronial-inquests/c18340417/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[37] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Report: Cutting of Women’s Hair in the Factory,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18340425/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[38] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Report: Cutting of Women’s Hair in the Factory,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18340425/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[39] Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Report: Cutting of Women’s Hair in the Factory,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18340425/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[40] Female Factory Online (https://femalefactoryonline.org/, 2018), 20 December 1838, report on Female Factory, (r18381220), https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18381220/, accessed 22 March 2018; Female Factory Online (https://femalefactoryonline.org/, 2018), 25 April 1839, report on Female Factory, (r18390425), https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18390425/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[41] Briony Neilson, “Josephine Mercelin: Convicts, Slaves and the Global Entanglements of New South Wales and Mauritius,” St. John’s Online (2019), https://stjohnsonline.org/bio/josephine-mercelin/, accessed 27 July 2022.

[42] Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of JOSEPHINE MERCELIN,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1834/bur18340606/, accessed 27 July 2022; St. John’s Online, (stjohnsonline.org), “Burial of JOSEPHINE MERCELIN,” https://stjohnsonline.org/burials/year-1834/bur18340606/, accessed 27 July 2022.

[43] Alexander Cameron-Smith, “‘The Indifferent Characters of Many of the Females’: Mary Leeche and Colonial Controversy in the 1830s,” St. John’s Online, (2021), https://stjohnsonline.org/bio/mary-leeche/, accessed 27 July 2022; also published on Female Factory Online, (2021), https://femalefactoryonline.org/bio/mary-leeche/, accessed 27 July 2022; Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of MARY LEECHE,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1834/bur18341203/, accessed 22 March 2018; Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of LUCY LEECHE,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1834/bur18341130/, accessed 22 March 2018. See also Michaela Ann Cameron, “Immigrant Burials,” Female Factory Online (2022), https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/immigrants/, accessed 22 March 2018.

[44] Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of CHARLOTTE QUIGGAN,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1839/bur18391214-2/, accessed

22 March 2018; Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of JOHN QUIGGAN,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1839/bur18391220-2/, accessed 22 March 2018. See also Michaela Ann Cameron, “Immigrant Burials,” Female Factory Online (2022), https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/immigrants/, accessed 22 March 2018. For a news article on the arrival of the Formosa and some statistics on births and deaths during the passage, see “The Formosa…,” The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia), Wednesday 22 May 1839, p. 2.

[45] For a discussion of the competing colonial attitudes towards ‘minors’, the particular challenges to this in the colonial setting, and doli incapax see Michael Belcher, [PhD Diss.], “The Child in New South Wales Society: 1820 to 1837,” (Armidale: University of New England, 1982), pp. 270–77.

[46] “The Gleaner. (From the Times of Tuesday),” The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (NSW : 1803 – 1842), Thursday 25 December 1834, p. 2; C. Smith, “To the Editor of the Australian,” The Australian (Sydney, NSW : 1824 – 1848), Friday 26 December 1834, p. 3; “‘Vox Populi—vox Dei.’ The Epidemic,” The Australian (Sydney, NSW : 1824 – 1848), Tuesday 30 December 1834, p. 2; “The Mirror of the Times,” The Sydney Times (NSW : 1834 – 1838), Friday 2 January 1835, p. 2; “The Faculty,” The Sydney Times (NSW : 1834 – 1838), Friday 9 January 1835, p. 2; “Original Correspondence. The Faculty. Measles or not Measles,” The Sydney Times (NSW : 1834 – 1838), Tuesday 13 January 1835, p. 3; Medicus, “To the Editor of the Colonist,” The Colonist (Sydney, NSW : 1835 – 1840), Thursday 15 January 1835, p. 2; “Measles,” The Colonist (Sydney, NSW : 1835 – 1840), Thursday 22 January 1835, p. 3; “The Faculty,” The Sydney Times (NSW : 1834 – 1838), Friday 23 January 1835, p. 2; “Death,” The Sydney Herald (NSW : 1831 – 1842), Thursday 26 February 1835, p. 3;  “Bathurst,” The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (NSW : 1803 – 1842), Thursday 23 April 1835, p. 2; “Died,” The Tasmanian (Hobart Town, Tas. : 1827 – 1839), Friday 8 May 1835, p. 7; “No title,” The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (NSW : 1803 – 1842), Saturday 4 July 1835, p. 3. See also Alexander Cameron-Smith, “‘The Indifferent Characters of Many of the Females’: Mary Leeche and Colonial Controversy in the 1830s,” St. John’s Online, (2021), https://stjohnsonline.org/bio/mary-leeche/, accessed 27 July 2022.

[47] Alexander Cameron-Smith, “‘The Indifferent Characters of Many of the Females’: Mary Leeche and Colonial Controversy in the 1830s,” St. John’s Online, (2021), https://stjohnsonline.org/bio/mary-leeche/, accessed 27 July 2022.

[48] “Summary of Public Intelligence,” The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (NSW : 1803 – 1842), Saturday 24 July 1841, p. 2.

[49] John Buxton Marsden, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales: and of his Early Connexion with the Missions to New Zealand and Tahiti, (London: Religious Tract Society, 1858), p. 275.

[50] John Buxton Marsden, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, Senior Chaplain of New South Wales: and of his Early Connexion with the Missions to New Zealand and Tahiti, (London: Religious Tract Society, 1858), p. 162.

[51] Female Factory Online, (femalefactoryonline.org), “Burial of SARAH ADAMS,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/burials/year-1848/bur18480105-2/, accessed 22 March 2018.

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