We often judge people on first appearances – hairstyles, body decoration, dress and posture all combine to shape a ‘first impression’. Often first impressions fade once we get to know someone but imagine if you were permanently judged based on how you looked.
Toowoomba was founded and prospered during the Victorian Era an Era when a person's morality or personality was solely based on their physical attributes alone. This practice was known as Physiognomy and explained the brutal nature of punishment in the Victorian Era. If you looked bad and had proven yourself to be bad, by committing a criminal offence, then you were bad and had no prospect of reform. Thus prison conditions were harsh and Toowoomba’s Gaol – Queensland’s Women’s Prison – was no exception as this article from the Darling Downs Gazette in March 1889 reporting on an inspection of the Reformatory, attests:
“The smaller of the two, about 14 years old, exhibits a promising physiognomy. Her fate constitutes another instance of the difficulty of discriminating character in the softer sex.
Males generally are what they look, but there is an element of weakness, the source of misery and crime, in women, which cannot be discerned until time has done its work”.
With such an approach young female offenders had little opportunity for reform. Confined to cramped cells with up to 16 other prisoners, many of them hardened, for 14 hours each day conditions were not conducive to any sort of reform. In the late 1880’s the influence of physiognomy began to fade, the ‘progressives’ of the day began to agitate for reform, particularly the introduction of a single cell system of confinement.
The deplorable conditions found in the Toowoomba Women’s Prison and the move away from physiognomy resulted in significant reform personified by the opening of Queensland’s new Women’s Prison at Boggo Road Brisbane, based on the single-cell system.
15 Mar 1889 - THE TOOWOOMBA REFORMATORY. - Trove
Want to know more then the Toowoomba Trails Dark Side Tour is the Tour for you.
