9

The Government Stroke

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NOBODY ON SHORE in Sydney was blasé about the arrival of a convict transport. For the people who crammed the bobbing flotilla of rowboats around the ship as she warped in, it meant news from home or even the glimpse of a familiar face, pallid from life below the hatches. But for the settlers, it meant a small gush of the most precious commodity in Australia: labor. Every convict faced the same social prospects. He or she served the Crown or, on the Crown’s behalf, some private person, for a given span of years. Then came a pardon or a ticket-of-leave, either of which permitted him to sell his labor freely and choose his place of work. What this came down to, in the common view of English critics of transportation—most of whom had not been to Australia and had no first-hand knowledge of the convict system—was that the Crown used them as slaves until they were judged fit to become peasants.

An equation between convictry and slavery was the invariable trope used to attack the System. Some key figures in the convict administration also used it—such as George Arthur, the Tory lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land from 1824 to 1836—but it was most commonly heard from Abolitionists, in a lengthy succession that began with Jeremy Bentham and William Wilberforce and continued to William Molesworth and Lord Russell in the late 1830s. It lasted, therefore, for fifty years and remained (at least as a figure of speech) largely unquestioned in English liberal circles. But was it correct? Were convicts, in fact, slaves? And could the matter of their rights—or lack of them—rightly be brought under the great moral umbrella of the English Abolitionist movement, which had at such vast cost and effort extirpated black slavery from the British Empire and, by the 1830s, was busy trying to suppress the tenacious institution of slavery among the Africans and Arabs themselves? English liberal reformers were sure it could. Today, one is less sure.¹

In theory, the social contract of slavery is simple, rigid and one-sided. It is pure power in action, rampant will. The master owns the slave: his work, his time, his person. Slaves are bought and sold; they are property. Their rights begin and end with their status as chattels. They do not have the right to negotiate, to set the tempo or length of their work, to organize collectively or to protest. Incentives are unknown in the theoretical world of slavery (though not, as the experience of slave societies always shows, in its real world). Slavery is permanent and it perpetuates itself from generation to generation; slave parents beget slave children. When slaves are freed, it is an indulgence—or a revolution.

None of these conditions applied to the convicts Britain exiled to Australia. Each served a fixed term of punishment and then became free. None was a chattel, the property of a master. All of them, within limits, had the right to sell some portion of their labor on the free market. Harsh and rigorous as their social world often was, it was enlaced by concepts of right and law, not of simple ownership. They could appear as witnesses in court, bring suits in civil law, and write petitions to the governor, which were given full and usually prompt consideration. Their masters did not have the right to flog them; such punishments could only be inflicted by the sentence of a magistrate, or, in later years, two magistrates. A convict could bring a master to court for ill-treatment. Often, when they had served their terms, convicts were given land and assigned convicts to work it. Their children were born free. They could not vote; but neither could anyone else in New South Wales until after 1840. If this was slavery, as its critics insisted, it was not of a kind recognizable in Barbados or Atlanta, let alone in ancient Athens, Rome or Luxor.

It had its own name: the assignment system. Most convicts were “assigned”—lent out, as laborers, by the government—to private settlers. A few, perhaps one in ten, were kept by the government to labor on public works, digging ditches and tunnels, building jails, courthouses, stores and breakwaters, making roads through the bush. Thus the “government man”—a favorite euphemism in a society where the word “convict” was rarely used—could serve the Crown directly and pay back his debt to English society. Government labor was thought the worse punishment. But assignment was the staff of colonial life for the first fifty years of European settlement. It shaped the colony and molded its social institutions; and it was one—if not quite the—main reason why emigrants went there at all.

Penal Australia was too distant, weird and tainted to attract many free immigrants from the working class. However, its government hoped to bring in “opulent” settlers, men of capital who would spend it in the colony, with offers of free land and free labor. In its unexplored vastness, the colony was glutted with land, and the government gave it away. Prime grazing country less than a hundred miles from Sydney could still be had for 2 shillings an acre in the 1830s.

Because it was far scarcer, skilled free labor was much more valuable than land. It could name its own price. When the green and hopeful colonist brought his free servant to Australia with him, the servant often deserted:

My own man, who had served me for eight years in England . . . never reached my new abode. About a month after our arrival I missed him one morning. Before night I received a letter, by which he informed me that he had taken a grant of land near Hunter’s River, and that he “hoped we parted friends.” He is now one of the most consequential persons in the Colony, has grown enormously fat, feeds upon greasy dainties, drinks oceans of bottled porter and port wine, damns the Governor, and swears by all his gods, Jupiter, Jingo and Old Harry, that this colony must soon be independent.²

Cheap land and free grants meant that anyone with hard hands and a strong back could become his own boss. They also meant that the only stable source of labor, whatever its defects, came from the assignment system. Thus, assignment was as important to colonial Australia as black slavery was to the antebellum South, and both had practical disadvantages in common.

Black slave labor was rarely as efficient as the paid work of the free. Its unproductiveness was rooted in the effect of slavery on men’s souls, for “bondage forced the Negro to give his labor grudgingly and badly, and his poor work habits retarded . . . the general level of productivity.”³ Most slaves were employed, not on Tara-like plantations, but in groups of one to ten on modest-sized farms.

Slavery suits the production line, where each worker does a rigidly set task over and over again, with no variation. It also suits the rural ancestor of a production line, the latifundium with a huge labor force. But on a small farm the worker must turn his hand to many tasks, and here the drawbacks of slave labor—lack of skills, absence of initiative—bit deep. Slavery is inherently static. No slave ever came up with a new farm tool or a better way of using an old one.

These drawbacks were just what a pioneer society did not need. But because the assignment system was more open and flexible than slavery, because it left some room for the initiative of the individual convict (if not in working for the master, then “on his own time”), it tended to be more innovative in its deployment of skills. Only in the outer penal settlements like Moreton Bay, Macquarie Harbor or Norfolk Island were the rigid, punitive inefficiencies of formal prison labor sustained, with men instead of animals dragging carts, and the hoe used instead of the plough. The economy of the mainland was more dynamic and, as John Hirst pointed out, “One of the colony’s claims to fame ought to be that it was a forced labor economy which developed a staple industry [wool] in which the forced laborers—the convict shepherds—worked alone.”⁴

Still, the convicts had an irreducible unit of labor. They called it the “Government stroke.” Doing it kept you out of the hands of the flogger; you were seen to be working, but that was all. Colonial Australia progressed slowly because of its shortage of capital, its solitudes and distances, its small population, and because jails are inherently conservative. But its worst problem was a labor force with so few incentives to work.

The mediocrity of convict labor drove free workers’ wages up. “Not the slightest dependence can be placed on convict labor as a permanent source of wealth.”⁵ But this was untrue. What was true was that being the master of assigned convicts did not give anyone the seigneurial confidence of the slave-owner, because the government could take them back. No farmer “had a property in” his convict servants. They were not part of his capital.

Nor would any master see them as morally neutral creatures, like black slaves. Convicts, by definition, were criminals; they had to be watched closely and kept in rigorous submission. The farther away from the city the master was, the harsher his vigilance tended to become, unless he was an ex-convict himself and treated his assigned man “softly”—an indulgence that, colonial conservatives believed, only led to disorder.

Yet the fact that convict labor produced less than the work of free men did not mean it was unproductive; indeed, fortunes were raised on it. Convicts did not represent capital, like slaves, but their work produced the same effect as the expenditure of capital. “The operation of the penal system has altered the face of the country where it has been set down,” remarked the author of an emigrant’s handbook published in 1851, “just as manure may have altered the character of a field.” It could not produce extravagant surpluses, but it could and did offer the well-organized settler a solid prosperity. Nobody could visit Camden Park in the 1830s, the proud seat of the Macarthur family, with its 60,000 acres and its elegant Regency house by John Verge, without seeing what the System could do. And here was a “typical” large 800-acre farm in Van Diemen’s Land in the 1840s:

The house is of stone, large, and commodious. The farm-buildings are ample in extent, and built of stone, with solid roofs. The implements are all of the best kind, and kept in perfect order. The livestock . . . consists of 30 cart-horses, 50 working bullocks, 100 pigs, 20 brood mares, 1,000 head of horned cattle, and 25,000 fine-wooled sheep. In this single establishment, by one master, 70 labourers have been employed at the same time. They were nearly all convicts. Nothing of the sort could have existed in this island if convicts had not been transmitted hither, and assigned, on their landing, to settlers authorized to make slaves of them.⁶

This idyll was more common on the small, fertile island of Van Diemen’s Land than in the sprawling backblocks of New South Wales. Because it favored standardized work, and because men of influence could get the skilled servants (leaving the lumpen for the lumpen), assignment worked better for the large farmer than for the dirt-farming “dungaree settler.” But in either case, it held several compelling merits from the viewpoint of the government.

First, it was cheap. It got convicts “off the stores” and, by shifting the cost of their food and keep to private citizens, it saved the British Government thousands of pounds a year.

Second, it induced well-to-do free settlers to think of emigrating to Australia. Where else in the world could “settlers of responsibility and Capital” assure themselves a free supply of labor? The authorities in New South Wales and their friends in England were apt to emphasize that advantage. The first capitalist-farmer to emigrate was a friend of Joseph Banks named Gregory Blaxland, a prosperous landowner from Kent who had sold most of his English property to invest in Australia, arriving in 1805. The authorities, realizing that here (at last) was the first settler of unimpeachable respectability, showered him with favors. On instructions from Castlereagh, Governor King gave him 4,000 acres of land “in perpetuity . . . in a situation of his own Chusing” and forty convicts to work them with. All were fed and clothed by the Crown for the first eighteen months of their assignment to Blaxland, at a total cost of £1,300, which is more than £50,000 in today’s money.⁷ Clearly, both the Crown and the colonial government were very anxious to have solid settlers. But in those years, few came out.

