Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict

While today’s children are serious about Sugar Plum fairies and Santa Claus, the ideas of ten 12 months outdated Mary Wade will have to have been vastly totally different. At Christmastime in 1789, Mary was the youngest convict aboard a ship sure for Australia: certainly one of two hundred and fifty or so girls, half approach to a wierd land. Their female convict ship The Lady Juliana, part of the Second Fleet, had set sail from Portsmouth in July.

Months earlier Mary, (born in England in 1778), had been arrested and located guilty of stealing one other child’s garments. Her dying sentence, commuted to transportation for all times, was bitter candy. Mary had escaped the gallows but would never see her family again. She spent the spring of 1789 in horrendous situations at Newgate Prison. Mary was certainly one of fifty women fed bread and water in a cell that had neither beds nor bathrooms. However, as quickly as aboard The Lady Juliana, her scenario improved. All convicts have been reasonably fed and given heat beds. Only 5 ladies and two kids died through the eleven month voyage and the situation of those that arrived within the colony in 1790, had improved.

To relieve the strain on Sydney Cove, Governor Phillip sent many new arrivals including Mary, to a spot described by Captain Cook as, ‘a Paradise’ – Norfolk Island. There, at age fourteen, Mary gave start to a daughter. She had two more children 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 but never returned.

By 1809, Mary had married and set up home near 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 demise in 1833.  Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict  in 1859, eighty yr previous Mary died at house. She had given start to twenty one youngsters. In her lifetime, her family had grown to include 5 generations and over three hundred descendants. Now, Mary’s descendants quantity in the tens of hundreds, including Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia.

At Christmastime in 1789, ten 12 months outdated convict Mary Wade was going through an uncertain future. Today, she is recognized as one of Australia’s founding moms.