Date of Conviction: 25/03/1800

Age at Conviction: 25

Crime Convicted of: Theft

Court Convicted at: Lancaster Assizes (held at Lancaster Castle)

Sentence Length: 7 Years

Ship Transported on: Earl Cornwallis

Where Arrived: Port Jackson, New South Wales

Departure Date: 18/11/1800

Arrival Date: 12/06/1801

Biography: Together, Maria and Mary Denton, both aged 25, tried to cash a stolen bill of exchange worth £9/11s in March 1800. They were tried together at the Lancaster Assizes, receiving equal 7 year sentences and were by each other’s sides during their first years in Australia.

After 7 months in Lancaster Castle’s dungeon tower, Maria and Mary were furnished with clothing and  transported to Gravesend with 11 other women, and put aboard the Earl Cornwallis, a ship carrying both male and female prisoners. It arrived in New South Wales in June 1801 after a sickly journey where many convicts had died of dysentery.

Only 4 months after arrival, Maria married convict Samuel Haslam (25 years her senior of ship Barwell) at St John’s, Parramatta. The preceding wedding had been Mary’s just three weeks earlier. The two women were witnesses at each others’ weddings though neither could write and both signed their mark with an ‘x’.

Maria went on to have 4 children. She helped her husband run a successful roadside inn on the road to Parramatta and the area around it became known as Haslam’s Creek (now part of the wider Sydney Olympic Park).  She received her certificate of freedom in Feb 1811. Living on a frontier road in a dangerous area in 1822, records show she was assaulted by district constable Thomas Bates in her own home (he was sacked after a trial), whilst as ‘an antiquated lady’ in 1826 she was woken and threatened with beheading by a gang who broke into and burgled her home; alcohol however seemingly clouded her memory of the event and she was unable to pick out the prisoner in a police line up. They were still at their location for the 1828 census. Samuel died in 1835 and it is not known if Maria remarried or also passed away.