Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this page contains the names of Aboriginal people who have died.
Most people driving up Church Street or catching the light rail through North Parramatta have no idea that behind the trees and the hospital car parks sits one of the most important women's history sites in the country. The Parramatta Female Factory was where thousands of convict women landed after the long voyage out. It was their workplace, their boarding house, their maternity ward, their marriage market and, if they played up, their prison. An orphan school went up next door in the 1840s. When the convict days ended the factory became a lunatic asylum, and the orphan school later became the Parramatta Girls Home, which only closed in 1974.
I've pulled the story together from the Dictionary of Sydney, the City of Parramatta's research pages, the Parramatta Female Factory Friends, the National Heritage List and the UNESCO Tentative List entry. Where they don't agree on a date or a number, I've set it out in the "Where the Sources Disagree" section near the end.
Burramatta – The Place of Eels
Long before the factory, this bend of the river was Burramattagal country. The Burramattagal are one clan of the Darug people, and their name comes from the Darug words for eel (burra), place (matta) and people (gal), so "people of the place of eels". The city of Parramatta takes its name from them.
The Burramattagal were pushed off their land quickly once Governor Phillip set up the farm and outpost at Rose Hill in November 1788. Their elder Maugoran complained to the British about how many white men had settled in his country. Phillip's answer was that wherever the colonists settled, "the natives are obliged to leave that part of the country", and he sent more troops to Rose Hill.
The UNESCO Tentative List entry for the site says the river gave the Burramatta fresh water, fish and eels, that the land was part of their core territory, and that the riverbanks near today's Norma Parker Centre are known to have been a site of women's ceremony. So women were gathering on this riverbank long before the Female Factory came along.
The Factory Above the Gaol (1804–1821)
The early governors saw convict women as a problem. Their labour couldn't be used the way the men's muscle could, and there was nowhere official to put the women who weren't married off or sent out as servants. According to Geoff Barker of the Parramatta Heritage Centre, many of those women had to live with a man or turn to prostitution to pay for a roof, and those with no fixed home often couldn't protect their weekly rations and went hungry by the end of the week.
Governor Philip Gidley King's answer was to put the women to work weaving. He had hired a master weaver, Thomas Wise, before leaving England in 1799, but Wise drowned on the way out. King started a small workshop in 1801 with women making rough woollen blankets. Then in August 1803 he signed a contract with George Mealmaker, a hand-loom weaver transported as one of the "Scottish Martyrs", to run the work in new rooms being built at the Parramatta gaol.
King had suggested adding an extra storey to the gaol going up on what is now Prince Alfred Square. Upstairs were two big rooms about 80 feet long and 20 feet wide, with no way through to the gaol below. That was the first "Female Factory", and the Parramatta Female Factory Friends date it from 1804 to 1821. By August 1804 Mealmaker had nine looms going, making fine linen, duck, wool, sailcloth and sacking, and 2,116 yards of cloth had been bartered for wheat through the commissariat.
It didn't last as a going concern. Barker writes that Governor Bligh had no interest in the industry, a fire hit the factory in 1807, and Mealmaker, who had "a propensity for whisky and snuff", died in poverty and was buried in St John's cemetery. In May 1809 the Sydney Gazette announced the factory had reopened under Benjamin Brewer.
By 1818 the place was a disgrace. The Reverend Samuel Marsden reported 150 women and 70 children on the books, but only two rooms, both used as workshops. About 30 women slept on the floor among the spinning wheels, wool and cards, many with little or no bedding, and "not less than 120 women are at large at night to sleep where they can". Francis Greenway, sent to report on the building in 1816, warned that the men in the gaol could get up to the women above, which "has a very bad moral tendency". The Parramatta Female Factory Friends note that most of Parramatta's hangings took place just outside this gaol, on what was called Hanging Green.
Greenway's Factory by the River (1818–1821)
Marsden had been writing to everyone who'd listen about the women, including Wilberforce, Lord Bathurst and Elizabeth Fry, and in January 1817 Governor Lachlan Macquarie put a new Female Factory on his list of essential public buildings. In March 1817 Greenway was told to draw up a factory and barracks "sufficient to lodge 300 female convicts, on an area of ground of four acres, enclosed by a stone wall nine feet high".
