Review: PBS series unveils 'Secrets' of Australia's founding

By David Podgurski
Staff Writer

Published November 20 2005

PBS's "Secrets of the Dead: Voyage of the Courtesans" (airing Wednesday night at 8 on WNET-Thirteen and CPTV) is the final installment in this sterling series' current edition. The title sounds a bit spicy in comparison to the series' previous macabre handles, such as tomorrow's updated "Killer Flu" episode (also at 8 p.m.) and last week's "Gangland Graveyard."

No matter. Most past "SOTD" installments have investigated gruesome and/or dangerous historical events/periods (syphilis, the black death) and "Voyage" is no exception, though it's a success story. It's about the founding mothers of Australia - and their present-day ancestors - unfolding, no less, a narrative of the growth of a colony to nationhood. Of course, the "secrets," when considered, prove no less ambivalent or problematic than other episodes (see last month's "Hunt for Nazi Scientists"). There's no small measure of death, hardship and, well, human trade, on this "Voyage."

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The program begins in London in 1783, then home to more than 800,000 people. The English have just lost their American colonies, and with them, a vital dumping ground for criminals, 50,000 of whom had been sent to America since 1718. Mad King George III, more than a little touched at this point, had issued "The Bloody Code," which set severe crimes, such as death or "transportation" to the Colonies, for criminal offenses, sometimes for as little as the theft of food.

There were some 200 to 250 capital offenses on the books, and jails were overflowing with convicts, many of whom were women -- mostly bawds or petty thieves. As historian and author Si‰n Rees points out, London's Newgate Prison was holding 750 inmates, double its capacity, with about 200 female prisoners, some as young as 6 or 7 years old. However, when the king recovered from his illness, a celebratory pardon was issued to female convicts, commuting sentences from death to "transportation." A few, according to historian Tim Hitchcock, said they preferred death; this sobering fact gives an idea of the esteem a new life on the Colonial frontier engendered.

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Australia's fledgling Botany Bay penal colony was fully established on Jan. 26, 1788, in Sydney Cove, and it was adopted quickly as England's new dumping ground. Governed by Arthur Phillip and chartered by English Home Secretary Lord Sydney, it was both a criminal exhaust valve and an extension of the British Empire, says criminal historian Vic Gatrell. Of more than 1,300 colonists, men outnumbered women by nearly 5 to 1, and due to lack of food and supplies, they were soon given over to lawlessness and disease -- "... half of them had the clap," Rees says. Mass intercourse or mass rape (no one knows which distinction fits), ran rampant one night after a violent storm shortly after its founding; an 8-year-old girl was raped in the summer of 1789. It was dire; the colony was in danger of failing, and Phillip wrote desperately to England for supplies, and more women.

In response, Britain's new home secretary rounded up some 200 female convicts in London and the countryside and shipped them to Botany Bay aboard a ship called the Lady Juliana. While there were fears that male colonists in Australia would engage in sodomy or "gross irregularities," the women were primarily considered "breeding stock." Historian Marilyn Lake points out that family life, then as now, was considered the structural base for civilization, ensuring colonial survival.

Whatever we may think of such a disturbingly tidy solution and the even more disturbing phrase "breeding stock" when applied to humans, more than 200 female prisoners were sent aboard the ship (coming after what's usually designated historically as "First Fleet"). It sat in the Thames Estuary for five months with the women in the bilge, as enough convicts deemed suitable were found to fill out its complement. The vessel would be well-cared-for, however, with regular meals and stocks of supplies, as well as a surgeon.

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Onboard conditions and the women's character are described in ship steward John Nicol's firsthand account, which paints a different story from the cold assessments of the courts. However, it would take the ship 10 months to arrive, stopping at several harbors (Tenerife, Cape Verde, Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope). While the crew took wives from the women onboard, many were allowed, with the help of an older female thief, to engage in free enterprise while at port.

When docked, the women turned the ship into a floating brothel, trading sexual favors for food, clothes, provisions and money from local sailors. Such a tidy system of "exchange" rivals Lord Sydney's own solution in terms of pragmatism, perhaps. Naturally, as we're reminded by scholars, many of the women were already prostitutes, and not as ... well, inflexible regarding the necessities of survival then as we might be now. As Gatrell says, they didn't have the luxury. And considering how overseas voyages essentially turned crews into ghost-ships, it's remarkable how well this ship fared in terms of brute survival -- the manifest records only five deaths.

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The program spindles this broad narrative forward to the lives of three modern-day Aussies whose ancestors were aboard the Lady Juliana: Meagan Benson, related to Mary Wade, convicted of stealing clothes at age 11; Helen Phillips, ancestor of Rachel Hoddy, a prostitute; and Delia Dray, descendant of Ann Marsh, a Devon girl of 21 convicted of stealing a handful of wheat. Each traces her ancestor's journey through newspapers and documents from the past, learning their fates.

These women, we learn, are related to those who stepped ashore in June 1790. The colonists who greeted them didn't want more "useless mouths" to feed, however, and it was only 18 days later, when supply ships arrived, that the colony began to turn around. (Turn around it did, though at the expense of Aboriginal populations and with notably abominable conditions on later fleets, as well.) The stories of the three young transports are tales of success and longevity: Hoddy, by the time of her death, owned two houses and a pub; Marsh, who'd married the ship's surgeon and became pregnant on the journey, owned a bakery, a pub and started a ferry that runs to this day; and Wade lived to be 87 -- with more than 300 living descendants at the time of her death.

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Production values are first-rate; as always with "SOTD," costumes and re-creations are very well done; the period wigs look good, and so do the tall ships and 18th-century cityscapes. Even the dirt and grime of the re-created London streets somehow seem genuine. As this tale of "exile into opportunity" affords a glimpse into history, we're also scanning the present and future, which is often what this superb series tries to do. It's a credit to PBS that it succeeds so often, and so interestingly.

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To track down court proceedings of many passengers of the Lady Juliana, visit www.oldbaileyonline.org. For more information on "Secrets of the Dead," visit www.pbs.org.

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