Picture if you will, a convict ship off-loading its cargo onto the wharf at Hobart Town. A bedraggled looking bunch of women in a sorry state, lined up in front of a table, where a clerk is recording each person's name and checking it against the ship's records. And detailed records they are, naming each woman, her age and sometimes her year of birth, the colour of her eyes and her hair, her height, her trade – when known, her police number, her crime and her sentence and the court and date of sentence. It is a detailed record, though often names get misspelt. Often there is a report of the convict's behaviour in gaol and accompanying this is the ship's surgeon's report of the convict's behaviour on the voyage out.
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From the commencement of transportation in 1788 to its cessation in 1868 some 162,119 convicts left the British Isles for the Australian colonies. Among these were 25.255 women. 12,101 of these women disembarked at Sydney, 12,460 at Van Dieman's Land. The remainder, either died or were seized by mutineers or privateers on the way there. Unlike Sydney Town, convict women were part of the colonisation of Van Dieman's Land from the very beginning of European settlement. There were three women in the small party of soldiers, settlers and convicts that established the first settlement at Risdon Cove in 1803. Another similar group settled Port Dalrymple a year later. Both settlements grew slowly at first and then a large group of settlers, some several hundred men, women and children came from England with the David Collins' expedition in 1804. However, as the colony expanded, the women population remained significant but small in number so that in 1814 it was decided that a “more orderly” regime of increasing the women population should be established. From that year until 1820, more than a quarter of the 1420 women to arrive in Sydney, were sent on to Hobart Town or Port Dalrymple. In 1820 direct transportation to Van Dieman's Land was introduced, though the ships then sailed on to Sydney with the rest of the cargo, and then in 1841, after transportation to Sydney and New South Wales had ceased, convicts were shipped specifically to the southern colony. The result was a dramatic increase in the population of women in what was to become Tasmania. Despite their growing numbers, though, women remained heavily outnumbered by men throughout this period and not surprisingly, this imbalance was to have a significant effect on the nature of the colony's society.