The site was on the north side of the river, just up from the weir for the government mill, on land that had been granted to Governor Bligh and taken back by Macquarie after Bligh left. Major George Druitt called tenders in December 1817, and in April 1818 the contract went to William Watkins and Isaac Payten, who were to finish in eighteen months for £4,778. Macquarie laid the foundation stone in 1818 (see "Where the Sources Disagree" for the exact day). The building was finished in January 1821, well over time.
Macquarie was proud of it. In his list of public works he called it "A Large Commodious handsome stone built Barrack and Factory, three storeys high, with Wings of one storey each for the accommodation and residence of 300 Female Convicts". It came with carding, weaving and loom rooms, stores for wool and flax, a kitchen garden and a bleaching ground, all inside a high stone wall with a moat or wet ditch.
According to Wikipedia's account, the walls of the main building were 2 feet 6 inches thick at the foundations, it had an oak-shingled roof, and the women ate on the first floor and slept on the two floors above. Barker points out that the plain, unornamented design was a lot like Greenway's Hyde Park Barracks. It also sat too close to the river: Commissioner Bigge noted a breach in the bank that threatened the wall's foundations, and the late decision to build the wall plus the flood works added £1,200 to the bill.
Moving Day – February 1821
The women were walked from the old rooms above the gaol to the new factory in February 1821. According to the City of Parramatta's history pages, Macquarie and Commissioner Bigge came to watch 109 women and 71 children moved in on 1 February. Bigge, who was in the colony looking into government waste, wasn't impressed and doubted such an expensive barrack had been needed at all.
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First, Second and Third Class
With a lot more women to manage, the factory brought in a class system. The Dictionary of Sydney says it began with two classes, and a third came in after Governor Brisbane ordered more sleeping quarters in 1823. The City of Parramatta says the Royal Engineers built the quarters for "third class" women around 1825. The Parramatta Female Factory Friends set the classes out like this:
- First class: women waiting to be assigned as servants, or eligible for marriage.
- Second class: women there for a minor offence, for pregnancy, or because they had a child with them.
- Third class: the "crime class", for women sentenced in the colony or caught behaving badly, for example by being insolent. Women could be moved up or down depending on their conduct.
For first-class women, the Dictionary of Sydney says, the factory was mainly a refuge and a labour exchange. They got better food and clothes, could have visitors, could go to church, and could earn their own money for extra work. Second class was a probationary class with worse food and fewer rights.
For the third class the factory was plainly a harsh women's prison. They did hard labour, and from 1826 they had their heads shaved, which marked them out and hurt their chances of being assigned or married. In June 1831 the Sydney Monitor reported that someone attached to the factory was making money on the side selling the women's hair. The Parramatta Female Factory Friends list the other punishments: breaking rocks, picking oakum, chopping wood, laundry work, solitary confinement on bread and water, wearing a heavy iron, and a cap of disgrace.
What landed a woman in third class was not always consistent. The Dictionary of Sydney gives the case of Julia Allen in 1831. She preferred a stroll in the Sydney streets to scrubbing her master's floors, told him he was "a dirty, disagreeable, detrimental little devil", and said she'd be damned before she'd work. That got her six weeks in the third class. A fortnight later Isabella Wass was found guilty of biting off part of a woman's finger and got two weeks less than Julia.
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Spinning, Weaving and Parramatta Cloth
Wikipedia explains it was called a factory because it made cloth: linen, wool and linsey-woolsey. It says the women wove 60,000 yards of cloth in 1822 and calls it the colony's first manufactured export. The Parramatta Female Factory Friends say the women spun and wove linen and what became known as "Parramatta" cloth.
The City of Parramatta says work for every class revolved mostly around making cloth and linen. Some women cooked and washed for the factory, some of that washing was done for the public, and others worked as needlewomen or hat-makers. When Bigge reported, he recommended adding sewing and straw-hat making to the spinning and carding to keep the women busy. The Parramatta Female Factory Friends add straw plaiting and a laundry service for the colony. The work came and went with demand, and the council notes the women often had nothing to do when production cost too much or nobody wanted their labour.
