11
i
IN CONVICT LORE, Van Diemen’s Land always had the worst reputation for severity. Its name induced a frisson that later became integral to Australian culture, and earlier ballads refer to it with a kind of passive dread lacking in the more defiant convict-songs of New South Wales. It was the very quintessence of punishment:
Come all you gallant poachers that ramble void of care,
While walking out one moonlit night with gun and dog and snare,
With hares and lofty pheasants in your pocket and your hand,
Not thinking of your last career upon Van Diemen’s Land.
It’s poor Tom Brown from Nottingham, Jack Williams and poor Joe,
They were three daring poachers, boys, the country well did know;
At night they were trepanned by the keepers hid in sand—
For fourteen years transported, boys, upon Van Diemen’s Land.
The very day we landed upon the fatal shore,
The planters they stood round us full twenty score or more;
They ranked us up like horses and sold us out of hand,
They roped us to the plough, brave boys, to plough Van Diemen’s Land.
The cottage that we lived in was built of sods and clay,
And rotten straw for bed, and we dare not say nay,
Our cots were fenced with fire, to slumber when we can,
To drive away wolves and tigers come by Van Diemen’s Land.
It’s oft-times when I slumber I have a pleasant dream:
With my pretty girl I’ve been roving down by a sparkling stream;
In England I’ve been roving with her at my command,
But I wake broken-hearted upon Van Diemen’s Land.
Come all you gallant poachers, give hearing to my song:
I give you all my good advice, I’ll not detain you long:
O lay aside your dogs and snares, to you I must speak plain,
For if you knew our miseries you’d never poach again.
The reputation of Van Diemen’s Land as the convicts’ hell was gradually acquired. At first the place seemed equally miserable for bond and free, in the way that any new Australian settlement did: coarse, dangerous, and plagued by shortages. Its reputation for severity began modestly with Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Davey (1758–1823), who ran Van Diemen’s Land from 1813 to 1816.
Davey was a Devon man, a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Marines, who, a quarter-century before, had sailed to Botany Bay as an eager young first lieutenant on the First Fleet. By the end of 1792, he was back in England; but the colonial bug had bitten Davey, and by 1810, when he learned of the death in Hobart Town of his old marine comrade David Collins, he thought the antipodes might offer a way of advancement. Davey got Lord Harrowby, a liberal Tory cabinet member who came from the same Devon village as himself, to lobby for his appointment as lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land. It was confirmed, and he arrived in Sydney in 1812 with John Beaumont, the son of his patron, in tow as his secretary (but without his luggage, which had gone on another ship and been captured by an American privateer).
Administratively, Van Diemen’s Land was an appendage of New South Wales, not a separate colony; much depended on good relations between Davey and his governor, Lachlan Macquarie. The two men hated one another on sight. Davey thought Macquarie a Scottish prig; and Macquarie considered his new lieutenant-governor a wastrel and a drunk, who manifested “an extraordinary degree of frivolity and low buffoonery in his Manners.”
So he did. Davey marked his arrival in Hobart Town in February 1813 by lurching to the ship’s gangway, casting an owlish look at his new domain and emptying a bottle of port over his wife’s hat. He then took off his coat, remarking that the place was as hot as Hades, and marched uphill to Government House in his shirtsleeves. Nicknamed “Mad Tom” by the settlers, he would later make it his custom to broach a keg of rum outside Government House on royal birthdays and ladle it out to the passersby.1
In the past, Davey was said to have tampered with his regimental payroll. Macquarie was given explicit orders from London that Davey could not have a free hand with public money, and he set out with gusto to cramp his lieutenant-governor’s style. Davey was not even allowed to draw treasury bills, construct buildings or make contracts for shipping without Macquarie’s approval, which, given the distance between Hobart and Sydney, would take months to get. Consequently, Macquarie was furious when Davey, in his zeal to suppress bushranging—which seemed ready to take over Van Diemen’s Land by 1814—proclaimed martial law throughout the island without consulting him. Davey, for his part, was sure that Macquarie had encumbered him with regulations out of spite; that he did not understand the problems of Van Diemen’s Land (as his ill-worded offer of amnesty to bushrangers in May 1814, unintentionally giving them carte blanche to commit any crime short of murder until the end of the year, indeed suggested); that he was hamstringing the island’s economy by buying wheat from India instead of Van Diemen’s Land; and that he used the island as a dump for hundreds of Sydney convicts who were too turbulent, lazy or brutish to be useful in New South Wales.
There was truth in all these grievances, but Macquarie went on papering Downing Street with reports denouncing Davey until, in 1816, “Mad Tom” was relieved of his lieutenant-governorship and put out to pasture as a farmer, at which he failed. He left behind him, as much through Macquarie’s mistakes as his own, a sub-colony with a growing reputation for unmanageability and violence, where bushranging had become so flagrant as to border on a general convict uprising. However, the administrative chaos, the lack of records and the prevalence of embezzlement in Hobart were of Davey’s own making.
It fell to the next lieutenant-governor, William Sorell (1775–1848), to repair the damage. He summed up the state of the island in a pessimistic memo in which he declared that it held “a larger portion, than perhaps ever fell to the same number in any Country, of the most depraved and unprincipled people in the Universe,” and was dragged down by
its long disordered state from a Banditti which has subsisted for years, with connexions ramified throughout the Country; the retransportation of the worst Convicts from Sydney; the great influx of Convicts to a Colony of such limited institutions, and their diffusion all over the Island; the difficulty attending the punishment of serious Offences, and . . . the want of a court of Criminal Judicature; and the Insufficiency of the Lower Police, in which (from the difficulty of obtaining with the present rate of payment the service of respectable people) Convicts are unavoidably too largely employed.2
Sorell was a far better man than Davey, with no weakness for the bottle. He too was a soldier, and had served with the 31st Regiment since 1790. In 1807, he was made deputy adjutant-general of the British forces at the Cape of Good Hope, which gave him some previous administrative experience. Skillful, tactful and patient, but with a steel backbone, he seemed an ideal choice to run a fractious place like Van Diemen’s Land, with its bloody-minded population and long delays in orders. His only flaw, which Macquarie reluctantly overlooked, was a taste for fornication; he had abandoned his wife and seven children and had taken up while at the Cape with a Mrs. Kent, the wife of a brother officer, who bore him several more offspring and, to the scandal of many, was installed in Government House as the lieutenant-governor’s lady.3
Sorell broke Michael Howe’s gang and hanged most of its members, thus stemming the tide of banditry that seemed set to sluice all law-abiding people off the island. With troops and police, he made the rich farmland of the upper Derwent and the Clyde at least partially safe for settlers. He systematized land grants and cleaned up the Augean stables of government bookkeeping Davey had left. He tried, but failed, to regulate the chaotic slippages of debased currency. He built convict barracks and laid the foundations of the “system of perpetual reference and control” over convicts that would become the bureaucratic masterpiece of his successor, George Arthur. Under his rule, the free population of Van Diemen’s Land (including Emancipists) rose from 2,546 in 1817 to 6,525 in 1824; the total population, from 3,114 to 12,464. This meant an enormous proportional increase in the convict population. At the start of Sorell’s regime, convicts made up not quite 18 percent of the white populace of Van Diemen’s Land; by 1822, the figure was 58 percent. New means of terror had to be devised to keep them docile, and Sorell came up with an effective one. In 1821 he founded a small penal settlement at Macquarie Harbor, as a “Place of Ultra Banishment and Punishment” for convicts who had committed second crimes in the colony and appeared to be turning into bushrangers. For ten years, this would be the worst spot in the English-speaking world.
ii
MACQUARIE HARBOR lies at latitude 42° 14’ S., longitude 145° 10’ E., on the west coast of Tasmania. As you approach it, sea and land curve away to port in a dazzle of white light, diffused through the haze of the incessantly beating ocean. All is sandbank and shallow; the beach that stretches to the northern horizon is dotted with wreckage, the impartial boneyard of ships and whales. No one has ever lived there or ever will. To starboard, there is a sharp jumble of rocks.
To enter the harbor, you must steer between this headland and another rock, Entrance Island, that marks the southern tip of the sandbars. There is no more than fifty yards between them, and at full tidal flow, the neck of water has a glossy, swollen look, ominous to seamen. Macquarie Harbor is one of the few large bodies of tidal water in the world (covering some 150 square miles), with a bottleneck entrance that faces west. Moreover, it looks directly into the Roaring Forties; the prevailing winds are northwesterly, and the waves of the Southern Ocean have the entire circumference of the world in which to build their energy before they crash on this pitiless coast. And so, when tide sets against wind and millions of tons of water a minute come boiling through the entrance, frightful seas rise. Worse, there is a sandbar dead across the entrance, with only eleven feet of water over it at spring tide. For these and other reasons, the place is called Hell’s Gates. It was the first thing that Irish and English convicts saw when their transport ship sailed in, a hundred and sixty years ago.
Sorell made no bones about the purpose of Macquarie Harbor. He commissioned its first commandant, Lieutenant John Cuthbertson of the 40th Regiment, with powers as magistrate and justice of the peace, so that he could hear and determine all charges against convicts and punish them with solitary confinement up to 14 days and floggings not in excess of 100 lashes. The place, he wrote, was for “the most disorderly and irreclaimable convicts,” and the system must be “strict and uniform.” “You will consider,” he wrote in his standing orders,
that the constant, active, unremitting employment of every individual in very hard labour is the grand and main design of your settlement. They must dread the very idea of being sent there. . . . You must find work and labour, even if it consists in opening cavities and filling them up again. . . . Prisoners upon trial declared that they would rather suffer death than be sent back to Macquarie Harbour. It is the feeling I am most anxious to be kept alive.4
To achieve this “grand and main design,” the Macquarie Harbor convicts would be loaded at Hobart into ships without bunks or hammocks; they had to sprawl as best they could on the stone ballast in the hold:
If they had a blanket it was all very well; but I think . . . out the 35 men they mustered 4 blankets. I recollect on one occasion . . . there was one prisoner who had neither jacket nor trowsers; the commanding officer gave him a bit of canvas, and I have frequently, when at Macquarie Harbour, seen men, 30 or 40 in that state, who have been on board the vessel for five or six weeks.5
Those weeks were spent at sea, beating north to Macquarie Harbor against the prevailing winds. Once off Hell’s Gates, stuck in a northwesterly, it could be days before a ship could get in. The Quaker missionary James Backhouse went there in 1832 and described the midwinter passage through the Gates. His ship had to wait close-reefed in a storm outside the sandbar while the semaphore on Entrance Island waggled its message, through relay signals, to the distant settlement. At last the harbor pilot appeared in a six-oared boat rowed by convicts, and when he came aboard
he commanded the women and children to go below . . . and advised me to go below too. I replied, that if we were lost I should like to see the last of it, for the sight was awfully grand. . . . The pilot went to the bows, and nothing was now to be heard through the roar of the wind and the waves, but his voice calling to the helmsman, the helmsman’s answer, and the voices of the men in the chains, counting off the fathoms.
As the vessel bore in toward the sandbar, albatrosses circled her; then the bar itself was seen, a pale blurred whaleback in the dark water.
The fathoms decreased, and the men counted off the feet, of which drew 7½, and there were but 7 in the hollow of the sea, until they called out 11 feet. At this moment a huge billow carried us forward on its raginghead into deep water. The pilot’s countenance relaxed; he looked like a man reprieved from the gallows, and coming aft, shook hands with each individual, congratulating them on a safe arrival in Macquarie Harbor.6
Past the entrance, past another rust-streaked rock named Bonnet Island, the harbor opens to view. It is so long that its far end is lost in the grayness. The water is tobacco-brown with a urinous froth, dyed by the peat and bark washed into it by Australia’s last wild river, the Gordon, which flows into the eastern end of the harbor. The sky is gray, the headlands gray, receding one behind the other like flat paper cut-outs. It is an utterly primordial landscape of unceasing interchange, shafts of pallid light reaching down from the low sky, scarves of mist streaming up from impenetrable valleys, water sifting forever down and fuming perpetually back. Macquarie Harbor is the wettest place in Australia, receiving 80 inches of rain a year.
The settlement was twenty miles back from the harbor entrance. One sailed to it past ironic names: Liberty Point, Liberty Bay, the Butt of Liberty. As their boat moved slowly to its anchorage—there was no hurry now, for prison time had superseded the time of the real world—the convicts must have begun to realize their final imprisonment in great space. Then coastal scrub, dreadful in its monotony, was so thick that a cat could hardly get ashore; the iron-laden rocks would tear the soles off your feet. Beyond them the hills rose, tier on tier of them, dominated by the 4,700-foot peak of Frenchman’s Cap—named, in irony, after the Phrygian headgear that had symbolized liberty, equality and brotherhood to the French a generation before. Below its smooth half-dome of basalt, veiled most of the year by clouds, the trees began.
The logging of these trees was the economic purpose of the settlement, and before the convicts arrived no man had ever touched them. The most prized kind was the Huon pine, Decydium cupressinum, which grew in great stands along the Gordon River. They attained a height of 70 feet and a circumference of 15 feet, and some of them had been saplings when Augustus Caesar was a child. Huon pine was the best ships’ timber on earth—springy, close-grained, easy to work, and so rot-proof that there are still Huon trunks felled by convicts in the 1820s and bearing their ax-marks lying intact along the shores of Macquarie Harbor today. In one year, 2,869 of these trunks were felled, sawn up and loaded for transport to Hobart.7 There were other valuable trees as well: light-wood (Acacia melanocylon), a lovely semi-hard timber that worked like walnut and had the grain and figure of Spanish mahogany, much prized by colonial shipwrights; celery-top pine (Podocarpus asplemfolius), good for masts and spars; and myrtle (Betula antarctica), whose wood resembled beech and was used by wheelwrights.
The prisoners were quartered on an island in the middle of the harbor, known as Sarah Island (now Settlement Island). Today the trees have reclaimed it, and the pink underfired bricks of its walls have all but dissolved back into their original clay; here and there one can make out the plan of a cell or a passage, and fragments of carved lintel repose like fragments of a botched, weak culture among the embrangling thickets. In the 1820s, however, the island was bare of forest, covered with buildings, fenced with sawn paling fences and protected against the northeast gales by tall lath windbreaks. It had sawpits and shipbuilding yards, a stone penitentiary, a bakehouse and a tannery, and trim, cold barracks. Of all the sites that could have been chosen for a settlement at Macquarie Harbor, this was the most windswept and barren; even the water and firewood had to come by boat from the mainland. But it was also the most secure.
At 6 a.m., the convicts were herded into boats and ferried to the mainland to cut timber. The settlement had no draft animals, because horses and bullocks rarely survived the voyage from Hobart and, in any case, there was not enough grass there to feed them. So the ponderous trunks, some weighing twelve tons, had to be hauled down a crude corduroy slipway of logs, known as a “pine-road,” laid on the forest floor. At the tideline, the logs—sometimes a hundred at a time—were chained together in rafts and towed behind whaleboats across the harbor to the sawpits. When they got the raft back to Sarah Island, the worst part of the prisoners’ work began: grappling the logs ashore with handspikes, struggling for hours up to their waists in icy water.
