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 16: Mothers and Children (Location: Yard 4)
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Convict women who gave birth here, in the Yard Four factory nursery, were subjected to new, harsh regulations.
Content warning: This chapter discusses infant mortality.
If at Cascades Female Factory, we recommend you listen to this chapter by the wall of Baby Names, a memorial to the infants born at the Factory, in Yard 4 (stop 16). This memorial was researched and developed by tour guide, Shelly Kube.
Mothers stayed with their infants for 9 months until they were weaned, and then other nursing mothers watched over the growing children. As you know from our time in Yard One, pregnancy for women under sentence was a punishable offence.
With the Nursery returning to Cascades in 1850, new regulations were put into place.
The regulations stated that mothers would attend to the care of their own child for just three months. For the next three months, she would be required to look after a second child as well as her own. And, for the three months after that, a third child.
Her child would be weaned at nine months and the mother removed from the Nursery.
From there she would be sent elsewhere in the establishment to complete her probation.
It was rare for a mother to be permitted to visit her children after they were weaned.
There was a high chance children would never be reunited with their mother. The death rate in the Nursery was high. The children who did survive were admitted to the Orphan Schools when they were 3 years old and stayed until their mothers could support them or they were apprenticed out and learned to support themselves.
It is gut wrenching to imagine what the women went through – the real chance that, after 9 months together, they may never see their child again …
In 1832, a petition was sent to Lieutenant Governor Arthur signed by ‘Nursery Women’. In it they begged the Governor to not treat them as objects of guilt but to pity them. But he did not pity them. He punished them. And this attitude continued throughout every iteration of the convict nursery.
It feels like an unnecessaryly cruel system which has affected generations to come.