31. Women were whipped in Australia's first years as a British penal colony, as one witness described:
"Their hair has been cut off and their head shaved, which they seem to dislike more than any other punishment. At first one or two were flogg’d with a cat-o-nine-tails on the naked breech... They were also whilst under punishment so very abusive that there was necessity for gagging them." (Aussie girls have always had attitude).
Elizabeth Dudgens was one such. She had already escaped from one prison ship and swum ashore, and was whipped on the transportation ship during the crossing, for swearing at the Captain. Then at Sydney Cove, she couldn't keep out of trouble.
Real Punishments - 1793 Anne de Mericourt
32. Anne Josèphe Théroigne de Mericourt joined the Girondist party in the French Revolution, and in June 1792 commanded an attack that re-took the Bastille. The crowds called her the Amazon of Liberty. On May 31, 1793, a group of Jacobin women (a rival faction) seized her, stripped her naked, and whipped her in public - in the gardens of the Tuileries - "in a very embarrassing manner" say accounts of the time.
Anne "went mad through rage and shame, and was afterwards confined for 20 years in the lunatic asylums of Bicêtre and Charenton. Whenever she could escape from the vigilance of her jailers, she would strip herself naked, and endeavour to administer to herself the degrading punishment she had once suffered at the hands of the populace." So clearly it wasn't on the back of her body - too ordinary. Whipping her own breasts would be awkward. That leaves one more possibility. And it was done by other women, who knew what would really hurt!
Real Punishments - 1798 Breeze & Flaherty
33. At the Norfolk Island penal colony, Lieutenant-Governor Robert Ross kept a diary and an extract from it reads: "Punished Elizabeth Breeze and Phoebe Flaherty with 23 each for neglect of duty by suffering the hoggets (piglets?) to get into the garden."
What were they doing in that bleak and lonely place, to get them so distracted?
