‘The majority of the Black convicts transported to the Australian penal colonies were men, but more than two dozen were women. Most of these women were transported for violent crimes. Some were likely survivors of sexual violence and abuse. Two were minors. Not all of them made it all the way to Australia: one woman was pardoned before she was transported, another died while awaiting transporta­tion, and another died during the perilous journey to the antipodes.

Black Convicts cannot, and does not, attempt to answer all the questions that arise from the lives of these people. It is a perspective, and not the perspective on the history of convicts of African descent.

What I hope Black Convicts does do is ask us, as Australians, to confront some of the ugly truths of our history—slavery, colonialism, racism and sexism—and seek to correct their legacies. To consider marginalised perspectives in discourses around ‘national’ and imperial histories. To reexamine our understanding of race, gender, capital and labour when considering convict and settler colonial histories. And perhaps most importantly, I hope that it serves as a historical document that underscores the presence of people of African descent in colonial Australia by reinscribing them into history. There remains little scholarship analysing the lives of convicts from British colonies in the West Indies, South Asia, the Middle East, South America, the Indian Ocean and Africa. This relative silence on the lives of non-white convicts means that historical accounts of the early Australian colonies continue to be dominated by the falsehood that convicts were all white and British. My hope is that no longer continues to be the case. The figures in this book have been neglected for too long. It’s time their lives were considered part of our history.’

Ann Hicks was a convict woman who was constantly at odds with authorities following her arrival in Van Diemen’s Land in February 1830. Hicks was born in Liverpool, England, to one parent of African descent.48 On the 26th of July, 1829, she was tried in Lancaster for ‘stealing a watch and box’ and ‘£15 from a person,’ and sentenced to seven years transportation for theft.49 (This was not her first offence: she had previously been charged with stealing weighing scales, though no punishment was imposed.50) Along with more than a hundred other female convicts, Ann boarded the Eliza III in London that November. Standing at just 5'2", local authorities recorded her as ‘a mulatto’ with a ‘dark’ complexion, ‘dark hazel’ eyes with ‘black’ eyebrows and hair. Hicks reportedly had a ‘slight speech impediment’, and it was noted that the 26-year-old Protestant could read.51 She was also said to be skilled at looking after children as a nursemaid, and though she was able to carry out other domestic duties like washing, it was noted—rather oddly—that she was not skilled at ‘ironing’.

Hicks must have exhibited good conduct on the voyage, because she was assigned to work for a settler, Mr P. Lette, upon her arrival in Hobart. However, just a month after arriving in Van Diemen’s Land, Hicks was reported to have been ‘drunk and disorderly’. She was remanded in a cell for seven days, during which time she was given only bread and water; she was then ordered to return to her service. Weeks later, she was again found to be ‘drunk’ and out after hours. After another seven days in a cell with only bread and water, she was sent to the Cascades Female Factory in south Hobart.

The time she spent at the female factory did little to reform Hicks. The following year, assigned to settler J.W. Allanby, she was reported to have been ‘drunk’ and ‘absenting herself from her masters’ service’. This time Hicks was only admonished and discharged. After being reassigned to Lette, she was later convicted of ‘being absent from her master’s house without leave’.52 She again spent ten days in solitary confinement on bread and water over the Christmas period of 1831. Two years later, still working for Lette, she received a similar punish­ment for being drunk. In October of 1833, she was admonished for being absent without leave; in December, she received two seven-day stints of solitary confinement, once for being disobedient, and once for being absent without permission. Between February 1834 and July 1835, there would be four 14-day periods of solitary confinement on bread and water for Hicks—for variously being absent without leave, being drunk, disobeying orders, or ‘disorderly conduct’.53

After spending six years in Van Diemen’s Land, Hicks received her Certificate of Freedom in August 1836. At this point, things seem to have gone more rapidly downhill. She was soon reported as ‘having no place of residence’, a misdemeanour for which she was discharged. In September 1836, she was again reported to ‘have no settled place of residence’ and for being ‘drunk’. She was fined five shillings, money she was unlikely to have had, with her numerous prison stays suggest­ing that Hicks was unable to pay the fines to secure her release.

