An Obadiah Slope column
Georgian architecture and human struggle: Mrs Slope took Obadiah on an adventure usimg the new light rail (or tram for Melburnians) that snakes through Parramatta. The light rail made it easy to explore the old asylum buildings that once housed the “female factory” where women convicts were sent.
At lunch in a building that bears the marks of generations of instiutional use – if only the Georgian sandstone would cry out like the stones Jesus spoke of in the Bible – Mrs Slope was inspired by the location. She whipped out her phone and found a great answer to whether one of her convict ancestors was housed inside those walls.
The answer was yes. Margaret Boyle, who arrived on the ship Brothers in the third fleet did live at the female factory. At age 26, Mary, a lady’s maid was sentenced to death: found guilty in Lancaster in England for having “uttered three forged £1 notes.” Her sentence was commuted to transportation.
Lancastrian Research has found a description of her: “In her jail description at Lancaster Castle, she said she was born at Dublin and had a fresh complexion though was a little pitted with the smallpox. She had hazel eyes and brown hair. She was married and her husband was a hawker. She had one child with her in jail and had another behind at Liverpool who would soon join her, these were Sarah and Henry.”
There is a vivid description of how Margaret and other women were treated by the Quaker prison reformer Elizabeth Fry. “Eleven women from Lancaster” [including Margaret] were sent to the ship “iron-hooped round their legs and arms, and chained to each other. The complaints of these women were very mournful, they were not allowed to get up or down from the coach without the whole being dragged together; some of them had children to carry, they received no help, or alleviation to their suffering.”
Transportation split the family apart, and she arrived at the female factory in May 1824 with two small children. From nothing she rebuilt her life.
Margaret Boyle remarried a sailmaker called William Thurgate in 1825, and they had five more children together. One of these, James, is Mrs Slope’s ancestor. Obadiah is told William and Margaret married at St Phillips, Church Hill in Sydney’s CBD. How many bigamous marriages took place there?
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The employee with cancer: Obadiah’s account of a Fairwork Commission hearing about Gordon Cheng, a stage four cancer sufferer and his dismissal from the Church Missionary Society for completing his work out of hours against direct instructions and not letting his boss know he was doing that was well read last week. It reminded Obadiah of the day at Fairfax he was summoned to his bosses office to hear his an encounter between his boss and the paymaster. At first it sounded like the paymaster was being berated for being too soft on a working journo “Don’t pay penalty rates or loadings to that particular journo was the message.” But it turns out what was really going on, was that the company was simply paying the wages of a journo with serious cancer who was not able to work – yes without holiday loading etc. And they kept on paying for years. Obadiah discovered later that his boss was a Christian.
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Early contender for ad of the year: Some readers may decide that a New Zealand tourism ad labelled on some socials as “When God visited New Zealand,” but on YouTube as “Mr Frosty and the BMX kid” is blasphemy. Obadiah does not see it that way.
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Church sale watch: St David’s Uniting Church, more recently Habitat Uniting in Melbourne’s Canterbury is described as “development land” in publicity for its sale.
Which means that any evidence of Christianity being ever proclaimed at that site will disappear.
as my wife said… “I expected a better ‘bomb’ from god.”
🙂