While today’s children are excited about Sugar Plum fairies and Santa Claus, the thoughts of ten 12 months outdated Mary Wade must have been vastly totally different. At Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict in 1789, Mary was the youngest convict aboard a ship sure for Australia: certainly one of 2 hundred and fifty or so girls, half way to an odd land. Their female convict ship The Lady Juliana, a 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 garments. Her demise sentence, commuted to transportation for life, was bitter candy. Mary had escaped the gallows however would never see her household once more. She spent the spring of 1789 in horrendous conditions at Newgate Prison. Mary was one of fifty women fed bread and water in a cell that had neither beds nor toilets. However, once aboard The Lady Juliana, her state of affairs improved. All convicts had been moderately fed and given heat beds. Only 5 women and two youngsters died through the eleven month voyage and the condition of those that arrived in the colony in 1790, had improved.

To relieve the strain on Sydney Cove, Governor Phillip sent many new arrivals together with Mary, to a place described by Captain Cook as, ‘a Paradise’ – Norfolk Island. There, at age fourteen, Mary gave start to a daughter. She had two more youngsters 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 but never returned.

By 1809, Mary had married and arrange house close to 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 Twenty six years later in 1859, eighty year outdated Mary died at residence. She had given start to twenty one kids. In her lifetime, her family had grown to include five generations and over three hundred descendants. Now, Mary’s descendants number in the tens of thousands, including Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia.

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