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Where Were Female Convicts Sent? | Tony Robinson
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Apr 4, 2025
Comedian and Historian Tony Robinson explores the city of Hobart and the remnants of its rich history. He visits The Female Factory, a prison like building which housed Tasmania's female convicts. He learns what it was like to live in such a place, from little food to moments of rebellion.
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0:00
Up here you get a sense of what this place might have been like 200 years ago
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Although, actually it wouldn't have looked anything like this because it would have been
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surrounded by tanneries and all the other detritus of industrial life. So that by the
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time the rivulet got down into Hobart it would have been stinking and putrid
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Not a very cheery thought, I know. But then life in early Hobart was a struggle
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Especially if you were unlucky enough to be banged up in my next stop
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It was called the female factory, and it's where the women convicts were put when they arrived in Tasmania
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It was really the female version of Port Arthur, which was a horrendous hellhole
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And from the beginning, it was a whole complex of buildings. You had places for washing, for sleeping, for working
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all surrounded by these incredibly high walls. And there were three classes of prisoner
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Excuse me, are you on a tour? Yes. Could I borrow you just for a minute just to do a demonstration of prisoners
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Is that all right? OK, there were three classes of prisoners, right? These were the C class. Could you bunch up here
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This is the convict class. You were the lowest of the low, the depraved, the absolutely contemptible
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And you had a C sewn on your petticoats and you'd have them on your sleeve there, another C
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so everybody knew how vile you were and you really didn't get much food at all
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That's you lot. Then the next class, the probationary class, oh, you're the guide, aren't you
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You know all this stuff, don't you? Oh, yeah, definitely, everything. The probationary class didn't have the C on their petticoats, did they
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No, they only had it on their arm. And you got better food? Yeah, a bit better, yeah
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There's always hope, right? So if you'd been a probationer for some time and you were good
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then you could be an assigned prisoner Oh you very friendly too The assigned prisoners were allowed to go out of the prison and they could work for an employer outside who could feed them and clothe them
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but they weren't allowed to give you any money. But it was much better than being a C-class or a P-class
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Give us a big smile. Oh, but we had to go and do housework
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Oh, you did have to do housework, but even that was much better than what these poor souls had to go through
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Anyway, thank you. for that. You don't really get much of a picture, though, of what this place looked like from here
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Up here, though... Lucy, this is a very convenient vantage point, isn't it
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It is. We just have these stark walls, but actually, from here, you can begin to imagine how
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this is almost like a village. There are walls within walls. People are walled off so that they
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are not supposed to be able to have contact with each other. So here's the kitchen and the laundry
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That's where the climb class is, where people are being punished. Over there is the probation class and the middle is the chapel
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It must have been crazy. It must have been. These were open courtyards, and so you could hear from one to the other
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It would be incredibly noisy. Not to mention bone-chillingly cold in winter and baking hot in summer
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This factory was little more than a prison, and like all prisons, it had its top dogs
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I must tell you about one aspect of this place which really tickles me
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Even though you were all so downtrodden, there were a group of you who were known as the Flash Mob
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because, essentially, you were really Flash. You managed to make homemade jewellery, homemade mob cats
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and they terrorised everybody else, and they were being lectured once by a reverend
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and this is what they did, which is the thing that I would love you to recreate if you wouldn mind Tony Tony Tony this is wrong No no no no It didn happen that way at all The flash mob were very stylish as you say
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and they just rejected the messages that were being beamed to them by the authorities
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Work, behave, work, behave. They kept getting together, and they drove the superintendent crazy
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He said, they've been singing and dancing and making a noise. They were not like these women
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who look as though they just came in from milking the cows. And they would never have done anything like that
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I think you made your point. This wouldn't be historically valid if we got these ladies to do this
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No, no. Which is a tragedy for me. I thought we were going to get a great piece of audience participation
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You've ruined it for me. I know, I know. Bye. See those words up there
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It's just a bunch of rocks on the hillside, but it's an ad that's been there for decades
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It says Keane's Curry, and it's a direct link to the next thing we're going to have a look at
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which is just down back towards the city. I'm just turning right out of Sandy Bay Road into Ashfield Street
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and the bloke who owned the curry business in the late 1800s
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was called Horace Watson, and he lived over here in a big mansion called Barton Hall
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But it's not the hall that interests me right now, it's the shed at the bottom of his garden
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You might think that's the most boring thing in the whole world, but bear with me because I think it's interesting
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Anyway, if it was at the bottom of his lot, then... It could be that, couldn't it
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Come on, it is. Watson, like so many rich Victorian men, was into all sorts of things. Shells, fossils
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the latest technology and the big new technology at the time was recording sound on wax cylinders which he did a lot of You see this great trumpet thing there
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He's brushing away with it there. And that has got to be here, isn't it
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He was doing his recordings right here. But what interests me is not him so much
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as the woman whose voice he's recording. This is her, Fanny Cochran-Smith
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an extraordinary Tasmanian Aboriginal who was taken from her parents as a child
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and forced into virtual slavery with a master who flogged her Eventually, she married an ex-convict
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started a boarding house and became an established community figure But what really set her apart from everybody else
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was her voice and it was that that Watson recorded in her original Aboriginal language
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Here it comes. This wax cylinder recording of traditional song lines
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is the only known example of a lost language unique to the Tasmanian Aborigines
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Watson, Fanny and her song are long gone. And Barton Hall doesn't exist anymore
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In its place there's this car park for a big supermarket and over there where the grand front of the hall would have been
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is a burger joint for an international chain with a name that sounds vaguely Scottish if you know what I mean
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All that's left of this story is that shed. And that's exactly the kind of thing you're constantly confronted with
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when you do a walk like this
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