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were floored and ceiled, the roofs reshingled and a high boundary fence
was erected to enclose the who le station. On December 31, 1848, there
were 17 female passholders awaiti.ng hire, 16 women under magisterial
sentence, and 29 women in the nursery, a total of 62 .
In addition
there were 42 children aged from 0-3 years , 20 boys and 22 girls, making
a total of 104 persons .
Hampton was well pleased with the new
establishment , both for the consequent reduction in iregular behaviour
and for the decline in infant mortality brought about by the transfer
of mothers from Launceston.
Hall's appointment on February 1, 1850, covered all the
convict establishments at Ross :
a female house of correction, including
a hiring depot, lying -in hospital and nursery for children;
sentence and hiring station, and a public male hospital .
a male
In addition
he had medical charge of all the road stations between Ross and Oat lands .
For the first time since leaving Liverpool in 1833 he was responsib le for
the care of a numb er of women and children.
In that city he had been
attached as Honorary Surgeon to a large institution where 40,000 to
50,000 patients, most of them children, were treated annually. There ,
too , for two years he was in medical charge of a female orphanage.
The
work at the Female House of Correction at Ross was in some respects ,
therefore, a return to the type of responsibility to which he had been
accustomed in his early medical career.
Always fond of children, he
entered upon his new tasks with enthusiasm.
Of course, there were many prob lems .
In spite of the recent
improvements to the buildi.ngs , they were still not good.
Hall later
declared that the buildings at Ross were worse than those at the Cascades
Female Factory in Hobart Town . Accommodation was very cramped. He
part'icularly obj ected·-to the fact that nurses and children were forced
to live in the same room day and night, and that the sleeping berths were
arranged in two tiers one above the other. He asked that this be
changed, but nothing was done . Nevertheless, both mothers and children
prospered under his care, and he considered the health of the chi ldren
was equal to that of children in private life.
He later boasted:
I had many as fine specimens of children there as I ever saw
in any part of the world. I used to be proud to show them.2
Female prisoners, he discovered, could be just as vicious as
men and just as much a threat to his life;
11Pemale furi es'1 , he called
t.
2
L.C. Journals, 1855 , Vo l. VI , Paper 32, p. 19 .