A small minority of luckier prisoners was chosen to build boats on the Sarah Island slips under the eye of Mr. Hoy, the master shipwright. Over the eleven years of its existence, the Macquarie Harbor settlement turned out a surprising number of vessels, all made from local timber. Hoy alone was responsible for the 200-ton bark William IV, four brigs of 130 tons each, three 50-ton cutters, five 25-ton schooners, twenty-two launches of 5 to 10 tons, and forty-six small craft of various types.
The convict’s daily ration was 1 pound of meat, 1¼ pounds of bread, 4 ounces of oatmeal or hominy, and salt. The meat was brine-cured pork or beef, two or three years old; Surgeon Barnes noted that it often had to be destroyed “as being too bad for the convicts to consume,” and that in his own eighteen months at Macquarie Harbor he himself had eaten fresh meat no more than six times.8
The officers would vary their diet by shooting kangaroos. The hunt “relieved the dreariness and monotony of a Station and Duty, which must otherwise in numerous instances have originated discontent and probably insubordination.” They also ate wombats, which they roasted like piglets (“a most delicious dish,” one visitor wrote) and the echidnas, or spiny anteaters, which with a stuffing of sage and onion were vaguely reminiscent—if one closed one’s eyes—of roast goose.9 Fish could not live in Macquarie Harbor; the peat washed down by the Gordon River poisoned them. The river had big eels in it, and a giant freshwater crayfish (Astacopsis gouldii, named after the convict artist William Buelow Gould, who was the first to draw and describe one), and mud crabs with fifteen-inch claws.
The convicts, of course, never got fresh meat, let alone the other exotica of Macquarie Harbor; nor did they get greens. Sorell urged Cuthbertson to grow as many vegetables as possible “as the sure mode of preventing scurvy,” but the incessant rain defeated most efforts at gardening in the mean, gravelly soil of the settlement. Hence scurvy was endemic there. It abated somewhat toward the middle of 1822, when lime juice and potatoes arrived from Hobart, but by January 1823 “it was again increasing rapidly, and in short there were very few who had not more or less of the disease.”10
By ferrying topsoil and humus across to Sarah Island, which had little good earth, convicts did manage to grow vegetables “of a quality and size which would not have disgraced the stalls of Covent Garden,” but these small crops were all reserved for the officers and the civil establishment. Phillip Island, about four miles down the harbor from the settlement, had better soil and potatoes were grown there—about forty tons a year, which were not issued to the prisoners either.11 They could have as much water as they wanted, Surgeon Barnes added with no conscious effort at irony; but “other sources of comfort or luxury could not be provided, as it was an insulated situation.”12
Such was light punishment, routine at Macquarie Harbor. If a convict was balky or insolent, he would be deprived of meat and forced to perform the same work on a protein-free diet. That was the second grade of punishment, and the third was to be ironed with clumsy leg-fetters, weighing 12, 18 or up to 45 pounds, riveted round his ankles and linked by a chain. An ironed man was issued leather gaiters to keep the basils, or rings, from wearing through his flesh. Before long, however, the wet chafing of the iron and the stiff hide started ulcers and scraped their ankles down to the bone.
By far the worst work was driving piles, under water and in chains, for the slipways. If that did not break a man down, he could be left overnight on tiny Grummet Island, half a mile off Sarah Island. According to a convict named Davies (his given name is lost) who spent several years at Macquarie Harbor, it was
a perpendicular Rock Fifty Feet above the levil of the Sea about 40 yards long and 8 wide—a rude stairs in the cliffs is the only road to a truly Wretched Barracks Built with Boards and Shingles (the timber quite green) into which 79 men were often confined in so crowded a state as to be scarcely able to lay down on their sides—to lay on their backs was out of the Question.13
To sleep on this rock, in Surgeon Barnes’s view, was “very severe indeed, although it was considered a minor punishment.” No convict could land on Grummet without being soaked, so he had to sleep either naked or in wet clothes, without fire or blankets.
Half-starved, chilled to the bone, forced to labor twelve hours a day in winter and sixteen in summer, sleeping on a wet rock under the driving rainsqualls of the Southern Ocean, aching with rheumatism and stinking from dysentery, afflicted by saltwater boils and scurvy, some convicts nevertheless remained defiant.14 Hence flogging was a daily event, and Davies noted down the sentences handed out in his time by Cuthbertson, “the most Inhuman Tyrant the world ever produced I think, since the reign of Nero. . . . Oppression and Tyranny was his motto, he had neither Justice nor compassion for the naked starved & wretched, Humanity was a virtue he did not acknowledge.” Neglect of work got 25 lashes, insolence 25. Losing an item from one’s “slops”—the cotton duck government-issue work clothes—meant 50 lashes and three months in irons, even if the garment had been stolen by another prisoner. Tools, in that remote settlement, were irreplaceable, and so 50 lashes and three months’ irons were meted out to anyone who broke “a Saw, Axe, Spade, Oar or any other tool no matter how, as [Cuthbertson] did not admit Accidents, he would say it was Carelessness.” For robbing the stores, or attempting to escape, or striking an overseer, a convict got 100 lashes and six months in irons. Davies’s manuscript gives a vivid picture of the daily blood-ritual:
The Cats and the way they were made and used were the most Dreadful things that can be thought of. They had 9 tails or rather thongs, each four feet long, just 3 times the thickness of the Hobart Town cats. Consequently it took 3 pair [of regulation cat-’o-nine-tails] to make one at this settlement. . . . [E]ach tail had on it seven Overhand Knots and was whipped, some with wire ends some with waxed ends. It was left to the decision of the Commandant which should be used.
The place of punishment was a low point almost levil with the sea, and just above high water mark was a planked Gangway 100 yards long. By the side of it in the center stands the Triangles to which a man is tied with his side towards the platform on which the Commandant and the Doctor walked so that they could see the man’s face and back alternately.
It was their costome to walk 100 yards between each lash; consequently those who received 100 lashes were tied up from one Hour to One Hour and a Quarter—and the moment it was over unless it were at the Meal Hours or at Nights he was immediately sent to work, his back like Bullock’s Liver and most likely his shoes full of Blood, and not permitted to go to the Hospital until next morning when his back would be washed by the Doctor’s Mate and a little Hog’s Lard spread on with a piece of Tow, and so off to work . . . and it often happened that the same man would be flogged the following day for Neglect of Work.15
On an average, over the five years 1822 to 1826, there were 245 prisoners at Macquarie Harbor. Of these, seven men in ten were flogged for various offenses, mainly “rebelliousness,” “insolence” or “refusal to work.” In that period the scourgers inflicted a total of 33,723 lashes—6,744 per year, meaning a little over 40 per man, each stroke meticulously noted in the commandant’s ledger.
Convicts distrusted one another, because the system was astute enough to use convicts as guards. All the constables at Macquarie Harbor were convicts, pressed into service by the military commandant. So were the floggers, the chief constable and the chain-gang overseers. The result was “the most tyrannical system that can be imagined.” If a convict constable failed to report some insubordination, word of his cover-up would usually get back to the military command and he would be flogged. If he did report it, and the disobedient convict was flogged, the other prisoners would hate him all the more. The worst thing the military could do to a convict constable, therefore, was to strip him of his rank and throw him back unprotected, among the prisoners. To survive at all, the constables had to ride an ascending spiral of vigilance and brutality; and the taste of arbitrary power was an elixir to men who had lost every other source of self-esteem:
There was a man of the name of Anderson at Macquarie Harbour, and that individual seemed to delight in seeing his fellow-convicts punished, and I believe scarcely a day passed over without four or five, and in some cases 16 or 17 individuals, being flogged on the report of that man. . . . Any man that he had a spite against, he would go before the commanding officer and swear that he had been idle; of course the man . . . would receive a flogging.16
The officers at Macquarie Harbor tended to be mediocre and harassed men whose skills, in the Army’s view, deserved no better reward; nobody who could get a better post wanted this one, and so “it was a most difficult matter to select individuals from a regiment to fill such a post.”17 So they tended to run the settlement by the book, and endless abuses were possible within the formal chain of command. Yet the more capricious the convict-overseer system was, the better it “worked,” since it demoralized the convicts as a group and made them weaker.
The jailers found other means to atomize the convicts, “to divide them as much as we could” and so frustrate their obsessive conspiracies to escape:
It is only the keeping their minds and their bodies constantly exercised that will prevent the commission of crimes. We invariably found, if the convicts were allowed to be idle, that there was always some new plan, either an attempt to make an escape or a personal injury to the other convicts in agitation; it was not in apportioning their work so much as it was in distributing them in various gangs, so that a man who was in one gang today should not be in the same gang tomorrow.18
There was reason to watch the refractory, because a convict would occasionally incite his mates to defiance and try to call a strike. In one twenty-man logging gang in 1825, Commandant James Butler reported to Arthur, an Irishman named William Pearse “stepped out and urged the others not to labour any more—that the Commandant would not flog but merely confine them, which they could well bear, tho’ they could not stand flogging—and called the Constables a damned set of villains.” Butler gave him 25 lashes.19
Prisoners would go to extreme lengths to get away from Macquarie Harbor, even for a little while. For example, two men would arrange for one to gash the other with an ax or a hoe; the victim would then swear out a charge and other convicts would step forward as witnesses. Since there was no court at Macquarie Harbor, they would all have to be shipped back to Hobart for trial. In court, their testimony would become vague and contradictory, and in the fog of lies the case would have to be dismissed. Prisoners detained on capital charges, waiting for the ship back to Hobart, could not by law be flogged or otherwise punished for a lesser offense until they had been tried for the hanging crime; hence “they become turbulent and insolent, cut their irons and injure the Gaol walls, besides setting an extremely bad example in a Station like this.”20
If a man was so fortunate as to be sent back to Hobart as a witness in a capital crime, he had a good chance of never returning to Macquarie Harbor. The strict omertà among convicts there virtually ensured that he would be beaten up or killed for ratting on a mate. In 1827 nine prisoners were charged with the murder of a particularly hated convict constable, George Rex. Down they went to Hobart, where the attorney-general’s case against them failed on a technicality. The five convict prosecution witnesses at once begged Lieutenant-Governor Arthur to be transferred to other settlements. “Our circumstances is at present very Critical and not safe, agoing to Macquarie Harbour again—there are such Characters there that would do us a great injury if not Terminate our Existence, as we was sent up to prosecute those men for Murder.” Three of them, “through the intercession of friends” who knew Arthur, were transferred to other penal stations; the other two went back to Macquarie Harbor, where they were indeed killed.21
Other prisoners would simply murder an overseer or a prisoner so that they could be hanged in Hobart. T. J. Lemprière, who worked for a time as storekeeper in the commissariat at Macquarie Harbor, described how one such man, by the name of Trennam, had reasoned this out. Trennam stabbed a fellow prisoner on Grummet Island and was in jail awaiting transfer to Hobart and the gallows. Why, the chaplain asked, had he done it? Because he was “tired of his life,” Trennam answered, and hoped to hang. Then why did he not drown himself, instead of murdering a fellow creature?
“Oh,” he replied, “the case is quite different. If I kill myself I shall immediately descend to the bottomless pit, but if I kill another I would be sent to Hobart Town and tried for my life; if found guilty, the parson would attend me, and then I would be sure of going to Heaven.” He was asked if he had any animosity towards his victim; he replied in the negative. Would he have killed any of the officers? Certainly, if they had given him the same chance. Would he have killed his interrogator, the Chaplain? “Yes, as soon as anyone else.”22
Even starker mutations were seen in the moral void produced by Macquarie Harbor. A group of prisoners were being led in single file through the forest when, without provocation or warning, one of them crushed the skull of the prisoner in front of him with his ax. Later he explained that there was no tobacco to be had in the settlement; that he had been a smoker all his life and would rather die than go without it; so, in the torment of nicotine withdrawal, he had killed the man in order to be hanged himself. At least he could get a twist of nigger-head shag in Hobart before he died.23
Such bizarre events became so common that the commandant, with the permission of the lieutenant-governor, ordered a public hanging at Macquarie Harbor. The gallows were raised, the felons were all mustered and the three condemned prisoners were marched forth; but, alas for the majesty of Law and the moral power of the spectacle,
their execution produced a feeling, I should say, of the most disgusting description. . . . So buoyant were the feelings of the men who were about to be executed, and so little did they seem to care about it, that they absolutely kicked their shoes off among the crowd as they were about to be executed, in order, as the term expressed by them was, that they might “die game”; it seemed . . . more like a parting of friends who were going a distant journey on land, than of individuals who were about to separate from each other for ever; the expressions used on that occasion were “Good bye, Bob” and “Good bye, Jack,” and expressions of that kind, among those in the crowd, to those who were about to be executed.24
Macquarie Harbor would remain a colonial benchmark for some time time—the nadir of punishment, until it was shut down and then exceeded by Norfolk Island. Sorell himself left Van Diemen’s Land in 1824. His reputation had been very much undermined by colonial gossips, particularly by a malevolent former officer in the Rum Corps named Anthony Fenn Kemp, who had risen to wealth as a grazier and trader in Van Diemen’s Land and out of sheer obsessive contentiousness had appointed himself Sorell’s bête noire. Perhaps it was Kemp’s snarling recitations of the lieutenant-governor’s sexual laxity, in letters to the English authorities, that did the trick; whatever the cause, Sorell was never to get another administrative post in the British Empire, and he died after twenty-four years of virtual idleness in 1848.
His successor had already been chosen before Sorell left Hobart. He remains one of the most controversial figures in early Australian history: Sir George Arthur (1784–1854), the archetype of the pious colonial strongman, charged by the British Government with the task of rendering all transportation a perfect terror to the criminal classes of Great Britain. “The most powerful, skilful and ruthless figure in the colony,” L. L. Robson’s judgment on him runs, “hated with an intensity of which only the neurotic and grasping settlers of Van Diemen’s Land were capable.”25
Arthur was a military man through and through. He had seen service against Napoleon with the 35th Regiment around the Mediterranean, from Calabria to Egypt; in 1815 he took on the post of superintendent and commandant of British Honduras, a slave state with some passing resemblances to the society he would later rule in Van Diemen’s Land. During his eight years there, Arthur showed himself to be a reformer, not by any means a populist but certainly more on the side of the slaves than of their choleric and arrogant owners. Reports of his work in Honduras won him the admiration of William Wilberforce.
He returned to England in 1822. Honduras had given him a taste for colonial administration. It was his vocation; what other field could give him the same proconsular scope, the same free hand to take a small remote country and re-mold its life in a way acceptable both to King and to God? There was not a trace of hypocrisy in Arthur. He believed it was his duty to make men moral—high and low alike. He was an evangelist who had chosen soldiering as his medium. Soon, through friends in London, he heard that the lieutenant-governorship of Van Diemen’s Land was open.