Picking a Wife at the Factory Gate
The factory was also, quite openly, a marriage bureau. Carol Liston, writing in the Parramatta Heritage Centre's Women Transported, says Governor Darling found the "disposal of the women in an eligible manner" both desirable and "extremely perplexing and embarrassing". Governments encouraged convict mechanics to marry by giving married men extra time to work for themselves. In 1832 the Government Gazette announced that men could apply to marry women in the factory.
Judge Roger Therry described ticket-of-leave men getting a pass to go to the factory and choose a wife, with little courtship beyond a quick look. The whole thing supposedly took three days: one to get there and choose, one for courtship and the wedding, and one to go home with the bride. Liston points out that in practice it can't have been that quick, because couples needed permission to marry and that took weeks.
Real names turn up in the church books. In October 1831 the banns approved at St John's, Parramatta included five women from the factory, among them Margaret Hogan, a widow with four children. On 13 March 1843 Henry Boggs of Wollongong married Catherine Nowlan of the Female Factory at St Patrick's in Parramatta, with three factory staff as her witnesses. It didn't always end happily. The Dictionary of Sydney notes that more than one newly married former inmate turned up in the newspapers' police columns complaining of beatings from her husband.
The Women's Hospital and the Children
Greenway also designed a hospital on the site, and it still stands. The Dictionary of Sydney says sick and injured women and expectant mothers, free as well as convict, were cared for there, which makes it the first dedicated women's health service in Australia. The City of Parramatta adds that in the 1820s the factory treated most of the women in the colony who needed a doctor, and that surgeons were treating women out in the open courtyard until a verandah was asked for in 1829.
Babies born there could stay with their mothers until they turned three, often less, and were then sent to orphan schools such as the Male Orphan School at Liverpool or the Female Orphan School at Rydalmere. Many never got that far. The Dictionary of Sydney says the St John's burial registers show plenty of infants who died at the factory, and women died there too, from infectious disease and childbirth. There was at least one coroner's finding of death by starvation, which the authorities were quick to reverse.
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Matron Ann Gordon
Ann Gordon ran the place longer than anyone. The Australian Dictionary of Biography says she was born in Portsmouth about 1795, married Robert Gordon of the Limerick Militia in 1812, and came to Sydney with him and their two daughters in 1817. Governor Darling gave her the job of superintendent and matron in October 1827 at £150 a year, including quarters, fuel and light, which made her one of the highest-paid women in the colony. Wikipedia notes that was £50 a year less than her predecessor got.
According to the City of Parramatta, there were 366 women in the factory in her first year, more than a thousand passed through in 1827 and 1828, and 500 were still there in late 1829. Built for 300, it grew to more than 600 women and children under Governor Bourke. Locals nicknamed it Gordon's Villa, Gordon's Nunnery or Gordon's Seminary, and women sent to live and work there were said to have been "Gordonised".
Scandal around her family finished her. The factory midwife, Mary Ann Neale, alleged misconduct by Ann's husband, and there were rumours about her daughter Caroline. Ann herself wasn't blamed, and Bourke called her "a valuable public servant", but she lost the job in 1836 and was paid a year's salary. Sarah and Thomas Bell took over. Ann died at Maitland on 6 June 1868.
The Riots
The women didn't take it all lying down. The Dictionary of Sydney and Women Transported both list riots in 1827, 1831, 1833, 1836 and 1843.
27 October 1827
The first riot broke out while the factory was changing matrons, as Ann Gordon arrived. Liston says it was a reaction to cuts in the ration of tea and sugar, and possibly a show of independence for the new matron's benefit. The Sydney Gazette's report is a cracker:
"A numerous party again assailed the gates, with pick axes, axes, iron crows … the inmates were quickly poured forth, thick as bees from a hive, over Parramatta and the adjoining neighbourhood. About one hundred came into town … A captain, a Lietenant, two serjents; and about 40 rank and file, were seen flying in all directions with fixed bayonets … and so violent were the Amazonian banditti, that nothing less was expected but that the soldiers would be obliged to commence firing on them."
