Southern Tour Day 4: Cascade Female Factory

By the numbers

11.18 kms

14,963 steps

I got up early enough so that I could catch the bus near the location of the Cascade Female Factory as it was my next location to visit. The great part of the bus’ in Tasmania at the moment is they are free, well I hope they are outside of Hobart as that would be a touch embarrassing. It wqas different just hopping onto the bus without having to tell the driver where you are going. The morning was kinda nice and clear if a touch chilly. I could see the top of Mount Wellington and could have walked up it if I felt the need.

 

I had arrived an hour early, so decided I wanted to walk up the hill to Cascades Brewery following the Hobart rivulet that went up to Mount Wellington. At first I didn’t realise one of the Cascade brewery buildings was part of the brewery, but some building that was part of the park I wandered into. Behind the brewery is the beginning of the Cascade walking trail and I walked up it a little way. If I kept following that track I would be walking all the way up Mount Wellington. I did turn around and walked down the hill back to the Female Factory so I could wait for it to open.

 

I had no idea what gates would open when I got there. There was an entry way that I had not thought about as I had been watching the gates to the complex. I soon learnt you could open a website to listen to the audio tour of the yards and explanations of various parts. Yard 1 for example had the isolation blocks where women stayed for 23 hours a day, but also meant you were the worst of the bunch. Have to remember that women had few rights back in the 1800s and included no employment being a convict apart through the system or getting married. If you were pregnant then you would be punished for another 9 months after the child arrived. The Cascade Female Factory had taken up a huge area and what we were visiting were the three yards that had survived. New yards were added onto the originals and during those times the yards were prone to flooding. No one did anything to prevent the flooding and the women had to live in the mud and other gunk that came from where the Cascade Brewery was up the road. They washed clothes in the smelly sewerage water from the little stream that went by. There was a high infant mortality rate too with examples of blankets being black with fleas. The women were punished if they made a noise, and that was passed onto the children who learnt to be silent around strangers. Apparently there was a cemetery and everyone had been told the remains had been removed, but there were no records so they could very well still be under a local road at the end of the street.

 

I did two tours of the facility one was a performance and the other was a introduction. Both were worth doing and the funny thing was the lady doing the performance about various convicts happened to have a convict in her family who did spend time at the Female Factory. The researcher who was part of the introduction tour told a story where she had been speaking about a convict woman and one of the people on the tour was in tears. Turns out the person being talked about was an ancestor of the person. You never know what would happen. After the Female factory had shut the site were used from everything from tennis courts to a car yard, but luckily some of the walls had remained. That was Yard 1, 2 and 3. The rest were now gone, with a side note that next door was a child care centre.

 

Towards the end the weather started turning and I was getting cold. I planned to walk back to the city by following the river. I found there were some specific paths that took me most of the way into the city with some information panels telling me that the area had once been dotted by mills. I followed the stream as far as I possibly could as it was interesting to see it go from a tree lined stream to becoming lined by concrete and then going under buildings instead of between. I hadn’t followed it to where it drained into the Derwent, but I thought it to be interesting all the same. Along the way I looked at where I would be catching the bus from the Transit Centre to make sure I could finds it. I decided since the weather had turned cold that I should head to the hostel and do some washing. Hopefully it wont stay wet and cold, but we shall see.