Ross Female Factory:

It’s easy to miss Ross Female Factory, tucked away in a quaint little town with cobblestone streets and a famous old bridge. But don’t let the charm fool you. This was one of Tasmania’s main sites for female convicts, a place of hard labour, punishment, and endless struggle.

Less touristy than Cascades Female Factory, but just as raw. 

•   Drive:
  • About 1.5 hours from Hobart or Launceston, perfect for a day trip through       Tasmania’s historic Midlands.
  • The town of Ross itself? Worth the stop, with heritage pubs, artisan bakeries, and that famous convict-built bridge. 

•   The Factory ruins:
  • Not much left standing, but that’s part of the power. You can still walk the footprint of the buildings: the yards, the cells, the solitary punishment cells.
• Interpretation panels:
  • They fill in the gaps in the stonework, telling the stories of the women who lived, worked, and suffered here. 

• Who was here?
  • Women like Mary Gangell, who worked, raised children, and fought for scraps of freedom.
  • Convict women who worked as domestic servants, laundresses, and factory hands, punished if they resisted punished if they didn’t work hard enough.
• The Punishment Cells:
  • Small, windowless rooms where women were locked for days.
  • Silence, darkness, and isolation, designed to break their spirit.
• Life at Ross:
  • Not just about work. These women were mothers, daughters, and survivors. Some gave birth here, some buried children here. 

•   Pair it with Ross town:
  • Check out the Ross Bridge carvings (made by convicts), wander through the Ross bakery, and soak in the history in every stone.
• Short visit, big impact:
  • You can walk the site in under an hour, but the stories stick with you.

Ross might feel like a sleepy little town today, but back in 1848, it was the last stop for many convict women who’d already served time elsewhere and still couldn’t catch a break. The Ross Female Factory wasn’t some towering fortress, it was a converted probation station, slapped together because Hobart and Launceston were bursting at the seams with too many women and too few cells.

But even in this quiet corner, the convict machine  rolled on. The women here were split into strict classes. At the bottom? Crime class, where punishment meant gruelling labour, lousy rations, and little hope. But make it to assignable class? You might score a posting to a settler’s house, though, let’s be real, that wasn’t exactly freedom either. Oh, and if you had a child? They were right there with you, caught in the same cold stone walls.

Ross closed down in 1854, the transport ships stopped coming, and the system began to unravel. But the ruins remain, quiet but stubborn, a reminder that this wasn’t just a holding pen. It was a place where women fought for survival, stitched clothes, scrubbed laundry, and tried to keep their humanity in a system designed to grind it out of them.