Eagle Farm Women's Prison and Factory Site, Heritage archaeological site in Eagle Farm, Australia.
Eagle Farm Women's Prison and Factory Site is an archaeological site on Schneider Road, Eagle Farm, in Brisbane. Between 1829 and 1839 it held a women's prison and factory with timber slab buildings: a superintendent's cottage, a two-room hut for male convicts, matron's quarters, a four-room female factory, a one-room store, school and hospital, and a six-cell prison enclosed by a 5.2-metre palisade fence.
Operating from 1829 to 1839 within the Moreton Bay penal settlement, the facility held female convicts who had received secondary convictions and were considered harder to manage. Its creation marked a turning point in how the colony organized and housed its incarcerated population.
Women at Eagle Farm did needlework, laundry, unpicked rope and worked in road construction, as well as in the fields. The move from Queen Street was meant to stop contact between female convicts and soldiers; women caught fraternising were put in solitary confinement, in irons or had their heads shaved. The cook house held a needle room where prisoners sewed.
The archaeological site lies on Schneider Road in Eagle Farm, within the Australia TradeCoast area that was formerly Eagle Farm Airport. There are no standing structures, only subsurface deposits, so there is little to see above ground. Access is from the public road; the surrounding land is used for industrial and commercial purposes.
The women's prison stood within a working farm: by January 1832 about 680 acres were under maize and some potatoes, with cattle and pigs raised. Working beside the Eagle Farm swamp brought a marked rise in malaria among convicts, yet the farm was kept on despite calls to abandon it.
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