Ann Farmer (c.1725-1790) was found guilty of petty larceny on 15 December 1786 at Clerkenwell Green at the Middlesex Sessions of the Peace. Sentenced to 7 years transportation she was taken to Newgate Gaol until discharged to the Prince of Wales in March 1787, arriving at Sydney in January 1788 as part of the First Fleet.
Farmer was sent to Norfolk Island on the Sirius in March 1790. She died there on 24 May 1790. Ralph Clark wrote that she was 'the first Person that has died a natural death Since the island has been first Settled', and that she was an 'Old Woman' and 'better than half dead before the[y] Sent her... by all accounts. She was a most wicked woman having been the Occation of more than twenty men and women coming to untimely ends...'
An Ann Farmer and an Elizabeth Jones were sentenced to death for a violent highway robbery in September 1783 but were later pardoned, fined 6d and held for six months at Clerkenwell Bridewell.
* information from Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia: A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet (1989), p 123
'Farmer, Ann (c. 1725–1790)', People Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://peopleaustralia.anu.edu.au/biography/farmer-ann-31017/text38387, accessed 27 July 2024.