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A WOMAN’S VIEW OF SYDNEY
Woman were a minority of the population of Sydney during the first few years of its history. Of the 736 convicts in the first fleet, 188 were woman, and only the officers of the marines and the civil officials were allowed to being their wives and children with them. Governor Phillips remarked to Lord Sydney: ‘With respect to the sending to the Islands for woman your Lordship will, I believe, think that in the present situation of this colony it would be only bringing them to pine away a few years in misery; and I am very sorry to say that those we have are most of them very abandoned wretches. Still, more woman will be necessary when more convicts are sent out.’ (A. Phillip to Lord Sydney, 28 September 1788, in Historical Records of Australia, series I, vol 1, p.75). For most of the convict woman, life was uncertain and brutish. Marriage, legal or de facto, was a necessity for physical protection from the hundreds of convicts, soldiers and seamen, as well as a means of ensuring them a regular supply of food. There was little clothing in the government store and only the barest of protection from the weather during the winter of 1788. As most of the woman were illiterate, they left no record of their misfortunes and injustices. But one of them managed to smuggle a letter back home. It read:
I take the first opportunity that has been given us to acquaint you with our disconsolate situation in this solitary waste of the creation. Our passage, you may have heard by the first ships, was tolerably favourable; but the inconveniences since suffered for want of shelter, bedding, & c., are not to be imagined by any stranger. However, we have now two streets, if four rows of the most miserable huts you can possibly conceive of deserve that name. Windows they have none, as from the Governor’s house, & c., now nearly finished, no glass could be spared; so that lattices of twigs are made by our people to supply their places. At the extremity of the lines, where since our arrival the dead are buried, there is a place called the church-yard; but we hear, as soon as a sufficient quantity of bricks can be made, a church is to be built, and named St. Philip, after the Governor. Notwithstanding all our presents, the savages still continue to do us all the injury they can, which makes the soldiers’ duty very hard, and much dissatisfaction among the officers. I know not how many of our people have been killed. As for the distresses of the women, they are past description, as they are deprived of tea and other things they were indulged in in the voyage by the seamen, and as they are totally unprovided with clothes, those who have young children are quite wretched. Beside this, though a number of marriages have taken place, several women, who have became pregnant on the voyage, and are since left by their partners, who have returned to England, are not likely even here to form any fresh connections. We are comforted with the hopes of a supply of tea from China, and flattered with getting riches when the settlement is complete, and the hemp which the place produces is brought to perfection. Our kingaroo rats are like mutton, but much leaner; and there is a kind of chickweed so much in taste like our spinach that no difference can be discerned. Something like ground ivy is used for tea; but a scarcity of salt and sugar makes our best meals insipid. The separation of several of us to an uninhabited island was like a second transportation. In short, every one is so taken up with their own misfortunes that they no pity to bestow upon others. All our letters are examined by an officer, but a friend takes this for me privately. The ships sail tomorrow.
- Letter from a female convict, Port Jackson, 14 November 1788, in Historical Records of New South Wales, vol. 11, pp. 746-7
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