The Gadbury Sisters The Secret History of My Family

1830 - Victorian working-class Britain...

..a labyrinth of destitution,

street crime, gang warfare,

drink addiction and welfare dependency.

Into this dark continent came an army of upper-class do-gooders

to study and help the problem families they found.

And on their expeditions into the slums,

these missionaries came face-to-face

with Britain's outcast and unrecorded.

We knew very little about the history of our family.

She's sort of lower class, not worth anything.

The working class?

Yeah, get over there! They're only crap.

Now, using the explorers' written accounts of their meetings

with the underclass,

we've traced their descendants, from Victorian times

all the way down to the present day,

to find out what happened to the families that history forgot.

To think about where our family's come in 200 years,

from just one girl - I think she'd be amazed.

We don't talk about it.

A story told by the descendants themselves.

We are all prisoners of our family histories.

Don't forget where you've come from. Don't forget.

Tonight, the true story of three criminal sisters

raised in Shoreditch in the heart of London's underworld

and banished to a thief colony which became a nation.

If that's my badge of honour, as descendant of convicts,

I'm quite proud of it.

My name is Pat Wardley and I'm the great-great-granddaughter

of Mary-Ann Gadbury.

And this is my husband, Robert Wardley.

We've been married 50 years come next year.

I can't say we've never had a cross word, cos we have!

THEY LAUGH

I grew up less than a mile away from Shoreditch,

where the Gadbury girls grew up.

I'll be truthful with you - I'm really proud of my family

and my ancestors, who gave us this incredible story today.

Our story begins in Victorian London

with the illegitimate son of King George IV -

William Miles.

Miles was a slum tourist and criminologist.

He thought that Britain was in the grip of a crisis -

the growth of a criminal class,

where children was being

brought up by their mothers and fathers into a life of crime.

To prove his point, he went to a prison hulk

and interviewed the young villains that was there.

Written down nearly 200 years ago,

they are the first interviews with young criminals.

And funny enough, they're a little glimpse into our own family story.

I lost my mum when I was nine but the bigger boys took me

to Mrs Burk's lodging house in Essex Street, Whitechapel,

where I got my bed for three pence a night.

30 or 40 thieves and beggars lived in this house - most of them boys.

We go out stealing in the daytime.

Two boys took me to a house in Shoreditch owned by a Jew.

He agreed to board and lodge me for two and six a week,

so long as I brought and sold to him all that I might steal.

I know what you're thinking - these interviews ain't real,

that they're nicked from Oliver Twist.

But as it turns out,

Miles' interviews were published three years before Dickens' book

and it's more than possible

that Dickens based his characters on Miles' interviews.

Just a game, Oliver! Just a game!

They played games to teach the little ones how to pick pockets.

I did a full night in training, and then was able to go out

to screen and assist the boys as they picked pockets.

Sometimes, a young hand gets taken up...

You can tell your story to the magistrate

and see if he believes it!

The bigger boys are sorry for it

and blame themselves for having taken him out too soon.

Transportation is looked upon by each thief as an event

which must occur sometimes or another.

And the only twist is to keep from it as long as they can.

It wasn't just the young lads that the upper class were shocked at -

it was the young girls as well.

Some of these girls was vicious and aggressive

and they was part of the criminal crowd that Miles was going on about.

Miles wanted to talk to one of the young girls

and a prison officer, in the end,

took him into one of the cells where there was a young girl there

from Shoreditch who was a repeat offender.

That was when he met our ancestor, Caroline Gadbury.

I got acquainted with girls who used to go shoplifting.

One time, I was at large for about two months, and during that time,

committed at least 40-50 robberies

without detection,

going out shoplifting two, three times a day.

I was never afraid of the police. I was intimate with a policeman.

I used to give him money.

I'm Madeleine Ogilvie.

I'm a Tasmanian Labour politician

and I'm descended from Caroline Gadbury.

By the time she was 12, Caroline was already getting into trouble.

Caroline and her older sister, Sarah,

were at the centre of a gang of pickpockets.

They were clever and organised.

And they were robbing wealthy Londoners on a systematic scale.

We would go every day stealing,

make as much as £3-£4 on some days,

which was divided between us.

We'd go to plays and dances, buy smart clothes,

treat others to various things.

We were expert robbers and used to practise it.

As soon as she got out of prison, Caroline started to reoffend.

