A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Monday, July 9, 2018
The hidden story of the women who rose up
John
Pilger gave this address on the 200th anniversary of the establishment
of the Parramatta Female Factory, Sydney, a prison where ‘intractable’
women convicts from mostly Ireland and England were sent to Britain’s
Australian colony in the early 19th century
( July 8, 2019, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Like
all colonial societies, Australia has secrets. The way we treat
Indigenous people is still mostly a secret. For a long time, the fact
that many Australians came from what was called “bad stock” was a
secret.
“Bad stock” meant convict forebears: those like my great-great
grandmother, Mary Palmer, who was incarcerated at the Female Factory in
Parramatta, near Sydney, in 1823.
According to nonsense spun by my numerous aunts – who had irresistible
bourgeois ambitions — Mary Palmer and the man she married, Francis
McCarthy, were a lady and a gentleman of Victorian property and
propriety.
In fact, Mary was the youngest member of a gang of wild women, mostly
Irish, who operated in the East End of London. Known as “The Ruffians”,
they kept poverty at bay with the proceeds of prostitution and petty
theft.
The Ruffians were eventually arrested and tried, and hanged — except
Mary, who was spared because she was pregnant. She was just 16 years old
when she was manacled in the hold of a ship under sail, the Lord
Sidmouth, bound for New South Wales “for the term of your natural life”,
said the judge.
The voyage took five months, a purgatory of sickness and despair. I know
what she looked like on arrival because, some years ago, I discovered
an extraordinary ritual in St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney.
Every Thursday, in a vestry, a nun would turn the pages of a register of
Irish Catholic convicts — and there was Mary, described as “not more
than 4ft in height, emaciated and pitted with the ravages of small pox”.
When Mary’s ship docked at Sydney Cove, no one came forward to claim her
as a servant or a skivvy. She was a “third class” convict and one of
“the inflammable matter of Ireland”. Did her newly born survive the
voyage? I don’t know.
They sent her up the Parramatta River to the Female Factory, which had
distinguished itself as one of the places where Victorian penal experts
were testing their exciting new theories. The treadwheel was introduced
in the year Mary arrived, 1823, as an implement of punishment and
torture.
The Cumberland Pilgrim described the Female Factory as “appallingly
hideous … the recreation ground reminds one of the Valley of the Shadow
of Death”.
Arriving at night, Mary had nothing to sleep on, only boards and stone
and straw, and filthy wool full of ticks and spiders. All the women
underwent solitary confinement. Their heads were shaved and they were
locked in total darkness with the haunting whine of mosquitoes.
There was no division by age or crime. Mary and the other women were
called “the intractables”. With a mixture of horror and admiration, the
Attorney General at the time, Roger Terry, described how the women had
“driven back with a volley of stones and staves” soldiers sent to put
down their rebellion. More than once, they breached the sandstone walls
and stormed the town of Parramatta. Missionaries sent from England to
repair the souls of the women were given similar short shrift.
I am so proud of her.
Then there was “courting day”. Once a week, “bereft gentlemen” (whomever
they might be) were given first pick, followed by soldiers, then male
convicts. Some of the women found “finery” and primped urgently, as if
an inspecting male might provide a way out of their predicament. Others
turned their backs should an aspiring mate be an “old stringybark fella”
down from the bush.
During all this, the matron would shout out what she called “the good points” of each woman, which was a revelation to all.
In this way, my great-great grandparents met each other. I believe they were well matched.
Francis McCarthy had been transported from Ireland for the crime of “uttering unlawful oaths” against his English landlord. That was the charge leveled at the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1833.
Francis McCarthy had been transported from Ireland for the crime of “uttering unlawful oaths” against his English landlord. That was the charge leveled at the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1833.
I am so proud of him.
Mary and Francis were married at St Mary’s Church, later St Mary’s
Cathedral, Sydney, on November 9th, 1823, with four other convict
couples. Eight years later, they were granted their “ticket of leave”
and Mary her “conditional pardon” by one Colonel Snodgrass, the Captain
General of New South Wales — the condition being she could never leave
the colony.
Mary bore 10 children and they lived out hard lives, loved and respected by all accounts, to their ninetieth year.
My mother knew the secret about Mary and Francis. On her wedding day in
1922, and in defiance of her own family, she and my father came to these
walls to pay tribute to Mary and the intractables. She was proud of her
“bad stock”.
I sometimes wonder: where is this spirit today? Where is the spirit of
the intractables among those who claim to represent us and those of us
who accept, in supine silence, the corporate conformity that is
characteristic of much of the modern era in so-called developed
countries?
Where are those of us prepared to “utter unlawful oaths” and stand up to
the authoritarians and charlatans in government, who glorify war and
invent foreign enemies and criminalise dissent and who abuse and
mistreat vulnerable refugees to these shores and disgracefully call them
“illegals”.
Mary Palmer was “illegal”. Francis McCarthy was “illegal”. All the women
who survived the Female Factory and fought off authority, were
“illegal”.
The memory of their courage and resilience and resistance should be
honoured, not traduced, in the way we are today. For only when we
recognise the uniqueness of our past — our Indigenous past and our proud
convict past — will this nation achieve true independence.