When, after much lobbying at the Colonial Office, Arthur was chosen as Sorell’s successor, he insisted on running Van Diemen’s Land as a separate colony and having the effective powers of governor, though he remained lieutenant-governor in title. Shrewdly, he realized even before he got there that Sorrell’s and Davey’s inability to move without permission from Sydney had done endless harm to convict discipline. He persuaded the Colonial Office to frame his commission so that he could draft laws, make land grants to settlers, directly control government money, extend pardons, remit sentences, appoint his own staff and report directly to Downing Street without referring to the governor in Sydney. This was done, and by 1825 the Government went further: It turned Van Diemen’s Land into a separate colony from New South Wales, with its own legislative council—which, in practice, was a rubber stamp for Arthur’s wishes. His Utopia of punishment and reform would be an autocracy.
iii
A FEW MONTHS short of his fortieth birthday, when he stepped ashore from the Adrian in Hobart on May 12, 1824, Arthur seemed distant, cold and aloof. His tall frame was stooped; the pallor of his face had not been changed by months at sea. His mouth was thin and compressed, the corners turned down. He rarely smiled in public. In conversation he would fix you with his wide, glaucous, interrogatory gray eyes, and he did not seem to blink as much as other people. He radiated an impression, not of wolfish severity, but of unshakable and vigilant moral calm. If there was ever an Australian governor who had no trouble distinguishing right from wrong, it was George Arthur.
This was not only due to his military background. Arthur’s serenity came from religion. He did not like to be called a Methodist; that smacked of “enthusiasm” and hence irrationality, and suggested links with the lower orders. But ever since he had a revelation of faith amid the tropical heat of Honduras, he had known that only God was the great emancipator. The Calvinist Evangelicalism he professed was not a private matter. Arthur had been put on earth to impose his values on others; that was the burden and duty of leadership.
He knew human nature was born and saturated in wickedness and could be redeemed only by prostration before Christ, by participating in the sacrifice of his Crucifixion in a complete surrender of faith. All social amusements that stood in the way of the Savior’s work were vain, and to be shunned. He was, as the vernacular of a later Australia would express it, a God-bothering, blue-nosed wowser. “Would the forerunner of Christ,” he asked his sister in a letter from Honduras, “ever have allowed himself the madness of the quadrilles?” (The image of the Baptist, goatskins a-whirl, treading nimbly across the polished teak at a regimental dance in Honduras has a certain charm, but not to Arthur.) Like most fundamentalists, he was stiffly censorious in matters cultural. He read mainly to reject: The philosopher David Hume was a “wretched infidel,” and the net effect of Alexander Pope’s didactic satires had been to make the young cynical and self-righteous. Social encounters with Arthur and family at Government House were marked by prayer and scriptural readings and were enlivened only by tea, although he permitted himself some port with his colonial secretary. Colonists, in the presence of this martinet and his starchy wife, realized that the days of “Mad Tom” Davey and adulterous Sorell were far behind them. Few people could extract much pleasure from Arthur’s company; but none could doubt that here was the most incisive and vigilantly ordered mind ever to immerse itself in the problems of running a convict colony in the antipodes.
Arthur meant to close all the loopholes in the system of convict punishment and turn the island into an ideal police state where surveillance was constant and total—a Panopticon-without-walls. Moreover, his new system of punishment and incentive would have the inexorable character of a machine, of Bentham’s idea of “a mill for grinding rogues honest.” Arthur came to believe that his system was so perfectly mechanical that it became cybernetic, or self-correcting. The convict’s fate was determined entirely by himself—by his own obedience and tractability, or lack of them. All the officials of the Convict Department had to do was tend the machine and stoke it with paper. As long as it was running, the disposal of the convicts and the severity of their punishment became automatic. That, at least, was the theory; for machines are dispassionate, not vindictive, and Arthur wanted to purge the grit and slop of emotion from his. Weakness led to cruelty; neither befitted a man of God.
In one respect, Arthur was surprisingly modern. He thought crime was a kind of sickness. Criminals suffered from a “mental delirium,” caused by seeing reality through a “false medium,” a scrim of illusions and distortions. The solution was to train them by drill and rote—he compared his prisoners, more than once, to unbroken horses—backed by the total exclusion of choice from their daily lives. Hard labor and, above all, the boredom of repetition was the only way to get convicts into the passive frame of mind where reformative teaching could pierce and dispel their “delirium.”
To enforce this “enlightened rigor,” as he called it, Arthur devised an extraordinarily complete system of social control. Van Diemen’s Land was a police state; he made no bones about that. But under Arthur, it also became the closest thing to a totalitarian society (though small and in some ways inefficient) that would ever exist within the British Empire. Arthur wanted to control his island utterly, settlers as well as convicts. His system had the logic of his given premise, which was that Van Diemen’s Land was first and foremost a jail, and that any free people who lived there must put up with the inconveniences of a penal society (the galling apparatus of police, spies, travel passes, trade restrictions, a muzzled press and crackdowns on the right of assembly) if they were to enjoy its benefits—free land grants and cheap assigned labor.
He divided Van Diemen’s Land into nine police districts, each with a police magistrate in charge of a force of constables and field police. Each police magistrate reported back to the chief police magistrate in Hobart, who in turn reported to Arthur. In his own district, however, the police magistrate was boss, judge, coroner and recording angel. He kept minute registers of births, behavior, proper transactions and deaths of the free and bond in his district. He issued travel passes to convicts. All applications from settlers for assigned servants and all petitions from convicts for “indulgences,” remissions and tickets-of-leave had to go through him. And he controlled the local police force, which ran from the chief district constable down to the rank and file of the field police, who were recruited from among the serving convicts. To get into the field police was considered a fine indulgence, and Arthur knew perfectly well what effect these government turncoats would have on the morale of convicts: “a mistrust and jealousy had already been infused into the prisoner Population which gives a Security to the free inhabitants.”26
Every convict, Arthur insisted,
should be regularly and strictly accounted for, as Soldiers are in their respective Regiments. . . . [T]he whole course of their Conduct—the Services to which they are sent, —and from which they are discharged—the punishments they receive, as well as instances of good conduct they manifest—should be registered from the day of their landing until . . . their emancipation or death.27
In 1826 he ordered a transported law-stationer named Edward Cook, under the direction of the muster-master as registrar, to start this gigantic compilation with the 12,305 prisoners who had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land since Collins founded the colony. The result was the “Black Books”—ponderous leather-bound tomes three feet high, containing the name, physical description, sentence, details of transportation and assignment, jail and surgeon’s reports, punishment and conduct record of every convict sent to Van Diemen’s Land. By 1830, Van Diemen’s Land had the most thorough files on its inhabitants, bond and free, of any community in the world—a mastaba of paper raised on the miseries of skewed, truncated lives, falling or rising through the levels of Arthur’s system.
Arthur made sure that each convict was interrogated on arrival, so that the muster-master had full particulars of them all.* He often went down to the Hobart Penitentiary to meet the prisoners as they arrived, and spoke to them in person. James Backhouse, the Quaker missionary, recounted the homily with which Arthur greeted them:
He alluded to the degraded state into which they had brought themselves by their crimes; this he justly compared to a state of slavery. . . . [He told them] that their conduct would be narrowly watched, and if it should be bad, they would be severely punished, put to work in a chain-gang, or sent to a penal settlement, where they would be under very severe discipline; or their career might be terminated on the scaffold. That, on the contrary, if they behaved well, they would in the course of a proper time, be indulged with a ticket-of-leave; . . . that if they should still persevere in doing well, they would then become eligible for a conditional pardon, which would give them the liberty of the colony: and that a further continuance in good conduct, would open the way for a free pardon, which would liberate [them] to return to their native land.28
From that moment the prisoner’s life became a strictly regulated and automatic game of snakes and ladders. “The spirit of the convict,” their new ruler would declare in the summation of his penal philosophy, Observations Upon Secondary Punishment (1833),
is not subdued by unmingled severity. Encouragement forms part of the plan by which he is reclaimed. . . . There is presented to him the choice of two opposite paths. The one will lead him to the possession of a ticket of leave. The other . . . will conduct him by a short cut, to the government gang or the penal settlement where he will be subjected to every privation. . . . Thus it is that every man has afforded him an opportunity of in a great measure retrieving his character and becoming useful in society.29
Arthur’s system set up seven levels of punishment between its extremes of freedom and the scaffold. In growing order of severity, they were: [1] holding a ticket-of-leave; [2] assignment to a settler; [3] labor on public works; [4] labor on the roads, near civilization, in the settled districts; [5] work in a chain gang; [6] banishment to an isolated penal settlement; and [7] penal settlement labor in chains.
A prisoner sank by bad conduct, and went up the rungs by good—after a time. But he always had to conform perfectly for a part of his sentence before he had any chance of a ticket-of-leave. A man with a seven-year sentence could apply for his ticket after four years of proven good behavior; a fourteen-year man, after six years; a lifer, after eight. He might also shorten his sentence by exceptional services—by catching an escaped fellow convict, for instance, or capturing troublesome Aborigines or serving as a convict constable in Arthur’s detested field police.
His progress up the ladders and down the snakes would be decided by full reports on his conduct, gathered from settlers, police magistrates and other witnesses, compiled at the police station in his district and forwarded to Arthur’s colonial secretary. Every offense and sentence, each change of place and labor, would be noted by “a firm and determined, but mild and consistent supervision,” which would also scrutinize the convict’s attitudes to authority and work, his state of conscience and degree of remorse. Thus the prisoner would live without refuge from the eye of authority.
Arthur’s belief in his system was absolute, and it distressed him to have its workings disturbed by direct orders from England. The Quaker missionary George Washington Walker called at Government House one day in 1834 and found Arthur “extremely chagrined” at an order that had just come on the transport Moffatt from Smith Stanley, the secretary of state for the colonies, enjoining him to take thirty of its four hundred newly arrived prisoners and work them in chains for seven years, instead of giving them the milder punishment of assignment. This draconic and arbitrary sentence, Stanley hoped, would spread the terror of Van Diemen’s Land in England. None of the unfortunate men had done anything to deserve it; they had all been submissive and quiet on the voyage; and Arthur was at a loss to know what to say to them. “They naturally ask why are we treated thus? What have we done?” wrote Walker.
[But] All the Lt.-Governor is able to say is, “such is the order from home, it is out of my power to help it. However, let me recommend you as your friend to submissively acquiesce: to resist wd only be to render yr situation worse; & I will write home & endeavour to obtain some mitigation of your sentence, until any bad conduct, exhibited in the colony, renders you deserving of this punishment.” Common equity, let alone humanity, prompts this language, which has actually been used towds them by the Governor.30
Arthur was certainly a martinet, and sometimes a suffocatingly pious one, but in no sense was he a sadist. That taint would be foisted on him later by a hostile colonial press, and fixed in literature long after his death by the Victorian tales of penal Grand Guignol written by Marcus Clarke and Price Warung. His real aim on Van Diemen’s Land was reformatory, not vindictive, like the aims of the Panopticon that Jeremy Bentham had set before the French National Assembly more than thirty years earlier.
All convicts entered the board at level [2], as assigned labor. Those not assigned to settlers were put on the public works, for which there was a constant demand, for Van Diemen’s Land always needed more jails, barracks, piers, bridges and roads to cope with the growing convict population and the spread of settlement. In 1827, after three years of Arthur’s regime, there were 2,500 men employed at punishment labor (levels [3] through [7]) on public works in Van Diemen’s Land, or 43 percent of the convict population (as against 577 men, or 32 percent in 1820); this reflected the urgent need for new government buildings of every kind.31
But most of the convicts in that year and all others (2,750 or 46 percent in 1827) were in level [2], the norm, as assigned servants. Assignment was the backbone of Arthur’s system but also—as he was well aware—its weakest point. The idea that any system could smoothly and automatically convert an undifferentiated mass of criminals into the permanent underclass of repentant, tractable cottagers who were the ideal end product of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land, was chimerical. To see the common reality one must turn, for a moment, from the administration to one of its thousands of subjects, whose claim to attention is that, unlike the great majority of his fellow convicts, he wrote an uncommonly frank clandestine letter, which has survived.32
George Taylor was transported for life to Van Diemen’s Land in 1826 for stealing a pocketbook, and in 1832 he tried to smuggle a letter describing his ups and downs to his “dear Brother” John Thompson, another convict serving time in Macquarie Harbor. On first landing at Hobart, he was sent to work in a government vegetable garden “under the Superintendence of a Cruel and Vindictive tyrant where I remained for a fortnight.” Then he drew assignation to a free settler named Tennant. “Here I was again unfortunate for altho I received a good Caracter from the Cleark of the prisoners barracks as a hard working industrious man Still I had no sooner got to my master than he began to discover [i.e., disclose] the disposition of a Hardhearted Wreach.” After seven months Taylor started scheming to get away. He hoped to provoke his master into bringing him before the local police magistrate on a minor charge, so he started a go-slow strike, only doing “that part of my work which I thought proper.” Tennant haled him before the magistrate “two or three times,” but the charge was not bad enough to warrant returning Taylor to government work. So Taylor “persued a diferant line” by feigning sickness and asking, as was his right, to be sent to the doctor—who discovered “that I was sailing under false Collors and gave me a note to take to my Master to that effect.” Taylor opened, read and destroyed the note. He stayed in a fellow convict’s hut for three days and then told his master, on returning, that he had been in the hospital. This flimsy story came apart, of course, the next time Tennant saw the doctor. Tennant took his assigned man to the police magistrate, who sentenced Taylor to the chain gang at Bridgewater. There, convicts in levels [3] through [5] were sweating to create one of Colonel Arthur’s favorite public works—a causeway and bridge over the River Derwent, part of the main trunk road from Hobart to Launceston. The facilities provided there to reform the likes of Taylor included cells that were more like animals’ lairs, seven feet long and less than three feet high; the men crawled into them at night and were padlocked there, behind a stout lattice, unable to stand or sit. Taylor spent two months at Bridgewater but did not seem chastened enough. His next “automatic” descent was to chain-gang labor at the Kangaroo Point jetty in Hobart and on the roads. “You may be sure my Sittuation is not very enviable,” he wrote to his friend, “for it only makes me think more of my Liberty than ever and I am determined to try the first opertunity to gain it by some means or other if possible.”
Unluckily for him, his letter was intercepted by the authorities. It had been folly to write it in the first place, and after due inquiry, Colonel Arthur banished him to level [6], an isolated penal settlement. “Let Him then be removed forthwith to Port Arthur,” he decreed in a note on the offending document. This was done by the end of 1832. Later, good behavior extracted Taylor from Port Arthur and moved him up again to level [5], this time in a chain gang at Launceston. But the desire for freedom still burned in him; in 1836 he vanished from Arthur’s records with the laconic notation “Run,” meaning that he had escaped. Whatever else Arthur’s system had done for him, it had not made Taylor any more docile. There were many Taylors.
