Notes

Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict

While today’s kids are serious about Sugar Plum fairies and Santa Claus, the ideas of ten yr old Mary Wade should have been vastly totally different. At Christmastime in 1789, Mary was the youngest convict aboard a ship certain for Australia: considered one of 2 hundred and fifty or so girls, half approach to a wierd land. Their female convict ship The Lady Juliana, a half of the Second Fleet, had set sail from Portsmouth in July.

Months earlier Mary, (born in England in 1778), had been arrested and found guilty of stealing another child’s garments. Her dying sentence, commuted to transportation for life, was bitter sweet. Mary had escaped the gallows however would never see her household again. She spent the spring of 1789 in horrendous conditions at Newgate Prison. Mary was one of fifty girls fed bread and water in a cell that had neither beds nor lavatories. However, as soon as aboard The Lady Juliana, her situation improved. Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict have been reasonably fed and given heat beds. Only 5 girls and two kids died through the eleven month voyage and the condition of those who arrived within the colony in 1790, had improved.

To relieve the pressure on Sydney Cove, Governor Phillip sent many new arrivals including Mary, to a place described by Captain Cook as, ‘a Paradise’ – Norfolk Island. There, at age fourteen, Mary gave start to a daughter. She had two more kids with emancipated Irish transportee, Teague Harrigan and by 1806, the household was living in a tent on the banks of the Tank stream in Sydney. Harrigan joined a whaling ship however by no means returned.

By 1809, Mary had married and set up home near the Hawkesbury River with convict Jonathan Brooker. Emancipated circa 1812, the pair took possession of a thirty acre farm in Airds, Campbelltown and lived happily till Harrigan’s dying in 1833. Twenty six years later in 1859, eighty 12 months previous Mary died at house. She had given delivery to twenty one youngsters. In her lifetime, her family had grown to incorporate 5 generations and over 300 descendants. Now, Mary’s descendants quantity in the tens of hundreds, including Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia.

At Christmastime in 1789, ten year outdated convict Mary Wade was facing an unsure future. Today, she is acknowledged as one of Australia’s founding mothers.


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