The Cascades Female Factory Audio Experience
The Cascades Female Factory Audio Experience provides an overview of the history of the site as well as the stories of the women and children that spent time here. Most of the structures and buildings that made up the Cascades Female Factory have been removed or lost with time. Today, you can take your time as you wander through the space and listen to true tales of the courage, resourcefulness and resilience of the women lived, worked and aspired to a better life outside these same walls. The audio experience fills in the space between then and now.
The Cascades Female Factory Audio Experience
Chapter 11: Yard Two (Location: Yard 1)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Sadly, no physical evidence of Yard Two remains above ground but it once stood on the other side of Yard One. Find out what was once here…
If at Cascades Female Factory, we recommend you listen to this chapter at the far wall in Yard One (stop 11).
There was a doorway in this wall which led into Yard Two. You can still see evidence of the door today but, sadly, there is no remaining physical evidence of the Yard itself.
Built in 1832 to alleviate the overcrowded conditions in the Factory, Yard Two became known as the Washing Yard.
The wash tubs were a place of back-breaking labour, where the women washed clothing and bedding for the Female Factory and other government institutions such as the orphan schools and the convict transport ships. They also provided washing services to the public and local businesses, which brought an income to the Factory.
In Yard Two, women scrubbed at washtubs in sheds running down the long walls, and laid the laundry out to dry across posts and rails in the centre of the Yard.
The days were long, up to ten hours at the tubs during the summer months. It seems entirely natural that, whilst engaged in this work, the women chatted and sang. Small moments of human connection during back breaking, tiring work. However, newspaper reports deemed this behaviour ‘too merry’ for convicts. And the chatter angered Superintendent Hutchinson who said the women ‘talked away all sense of punishment’.
Yard Two also contained solitary working cells, also known as ‘light cells’ because they let in just enough light for the women to work. This punishment was considered a less severe form of solitary confinement than that experienced in the dark cells.
In these cells, women were put to work sewing or picking oakum.
For its first 15 years, Cascades Female Factory consisted of just these two yards.
By the 1840s, another Yard was desperately needed. The new Governor, Sir John Franklin, was facing an influx of convicts since transportation to New South Wales had ceased. He also needed to implement a new system – the Probation system was to replace the Assignment system and Yard Three was designed with this in mind … Let’s go take a look …