I’m making a bonnet for a woman I will never meet, a woman who very probably died before my great-grandparents were born. Her name was Alice McAnnally, and she was a convicted criminal.
I don’t know what law she broke (although I imagine that anything I’d consider really bad would’ve got her hanged). Maybe she stole Trevelyan’s corn so the young might see the morn – something like that, anyway.
All I know about her is that she sailed to Australia in a ship called the Elizabeth in 1828, a transported convict.
Why am I making her a bonnet, of all things?
Christina Henri is a Tasmanian artist; her Roses from the Heart project will consist of 25,266 bonnets from around the world – one for each woman transported to Australia between 1788 and 1853.
Someone in my branch of the Irish Patchwork Society was handing out patterns and names a couple of months ago, and I got Alice.
I know very little about the lives of female convicts, but it wasn’t what you’d call a cushy billet. They worked as servants or prostitutes, or in “female factories” (which sound rather like our own Magdalene Laundries). They were treated fairly universally as the chattels of men – which was business as usual, of course, but in a way intensified by the penal context.
Fun times.
Embroidering Alice’s name was an oddly powerful experience. (From talking to other bonnet-makers, this is common.) Nothing links me to this woman, as far as I know; our lives are almost unimaginably different.
And yet, I have found meaning in stitching this memorial to her.
When it’s finished, I’ll tell you more about how I went about the task.
What a great project! I can easily elieve that embroidering this name was a powerful experience.
I wonder if there were women from here deported to Australia as convicts. I know there were men, notably some of those who took part in the 1837-1838 Patriots’ Revolt. But women? Of course, history doesn’t say as much about women as it says about men, so I have no clue. Which is one of the reasons why I think that project is so meaningful. It’s really neat to know that you are part of it!
From a quick search, I can find that she was born in 1809, convicted in Louth of robbing a person, and departed Ireland on 15 March 1827 on the Elizabeth. Her occupation was given as housemaid and washerwoman. She may have married a man called Manville. They had a very difficult time bfore they shipped out – an Australian family historian has done a huge amount of work on the Elizabeth convicts, which you can see here: Elizabeth 1828: the worst and most turbulent.
@Josiane: Interesting question! If they were deporting them from Ireland (in droves), then surely from other colonies too? I don’t know.
@Emma: Oh, my goodness, thanks for taking the time to look that up! It didn’t even occur to me that I might be able to find stuff about an individual convict online. (Shows how much I know.) That’s absolutely fascinating.
Josiane, there were convicts from Canada sent to Australia after the revolt — Sydney has suburbs called Concord and Canada Bay as a result. You can find out more here: http://members.iinet.net.au/~perthdps/convicts/canadian.html, and at http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org as soon as I commission someone to write The Canadians in Sydney for me (I’m the editor). Doesn’t look like any of them were women though.
It’s a small number compared to the thousands of Irish who were sent here. There’s lots and lots of information online about the Irish convicts, and soon to be an article on the Dictionary of Sydney about the Irish in Sydney, many of whom became extremely successful and powerful in the colony.
I’ll stop now — I could go on all night