MOT Tour Day 52 - Botanical Gardens & Female Factory

Not much disappoints us but arriving to find that a new airport access has been developed, bypassing the section of the original Tasman Highway which passes by our caravan park, is one of the things. Why? Because in developing the new roadworks, they removed a public bus stop which was right at the entrance to the park. As a consequence, we now have to drive miles to the nearest bus stop.

After studying options last night, we drove to the Tasmanian Botanic Gardens this morning to both visit the gardens and sus out potential long hour parking from which we could launch our public transport attack on the city.

The TBG are set on a hillside above the Derwent within a bushy area of public land known as the Queens Domain and dedicated to the people of Hobart. Government House is its neighbour. The gardens are the second oldest public garden, having been established in 1816, only two years after the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney.

There is a mixture of rare and common, endemic and exotic plants, set out along sweeping walkways and with several micro-environments established within. It’s not all flowers and colour but there are lots of trees from all corners of earth. Some of the giant American conifers dwarfed other trees.

You are met inside the gate after your fee-less entry, by volunteers manning “The Hub” and according to your needs and desires, directed to those parts of the garden which will satisfy you.

After wandering for an hour, we found a park bench off by the Eardley Wilmot Wall, looking down across a long slope of lawn. Behind us, we could hear the jazz playing as part of a wine tasting festival which we later saw attendees being frisked for and having their bags searched.

After lunch, we wandered further up the hill and through the area where Peter Cundall of Gardening Australia fame had established raised garden beds and regularly used to record segments for the show. A younger presenter still records for the show there.

The Conservatory was our last garden to be viewed: a beautiful old sandstone building with a variety of plants who need things to be a little warmer. Of particular note was an entire section devoted to bromeliads.

Deciding on a coffee before jumping on the Big Red Bus Tour, Sue went off to procure refreshments while my task was to find a seat. A picnic bench was obtained and as I waited, a middle aged couple just walked up and sat down. No reference to me, no “would you mind sharing?” or “is this spot taken?”. I didn’t mind sharing but I did mind the lack of courtesy involved. Deciding not to wait further for Sue, as I stood to leave I said “hey guys, maybe next time you might ask if you could share the space”.

What followed was a torrent of really aggressive abuse from both of them. What the? Shrugged my shoulders and walked away.

While waiting for the BRB, we had a charming conversation with a couple of expat Scots who have called Oz home for more than thirty years. Like us, first time in Tassie. Unfortunately, when the bus arrived it was chocko, so we decided to save getting our 48hr travel pass until the morning and instead, drove up to Casades for a visit to the Female Factory.

Operating from 1828 until 1856, there are very few stories you can be told about the Female Factorythat have happy endings. It was a place where women who did not conform, all of them from working class backgrounds, were put to learn their place. Females as young as ten years of age were interred here and whilst there were some hardened criminals who were repeat offenders, the bulk had been sent from England for petty crime. The conditions were harsh and the superintendents harsher. Three “classes” of women were held: the first class were women whose crimes were light and had earned good favour in passage to Australia; the second class, who were women transitioning from the third class, which were termed the criminal class.

The criminal class had their heads shaved, were often held in darkness in solitary cells and made to work. If not in solitary, they did laundry which was brought to the Factory. If in solitary, they were given hafts of used ship rope to pick a tar like substance from so it could be reused in newer rope. They did this by picking it out with their fingernails!

Women in the first class were distributed into the community for household service, never earning a penny. Payment for their service or the laundry or the picking of the tar all went to the running of the Factory.

Many of the women fell pregnant and were given extended sentences as punishment, while the men who participated in consensual and often non-consensual sex, were not. The mothers were allowed to keep their babies for six months and in later years of operation, nine months but then the babies were taken from them and given to an orphanage. They were to never see each other again. Children not adopted were raised to be white slaves like their mothers.

I found this very distressing and was barely coping with the experience of it that our very capable guide provided when she told the story of Truganini, one of Tasmania’s most renowned Aboriginal citizens. In the centre of the yard stood a eucalypt tree, in a pot, which has been placed on the spot where she was buried. Against her express requests to have her remains given to her people for ceremonial burning and scattering in a particular place of significant to her dreaming, she was ignored. Her body was buried in Cascades Female Factory instead, apparently to protect it. Instead, soon after, the Royal Society of Tasmania had the body exhumed and it was placed on display in the Tasmanian Museum up until the 1940’s. It was eventually returned but some of her bones were also held by the Royal Society of Surgeons in London and were only returned in 2002.

I was distraught and tears welled up in me. White fellas have done some terrible things but perhaps the well considered one, often done in the name of science, are the worst.

Click here for today's photos

Cascades Female Factory is an important place to go because sanitised history is no good to any of us. We can’t grow into better people if our view of the past is jaundiced. We must always endeavour to prevent the same atrocious mistakes happening again. Anytime women are treated with disrespect and inequality, we place them back in The Female Factory.

Any resentment or racially based discrimination we exercise over indigenous folks is just burying them in Truganini’s grave.