Mary Wade was a poor London girl who, in January 1789, was sentenced to hang for taking the clothes of a younger child. She did not hang. She was shipped to the other side of the world, and by the time she died in 1859 she had more than three hundred living descendants. They now number in the tens of thousands.
The Horror
The facts of the crime come from the Old Bailey trial of January 14, 1789. Mary and a friend were accused of robbing a child of a cotton frock, a linen tippet and a linen cap. The victim is described in one account as an eight-year-old girl. Under the law of the time, robbery with menace was a capital offence. The jury found her guilty and the sentence was death.
Her age is uncertain. The usual account gives it as about eleven, which fits a birth year of 1777. Later research points to a birth on 17 December 1775 in Westminster, which would have made her 13, and at least one account gives that age at trial.
She was held in Newgate for 93 days awaiting execution. What saved her was not the court but the King. George III had been ill during the winter of 1788 to 1789, and on March 16, 1789, the death sentences of the condemned women were respited to mark his recovery. Mary’s sentence was commuted to transportation.
She sailed on the Lady Juliana, a convict ship carrying women and children, as its youngest convict. It reached Sydney on June 6, 1790. One regional account calls the ship a “floating brothel”; that label is reported, not verified. In August 1790 Mary was sent on to Norfolk Island on the Surprize. She was still a child and had two children of her own there, by Harrigan, a fellow convict.
Back on the mainland, family legend places her in a tent on the banks of the Tank Stream in Sydney, which is unconfirmed. From 1809 she lived with Jonathan Brooker, whom she married in 1817. They took land in the Illawarra, including 30 acres at Tarrawanna. Family tradition credits her with 21 children, a figure researchers question. She died at Wollongong on December 17, 1859, at about 84.
The Modern Relic
Her descendants include a former Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, and she is described as one of the founding mothers of European settlement in Australia. In 2017 the New South Wales Government named a women’s remand centre after her.
In Wollongong, her funeral was the first held at St Paul’s Church. She was buried in the Church of England cemetery, which became Pioneers Rest Park around 1940. The headstones there were laid flat and covered by a rose garden, and the exact location of her grave is not confirmed. A plaque at the park entrance carries the name Mary Brooker.
