‘Depravity and Disorder’

Abstract

The Polluting of Parramatta In his public tract on 'sexual disorder', An Answer to Certain Calumnies , published in 1826, Samuel Marsden, Anglican clergyman, magistrate and member of the board of management of the Parramatta Female Factory, explored the link between convict women's sexuality and their 'polluting' of the town of Parramatta. One cause of corruption, he wrote in a letter to Governor Macquarie in 1815, was the behaviour of male convicts. But a second, more insidious, cause of the moral and political decline of Parramatta and its neighbourhood 'is the miserable state of the female convicts in the service of the Crown, and employed at the Government factory'. The expansion of Parramatta coincided with the presence of convict women in its public spaces. Prior to Governor Macquarie's arrival in New South Wales in 1810, the town largely consisted of a number of huts scattered over the area, which had been established under Governor Arthur Phillip's command during the 1790s. By 1802 there had been some growth with the establishment of 180 houses inhabited by free men and government officials. But it was with Macquarie's arrival in the colony that the town's architecture was transformed. Parramatta began to flourish as several public buildings were installed. The orphan school and the hospital were erected in 1818, and ten years later the Sydney Gazette noted that the town was 'improving in point of respectable and capacious buildings'.