Compressed between paired Corten steel walls, Cascades Female Factory welcomes today’s visitor freely, rather than incarcerating them to work by picking oakum, carding yarn, or washing laundry. Even then, these options were better than illness which, in the convict days, was punishable as a crime. While only some of Cascades yard walls remain, they give a sense of what these female factories were like. All historic structures within the yards are gone, save the Matron’s Cottage. Collaborating with an extensive stakeholder group, we created 12 low-impact interventions, allowing a new ‘reading’ of a period when all five yards were operational as a factory and Yard 1 housed all female convicts, staff and the superintendent. The contribution of designed elements to this public domain offers varied levels of engagement along an interpretive spectrum. New elements are emotively inscribed with etched-black words, quoting Superintendent May’s descriptions of the women he reformed: “…breasts freckled, fiery, face pockmarked, scars centre of forehead, beautiful, deceitful, Protestant…” Our interventions aimed for a consistent, sympathetic aesthetic across this significant site. Washed linen made of rusted folds of steel speaks to the work of Cascades’ convict women and yet it recedes too, abstracted, poetic in the storytelling of a special place.
Architect
Birrelli Art + Design + Architecture
Consultants
Structural consultant – JMG
Landscape consultant – Susan Small Landscape Architects
Landscape architect – Susie Roberts
History research – Dr Trudy Cowley
History research – Prof Lucy Frost
Presentation plan 2008 – 3D Projects
Photographer – Nina Hamilton
Photographer – Gail Shepherd
Heritage consultant – Dr Jodie Steele, PAHSMA Conservation Project Management
Heritage consultant – Jo Lyngcoln, PAHSMA Conservation Project Management
Contractors
Interpretation construction – Red Arrow
Landscape contractor – Specialised Landscape Services