While today’s children are thinking about Sugar Plum fairies and Santa Claus, the ideas of ten yr old 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: considered one of two hundred and fifty or so ladies, half approach to a strange land. Their female 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 responsible of stealing one other child’s garments. Her death sentence, commuted to transportation for life, was bitter sweet. Mary Wade: The Littlest Convict had escaped the gallows however would never see her household again. She spent the spring of 1789 in horrendous situations at Newgate Prison. Mary was considered one of fifty ladies 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 have been fairly fed and given warm beds. Only 5 ladies and two youngsters died through the eleven month voyage and the situation of those that arrived in the colony in 1790, had improved.

To relieve the pressure 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 delivery to a daughter. She had two extra kids 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 but by no means returned.

By 1809, Mary had married and set up home 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 fortunately till Harrigan’s death in 1833. Twenty six years later in 1859, eighty year outdated Mary died at house. She had given birth to twenty one youngsters. In her lifetime, her family had grown to include 5 generations and over three hundred 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 year old convict Mary Wade was dealing with an unsure future. Today, she is acknowledged as certainly one of Australia’s founding mothers.