Nevertheless, Arthur had to make his system as perfect and uniform as he could. His task, in conformity with John Bigge’s advice to the British Government, was to run an island of punishment, a place of terror to English criminals. He therefore had to keep assignment in Van Diemen’s Land from becoming the ill-supervised lottery it had become in New South Wales.
But the free clay of his island varied as much as the criminal. Like New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land had kind and cruel settlers; vigilant and negligent ones; men who would work their assigned servants to the bone, and others who would let them eat at the same kitchen table; above all, men who by temperament and sense of moral obligation would stick to the lieutenant-governor’s rules of convict management, and others who would not, and in between those who, like most people anywhere, would bend the rules if they wanted to and thought they could get away with it. All of them must be brought into line, levelled before the System.
Without assignment, there could have been no colony in Van Diemen’s Land. Its economy would have died because, as in New South Wales, there was no labor but convict labor. Hence, in Arthur’s view, the mere fact of living as a free settler in a penal colony meant that a man must accept the paramount values of penal discipline. Free settlers were as integral a part of Arthur’s machinery of punishment as policemen or government clerks. Assignment was a bargain a man struck with the government and if he did not play by the government’s rules he lost his convict servants. And the rules were far stricter than they had been under Lachlan Macquarie’s more liberal (and, to Bigge, more muddled) system in New South Wales. They went with a larger and ever-growing police force, and a complete denial of any political say to Emancipists and free settlers alike. Throughout his term of office, which was as long as Macquarie’s New South Wales—twelve years, from 1824 to 1836—George Arthur never lost sight of the fact that to control a state’s labor supply is to control its political life. So Arthur’s “red list” of settlers who could not get assigned convicts was, in plan and in detail, a formidable social weapon.
Whole groups were automatically put on it. Arthur would show none of the encouragement Macquarie had given to Emancipists in New South Wales. His view tallied exactly with Bigge’s. Ex-convicts, he thought, made bad masters—and of course there was evidence to support it. Either they were too lenient to their men and despised the police, thus jamming Arthur’s “objective” machinery of punishment; or else the psychological need to wield power, after their grinding years of servitude and degradation, turned them into sadists and so aborted their servants’ prospects of reform. Hence, with very few exceptions, no one who had been a convict in Van Diemen’s Land could get convict labor. In this way, Arthur tried to enforce the ideal of Bigge and the Exclusives—that of a permanent ruling class of free descent, with the descendants of convicts as their helots. Refusing labor to Emancipists in Van Diemen’s Land could only deepen the gulf between wealthy (or at the very least, “unstained”) Exclusive families there, and the convict-descended majority. There were only three passably wealthy ex-convicts in all of Van Diemen’s Land at the time Arthur arrived, and he was not anxious to create any more. David Lord, who had inherited an estate worth £50,000 from his convict father James and by 1827 was said to have so multiplied it that he “knows not the extent of his riches,” was not only an inveterate enemy of Arthur but also a complete social anomaly.33
Some trades found it hard to get convict servants. Arthur despised rum and those who sold it, and would rarely assign a convict to an innkeeper. Believing that the city was wickeder than the country—which it was, given the number of its taverns and the floating population of “loose” women it harbored—Arthur preferred to assign convicts to farmers rather than tradesmen in town.
Arthur expected masters to make their servants pray and scrupulously observe the Sabbath. They must buy Bibles for their men, if the men could read, but few masters actually did so. Few things irked Arthur more than a master’s failure to instill religious habits in his convicts. Besides, he wanted to leave Van Diemen’s Land covered with a brown mantle of Anglican churches and Wesleyan meetinghouses. He did all he could to bring in clergymen, missionaries and other catechists. The Wesleyans did particularly good work at the foot of the scaffold with condemned criminals, of whom there was no shortage under Arthur. One preacher, the Reverend Carvosso, helped fourteen men to lament and exult their way through the noose into the portals of eternity within a space of thirty hours.34
Wherever a town coalesced in the “settled districts” of Van Diemen’s Land, Arthur wanted a chapel to be built, usually a plain stone box with lancet windows and a pitched roof in the Gothic manner, without much in the way of crockets and stone foliage, where the Lord could be praised in metrical psalms. There were four churches in Van Diemen’s Land when he arrived in 1824, and eighteen when he left. The church and the police magistrate’s office were the architectural symbols of his regime, and one served the other. Official religion was a means of penal control. The mandatory Sunday muster of convicts had to finish with a service and a clerical harangue. But it was not easy to make sure masters kept their men’s noses to the moral grindstone. Some would work their convicts on the Sabbath, tolerate their propensity to vice and give them rum as an incentive. If he found out about that, Arthur withdrew their assigned men and left them economically crippled.
He discouraged all intimacy between bond and free. One settler found himself red-listed for letting his convicts eat Christmas dinner with his family. In 1831, when a leading settler, George Meredith, defied the strict letter of police regulations by treating his assigned men to a drink on New Year’s Eve, Arthur ordered his colonial secretary to warn him that another dram of rum down a felon’s throat “will lead to the immediate removal of all his servants.”35
If a settler had an affair with a convict woman, and Arthur found out about it through his district police magistrate, all his servants would be reassigned. Even if a free man married an ex-convict woman—and most of the women in Van Diemen’s Land had been transported, so there was not much choice for the small settler—he would lose his assigned servants at once. The situation that often arose in New South Wales, where a convict might be assigned to a relative, was rarely allowed here. Sometimes Arthur would let a wife emigrate to Van Diemen’s Land to join her convict husband, provided that the man had his ticket-of-leave or that his master would give her domestic work. But he would not, of course, pay for her passage.
One exception was reluctantly made for “Ikey” Solomon, the celebrated Jewish pickpocket and fence on whom, legend (perhaps incorrectly) insists, Charles Dickens had based the character of Fagin. His wife Ann, daughter of an Aldgate coachmaster named Moses Julian, had been transported for receiving stolen goods. She landed in Hobart in 1828, with four small children between the ages of three and nine. She was assigned as a servant to a police officer. Meanwhile the intrepid “Ikey,” who was tried and sentenced for theft in 1827 but had escaped from the Black Maria on his way to Newgate (the vehicle, as the authorities discovered all too late, was driven by his father-in-law), had fled to Denmark, to the United States, to Rio and finally to Hobart under an alias to join his wife. He bought land and a house and he started a business, which flourished. Everyone in Hobart knew who he was (the town was small, and of course full of his former colleagues) but a peculiar technicality saved him: Arthur, who always played by the book, had received no warrant for his arrest from the Colonial Office in London and could not touch him until one arrived. Thus, with the backing of some fellow traders, Isaac Solomon put up a bond of a thousand pounds and Arthur reluctantly allowed his wife to be assigned to him. Their family idyll was rudely disrupted in November 1829 when Arthur at last received the warrant from England. Even then, the ur-Fagin made one last wriggle to dislodge the hook, and with effrontery worthy of his fictional counterpart he petitioned Arthur from his jail cell for an official job:
TO:
His Excellency Colonel George Arther
Lt Govener of V D Land &c &c &c
Sir,
I beg leave to state the following . . . I some time back detected A Man with A Forged note on the Bank of the Derwent I had him taken into Custedy; he was Convicted and sent to Mackquarrey Harbour. I allso beg Leave to State that theire Was a Greate Many forged Note in Circulation before I detected this Man; & I have not heard of Any being in Circulation since I detected this Man; I theirefor now offer my Serveses to The Government in detecting all Such Offences or Any thing Else that the Goverment may Appoint me to do to the Hutermost of my Obility.
I have the honor to subscribe
Your Excellencys Most humble Servant,
Isaac Solomon.36
But Arthur was not swayed. “I presume,” he frostily noted on the verso, “this is from the Person commonly called ‘Ikey Solomon’—no notice need be taken of his Memorial.” So Isaac Solomon was returned to England amid cries of protest from the Hobart opposition press, who thought it a breach of habeas corpus. There he was tried and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation; by the end of 1831 he was back in Hobart; and in 1835 he got his ticket-of-leave and was reunited with his family. By then, unfortunately, they all loathed one another.*
It was essential to Arthur’s system that the settlers who had convict labor assigned to them carry out his rules to the last detail. Judging their moral fitness to preside over the punishment of prisoners was perhaps the most ticklish problem that faced the Convict Office. The price of having assigned servants was full participation in Arthur’s system of convict management. It made all free settlers into jailers—“auxiliaries,” in John West’s words, “hired by royal bounties to co-operate with the great machinery of punishment and reformation.”37 The settler was expected to shut up about “rights,” stay at home on his farm and do exactly as he was told. A master could lose his assigned labor if he let his men idle, or used convict rather than free overseers or lent a man to another settler. In particular, it was forbidden to transfer convicts as though they were private property, as sometimes happened in New South Wales. To abuse a servant was to lose him, and assigned convicts had the right to complain to the police magistrate at any time. But it was equally forbidden to indulge them, and any delay in bringing a mulish, rebellious or backsliding convict before the magistrate would get the master (or mistress) in trouble. The only play in these regulations came from the supply of assignable convicts. When the demand for them was high, Arthur could take them away from settlers who infringed the rules, just as he pleased. But convicts had to be put somewhere, and so when there was a glut of assignable felons, more settlers found they were let off with a reprimand and could keep their men.
The key to Arthur’s scheme of total surveillance was, of course, the quality of the police. “It is extremely desirable,” he declared, “that either through the Police or Principal Superintendent’s Department, the most conclusive information should always be obtained of the character of the applicant [for] assigned labor and all circumstances.”38 To assure this, Arthur had to make certain that his police force was run by men who had no allegiance to either settlers or convicts and were responsible only to him; and that its rank and file had no reason to favor anyone either. He cunningly did both by appointing army men as district magistrates and by putting upward-moving convicts in the field police as a reward for good conduct and a step toward freedom. This was a bureaucratic master stroke. The convict constables were anxious to distinguish themselves, could be kept in line by the merest threat of demotion, knew they had no second chances and doubtless took a certain pleasure in bossing the settlers around. One could expect dog-like obedience—and canine ferocity—from them. The army police magistrates might not know much about civil law; often they looked on the settlers with disdain, and on convicts with contempt. But they were impervious to criticism from civilians and despised the press. Their background had trained them to handle the laborious, detailed paperwork of reports and to carry out every quillet of Arthur’s copious, inflexible orders with military zeal. They believed in the chain of command as implicitly as Arthur did.
Not everyone resented the methods used by Arthur’s police. They had cleaned out the bushrangers, destroyed the Brady gang and made the roads safe for trade; thousands of people could sleep easier because of them. Nevertheless, they poisoned the social air. Tempers had always been short in Van Diemen’s Land, frictions magnified, manners gross. Bitching and backbiting were the favorite sports of Hobart society—as of Australian society in general. Among the “dirty pack of unprincipled place hunters” whom Arthur’s auditor-general, the waspish George Boyes, saw occupying the upper rungs of Van Diemen’s Land, “lying, slandering, every hatred and malice are their daily ailment and their consumption is incredible.” Now the stew of ill-will was thickened by spying and the fear of denunciation. By 1830, Van Diemen’s Land was fast becoming “a community of slanderers and slaves.”39
Besides, Arthur was a committed nepotist. He knew what a small pool of administrative talent he had in Van Diemen’s Land, and he needed people he could trust—loyalty being an acceptable substitute for imagination. If he was an autocrat, and he was, he had partly been made so by distance: He faced a year’s delay in obtaining instructions from London, and up to four months’ lag in getting them from Sydney. This gave him even wider discretion than the governor enjoyed in New South Wales, and he used it with a sovereign contempt for “liberal” and “democratic” principles. Never apologize, never explain.
Arthur made no bones about the scope of his patronage or his bias toward military men. Given the quality of some of the civil officials the Crown sent, one can hardly blame him. Dudley Fereday (1789–1849), a bankrupt coal magnate’s son whom an English lord’s patronage had made sheriff of Van Diemen’s Land in 1824, turned out to be a relentless usurer, lending money at 35 percent interest. Arthur soon got rid of him, and of his uncompliant attorney-general, Arthur Gellibrand, and of anyone else who seemed either disobliging or short on moral fiber. He went after the customs collector, Rolla O’Farrell, who had arrived penniless in Hobart but amassed a fortune of more than £15,000 by creative venality. This man, Arthur told London, was a debauchee with the morals of a stoat, who lived with one of the prostitutes off the Princess Royal and had been fined for harboring and seducing female convicts. In 1831 England sent Arthur a judge, Alexander “Dandy” Baxter (1798–1836), whose ignorance and paranoiac sadism (while serving as Darling’s attorney-general in New South Wales, he had battered his wife with a poker after she gave birth to twins) were such that Arthur would not have him in his colony. “I found him,” he declared, “in a high state of neurotic excitement and such an habitual sot that it would have been a violation of all public decency to have suffered him to take his seat on the Bench.”40 In 1826 Arthur received John Burnett (1781–1860) as his first colonial secretary—a mewing, forgetful creature, who confessed to Arthur soon after getting to Hobart that “so extremely sensitive is my nervous system that everything which agitates my mind immediately affects my bodily health, and brings on illness.”41 Not without some difficulty, Arthur replaced him with John Montagu (1797–1853), a blunt, thrusting ex-officer of the 40th Regiment, a veteran of Waterloo who—no incidental point—had married Arthur’s niece.
In the end, Arthur always got his way with appointments and managed to cripple most of the enemies his purges made. “The Government of the Colony is nominally vested in the Lieutenant Governor and an Executive Council,” wrote Boyes. “I say nominally, because the Executive Council as a body is powerless. The real government is composed of Colonel Arthur [and] his two nephews.” The “nephews” were Montagu and the chief police magistrate, Matthew Forster (1796–1846), a half-blind former captain in the 85th Regiment who had had the excellent sense to marry another of Arthur’s nieces.