But this time, she was in cahoots with her other sister, Mary-Ann.

Caroline and Mary-Ann turned up in a haberdashery shop

in Chiswell Street in the city.

They were smartly dressed and asked to see some silk handkerchiefs.

Mary-Ann had her baby son with her.

He started to cry, so she stepped out of the shop.

One of the shopkeepers noticed she was walking strangely,

so he held her up at the door.

When the police arrived,

they pulled 20 yards of fabric from under Mary-Ann's dress.

Caroline realised the game was up.

She made a run for it but she got caught in the street by a copper.

She didn't go quietly - she screamed, she lashed out,

while a crowd of 100 people looked on.

I'm Michael Slattery.

I'm a judge at the Supreme Court of New South Wales

and I'm Caroline Gadbury's great-great-grandson.

Silence. All stand.

When Caroline was arrested, the evidence is pretty weak.

She's certainly in the company of the others

but she didn't actually do anything!

The astonishing thing about her trial

is that it seems to have taken, by my reading of the transcript,

no more than 20 minutes to half an hour.

Caroline was not able to give evidence in her own defence

which, to us, seems utterly remarkable -

you're regarded as biased and not a good witness.

When the prosecution case finished,

there's just a pause and then the judge convicts her.

She was sentenced to transportation for seven years,

which was effectively life, cos she couldn't get back -

a sentence which, by any modern standards,

would be described as harsh.

Round the world, the name Van Diemen's Land conjured up

images of the penal settlement and its harshness.

And we see this in the book and the film

For The Term Of His Natural Life,

which shows Van Diemen's Land in the worst possible light.

On this strange island, Caroline was put to work

in the house of a new master, a free settler,

as an indentured servant.

Just a few months earlier, Caroline was a cocky, self-assured Londoner.

Now she was a virtual slave.

Well, she wasn't going to put up with that for long.

Um... Caroline Gadbury's convictions in Van Diemen's Land.

"March 1839 - Master Campbell found drunk and reprimanded.

"March 1839 - Master Campbell, absent and found in a public house,

"given 16 days in a cell on bread and water

"and then returned to service."

After she got out, Caroline was sent to a new master

and she was found drunk and disorderly.

Her list of convictions reads like the story of a young woman

spiralling out of control.

"Master Lewis, absent.

"July 1841, Master Sloane. Disorderly conduct, 14 days.

"Absconding, sentenced to 12 months in the house of correction.

"Misconduct, ten days' solitary confinement."

The first three years that she's here,

the irrational reoffending is all based in one direction -

it's all basically escape-oriented.

She didn't like being a servant - you could tell that.

She was too independent-minded.

I mean, I can hear,

across the centuries, her frustration,

and she's clearly trying to get out.

Caroline calmed down

and her reoffending became less and less frequent.

She was finally given her ticket of leave,

which was her passport to freedom, in 1845.

Caroline met Charles Chapman, another convict from London,

and they had three kids together.

Caroline named her children

after the mum and sisters she'd left behind in London.

But two of Caroline's daughters died

and then so did her husband, Charles.

It left her alone with just little Sarah.

Caroline and Sarah lived on their own for five years.

I don't know how they survived - it must have been pretty hard.

Then one day, Caroline met George Ogilvie -

an Aberdeen hell-raiser.

He'd been married but she'd died,

leaving George to bring up their only son, Jimmy, alone.

They fell in love, got married and merged their families.

Young Sarah had a new dad and little Jimmy finally had a new mum.

The Cockney girl and the Aberdonian had built a stable and loving family

that was going to reshape Tasmanian history.

Jimmy's sons, Eric and Albert Ogilvie,

were born in 1890 and 1892.

The boys grew up above a pub in a working-class household

with a rough and ready group of regulars.

My name is Albert Ogilvie,

I'm a descendant of the convict George Ogilvie

whose second wife was the convict Caroline Gadbury.

Albert and Eric grew up in this working hotel,

with obviously a lot of working-class people

and they led a hard-ish life,

they were required to help with washing the beer glasses

each morning after the night's service the night before.

The kids used to tease Albert and Eric

with bottles of ginger beer from their mother's pub.

They took the bullying to heart and the experience of this helped shape

Eric and Albert's political philosophy for their entire careers.

They'd encountered the class snobbery

against which they railed for their entire lives.

Albert and Eric started to build successful careers as young lawyers.