The assignment system had a third merit: social control. It dispersed convicts all over New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, instead of concentrating them in potentially rebellious groups and gangs. It could also control settlers through patronage. The government could punish a settler by denying him convicts, or reward another by assigning them. This damped the political dissensions of free settlers, just as the convicts could be kept in line by the threat of the lash and the promise of eventual freedom. It was a power wielded with special vigor in Van Diemen’s Land between 1824 and 1836, under Lieutenant-Governor Arthur—where, according to the wealthy settler George Meredith, a potential master’s access to convict labor depended “not upon [his] wants, but upon the construction the Governor may be pleased to put upon the political sentiments and conduct of the applicant.” Arthur’s favoritism was such that in 1832 half the skilled artisan convicts in Van Diemen’s Land were assigned to one-tenth of the settlers, mostly his own clique of officials.⁸ The price of irking a governor might be to lose one’s servants a week later, for “what the Settler is now allowed by the law to enjoy is a mere indulgence, a temporary, revocable loan of services.”⁹

Convict assignment in Australia differed, in law, from its earlier form in America. Many respectable Americans railed at the influx of felons, which they thought polluted their society. “In what can Britain show a more Sovereign contempt for us,” wrote an irate Virginian in 1751, “than by emptying their Jails into our settlements; unless they would likewise empty their Jakes on our tables!” But the fact was that most farmers and merchants in Maryland or Virginia, when offered a chance of convict labor, grabbed it—and paid handsomely for it. The American colonist owned his indentured servants. He had paid for their transportation across the Atlantic, and he expected to be safeguarded against financial loss if they were set free by some “unforeseen exercise of the Royal Mercy.” Convicts were capital, like slaves, and had been freely traded as such since the early seventeenth century. “Our principall wealth consisteth in servants,” wrote the Virginia settler John Pory in 1619. Under the transportation acts of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, therefore, the Crown was bound to pay a convict’s owner should it remit his sentence. Such a release was unlikely but possible.¹⁰

In any case, Virginia and Maryland were not penal colonies, but free ones that used felon slaves. In Australia, which had been settled as a jail, no free settler ever paid for a convict’s passage from England; and that, in the official view, disposed of the settler’s claim to a right of property in the convict’s labor. All such rights belonged to the government. Nevertheless, disputes over the “right” of settlers to sell or reassign their convicts kept raising colonial hackles for decades.¹¹

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IN THE FIRST years of the colony, under Governor Phillip, convicts worked only for the government, which also had a monopoly on all the crops grown; these went into a communal store and were rationed out to the colonists. The first stage of the assignment system, which lasted until 1800, was a refinement of this. The government gave convict labor, clothed and victualled at government expense, to free settlers. But the crops they raised could only be bought by the government, at fixed prices. The government store became the sole market. In 1790 there were 38 such “assigned” convicts in New South Wales, working on private farms. By 1800 there were 356, and by December 1825 there were 10,800.

As the memory of the “famine years” receded and the economy of the colony grew and diversified, the government store gave up trying to hold its monopoly on farm produce. As it no longer controlled the market, it did not want to pay for the upkeep of assigned convicts either. Hence, by a General Order issued in October 1800, Governor King changed the system. In this second stage of assignment, the masters had to feed, clothe and shelter their servants. The government would advance them food and clothing out of its own stores, to be repaid at the year’s end; a full year’s rations for one convict cost about £13 13s.¹²

This not only stimulated farming; it got convicts “off the stores,” so that they cost the government nothing. From 1800 to 1806, Governor King tried very hard to cut the routine costs of convict administration. Part of his strategy was to alter the rules of assignment again. After 1804, any settler who took a convict “off the stores” signed an indenture to keep him for at least twelve months.¹³ The master must maintain his man on exactly the same terms of work, food and clothing as the felons in government employ. If a settler could not support the convict and had to discharge him, he must pay the government a shilling for every day of the unexpired year, a fine that few smallholders could readily afford.

In return, the convict worked the same hours as the government exacted: ten hours Monday to Friday, and six on Saturday, giving a fifty-six-hour week—not a brutal schedule, by any means. But every prisoner, whether he worked for the government or a settler, had to do his “task” of work. Labor by task rather than time followed the logic of having an unwilling convict work force. It had been excessively difficult to keep the hands at work all day; and the early settlement had no full-time guards except the military, who resented being used as jail overseers. Hence, very early, Phillip adopted the system of fixing an amount of product rather than a span of time as the daily norm, and convicts would work at their own rates, although at first, Collins complained, “they preferred passing in idleness the hours that might have been so profitably spent.”¹⁴ Task-work had an association with skilled labor in England; it suggested a higher status than mere toil. In this way, labor negotiations were installed in the fledgling penal colony almost from its birth—not what one would expect in a jail, still less in a “slave society.” In 1800, Governor King fixed some typical task-rates: In one week, a male convict must fell an acre of forest timber, or split 500 five-foot palings, or thresh 18 bushels of wheat.

In the “famine years,” convicts had been let off work at three in the afternoon so that they could raise their own produce. This dispensation became the custom, and it survived for both private and government workers after the shortages had passed. Convicts soon came to be paid wages for out-of-hours labor. They could sell this overtime anywhere, if the master did not want to pay for it. Some items in the 1808 code of labor prices were: 10s. for felling an acre of trees, £1 4s. per acre for “breaking up new ground,” 6d. a bushel for pulling and husking corn, and so forth. If a convict always worked the whole day for his master, not just the ten standard government hours, his surplus time entitled him to a shilling a day, or about £18 a year. He might also get occasional bonuses of rum. “Mechanics” or skilled craftsmen—blacksmiths, shoemakers, tailors—could get much more on their own time, sometimes £4 to £5 a week.¹⁵

How well did the convict’s right to earn overtime, which was part of the essence of the assignment system for some twenty years after 1804, translate into spending power? Certainly, worse than one would suppose. Successive governors fixed the price of overtime convict labor, but the colony had no money supply. England had not sent money there, for one did not need cash circulating in a jail. Not until 1812 would the Crown dispatch a supply of silver coin to Australia; £10,000, which, as the Select Committee on Transportation had gloomily predicted, was sucked out of the colony by its unfavorable balance of trade. Not even Macquarie’s creation of the “Holey Dollar”—a mutilated Spanish coin of Charles III, whose center or “dump” was punched out and given a value of 1s. 3d., the “ring” being worth 5 shillings—could keep coinage in the colony.¹⁶

As a result, the first twenty-five years of economic life were a crazy quilt of barter, IOUs and sliding coinage—guineas, johannas, guilders, mohurs, rupees, Spanish dollars and ducats, left in the colony by visiting ships. At one point in 1800, even the English copper penny was declared to be worth twopence. Official prices were given in sterling but the only notes with full sterling value equal to their face value were of two kinds: government bills of exchange on the British treasury, and paymaster’s notes issued to the officers of the New South Wales Corps, which were consolidated as bills on the regimental treasury in England.

Of the two, the Rum Corps notes were much preferred, although the government could enforce the use of its own paper in settlement of debts up to £300. Rum Corps paper carried premiums of as much as 25 percent against copper cash, let alone personal IOUs, which no one trusted and whose use as circulating currency was finally proscribed by Governor Bligh.¹⁷

The convicts got the worst of these economic arrangements, of course. Their paid labor was mercilessly exploited by the means of payment, which was mainly in kind, at the prices of goods fixed by the free settlers. Sometimes they would be forced to take imported goods they did not need at all: white cotton dress stockings, for instance, or “sheeps’ rumps” (lambskins) imported from Cape Town. In the heyday of the Rum Corps, sugar was 7s. a pound, tea 6s. an ounce, and spirits 20s. a bottle. King had known rum to go as high as £8 a gallon.¹⁸

Even when a convict could get cash wages, he received them not in sterling but in the depreciated “currency” of the colony. In 1814, some little while after Governor Macquarie had begun to deflate the exorbitant prices of the 1800s, the convict weaver Thomas Holden wrote to his parents in Bolton,

Dear Mother, things in this Country is very dear, mens hats is too pounds too shillings and stockings ten shillings per pair and shoes 16 shillings per pair sugar 3 shillings per pound and butter 7 shillings per pound . . . although the Prices is so high we are very glad to get [them] at any price.¹⁹

As an assigned man, Holden added, he was earning £20 a year in “currency,” but that was only worth £12 in English money. In general, by 1820, the assigned man was paid in kind for overtime work at prices 40 to 70 percent above wholesale cash prices, and 25 to 35 percent over retail. He could (and some did) appeal against this gouging to a magistrate, but magistrates, being settlers themselves, “must naturally feel an interest in support of charges that have the effect of diminishing the price of labour to themselves as well as to others.” They always favored paying convicts in store goods rather than money.²⁰

The most sought-after commodity of all was rum, a word which stood for spirits of all kinds—arrack, aguardiente, poteen, moonshine—but which meant, especially, imported liquor from Bengal. In this little community (less than 5,000 people in 1799; about 7,000 in 1805; just over 20,000 by 1817), nearly all the men and most of the women were addicted to alcohol. In Australia, especially between 1790 and 1820, rum became an overriding social obsession. Families were wrecked by it, ambitions destroyed, an iron chain of dependency forged. Many colonists drank with an oblivion-haunted thirst, determined to blot out the harsh tenor of their lives. In the heyday of the rum monopoly, William Bligh recalled,

the thirst after spirits was so very strong that [the settlers] sacrificed every thing to the purchase of them, and the prices were raised by that monopoly to so high a degree that it was the ruin of many of those poor people.²¹

Governor Bligh, who was firmly sympathetic to the plight and interests of struggling small farmers and sometimes supported them against the Rum Corps officers, saw rum as an instrument of debilitation that helped an elite maintain its power, even as it was debauching the quality of labor. Settlers would leave their farms and come forty miles into Sydney, a four days’ round trip, to pick up a gallon of spirits, “in doing which they spent ten times more than it was worth, and lost their time in agriculture.”

It may be that the reproofs of lower-class colonial boozing that came from the upper colonial crust should be treated with caution, like the pronouncements of Marsden and others on convict sexuality. If everyone had been drunk, the colony could not have survived. And yet there is little room for doubt about the hold rum had on the embryo society of New South Wales; and its evangelical pastors, first Richard Johnson and then Samuel Marsden, were powerless to stop it.

Because most convicts would rather be paid in rum than anything else, it gave great leverage to the wealthy landowner, who could secure any amount of overtime labor with a broached barrel. “You may get more ground worked for a little spirits than you can for anything else, and that I fancy is the reason of labour being so high,” declared John “Little Jack” Palmer, Captain Phillip’s former purser on the First Fleet who had risen to be the official banker and contractor to the early settlement. When Major George Johnston of the New South Wales Corps received a grant of 2,000 acres from Governor King as his official reward for crushing the Irish rebellion of 1804, he “used to barter spirits to pay the labourers for clearing our grounds,” although it was not always easy to get the governor’s permission to buy as many barrels of liquid incentive as he wanted.²²

Naturally, the prudent master would find a balance between the quantity of liquor served out as a special indulgence to his men and the amount of work he needed done the next day. At Camden Park, the Macarthurs made it a rule to give steady workers a bonus in Cape wine. Colonial Australia showed little interest in beer or ale. It was rum that could make or break a man’s prosperity, and although civil and military officers controlled the rum trade by getting first access to incoming cargo and selling the liquor at an initial markup of 500 percent, every small businessman tried to dabble in it, while judges, lawyers, surgeons, ministers and missionaries all got into the trade.

