Book Talk: Pack of Thieves? Convict-era Australia stacks the deck
By Pauline Askin
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Fate dealt Honorah Sullivan a bad hand when she was found guilty of arson in the mid-19th century and put on a British convict ship bound for modern-day Tasmania.
But more than 160 years later, the lives of Sullivan and 51 women at a historic workhouse on the Australian island are played out in a deck of cards and a companion book of real-life stories.
In "Pack of Thieves? 52 Female Factory Lives", researchers trace the lives of prisoners and jail staff, using digitised archives of newspapers and convict records.
Imagery and text take readers through a period of Australian penal history marked by hardship, cruelty and alcohol abuse. The authors focus on 52 women, each portrayed on one playing card of a standard deck, who passed through Hobart's Cascades Female Factory between 1828 and 1856.
Susan Hood, a co-author of the book and an official at the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, spoke to Reuters about the project, the convicts and creating the deck of cards.
Q: Why add a deck of cards to a book?
A: It's a novel way of educating children and families. There is something on each card that gives a bit of an insight into those women's lives. We supplied the artist, Simon Barnard, with as many details as we could. What you see on the cards is his interpretation.
Q: Where did most of the information for stories come from?
A: The information that is being tapped into includes what are called the conduct records. These are the equivalent of police records for every convict that came to Van Diemen's Land (an early name for Tasmania). They're basically a record of bad conduct. This provided background information prior to transportation to the colony, and any information pertaining to their lives following their arrival.
Q: What was the most surprising thing about this project?
A: The newspapers revealed a huge amount of information on convicts. Modern technology has opened up this huge area of research and information. While the information was available before, the time taken to access it manually would have been way beyond the capacity of many people.
Q: How did you select 52 stories from more than 6,000 women incarcerated at the Cascades Female Factory?
A: We wanted a full range of stories that reflected a variety of lives, an interesting expression of humanity.
Q: Were they all hardened convicts?
A: It's not that every convict was bad, some of them found themselves in a situation, for a whole range of reasons, making decisions that had consequences on their lives.
Q: Alcohol played a big role in the plight of these women, what were some of their crimes?
A: Repeated breaches of conduct regulations, being idle, talking when they shouldn't, drunkenness, all those sorts of things. You do feel quite an empathy for the people whose records you are looking at.
Q: How did you decide the ranks of the playing cards?
A: We decided that the officials (matrons and jail superintendent) would get a high ranking card, so they ended up being the king. I basically sorted them by their age, it seemed to make sense to use a lower ranking card for the younger women and then go up from there.
Q: Who do you see reading this book?
A: Our intended audience is anyone who is interested in female convicts and their descendants, and the education market.
(Editing by Tony Tharakan and Clarence Fernandez)
