Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict

While today’s children are serious about Sugar Plum fairies and Santa Claus, the ideas of ten year previous Mary Wade must have been vastly completely different. At Christmastime in 1789, Mary was the youngest convict aboard a ship certain for Australia: certainly one of 2 hundred and fifty or so girls, half method to a wierd land.  Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict , 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 responsible of stealing one other child’s clothes. Her demise sentence, commuted to transportation for all times, was bitter candy. Mary had escaped the gallows however would by no means see her household once more. She spent the spring of 1789 in horrendous conditions at Newgate Prison. Mary was one of fifty women fed bread and water in a cell that had neither beds nor lavatories. However, once aboard The Lady Juliana, her scenario improved. All convicts had been moderately fed and given warm beds. Only five girls and two children died through the eleven month voyage and the situation of those that arrived in the colony in 1790, had improved.

To relieve the strain on Sydney Cove, Governor Phillip despatched many new arrivals together with Mary, to a place described by Captain Cook as, ‘a Paradise’ – Norfolk Island. There, at age fourteen, Mary gave birth to a daughter. She had two more kids with emancipated Irish transportee, Teague Harrigan and by 1806, the family was living in a tent on the banks of the Tank stream in Sydney. Harrigan joined a whaling ship however never returned.

By 1809, Mary had married and set up residence 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 death in 1833. Twenty six years later in 1859, eighty yr previous Mary died at residence. She had given start to twenty one youngsters. In her lifetime, her household 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 previous convict Mary Wade was facing an unsure future. Today, she is recognized as considered one of Australia’s founding moms.