Long after the Rum Corps was recalled to England in 1810, the fledgling economies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land—particularly as they affected convicts—remained tied to a kind of rum standard. Quality hardly mattered. Real Jamaica rum, landed at 6 shillings a gallon, reached the small settlers land convicts at £2 to £4; but it was the first victim of the efforts of King and Bligh between 1800 and 1810 to fix rum prices, since their standards abolished the shippers’ profit margin and sometimes sent the boats away at a loss. Bringing spirits from England became “a losing trade,” but there was liquor from Bengal, half the price at 10 shillings a gallon. Cheap Bengali rum, even with restrictions, was the most profitable kind and it did incalculable social damage, from the bottom of the colony to the top.²³

The civil establishment bore its quota of fuddled incompetents, from Richard Atkins (1745–1802), Governor King’s deputy judge-advocate, to William Gore (1765–1845), acquaintance of Palmerston and the provost-marshal of New South Wales under Bligh, who became (in the words of a later governor) “so totally abandoned to drinking that I fear He is for ever lost to Society.”²⁴ This sad, detested creature was transported to the penal settlement at Newcastle for shooting a trespassing soldier of the 48th Regiment, and he died at the age of eighty, penniless and disgraced, his body left for several years unburied along with his wife’s beneath a heap of palings on his farm. The Sydney suburb of Gore Hill bears his name.

The convicts were even less able to stay off the rum, since their need for oblivion was worse. “Intemperance is the greatest curse we have on our land,” wrote a convict named John Broxup, claiming that booze caused “three-thirds [sic] of the crimes that are committed.” If a young assigned man managed to live soberly it was a cause for congratulation, to be mentioned in letters home: “Your son Richard I can say is very steady for though liquor is very cheap”—it is 1832 and the price of rum has dropped to 2 shillings a pint—“and he have the means and opportunity of getting it he never gets more than do him good,” a convict scribe added to a letter home from Richard Dillingham, a convict in Van Diemen’s Land.²⁵

But most convicts would have found an anthem in the “Rum Song,” supposedly of penal days:

Cut yer name across me backbone,

Stretch me skin across a drum,

Iron me up to Pinchgut Island

From today till Kingdom Come!

I will eat your Norfolk Dumpling

Like a juicy Spanish plum,

Even dance the Newgate hornpipe,

If you’ll only give me rum!^*

Some authorities thought that the only solution was prohibition, which Governor Thomas Brisbane tried to enforce on Newcastle and the Hunter River Valley settlers in 1824. Ships entering Newcastle Harbor had to be placed under bond whether they carried liquor or not, because the mere sight of a possibly rum-laden boat caused “confusion and wild uproar.”²⁶

The English authorities had transported Gin Lane to Australia, and the harsh conditions of colonial life made for heavy drinking. Yet the relationship between drink, wages and work had long been ingrained in England. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, had been astonished to see that his fellow printers in London drank three-quarters of a gallon of strong ale every day at work, supplied against their wages, while the habit of paying workers and craftsmen on Saturday nights from a table in a public-house—thus assuring that all but the teetotaller would drink a hole in his salary before he got home—did not die out in London until the 1820s. Certainly, few convicts were likely to feel that their rights were under attack if their masters part-paid them in rum, and none complained about it.²⁷

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THE MAN WHO cleaned up this system was Lachlan Macquarie (1762–1824), the last British proconsul sent to run New South Wales as a military autocracy. In guts, moral vigor and paternal evenhandedness, as well as in his bouts of self-righteousness and bull-headed vanity, Macquarie was a fine early example of that breed of Scottish administrators who kept the engine-room of Empire working throughout the nineteenth century. The son of a Hebridean tenant farmer, related through his mother to the Highland laird Maclaine of Lochbay, he was to become the laird of New South Wales, ruling his anomalous fief from January 1810 to December 1821—the longest tenure of any Australian governor.

Macquarie had risen through the British Army as a career officer, serving with increasing distinction for nearly twenty years in India and the Middle East. By his fortieth year he was a thoroughly seasoned Empire hand: a good organizer, resentful of critics, used to prompt obedience, socially rather creaky but shrewd about the needs of those who fell under his power—an “awkward, rusticated, Jungle-Wallah,” in his own words, ramrod-like in port and bearing, with a bony jaw and eyes as hard as cairngorms.

But he was not too awkward to look after his career. In 1807 Macquarie transferred to a new regiment, the 73rd Highlanders. He then learned that it was being sent to New South Wales to clean up the chaos left in the wake of the Rum Corps’s 1808 rebellion against Governor Bligh. Its commander would be the colonial governor, since the mutiny against Bligh had shown that a naval governor could not necessarily depend on the army’s allegiance. But the commanding officer of the 73rd did not want to go, so Macquarie started lobbying for the post. In 1809 Lord Castlereagh confirmed his appointment as governor of New South Wales. With his wife and his regiment, he sailed for Sydney in May 1809, and was sworn in there on the first day of 1810.

Macquarie’s orders were to arrest the leaders of the Rum Rebellion—John Macarthur and the corps’s naïvely seditious second-in-command, Major George Johnston, who had arrested Bligh and taken charge of the colony—and to send them back to England for trial. But they had sailed for England already, to take their case before the government. Bligh himself came back to Sydney from his exile in Van Diemen’s Land a fortnight after Macquarie’s arrival, raging against the rebels in his foul “tarpaulin” lingo. Macquarie ignored him; he, not Bligh, was governor now. Bligh sailed back to England soon after and never saw the blood he wanted, for Johnston was cashiered, not hanged, and Macarthur, “the great perturbator,” returned to New South Wales in 1814, his wings clipped (though not for long) by an order to stay out of public affairs.

Macquarie cancelled all the civilian and military appointments and revoked all the pardons, leases and land grants made in Sydney between January 26, 1808, the day of the Rum Rebellion, and his own arrival. He reinstated all dismissed officers and got rid of Macarthur’s drunken stooge of a judge-advocate, Richard Atkins, replacing him with Ellis Bent (1783–1815), the first decently trained professional lawyer to hold office in Australia, who had come out with him on the same ship from England. Firmly seated now, all reins in his hand, Macquarie began the inchmeal conversion of a jail into a colony.

It was not an easy task. He could not, for instance, abolish the social addiction to rum by an act of will. The Rum Corps was gone but the thirst remained. However, as the farms spread, and free settlers seeped in and emancipated convicts got their land grants and businesses other than farming grew on the coast—mainly whaling and sealing—so the economy of New South Wales diversified and could no longer be ruled by a primitive cartel. The rum monopolists’ day would therefore have ended anyway, but Macquarie hastened it by a series of enactments against drinking: Public-houses were to shut on Sundays and there was, instead, mandatory church parade for convicts; the number of licensed houses was sharply cut; a stiff duty went on imported spirits in the hope of pricing drunkenness out of existence. This last measure failed, as it was bound to do; despite Macquarie’s brisk reports of moral improvement, it only caused more colonists than ever to drink themselves into debt.

His attitudes to convicts mattered more than his war on appetite. He rejected the idea that convict labor was a pool from which officers and a few favored settlers could enrich themselves. Convicts were there to be punished but rehabilitated through work. Macquarie saw that Emancipists so outnumbered emigrant settlers that Australia was bound to be an Emancipists’ country, its political reality shaped by them and their descendants. If emancipated convicts were not given back their rights as citizens, New South Wales would become as riddled with false dreams of aristocracy as the American South.

Emancipation pointed a convict back into respectable society, which must receive him. With the flurry of capital letters that usually signalled his moral enthusiasms, Macquarie told Castlereagh that emancipation was “the greatest Inducement that Can be held out to the Reformation of the Manners of the Inhabitants. . . . [W]hen United with Rectitude and long tried Good Conduct, [it] should lead a man back to that Rank in Society which he had forfeited and do away, as far as the Case will admit, with All Retrospect of former Bad Conduct.”²⁸ And for the emancipated to grasp the normal responsibilities of citizenhood, they must be shown that they had rights while they were still in the larval stage of convict serfdom. Macquarie’s respect for the potential of convicts was noble. Yet it led to his political ruin at the hands of the “Merinos” and their allies in England, who believed in unrelenting exploitation of the convicts; and he died a broken man, obsessed with his detractors and their myriad calumnies.

But that lay in the future. What Sydney saw, at the beginning, was the vigorous administrator in his late forties, for whose attention no matter was too trivial. Whenever a convict transport disgorged its cargo in Sydney, Governor Macquarie was there to meet it. A convict remembered the ceremony that greeted the disembarked prisoners:

The Governor, Superintender, and Doctor, &c., comes; the Governor addresses them, by saying what a fine fruiteful country they are come to, and what he will do for them if there conduct merits it; likewise tells them if they find themselves anyways dessatesfied with there employer, to go (immediately) to the madjestrate of the district, and he will see him righted.²⁹

All convicts were initiated to Australia with this fatherly speech from the governor. By telling the new arrivals “what he will do for them,” Macquarie made it plain that the channels of patronage were as much in operation here as the chains of the law. No matter who their master was, they would always be working for the government.

At first Macquarie complained of the shortage of labor and asked the government for more convicts. But for the first five years of his rule, not enough ships could be spared from the war against Napoleon to send them out. So he was faced with a ticklish balance. He would assign men and women to free settlers as far as it was necessary; he had no bias against the farmer and his need for labor. But he felt convict labor was best used in government service, where Authority could judge its incentives nicely and measure the reformation of each person instead of depending on second-hand reports from masters.

It would be better for the colony, too. For Macquarie was appalled by the shoddy look of Sydney: an unplanned straggle of shacks “in most ruinous decay,” perched on the rim of the shining, amethyst, many-lobed harbor. The judge-advocate’s residence was a “perfect pigstye,” and the convict barracks at Sydney and Parramatta were beyond mere disgust. There was no proper hospital. The churches were huts—a fact particularly repugnant to Macquarie, who believed religious practice would reform his sinners. The town streets were dusty tracks in summer and ditches after a rain, and no sewers existed. Beyond the town’s perimeter, the roads (except for the toll road to Parramatta) could scarcely be negotiated by a cart.

With a mixture of naïveté, zeal and creative drive, Macquarie set out to turn this hodgepodge into a Georgian city. His architectural education was necessarily slight, but he had seen the work of Nash, Soane and Wood, and believed their idiom was the correct one for the architecture of Empire. About the technicalities of building he knew nothing, but the taste of his time had rubbed off on him, as it was bound to do on any intelligent proconsul with firmly elitist values. Elizabeth Macquarie, his wife, had brought an album of building and town designs with her. It became the source-book for Macquarie’s plans of urban renewal.

He started writing codes that specified the minimum floor area of houses and width of streets in Sydney. There would be no more hovels on Crown leases. These were the first such regulations in Australia. He laid out what is still the central grid of Sydney, and in five settlements along the Hawkesbury River he ordered that the core sites should be reserved for the court, the schoolhouse and the church, and that all houses must have their plans filed with the district constable.³⁰

When he turned from rulebooks to real buildings, Macquarie faced more obstacles. The British Government wanted him to cut costs. That meant no “extravagances,” no structures except of a strictly military or penal kind—and even they should be humble. It refused to send him an architect. But Macquarie had emergency powers, and felt he could define “emergencies” broadly enough to stifle long-range criticism with faits accomplis. So he tricked his way around the British Government’s ban on building. His first effort was probably designed with his wife. It was a new hospital, a handsome three-block affair with wide verandas (which came, not from English Regency architecture, but from Macquarie’s observations in India). It was by far the largest structure ever built in the colony. He financed it with rum, as the New South Wales Government, 150 years later, would part-finance its colossally expensive Opera House with lotteries. He gave its building contractors a trading monopoly on 45,000 gallons of spirits, from which the government drew a duty of 3 shillings a gallon; the £6,750 this generated was to be kicked back to the contractors as their fee, off the books. These arrangements did not work out, and bitter accusations of graft and cheating flew in all directions, but the “Rum Hospital,” as it was inevitably nicknamed, got finished. Two of its three blocks survive today: jerry-built in parts, due to the greed of the contractors, but the first presentable Georgian public building in Australia.

