At the Cascades Female Factory, Hobart, which operated from 1828 until 1856

. . .

Still here, remnant walls that penned the women,
serried sandstone blocks ingrained with misery;

still here, the restless air the women breathed
engorged with unsaid words,
their soundless bastards and their swines
here in this place of demanded silence
except for foot-treads and the turnkeys’ goading;

still here, rubble of cooped-up yards where
crunch of trodden gravel feeds imaginings
of hordes of female feet through dreary years
busied with the bidding of men;

still here in this damp-swamped gully
gouged below cold-shadowing kunanyi,
the sense of back-then years,
of an overcrowding of women
laundering, wringing hanks of cloth
with hands stiff-fingered in the sleety chill,
women bleaching cloth, bleaching pain-puckering skin,
breathing in the stench, hefting irons,
mending for the bastards;

still here, the spirit of the female factory,
incarcerated production line of laundry,
of woven cloth, of clothes, of hats,
production line too of servants (and of wives sometimes—
those seemingly bent-head biddable);

still here, fragments of a cramp of solitary cells,
mildewed, unlit, foul back then,
reminders of the punishment regime
for insubordination, insolence and obscene language,
conduct unbecoming of the female character;

the hated isolation, though,
desired after all by some, once in a master’s house;

back here, women returned from servitude
for dogged disobediences and misdemeanours—
better a solitary cell than the hot stink of a man,
his limbs, his flesh, his unbounded bidding.

This poem was first published in issue 92 of Forty South magazine.

After a teaching career in Hobart, Canberra and Sydney, during which she wrote two books about teaching, Penny Lane turned to writing short stories and more recently poetry, and has won several awards for both stories and poems. She was a finalist in the 2017 Newcastle Poetry Prize, and most recently won first and third prizes in the free verse section of the 2019-20 Sutherland Shire Literary Competition. She has published a Kindle e-book, Winning Writing: What Works For Me, about her short story writing.