The women came back a few hours later under military escort, their aprons loaded with bread and meat. The historian Gay Hendriksen argues it was Australia's first female workers' riot, and the Parramatta Female Factory Friends describe it as the women refusing to work on starvation rations.
March 1833 – The Hair-Cutting Riot
In March 1833 the women resisted the routine cropping of their hair. According to Liston, the constables and 40 soldiers followed the elderly Reverend Marsden and Dr Anderson into the third-class yard and were met with a shower of stones. The women were subdued and their hair was cut. A convict woman, Mary Ann Jarvis, did the cutting when the paid monitresses refused, and her own sentence was remitted because of the risk she took.
February 1843
By the early 1840s transportation had stopped, assignment had stopped and the colony was in a depression. Liston says numbers in the factory hit 1,203 women and 263 children in the winter of 1842. In October 1842 the women petitioned the Governor, arguing they had been sentenced to transportation, not imprisonment. An inquiry backed them. Even so, in February 1843 about a hundred third-class women broke out of their quarters, yelling and throwing stones, and got into the outer yard before the military and police pushed them back.
That same year Gordon Elliott, the Parramatta police magistrate, started a hiring scheme where the women would be paid. Between February and March 1843 he placed 94 of the best-behaved women as cooks, laundresses, needlewomen and housemaids.
Gipps's Cells and the End of the Factory
Under Governors Bourke and Gipps the factory turned more and more into a prison. In June 1838 the Royal Engineers under Captain Barney started a three-storey cell block, finished in September 1839. Charles White, writing in 1906, put the total cost at £3,767 and the number of cells at 72, built on the American separate system. The ground-floor cells were so dark that Her Majesty's Prison Inspector criticised them and new windows had to be cut. Gipps also brought in two new administrators chosen by the English prison reformer Elizabeth Fry. Liston says 72 women were regularly in the cells through 1840 and 1841.
Once transportation to New South Wales ended in 1840, the factory slowly ran out of purpose. Assignment of women stopped in 1841, and by 1846 there were only 250 women left. The City of Parramatta says the factory's administrative positions, including the matron's, were abolished by 1848. Edwyn Statham, the last superintendent, and his wife were straight away made superintendents of the new Parramatta Lunatic Asylum.
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Factories Built on the Parramatta Model
Parramatta was the first purpose-built female factory and the pattern for the rest. The Parramatta Female Factory Friends list eleven others: George Town, Launceston, Ross, Hobart Town and the Cascades in Van Diemen's Land, Bathurst, Newcastle and two at Port Macquarie in New South Wales, and two at Moreton Bay. The National Heritage List says only three of the twelve survive.
The Roman Catholic Orphan School Next Door
Right next to the factory, on its south side, stands the old Roman Catholic Orphan School. The City of Parramatta says work began in 1841 on a four-storey building and a three-storey servants' wing designed by Henry Ginn, using stone from a quarry in Fleet Street. Wikipedia says it was first meant for the children of the factory women. It was supposed to replace the Male Orphan School at Liverpool, but instead 113 children were brought over from the Roman Catholic orphanage at Waverley.
It grew and grew: a new wing around 1850, more work by William Munro from 1859, a hospital in 1862 (later called Bethel House), and a chapel in 1865. According to Wikipedia, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd took over its management in 1859. By the 1870s it held 318 children, and the 1873–74 Royal Commission on Public Charities found boys and girls crammed into dormitories, in some cases more than one child to a bed. When it closed in August 1886, 41 children were still there.
The Sisters of Charity, who later founded St Vincent's Hospital, also did some of their early work at the factory and the orphan school. I've written about them in my St Vincent's post (link below).
From Lunatic Asylum to Cumberland Hospital
In July 1849 Governor FitzRoy announced that "incurable chronic lunatics" would be moved from the overcrowded Tarban Creek asylum at Gladesville to "the building at Parramatta, known as the Female Factory". The City of Parramatta says the site officially became the Parramatta Lunatic Asylum in 1850. Dr Patrick Hill became the first surgeon superintendent in 1852 but died soon after, and Dr Richard Greenup took over. Through the 1850s most new arrivals were destitute people and low-risk patients. By the 1870s it was the biggest government establishment in Parramatta, with about 800 inmates.