Another Arthur favorite was Roderic O’Connor (1784–1860), a “red-hot Irishman,” the son of a rich landowner, who had sailed to Hobart on his own ship with his two bastard sons in 1824. O’Connor was tough, outspoken, pragmatic and arrogant—a man Arthur could use, despite his atheism and his taste for the grog. He appointed him to the survey and valuation commission, whose task it was to oversee the division of Van Diemen’s Land into counties and parishes, to assess unoccupied Crown land and survey the route for the north—south trunk road, the spine of the colony, which convicts would build between Hobart and Launceston. It was the right job in which to gather some land of his own. In 1824 Arthur gave O’Connor 1,000 acres; by 1828, he had 4,000 and as much convict labor as he wanted—when assigning men to his favorites, the colonel never stinted. In 1836, when Arthur left Van Diemen’s Land, O’Connor was one of the half-dozen richest men in the colony, adamantly opposed to any alteration in the system of slavery that had created his wealth. He was not liked (Lady Franklin, the wife of Arthur’s successor, complained that he was “bound by ties of I know not what nature to the Arthur faction . . . a man of blasted reputation, of exceedingly immoral conduct and of viperous tongue”), but he was very much feared, and at his death he owned 65,000 acres of Tasmania and leased 10,000 more from the government.42
Meanwhile, under Arthur’s organizing hand, the economy of Van Diemen’s Land was surging. In 1824, when he arrived, Van Diemen’s Land had a white population of about 12,000 and its exports were worth £45,317. In 1836, the year he left, they stood at £540,221, and there were 40,000 bond and free. Most of the settlers were men of capital, for Arthur discouraged free workers, even mechanics, from emigrating to Van Diemen’s Land; a free labor market would have diminished the social control that flowed from his power to allocate convict labor. Wealthy settlers—the “planters” of folksong—ruled the Vandemonian roost and despised mere traders and merchants. By 1830, Van Diemen’s Land had a wool boom, a wheat boom, a boom in real estate and agricultural land and a severe loansharking problem; members of Arthur’s own Legislative Council were rumored to be lending out money at illegal rates of 15 and even 50 percent. Thrifty and ruthlessly astute, the colonel himself knew of every project in advance, made a fortune from land investment and lived like a tea-drinking, psalm-intoning nabob. He stayed within the letter of the law, but the law was easier then, and respectable folk were more apt to avert their eyes from conflicts of interest. Thus when he had the causeway and bridge over the Derwent River for the Hobart—Launceston road built at Bridgewater, Arthur owned most of the land around it; and when he picked the site for a new Hobart wharf, he was accused (though not conclusively) of increasing the value of his property next to it from £800 to £12,000.
After a few years of dictatorial, God-fearing nepotism there was plenty of reckoning and questioning. It came from settlers, who chafed at the intrusions of his police and were furious when Arthur withdrew their convict servants for infractions of his code; from merchants, who were treated as low money-grubbers by Arthur’s landed gentry; and from all who felt that, as Englishmen in a far colony but Englishmen still, they should have the constitutional rights their “tyrant” denied them. They liked having convict labor but disliked living in a jail. Van Diemen’s Land could not be run simply as a jail forever, but Arthur was determined to do so until the Crown changed his orders. The opposition was weak and tetchy. Its attempts to make itself heard—public meetings in 1831 and 1832 and a constitutional association in 1835—were ignored in Government House. But it had an irksome and at times hysterically abusive voice: the press, which Arthur detested.
The newspapers of Van Diemen’s Land were rough, choleric and short—a few columns of news and editorials, some letters and official business, tacked onto a mass of advertisements. They tried to win their petty circulation wars with stilted, lurid rhetoric. In short, they were as poor and vindictive as most early nineteenth-century American newspapers. But they were the only forum of popular opinion—as distinct from the printed mandates of the government—in the colony. Everyone read them.
Such journalism goaded Arthur to folly. In 1827, he tried to quash the liberty of all printing on the island by proposing a Licensing Act, so that any editor’s right to publish could be cancelled at the lieutenant-governor’s pleasure. He coldly offered his all-purpose justification. Van Diemen’s Land was a jail, and in jail opposition should have no voice. Compared to the absolute need for “security and tranquillity,” the free settlers’ unanimous desire for a free press must go unsatisfied. Behind this, of course, lay Arthur’s implacable vanity; he could not stand criticism of any kind, especially not from civilians, and least of all from ex-convicts.
When he looked at Vandemonian journalists, Arthur saw, not a Fourth Estate struggling for freedom of the press, but a swarm of semi-criminal gadflies sent to harass him personally. There was Robert Murray (1777–1850), ex-soldier, journalist and reputedly the bastard son of an English peer, transported for bigamy in 1815 and by 1825 editor of the Hobart Town Gazette, who wrote sharp attacks—or gross slanders, depending on which side one took—on Arthur’s policies under the name “A Colonist.” (He fell into line after 1832 and became a sycophantic tool of Arthur’s patronage.)
Another was Murray’s colleague Andrew Bent, sent out for burglary in 1810, now editor of the Colonial Times: an unrestrained seditionist, Arthur thought. Henry Melville, an eccentric Freemason obsessed with the occult, published the first Australian novel set in Australia (Quintus Servinton, 1830-31, by the transported forger Henry Savery) and, to Arthur’s intense displeasure, wrote an entire book against his administration, History of the Island of Van Diemen’s Land from the Year 1824 to 1825, which had to be smuggled out of the colony and published in England. Then there was William Goodwin, editor of the Cornwall Chronicle, a harsh transport captain turned venomous hack, whose attacks on Arthur and other pillars of the Vandemonian establishment seemed, unlike those of these other editors, to have no basis at all beyond his own opportunism.43
Some of these men bore unmistakably personal grudges against Arthur. One was Gilbert Robertson, the mulatto son of a Scottish sugar-planter in British Guiana, who had twice failed as a farmer: first in Scotland (where falling wheat prices ruined him), and then on a 400-acre grant in Van Diemen’s Land. He was jailed for debt in 1824 and then worked for Arthur as superintendent of a government farm. In 1829 he struck out on his own again on Woodburn, a fine grazing property in the Richmond district. This time Robertson seemed set. Arthur had made him district constable and the farm prospered; but in 1832 he made the mistake of indulging his convicts too much. For a celebration after the February harvest, he gave them a barrel of wine, invited in another eight assigned servants from farms nearby and left twenty-five convicts carousing while he went to perform his police duties. All the convicts got drunk and one was mortally wounded in a brawl. This time, Arthur acted with surprising leniency. He did not withdraw all Robertson’s assigned men; he merely red-listed him from getting any more. But that was enough for the choleric Scot, who switched to journalism to get his revenge on Arthur and emerged as editor of a daily paper, The True Colonist. Through this sheet, Robertson was able to heap accusations of fraud, peculation, favoritism and tyranny on Arthur for the last two years of his office.
Arthur’s running battle with the press lasted throughout his administration. The British Government refused to let him have his Licensing Act; so Arthur felt he had no recourse but to sue his critics for libel, bombarding them with litigation to the point where, harassed and short-staffed, they would no longer be able to publish their broadsides against him. Arthur did this with such methodical zeal that Murray, Robertson, Melville and Bent all spent time behind bars. They protested their treatment, in and out of print. There is a particularly indignant letter from Henry Melville to Arthur, protesting the “torture” inflicted on him in the Hobart jail:
I am writing this in the condemned cell where the notorious maneater Pierce and some score of other murder[er]s have been confined. In this cell I passed the night (after being locked up by British convicts!) with swarms of bugs, which precluded the possibility of my sleeping.
I ask for suitable appartments chiefly on account of my wife, who has expressed her determination to remain with me as many hours as possible, and if the authorities have a wish to be revenged on a political opponent at all events the chief ruler ought to have some feelings for an unoffending woman who suffers more from the incarceration of her husband than [he] does.44
Naturally, they were seen as martyrs. Andrew Bent was defended in court in 1830 as “this Nimrod of printers, this [Benjamin] Franklin of the Southern Hemisphere.” Arthur could put them in jail, but not all his autocratic powers could keep them there forever. What especially irked him was the attitude of his own attorney-general, Joseph Tice Gellibrand (1786–1837), a close friend of Robert Murray. Gellibrand several times refused point-blank to sue for libel on the Crown’s behalf; he even helped write editorials for Murray’s paper. Arthur could not endure this and laid siege to Gellibrand’s reputation in England. As Gellibrand was one of the few genuinely acute and honest lawyers ever to hold public office in early Australia, Arthur could not nail him for incompetence; but he created a cloud of allegations of fiscal dishonesty, and in 1826 a dispatch from Lord Goderich removed Gellibrand. His successor as attorney-general was a feeble anorexic named Thomas McCleland, whom Arthur found much easier to control. Gellibrand at once became editor of The Tasmanian in Hobart.45
And so, through his moral arrogance and his inability to understand or sympathize with civilian tempers, Arthur soon found himself facing a raucous phalanx of opposition papers. Part of their strategy was to contrast the suffering convict with the cold, rhadamanthine lieutenant-governor. To show the “tyrant” at his worst, they harped on the dreaded nadir of Arthur’s system, the secondary penal settlements: first Macquarie Harbor, and then Port Arthur.
iv
UNTIL 1832, the only place in Van Diemen’s Land fit for the severest levels of Arthur’s punishment system was Macquarie Harbor, reserved for those who had committed serious crimes after landing in the colony. Its name reeked of fear and woe; all convicts feared it; but Arthur thought it had defects as well, and these came to look worse as both the convict population and the number of secondary convictions grew.
Despite its wealth of Huon pine, Macquarie Harbor was expensive. Being so remote from Hobart, it was hard to run. Ships took as long as six weeks to reach it, and no overland route had been found. The sandbar at the mouth of Hell’s Gates was silting up, making entry to the harbor even more perilous than it already was. Arthur’s orders were slow in reaching it, and the commandant’s replies were delayed. Food ran short; scurvy was endemic; the barracks on Sarah Island, with a capacity of about 370 prisoners, was too small. Furthermore, a new speculative venture called the Van Diemen’s Land Company was trying to open up the west coast for stock-grazing, and it looked as though the utter isolation of Macquarie Harbor, its best feature, might be on the wane.
There was another, far milder, penal settlement on Maria Island, three miles off the east coast of Van Diemen’s Land. Arthur had it set up in 1825 to receive convicts “whose crimes are not of so flagrant a nature to induce the Magistrates to sentence them to Macquarie Harbour.” The convicts lucky enough to be sent to this sweetly idyllic place wove cloth and cobbled shoes, and although flogging and solitary confinement were common punishments, their life escaped the miseries of Macquarie Harbor.46
But it made no sense and cost too much to keep two isolated secondary-punishment stations, one severe and one not; the levels of Arthur’s system did not call for light punishment in remote places. Arthur decided to shut both of them down and to open a new penal settlement on the ragged tip of the Tasman Peninsula, closer to Hobart. The place was called Port Arthur. It is his monument, and perhaps no British proconsul has a more impressive one.
Today Port Arthur is easily visited by road; it is sixty miles from Hobart, and every season thousands of tourists in buses and cars stream down the Arthur Highway below Mount Forestier, glimpsing the bright planes of Blackman Bay and Norfolk Bay like burnished pewter struck and feathered by shafts of light, framed by dark headlands. Outcrops of cream and green fibro cottages, neat with garden gnomes and carports, cling to this melancholy coast. The hamlets of this peninsula look feeble and intrusive; their modest grafts of suburbia do not belong in a landscape so drenched in sublimity and misery. One soon forgets them, looking down on the mosaic shore at Pirate’s Bay, cracked into hexagonal tessellations by the cooling of the lava flow; or gazing into the vertiginous depths of the Blowhole where, beneath a slender natural arch of rock, the sea two hundred feet below thunders across the jostled slabs of basalt on the cavern floor, saturating the air with a permanent, clinging mist.
In convict days, of course, there was no road. The inaccessibility of the Tasman Peninsula was what commended it to the System, and the best way to sense this is to go there, as prisoners did, by sea. One sails down the Derwent estuary from Hobart and turns into Storm Bay, once the calving-ground of thousands of black whales but now empty; from Cape Direction, where Australia’s oldest lighthouse still winks its beam, the long humpy profile of the Tasman Peninsula lies on the southeastern horizon. Its furthest southern point is Cape Raoul, which as one rounds it appears as the western arm of Maingon Bay, the sea-gate that opens the way to Port Arthur—the eastern arm being Cape Pillar. Both capes are of towering basalt pipes, flutes and rods, bound like fasces into the living rock. Their crests are spired and crenellated. Seabirds wheel, thinly crying, across the black walls and the blacker shadows. The breaking swells throw up their veils. When the clouds march in from the Tasman Sea and the rainsqualls lash the prismatic stone, these cliffs can look like the adamantine gates of Hell itself. Geology had conspired with Lieutenant-Governor Arthur to give the prisoners of the crown a moral fright as their ships hauled in.
But once inside the landlocked bay of Port Arthur, the impression melts. Or so it does for a modern visitor, who sees green lawns, the ivy-covered remains of a Gothic church and the enormous bulk of the penitentiary. In its soft tones of pink brick, far gone in crumbling, it seems an almost maternal ruin. It did not seem so to the convicts, but the shudder it reliably evokes in the modern tourist comes from the contrast between its mild, pastoral present—et in Arcadia ego—and the legends of its past. Australia has many parking lots but few ruins. When Australians see the ruin of an old building, our impulse is either to finish tearing it down or to bring in the architects and restore it as a cultural center, if large, or a restaurant, if small. Port Arthur is the only major example of an Australian historical ruin appreciated and kept for its own sake (although local entrepreneurs have tried, and so far failed, to refurbish it as Convictland). It is our Paestum and our Dachau, rolled into one. Far more than Macquarie Harbor or even Norfolk Island, Port Arthur has always dominated the popular historical imagination in Australia as the emblem of the miseries of transportation, “the Hell on earth.”
Moreover, its reputation was terrible right from the start. To have served time there was to receive an indelible stain. “There is something so lowering,” remarked Arthur’s successor as lieutenant-governor, Sir John Franklin, “attached to the name of a Port Arthur man.”47 Yet the records clearly show that Port Arthur, though certainly a place of misery for its prisoners, was by no means as bad as either Macquarie Harbor or Norfolk Island.
Its main difference from other secondary stations lay in the hermetic regularity of its discipline. It was conceived and run as a purgatorial grinding-mill rather than a torture chamber. “The most unceasing labour is to be exacted from the convicts,” Arthur’s Standing Instructions emphasized, “and the most harassing vigilance over them is to be observed.”48 But his regulations for the settlement were equally strict on the behavior of its guards. The commandant’s authority was absolute, and he answered directly to the lieutenant-governor through the colonial secretary in Hobart. He could, and did, inflict punishment without trial, immediately after the offense, so that the convict would “learn his lesson” without delay. But the sequence of offense, detection and punishment must show a machine-like regularity, to which vindictiveness and pity were equally alien. Arthur’s regulations were framed to leave no scope for the exercise of sadistic practices by prison personnel that made a convict’s life at Macquarie Harbor or Norfolk Island so vile. Thomas Lemprière (1796–1852), who served as a commissary officer at Port Arthur (as well as Macquarie Harbor and Maria Island), felt that Arthur’s enemies exaggerated in calling it an “Earthly Hell.” But he did not bridle at phrases like “the abode of misery.” “To this cognomen we do not object,” he remarked with a certain brisk realism, for
a penal settlement is, and ought to be, an abode of misery to those whose crimes have sequestered them from the society of their fellow-creatures. Were it a place of comfort, the very object for which such establishments are formed, the punishment and reform of malefactors, would become nugatory.49
“And reform”—this was a crucial phrase. Port Arthur existed to punish its men purposively. It would be the clamp that held the rigid structure of Arthur’s social system together at the bottom.