The political climate of those times did not favour kids

who came from where Eric and Albert had come from

and they had to work hard and they had to find a way.

They got involved in politics

and they looked for ways to push for a better deal for working people.

They were dedicated men, who had real battles to fight.

They wanted to help the needy and the disadvantaged.

It was almost religion to them.

My father tells me that he and Albert

went around the houses of Battery Point,

which was a very poor suburb in those days,

and found men who were at home doing the washing,

unable to get employment and he went to these men and said,

"Instead of the dole, we're going to give you work

"building Mount Wellington Road."

What a clever politician, that the Premier himself

walks into a working man's cottage and gives him employment.

Obviously it would attract votes,

but that wasn't the selling point, it was to give them work

and get the road built

and to stimulate the economy of the state.

The working people of Tasmania

had found their voice and found their champions.

Almost unbelievably, the convict kids

had become the Premier

and the Attorney General of the state.

He and his brother, Eric James Ogilvie, my father,

became Premier of the state of Tasmania

with his brother at his side in the Cabinet as Attorney General.

Albert's career included a world trip in the late 1930s,

attending George V's coronation in England.

They had meetings with many of the people

in the highest positions of power in London.

He went to visit Mussolini in Rome.

In Germany, they sought a meeting with Hitler.

-LAUGHING:

-But he had other things on his mind

and declined to meet them.

VOICEOVER: Mr AG Ogilvie, Premier of Tasmania.

I am convinced that the defences of Australia are totally inadequate

and need strengthening as speedily as possible.

But let us also remember that no people in any country

are assured of the right to live their lives in peace.

Well, in 1939, Albert George Ogilvie collapsed

and very shortly thereafter died.

The funeral which followed was a state funeral.

40,000 people, we're told, lined the streets of Hobart

and the whole state came to a standstill for that event.

It's a remarkable story.

Within two generations,

this family had gone from forced migration

to the Premiership of Tasmania

in a new social order that they helped create.

My uncle and my father were like John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.

Premier and Attorney General.

From that rather inauspicious beginning,

they rose to the greatest political heights

and reforming heights this state has known.

An extraordinarily astonishing achievement

when you look back at it with the value of hindsight.

We're walking here to what's called the dock

and this is where the prisoners were brought up, the accused.

They sat in the dock here,

they had come up from the cells below,

and down here were holding cells

in the old...what was the old prison.

-Did you know your ancestors were convicts?

-No.

I did not.

-You must have known something?

-No, I didn't.

It was never mentioned in my upbringing.

-It was never mentioned?

-No.

That all your ancestors are convicts?

It just didn't arise.

So I don't know whether it was deliberately hidden.

You'd think my father must have known all this.

Never mentioned.

When's the last time you were in this room?

Oh, well, it would be 40-plus years ago, yes. So I'm 74.

I would have spent hundreds of hours in this courtroom.

Is there such a thing as a bad person?

I have seen in my own career as a barrister

many people who have had strife in their life

and then circumstances have changed

and they've led blameless and,

indeed, praiseworthy lives thereafter.

Every human being has great potential

for both good and evil, so it can turn on a dime.

Life is unpredictable.

Caroline had fire and character, yeah.

She had power, didn't she? She wasn't intimidated.

And that, I think, is an Ogilvie trait.

We don't give up.

Of course, now your daughter's and up-and-coming politician.

-What's she going to do?

-She's good.

She's got a highly developed sense of social justice.

Oh, hi, guys!

-'She's very, very astute.'

-Hello!

So she meets my criteria

of a highly accomplished, talented person.

I made it a bit more

that Margaret Thatcher sort of hairspray look.

Everyone looking, looking, looking and everyone say "Ogilvie"!

ALL: Ogilvie!

I had to give a speech. I had to give it...speeding.

It was a speed speech, to get here on time.

You are quite literally picking pockets.

Like Oliver Twist.

Nicking things from hard-working people.

My name is Madeleine Ogilvie,

I'm vice-president of the Tasmanian Labour Party.

My grandfather was Eric Ogilvie, my great uncle was AG Ogilvie

and I'm a descendant of George and Caroline,

the convicts who made good in Tasmania.

What a huge social experiment.

"Let's just take a cohort of poor people from the UK

"and transplant them and see what happens."

And this is what happens.

Amazingly difficult times for those people

who were actually transported, our forebears.

