Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict

While today’s kids are serious about Sugar Plum fairies and Santa Claus, the ideas of ten 12 months old Mary Wade must have been vastly totally different. At Christmastime in 1789, Mary was the youngest convict aboard a ship bound for Australia: certainly one of two hundred and fifty or so ladies, half way to a strange land. Their feminine convict ship The Lady Juliana, a 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 responsible of stealing one other child’s garments.  Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict , commuted to transportation for all times, was bitter candy. Mary had escaped the gallows but would never see her household again. She spent the spring of 1789 in horrendous situations at Newgate Prison. Mary was certainly one of fifty ladies fed bread and water in a cell that had neither beds nor toilets. However, once aboard The Lady Juliana, her scenario improved. All convicts were reasonably fed and given heat beds. Only five girls and two youngsters died during the eleven month voyage and the situation of those who arrived in the colony in 1790, had improved.

To relieve the pressure 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 extra youngsters with emancipated Irish transportee, Teague Harrigan and by 1806, the household was dwelling 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 arrange house 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 until Harrigan’s dying in 1833. Twenty six years later in 1859, eighty yr outdated Mary died at house. She had given delivery to twenty one children. In her lifetime, her family had grown to include five generations and over three hundred descendants. Now, Mary’s descendants number in the tens of thousands, together with 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 one of Australia’s founding mothers.