Cascades Female Factory – Stories Behind the Stone Walls
Tucked beneath kunanyi / Mount Wellington in South Hobart, the Cascades Female Factory offers a powerful glimpse into the lives of Australia’s lesser-known convicts — women. This UNESCO World Heritage Site once held thousands of female prisoners and their children, many of whom never left.
Built as a self-contained reform facility, the factory operated as a place of punishment and labor, where women worked in laundry and needlework to offset the colony’s penal costs.
Visitors can join the Convict Women’s Tour, a 45-minute guided experience that brings the site’s haunting past to life (first tour at 10am). For a deeper connection, the Notorious Strumpets & Dangerous Girls performance tour runs at 1pm on Saturdays, Sundays, and Tuesdays — a moving 60-minute journey through the stories of seven resilient convict women.