Launceston Historical Society | October Talk

Children at work: Orphan School apprentices in Launceston and the Tamar Valley

All welcome. Admission is free for LHS members, and $5 for visitors.

Talk begins at 2pm at the Meeting Room, QV Museum, Inveresk.

Between 1828 and 1879 some 6,000 children spent time in the institution remembered as the Queens Orphan Schools. The orphanage played an integral part in the penal system, acting (in the words of Lt-Governor Eardley-Wilmot) as ‘an Asylum or workhouse for lodging, clothing, maintaining, and educating the children of Convicts’.

Once children turned 12, they became available to approved employers as unpaid labour until the age of 18. Many of these ‘apprentices’ were indentured to masters and mistresses in Launceston and the Tamar Valley. This talk will focus on these children and their experiences.

Lucy Frost is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Tasmania, and chair of the Board of Digital History Tasmania. Since moving to Tasmania in 1997, her research has focussed on the experiences of convict women and their children, with publications including Abandoned Women: Scottish convicts exiled beyond the seas, and three volumes edited or co-edited in the “Convict Lives” series of Convict Women’s Press.

She served for a decade on the board of the Cascades Female Factory Historic Site Ltd.; was the first president of the Female Convicts Research Centre; and was a member of the four-person team which commissioned the “Footsteps” sculptures on the Hobart waterfront of three convict women and an Orphan School boy. Her most recent book is Convict Orphans, published in 2023.