Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict

While today’s children are thinking about Sugar Plum fairies and Santa Claus, the thoughts of ten 12 months outdated Mary Wade must have been vastly totally different. At Christmastime in 1789, Mary was the youngest convict aboard a ship certain for Australia: one of 200 and fifty or so women, half method to a wierd land. Their feminine 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 responsible of stealing one other child’s clothes. Her dying sentence, commuted to transportation for all times, was bitter candy. Mary had escaped the gallows however would never see her family again. She spent the spring of 1789 in horrendous conditions at Newgate Prison. Mary was certainly one of fifty ladies fed bread and water in a cell that had neither beds nor bathrooms. However, once aboard The Lady Juliana, her scenario improved. All convicts have been moderately fed and given heat beds. Only five women and two children died in the course of the eleven month voyage and the situation of those that arrived within the colony in 1790, had improved.

To relieve the stress 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 extra 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 by no means returned.

By 1809, Mary had married and set up residence close to the Hawkesbury River with convict Jonathan Brooker. Emancipated circa 1812, the pair took ownership of a thirty acre farm in Airds, Campbelltown and lived happily till Harrigan’s death in 1833. Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict in 1859, eighty yr outdated Mary died at house. She had given delivery to twenty one youngsters. In her lifetime, her household had grown to include 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 yr old convict Mary Wade was going through an uncertain future. Today, she is acknowledged as considered one of Australia’s founding mothers.