While today’s youngsters are thinking about Sugar Plum fairies and Santa Claus, the ideas of ten year previous 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 ladies, half method to an odd land. Their female 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 located responsible of stealing one other child’s clothes. Her demise sentence, commuted to transportation for life, was bitter candy. Mary had escaped the gallows however would by no means see her family again. She spent the spring of 1789 in horrendous circumstances at Newgate Prison. Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict was considered one of fifty ladies fed bread and water in a cell that had neither beds nor bathrooms. However, once aboard The Lady Juliana, her situation improved. All convicts had been moderately fed and given heat beds. Only five girls and two youngsters died through the eleven month voyage and the situation of those who arrived in the colony in 1790, had improved.

To relieve the pressure on Sydney Cove, Governor Phillip sent many new arrivals including Mary, to a spot described by Captain Cook as, ‘a Paradise’ – Norfolk Island. There, at age fourteen, Mary gave start to a daughter. She 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 however never returned.

By 1809, Mary had married and arrange residence near the Hawkesbury River with convict Jonathan Brooker. Emancipated circa 1812, the pair took possession of a thirty acre farm in Airds, Campbelltown and lived happily until Harrigan’s demise in 1833. Twenty six years later in 1859, eighty 12 months previous Mary died at home. She had given start to twenty one kids. In her lifetime, her family had grown to incorporate five generations and over 300 descendants. Now, Mary’s descendants quantity in the tens of 1000’s, including Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia.

At Christmastime in 1789, ten yr old convict Mary Wade was facing an unsure future. Today, she is acknowledged as certainly one of Australia’s founding mothers.