While today’s youngsters are serious about Sugar Plum fairies and Santa Claus, the thoughts of ten 12 months previous Mary Wade will need to have been vastly totally different. At Christmastime in 1789, Mary was the youngest convict aboard a ship bound for Australia: certainly one of 2 hundred and fifty or so women, half method to a strange land. Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict , 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 clothes. Her death sentence, commuted to transportation for all times, was bitter candy. Mary had escaped the gallows but would by no means see her family again. She spent the spring of 1789 in horrendous conditions at Newgate Prison. Mary was considered one of fifty girls fed bread and water in a cell that had neither beds nor lavatories. However, as soon as aboard The Lady Juliana, her scenario improved. All convicts were reasonably fed and given heat beds. Only five ladies and two children died during the eleven month voyage and the situation of those that arrived in 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 birth to a daughter. She had two extra children with emancipated Irish transportee, Teague Harrigan and by 1806, the household was dwelling 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 near the Hawkesbury River with convict Jonathan Brooker. Emancipated circa 1812, the pair took ownership of a thirty acre farm in Airds, Campbelltown and lived happily till Harrigan’s dying in 1833. Twenty six years later in 1859, eighty year previous Mary died at residence. She had given start to twenty one children. In her lifetime, her household had grown to include five generations and over 300 descendants. Now, Mary’s descendants quantity within the tens of thousands, including Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia.

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