Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Babette Smith, NLA Publishing, $49.99.
Defiant Voices aims to draw together accumulated research into a picture of the women convicts as we understand them today.
Historian Babette Smith elaborates: “It unashamedly takes on the women’s perspective, which means some events and people that are usually prominent in Australian histories fade to background. Emphasis on the women’s point of view at this time, when research has revealed so much, allows fresh insights: their use of sound and voice to harass officials, for example; and, with the aid of digital data, the extent of their deliberate resistance against authority, which contributed significantly to the broader Australian culture in ways not previously recognised.”
Between 1788 and 1853, approximately 25,000 women were transported to Australia. For nearly 200 years, there has been a chorus of outrage at their vulgarity, their depravity and their promiscuity. Smith takes the reader beyond this traditional casting of convict women, looking for evidence of their humanity and individuality. Certainly some were desperate, overwhelmed by a relentless chain of criminal convictions, drunkenness and despair. However, there were those who were heroic, defiant.
Smith takes us beyond the traditional casting of convict women as depraved and promiscuous, and instead seeks evidence of their humanity and individuality.
Defiant Voices tells the interesting story of the Crown trying and failing to make its prisoners subservient to a harsh penal system. Convict women challenged the authorities by living in perpetual disobedience, which was often flagrant, sometimes sexual and always loud.
From factory rioters to individuals like Ann Wilson, whose response – “That will not hurt me” – provoked a magistrate to pile punishment after punishment onto her, the women of Defiant Voices fought like tigers and drove men to breaking point with their collective voices, the lewd songs and ‘disorderly shouting’ resounding from the page.