It was followed by others. Lacking a free settler who was an architect, Macquarie found a convict of that profession: Francis Howard Greenway (1777–1837). The descendant of generations of West Country builders and stonemasons, Greenway was a trained architect—a pupil of Nash—but a poor businessman. Practicing in Bristol, he went bankrupt, forged a contract and received a death sentence which, as usual by then, was commuted to fourteen years’ transportation. When Macquarie found out about Greenway’s arrival in 1814, he grew cautiously interested. Given his modest talents and lack of savoir-faire in dealing with clients, Greenway might never have landed important commissions in England. But in Australia he was John Soane, he was Beau Nash—he might as well have been Gianlorenzo Bernini, for all the competition he had. Macquarie put him in charge of designing and building all government works, beginning in 1816.³¹

Over the next six years, Greenway turned out for Macquarie a series of buildings, uneven in quality, the best of which utterly transformed the architectural standards of the fledgling colony. The main ones were two convict barracks, the Female Factory in Parramatta (1819) and—his secular masterpiece—the Hyde Park Barracks for men in Sydney (1819), together with several churches, notably St. Matthew’s in Windsor (1817–20) and St. James’ in Sydney (1820–24). The Female Factory kept at least some women off the Parramatta streets, although it was never large enough. The Hyde Park Barracks—which, like the General Hospital, Macquarie began without permission from London—he believed was an unqualified success. It was designed to house all convicts working for the government in Sydney. Because the 800 convicts placed in it could no longer plead that they needed the income from their “own-time” work to pay for the lodgings the government had formerly not provided, moving them in there was a ticklish business: The Hyde Park Barracks had to provide all kinds of inducements, from extra rations to weekends off, in return for Macquarie’s wholesale appropriation of the convicts’ time. The extra surveillance it afforded seemed to affect them for the better, or so Macquarie thought. In 1820 he told Bathurst that “not a tenth part of the former Night Robberies and Burglaries [are] being now committed, since the Convicts have been lodged in the New Barracks.” It held 800 felons, rather less than a third of the convict population of Sydney.³²

Such projects demanded skilled labor from bricklayers, masons, tilers, blacksmiths, glaziers and joiners. These “mechanics,” the riffraff of the immense body of craft on which the architectural achievements of England had been raised, were always in short supply and rarely much good. The government picked them out as soon as they arrived. When a ship anchored, the superintendent of convicts made a roll of names and trades, skimming off the men whom the government wanted for public works. Since most arriving felons had already learned that a skilled man’s life was apt to be easier in private assignment than in government labor, this always produced a little ballet of lies on shipboard, with wheelwrights and coopers professing to be common ditch-diggers or hayseeds. From 1814 to 1820, the government took 1,587 (or 65 percent) of the 2,418 “mechanics” arriving in Australia, and 3,000 (or 32 percent) of the laborers—the peak year in its demand for the skilled being 1819, at the height of Macquarie’s building schemes, when it took 80 percent of the artisans. Naturally, this policy irked the free settlers who needed artisans themselves.³³

Besides skilled labor, there was an equally great need for unskilled. From 1814 to 1820, the government took over some 4,600 of the 7,200 convicts arriving in Australia, for it needed worker ants. In technological terms, Macquarie’s Australia was more backward than Cromwell’s England. There was as yet no steam power; draft animals were few; and there were no streams near Sydney reliable enough to turn watermills. So every hole was dug, every log sawn, every rock quarried and every ton of rubble moved by that least efficient of engines, the human body, toiling in gangs. Macquarie’s plans demanded roads.

For by 1813 the colony was beginning to feel crowded. Along the Hawkesbury River and on the rich flats of Parramatta, every inch of land had been leased and granted. Settlers had pushed southwest to Stonequarry (modern Picton and Bowral) and the poor dry belt of the Bargo Brush. But the great barrier lay to the west—the line of mountains that could be seen, low on the horizon, from Sydney. The Blue Mountains, as they were named after their color, were an ever-present proof of the “impenetrability,” the “hostility,” of the continent to whose rim the colonists clung. Nobody had got across them—not in twenty-five years. Even the Aborigines said they were impassable. Some convicts who tried to cross them, thinking China lay beyond, died of hunger in their immense labyrinth of sandstone, where bellbirds chimed and long filaments of water fell, wreathing, from distant cliffs.

Then in 1813 three prosperous settlers, Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and W. C. Wentworth, set out to look for a way over the divide. They took convict servants, dogs and horses; and after three weeks’ exhausting struggle they found themselves looking down on a golden vista which, like other explorers in America, they compared to Arcadia and the land of Canaan. From the summit of what is now Mount Blaxland they saw, rolling like the sea, “Enough grass to support the stock of this colony for thirty years.” There would never be a shortage of pasture again; but there had to be a permanent way to get to it. In 1815 Macquarie made a journey of inspection along their trail, bestowing names on its grander views: “The Prince Regent’s Glen,” “Black Heath,” “Pitt’s Amphitheatre.” To record the picturesque splendors of this gateway to Goshen, he even took an artist, John Lewin, with his party. Surveyors followed; and Macquarie, determined to have “a good practicable Cart Road made with the least practicable Delay” from Parramatta to the other side of the Blue Mountains, chose sixty convicts “who had been a Certain Time in the Colony and who were also considered well-behaved Men, and entitled . . . to some Indulgence.” He told them they would get conditional pardons for their “Arduous Labours” if they finished the road—126 miles of it—in six months. They did it and were set free. This meant cutting about 1,200 yards of road per day and building more than a dozen wooden bridges along the way from Emu Island to the Macquarie River—a feat that showed what prisoners could do if they had better incentives than the lash. There was only one major problem with this road: Parts of it, especially the descent of Mount York, were so steep that loaded bullock-carts had to go down with big logs hitched to them as brakes; and the ascent could only be made if the cart were dragged up in stages, by a chain run through iron ringbolts in the rock face harnessed to a second bullock team pulling downhill. The Western Road, as Macquarie pointed out to Bathurst (for whom its destination was diplomatically named), would have taken three years to finish by contracted free labor or the “Government stroke” of unmotivated prisoners, instead of six months.³⁴

It was also the first public work in Australia to be praised in verse. For Macquarie had appointed a convict poet-laureate: Michael Massey Robinson (1744–1826), a graduate of Oxford and former lawyer who had tried to blackmail a London ironmonger by threatening to publish a scurrilous verse about him, and was transported for life. It was his task, each year, to recite a birthday ode at Government House in Sydney. These first frail pipings of the formal Australian muse included a paean to the Western Road across “yon Blue Mountains, with tremendous brow,”

Behold, where Industry’s encourag’d hand

Hath chang’d the lurid Aspect of the Land;

With Verdure cloathed the solitary Hills,

And pour’d fresh Currents from the limpid Rills;

Has shed o’er darken’d Glades a social Light,

And BOUNDLESS REGIONS OPEN TO OUR SIGHT!³⁵

One can almost see Marquarie, stiff in his gold braid, nodding with approval to the march of his assigned iambics. For his vanity matched his energy. He loved, as the colony expanded, to name new places after himself, a harmless habit much satirized after (not before) he left the colony. “’Twas said of Greece two thousand years ago,” wrote another Scot, the Presbyterian minister John Dunmore Lang, who had arrived in Sydney in 1823, the year after Macquarie sailed,

That every stone i’ the land had got a name,

Of New South Wales too, men will say that too,

But every stone there seems to get the same.

“Macquarie” for a name is all the go;

The old Scotch Governor was fond of fame,

Macquarie Street, Place, Port, Fort, Town, Lake, River;

“Lachlan Macquarie, Esquire, Governor,” for ever!³⁶

Nevertheless, Macquarie’s commitment to public works rather than private assignment paid its dividends by giving the colony a civic armature. Its critics in London and New South Wales harped on how much it cost the Crown to have so many convicts working for the government, for during Macquarie’s term of office, 1810–1821, the colony cost England about £3 million, which seemed a great deal for a place that sent no goods back to England and functioned in a merely negative way, as a social oubliette.But in 1810 it took £100 a year to transport a man and maintain him “on the stores,” whereas by the time Macquarie’s public-works policy was fully under way—between 1816 and 1821—the cost was down to less than £30 a year.³⁷

The gross cost of the transportation system had certainly risen: £579,000 for 1810–12, £717,000 for 1816–18, £1,125,000 for 1819–21. This worried the British Government and disposed Lord Bathurst to listen to critics who believed that convicts should work only, or mainly, for private enterprise—and especially for free emigrant settlers, whose numbers had increased from about four hundred in 1810 to nearly two thousand men, women and children by 1820.³⁸

Such was the pressure that in 1819 Bathurst sent a commissioner of inquiry, John Thomas Bigge, to look into Macquarie’s administration. Bigge, a diligent, intensely snobbish Tory lawyer who thought convicts were scum and unhesitatingly sided with the emigrants against the small farmers and Emancipists, fell out with Macquarie and in with the Macarthurs, and his eventual report was a litany of extravagance—a political disaster for Macquarie.

And yet Macquarie’s policies were, if anything, frugal. What had driven the gross cost up was numbers—the flood of convicts that came after 1815 with the end of the Napoleonic Wars. England now had more crime and more ships to bear it away; and Macquarie, who had begged for more convicts, had not bargained for so many. The white population of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land almost doubled between 1812 and 1817, going from 12,471 to 20,379. Most of these were convicts; in 1818 there were so few free settlers—and the ones along the Hawkesbury River had been so battered by a disastrous flood in 1817—that hardly one convict in eight could be assigned. “In the meantime I have no alternative but to employ large Gangs of them on the Government Public Works,” Macquarie protested.³⁹

By 1821, his last year in office, Macquarie had a total of 4,001 convicts working for the government—more than twice the number (1,853) that would be doing government labor under his successor, Sir Thomas Brisbane, in 1825.⁴⁰ And he had cut down the treasury bill expenditure for each convict per year from £60 in 1810 to less than £15.