Conditions were grim. The women patients lived in Gipps's old prison cells, described in 1877 as a "gloomy, three-storied building" so dark inside that it was "never brighter than twilight on the sunniest day". Dr Frederick Norton Manning, after touring asylums around the world, wrote: "I have not seen anything so unsatisfactory and so saddening as Parramatta, except at Cairo."
Under the Lunacy Act of 1878 the asylum became the Parramatta Hospital for the Insane. The women moved into a new weatherboard complex in 1882, and the old factory buildings started coming down. Sandstone from Gipps's cell block went into James Barnet's No. 1 Male Ward, finished in 1885, which still stands with the turret clock from Greenway's main factory building in its spire. The Dictionary of Sydney adds that the factory bell, dated 1820, hangs above the clock. Greenway's main building itself was knocked down in the 1880s, and the old factory gates went around 1909 for Walter Liberty Vernon's administration block. By 1934 there were 700 women patients. The name changed to Cumberland Hospital in 1983, and it is still a mental health hospital today.
Parramatta Girls Home, Kamballa and Norma Parker
This is the hardest part of the story. In 1887 the girls of the Biloela Industrial School on Cockatoo Island, ninety of them, were moved into the old orphan school buildings. It became the Parramatta Industrial School for Girls. A 1910 official handbook said it was designed for "neglected and uncontrollable girls between the ages of 13 and 16 years", especially those whose company had led them to "immoral tendencies or criminal instincts".
Wikipedia says girls were sent there as "delinquent", "neglected" or juvenile offenders, and many were Aboriginal girls of the Stolen Generations. The UNESCO entry says the training aimed at domestic skills and "moral purity", and that many former inmates see it as forced domestic slavery. There were riots from the very first years, and Wikipedia lists others in the 1940s, 1958 and 1961. The UNESCO entry tells of one escape where the girls built a human pyramid to get over the high walls. From 1961, girls who broke the rules could be sent to the Hay Institution for Girls, a maximum-security annexe.
Public pressure, led in large part by the campaigner Bessie Guthrie and the Women's Liberation Movement, closed the home in 1974. The UNESCO entry says the site then became Kamballa, a shelter for girls, and Taldree, for boys, and from 1980 it was a women's detention centre called the Norma Parker Centre. In 2014 the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard from sixteen women who said they had been sexually and physically abused at the Girls Home. The National Heritage List places this history alongside the convict story, naming the Forgotten Australians, Child Migrants and Stolen Generations.
What's Left Standing
The Parramatta Female Factory Friends list what survives from the factory years:
- Two Greenway buildings from about 1818: the Matron's Quarters and administration building, and the Lying-In Hospital.
- The third-class penitentiary and sleeping quarters from about 1823 to 1826.
- The sandstone walls and yards.
The Dictionary of Sydney adds the 1830s courtyard walls and the Gipps courtyard, where discarded convict stone still lies around but the solitary cells are gone.
Heritage Listing and the World Heritage Bid
The Parramatta Female Factory Action Group, now the Parramatta Female Factory Friends, started in 2010 to stop the buildings being lost to "demolition by neglect" and to push for national and world heritage listing. They got the first part. The Parramatta Female Factory and Institutions Precinct went onto the National Heritage List in November 2017. The listing says the precinct, used from 1821 until 2008 by state and church institutions, is "outstanding in its capacity to tell the stories of women and children in institutions".
On 13 September 2023 Australia added the precinct to its UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List. That bid ended in February 2026. According to Property and Development NSW, the UNESCO advisory body ICOMOS told the Australian and NSW governments the precinct didn't meet its criteria, and the nomination was discontinued. The Parramatta Female Factory Friends said they were "deeply disappointed — but determined to continue the fight". In their statement of 22 February 2026 they called on both governments to keep a World Heritage pathway open, possibly as an extension of the existing Australian Convict Sites listing.
