Read a note from author Shirley Barrett about her book Mrs Hopkins.
Below you'll find an edited extract of Shirley Barrett's Author Note from Mrs Hopkins. You can find the full text and historical references in Mrs Hopkins, available now in all bookstores...
The true story of Biloela Industrial School on Cockatoo Island is so desperately sad and horrifying, that I feel a good deal of guilt for having concocted my little fiction against such a bleak and terrible backdrop.
So my meagre way of making amends is to try to give some kind of account of what transpired there, lest the horrors be forgotten.
In 1866, in response to public concern about the problem of child destitution and delinquency, the Act for the Relief of Destitute Children (also known as the Industrial Schools Act) was passed by the Government of New South Wales under the guidance of Henry Parkes, with the intention of providing care, education and training of neglected and abandoned children. The idea of Industrial Schools was that these children would be trained with the necessary domestic skills, that they might go out to service. There was a desperate shortage of servants in Sydney at the time.
The Newcastle Industrial School was established on 6 August 1867 in the former Military Barracks on the Newcastle Government Domain. The Newcastle site was open to public view—and the inmates, almost all used to wandering freely and not having to follow rules— protested their confinement with wild rioting, obscene language, lewd behaviour and frequent escapes.
The girls barricaded the doors, broke up the bedsteads, smashed the crockery, and using the broken bedsteads broke every window and window frame in the Industrial School wing. Nine more girls were placed in the cells where they set up the most unearthly yells and foul language, which continued throughout the night. (From the Newcastle Industrial School for Girls website.)
It became apparent that the situation could not continue. In 1871, the girls were moved to the abandoned convict barracks of Cockatoo Island, safely out of public view. The institution was re-named ‘Biloela’ (an Aboriginal word meaning ‘white cockatoo’) in an apparent bid to remove any association with its convict past. That appears to be the only attempt to soften the environment into which the girls were interred. A bleaker, more prison-like environment could scarcely be imagined. (It can still be visited on Cockatoo Island.) And yet the girls, aged from three years to the age of eighteen when they were cast out once again upon the streets, having committed no crime except to be destitute, spent their entire girlhoods locked up like prisoners. To make matters worse, a new Superintendent, George Lucas, was installed, along with his bad-tempered wife as Matron. He was illiterate and incompetent, and prone to rages.
There seems to have been remarkably little compassion for their plight.
Certainly, the girls rioted, smashing windows and setting fire to bedding. For this, they were punished by extended periods of being locked up in darkened dormitories for extended periods on bread and water. Sometimes they were interred in solitary confinement (again, for days on end) in underground cells, remnants of the convict days, carved into the rock.
Horrifyingly, as evidenced in the Commission witness testimonies, there seems to be almost no compunction about locking girls in these underground solitary confinement cells—one of which can be viewed to this day on Cockatoo Island.
In 1873, a Commission was conducted into Public Charities. Members of the Commission visited the island and were shocked by what they discovered:
On arriving at the Industrial School, it was found that a number of windows had been broken in a riotous disturbance which had taken place some few days before, and a number of the girls engaged in the disturbance were still locked up in two of the dormitories.
One of the girls requested permission to make a statement to the Commission was called in and examined. She complained of ill treatment on the part of Mr and Mrs Lucas, stating that both these officers had beaten her, and other girls named, by knocking them down, striking them with the fist, a cane and a broomstick; and by knocking their heads against a wall on which some caricatures of Mr and Mrs Lucas had been drawn. She exhibited the marks of blows recently inflicted in support of her statement. The other girls named by her were called in and examined. Every one of these girls bore marks of violence and corroborated the account given by the first witness of the ill-usage to which they had been subjected.
They complained of having been beaten, kicked, dragged by the hair, caught by the throat, and having had their heads struck and rubbed against a wall, apparently in a rough effort to make them rub out a caricature on the wall with their hair.
The former witnesses having complained of being locked up in a dark room, which was so oppressive and foul from its close- ness that they were unable to sleep, the Commission repaired to No. 3 dormitory, the room spoken of. On opening the door of this dormitory, eight girls, from fourteen to seventeen years of age, were found in a half-naked condition, and all without shoes and stockings. The room had a stone floor, was without a chimney, had every window boarded up, was without an article of furniture, and had a foul and sickly smell, every call of nature being there answered by its inmates. On the door being closed upon the Members of the Commission, it was impossible to see each other until accustomed to the darkness. Into this room, when still damp from a recent scrubbing, it appeared the eight girls had been put, and kept in the dark from Friday morning till the visit of the Commission on Tuesday night, in the semi-nude condition in which they were found. Fed on bread and water, they drank, as they said, like dogs, from a bucket placed in the room.
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The Commission, to their credit, conducted an exhaustive enquiry, interviewing in detail everyone from the Lucases to the girls themselves. (This extraordinary document can be viewed in the State Library of New South Wales). Among their findings, they found that Biloela was unsuited as an Industrial School, owing to its prison associations and inaccessibility from Sydney, and should be moved as soon as possible to some situation more accessible to Sydney; that the management of Mr and Mrs Lucas was defective (they were removed from their positions, much to their outrage); that corporal punishment was too frequently resorted to; that the institution be placed entirely under the control of a woman; that in the new institution, ‘care should be taken that the older and more vicious girls be isolated from the younger and more innocent’; that it was highly important that some provision be made for their supervision after they have left the Industrial School.
And yet Biloela remained at the Cockatoo Island site until 1887, some fourteen years after the Commission’s findings. It was then moved to Parramatta, to become the Parramatta Industrial School, which has its own bleak history. In 1888, Biloela became a women’s prison; its offenders chiefly ‘vagrants, drunkards and prostitutes’. It is dispiriting to think how many Biloela girls may have returned there.
Mrs Hopkins
by Shirley Barrett
A witty and poignant final novel from acclaimed author and filmmaker Shirley Barrett about what destroys us, what sustains us, and what we carry from one world into the next.
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