Arthur had been thinking about the place since 1827, when the colonial brig Opossum took refuge there from a storm on the way back from Maria Island to Hobart and came back with news of a deep sheltered inlet, surrounded by colossal stands of timber. Arthur sent her captain back with a surveyor to make a detailed report on the place: its merits as a port, its water supply, and above all its forests, since the demand for timber for buildings and furniture kept rising, and logging was an ideally harsh punishment.
The report was good, and Arthur decided to put a settlement on the bay that, “from profound respect,” had been given his name. He did not mean to transfer all the convicts from Macquarie Harbor at once. Some of the less evilly inclined ones could be put there as a form of probation, on their way back up the ladder of his system. But the basic population of Port Arthur would be men re-convicted of minor offenses, and others fresh from England.
The first group, thirty-four new English prisoners with fifteen soldiers to guard them under the command of Dr. John Russell, assistant surgeon of the 63rd Regiment, was landed there in September 1830. More followed; by mid-1831, the convict population was about 150. Dr. Russell would later list “a few well-known characters . . . mixed with the general class of housebreakers, pickpockets and felons”:
There was the famous Ikey Solomons; there was Collins, the old sailor, who threw a stone at the King—he died at Port Arthur; there were those men for agrarian disturbances, for setting fire to haystacks, a circumstance that occurred about 1830 or 1831; there was a clergyman from Scotland, and an attorney from Ireland; there were a number of boys sent to learn trades.50
A heterogeneous crew—which, as always at new penal outposts, had great difficulty surviving at all. Rations were miserably short and scurvy widespread. Medical supplies were so inadequate that at one point the doctor had to operate on a man’s “stricture” with a piece of sharpened whalebone for a scalpel. Convicts went half-naked from want of uniforms. “I had great difficulty in punishing the men,” Russell recalled, “in fact, I was living in the bush myself, and I therefore struck off the irons of every man that came down, and made it a punishment to put them on again.” He could not use solitary confinement at first, for want of cells; but later the “most effectual” punishment proved to be hard labor in irons, with all meals and rest hours in solitary.51
Russell’s pleas to Hobart went unanswered, because Arthur was obsessed with the field strategy of his military campaign to round up the remaining black tribes of Van Diemen’s Land. And when the first group of convicts from Macquarie Harbor was moved to Port Arthur, Russell soon saw their influence on the prisoners fresh from England: “They exercised a complete tyranny over them, and shortly rendered them as hardened, as reckless, and as hypocritical as they were themselves.” With Arthur’s attention distracted, the colonial government ruined morale by not keeping its word to the better prisoners:
Promises were sometimes held out through the commandant to well-conducted men, that their sentences should be shortly remitted in case of good conduct; that very good conduct rendered the men more useful in the settlement, and then the government detained them much longer. . . . The men, finding good conduct useless, reverted to bad practices, being rendered desperate.52
Little by little, a settlement rose at Port Arthur. At the end of 1832, Lieutenant-Colonel Logan of the 63rd Regiment made a tour of inspection of Tasman’s Peninsula and reported that, once it had a fast patrol boat that could cruise the shore looking for absconders, the place would be ready to take over from Macquarie Harbor.53 Two months later, in February 1833, the man who was to give Port Arthur its true penal shape disembarked at Hobart with a detachment of the 21st Fusiliers. This was Charles O’Hara Booth, destined to fulfill Arthur’s hopes by taking “the vengeance of the Law to the utmost limits of human endurance” on Tasman’s Peninsula. He would remain commandant at Port Arthur for eleven years. In 1833, when he took command, there were 475 prisoners on the Tasman Peninsula; by 1835 there were nearly 950; and the total number of convicts received by Port Arthur up to 1844, the last year of Booth’s command, was 6,002. About 6,000 more had gone there by 1853, the year transportation to Van Diemen’s Land ceased. All told, about 12,700 sentences were served at Port Arthur during its half-century of active life—about one in six of the 73,500 convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land. (Some prisoners, however, went there more than once.) The place was therefore of great importance in the penal scheme and played a much bigger part in the punishment of habitual criminals, or recidivists, than Macquarie Harbor or even Norfolk Island.54
Charles O’Hara Booth was a tough, vigilant man, whose taste for iron discipline was mingled with a liking for puns, Frenchifications and music-hall jollities. He had a strong sense of his job as role. In his journal, he called the Port Arthur convicts his “lions”; their tamer needed a certain histrionic poise. “Put on my annihilating countenance,” he wrote one evening when he had to face down 375 insubordinate prisoners on his own. “Raised my Stentorian voice and made them quake.”55
He was innately conservative and had no illusions about his ability to reform the Port Arthur convicts. He was there to discipline them and make them work, but any moral change seemed an unlikely bonus. He made his opinions clear to a French visitor, Captain Laplace, in 1839. How, Laplace inquired as they paced the night rounds of the settlement with Booth, had he achieved such quiescence with such minimal means—a dozen or so guards to supervise several hundred men, a low-security jail building? “By severe punishments, he replied, by impartial justice, as impassive as that of fate; by untiring vigilance; by demanding absolute silence from the prisoners.” Booth added that he saw to it that convicts were never insulted or sworn at, and that he rarely had them flogged because the lash “often exasperates them and drives them to crime instead of reforming them”; he preferred solitary confinement, which, “much dreaded . . . subdues them through boredom.” They came out of solitary “better than they went in,” but only for a little while; “the banter, the bad examples of their companions, a fatal pride, soon make them forget their good resolutions, and they become just as dangerous as before.” When depressed, as he sometimes was by illness, he would feel doubts. “Sick at Heart from the number of Boys obliged to punish,” he noted in his journal in 1838, after a particularly taxing day among the refractory juveniles of Point Puer. “Would that we had persons to work the system—with firmness but temper and Patience to witness the results of perseverance—find myself breaking constitutionally rapidly—this is a trying situation . . . but great good may be effected by firmness tempered with kindness and unremitting perseverance.” This was the only opinion on the aims, as distinct from the means, of prison policy that Booth committed to his diaries in Port Arthur. His journals were full of notes on hunting, which he loved; sixteen brace of quail bagged one day, nine kangaroos another, duck on the lagoon; the making of a purse from a kangaroo’s scrotum, or “pebble case” as he archly called it, “it being a very fine specimen from a ‘Fighting Buck.’” But of reflection on his job and the moral values it entailed, there is hardly a trace. Booth was not a reflective man.56
He had a name for justice, and even humanity, among his subordinates at Port Arthur. “We know he detests the use of [the lash],” Lemprière wrote, “and it is with regret, when he is compelled by the necessity of inflicting strict discipline, that he causes corporal punishment to be inflicted.”57 But when he used it he laid it on, handing out sentences of up to 100 lashes. Convicts regarded the Port Arthur cat-o’-nine-tails as unusually cruel—although the same had been said about the tools of flagellation at Macquarie Harbor. One of Port Arthur’s political prisoners, the Chartist John Frost (he had been sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered for leading an ill-armed band of insurrectionary miners from the Monmouth Hills against the English town of Newport after the mass arrests of Chartist leaders in 1839, but this was commuted to life transportation) claimed that “twenty-five lashes at Port Arthur . . . produced more suffering than 300 would have produced as they are inflicted in the Army.” In Van Diemen’s Land in the 1840s, “politicals” were relatively privileged, and Frost was never flogged. But his description of the hateful ritual, with “the flogger using every means in his power to break the spirit of those who suffered, and the sufferers determined to sustain the punishment unflinchingly,” was vivid enough:
The knout was made of the hardest whipcord, of an unusual size. The cord was put into salt water till it was saturated; it was then put into the sun to dry; by this process it became like wire, the eighty-one knots cutting the flesh as if a saw had been used.
Charles O’Hara Booth, Frost claimed, “would often witness this punishment with as much indifference as if he were looking at some philosophical experiment.”58
He would also muster the convicts to witness floggings, a practice that the Quaker missionaries Backhouse and Walker felt “has an exasperating effect upon bystanders” and risked provoking a general mutiny, “in spite of the military Guards; the Prisoners present at these times being between six and seven hundred and the Guard but forty in number.”59
Booth had solitary cells built, and special punishment cells, 7 feet by 4 feet and pitch dark, where “the occupant is not even allowed a knife to eat his food. . . . They throw in to him in the dark, as they would to a dog, a little food, and there is nothing but an old rug for him to lie upon. If he is wet he is obliged to remain in his wet clothes until the following morning.” Nights are cold on the Tasman Peninsula. For less “atrocious” offenders there were boxes like dog-kennels where the prisoner was chained, breaking stones from a pile in front of him; and if the irons were not heavy enough to suit his sins, he would go with “the log on his toes,” with a heavy balk of timber attached to his ankle-irons that he dragged as he walked.60
To scrutinize into the punishment records of Port Arthur men is to look into a microcosm of harsh, bureaucratic tedium. Its horror comes not from unrestrained cruelty (as the Gothic legends and popular horror stories of the place insisted) but rather from its opposite, the mechanical apportioning of strictly metered punishments designed to wear each prisoner down into bovine acceptance—Arthur’s criterion of moral reform. It is like looking into the memory of some dull god interminably counting fallen sparrows on his fingers. Here, as a sample, is three years from the punishment record of a Scottish horse-thief named Robert Williamson, born in 1812, who was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation at Inverness in 1832, arrived in Van Diemen’s Land on the John Barry in 1834 and later that year was sentenced to seven years in Port Arthur for the extreme unwisdom of stealing a pea-jacket and other nautical gear from Arthur’s former attorney-general, now a judge of the Supreme Court and passionate amateur yachtsman, Algernon Sidney Montagu:
1835
JAN. 3RD: Having a file in his possession: 6 weeks in Chain Gang.
FEB. 21ST: Neglect of Duty while at work: 6 weeks in Chain Gang.
MARCH 28TH: Breaking gaol and absenting himself without leave from the Public Works at Port Arthur . . . and remaining absent until apprehended this day at Sympathy Point [sic] by a party of Constables and Military: 75 lashes.
MARCH 28TH: Same date—having a variety of Government tools in his possession for the purpose of aiding him in his Escape from the Penitentiary . . . the Settlement Workshop having been broken into: 10 days Solitary Confinement in a Cell at the Coal Mine.
SEPT. 4TH: Absenting himself from his Gang: 10 days Solitary Confinet.
NOV. 6: Absent from his Gang for several hours: 10 Days ditto.
DEC. 3RD: Endeavouring to excite prisoners to Abscond: 6 months in Irons.
DEC. 19: Tampering with his Leg-Iron: 36 lashes.
1836
AUG. 13: Fishing contrary to orders: 3 weeks in Irons.
SEPT. 6: Having a quantity of Vegetables in his Possession: 1 month on chain gang.
SEPT. 20: Idleness: 3 Days Solitary Confinet.
OCT. 10: Idleness: To lodge in a Cell 10 nights.
OCT. 20: Fighting at Work: 48 hrs. solitary Confinet.
DEC. 28: Absenting himself from his Gang without leave: 14 days No. 1 Chaingang.
DEC. 29: Having a Knife improperly in his possession: 3 Days Solitary Confinet.
1837
JULY 15: Having a Towel improperly in his possession: 14 Days No. 2 Chaingang.
SEPT. 18: Making use of a most Grossly Indecent Expression and subsequent malicious Conduct towards a fellow prisoner:
10 Days Solitary Confinet.
OCT. 4: Absenting himself when going to the Hospital: 1 month in No. 2 Chaingang.
NOV. 28: Having a Crayfish in his possession and endeavouring to convey it into the Gaol: 1 month No. 2 Chaingang.61
Charles O’Hara Booth was an active commandant, roaming on foot and horseback through the bush of the Tasman Peninsula to drive his favorite projects along: a coal mine; a semaphore system that could communicate with Hobart; and the first Australian railway, powered not by steam but by convicts. But first he had to attend to the security system at Eaglehawk Neck, where Arthur had posted a permanent guard-station in 1831, after prisoners started escaping in numbers two years before Booth’s arrival. This wasp-waisted isthmus between the surf of Pirate’s Bay and the calm of Norfolk Bay, less than 100 yards wide, was the key to Port Arthur; it was and still is the only way a man could leave the Tasman Peninsula by land. Getting across it, therefore, became an obsessive focus of convict ingenuity. They walked, crept, ran, waded and even hopped. One prisoner, a former actor named William Hunt, “who in his younger days had belonged to a company of strolling mountebanks,” disguised himself as an enormous “boomer” or male kangaroo. He nearly got across to Forestier’s Peninsula before two picket-guards, thinking he really was a kangaroo, spotted him and gave chase, levelling their muskets. “Don’t shoot, I am only Billy Hunt,” the nervous marsupial squeaked, to their consternation.62
Booth soon put a stop to such doings. His “prudent measures,” Lemprière acknowledged, “have . . . rendered every attempt futile, nor does it appear that any man effected the passage across.” Eaglehawk Neck was dotted with sandy hummocks, which gave cover to an escaping man creeping by; and the surf blotted out the sound of footsteps. In 1832, before Booth arrived, the ensign in charge of the guard there had the smart idea of putting a string of nine tethered guard dogs across the Neck. To this line he added a row of oil lamps, which shed their light on a white band of crushed cockle-shells; these primitive searchlights made it still more difficult for a bolter to pass at night without his shadow being spotted, even if he got past the dogs. Booth increased the guard to twenty-five men, built guardhouses and sentry-boxes, and doubled the number of dogs. “Whether Port Arthur is an ‘Earthly Hell’ or not,” Lemprière ponderously quipped, “it has at all events its Cerberus . . . [T]hese dogs form an impassable line.”63 When convicts started trying to wade out into the water to get past the line, Booth put more dogs on platforms out from the shore. There may have been some truth to the legend that the guards habitually dumped offal and blood off the beaches to draw sharks, since there was a slaughtering-station a few miles away on Forestier’s Peninsula. But perhaps they just told the convicts they did.
