Ross is home to one of four female factories across the state, which 12,000 female convicts passed through. 

Operating from 1847 to 1854, when the cessation of convict transportation spelt its end, it was not a factory of the sort we know today, but was a place of punishment and correction for female offenders. 

The site is now managed by the Tasmanian Wool Centre, and centre manager Debra Cadogan-Cowper said the female factory was built at the request of local landholders who wanted a closer factory than that in Hobart from which to get their servants. 

“They saw it was a convenience to them that if they [the convicts] misbehaved they could just bring them here they wouldn’t have to take them back to Hobart,” Mrs Cadogan-Cowper said. 

The factory was split into two, the “crime class” and the “passholder class”

After serving a hard six months in the crime class, they became passholders and could work for wages outside the prison and were able to be acquired by local landowners as servants, or sometimes as wives. 

Mrs Cadogan-Cowper said the superintendent of the factory was also a doctor, and people would visit for his services and then “men would come and say, ‘Well I believe you could find me a wife’”.

Life was tough as a female convict and this prison, like many others, boasted a suite of solitary confinement cells.

Women requiring discipline were placed in the 4 foot by 6 foot earthen-floored cells for up to three weeks on rations of bread and water, with only a tiny opening for light.

“Apparently if you had created quite a terrible ruckus and it was a major punishment they wanted to give you they would shave your hair off as well,” Mrs Cadogan-Cowper said. 

An archaeological dig in the 1990’s shed light on the everyday life of those incarcerated at the factory. 

“In the solitary cells they found more [artifacts] there than they did anywhere else, which is really amazing,” Mrs Cadogan-Cowper said. 

“They found bits of chopped bone from meat, glass from beer bottles, the pipes they smoked and lots of mens trouser buttons were found there; so you know, ‘you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours’.

“It tells a tremendous story of this site.”

A project developed between the Tasmanian Wool Centre, Parks and Wildlife and the Tasmanian Community Fund

To discover more about the lives of the women in Tasmania’s female factories, the Convict Women’s Press has published a book on each of the four female factories. 

The sounds of babies cries would also no doubt have been heard floating over the once-high fence surrounding the Ross female factory that held incarcerated female convicts.

The factory, one of four in the state, would keep the children of prisoners until the age of three, after which they were placed in government orphanages. 

“But the laws of the time were that you only got to see that child once a week after church on a Sunday and so they were shut off from the children when they were working,” Mrs Cadogan-Cowper said. 

The outlook was not good for the children of the factories, with three-quarters perishing from disease, malnutrition and even heat stroke from sunburn. 

“There were all sorts of things that unfortunately they perished from,” Mrs Cadogan-Cowper said. 

“There were 1200 babies born within all the female factories in Tasmania and out of that 1200, 900 of them died while they were within the factory system.”