The Girl Who Stole Stockings: The Story of Susannah Noon and the Women of the Convict Ship Friends by Elsbeth Hardie

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges, particularly the left tail back cover corner now protected by book tape.

On 8th April 1811, the ship Friends sailed from England carrying 101 female convicts bound for the penal colony that was New South Wales. The crimes of the women and girls on board ranged from pickpocketing to murder, but most were convicted of theft.

Susannah Noon, not yet in her teens, tried to steal four pairs of cotton stockings from a shop in Colchester. It earned her a sentence of transportation for seven years 'beyond the seas'. It was a sentence that reverberated throughout her lifetime; she never returned to England.

What drove most of these young and old women to crime was what helped them shape new lives in New South Wales - the will to survive. The newly invented society they found themselves in was, in effect, that of an 'open prison'. In 1811, only one hundred women in New South Wales had not arrived as convicted felons.

Susannah and her Friend's shipmates were free to work and marry. Most of them grabbed the chance for respectability and, in doing so, became part of the unexpected phenomenon of transforming a penal outpost into a thriving colony.

Author Elsbeth Hardie knew nothing of these women when she went in search of them. Susannah and the others remained largely silent and invisible to history. In uncovering their stories, she provides a little-known account of the convict system that prevailed in the early years of transportation to New South Wales and how these women fared.

Susannah's journey would take her on to yet another new life in a whaling station in New Zealand, some years before the arrival of that country's first organised colonists. Her story becomes that of the shore-based whaling industry that drew hardened men from around the world to the southern seas and the families they gained.