Convict Women’s Prison and Factory

Penal Colony

Convicts arrive

In August 1825 the barque Lalla Rookh brought the first 28 prisoners sentenced to Moreton Bay. They landed at Amity Point on North Stradbroke Island and ferried passengers and stores ashore in small boats. The convicts were serving a range of sentences, mostly three years, including runaways from Port Macquarie. One was a lifer.

Botanist and explorer Alan Cunningham noted the work was harder in Moreton Bay than Norfolk Island, because of the summer heat. All work was done by hand. There were no beasts of burden to lighten the load, even though Logan asked for 30 bullocks to set up a farm at Oxley Creek, 14 kilometres upstream, where he said there was ‘an extensive and fertile plain’.

Logan worked the men hard in the fields in an effort to increase maize production, their staple food. It was not the corn we buy now, but a hard, unpleasant ground meal. The convicts didn’t like it but it kept them alive.

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Convict Factory

Eagle Farm

Expansion of the settlement came in 1829 when Colonial Botanist Charles Frazer visited to check the progress of his gardens at Gardens Point (now the Brisbane City Botanic Garden).

He was delighted by what he saw. The growth, he wrote, was truly astonishing. There were about 15 acres (6 hectares) under crop, with an abundance of common vegetables like cabbages and carrots. The success of Frazer’s gardens meant the health of the convicts had improved considerably. In addition to the city gardens there were nearly 15 acres of sweet potatoes and yams, mostly at New Farm.

Logan was confident they could do better. With Frazer’s help he chose a large site about eight miles by land and eleven by water down river from old Brisbane Town. The site came to be known as Eagle Farm.

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Women’s Prison

Close enough for comfort

Women convicts were housed separately in Brisbane, in what was known as a Female Factory, located in Queen Street, at the site of the present GPO. Officers continually took liberties, visiting the women at night. These forbidden fraternisations intensely annoyed the penal colony’s Commandant, Captain Foster Fyans. He took to personally guarding the Female Factory at night. The more troublesome women were gradually transferred to the abandoned Agricultural Establishment at Eagle Farm, which, at a distance of eight kilometres by land, was at least remote from the main population.

The farm itself had been afflicted with crop failures, floods, drought, and outbreaks of malaria. By 1837 all Moreton Bay’s women prisoners had been moved to Eagle Farm. The Agricultural Establishment had survived in a much reduced form. Existing buildings were adapted and new ones built. Superintendent Parker’s 7-room cottage, where he lived with his wife, was the most substantial building. Its walls were plastered inside and out.

The remains of the Superintendent’s Quarters, still exist at the TradeCoast Central Heritage Park, uncovered by archaeological digs at the Eagle Farm site.

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Early Brisbane

In 1839 Moreton Bay stopped receiving convicts. Preparations were underway to convert the outpost to free settlement. One of the earliest attempts at settlement was the Zion Hill mission (now Nundah) from 1838 to 1848, established even before free settlement was declared.

John Dunmore Lang was instrumental in bringing the German missionaries to Zion Hill, adjacent to the northwest and essentially part of Eagle Farm at the time.

John Dunmore Lang also recruited Andrew Petrie, who arrived in 1837 as clerk of works to repair the settlement’s buildings. Petrie stayed on to design and build most of the important structures for the future town.

The Petrie family’s first Brisbane lodgings were in the original Female Factory at the site of Brisbane’s GPO. A year later, Petrie and his family moved into a stone house on the reach of the river now known as Petrie Bight.

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