-And I think it's time we hear...

-Tell us about yours.

Oh, well, Thomas Green was a horse thief.

Apparently, they didn't hang him because he was literate.

My family history had the convicts working FOR them.

-At Fonthill!

-LAUGHTER

A not-very-pretty history! No.

We did have convict origin and here we are, you know, in Parliament now.

You can't show that there's a blight on Tasmania

attributable to the transportees.

There's no difference walking around Tasmania

from any other civilised community in the world.

None at all. Nothing.

I have great respect for them.

Human beings battling with life and destiny.

Life was nasty, short, brutish and difficult.

Tough times, tough people. So they were survivors.

Some people, including Charles Dickens,

thought that transportation might help people.

It might remove the barriers to social mobility.

The biggest social experiment of the last 200 years happened here

and that is the forced migration of an entire generation of people.

And so our ancestors who came here were gifted an opportunity

that hasn't happened anywhere else in the world.

The social mobility happened,

these things that Charles Dickens spoke of were proved to be correct.

And we're incredibly proud of that.

I am Amelia Cleary and I am the great-great-great-granddaughter

of the convict Caroline Gadbury.

Caroline's daughter, Sarah, married Arthur Miles.

And he had a convict for a father

who had built a really successful boot-making business.

Together, Sarah and Arthur had six children.

The grandchildren of Caroline.

The boot-making business went from strength to strength

and the Miles family began to prosper.

By 1901, Sarah and Arthur owned at least nine houses

in a fancy part of Hobart.

The family was now living a lifestyle that Caroline,

Sarah's illiterate convict mother from the East End,

could never have imagined.

Sarah and Arthur decided they had enough money to do something

that would change the course of the family history for ever.

Even though they were both children of convicts,

they decided to send their children to a private school.

CHORAL SINGING

NEWSREEL VOICEOVER: Australia has no other school like it.

It's a Quaker school in Hobart run by the Society of Friends.

The school was established in 1887.

PIANO MUSIC

Oh, look, Melinda. Here's a lovely photo.

-When do you reckon that one's taken?

-I'd say that's around 1892.

-Ah!

-So, would the Miles girls have been here at this time?

-Yes.

Have a look here. Elsie Miles was enrolled in 1890.

Elsie is seventh in, on the second back row.

And here we have Nellie M Miles

and she was enrolled in 1889.

So we've got Mildred and then Eva

and Harry and George.

Ah! They were concurrent.

So that would have been six lots of fees at a very similar time...

It would have been a fairly lot

because it wasn't an inexpensive school.

Do you think, say, Nellie and Elsie would have known

that their grandmother had been a convict?

I personally think they'd have had to know,

but they would have been told to be quiet and not talk about it.

For a very long time, it was hushed up

and swept under the carpet, so to speak.

We were in denial about removing that convict stain,

whether it would be pulling down buildings,

getting rid of records and just pretending it didn't happen.

We do know that in the state archives,

eminent families have gone and removed pages

from official documents

so that the convict stain isn't on their family.

My name is Elizabeth Young, I'm 79,

and I'm the great-granddaughter of the convict Caroline Gadbury.

It would have been very expensive

to send all of those children to that school.

It must have been about removing yourself from the ordinary

where the convicts might have been going to school.

Being the children of convicts, they had to airbrush that

out of their lives.

The more you diluted that convict heritage,

the better the family thought of themselves.

We don't like to actually say out loud

that somebody wanted to be of a better class.

But I'm quite sure that that's what it was about.

Why don't Australians like to talk about that kind of thing?

I think we like to think we are egalitarian.

Is that true?

No.

SHE LAUGHS

The idea of not having a class system

is a really big part of our national pride.

The idea that we do have a class system is almost shameful

because that's something that I think we like to think

that we left behind.

In around 1903, Sarah and Arthur packed up and moved to the mainland.

They settled in Sydney.

And soon their daughters Nell and Elsie,

who were unmarried, bought two boarding schools

on the outskirts of the city.

They were called Elmswood and Normanhurst.

Nell and Elsie took on the roles of headmistress and administrator

but they didn't always have an easy time at Normanhurst.

Sydney's new middle class was trying to imitate upper-class England

and Nell and Elsie didn't make the cut.

Not only were Nell and Elsie

the first principals without a university degree,

they were working-class and they were Australian-born

instead of English ladies.

They set about to prove themselves.

