‘Reflection: Cascades Female Factory, Hobart’

When thee builds a prison, thee had better build with the thought ever in thy mind that thee and thy children may occupy these cells

• Elizabeth Fry, Social Reformer

 

Crime upon crime.

 

These yards are silent now.

The old walls stand four-square

round paving emptied

of its convicts and catastrophes.

 

But silence speaks.

Has learnt to speak

of seven thousand pasts

once cast immoral; and yet the

 

charge must be colossally misplaced.

Children died here,

innocent and starved.

One in four, they say.

 

II

 

Crime upon crime.

 

Years later, following closure,

Truganini¹ was buried

in the old Yard One,

outside the chapel.

 

Later disinterred for a so-called ‘royal’ museum

they toured and displayed her body.

And they said those female convicts

were immoral.

 

Amid the factory paving

Stands a single tree

Within a pot engraved

‘Trukanini Set my spirit free.’

 

III

 

Crime upon crime.

 

Language once spoken on this land

was buried too.

Language which died

along with Truganini.

 

Yet, palawa kani² roars,

silent no more and resurrected

from its coarse colonial death.

Its spirit is set free.

 

From mountain, up upon kunanyi³,

everything is seen, everything remembered

through shifting mists of tears

for mothers and their children.

 

Crime upon crime.

Set their spirits free.

 

 

¹ Truganini (also Trukanini, inter alia) was one of the last speakers of the original Tasmanian languages.

² Palawa kani is the recovered language of the Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples.

³ Kunanyi is the palawa kani word for mountain and is used specifically to refer to the large mountain set behind Hobart also known as Mt Wellington.

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