Parramatta North Today
The land around the factory has been fought over for more than a decade. In 2015 the ABC reported that UrbanGrowth NSW wanted about 3,900 dwellings in North Parramatta, in buildings up to 30 storeys. The Female Factory Friends and local residents fought hard against it, and the government promised $103 million to restore the buildings.
The latest chapter came on 7 August 2026, when the NSW Government finalised the rezoning of 33 hectares of Parramatta North. The plan allows around 2,000 new homes, at least 100 of them affordable, in buildings from two to 23 storeys. It also allows up to 12,000 jobs, a university campus, up to 10 hectares of open space and a new First Nations pavilion by the river, with $124.5 million for the first stage of infrastructure. The 6-hectare Female Factory and Institutions Precinct itself is not part of the rezoning and stays in government ownership, and buildings next to it were cut back in number and height.
Property and Development NSW says government money has already gone into restoring buildings for uses like the Western Sydney Startup Hub and the Parramatta Girls Home Memorial Garden. It held a Heritage Day on the site on 9 May 2026, with tours of the Girls Home and the Female Factory. The Female Factory Friends run tours from their rooms at 5 Fleet Street.
The Descendants – One in Seven?
You'll often hear that one in seven Australians descends from the women of the Female Factory. It's worth knowing where that comes from. The City of Parramatta writes that it is "estimated one in seven Australians is descended" from the women who passed through. In 2015 Gay Hendriksen, president of the Parramatta Female Factory Friends, told the ABC: "It's estimated one in seven Australians are related to the women who went through the factory." The Friends' own fact sheet gives a range, "1 in 5 to 1 in 7 Australians are related to female factory women", and separately says one in seven Australians are descended from convict women generally.
So it's an estimate from the historians and advocates closest to the site, and the wording shifts between "descended from" and "related to". None of the sources I read show how the figure was worked out. It's a nice thought all the same. If your family tree has a convict woman who came to New South Wales between 1821 and 1848, there's a fair chance she spent time behind those sandstone walls.
Timeline
- Before 1788 – Burramattagal country, part of the Darug nation.
- November 1788 – Governor Phillip sets up the farm and outpost at Rose Hill, and the Burramattagal are pushed out.
- 1801 – King starts a small blanket-weaving workshop with women convicts.
- August 1803 – George Mealmaker is contracted to run weaving in new rooms on the Parramatta gaol.
- 1804 – The women move into the "factory above the gaol".
- 1807 – A fire at the factory.
- May 1809 – The factory reopens under Benjamin Brewer.
- 1816 – Greenway reports on the crowded old factory.
- March 1817 – Greenway is ordered to design a factory for 300 women.
- April 1818 – The contract goes to Watkins and Payten for £4,778.
- 1818 – Macquarie lays the foundation stone (4 May or 9 July, depending on the source).
- February 1821 – 109 women and their children move into the new factory.
- 1822 – 60,000 yards of cloth woven.
- 1823–1826 – Third-class quarters are added and the three-class system starts.
- 27 October 1827 – The first riot. Ann Gordon becomes matron.
- 1831 – A second riot.
- March 1833 – The hair-cutting riot.
- 1836 – Another riot. Ann Gordon is dismissed.
- 1838–1839 – Gipps's three-storey cell block is built.
- 1840 – Transportation to New South Wales ends.
- 1841 – Assignment of women ends. Work begins on the Roman Catholic Orphan School.
- Winter 1842 – 1,203 women and 263 children in the factory.
- February 1843 – The last recorded riot.
- 1848 – The factory's positions are abolished and it becomes the Parramatta Lunatic Asylum.
- 1849–1850 – Patients are moved in from Tarban Creek, and the asylum is made official.
- 1878 – The asylum becomes the Parramatta Hospital for the Insane under the Lunacy Act.
- 1880s – Greenway's main building and Gipps's cells are demolished, and the No. 1 Male Ward is built in 1885.
- August 1886 – The Roman Catholic Orphan School closes.
- 1887 – The Parramatta Industrial School for Girls opens.
- 1974 – The Parramatta Girls Home closes, and Kamballa and Taldree take its place.
- 1980 – The Norma Parker Centre for women opens.
