Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict

While today’s children are serious about Sugar Plum fairies and Santa Claus, the ideas of ten 12 months old Mary Wade should have been vastly completely different. At Christmastime in 1789, Mary was the youngest convict aboard a ship certain for Australia: certainly one of 2 hundred and fifty or so women, half approach to a wierd land. Their feminine convict ship The Lady Juliana, part of the Second Fleet, had set sail from Portsmouth in July.

Months earlier Mary, (born in England in 1778), had been arrested and found guilty of stealing another child’s garments. Her dying sentence, commuted to transportation for all times, was bitter sweet. Mary had escaped the gallows but would never see her family again. She spent the spring of 1789 in horrendous conditions at Newgate Prison. Mary was certainly one of fifty women fed bread and water in a cell that had neither beds nor toilets. However, once aboard The Lady Juliana, her state of affairs improved. All convicts were reasonably fed and given warm beds. Only five ladies and two youngsters died through the eleven month voyage and the situation of those that arrived within 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 start to a daughter.  Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict  had two more kids with emancipated Irish transportee, Teague Harrigan and by 1806, the family was living in a tent on the banks of the Tank stream in Sydney. Harrigan joined a whaling ship but never returned.

By 1809, Mary had married and set up home near 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 till Harrigan’s death in 1833. Twenty six years later in 1859, eighty 12 months old Mary died at residence. She had given birth to twenty one youngsters. In her lifetime, her family had grown to include five generations and over three hundred descendants. Now, Mary’s descendants quantity in the tens of 1000's, together with Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia.

At Christmastime in 1789, ten year outdated convict Mary Wade was dealing with an uncertain future. Today, she is recognized as certainly one of Australia’s founding moms.