Maryborough Goal 1861-1902

Bruce Osborn (2004)

Soft cover; 

$18 plus postage.

PREFACE

People will always have a fascination with the first fifty years of Maryborough's history.  It was during this period that the Maryborough Gaol started and finished.

Virtually no Maryborough gaol records exist, but they can be reconstructed in part by using the two local papers - Maryborough and District Advertiser and Maryborough Standards as well as Maryborough Borough Council minute books, Victoria Police Gazettes and Victoria Government Gazettes.  Maryborough Court records for the period have been destroyed (see Against the Odds p. 284) but these have been reconstructed from the local papers.  My special thanks goes to Ray Wigraft who recorded from Victoria Police Gazettes names of prisoners released week by week from the gaol.  (His Index is held by Maryborough-Midlands Historical Society).

For nineteen years prisoners from the gaol worked for the Borough Council on the roads and parks.  (For full details see Work of Prisoners 1862-1887(2002).

In the 1850s most migrants came to Australia with nothing but the hope of finding gold.  In the biography of Bessie Florence Baldwin, an ex-convict at Port Arthur, she declared that in "England in the 1820s... a middle class was virtually non-existent.  There were only two classes, the very rich and the very poor."

The Maryborough Gaol is basically the story of extreme poverty and an insight into social conditions without social welfare.

My special thanks for assistance with this work goes to my wife, Betty, Ray Wigraft and other members of the Maryborough-Midlands Historical Society.