- 1983 – The asylum is renamed Cumberland Hospital.
- 2010 – The Parramatta Female Factory Action Group is formed.
- November 2017 – National Heritage listing.
- 13 September 2023 – The precinct is added to Australia's World Heritage Tentative List.
- February 2026 – ICOMOS advises against listing, and the nomination is discontinued.
- 9 May 2026 – Heritage Day at Parramatta North.
- 7 August 2026 – The Parramatta North rezoning is finalised, with the Female Factory precinct left out.
Where the Sources Disagree
- When the first factory started: The Parramatta Female Factory Friends say 1804 to 1821, and Wikipedia says the women moved in in 1804. The Dictionary of Sydney heads its section "c1802–1821". The City of Parramatta titles its page "1803–1821", and the UNESCO entry says the earlier factory was "established 1803".
- The foundation stone: The Dictionary of Sydney and the City of Parramatta's bicentenary podcast page both say Macquarie laid it on 4 May 1818. Another City of Parramatta page, "The Second Female Factory: 1818–1848", says 9 July 1818.
- Moving day: The Dictionary of Sydney, the Parramatta Female Factory Friends and the City of Parramatta's "Second Female Factory" page say 1 February 1821. The City of Parramatta's bicentenary page says 21 February 1821.
- How many children moved in: The City of Parramatta says 71 children came with the 109 women. The Parramatta Female Factory Friends say 72.
- How many women it was built for: Macquarie's own description and Greenway's orders say 300. Wikipedia says Greenway was told to design for 250.
- The contractor's name: The City of Parramatta has Isaac "Payten" (in partnership with William Watkins on one page, and William Gooch on another). The Dictionary of Sydney spells him "Peyton".
- How many women passed through: Wikipedia says over 9,000 names are recorded across all the factories, with about 5,000 through Parramatta, and the City of Parramatta also says about 5,000. The Parramatta Female Factory Friends' fact sheet says about 15,000 went through the factory system at Parramatta.
- What the 1827 rioters wanted: Liston, in Women Transported, says the riot was over cuts to tea and sugar. Wikipedia says the disputed ration was bread and sugar.
- How many riots: The Dictionary of Sydney, Women Transported and Wikipedia list five (1827, 1831, 1833, 1836 and 1843). The Parramatta Female Factory Friends say there were six.
- When the third-class quarters went up: The Dictionary of Sydney links the third class to new sleeping quarters ordered by Governor Brisbane in 1823. The City of Parramatta says the Royal Engineers built the third-class quarters around 1825, and the UNESCO entry says the three-class system came in in 1825. The Friends date the surviving penitentiary to about 1823–1826.
- When the factory became an asylum: The Dictionary of Sydney, the Friends and the UNESCO entry say the factory closed and the asylum began in 1848. Wikipedia's Cumberland Hospital article says the site held female convicts until 1847 and was redesignated a lunatic asylum in 1849. The City of Parramatta says it officially became the asylum in 1850.
- When it became the Hospital for the Insane: The Dictionary of Sydney says it was renamed in 1869. The City of Parramatta says it happened under the Lunacy Act of 1878. The Parramatta Female Factory Friends say it was the Lunatic Asylum until 1890.
- When Greenway's main building came down: The Dictionary of Sydney says 1883. The City of Parramatta says Greenway's building was demolished in 1885–1886, after Gipps's cells were approved for demolition in 1882.
- When the orphan school started: The Dictionary of Sydney says construction began in late 1840, and Wikipedia and the City of Parramatta say 1841. The UNESCO entry says the school was established in 1844, and the Friends call it the Roman Catholic Orphanage (1844).
- How many female factories there were: Wikipedia says Parramatta was one of 13. The National Heritage List says 12 were established and three survive. The Friends say Parramatta was the model for 11 others, which also makes 12.
- The date of the National Heritage listing: The National Heritage List page says it was inscribed on 14 November 2017, and Wikipedia says 17 November 2017. Property and Development NSW says the precinct has been on the list "since 2018".
- When the Norma Parker Centre closed: The UNESCO entry says it ran as a women's detention centre until 2008. The City of Parramatta says it stopped being a detention centre in 2010.