They wore elegant clothes,

they used pristine manners and English accents.

The school thrived.

The two granddaughters of convicts

had built a successful family business.

CHORAL SINGING

Britain was regarded as home.

And so, people would try and lift themselves up in status

so the more like the Victorian upper class in Britain they could look,

the better they felt about themselves.

The woman who went on to write Mary Poppins, PL Travers,

was a boarder at Normanhurst.

The character that she eventually wrote about may well have

been inspired by her time at the school.

Close your mouth, please, Michael, we are not a codfish.

PL Travers did go to Normanhurst

before my aunts Nell and Elsie were there.

It was something that the school didn't forget.

They were determined to make this business work,

which they did because they were able to leave

a marvellous portfolio of real estate

and a nice lot of blue chip shares.

Nell's will, I think, is really interesting

because she only left money to women,

with one exception.

You feel terribly grateful

for how hard people have worked in the past

to give you that leg up the ladder.

My first memories are of us living at Chester Hill

where we had two tennis courts.

We lived very comfortably.

We had monogrammed cutlery, monogrammed bedspreads.

When I was five, we moved to Randwick,

where my mother reasoned that the girls would have a better chance

of meeting suitable husbands.

That was Margaret and Rita.

My name is Gabrielle Lee, Nell and Elsie where my great-aunts

and I'm Caroline Gadbury's great-great-granddaughter

and this is my mate, Michael.

Mate(!)

THEY LAUGH

It's thought to be possibly

the oldest tourist ruin in Australia.

1833 was only 50 years after the colony was founded.

It may have been built by convicts.

Did you spend more money on the restoration

than buying the house?

-Oh, no.

-No, but we went close.

-Around 2 million?

2.5, just call it 2.5 and you're about right.

But look at Caroline and her life.

You'd find that wherever you put her descendants,

they'd chase nice things.

Are you embarrassed by that convict ancestry?

Not in the slightest. Why would I be embarrassed about it?

I don't like you positioning it

as if...should I be ashamed of this criminal class?

We haven't, you know, been dragged out of some moral degradation.

We simply are people who are resilient and resourceful

and that's how she expressed her resilience and resourcefulness.

These people were the victims of a very unjust class system

so why would I be ashamed of her?

At least in Australia,

it's much easier than it is in England

to go and make your own life the way you want to do it.

Do you mean there's no class system here?

Class system?

-I'm sorry...

-It's different. It's very mobile.

It's not fixed. It's not like a caste system

like William the Conqueror more or less set up

in England when he got going.

In Australia, you looked after the ordinary guy.

When they landed just down here at Circular Quay,

they said, "We are going to take these guys

"and we are going to mix their sweat with the soil.

"We're going to make something of these people."

-They were convicts, they were slaves?

-Yeah.

But the proof was in the pudding.

Once they produced children,

they grew up to be strapping, healthy, powerful

and energetic people.

They didn't go back

and the relatives of Caroline Gadbury

who sadly stayed in England,

lived shorter lives than the ones who came out here.

So you're not sorry that she was transported?

Obviously we're delighted.

I feel quite personally towards the events

that my ancestor went through.

Intelligent people not taught to read and write,

what do they do with themselves? You know?

They used their imaginations and that's not always...within the law.

She's sentenced by an English trial judge,

probably at the Old Bailey

and who performed much the same sort of functions that I do

and then she comes to Australia

and, um...five and six generations later,

there's two other judges who are her descendants.

The other one is Justice Antony Larkins

who was a judge in the 1970s.

It's...it's a remarkable story.

Had she been born in our current century,

she probably would have risen as far as she wanted to.

I kind of have a hunch that it would have been something special.

Caroline Gadbury's great-great-great-grandchildren

are now doing pretty well..

When I can drag them away from the beach,

they are an architect and two law students in their other life.

My name is Edward Slattery

and I'm Caroline Gadbury's great-great-great-grandson.

-I'm Susan.

-I'm Bree Nielsen.

-I am Karyn Louise Meaker.

-I'm Sarah Gadbury's great...

-Great...

-Great-granddaughter.

By the time she was 16,

Sarah's behaviour started spiralling out of control

and she was dragging Caroline, her younger sister, along with her.

Sarah Eliza, Caroline and the gang where organised

and very clever.

They set money aside for lawyers.

They bribed the police and the took big risks.