To warn of escapes and crises in Port Arthur, and to receive messages from Hobart, Booth set up a chain of signal stations, the first long-range communication system in Australia. It was a “telegraph” without electricity, run by semaphores: tall poles set on hilltops and islands, each carrying three sets of double arms like railway signals. By a system of chains, each arm could be set at various angles, and each angle was allotted a numerical meaning. The number-groups translated into words, phrases and whole sentences through a codebook. Booth spent years of midnight oil on his signal book, which eventually contained thousands of number-groups referring to such matters as names, weather, runaway prisoners, supplies, tools, weapons, disease, food, places, measurements and distances. By 1844, the book listed 11,300 signals, which could be sent to Hobart through a relay of twenty-two stations perched on coastal headlands and islands around Storm Bay. In clear weather, it took less than half an hour to waggle a message to Hobart from Booth’s transmitter, a wooden pole as high as a ship’s mast, which dominated the settlement at Port Arthur. Local semaphores on the Tasman Peninsula could flash the news of a bolting convict from Port Arthur to Eaglehawk Neck in one minute flat.64
Deep in the sandstone about fifteen miles from Eaglehawk Neck, on the western side of Norfolk Bay, there was a seam of coal. What more chastening form of extra punishment than to turn convicts into miners, condemned to hard labor, darkness, extreme confinement and hourly fear of cave-ins? So Arthur reasoned, and told Booth to sink shafts there, worked by the most refractory prisoners. Before long, the commandant had built a large stone barracks for 170 men, whose apricot-colored ruins, fretted by wind and weather and underpinned by cramped, half-collapsed isolation cells, still gaze picturesquely over Norfolk Bay. The mineshafts, behind, are long closed. Working in them was much dreaded. Only eleven miners could attack the seam at a time, and each had to hew 30 trolleys-full or 2½ tons of coal a day. The deeper of the shafts was 100 feet below sea level, and seepage was a constant problem. Lumps of Port Arthur coal kept alight “for an incredible length of time,” but “when at first lighted they crack and throw out small pieces in great quantities, to the detriment of carpets, furniture, ladies’ gowns, etc.” Nevertheless the fuel sold in Hobart for one-third the price of New South Wales coal and was in great demand.65
Booth’s inventiveness shone forth, however, not from his mines but from his railway. It was a true curiosity, a small landmark in the history of transportation—in either sense of that word. It connected the dock at the head of Norfolk Bay, by Eaglehawk Neck, to the main settlement at Port Arthur some 4½ miles away. On it, supplies and people could be taken to the coal mines and the Neck without a long detour by sea around the peninsula. It was laid along a switchback route through the dense gum-and-fern forest; sawn hardwood rails about 6 inches by 3 inches were nailed to rough sleepers bedded in clay. Wooden bridges carried the line across the gullies. It had no engine; the power was supplied by convicts, propelling it at a trot, pushing against crossbars at front and rear. Its carriages were four-passenger carts, running on cast-iron mine-truck wheels. Such was the first passenger railway in Australia. It embarrassed some visitors, but on the other hand it was better than walking, especially for the ladies. The trucks of Booth’s railway could rattle downhill at 30 mph, a terrifying velocity at a time when people seldom went faster than a trotting horse. Colonel Godfrey Mundy, a visitor to Port Arthur in 1851, described how the convicts pushed the cart up to the top of “a long descent,”
when, gettting up their steam, down they rattled at tremendous speed—tremendous, at least, to lady-like nerves—the chains around their ankles chinking and clanking as they trotted along. . . . [T]he runners jumped upon the side of the trucks in rather unpleasant proximity with the passengers, and away we all went, bondsmen and freemen, jolting and swaying . . . a man sitting behind contrived, more or less, to lock a wheel with a wooden crowbar when the descent became so rapid as to call for remonstrance.
In a more pensive mood, Lieutenant-Governor Sir William Denison rode a similar convict railway at Ralph Bay Neck while on an official tour of inspection of Tasman Peninsula in 1847: “I must say that my feelings at seeing myself seated, and pushed along by these miserable convicts, were not very pleasant. It was painful to see them in the condition of slaves, which, in fact, they are, waiting for me up to their knees in water.”66
It must have given the children pause, too. For Port Arthur was not only a prison for the errant mature; it was also a school for young boys.
v
T H E V I S I T O R to Port Arthur in the 1830s and 1840s rarely failed to take a boat across Opossum Bay to a neck of land named Point Puer, where he could see, “climbing among the rocks and hiding or disappearing from our sight like land-crabs in the West Indies,” a colony of ragged pale-faced lads.67
Point Puer was aptly named, puer being Latin for “boy.” It was a prison for children between nine and eighteen years of age who, caught in the inexorable mechanism of British law, had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land. “Little depraved felons” was Arthur’s word for them. By the mid-1830s, they were arriving in disconcerting numbers, as the gross influx of transported felons steadily grew. Thus, out of 1,434 convicts disembarked at Hobart between January and September 1834, 240 were juveniles. In all, more than 2,000 such boys were transported to Van Diemen’s Land and went to the reformatory at Point Puer.68
The problem for Arthur and his three-man Board of Assignment was what to do with them. They were, to the last boy, either too young or too ignorant to have a trade or to be of the slightest use to a settler. These bewildered tykes, many of them hardened in theft and flashness, for whom no place could be found in the assignment system, were a dead weight on the government. Some were helpless, Arthur recognized, from “having been thrown upon the world totally destituted, others have become so from the tutelage of dissolute parents—and others have been agents of dexterous thieves about London—but all are objects of compassion.”69
In 1833, sixty-eight such lads were vegetating in the Prisoners’ Barracks in Hobart, and Arthur’s “compassion” expressed itself by sending them all to the Tasman Peninsula. They arrived in January 1834, all of them drunk, for on the ship they had broken into a six-dozen crate of wine and shared it with the adult convicts on board. After a sharp lecture from Commandant Booth, they were put in a large, drafty temporary barracks rigidly segregated from the main settlement, so that the adult prisoners would have no chance to “contaminate” them. Point Puer was well isolated, with a shoreline consisting mainly of sixty-foot cliffs and the sea around it full of boiling rips and dangerous currents—“a wretched, bleak, barren spot without water, wood for fuel or an inch of soil that is not . . . utterly valueless.” It would improve along with its inmates, or so the System assumed.70
The juvenile population at Port Arthur climbed rapidly. By the end of 1834, Booth had 161 boys under his eye; in 1836, 271; and in 1837, a special transport ship, the Frances Charlotte, was dispatched from England at the benevolent suggestion of Lord John Russell, with 139 boys and 10 adult overseers on board. By 1842, there were 716 lads on this dismal neck of land, and a jumble of barracks, workrooms and schoolrooms had grown up to shelter them.
They were to be schooled, taught trades, instructed in the truths of Christianity, and punished. “Keep in mind that these boys have been very wicked,” wrote Arthur to Booth in 1834, in the ominous accents of Dickens’s Wackford Squeers; “the utmost care should be taken to enforce upon their minds the disgraceful condition in which they are placed, whilst every effort should be made to eradicate their corrupt habits.” He did not want to see too much time wasted in “instructing the boys in reading and writing.” They needed practical skills, which would make useful assigned servants of them. They would acquire these from a hard daily grind. Up at 5:00 a.m., fold hammocks, assembly, Bible reading and prayer; breakfast at 7:00, hygiene inspection, muster, and classes in practical trades like joinery or bootmaking from 8:00 to 12:00. At midday, ablutions and another inspection; at 12:30, dinner; from 1:30 to 5:00, more apprentice work; wash and inspection again, and supper at 5:30; muster for school at 6:15; then school lessons for an hour, followed by evening prayers and Scripture reading, and bed at 7:30. Later the time for schoolwork in the evening was increased to two hours; it made little difference, however, as most of the boys were by then too fatigued to learn anything much.
The most successful part of this regime was the trade instruction, which was remarkably diverse. By 1837 it included baking, shoemaking, carpentry, tailoring, gardening, nail-making and blacksmithery. Enrollment in trade classes was limited, and most boys wanted to get into them. “As vacancies occur,” reported Booth, “the better disposed are selected to be placed at a trade, which is eagerly sought after.” They were anxious to get out of the laboring gangs, where every new arrival at Point Puer was introduced to “the use of the spade, the hoe and the grubbing-axe.” Boys in the laboring gangs did the donkey-work of Point Puer—the cleaning and scrubbing, the fetching and carrying—and they were worked hard; it may be no coincidence that, out of thirty-eight boys who died at Point Puer in the years 1834 to 1843, twenty-two were laborers. To be a sawyer or a joiner was far better. It also meant free skilled (or semi-skilled) labor for the Establishment, of the kind noted in the Port Arthur returns:
Construction of wheel-barrows, four cells, five coffins, 390 hammer-handles, six barrack stools, 13 school desks, 4 garden gates, and one set of stocks, and a pillory.
Turning of 216 masons’ mallets, 20 hat-pins, 50 belaying-pins, 2 bed-posts, and 243 ships’ blocks.
Making 17 pairs of Wellingtons @ 11s. pr., 24 Bluchers @ 5s. a pr., 2 prs. ladies’ shoes @ 3s. a pr., 1788 boots, prisoners’, @ 4s. a pr.
Point Puer boys made the nails, sewed the convicts’ “canary” uniforms of yellow and gray wool, painted the fences, forged the ax-heads and shaped the sledgehammer handles with their drawknives; the stonemasons among them laboriously cut the ashlar for the round security towers of Port Arthur, chiselled the moldings and ornamented keystones for the stone arches, hewed the angles of the pediments. The carpentry class made the elaborate pulpit and pews for the large neo-Gothic church, and in 1844 the thirty-four brickmakers turned out 155,000 bricks, some of which—bearing the thumb-marks left by those long-dead adolescents as they pushed the bricks from the sandstock molds—still lie scattered among the ruins of Point Puer.
There is no question that Point Puer boys received a trades education as good as (and probably better than) any they could have hoped to get in England in the 1830s. But their intellectual schooling was rudimentary. In 1842, some boys who had been there two or three years had difficulty reading words of one syllable; their arithmetic was no better. The only readers the pupils had were Bibles, supplied by a Wesleyan mission, and there were a few spelling-books and primers, but never enough; for eight hundred pupils there was “one very small blackboard seldom used” and not even a map of the world. The state of religious instruction was not much better. At first, it had been in the hands of Methodists, who reported in 1836 that “considerable attention is given to the boys’ religious instruction and several have been brought under the saving influence of the Gospel”; Backhouse and Walker, the visiting Quakers, vehemently dissented, finding the boys’ morals in “a most degraded state.” The Wesleyans were replaced in 1837 by an eager young Anglican catechist, Peter Barrow, fresh from running an orphanage for black foundlings on the coast of Sierra Leone. He thought a chaplain could reclaim half or even two-thirds of the Point Puer boys. He failed. Five years later, a few of the boys could parrot bits of an Anglican catechism, but none could recite the Commandments in correct order or show much grasp of scriptural history. Even their hymn-singing had declined, to the point that “the screaming is almost intolerable to any person whose ears have not been rendered callous.”71
The likelihood of producing good little Christians at such a place was slight. Like any borstal or boarding-school, Point Puer had not one but two social systems: an official one imposed by the commandant and the chaplain, and a tribal one invented by the boys. Benjamin Horne, reporting on the place in 1842, mentioned “a sort of tyranny of public opinion amongst themselves which every boy in the place must submit to as a slave, almost at peril of his life . . . [T]he maxim of the whole fraternity was that everyone must tell as many lies [to overseers and other authorities] as may be necessary for himself and the community.”72
The boy who ratted on his fellow prisoners would be persecuted and hazed half to death. The Point Puer boys had no reason to like their jailers; and although conditions there were at least no worse than an English orphanage or ragged-school, they were little better and its inmates loathed them. In particular, the boys hated the convict overseers as tyrants. If an overseer fell asleep on night dormitory watch, the lads would put out the lights and empty the communal chamber pot over his head. One especially unpopular overseer was so battered in such a nocturnal scuffle that he spent three months in the hospital. In 1843 one overseer, Hugh McGine, was murdered by a pair of fourteen-year-olds named Henry Sparks and George Campbell.73
If a boy at Point Puer found a middle way between the strictures of Authority and the pressure of his peers and managed to learn a trade, he could come out with a better chance of making good than most assigned men; if not, the System would simply grind him down. So it was with Thomas Willetts, a stunted boy of sixteen from Warwick, transported in 1834 for filching some stockings and garden vegetables, who in the course of five years at Point Puer and Port Arthur racked up a total of 35 lashes from the full cat-o’-nine tails, 183 strokes of the cane on his butt and 19 sentences of solitary confinement.
THOMAS WILLETTS No 1809
tried 12 March 1833, arrd V.D.L. Augt 1834.
|
Trade: None. |
Height: 4 ft. 11 in. |
|
Complexn: Dark |
Head: Small |
|
Hair: Brown |
Whiskers: None |
|
Visage: Small |
Forehead: M. Ht. |
|
Eyebrows: Brown |
Eyes: Grey |
|
Nose: Small |
Mouth: Med. Wide |
|
Chin: Small |
Remarks: Pockmarked, scar on Rt. Arm. |
Arrived in Van Diemen’s Land August 1834.
Convict. 7 Years’ Transportation.
Tried at Warwick, transported for stealing Stockings.
Character—Very Bad.
1834
DEC1 30TH: Assaulting fellow prisoner & attempt to deprive him of his bread: 24 lashes on the breech.
1835
SEPT. 9: Transferred to Port Arthur.
SEPT. 28: Improper & riotous conduct in the Cells: 15 lashes on the breech.
OCT. 21: Swearing, etc.: 7 days solitary confinement.
Nov. 18: Having Tobacco: 5 days ditto
1836
FEB. 22: Having turnips, 5 days ditto
Nov. 3: Insolent conduct to Overseer, 4 days ditto
Nov. 7: Talking in cells, 3 days ditto
DEC1 26: Most improper conduct to the Ass’ Sub-Constable in the Execution of his Duty: 36 stripes.
1837
JAN 26: Fighting in the Schoolroom, 3 Days Solitary, Bread & Water.
FEB. 18: Disorderly Conduct in School on Sunday, 5 Days ditto, ditto.
MARCH 20: Having a pair of Fustian Trowsers in his possession and most Improper Conduct towards the Assist. Sub-Constable: 36 Stripes on the Breech.
SAME DATE: Most Contemptuous Conduct in laughing immediately on leaving the Office after Sentence for the preceding Offence: 7 days’ solitary confinement on bread & water.
MAY 29: Having a pair of Boots improperly: 4 Days Solity Conft.
JUNE 26: Smoking in his hut contrary to orders: 3 weeks in No. 2 Chain Gang.
SEPT. 2ND: Gross Misconduct & Violence to Schoolmaster: 36 Stripes on the breech.
1838
JAN 17: Insolence: 3 Days solitary Confinement, Bread & Water.
MARCH 16: Gross insolence, 7 days ditto.
APRIL 19: Improper Conduct towards a fellow Boy: 10 days ditto.
JUNE 25: Talking in church during Divine Service, 48 hrs. soly conft on Bd & Wr.
JULY 7: Striking a fellow prisoner: 36 Stripes on the breech.
JULY 28: Talking in the Cells and Insolence when checked, 3 days solitary, Bd & Wr.
AUGUST 3: Having his Face disgracefully disfigured, 48 hrs. soly confmt.
AUGUST 16: Gross indecency on his going to the cells, 4 days ditto.
OCTOBER 1ST: Absenting himself without leave from Public Works at Port Arthur and remaining absent until apprehended and brought back: 7 days ditto.
1839
MARCH 5: Absconding: 35 lashes.
MARCH 20: Absconding: 2 years hard labour in Chain Gang, Port Arthur—conduct to be reported to Lieutenant Governor.
