A
recent visit to the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart, Tasmania, was
a most moving experience for me. Being the sole female in the
audience of an interactive guided tour that tells the story of a
young woman convict, I felt the full force of it. The two actors were
excellent, and the booming wrath of the male overseer really put the
fear into me and gave me an inkling of the terror and helplessness
the poor women incarcerated in this dreadful place would have
experienced.
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| From the memorial to the women who passed through Cascades |
One
aspect that particularly made me shudder was being sent to the
solitary or dark cells. Without any light source and measuring about
a yard wide and two yards long, just enough room to stand up and lie
down in, a woman could be locked up in here for weeks or months for
all kinds of reasons, including having had a baby out of wedlock, even
if she had been a victim of rape or abuse at the hands of an overseer
or employer to whom she had been assigned. It would have taken a
woman of extraordinary mental resilience and courage to have survived
such an experience and not emerge from the darkness totally insane.
Yet some remarkable women did recover, went on to lead normal lives after they
earned their freedom and become the founding mothers of a nation.
But
what is also disturbing is that this appalling treatment of women
wasn’t confined to just the faraway convict colonies of Australia in the
late 18th and early 19th centuries. Despite
growing enlightenment over prison reforms, dark cells were still
being constructed in British prisons. Here is a map dated 1875 from
the Northumberland Archives of a proposed female dark cell to be
built at Morpeth Gaol (now converted to luxury apartments). As of writing this, I don’t know if this
cell was ever completed and used, but sincerely hope that it wasn’t and possibly someone reading this might be able to tell me more.
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Copyright Northumberland Archives. Click here for larger version.
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| Morpeth Gaol today |
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