While today’s kids are serious about Sugar Plum fairies and Santa Claus, the ideas of ten year previous Mary Wade should have been vastly completely different. At Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict in 1789, Mary was the youngest convict aboard a ship certain for Australia: certainly one of 200 and fifty or so girls, half method to an odd land. Their feminine convict ship The Lady Juliana, a half of the Second Fleet, had set sail from Portsmouth in July.

Months earlier Mary, (born in England in 1778), had been arrested and located guilty of stealing another child’s garments. Her death sentence, commuted to transportation for all times, was bitter candy. Mary had escaped the gallows but would never see her family again. She spent the spring of 1789 in horrendous circumstances at Newgate Prison. Mary was considered one of fifty ladies fed bread and water in a cell that had neither beds nor toilets. However, as quickly as aboard The Lady Juliana, her state of affairs improved. All convicts were fairly fed and given warm beds. Only 5 ladies and two youngsters died in the course of the eleven month voyage and the situation of those who arrived within the colony in 1790, had improved.

To relieve the stress on Sydney Cove, Governor Phillip sent many new arrivals together with Mary, to a spot described by Captain Cook as, ‘a Paradise’ – Norfolk Island. There, at age fourteen, Mary gave delivery to a daughter. She had two more children with emancipated Irish transportee, Teague Harrigan and by 1806, the family was residing 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 home close to the Hawkesbury River with convict Jonathan Brooker. Emancipated circa 1812, the pair took ownership of a thirty acre farm in Airds, Campbelltown and lived fortunately till Harrigan’s demise in 1833. Twenty six years later in 1859, eighty yr previous Mary died at residence. She had given delivery to twenty one youngsters. In her lifetime, her household had grown to incorporate five generations and over 300 descendants. Now, Mary’s descendants quantity in the tens of thousands, together with Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia.

At Christmastime in 1789, ten 12 months old convict Mary Wade was dealing with an uncertain future. Today, she is recognized as certainly one of Australia’s founding mothers.