Authors’ Note

The Parramatta Female Factory was the template for eleven similar factories which operated around Australia during the colonial period. Conceived as a means of keeping men and women separate in a society where one group greatly outnumbered the other, the Factory was also supposed to embellish the colony’s coffers through the work of the women detained there. Far more than a factory, though, it was also a marriage and employment bureau. And for many women, particularly those in the Third Class, it was a place of punishment.

The Factory went through a few iterations, and during the period in which this book is set the second Female Factory was in operation. Its buildings still stand on land which is now part of Cumberland Hospital.

Around 5000 women went through the Parramatta Female Factory over the years, including Meg’s great-great grandmother Mary Shields, who was transported from Limerick for stealing clothing. It is estimated that as many as one in five Australians are related to Factory women.

For all its influence, though, the Factory is not as well-known as it deserves to be. The Third Class penitentiary stands empty and is not open to the public. Neither is the Third Class dining hall, which still bears smoke stains from an internal fire some years ago. Several of the buildings, including the one housing the committee room where women stood to be selected for marriage or service, are now part of the New South Wales Institute of Psychiatry, who are sympathetic custodians of the site.

It is a tremendous shame, in the opinion of the authors, that those who have sprung from the outcast women, as one governor called them, cannot stand where their ancestors did. The authors support the contention of the Parramatta Female Factory Friends that the site should be preserved and parts of the precinct repurposed as a museum of Australian identity.

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The Factory has a long and fascinating history, both as a convict site and later as an asylum. We have sought to represent that history as accurately as possible; however, for the sake of the narrative certain parts of the story depart from the facts.

Robert Church is, we believe, a worse character than any superintendent who actually had charge of the Female Factory. However, some superintendents did indeed skim the women’s rations for profit. The superintendents lived outside the Factory walls, but for the purposes of the story we have married Robert Church to the matron, and situated them both in her quarters.

While the fictional Church may be more monstrous than any actual administrators of the Factory, there is no doubt that conditions there were frequently inhumane. The story of the starvation of Emily Gray, for example, is based on an actual event, involving a convict called Mary Ann Hamilton. Head shaving was also a real punishment, together with the wearing of what were known as caps of shame, though there is no surviving record of what these looked like.

The first riot at the Factory did not occur until after this book is set, in 1827. The article in the fictional Sydney Chronicle, mentioning Amazonian banditti, is lifted from an actual article on the riot from the Sydney Gazette, published on 31 October 1827.

The Factory itself was twice a penal site, and we have conflated these for the purpose of the narrative. For example, the mattresses of untreated wool and the broken windows referred to here were features of the first Female Factory, not the second. The clock, described in this novel as above the entryway, was not installed in reality at the time this story is set.

As mentioned in the novel, the children of convict women were taken away from their mothers and placed in orphan schools from the age of four. However, only girls went to the Parramatta Orphan School. Boys went to a similar institution further away. We have also taken various liberties with the Factory’s layout for the purposes of the plot, particularly in relation to the stores and the Dead House.

Ralph Eveleigh, private secretary to the governor, is a complete fabrication, as are his office and the cellar attached to it (but Government House, with its observatory and bathhouse, still stands today). We have been unable to find a record of anyone performing Eveleigh’s function in Parramatta, although as in the novel Governor Thomas Brisbane did spend a significant amount of time at Parramatta Government House, and was criticised for doing so.

There was a gap between the departure of Brisbane and the arrival in Parramatta of his successor, Ralph Darling, and we have extended this for narrative purposes.

Two characters in the book bear some resemblance to key figures in Parramatta’s history, although we’d like to stress the likeness is passing. Hannibal Macarthur, like Socrates McAllister, was the nephew of a great pastoralist, John Macarthur. Like Socrates, Hannibal struggled to win his uncle’s approval, and there is some suggestion he dealt in sly grog. Hannibal was also a magistrate. However, Socrates’ Machiavellian nature, and some of his more lurid adventures, are entirely fictional.

The Reverend Samuel Marsden sat with Hannibal on the bench and was on the Factory’s management committee. While he was hardline in his views on morality and convicts, the fictional character of Reverend Horace Bulmer takes these attributes to extremes.

The smearing of Monsarrat’s old employer Cruden was inspired by a similar event in which charges of immorality were brought against magistrate Henry Grattan Douglass, who was ultimately vindicated. Hannibal Macarthur and Samuel Marsden were removed from the bench as a result.

There was also a pieman in Parramatta: William Francis King plied his trade some decades after Stephen Lethbridge in this novel, styling himself the Ladies’ Walking Flying Pieman, and dispensing his own brand of philosophy along with his pies. His feats of pedestrianism include beating the mail coach in a race between Sydney and Windsor, walking 309 kilometres around the Maitland racecourse in 46 hours and 30 minutes, and walking from Campbelltown to Sydney carrying a 30 kilogram dog between midnight and 9 am.

We have also made some small changes to the geography of the township of Parramatta. The intersection of George and Church Streets, known as the Corner, existed in 1825 as did a number of public houses, most notably the Freemason’s Arms (now the Woolpack Hotel). Sophia’s guesthouse, though, is fictional, as is Crotty’s shebeen, although there were likely to have been a number of unlicensed drinking establishments operating at the time (that sly grog had to go somewhere). The bend in the river where Monsarrat finds the awl is also fictional.

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In addition to more general works on Australian history (including Tom’s Australians Volume 1, The Great Shame and Commonwealth of Thieves, as well as Grace Karskens’ The Colony), we drew on a range of sources which specifically relate to the Parramatta Female Factory, or to Parramatta’s history more generally. These include:

These Outcast Women: The Parramatta Female Factory, 1821–1848, Annette Salt, Hale & Iremonger, 1984

Women Transported: Life in Australia’s Convict Female Factories, a project of the Parramatta Heritage Centre and University of Western Sydney, 2008

Colonial Ladies: Crime Reports from the Sydney Herald Relating to the Female Factory, Parramatta, Judith Dunn F.P.D.H.S., 2008

Rules & regulations for the management of the female convicts in the new factory at Parramatta, issued 31 January 1821, Government Printer

The Prisoners of Australia: a Narrative, Charlotte Anley, Bodleian Library Oxford, 1841

Parramatta: A Past Revealed, Terry Kass, Carol Liston and John McClymont, Parramatta City Council, 1996

The Cradle City of Australia: A History of Parramatta, James Jervis F.R. A.H.S., Council of the City of Parramatta, 1961