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In which Squire pokes his head up for the first time since arriving in Sydney Cove
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These days we like to think of James Squire as a big figure in the colony. After all, he’s one of the few convicts most of us know by name, right? So he had to be a bit of a mover and shaker. Well, eventually he was; after he served his sentence, moved inland a bit to Kissing Point and conned others to sell him their land for pennies on the dollar.
But in the early years of the colony he wasn’t that special. He was just another convict; albeit one who was a bit smarter than most. He seemed to realise the best course of action was to shut up and keep his head down.
Which would be why he appears nowhere in any official records or diaries throughout 1788. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it very quietly and making sure no one noticed. It’s not until more than a year after the First Fleet’s arrival, in March 1789, that Squire does something that draws attention to himself. And what he did was choose to stay up late one Sunday night.
At 10pm on March 1, Squire was still awake, sitting in his hut when he heard a rustling noise outside near the fence of his neighbour William Parr. He took a look outside to see what was going on and spotted a man darting out of the garden and over the hedge. A not-very-chivalrous man either, for he left behind two women, one of whom had a bag full of cabbages. The thieving pair had been caught red-handed. A convict himself, Squire could not arrest the pair, but he was forced to give evidence at their trial five days later on March 5.
The two women Squire saw that night were Tamasin Allen and Mary Turner, who had both sailed on the Lady Penrhyn. Allen seems to be the more devious of the two. Described as a “lustyish woman with black hair” at her trial in England, she was sentenced to seven years’ transportation for assaulting and robbing a man who had just had his watch pilfered by someone else. Turner had the same seven-year sentence but her crime was to steal a few items of clothing amounting to little more than £2 from a house where no-one was home.
The pair were found guilty of stealing six cabbages from Parr’s garden and sentenced to 50 lashes each – 25 immediately and the remainder to be administered on the next provision day. The women presumably escaped the death sentence for stealing food because they didn’t pilfer it from the government stores. Or maybe the judge liked lusty women.