The most parsimonious Scot could hardly have done better, but the British Government counted grosses, not averages, and did not like Macquarie’s reputed kindness to convicts. Before Bigge sailed, Bathurst told him unequivocally that Australia must be “rendered an Object of real Terror” and that this must outweigh all questions of the economic or social growth of Australia as a colony.⁴¹ Since Macquarie’s policy was based on his belief that the social growth of Australia really mattered, and it could not grow unless some quilting of liberality softened the iron framework of its repressive laws, this idea of Australia as a theater of horror acted out for a distant audience was not to his moral taste. In the end, he was seen as too extravagant because his own government sent him more convicts than the colony could absorb—and too lenient because he, alone among the early governors of New South Wales, really thought about the rights of these prisoners.

iv

THE QUESTION of rights under the assignment system was, in fact, more delicate than it looked. The convicts were not slaves under the law, but British citizens whose enforced task, in Australia, was to work their way back to freedom through expiation. Certain rights were guaranteed them—to food, to shelter, to protection from summary punishment by masters. Others accrued to them by custom, such as the right to sell what one made or did on one’s “own time.” From the Crown’s point of view, all convicts were legally dead under civil law from their arrival in Australia to their emancipation. They could neither sue nor be sued, nor could they testify in court as witnesses. In the colony, these restrictions were simply overlooked—they had to be, since no society composed mainly of present or former convicts, most of whom had businesses to run, debts to recover and wrongs to right, could function otherwise. But the rights to a convict’s work were vested in the government, which owned his labor until his sentence was served or remitted.

This put the assigned servant in an odd relationship to his or her master. Government would only get between them to protect its own rights. The government strictly monitored a master’s treatment of his assigned servants because each master was its agent in the scheme of punishment. The assignment system was not just a way of using the labor of people whose crimes had already been expiated by transportation. Assigned labor was their punishment—hence, the government had the right to control its conditions and to step in when a master became too hard or too soft. The strictest emphasis on this was laid, in Van Diemen’s Land under the rule of Sir George Arthur, but it was the ground rule of the System everywhere in Australia.

The axiom that the settler, in accepting a convict servant, was acting on behalf of the government caused resentment. No settler, for instance, could take it on himself to punish a convict; for that, the felon had to be tried before a magistrate. When the settler was himself a magistrate he could not flog his own men; they had a right to their day in court. Likewise, if a convict felt ill-treated, he could complain to a magistrate. In this way, the government meant to protect its rights in its prisoners’ labor. But neither master nor servant was always willing to grasp that the rules were meant to safeguard the government’s interests before their own.

Although the government took the skilled workers for its own projects and gave the dross of the labor force to settlers, it was a common practice under early governing officials such as Grose, Paterson and Hunter to give favored insiders a share of the first pick. Maurice Margarot thought “only the greatest ruffians” were assigned to the ordinary settlers, for “it is not in the interest of officers that settlers should get forward.”⁴²

A wealthy and established landowner could usually expect to get the convicts he needed. One finds Robert Townson (1763–1827), a scholarly friend of Joseph Banks who had published works on botany and mineralogy before taking up land grants in New South Wales, writing in 1822 to ask the government for “three men from the first ships” for his model estate, Varro Ville, near Minto. He made a request for “Shepherds, Gardeners, & Ploughmen—But English or Scotchmen, having already an undue proportion of Irish. The last three were Irish of no use—one was a runaway Soldier Lad—& another a Dublin Grocer’s errand boy.”⁴³

The law could also be bent. New settlers were meant to get servants first, so they could get started on the land. The liberal Whig governor Richard Bourke (1831–37) wanted to make sure that convicts were assigned in proportion to the amount of land a master held. Unfortunately, the law did not care whether their land was freehold or leasehold, cleared or raw bush; hence the loophole, not closed until after 1835. A large farmer could issue dummy leases of land to his own dependents and get up to eight assigned servants on each lease, “whilst persons who were more scrupulous as to the means they employed could get none.” He could also pad his application by claiming that acres of bush were actually worked land that needed assigned labor.⁴⁴

The cure for these and other abuses lay in tighter bureaucratic control over assignment. Governor Darling set up a board to which all applications for servants had to be sent; he told its members to favor settlers with a good record and to turn down applications from men with a record of cruelty or excessive lenience. Unfortunately, much of the paperwork in processing applications for assigned servants was done by convict clerks, who rarely refused a bribe. Nevertheless the successive administrations of Darling and Bourke did much to make assignment more “objective.” But it could not guarantee the quality of a convict’s labor.

Throughout the life of the System, the average “dungaree settler” was likely to end up with an unskilled, resentful cuckoo of a convict who had been born and raised in a city and could not tell a hoe from a shovel. Only one convict in five had been an agricultural worker. But incompetents could neither be fired, like free workers, nor sent back to the government. This arrangement, Governor Richard Bourke remarked in 1832, was “for the most part very Unsatisfactory”:

The Convict generally does as little as he can. . . . Much of his time is passed on the road going to or returning from Hospital, or to a Justice to complain of his master’s treatment, or to answer the Master’s charges against him for negligence, drunkenness or insubordination. Many also are unsuited to labour of any sort.⁴⁵

By then, the cavalier habits of some settlers with their assigned convicts had already been causing some concern in England. A farmer saddled with an incompetent convict would swap him off with another settler or abandon him in town. The inconvenience and waste of time in haling a convict before a magistrate’s court, which might be three days’ journey from the farm, discouraged complaint through legal channels; so the incompetent assigned man would simply be dumped on the road or left in town, to beg or survive as best he could. The authorities had no choice but to put these outcasts in jail, on a skimpy allowance of bread and water, until they were either reassigned or put in a government work gang.⁴⁶

It was demoralizing for them and irksome for the government; but in New South Wales, at least, there seemed to be no way of stopping it. Ten years after Bigge described the problem in his report, it was still perplexing the Crown. By 1831, there were about 13,400 assigned servants scattered around New South Wales, and keeping track of them was becoming a clerical nightmare. So although convicts could not, of course, be legally sold by one master to another, Governor Bourke compromised: Now they could be reassigned without the cumbersome business of recalling them to Sydney, endorsing their papers and sending them out into the remote bush again. All one needed was a formal permission to transfer, which “indeed is Seldom refused . . . as it is not only a convenience . . . but it saves expense.”⁴⁷

Masters who were caught transferring servants without permission would be blacklisted from getting assigned men again. But neither Bourke nor his predecessors could get rid of the common assumption among landowners that, whatever the Crown might sayabout its ownership of convict labor, the fact was that convicts were slaves, and masters should be left to treat them as such. Farmers without servants believed they had a right to them. “Every man, who cannot obtain Land or Convict Servants as he wishes, thinks no doubt he has a right to complain of the Governor’s injustice,” wrote Governor Darling in 1831.⁴⁸

Nor were such feelings without legal support. Sir Francis Forbes, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, thought masters did have a right to the labor of their assigned servants. He based this on seventeenth-century American precedents. The settlers wanted to believe him, but the Crown refused, pointing out that in America the settler paid for the convict’s passage, which gave him this right—but not in Australia.

Even Forbes’s position looked mild compared to the one adopted, a few years later, by William Charles Wentworth, who had become a power in the colony (see Chapter 10) by agitating for the rights of Emancipists. In 1839 Wentworth actually proposed that assignment should be cancelled altogether and that convicts be sold outright to the highest bidder. Worse still, he wanted to institute group punishments of assigned convicts. If one man on a property committed a crime, all the other servants should be penalized by an automatic extension of their sentence unless they informed on him. This, Wentworth thought, would reduce the main inconvenience settlers had to put up with from their assigned men—the difficulty of getting them to “tell” on one another.⁴⁹

The convicts, on the other hand, believed they had rights, and that these arose from the fact that they worked. A man was a convict from sunrise to afternoon, but overtime was his to sell. The more skilled he was, the harder he could bargain with his master. In this way, some masters were gradually forced to make concessions, even within the unequal class relations of the colony.

What were these rights? Some were conventional: food, clothing, health care. The government enforced strict standards for the first two and was by no means indifferent to the third. By the 1830s, masters were obliged to pay a shilling a day, up to thirty days, toward the keep of an assigned man in hospital—hardly a lavish allowance, but the cause of much grumbling among settlers.⁵⁰

Before 1830, the master had to give each assigned man a wage of £10 a year, which paid for his clothes and bedding. In 1831 Governor Darling changed this by ruling that the master must issue the blankets, palliasses, and clothes directly, instead of wages. The workers’ diet was rough and monotonous. “They can make a meal from what would not be looked at in England,” wrote the convict John Broxup. In 1823 a settler in Van Diemen’s Land, Gilbert Robertson, was accused of feeding his men on dead magpies. But on most farms the servants ate what the masters ate.⁵¹

A master might give his convicts tea, sugar, milk or a bit of the rank, locally grown colonial tobacco as an “indulgence,” a little reward for good work. But custom might turn the master’s indulgence into the convict’s right or claim. This tended to happen especially after the 1820s, when Macquarie’s successors—Governors Brisbane and Darling—did away with wages and “own time” rights for assigned servants. They were replaced by an informal system of incentives and rewards, “indulgences” under the law but essential to the efficient ordering of a property. At the master’s discretion, men could be favored with easy jobs or punished with hard ones; they could be given work that would teach them trade skills, or sent to the most routine tasks of common labor. “Luxuries” like tea, sugar and soap, a half-pint of rum or dinner in the homestead kitchen, were prized as signs of status and regarded as forms of payment, replacing the wages and overtime that Brisbane and Darling cancelled. Some men certainly felt they had a right to tea, sugar and tobacco, and they vociferously told their masters so. When William Larissey, a convict at Port Macquarie in 1836, was told his sugar and tea were stopped, he seized his master by the neck. “Damn my bloody limbs and bones,” he shouted, “if I don’t have the worth of that tea and sugar out of you.” He paid for this outburst with twelve months in the iron gang.⁵²

Not all convicts were as defiant as this, but the bench books of the magistrates’ courts show many cases of men brought up for “insolent” behavior in disputes with their masters over rations and clothing. Sometimes—though much more rarely—a convict would bring his master to court. In 1833, in the district of Scone north of Sydney, there were 210 charges by masters or overseers against assigned convicts, and only six charges by convicts against masters—all of which, however, were upheld by the magistrates. They involved matters like rotten meat and insufficient shelter; one convict, Simon Lewis, assigned to an absentee station-owner, was found to have had no blanket or mattress from him in four years.⁵³

Very occasionally, convicts would band together to bargain in defense of what they perceived as their rights. But it was more common to “go slow” (after sizing the master up), either for the pleasure of inconveniencing him or in the hope of being transferred. Thus, finding he was in bond to “a hard hearted wreach” in Van Diemen’s Land, the convict George Taylor “began to only do that part of my work which I thought proper and soon aforded my Master an opertunity of takeing me to a magistrate, this was repeated two or three times [but] I found I could not get from him by this means.”⁵⁴