Within a year, Sarah was in Newgate prison.

She was awaiting trial for theft.

Whilst there, she actually wrote to her alleged husband

but he's a bit of a mystery

because he doesn't appear anywhere else in records.

June 7, 1837.

Dear husband, as time is drawing near,

do not forget to send me all my things,

for I shall be one of the first who goes to trial.

I hope you'll come and hear my trial

and get me as many characters as you can.

I wish you could have seen the policeman that had me.

Persuade him not to say anything about me.

My friend often told me I was too lucky.

My dear, you mustn't think anything of this false place,

it makes you think of strange things.

I might have got away many times

but I'm now more likely to get seven years than a month.

I don't think I shall ever return to work in this country any more

for I think it's all over for me now.

Sarah was no fool.

She knew that she was facing transportation to Australia.

She realised that this was most probably the last time

that she was going to be there.

Life in England was finished.

Would you see your mother to say goodbye?

There's almost a sense of resignation...

..that I'm saddened by the situation

but we all knew it was going to happen eventually.

It's traumatic to be torn away from your family

and everything that you know.

For Caroline, the separation seems to have affected her

more than it did Sarah Eliza.

The running away and the drinking, to me,

that sounds like self-medication.

Like, you know, I'll drink until I've passed out

because then I won't have to think about it any more.

Sarah Eliza actually didn't have the same response.

I don't think the trauma was any less for her

but I think she found other ways to cope with it.

Sarah's fears were justified.

She was transported to Australia and she never saw her family again.

She was left to her own fate in England's thief colony.

Sarah Eliza arrived in New South Wales,

650 miles away from Van Diemen's land and Caroline.

Sarah ended up in the Hunter Valley

and was put to work as a servant in the house of a free settler.

To get up each morning and not only have to cook,

clean and care for someone else, let alone themselves,

Sarah had to have sadness and regret and a sense of loss

but they did what they had to do.

The masters were able to flog their servants

but there's no record of Sarah being in trouble with her master.

She turned it around and changed her behaviour from what she'd come from.

But life in New South Wales for former convicts was really hard.

In Tasmania, people didn't stigmatise convicts

because almost everyone was one.

The fact that they weren't discriminated against

meant that the convicts prospered.

New South Wales, where Sarah was sent to,

had a lot more free settlers.

There was much harsher discrimination.

And it was a huge insult to be called the child of a convict.

The children of convicts were labelled currency

whereas the children of the free settlers

were thought of as British Sterling.

It was the start of a class system.

Three years into her sentence, Sarah married a free man,

a former convict, William Robbins.

Sarah and William had nine children.

I feel sorry for them they've got that family name.

You'd be called currency and ex-convicts.

But I guess what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

I'm Stanley Paul Bergquist and I'm the great-great-grandson

of the convict Sarah Eliza Gadbury.

Sarah Cadbury's daughter, Susan Naomi,

married my great-grandfather, Henry William.

Their boy, William Henry,

he married Pauline Peterson and they had a tribe of kids,

one of which was my mum, Matilda Esther,

and she married Dad, William Carl Augustus Bergquist.

They had 11 kids, three girls, eight boys.

We call them the famous 11.

My father's there, that's Frank.

And I'm one of Frank's children.

Dad was born in 1929, they lived at what we called Hollywood

but it was a shantytown.

It was very poor.

Dad described what they lived in

as hessian bags lined with newspaper.

It was a slum village - like a ghetto,

where all these people that had no housing

because of the Great Depression,

they all gravitated down to where there was somewhere

they could build some sort of shelter for their families.

So apparently there was hundreds of these shanties built

out of whatever material they could find.

Then they got a government-assisted house.

-REPORTER:

-In the industrial areas, the State Housing Commission

is building new homes for the lower-paid workers.

They're all very similar type of people.

Everyone was in the same position.

They were poor in possessions

but they weren't poor in life and happiness.

By the 1920s, Sarah's grandchildren had moved

to the coal-mining area of Newcastle and had fallen into labouring jobs.

-REPORTER:

-It's a city of industry.

Coal and steel are its lifeblood.

Newcastle was an industrial town in my growing-up years.

Young men knew that they were going to get an apprenticeship.

There was never any fear of no work.

The power of great machines and the labour of men.

The world has changed. Newcastle has changed.

All that's gone now.

Top hospital, no pregnancy, mid hospital and basic hospital.