Towards the end of 1836, Hicks was arrested for being drunk, and fined £5, on three separate occasions. Just before the year ended, she was ordered to ‘find sureties to keep the peace’ after having been arrested for being ‘disorderly’. But in February 1837 she was arrested again for being drunk, and for obstructing a constable in the execu­tion of his duty—she was fined five shillings for each offence. In April, Hicks was served yet another five shilling fine for being drunk, before she was sent back to the Female House of Correction in May for three months for ‘vagrancy’. On her release, she was fined several more times for being drunk or for ‘disorderly conduct’.

Then in December of that year, Hicks added a new charge to her record, that of being ‘common prostitute’. Described in a news report as a ‘dusky priestess of both Bacchus and Venus’, she pleaded guilty to prostitution and was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment with hard labour.54 No sooner was she released than she was sent back to prison for another month, along with two other women, for ‘incorrigible drunkenness’ and for not having any money. Hicks and one of the other women arrested, Maria Harrington—who was an Aboriginal woman of mixed heritage—were singled out by the reporter for their ‘fleecy locks and black complexion’, though no comment was made on the appearance of their drinking companion, Ellen McCarty.55

After this, Hicks seems to have become even more embedded in criminality. After two months in the House of Correction from March 1839, for being an ‘idle and disorderly person’, in June 1841, she was going by the nickname of ‘Chance It’ when she was committed to trial for a felony, allegedly having stolen clothes from a sailor.56 I could not find any record of her conviction, so it seems possible the case was dropped.57 But criminal activity continued to define Hicks’ life in the colony. About a decade later, in October 1852, Hicks appeared with two others before the Supreme Court in Hobart, charged with robbing a gold digger. The court heard that the victim, William Piggett, had been visiting from Victoria when he met Hicks and her friend Martha Whiteman on the city streets at night. They asked him to buy them a drink; the trio stopped at a nearby pub. Eventually they continued on to another pub, where Piggett said he ordered a round of brandy for himself and the two women. He claimed to have had £178 in the pocketbook that was in his waistcoat. As he sat down on the sofa in the pub, Hicks allegedly sat across his knee, ‘covered his head’, and took the pocketbook out of his waistcoat. ‘The prisoner Ann Hicks put her hand into my bosom and took it; I tried to catch her but could not reach her. She was so quick,’ Piggett told the court. Hicks allegedly ran from the venue with the money, and Whiteman followed her.

The two women were apprehended days later at Whiteman’s home, along with Whiteman’s husband. Although they pleaded not guilty, the two women were both found guilty and sentenced to transpor­tation—Whiteman for ten years and the then 49-year-old Hicks for another 15 years.58 Hicks departed for New South Wales aboard the Charles Carter in June 1853, and after this point she disappears from the records.59 It’s possible that she had no more run-ins with the law. Given her history, it seems more likely she died.

On one reading, Hicks’ life is a record of marginalisation and decline—drink, prostitution and theft are often the only means that struggling people have to survive in societies that punish rather than help them. But it’s also possible to see Hicks’ life as an act of resistance to a society where women’s identities were based on their relationships with men. Unlike many other Black convicts—or convict women in general—Hicks does not appear to have married or had children. Her single life may or may not have been a choice, and it is easy to romanticise her independence, but there is some­thing gloriously defiant in the glimpses we catch of this woman.

48 Tasmanian Archives, CON19-1-12, Image 330.

49 Tasmanian Archives, CON40-1-5, Image 74; The National Archives of the UK, Class HO 27/37, p. 439.

50 Tasmanian Archives, CON40-1-5, Image 74.

51 Tasmanian Archives, CON19-1-12, Image 330.

52 Tasmanian Archives, CON40-1-5, Image 74.

53 Tasmanian Archives, CON40-1-5, Image 74.

54 ‘Launceston Police: Wednesday Dec 20’, The Cornwall Chronicle, 23 December 1837, p. 2.

55 ‘Launceston Police: Wednesday Jan 1’, The Cornwall Chronicle, 3 February 1838, p. 18.

56 ‘Launceston Police: Wednesday March 20’, The Cornwall Chronicle, 23 March 1839, p. 3.

57 ‘Police Intelligence: Wednesday June 2’, The Cornwall Chronicle, 12 June 1841, p. 4.

58 ‘Supreme Court: Robbing of a Gold Digger’, Tasmanian Colonist, 25 October 1852, p. 4.

59 Tasmanian Archives, POL220-1-3, Images 201, 203.