Although it was by no means impossible, or always difficult, for an assigned man, once before the magistrate, to justify his insolence or violence by proving his master had provoked him, not a few convicts took their legal rights at face value and brought their masters to court for ill-treatment. The usual complaints were stoppage of rations and physical violence. Thus, in 1829 the convict James Davis, assigned in New South Wales to Mr. David Hayes, “maketh Oath and saith . . . I swear I have had no Rations since Friday last excepting part of a Loaf; a Two-Pound Loaf was shared among five of us.” He was backed by four other convicts and won. In the same year, Thomas Argent, assigned to a Sydney butcher named William Merritt, was ordered to wash Merritt’s gig with warm water and then go to Parramatta to take delivery of some livestock. “Argent said he was weak and faint with hunger, having received nothing to eat since Friday, and that he would not go. . . . Mr. Merritt jumped up and gripped him by the breast with one hand, and struck him twice with the other, and dragged him out of the hut, and then took up a paling and threatened to beat his brains out.” Argent, terrified, said he would put himself in police custody, at which Merritt mounted his horse and tried to run him down.⁵⁵

Argent’s reward for getting Merritt into court was to be reassigned to another and better master. The government had no interest in assigning convicts to brutes, but some masters seemed unable to grasp that their servants were, in the ordinary sense, human. Such was the case with a Mrs. Ramus of Hamilton, Van Diemen’s Land, whose assigned man, George Willey, had in 1833 been sentenced to twenty-five lashes for insolence. The punishment was to be inflicted in the local jail, and Willey had words with Mrs. Ramus’s brother over his right to take rations there when he was flogged. At this point, the Hamilton magistrate reported,

Mrs. Ramus’ brother ordered his hands to be tied behind him with a piece of hide rope, a heavy bullock chain to be put around his waist which was attached to another chain and yoked to a pair of bullocks, he himself following on horseback with a loaded gun. In this state the man was brought to my house, a distance of 5 miles, when I immediately ordered him to be set at liberty.⁵⁶

An order followed, depriving Mrs. Ramus of all her assigned servants. Losing one’s convicts in this way was more of a risk in Van Diemen’s Land in the 1830s, because of Arthur’s evenhanded strictness. But a cruel settler in New South Wales could be stripped of his servants, especially if his social connections were poor.

The most vivid disagreements over the matter of rights were caused by the ticket-of-leave system. There were only three ways in which the law might release a man from bondage. The first, though the rarest, was an absolute pardon from the governor, which restored him to all rights including that of returning to England. The second was a conditional pardon, which gave the transported person citizenship within the colony but no right of return to England. The third was the ticket-of-leave. The convict who had been given a ticket-of-leave no longer had to work as an assigned man for a master. He was also free from the claims of forced government labor. He could spend the rest of his sentence working for himself, wherever he pleased, as long as he stayed within the colony. He was, as the phrase went, “on his own hands,” in contrast to the assigned man who was merely said to be “off the store.” The ticket lasted only a year and had to be renewed, and it could be revoked at any time. It was an effective way of fostering conformity and self-help while keeping the convict on a leash.

Ticket-of-leave men could be denounced by anyone, and thus they lived in some uncertainty. As an editorial in the Sydney Gazette put it,

A ticket-of-leave is the most tender kind of liberty that can be conceived; it is liberty in one sense, and non-liberty in another. . . . Under the present system, a ticket-of-leave exempts a man from the service of one master, while upon the other hand he becomes the slave of hundreds of others. From the Magistrate, down to the meanest constable in the district, a ticket-of-leave holder is continually kept the subject of apprehension.⁵⁷

One lost one’s ticket, Governor King proclaimed in 1804, by being idle, or insolent to “any officer, soldier or Constable,” or charging too much for out-of-hours work. But fragile as it was, the ticket-of-leave was craved by every convict in the colony and regarded by most of them as a natural right, a goal that one struggled toward and was entitled to. It played an immense role in the moral economy of colonial life. The worst thing a master could do to a convict servant was to keep him from getting his ticket-of-leave.

The less scrupulous settlers sometimes tried to do this. More convicts were always coming in one end of the System from the transports than were going out the other, as “ticket-of-leavers” or Emancipists. Thus, from January 1826 to December 1828, 6,032 male convicts arrived in Australia, while 4,140 men were added to the free population by the expiry of sentence or the granting of tickets-of-leave.⁵⁸

But this did not reduce the demand for assigned labor, because so many of the newly freed men became farmers themselves and needed working hands. “Since convict labour has become so exceedingly valuable as it now is,” Governor Gipps reported to the secretary for war and the colonies in 1838,

it is a matter of very frequent complaint that Masters prevent their Servants from getting Tickets of Leave from an unwillingness to lose their labour; and that they even cause (in some cases) their men to be punished, for the sake of retaining their services . . . [E]ach punishment which an assigned man receives, puts him back a year in getting his Ticket. I am willing to hope that the cases are but few.⁵⁹

They were probably more common than Gipps was “willing to hope,” and they had been going on for nearly forty years before the government cast an official eye on them. The prisoner Thomas Cook described the fate of one convict, assigned to “a very oppressive and miserable-hearted man” at White Rock in New South Wales during the early 1830s. Originally sentenced to 14 years’ transportation,

he had toiled hard and so fared for the space of 5 years and 9 months of that term, without a charge being preferred against him; but as he approached his probationary period of servitude (6 years) entitling him to a Ticket of Leave . . . his master, to benefit himself by the Blood and Sweat of a hard-toiling Slave, preferred a charge of insolence and threatening language against him.

That meant a magistrate’s sentence of 50 lashes, and a year’s delay on the ticket-of-leave. When the year was almost gone,

his cruel Master, unmoved by compassion or gratitude, again brought him before the Bench, and charged him again with disrespectful conduct upon which he was again sentenced 50 lashes. Thus was this pitiable object despairing of obtaining a moment’s liberty until the death of his master or the termination of his sentence. He was nearly stupid from hard toil and cruel treatment.⁶⁰

A master might goad an assigned man to insolence or violence, simply by battering him with insults. The Sydney Gazette in 1826 complained about “the all too prevalent custom”

of casting an unhappy fellow creature’s life and character into his teeth, and by this means leaving the man either passively to suffer under such a gross outrage . . . or to resent it by insubordinate language and conduct, whereby he becomes subject to . . . 50 lashes! for the magistrates . . . generally feel it imperative to lean on the side of power.⁶¹

District benches close to Sydney were apt to treat convicts fairly and well, partly because their magistrates were more in the public eye. The Stonequarry bench, run by a settler from New York named Henry Antill, who had married the daughter of an Emancipist and settled down to become the largest landowner in the modern district of Picton, had a name for decency, and Antill was by no means the only even-handed magistrate in New South Wales.

But the further outback a farm was, the more opportunity it held for tyranny and the more likelihood there was of collusion between settlers and magistrates. George Loveless, another Tolpuddle Martyr, believed from his own experiences that no one could “form a just impression of the System” unless he had been assigned in such remote places:

One magistrate will bring his men to be tried before a neighbour magistrate, and it is a frequent practice for the master to pay a private visit to the magistrate, and say he is going to bring such a man or men before him, and wishes that such or such particular punishment may be dealt out. On the arrival of the men . . . the magistrate enquires what they have to say in answer to this charge, and frequently, if they attempt to answer, he interrupts them, saying “I will not believe a word you have to say, and I shall sentence you to receive so many lashes.”⁶²

While it is true that the masters won most cases in which they brought their servants to court for disobedience or insolence, one cannot simply assume that this was due to collusions of class between masters and magistrates. As Hirst observed, the magistrates “were superior men both in wealth and education and were free from personal ties or obligations to the middling and small masters. How better to demonstrate their superior status than by carefully examining the complaint of a convict against a small farmer and perhaps reproaching the master or even taking his servant from him?”⁶³ The area of offense that magistrates always paid attention to was summary punishment by master of man, and here the claims of convicts often succeeded—partly because the physical evidence, the wounds and weals, spoke clearly in court. But a servant in the settled areas had a better chance of access to a magistrate’s court than one in the outback, where lodging a complaint might entail a walk of fifty miles or more—and require permission from the master to leave the property for several days.

We cannot know how many assigned men were unjustly denied their tickets-of-leave. Presumably the settlers minimized the number and the convicts exaggerated it. What is not in doubt is the gulf that separated the settler’s from the convict’s view of the ticket-of-leave—one calling it (as the government declared it to be) an “indulgence,” the other always claiming it as a right. Thomas Cook, for instance, wrote of servitude “entitling” the convict at White Rock to his ticket. The extreme opposite view on this was held by Chief Justice Francis Forbes, who thought no convict had a right to a ticket while on assigned service to a private settler. Luckily for the convicts, Forbes could not persuade the government of this.

Their belief in a right to a ticket did not mean the prisoners were deluded. Rights emerge by bargaining between the powerful and the relatively powerless; they are not simply “granted,” for if they were, there would be none. Rights are solidified claims, sanctioned by usage and expectation. When convicts spoke of wider rights than their simple, mechanical entitlement to food and shelter, they were speaking from their inherited expectations as laborers—that masters should behave with fairness and circumspection, and that the law should offer some formal protection to their own interests. In short, they expected the moral and legal economy of the traditional English labor market to apply in the continental prison that was Australia. And that economy did not exclude the common English practice by which free workers, adults as well as apprentices, were bonded to their masters and suffered severe penalties, ranging from fines to ostracism, if they broke away. In this respect, at least, assignment was not as totally foreign to English labor relations as one might assume.

Some were cruelly disappointed. “The extent to which tyranny was formerly carried on with regard to assigned servants throughout the Colony,” wrote one ex-convict, Charles Cozens, “is almost incredible.” But sometimes the accounts of the same convict establishment, seen through different eyes, contradict one another like black and white. The Abolitionist J. D. Lang, who was certainly no friend of the assignment system, praised the way Governor Darling’s private secretary, Colonel Henry Dumaresq (1792–1838) ran St. Heliers, his 13,000-acre estate near Muswellbrook in New South Wales: “one of the best regulated estates in the colony . . . rewards, not punishments . . . the men are sober, industrious and contented.” To a visiting Quaker named James Backhouse, St. Heliers also seemed a model of convict management, and the future explorer Edward J. Eyre, a man of unquestionable decency and candor, thought it “the best-ordered, best-managed station on the Hunter.” Yet in 1850, one of Lang’s co-Abolitionists, John Goodwin, protested that his praises were only true of “the time of the late Mr. Whiteman’s superintendence” of St. Heliers (after 1830) and that the previous superintendent, Mr. Scott, had been “a demon incarnate”:

He was in the habit of putting handcuffs, and leg-irons on them, and throwing them into a dungeon on that estate, where they remained generally for three days without either meat or drink. . . . [H]e did not trouble to take his men to court; but sentenced them for the most trivial offence, and just as his caprice dictated, to carry logs of wood on their shoulders, on his own verandah, and under his eye, for two to twelve hours; these logs weighed from 50 to 100 lbs. He never went out without a brace of loaded pistols and a belt-full of handcuffs. . . . Captain Dumaresque [sic], “that nice gentleman,” has to my own knowledge drawn as much blood from the flogged backs of his assigned men, as would make him to swim in human gore.⁶⁴

James Brine, one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs transported to Australia for trade-union activity in 1834, was assigned to a magistrate named Robert Scott at Glindon on the Hunter River. Scott set Brine to digging postholes, even though his bare feet were so cut and sore that he could not put them to the spade. Eventually Brine “got a piece of an iron hoop and wrapped it round my foot to tread upon,” but for six months (the regulation period between issues) Scott would give him no shoes, clothes or bedding. Stricken by a severe cold after spending seventeen days up to his chest in a creek, washing sheep, Brine begged for a blanket and got a homily instead.