And then, what you can then choose is the bundle of extras,

so it becomes a bit more personal type of cover for you.

I'm Bree Nielsen,

I'm Sarah Gadbury's great-great-great granddaughter.

I work in the Beachcomber resort on the Gold Coast in Surfer's Paradise.

As some would say, it's living the dream.

I come from a hard-working family,

a loving family,

a family that...even though through the rough times,

they always look for the positive in it and band together.

I think when your own children come along,

it's like, "What's our past, where do we come from?"

You would always like to say, "Well, you're from

"this famous person and this line where you achieved this",

and it's not always easy to say,

"Well, your family stole a bale of hay and they were sent...

"banished to an island."

For me, as a younger girl growing up in New South Wales...

..there was that stigma attached to "Where did you come from?"

You know, or you'd be called a convict, or ex-convict.

There's always going to be that.

-Sorry, you mean in your lifetime?

-In my lifetime.

-You've experienced that?

-Yes.

-You're joking?

-No.

I'm surprised that you're surprised.

That you don't get asked, "Where do you come from?

"What is your background? What is your line of family?"

I still believe myself that it goes on today.

I'm Karen Narelle Bergquist and I'm the great-great-great-granddaughter

of the convict Sarah Gadbury.

To think about where our family's come in 200 years,

from just one girl,

I think she'd be amazed.

So you're not ashamed of being descended from a convict?

Oh, God, no. Gosh, no. No way.

Like I said that to Willem -

when your teacher asks you in history,

"Have you got any convict relatives?" you can go,

"Yeah, yeah, I do, actually. Yeah! Yeah!"

Yeah! Yes, we still have some today, there you go!

LAUGHTER

When Sarah came to Australia, something changed in her.

Well, all right - you're a difficult teenager,

but when you've got here, you've sorted yourself out.

And you got on with your life, you had to,

because otherwise your children wouldn't have stayed

in the same area with you,

so you must have done all right.

Her personality has flowed through the family to make us who we are.

We haven't journeyed far at all.

I don't know what it is, but we stay close.

There's something there that says, "We're good people."

And that's got to come from somewhere,

so Sarah must have been a good person,

somewhere along the line.

I'm comforted to know that this woman lived into her 80s.

And...her strength

is running through my veins.

My blood.

In 1906, at the age of 86,

Sarah passed away while living in the home of her daughter Susan,

who was my great-great-grandmother.

Sarah had come a long way from her roots in the East End of London

and together with William...

..they created my family.

I'm sure Joe's filled you in on what we're going to be doing this afternoon.

What we basically want to do is get a nice family group photo

of all of you together in front of Sydney's beautiful harbour.

You know this path connects...

I was surprised when we met the family in Sydney

and Caroline's descendants, and they speak...not like we speak.

We're a bit more, I don't know...

Laid-back, slang, ocker...

I guess in Australia, they call it "a bit raw".

We're all Caroline's descendants through Harold...

But they were...they were quite well-spoken and quite posh,

I think, is the word my uncle used.

The posh side of the family!

Hello!

Who are you...?

Most of these are all...

Caroline Gadbury.

And you're...?

INDISTINCT

So Caroline?

And you must be Amelia's mum.

I didn't realise there was such a uniformity

in my little part of the family

until you meet another branch who...yeah,

you do realise that they're different.

It's funny to think that so long ago,

that was one family unit

and now, there's two such different families.

I worked out that some of my forebears are actually

buried in the same cemetery as your forebears.

You sort of wonder the steps that they've got to be where

they are, what makes you...

How did you get to that step from Caroline,

who was more mischievous than Sarah?

Who do you want out of the shot?! Speak up now!

What does it matter? We're all the same background.

Those people we met on Monday from Newcastle and...

They're different people,

they're working-class people, aren't they?

-Yes.

-Yes, they are, but let me tell you,

it's rude in Australian society to talk class.

-OK?

-Why?

-It's offensive.

-Why?

-It just is, that's all.

I can't tell you why it's offensive, but it is offensive.

We don't talk about it!

One, two, three, go!

ALL: Gadbury!

Love it!

Yeah, that's nice, that's really good.

Today, we still have all these ideas about having a fair go,

and being a land of opportunity and, you know, that

when you work hard, you will get the reward for that work.

And that's not always true any more.

Nice to meet you!

