of women at the original female factory in Queen Street had increased to 76. By the end of June 1836 the construction of strong slab cells at Eagle Farm was considered necessary and in 1837 all female prisoners in Brisbane Town were removed to Eagle Farm. By November 1838 the decision had been taken to abandon the Moreton Bay penal settlement and the numbers of convicts, both men and women, started declining rapidly as the penal settlement began to wind up. By March 1839 the Eagle Farm Women's Prison and Factory consisted of a Supervisor's cottage with walls plastered internally and externally, with detached slab kitchen at rear. A two-roomed hut occupied by male convicts and two-roomed hut serving as matron's quarters, with another room under construction and a slab kitchen at rear. All were slab buildings including the Female Factory which comprised a number of four-roomed accommodation buildings; a store, a school, a hospital (plastered) and workhouse, each of one room; a two-roomed building housing the cook house and needle room; and a block of six cells. The area was surrounded by a double fence, the outer being a stockade of strut poles with sharp tops, high, long and deep. In May 1839 the remaining 57 convict women were shipped to Sydney and the penal settlement at Eagle Farm was effectively closed, becoming a government cattle station by 1841. In 1841 the superintendent's quarters were occupied by assistant surveyor Robert Dixon and then briefly by Stephen Simpson, Commissioner for Crown Lands. In 1842 the land was surveyed, put up for public auction and subsequently farmed. From the 1840s to the 1930s the land was used for mixed farming including citrus fruit, dairying, cattle grazing, and small crops. Aborigines were known to raid produce and dwellings in the vicinity of Brisbane including small farms from Breakfast Creek to Eagle Farm, mostly in the period 1845-54 after the penal settlement was closed down and the area was opened to white settlers. In 1850, 31 Aborigines armed with spears and waddies descended on Breakfast Creek and dug up the potatoes of Martin Frawley, the former convict miller turned farmer. The buildings on the women's prison site were demolished at an unknown date. The superintendent's house was thought to have survived until at least 1890. In 1922, the land was acquired by the Australian Government for an aerodrome, the Eagle Farm Airport. In