“No,” said he, “I will give you nothing until you are due for it. What would your masters in England have had to cover them if you had not been sent here? I understand it was your intention to have murdered, burnt and destroyed every thing before you, and you are sent over here to be severely punished, and no mercy shall be shown you. If you ask me for any thing before the six months is expired, I will flog you as often as I like. . . . You d—d convict!—don’t you know that not even the hair on your head is your own?”⁶⁵

1. J. Eyre, who found it “a most revolting sight to see the scarred and bleeding backs of human beings—convicts tho’ they were,” was impressed by the docility with which accused servants would trek unguarded to the split-slab outback courthouse. It was “singular,” he wrote,

that men said to be the most worthless of their kind and the most reckless ruffians should thus quietly march a distance of 5, 10, 20 or even 60 miles, knowing that at the end of their journey there was a moral certainty of being severely flogged; yet the instances of their absconding or failing to appear at Court were comparatively rare. Some of the men would almost willingly undergo punishment for the sake of a few days’ wandering about in idleness and gossiping with the various persons they passed on the road.⁶⁶

Some masters began as liberals and ended as martinets. One such man was “the Laird of Shoalhaven,” a Scottish settler from Fife named Alexander Berry, who traversed almost the whole period of transportation, having arrived in Sydney in 1808 and died, aged 102 and worth 40,000 acres, in 1873. At first he was against flogging:

It is silly to object to any man because he is a rogue, when they all come here for their crimes. All I care about is having able-bodied men—for the rest, no matter if they have been born and bred in Hell. With quiet, peaceable and humane measures, I will make the most refractory see that it is in their interest to behave well. . . . [T]o turn in men for flogging because they behave ill is utterly childish.⁶⁷

“Childish,” of course, because it showed a dependence on higher authority—the unwieldy power of the Bench—and so made the master lose face before his servants. But two years later, Berry was calling for irons and cat-o’-nine-tails: “We have been teasing ourselves to death,” he wrote to his partner Edward Wollstonecraft, “in endeavouring to render ungrateful and irreclaimable profligates more comfortable than they have ever been in their lives.”⁶⁸

But a contented convict plainly worked better than a hungry, rebellious one. To that end, as John Macarthur’s son James sensibly told the Select Committee on Transportation in 1837, it was best “where a man behaves well, to make him forget, if possible, that he is a convict.” One of the first treatises on Australian farming (1826) advised settlers that “the belly is far more vulnerable and sensitive than the back.” Use firmness and circumspection, the carrot not the stick; stay away from magistrates, because constant appeals to the formal powers of higher authority will diminish your own. Set up wages and a scale of rewards which will seem “a very great boon” and whose withdrawal will be “much more effectual . . . than the lash of the flogger.” On one hand, do not get familiar with the convicts or give them the idea that their work is indispensable; on the other, a master must never forget “that they are men who, however degraded, still have the same feelings and passions as himself.” The right stance is balanced paternalism, the instinctive attitude of the English squire when dealing with his laborers. For that was how the English workingman expected his employer to behave; the code of the country gentleman underwrote the modest, customary rights of his workers. Kindness, firmness and distance—with these, boasted a new settler with ten assigned men on the Yass Plains in 1835, “as Burns says, ‘I labour them completely,’ and have them in hand, bless your heart, as tame as ‘pet foxes.’ . .  I never had occasion to give a single lash.”⁶⁹

Most “government men” in bush service were, if not content with their fate, realistic about it. They knew that rebelliousness, insolence or conspicuous foot-dragging would probably extend their sentences and delay their tickets-of-leave for years—and knew as well, from experience, how pervasive and efficient the “pass system” was in preventing long escapes. (Every convict, when off his master’s property for any time or for any reason, had to carry and show on demand a written pass that stated his name, where he had started from, where he was going and the precise number of days or even hours he was to be on the road.) So they behaved “admirably as a class,” Edward J. Eyre observed after he took up land near Queanbeyan on the Molonglo Plains near the present site of Canberra in 1834, and became “most excellent, careful, industrious, trustworthy servants.” Even the worst of them, though they might rob a passing visitor or a new assigned man, “would rarely plunder their own masters” and could be trusted anywhere:

I have constantly known two convicts sent down to Sydney quite by themselves, a distance of 200 miles in a dray full of wool drawn by oxen, and having, after depositing their wool at the merchants’, to bring back a load of . . . clothing, flour, tea, sugar, tobacco and other groceries—luxuries for the master, and even wines, beer and spirits, and yet tho’ this journey involved an absence of five or six weeks during which the men were tempted constantly by the presence of so much property and the facility of appropriating it, the instances were very rare in which any plundering took place or loss ensued.⁷⁰

And trust built reform. The posting of sanctioned rural relationships on the far soil of Australia mattered greatly to convicts and always evoked their gratitude. Everything else was strange—the bouncing animals, the upside-down stars, the resentful blacks and the nine agonizing claws of the cat-o’-nine-tails—but this was blessedly familiar. Besides, the man assigned to a decent master in the country districts in the 1830s was, as Eyre pointed out, “in a better position than half the honest laborers of England. No wonder then that convicts behaved well, and from being useful members of the community gained both the respect of others and learned to respect themselves.”

The feeling was sometimes reflected in convict songs, or folk songs about convictry. In one of the versions of “Van Diemen’s Land,” a ballad circulated in the late 1820s, the narrator is at first horrified to see

. . . my fellow sufferers,

I’m sure I can’t tell how,

Some chained to a harrow

And some unto a plough.

No shoes nor stockings had they on,

No hats had they to wear,

Leather breeches and linen drawers,

Their feet and heads were bare.

They drove about in two and two

Like horses in a team,

The driver he stood over them

With his malacca cane.

Such was the fate of the “government man.” But then:

As we marched into Hobart Town

Without no more delay

A gentleman farmer took me,

His game-keeper for to be:

I keep my occupation,

My master loves me well,

My joys are out of measure

I’m sure no tongue could tell.

Assigned convicts and their relatives often expressed their gratitude to the good master. Thomas Holden, the Bolton weaver transported for political protest, is assigned to a decent master, writes home about his good luck, and in 1814 hears from his parents, “We are led to believe that the man you are liveing with is a gentleman, we beg to say to him we are very grateful that he hath so far condescended to take you into his service.” His wife, who with other wives of radical weavers has unsuccessfully petitioned the Prince Regent to be allowed to join their men in Australia—“Let your situation in Life be prosperity or adversity it Woud give me great satisfaction to share the Toil with you, but wether it will Ever be our lot to meet at NS Wales or not I cannot tell”—reinforces his gratitude:

It gives us all the greatest pleasure to say [you have found] a friend . . . [W]e think it our Duty to say as he hath placed so much confidence in you we make not the least doubt but you will study to merit his Future Trust or Favors he may Chuse to bestow on you.⁷¹

This, from the point of view of authority, was an ideal penal relationship. But it depended on a steady market, as John Bigge pointed out: Only constant production would keep felons too busy and tired for sin and achieve “that stimulus to exertions that supersedes the necessity of coercion.” And if there was not the proper class distance between master and man, all was apt to be lost. Bigge frostily noted that Emancipist settlers did not like to have a servant punished:

This feeling is . . . attributable to a sympathy with that condition which was once their own, and is not corrected until they acquire property.⁷²

Many settlers who had been convicts did, in fact, spare the lash. Samuel Terry, the “Botany Bay Rothschild,” was said never to have had a man flogged; and Governor Bourke thought assigned men would rather work for a newly freed Emancipist: “A Convict . . . prefers their coarse fare to being better fed and Cloathed with a more opulent Master and less liberty.”⁷³ Colonial conservatives were doggedly opposed to this. Their views were mirrored in Bigge’s report, which argued that convicts should be assigned preferentially to “opulent” rural settlers. Giving them to small Emancipists, the poor white trash of New South Wales, was “very pernicious.”⁷⁴

Convicts who found benevolent masters far preferred their assigned life to the miseries they had known in England. When they could write home, they stressed their comforts, reassured their families and begged them not to fret. “When this you see, remember me, and banish all trouble away from thee,” runs a little jingle in a letter from William Vincent, convict at Parramatta, to his family in Sussex in 1829. “Some people thought they had put me in [a] great deal [of] trouble, which they would, some of them, be glad to be as well as me; and I hope you are, mother, for I live at the Governor’s table, along with the other servants.” Two years later he is made an overseer, the much-coveted “bludger’s job,” and he jubilantly reports that “I have not worked one day since I have been in the country, so I am not hurt with work.” But Vincent was not an assigned man. An experienced farmer, he had been grabbed for government service as soon as he landed, “for there is but a few in the country knows much about cultivation.” He even urged his brothers to emigrate: “If I came free in this country, I could get 90£ a year to look after land.”⁷⁵

The sense of opportunity was a common theme. “Dear brother,” wrote the rural protestor Peter Withers in 1833,

I hav got a very good place all the Bondeg i am under is to Answer My [Name] Every Sunday before I goes to church so you Mit not think that I am made a Slave of, for I am not, it is quite the Reverse of it. And i have got a good Master and Mistress i have got Plenty to eate and drink as good as ever a gentleman . . . so all the Punishement I have in this Country is the thoughts of leaving My frends My Wife and My Dear Dear Children . . . [T]ell Samuel never to get trannsported for i knows Very Well he will not Like to Lave his Mother 16 thousand miles behind him.⁷⁶

After this mild bit of child-scaring, the testimonials: “I think you would make your forting [fortune] in about 6 years, dear Brother,” Withers adds. “I should like to see you and your famly Com to this Country if you could get to com, for it Whould be Well for your Children after you are dead, for this is a very Plentiful Contrey, pervisions is very Cheap and Labour is dear, this is the Plesents [pleasantest] Country that ever I saw.” In the same way, Richard Dillingham, a ploughman from Flitwick in Bedfordshire who had been transported for life in 1831 for theft, is assigned to a colonial architect named David Lamb in Van Diemen’s Land and, after a few years, assures his parents that “I am now very comfortably situated . . . [A]s to my living I find it better than ever I expected thank God. . . . I am doing much better than many labouring men in England.”⁷⁷