I almost feel like we need to make a new national identity which is

really about giving people a fair go, but that's not

just by saying we don't have a class system,

it's by recognising that we do

and then giving people a hand when they need it.

So you remember there was a third sister in the gang called Mary Ann.

She got caught in the haberdashery shop,

stuffing material up her bloomers.

That's how come she got sent to the Old Bailey.

She got six months for doing that.

But prison straightened her out

and after that, she went straight,

she got married and settled down.

She never ever got another conviction

and she was never transported.

Her daughter stayed in east London,

so did her kids, so did their kids.

We all stayed.

Loved our families and kept on

the right side of the law.

In fact, I grew up less than a mile

from Shoreditch,

where the Gadbury girls lived.

# Come on, let's twist again

# Like we did last summer

# Yeah, let's twist again

# Like we did last year

# Do you remember when

# Things were really hummin'

# Yeah, let's twist again

# Twisting time is here... #

A lot of girls used to love a Jack the Lad, a lairy boy,

and Pat, I know why Pat went with me -

because I had a bad name.

You came away from that life.

You came away from all that life completely.

And that was it.

A bit like, maybe Mary Ann was like,

"Hang on, I've got responsibilities now.

"This is my responsibility, not that", and it changed you.

It is though, isn't it? No, it was. It is though, isn't it? Eh?

He could have gone down a different road, couldn't he?

-He could have, yeah.

-A lot different road.

If I hadn't have pulled them reins in.

She done more than what the police could have ever had.

LAUGHTER

How did you manage that?

Fear!

He was more scared of her than the police!

No, it's just, you know,

I didn't want to have a husband as a criminal.

I've got three kids, I brought 'em up in east London,

not one of my kids has been in trouble with the police,

not one of them.

I've got all my grandchildren,

never been in trouble with the police.

I'm proud of that, being brought up in the East End.

All around 'em, their mates getting nicked,

this one getting nicked -

not one of them, ever, ever ended up in court.

Silly as it sounds, just that little thing,

through one person going straight and altering her life,

made my life.

Because I've got my wife and I've got my family, for her,

not going over there.

Robert, you couldn't put your arm around your loved one...?!

You're asking too much, this close!

Are you happy with the family you've got?

I'm over the moon with it. I'm over the moon with it.

I've got everything to thank her for, what I've got.

Not a lot, but what I've got.

Can you do it again for me, just for luck, to make sure?

Can I tighten me belt up first? Me trousers are falling down!

-..'Sake!

-Language, you're wired up, George!

-I know.

-What's happening, George?

-Me strides are fallin'!

I suppose you're the family that didn't get transported.

-Yes.

-Oh, yeah.

-What do you think about that?

-Lucky!

If it hadn't been for Mary Ann, none of us would have been here.

Wouldn't have had all our family and that.

We wouldn't have had these two.

-You don't like kangaroos, do you?

-I don't like it out there,

I'd never go there visiting, too many deadly spiders and snakes.

Nah. Not for me.

I like my feet on the ground here.

ALL: Gadbury!

And whatever happened to that man

that interviewed Caroline in that prison 200 years ago?

The man in Caroline's cell that day was William Miles.

Miles wanted to see a national police force

and the surveillance of criminals.

In the end, he became a pain in the backside to the government,

so they pushed him off to Sydney in Australia to be Chief of Police.

So Miles followed the scores of young men and women

who he'd seen transported to the other side of the world.

But in 1847, he lost his job for being drunk on duty.

Miles died in 1851.

Today, his grave is buried under a park in a Sydney suburb.

Miles had no children

and so no descendants to tell you his story.

Miles referred to a criminal class.

If that were the case,

it's inexplicable that Tasmania has prospered

and done as well as it has.

The origins of this community of persons who ran foul of the law

in England has not prevented their descendants from reaching

the highest levels in every field of endeavour on planet Earth.

If that's my badge of honour as a descendant of convicts,

I'm quite proud of it.

The descendants of the three Gadbury sisters

have been on an incredible journey through history.

But if you think about everything that's happened to us

since Sarah and Caroline were transported

to the other side of the world,

only a fool would try and predict what will happen next.

# Come on, let's twist again

# Like we did last summer

# Yeah, let's twist again

# Like we did last year

# Do you remember when

# Things were really hummin'

# Yeah, let's twist again

# Like we did last year

# Let's twist again

# Twisting time is here

# Bop, bop! #