Remembering the women and children detained in Grangegorman before being transported to Australia

In September 1845, Margaret Butler was transported from the prison in Grangegorman to Tasmania to serve a seven-year sentence for stealing potatoes.

Butler – a widow from Tullow in County Carlow – said she had stolen the potatoes to feed her six children.

When she was transported, she travelled with two of them, Mary Anne and William. But on arrival, the children were put in an orphanage.

When Butler finished her sentence as a servant in Tasmania, then known as Van Diemen’s Land,  she got Mary Anne out, but William had already moved on to an apprenticeship.

Margaret Butler was later murdered by her second husband, says genealogist Dianne Snowden.

“The little girl was a witness,” says Snowden, who is William Butler’s great, great, granddaughter.

Through research in newspapers, Snowden discovered that the brother and sister found each other later, in New South Wales.

“He was in the mountains and she was on the coast, but they managed to reunite,” says Snowden, sitting on the grounds of the modern campus at TU Dublin in Grangegorman.

The Grangegorman Development Agency is encouraging projects that commemorate the history of the place, says Snowden.

And, together with Joan Kavanagh, a PhD researcher from Wicklow, Snowden is working on a free, searchable database of information on thousands of women and children who were detained in Grangeorman awaiting transportation to Australia.

“White Rag Burning”

At a conference in Melbourne in 1998 Snowden happened to sit beside Kavanagh, who was working in the interpretive centre at Wicklow Gaol.

“We discovered very quickly that we had a common interest in a convict ship,” says Kavanagh.

She was researching a young woman, Eliza Davis from Wicklow, who was sentenced to death for infanticide, had her sentence commuted to transportation, and later went on to become a midwife in Australia.

Davis was transported on the same ship, Tasmania, as Snowden’s ancestor, Margaret Butler.

Kavanagh and Snowden began collaborating on their research and in 2015 published a book: Van Diemen’s Women: A History of Transportation to Tasmania.

Snowden is also author of the 2005 book White Rag Burning, which tells the stories of women so desperate for a better life during the Famine era that they committed crimes to get transported.

“It’s a real contrast to the typical image of Irish convict women as passive victims during the Famine era,” says Snowden. “These were women who had agency, they took their lives into their own hands and set fire to something.”

They stood beside the burning buildings and waited to be arrested, she says. “In Australia, they were fed, housed, clothed and had work.”

Of course, some people were desperately trying to dodge transportation too, says Kavanagh. One woman chewed glass to try to make herself sick so that they wouldn’t send her.

Remembering their stories

Artist Rowan Gillespie, who did the Famine memorial on Custom House Quay, has also made sculptures of transported women and children that were installed in Hobart, Tasmania.

“I’ve done a lot of work with convict women,” says Gillespie. “It is the thing I enjoyed most and might be most proud of even.”

He likes immortalising people in bronze who might never have thought that would happen, he says.

He used descendants of the convicts as models. For example, Dianne Snowden’s grandchildren were models for his sculpture of William and Mary Anne Butler.

His process involves a lot of research into the era, he says. “You need to get the whole thing right,” he says.

He tries to place the sculptures in the exact spots where the people would have stood, he says. The Famine sculptures on Custom House Quay stand where people queued up for the ships, says Gillespie.

A lot of people assume transportation was similar to the coffin ships, says Gillespie, but that isn’t the case.

The people who were transported to Australia were not starving, he says. They were fed well in Grangegorman before the voyage and, for some people, it was the first time they got to eat meat, he says.

Grangegorman was a training centre as well as a prison, and those who didn’t have skills received training there, she says.

The voyage took around four months but the ships were well managed, with doctors on board, says Snowden. “They needed to be able to work when they got to the Australian colonies,” she says.

Says Kavanagh: “They were a valuable commodity.”

Gillespie says that for many, “the real horror happened when they arrived … They were treated appallingly.”

After they arrived, they were lined up for selection, he says. Most of the women were put to work as domestic servants, says Snowden and some were cooks and seamstresses.

If, for any reason, the householder who took them on decided not to keep them, they were punished with a period in solitary confinement, says Gillespie.

It was the famine era, so there was a lot of chaos. But, says Kavanagh, who recently completed a PhD on the topic, the transportation system was very well organised.

“The administration in the 19th century was incredible,” she says. “Everything worked like clockwork.”

Kavanagh says Australians tend to be more aware of the history of transportation than Irish people.

Here the experience is remembered in the well-known song “The Fields of Athenry”, but is otherwise almost forgotten, she says.

Many of those who were transported couldn’t read and write and so there are few letters home, says Kavanagh.

“It’s not that it was necessarily hidden,” she says. “The memory has died out because the people have died.”

Kavanagh and Snowden are planning a book and a free, searchable database so people can research their ancestors who passed through the detention centre at Grangegorman having been sentenced to transportation.

They can also access the Grangegorman admissions registers, petitions the women put forward to have sentences commuted and government records from when they arrived in Tasmania.

“They are all interesting and they all have individual stories,” says Snowden. “That is what we’re trying to do, to tell as many of the stories as possible.”