- The descendants figure: The City of Parramatta and Gay Hendriksen (ABC, 2015) say one in seven. The Friends' fact sheet gives one in five to one in seven, and it switches between "descended from" and "related to".
My Earlier Posts
- Willow Grove – 34 Phillip Street – Parramatta
- St Vincent's Hospital – Victoria Street – Darlinghurst, where the Sisters of Charity's early work at the Female Factory gets a mention
- Benevolent Asylum – Railway Square, which took in former Female Factory women
- Philip Gidley King – Third Governor of New South Wales
- The Orphan School – George Street
- Old Government House – Parramatta
- St John's Anglican Church – Parramatta
- St Matthew's Church, Windsor – Francis Greenway
- Sydney Hospital – The Rum Hospital
- Darlinghurst Gaol & Darlinghurst Court
- Elizabeth Farm – Alice Street – Parramatta (Historic Sydney Mansions)
- The Cedars – St John's – Parramatta (Historic Sydney Mansions)
- Parramatta – From Burramatta and Rose Hill to the River City – Old Government House, St John's, Elizabeth Farm and Australia's Second Settlement – 1788 to Today
Sources
- Michaela Ann Cameron, "Parramatta Female Factory", Dictionary of Sydney, 2015, revised 2017 – dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/parramatta_female_factory
- Geoff Barker, "The First Female Factory, Prince Alfred Square, 1803 – 1821", City of Parramatta – historyandheritage.cityofparramatta.nsw.gov.au
- "The Second Female Factory: 1818-1848", City of Parramatta – historyandheritage.cityofparramatta.nsw.gov.au
- "Parramatta Female Factory – Bicentenary 1821 – 2021", City of Parramatta – historyandheritage.cityofparramatta.nsw.gov.au
- "Parramatta Female Factory – interviews with local historian" (200 years page), City of Parramatta – historyandheritage.cityofparramatta.nsw.gov.au
- Emma Stockburn, "Matron Ann Gordon", City of Parramatta, 2020 – historyandheritage.cityofparramatta.nsw.gov.au
- Neera Sahni, "History of the 'Parramatta Lunatic Asylum' 1848-1878", City of Parramatta – historyandheritage.cityofparramatta.nsw.gov.au
- Geoff Barker, "'Parramatta Hospital for the Insane', Destruction of 'Female Factory' Buildings and structures, Cumberland Hospital, 1878-1983", City of Parramatta – historyandheritage.cityofparramatta.nsw.gov.au
- "Parramatta Roman Catholic Orphan School Site", City of Parramatta – historyandheritage.cityofparramatta.nsw.gov.au
- Gay Hendriksen, Carol Liston and Trudy Cowley, Women Transported – Life in Australia's Convict Female Factories, Parramatta Heritage Centre, 2008 (PDF) – historyandheritage.cityofparramatta.nsw.gov.au
- Parramatta Female Factory Friends, "Fast Facts" – parramattafemalefactoryfriends.com.au
- Parramatta Female Factory Friends, Media Statement, 22 February 2026 (PDF) – parramattafemalefactoryfriends.com.au
- Hilary Weatherburn, "Gordon, Ann (1795–1868)", Australian Dictionary of Biography – adb.anu.edu.au/biography/gordon-ann-12943
- Australian Government (DCCEEW), "Parramatta Female Factory and Institutions Precinct", National Heritage List – dcceew.gov.au
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Tentative Lists, "Parramatta Female Factory and Institutions Precinct" – whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6686
- Property and Development NSW, "Parramatta North" – nsw.gov.au
- NSW Government, "Historic Parramatta North set for a once in a generation renewal", 7 August 2026 – nsw.gov.au
- ABC News, "Development plans could ruin major Australian historical site in Parramatta, heritage groups say", 19 June 2015 – abc.net.au
- Wikipedia, "Parramatta Female Factory" – en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Burramattagal" – en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Roman Catholic Orphan School" – en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Parramatta Girls Home" – en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Cumberland Hospital" – en.wikipedia.org
- Images: Wikimedia Commons, with individual credits under each picture.