Isabella (Bella) Ramsay, a farm servant girl from Cumberland
in England, made her mark on Australian history.
Found guilty of stealing wearing apparel in August 1790, sixteen-year-old Bella was incarcerated at the Carlisle Citadel. With English prisons being scoured for women of marriageable age who could be sent to the fledgling penal colony of New South Wales, she was scooped up. Women like Bella were needed as 'partners' for the preponderance of males who'd arrived in the colony on the First and Second Fleets.
She arrived in Sydney in July 1791 aboard the Third Fleet vessel Mary Ann, three months short of her eighteenth birthday. She was 'selected' by the First Fleet marine settler James Manning and in 1792 she married him but in 1793 she apparently exercised her free choice of partner. Manning gave up farming and returned to soldiering and she took up with Robert Forrester, an industrious First Fleet convict and a former member of Sydney’s night watch. Bella and Robert had nine children together.
By August 1794 Bella and Robert were settled at the Hawkesbury where Bella was among the first white women pioneers to live
on the frontier of settlement, unguarded by the soldiers living at Parramatta and Sydney Cove.
In October 1794, in the first case of its kind, Robert was ‘interviewed' at Parramatta by John Macarthur over the
killing of an Aborigine at the Hawkesbury but no charges were laid.
In September 1799 Bella enters the history books in her own right. In front of her five young children, she played a prominent role in standing up to her neighbours (a group estimated to involve nine men including the local constable Edward Powell, her next-door neighbour) against the execution of three Aboriginal boys in her home. Robert Forrester was away at the time. Her neighbours ended up taking the boys away from her home and killed two of them while the third escaped.
The ensuing court case in October 1799 led to the
first policeman in Australia’s history being charged and found guilty of
killing an Aboriginal person. Powell was initially demoted but was eventually
pardoned, as were the other four men charged. Despite many Aboriginal deaths in
custody after that, his charge was the last for several hundred years, until a
Queensland case in 2007.
Bella was rescued from the March 1806 floods at Windsor and was still alive when Marsden’s Muster of Women was recorded in August 1806 but seems to have died by early 1807, as her youngest child, an infant born in March 1806, was raised by foster parents (the Second Fleet convict Paul Bushell and his wife Jane Sharp).
Bella stands out as an early example of a courageous woman willing to stand her ground in a tough man’s world. In May 2020 she was accepted as a nomination for the Australian Dictionary of Biography's 'Colonial Women' project. It's to be hoped that she makes it through to the finals of the selection process.
Read her full story in 'Sentenced to Debt: Robert Forrester, First Fleeter', available from BookPOD.
Found guilty of stealing wearing apparel in August 1790, sixteen-year-old Bella was incarcerated at the Carlisle Citadel. With English prisons being scoured for women of marriageable age who could be sent to the fledgling penal colony of New South Wales, she was scooped up. Women like Bella were needed as 'partners' for the preponderance of males who'd arrived in the colony on the First and Second Fleets.
She arrived in Sydney in July 1791 aboard the Third Fleet vessel Mary Ann, three months short of her eighteenth birthday. She was 'selected' by the First Fleet marine settler James Manning and in 1792 she married him but in 1793 she apparently exercised her free choice of partner. Manning gave up farming and returned to soldiering and she took up with Robert Forrester, an industrious First Fleet convict and a former member of Sydney’s night watch. Bella and Robert had nine children together.
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Convicts
in New South Wales, lithograph, 1793, Juan Ravenet,
from wash drawings collected by Felipe Bauza on the Spanish Scientific Expedition to Australia and the Pacific, 1789-1794, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW |
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Detail from 'A View of the River Hawkesbury, NSW, c 1810’,
Watercolour drawing by John William Lewin,
Image a3531001, By Permission State Library of NSW
|
In September 1799 Bella enters the history books in her own right. In front of her five young children, she played a prominent role in standing up to her neighbours (a group estimated to involve nine men including the local constable Edward Powell, her next-door neighbour) against the execution of three Aboriginal boys in her home. Robert Forrester was away at the time. Her neighbours ended up taking the boys away from her home and killed two of them while the third escaped.
 |
| Original sketch by Julia Woodhouse |
Bella was rescued from the March 1806 floods at Windsor and was still alive when Marsden’s Muster of Women was recorded in August 1806 but seems to have died by early 1807, as her youngest child, an infant born in March 1806, was raised by foster parents (the Second Fleet convict Paul Bushell and his wife Jane Sharp).
Bella stands out as an early example of a courageous woman willing to stand her ground in a tough man’s world. In May 2020 she was accepted as a nomination for the Australian Dictionary of Biography's 'Colonial Women' project. It's to be hoped that she makes it through to the finals of the selection process.
Read her full story in 'Sentenced to Debt: Robert Forrester, First Fleeter', available from BookPOD.
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