One must read such praises in context: Vincent, Withers and Dillingham were all farm workers who had known the dreadful privations of the agricultural collapse whose nadir came in the 1830s, when England went closer to general agrarian revolt and “levelling” than it had been since the days of Wat Tyler. After such miseries, the cheap food and high wages in Australia must have seemed wonderful; in the words of such convicts, the idea of Australia as the paradise of a working man finds its first voice among workers. But the word about opportunities in Australia spread quite rapidly, and by 1830 the Privy Council archives contained many such petitions as this one, from Thomas Jones, a convict languishing on the York hulk:

Having made Frequent applications to leave the country . . . having served four years and upwards . . . my friends having deserted me and my character lost, I dread to think of my situation when I obtain my liberty as no one will employ me; I have no resource left. . . . [H]ave the kindness to send me by the first ship that goes to New South Wales, I doubt not that I shall redeem that character that I have lost.⁷⁸

Eight years before, Bigge had warned in his report that the shortness of sentences—for most, a “mere” seven years—combined with the ticket-of-leave system and the high labor market to disturb the penal framework. A seven-year sentence was “too short” for convict laborers; it gave them premature thoughts of becoming settlers and made them less cautious, obedient and respectful. Thus by 1820, convicts were becoming uppity, or so Bigge thought, and “the prospect afforded by transportation to New South Wales is more one of emigration than of punishment.”⁷⁹ This became a common criticism of the System in the 1830s. In 1833 the Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whately, a fervent abolitionist, wrote that Australian felons

are carried to a country whose climate is delightful, producing in abundance all the necessaries and most of the luxuries of life;—that they have a certainty of maintenance . . . are better fed, clothed and lodged, than (by honest means] they ever were before; (can get) all the luxuries they are most addicted to . . . are permitted, even before the expiration of their term, to become settlers on a fertile farm . . . [I]t certainly does not look like a very terrific punishment.⁸⁰

When Thomas Potter Macqueen, an English magistrate who was the absentee landlord of 10,000 acres in Australia granted him in 1823 by Governor Brisbane, echoed this by remarking that assigned convicts in New South Wales were better off than farmworkers in Bedfordshire, a pseudonymous Australian settler fiercely disputed it:

The work in this new country is of the most laborious description:—cutting down trees, the wood of which is of such hardness that English-made tools break like glass before the strokes of the woodman; making these trees into fires, and attending them, with the thermometer usually ranging in the middle of the day from 80 to 100 deg. for eight months in the year; grubbing up the stumps by the roots, the difficulty of which would appall an English woodman; splitting his hard wood into posts and rails, and erecting them into fences. . . . In what, then, does the superior condition of the convict consist? Is it in a slavery more profound than that of the West African negro?⁸¹

Farm work in Australia was always hard; and probably the toughest of all jobs, in terms of the psychic tolls it could exact on a man, was a shepherd’s. As merino cross-breeds became the basis of Australian prosperity, more and more assigned men were sent to a lonely life in the bush, tending sheep. They lived on the perimeter of remote properties; and even places near Bathurst or in the Hunter River Valley were still virgin bush in the 1830s, not much tamer than the “real” outback, 300 miles inland. A shepherd stood a high chance of being the first white person to bear the revenge of Aborigines who had been evicted from their hunting-grounds by the outward push of white settlement. When blacks could not mount a frontal attack on a station homestead, they could easily pick off a lone shepherd with their silent spears, especially since assigned men are not armed. Even if local Aborigines had no special grievance against the farmer, they loved mutton anyway and would kill to get it. The assigned shepherd therefore lived in constant fear of death.

His flock could be as few as 200 or as many as 3,000 sheep. The work sounds simple: All he had to do was drive the sheep out in search of pasture each day, keep an eye on strays, and bring them back at night. But he was rarely mounted and often had no dogs. Moreover, pasturage was not as common in New South Wales before 1850 as it is today. Millions of rolling acres were covered in box, a middle-sized eucalypt of no commercial value, whose thirsty roots pulled every drop of surface moisture out of the soil and prevented the growth of grass. The solution, which later farmers resorted to with excessive zeal, was ringbarking. This killed the box without using up extra labor in felling it and grubbing out the stumps. Grass then sprouted in abundance on these spectral landscapes of gesticulating, claw-white dead trees. But in the convict era, ringbarking was not much used, and the shepherd had to cover much more ground to find enough grass for his sheep. If he got lost, or if he lost some of the flock, he would have to stay out for days until he rounded them up again and struggled back to the out-station, although his master would only give him a day’s rations when he set out, to discourage him from abandoning the flock and bolting.

The loneliness of a shepherd’s life was increased by the medical need to keep flocks (and hence their keepers) away from one another. Besides dingoes, the terror of a pastoralist was a highly infectious ovine disease called the Scab which, as Eyre found from bitter experience, ruined the wool, checked breeding and was practically incurable:

A single act of neglect or inattention on the shepherd’s part might in a moment blast the prospects of his employer—and what more natural than that such acts should occur—the shepherd anxious to have a gossip would drive his flock as near to the boundaries of his run as possible—the shepherd of the infected flock would do the same, and while the two men were talking the two flocks would intermingle and the dreaded mischief be done.⁸²

It was not unknown for a resentful convict to avenge himself on his master by deliberately infecting his stock.

In mallee scrub, patches of which could extend for miles—there was one district shared between northern Victoria and southern New South Wales that still covered 10,000 square miles in the 1880s—sheep were bound to get lost. The tough bushes of Eucalyptus dumosa were too high for a man to see across, even from horseback. In such a labyrinth, with dingoes howling in the middle distance—mallee was known as “dingo scrub” because it sheltered the wild dog that shepherds most feared—the assigned man was likely to go “cranky,” as colonial slang termed the harmlessly mad. As stations got larger, all the grass near the homestead was needed for stock-horses and working bullocks. The shepherd had to mind the flocks on runs three, five or ten miles out; instead of coming back to the homestead each night, he would have to sleep out in the bush.

John Standfield, one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, described what this did in 1834 to his father, Thomas Standfield, who was in his fifties and had been assigned to a farmer named Nowlan near Maitland, some 150 miles from Sydney. Three weeks after being sent to this out-station, he was

a dreadful spectacle, covered in sores from head to foot, and as weak and helpless as a child. . . . [H]e pointed to the place where he slept, called a “watch-box.” After my father had been out in the bush from sunrise to sunset, he had then to retire for repose to the watch-box, 6 feet by 18 inches, with a small bed and one blanket, where he could lie and gaze upon the starry heavens, and where the wind blew in at one end and out of the other, with nothing to ward off the pitiless storm—such were the comforts of the watch-box. Besides this he had to walk four miles for his rations, which journeys he was compelled to perform by night.⁸³

The Tolpuddle men (and a few other “politicals” in Australia) seem to have had especially harsh treatment from their masters. But even at the best of times, life in the outback could have a hallucinatory strangeness for men fresh from England. One visitor to the Maitland area in the 1830s noted that convict quarters in the bush were like a cross between a zoo and an Irish cabin, with

a multitude of noisy parrots, intended for sale; pet kangaroos and opossums, and a variety of kangaroo dogs, greyhounds, and sheep-dogs; on the fire was a huge boiler filled with the flesh of a kangaroo, and close by were suspended the hind-quarters of another of these animals; in one corner was a large pan of milk; in another, a number of skins partially dried; while, a few feet from the ground, were the filthy bed-places or cribs of the people themselves.

Inside it all was fug and cockatoo-shit, dried sweat and blowflies and the stink of hides. Outside, the landscape could be apocalyptic, vast; it was like standing on the edge of one world and looking into another:

The extreme silence that prevails here almost exceeds what the imagination can conceive. . . . One would imagine that a residence in such a lone place would be liable to cause a change of some consequence in the minds and habits of any person; and it would be an interesting point to ascertain the effect on the convict stock-keepers, who, for weeks together, can have no opportunity of conversing with a white man, except their sole companion; for there are always two to a hut.

And it did affect them. It promoted the pair-bonding, the feeling of reliance on one’s “mate,” that would lie forever at the heart of masculine social behavior in Australia. Because there were no white women in the bush, it meant—as some authorities grudgingly acknowledged, by the end of the 1830s—that “mateship” found its expression in homosexuality. Most important, in the eyes of some observers, was the fact that life in the bush reformed the socially useless criminal by teaching him skills and giving him time to reflect, with the bonus of exposure to “sublime” landscape. Here was Wordsworth applied to penology—the nineteenth-century belief that Nature, as the unaltered fingerprint of its Creator, could serve as a moral text for the betterment of fallen man. The convict becomes a hermit, cleansing his soul in the desert:

This monotonous and solitary life has the effect of giving a new direction to the ideas of the moral patient, superior to any other which the most profound metaphysician could have invented. Solitude and idleness in a cell either subdue and subvert the mind entirely, by causing madness and suicide, or they generate a hardihood and a caution which enable the criminal to pursue his career with greater chances of profit; while the combination of pastoral occupation with solitude, offers the fairest chance of success, by weaning and forcing him from his ancient habits.

The future Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, while still at Oxford in 1794, had drawn much the same picture of the moral benefits of Australian wilderness on the repentant sinner in his Botany-Bay Eclogues:

Welcome ye wild plains

Unbroken by the plough, undelv’d by hand

Of patient rustic; where for lowing herds

And for the music of the bleating flocks,

Alone is heard the kangaroo’s sad note

Deepening in distance. Welcome ye rude climes,

The realm of Nature! for as yet unknown

The crimes and comforts of luxurious life,

Nature benignly gives to all enough,

Denies to all a superfluity . . .

On these wild shores Repentance’ saviour hand

Shall probe my secret soul, shall cleanse my wounds,

And fit the faithful penitent for Heaven.

The bassoon-like sound of the distant ‘roo, one feels, must have made the journey worthwhile.

Probably about one-fifth of the masters in Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales were genuinely interested in reforming their assigned servants, and two-fifths more “encouraged the convicts for their own interests.” The latter might treat their assigned servants like farm equipment, but at least they would teach them skills and keep them away from bad company. Out in the bush, there were no booze-shops, whores, or criminal cabals. There, convicts led “a healthy useful life of labor, well clothed and well fed, with the prospect of attaining their freedom,” Eyre wrote. “Transportation of convicts to a healthy country and the assignment of them to settlers . . . is . . . the true means of reforming the criminals themselves.”⁸⁴

Masters and government authorities generally believed that it was far harder for an assigned convict to “go straight” in a butcher’s shop or wearing servant’s livery in Sydney. The city was the condenser of vice; in the bush, there were more routines and less company, and the master’s life shared more of the hardships of the servant’s than in town. In Sydney or Hobart, the bon bourgeois’ need to demarcate his life from the felon’s led to exaggerated rituals of class superiority, which promoted the feeling that convicts could not be reformed at all. But the issue of class loomed large in penal Australia—a society traversed by confusingly rapid movements of individual status, where tides of men and women were constantly flowing from servitude into citizenhood and responsibility, from bitter poverty to new-found wealth. By the 1830s, Australia was as class-obsessed a society as any in the world.