Child Servants in Queen's Asylum, Tasmania (1875-1879)

Child Servants in Van Diemen's Land, Printed 'Form of Indentiture' documents from the Queen's Asylum, Tasmania, dated 1875, 1878 and 1879, providing details of the apprenticeships arranged for George Crump (aged 12 years & 10 months), Albert Bolch (13 years & 3 months) & William Sutcliffe (14 years). (3 complete documents), The Queen's Orphan Asylum opened as the King's Orphan Asylum in New Town in 1833. It was the first purpose built institution for orphaned, destitute and neglected children in Van Diemen's Land, later Tasmania. It closed in 1879. From the beginning, the Orphan School seems to have been a bleak place. In 1839 the Colonial Times reported, Everyone knows how pleasing an appearance the exterior of the building exhibits, we wish we could say as much of the interior, but we cannot do, as the majority of the apartments allotted to the use of the children are cold comfortless, and ill arranged upon a most mistaken system of parsimonious economy.., in one room we saw five little fellows blue and shivering with cold, there was it is true a fireplace in the room, but no fire..We have seen many assemblages of children in our time..but never did we see two hundred human beings, that exhibited so squalid an appearance, as did the majority of the Queen's Orphans.' In its early years of operation, the majority of children at the Orphan School were born to convict women under sentence