maietime

 Introduction and Contents            Image: A. Maie ‘Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house not a creature was stirring not even a mouse… (Clement Clarke Moore, 1823) At midnight on Christmas Eve in 1782 Elizabeth Pulley broke in and stole 10 lbs cheese, 3 lbs bacon, 24 oz butter, 3 lbs raisins, 7 lbs flour and 2 rolls of worsted material from the shop of Elizabeth Mimms at Hethersett in the South-East of England. Elizabeth was a single woman, poor and had no known trade.   Little else is known about her background at this time, except that she was orphaned at six years of age, so we can only imagine how she lived and survived. [1]   According to Portia Robinson ( The Women of Botany Bay ) “it was the very poor, especially the single women, the washerwomen, the charwomen, the street-sellers, the silk-winders, streetwalkers and those of “no trade” who lived in...cellars and garrets...” in “...all the major cities and towns of Britain”.   Their lives “wer

  INTRODUCTION Elizabeth Pulley was one of the approximately 778 convicts transported in the First Fleet to Australia from Britain in 1787, arriving in in Australia in January, 1788. This series attempts to present the story of Elizabeth Pulley and her husband-to-be Anthony Rope from Elizabeth’s point of view.   It is a mix of documentation and story, with the aim of imagining what life would have been like for them at the time.  It first began as  The Story of Elizabeth  Pulley and her first five years in Australia  which I began to write for my family in 1999.  In 2019 I decided to edit and publish it online as a series. . The series also attempts to address the devastating impact this arrival on the First Nations peoples of this country.  With this in mind I have more recently set up a facebook page, Rope-Pulley Descendants for Reconciliation ,. The original family research  from birth, marriage, death, church, cemetery and land records.  was begun by my mother, Madge Rups (nee