Word: conviction
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...Gazing now at a 150-year-old ambrotype photograph of her convict forebear, Upfold sounds proud and protective. She will not brook any suggestion that Anne Dunne was other than a brave soul who endured a myriad of hardships while at the female factory in the settlement of Parramatta, now a commercial center in western Sydney. Dunne eventually married a lifer named James Tompkins and experienced, Upfold speculates, times of joy in a land where she chose to live out her post-convict years. "In life, you've got to go forward," Upfold says...
...lives of women like Dunne are the subject of an exhibition, "Women Transported: Life in Australia's Convict Female Factories," whose national tour opens Aug. 2 at the Parramatta Heritage Centre. Between 1804 and the early 1850s, some 10,000 British women served in one of the 12 female work houses - known as factories - in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). Theirs is a tale of dislocation and suffering of which few Australians have more than the sketchiest knowledge, yet it's hardly stretching things to call these women the mothers of a nation, or to suggest...
...common misconception is that most of the convict women were illiterate whores from the criminal class. Not so, according to documents of the time. Prostitution wasn't illegal in Britain in the early part of the 19th century, so it wasn't grounds for transportation. The convicts were no more likely to be illiterate than the Britons who were coming to Australia by choice, and more than 60% of them were transported for a first offence, usually theft. Between them, they brought some 180 trade skills...
...breaking, spinning, needlework and laundry. Unlike their male counterparts, they were spared the lash. But they were not spared solitary confinement or the indignity of being gagged or having their head shaved for serious misconduct. Parramatta hosted Australia's first act of industrial defiance in 1827, when hundreds of convict women rioted over food...
...could never run for any public office. "Not in this country, no. Maybe France. They might be a little bigger on porn and hating America," he said. Before I could become Vice President, he told me, America would have its first female, Jewish, Hispanic, gay, Muslim and ex-convict Vice Presidents. Still, Vice President of France doesn't sound...