Lucy Pritchard Frost '63 gives voice to the past

by Coleen Dee Berry

She was a petty thief arrested on the streets of Dundee, Scotland. Her crime: stealing a pair of trousers. Her punishment: indentured servitude halfway around the world. In 1837, Jean Boyd endured an arduous ocean voyage only to arrive in Van Diemen’s Land, known today as Tasmania, to face bouts of solitary confinement in a prison/workhouse known as the “female factory” and the uncomfortable role of servant in a strange land. 

But Jean Boyd persevered and ultimately prospered in this strange land. She married a fellow convict, had a family, briefly ran a pub and then a successful farm. Boyd and other Tasmanian convict women come to life in the writings and research of Lucy Pritchard Frost ’63, who believes “narratives matter.”

Frost used these words to begin her inaugural lecture as the chair of English at the University of Tasmania more than 16 years ago. Narratives matter, she contended, because of their importance in how communities imagine themselves.

A large part of Frost’s career has been spent giving voice to women’s narratives from the past in her adopted country, Australia. She began by recounting the experiences of women settlers in Australia. More recently, her work has illuminated the lives of female convicts transported in the early to mid-1800s.

Australian settlement stories are “very similar to popular culture about the American West,” Frost said. “From the male perspective of telling the story, it’s all very heroic and romantic. But when you look at the women’s perspective, you see a very different story. You see so much more of the hardship and heartbreak involved.”

Frost first came to Australia in 1970, after graduating from Wilson with a bachelor’s degree in English, completing postgraduate degrees at the University of Rochester and then teaching at UCLA. She taught American literature at La Trobe University in Melbourne, but it was a work of Australian literature—Barbara Baynton’s short story collection Bush Studies—that set her on a mission. Baynton’s uncompromisingly bleak fiction about life in Australia’s outback “made me wonder how the women on the Australian frontier would write about their own lives,” Frost said. “So I began to look at their unpublished letters and diaries.” 

The result was her first book, No Place for a Nervous Lady: Voices from the Australian Bush, published in 1984 and now considered a classic in Australian nonfiction. Taken from letters and diaries written between 1840 and 1883, the narratives include an increasingly pessimistic 25-year-old Louisa Clifton helping her family settle a new town; the bitter governess, Rosa Payne, who despises her bush posting; and the adventurous Lucy Jones, who wrote illustrated letters to relatives detailing a harrowing journey through the outback, signing one, “I remain, A conglomeration of wonder and hope!”

But if narratives help communities imagine themselves, Frost discovered that a large part of the story was missing in Australia and especially in the island state of Tasmania, located off Australia’s southeastern coast. 

More than 70,000 convicts from across the British Empire were sent to Tasmania in the early 1800s. Many convicts, like Jean Boyd and her husband John Clark, embraced the land that was once their prison and provided it with descendants. Today, some estimate close to three-quarters of Tasmanians can claim a convict ancestor.

However, until recently, no one in Tasmania or elsewhere in Australia wanted to acknowledge the early convicts, Frost said. Until the late 1980s, official records of the convict period were closed to scholars and family historians alike. “A kind of amnesia settled over convict sites and family histories, an aversion to what was known as ‘the convict stain,’” she said.

Many factors went into the overthrow of the convict stain, but “the main one seems to be the celebration of the Australian bicentennial in 1988 and the resulting long look back into the country’s history,” Frost said.

In 1997, Frost became the first woman to hold the chair of English at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, the state capital. “Once I came to Tasmania, I began to think about the role of convict women in the foundation narrative of Australia,” Frost said. Taking advantage of the newly opened records, she began researching the lives of women “transported beyond the seas.” 

In 2001, Frost was appointed to the board of directors of the Cascades Female Factory Historic Site in Hobart. Cascades was in many ways, the institution at the center of the female convict story, but when Frost arrived in Tasmania, most of the buildings had been sold off or destroyed. The convicts were assigned employment after their long voyage when they arrived here. If children had accompanied them, the women were required to leave them at the factory and many were then shipped to orphanages. If a woman became pregnant, she returned to the factory to give birth and again, was required to leave her child behind when she returned to work. If employers lodged complaints against their convict servants—even for something as trivial as talking back—punishment was solitary confinement at the factory.        

As a Cascades board member, Frost spent the next decade as part of the effort to return the female factory to public visibility. Today, the Cascades Female Factory is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a historic tourist destination.

While on the board, Frost and another member, Alison Alexander, formed a sub-committee that blossomed into the Female Convicts Research Centre. The center, now with more than 4,000 members worldwide, encourages research into the experiences of Tasmanian convict women and their children. Frost, who retired from the University of Tasmania in 2009, remains the organization’s president.

I also have no doubt that being taught by strong, smart women gave me the role models I needed to survive in a career seen very much as a man’s world when I entered the workforce in the 1960s. - Lucy Pritchard Frost

Frost has also written or co-written six books detailing the lives of convict women. Abandoned Women: Scottish Convicts Exiled Beyond the Seas, published in 2012, traces the lives of women transported on a ship named HMS Atwick. Compiling this narrative was no easy task, Frost said. Her educated Australian women settlers left behind diaries, letters and journals. Most Tasmanian female convicts were illiterate petty criminals who were essentially voiceless and anonymous.

It took her “six to seven years of real detective work” to piece together the convicts’ lives. “You have to remember I was a full-time professor at the time!” Frost said. She traveled four times to Edinburgh to research the voluminous court records there, and combed libraries in Scotland, England and Australia for news articles. 

Frost is now at work on her 10th book, From the Edges of Empire: Convict Women From Beyond the British Isles, which will highlight narratives about women from all corners of the British Empire, such as India and Jamaica, who were transported to Tasmania.

After 45 years in Australia, Frost is comfortably settled. She moved to Tasmania after visiting a friend who is a sixth generation Tasmanian. “It has mountains and lots of water. I grew up in a town just outside the entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains and a lot of what I loved about that area, I found in Tasmania,” Frost said. Her two daughters also live in Australia. 

Frost said she regrets losing touch with many Wilson friends—when she first moved to Australia, long-distance phone calls were expensive, flights were exorbitant and social media didn’t exist. (“If only I had Facebook back then!” she lamented.). But she has maintained a long friendship with Wilson classmate Sarah Walker Risher ‘63. “We do a lot of traveling together. And we Skype.” 

Frost credits her time at Wilson with encouraging her love of writing. “I also have no doubt that being taught by strong, smart women gave me the role models I needed to survive in a career seen very much as a man’s world when I entered the workforce in the 1960s,” Frost said. “Almost all my career has focused on the literature and history of women, and again, I’m sure that, directly and indirectly, my years at Wilson were crucial in giving me the confidence to believe that this was a worthwhile subject.”