While today’s youngsters are thinking about Sugar Plum fairies and Santa Claus, the ideas of ten year outdated Mary Wade will need to have been vastly totally different. At Christmastime in 1789, Mary was the youngest convict aboard a ship certain for Australia: one of two hundred and fifty or so girls, half method to a wierd 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 found responsible of stealing one other child’s clothes. Her dying sentence, commuted to transportation for all times, was bitter candy. Mary had escaped the gallows but would by no means see her household once more. She spent the spring of 1789 in horrendous circumstances at Newgate Prison. Mary was certainly one of fifty ladies fed bread and water in a cell that had neither beds nor lavatories. However, as quickly as aboard The Lady Juliana, her situation improved. All convicts have been fairly fed and given warm beds. Only five women and two youngsters died during the eleven month voyage and the condition of those that arrived in the colony in 1790, had improved.

To relieve Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict on Sydney Cove, Governor Phillip despatched 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 dwelling in a tent on the banks of the Tank stream in Sydney. Harrigan joined a whaling ship however by no means returned.

By 1809, Mary had married and arrange house 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 fortunately until Harrigan’s death in 1833. Twenty six years later in 1859, eighty year old Mary died at house. She had given start to twenty one children. In her lifetime, her family had grown to incorporate 5 generations and over 300 descendants. Now, Mary’s descendants quantity within the tens of hundreds, including Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia.

At Christmastime in 1789, ten yr old convict Mary Wade was going through an uncertain future. Today, she is recognized as one of Australia’s founding mothers.