JULY 18: Disorderly Conduct: 24 hrs. solitary conft.
OCT1 9: Having a Silk Stock in possession improperly: 1 month on No. 2 Chain Gang.
DEC 5: Neglect of Duty and refusing to work: 1 month ditto.74
On skins like his, the flaws of Arthur’s system were glaringly inscribed. But however wretched the life of the “incorrigible,” the “fractious” and the “refractory” could be made at Port Arthur, their sufferings were slight compared to the fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines under Arthur’s reign.
vi
COLONEL ARTHUR’S last big problem was the Tasmanian blacks; and he was theirs. By 1824, the year he came to Van Diemen’s Land, a vicious, undeclared and seemingly unfinishable guerrilla war had been dragging on between whites and blacks for two decades. Its first shots were fired at Risdon Cove in 1804, a few months after the first landing. Years later, Edward White, a former convict, told a Committee for Aboriginal Affairs how it had been. On May 3, 1804, he was hoeing ground by the creek when a party of some three hundred Aborigines, men, women and children, came out of the bush, driving a mob of kangaroos before them. The blacks were strung out in a big crescent, between the ‘roos and the water. They carried clubs but no spears, and White saw that they were not a war-party; all they meant to do was kill the cornered game, build their fires and have a corroborree. He remembered how “they looked at me with all their eyes . . . [they] did not threaten me; I was not afraid of them.” Nevertheless he ran off to tell the soldiers, who loaded their muskets and marched on the tribespeople. “The Natives did not attack the soldiers; they would not have molested them.” Nevertheless the soldiers trained a carronade on them point-blank and blasted them with grapeshot. Nobody counted how many of the unarmed blacks were slaughtered, but at the end of the massacre the colonial surgeon Jacob Mountgarrett, prompted by some anthropological whim, salted down a couple of casks of their bones and sent them to Sydney.75
There may have been four thousand Aborigines in Van Diemen’s Land when the whites landed; by Arthur’s time there were considerably fewer, although it is hardly possible to guess how many. Perhaps ten blacks were killed for every white, perhaps twenty. At first the dirty little war sputtered its way around Hobart and the banks of the Derwent, as settlers in the starvation years competed against blacks for the kangaroos. Sometimes whites killed blacks for sport. In 1806 two early bushrangers, John Brown and Richard Lemon, “used to stick them, and fire at them as marks whilst alive.” Another escaped convict, James Carrott or Carrett, abducted an Aborigine’s wife near Oyster Bay, killed her husband when he came after them, cut off his head and forced her to wear it slung around her neck in a bag “as a plaything.”76 There were rumors that kangaroo-hunters would shoot blacks to feed their dogs. Two whites cut the cheek off an aboriginal boy and forced him to chew and swallow it. At Oatlands, north of Hobart, convict stock-keepers kept aboriginal women as sexual slaves, secured by bullock-chains to their huts. On the Bass Strait coast, marauding sealers would try to buy women from the tribes; the usual offer was four or five sealskins for a woman, but if the Aborigines would not sell, they would shoot the men and kidnap the women. When one of these women tried to run away from the sealers, they trussed her up, cut off her ears and some flesh from her thigh and made her eat it. All this and more, the convict pioneer James Hobbes remarked, with some understatement, “was known by the tribes, and operated on their minds.”77
The pattern of violence between black and white in Van Diemen’s Land was fully established by 1815. It went on against a background of proclamations by the lieutenant-governor—Collins, Davey and Sorell all issued them—enjoining the settlers not to provoke or persecute the blacks and stressing that they had the full protection of English law. Their utterances weighed nothing against the reality of invasion: The whites were on the blacks’ land, and grabbing as much of it as they could. No colonists were prepared to consider such two-legged animals as beings with prior rights.
So the war of random encounter inexorably changed into one of extermination, as the settlements and the stock-pastures spread. The late 1820s began a roaring boom in sheep-farming and wool exports. Some stock-breeders got three lambings every two years. In 1827 there were 436,256 sheep in Van Diemen’s Land. By 1830 there were 682,128, an increase of more than 55 percent. By 1836 the ovine population had risen by another third, to 911,357—20 sheep for every white person in the colony. The export figures, in pounds sterling, tell their own story of growth:78
|
YEAR |
GROSS EXPORTS |
WOOL EXPORTS |
|
1825 |
£ 44,498 |
£ 12,543 |
|
1827 |
59,912 |
9,089 |
|
1830 |
141,745 |
57,724 |
|
1832 |
152,967 |
63,145 |
|
1836 |
540,221 |
220,739 |
This new prosperity affected the look, the self-esteem, the very fiber of Vandemonian life. “Trade flourishes exceedingly,” wrote Richard Stickney, a Quaker emigrant, to his sister Sarah in 1834; there are
rows of shops in the first London style and elegant houses are springing up like magic. The Sperm Whale fishery is carried on successfully and to a great extent, whilst Wool is becoming a greatly increasing article of export. The peach tree is loaded with fruit without the aid of a gardener. . . . I don’t think England has a colony where everything appears so much like home as this. The scarcety of the Black Natives, . . . the excellent roads, the fashionable appearance of the well-dressed inhabitants, carriages without number and good horses. It really has not the dull look of a Colony at all but the bustle and activity of an English seaport. A stranger might easily fancy himself in England.79
In 1829 the “scarcety of the Black Natives” was not so pronounced, and no savages would be allowed to interfere with growth. But the sheep were destroying the Aborigines’ food base by displacing kangaroos and other game. By the late 1820s, retaliatory raids by tribesmen against sheep had become a constant nuisance: They speared the stock and left them dead on the ground, often without eating them, as a sign of contempt; they robbed and burned outlying huts and, although frontal attacks on homesteads were rare, they kept convict shepherds in continuous terror. Out of these scattered forays, by 1829, a general strategy seemed to be emerging. The idea that they had developed “a systematic plan of attacking the settlers and their possessions,” thought Archdeacon Broughton, chairman of a committee convened in 1830 by Arthur to inquire into the causes of black hostility to white settlers, “has been but too completely verified by the events of the last two years. . . . It is manifest that they have lost the sense of the superiority of white men, and the dread of the effect of fire-arms.”80
The Aborigines had learned not to attack en masse, charging into the muzzles of the settlers’ guns. Instead, they harassed the periphery of settlement, the stock-huts and shepherds’ cottages. In the first three months of 1830, there were almost thirty such incidents, involving the death of eight whites. The tribesmen set fire to thatched roofs to drive the whites into the open. They lured stockmen into the bush away from their huts where they could be more easily killed, and the undefended hut was plundered and burned. Then the blacks would melt away into the hills, where few whites could catch up with them. One settler, Gilbert Robertson, complained that there was no “effectual mode of pursuing them. . . . [T]hey cannot be surrounded by several parties coming upon them; they go all over the whole island; they always keep regular sentries, and pass over dangerous grounds, and by the brinks of the most dangerous precipices.” He had a low opinion of the soldiers’ ability to pursue the black marauder, declaring that they were “quite useless . . . they will not exert themselves.” Settlers, police and convicts did better. Sometimes they hunted tribal groups down like kangaroos, shooting them from horseback; but the efficient way to catch up with the Aborigines was to follow them by night and mark their campfire smoke in the morning. One party of five or six constables from Campbell Town, according to Robertson (although his story was indignantly denied by other whites), ambushed an encampment of natives in a gully between two cliffs and slaughtered seventy of them; and when the gunsmoke cleared, they went down among the rocks, dragged out the terrified women and children and brained them. This, he thought, put paid to the whole tribe.81
When whites did such things, they showed necessary rigor; when Aborigines threw their spears from ambush, they proved their treachery. Whites “defended their interests,” while blacks “perpetrated atrocities” and “committed the most wanton and unprovoked acts of barbarity.” Faced with the black resistance, the settlers began sliding toward panic. Arthur, after a long and searching field trip among the agitated settlers of the outer districts that had borne the brunt of aboriginal resistance, noted a curious passivity in them. “The indifference . . . is quite remarkable, and strikingly manifests that people are always much more ready to complain of evils than disposed to exert themselves to overcome them.” Instead of whingeing, he thought, they should get guns and learn to use them—“the only security which can be given, unless a safety-guard were placed in every dwelling, a thing which is impossible.”82
Arthur’s Committee for Aboriginal Affairs knew where the real blame for this ghastly situation lay, and declared that “every degree of moderation and forbearance” was due to the “ignorant, debased and unreflecting” blacks, so cruelly wronged by “miscreants who were a disgrace to our name and nation.” But on the other hand, one had to admit that “the Natives are now visiting the injuries they have received, not on the actual defenders, but on a different and totally innocent class.” This reflected Arthur’s own delusion that the only people to blame for the murder and harassment of the Aborigines were escaped convicts, sealers and other colonial trash—never the respectable settlers, who “always” showed “kindness and humanity.”83
Some of these colonial innocents aired brisk and strong views on how to handle the blacks. “They must be captured or exterminated,” opined John Sherwin, merchant, whose house on the River Clyde near Bothwell had just been burned to the ground. He said that others (not he) had proposed setting up “decoy huts, containing flour and sugar, strongly impregnated with poison.” He claimed he did not know of any atrocities whites had done to blacks; all that was exaggeration. But if they did not take steps soon, by bringing in blacktrackers and bloodhounds from Sydney and hunting the pests down, no one could live in the bush, for “the Natives wish to have their lands to themselves.” His fellow settler George Espie wanted to see 150 armed convicts sent after the natives, with a promise of a ticket-of-leave for every two or three blacks a man brought in—“they would shoot more than they would capture.” Roderic O’Connor, a red-hot Irishman who accumulated vast estates while serving Arthur as magistrate and land commissioner, growled that armed posses of convicts might do the trick; he knew of one man named Douglas Ibbets who had wiped out half the “Eastern mob” of natives with his double-barrelled shotgun. “Some of the worst characters would be the best to send after them.” An elderly farmer named Brodribb claimed he knew of no rational cause for the blacks’ new ferocity, that most settlers treated them kindly, that he really “cannot form an idea if the Natives are displeased at our taking possession of the country”—and so on.84
The Aborigines, in fact, were in their last frenzy of resistance. In 1828 Arthur reported to Goderich that “I have been pressingly called upon by the settlers . . . to adopt some measure which should free them from these troublesome assailants, and from the nuisance of their dogs.”85 He felt he had to take “some decisive step,” and he thought the most likely one was to round them all up and put them—every last Aborigine on Van Diemen’s Land—on one of the islands in Bass Strait, give them temporary rations, teach them to raise crops and so convert them by force from nomadic hunter-gatherers into a “stationary . . . civilization.” But he realized it would not work:
They already complain that the white people have taken possession of their country, encroached upon their hunting grounds, and destroyed their natural food, the kangaroo; and they doubtless would be exasperated to the last degree to be banished altogether from their favourite haunts; and as they would be ill-disposed to receive instructions from their oppressors, any attempt to civilize them . . . must fail.86
Besides, Arthur knew where the blame lay: “All aggression originated with the white inhabitants, and . . . much ought to be endured in return before the blacks are treated as an open and accredited enemy by the government.”
So instead of sending them to a miserable death on an island, Arthur proposed an early form of apartheid to keep them out of the settled districts. His idea was to round them up and move them all to the north-east coast of Van Diemen’s Land, “the best sheltered and warmest part,” where they would be fed and clothed by the government and protected from the annihilating fury of white farmers.
He issued a proclamation. It repeated what everyone knew: that the whites (especially convicts: shepherds, stockmen and sealers) were the first aggressors, but that now the black resistance was making “advances in art, system and method.” So ways must be found to “restrict the intercourse” between white and black “by a legislative Enactment, of a permanent nature”—putting them beyond a pale of settlement in the northeastern corner. In the meantime, there would be a line of military guard posts stationed along the confines of the settled districts, which the Aborigines must not cross:
And I do hereby strictly command and order all Aborigines immediately to retire and depart from, and for no reason, and on no pretence, save as hereinafter provided, to re-enter such settled districts, or any portions of land cultivated and occupied by any person whomsoever, on pain of forcible expulsion therefrom, and such consequences as may be necessarily attendant on it.87
This magnificently festooned slab of imperial boilerplate meant nothing to the blacks, who could not read and kept striking back against their white tormentors as best they could, while suffering the “necessarily attendant” consequences.
So Arthur proclaimed martial law against the Aborigines in the settled center of the island. It would not extend to designated outer areas, to which he hoped the blacks would drift—the Tasman Peninsula, the northeast and southwest corners, all the country south of Mount Wellington to the ocean including Bruny Island, and the whole western coast.88 This must have seemed a fair deal to Arthur, since the “settled districts” had few kangaroos left and could not support the traditional forms of aboriginal life, whereas the areas he had exempted from martial law and hoped to push the blacks into were wild, untrammelled, unlikely ever to be settled, full of game, and constituted about half the land area of Van Diemen’s Land. But the Aborigines did not think it fair.
Meanwhile, the whites kept slaughtering the blacks, women and children usually first, with musket and fowling piece, cutlass and ax. By 1830, there were perhaps two thousand Aborigines left alive in Van Diemen’s Land.89 Some settlers took Arthur’s proclamation of martial law as a license to kill. In February 1830 Arthur’s colonial secretary tried to recall them to a sense of measure and proportion:
The repeated orders which have been put forth by this Government must convey the idea . . . that there exists a horde of savages in Van Diemen’s Land whose prowess is equal to their revengeful feelings; thereas every settler must be conscious that his foe consists of an inconsiderable number of a very feeble race, not possessing physical strength, and quite undistinguished by personal courage.90
But the pressure on Arthur to solve the “black problem” was intense, and he must have reflected that a solution would amend his own extreme unpopularity with the colonists, for people will love an autocrat if they believe he is a savior. Suppressing the Aborigines was the only major issue on which every settler in Van Diemen’s Land was ready to work with Arthur and the military. “How cordially and entirely the whole community unite with the earnest desire of the Government!” he reported to Murray in London.91
Reading Arthur’s reports in London, Sir George Murray, secretary of state for the colonies, had felt a tingle of premonition: “The whole race of [Van Diemen’s Land Aborigines] may, at no distant period, become extinct. . . . [A]ny line of conduct, having for its avowed, or for its secret object, the extinction of the Native race, could not fail to leave an indelible stain upon the character of the British Government.”92
Arthur decided to bring every white—settlers as well as military—into one concerted effort to expel the aboriginal tribes from the settled areas of the island, where they had become such a menace to Europeans, and bottle them up in the Tasman Peninsula, between Forestier’s Neck and Eaglehawk Neck, where they could be kept imprisoned forever by a small garrison at either end. This operation was called the Black Line. He may not have expected it to succeed; it was, as Robson rightly called it, “an excellent public relations exercise to show that the highly unpopular Arthur apparently had the welfare of the colonists at heart.”93 But if he wanted to preserve any loyalty among the colonists, he had little choice. The settlements were almost hysterical with fear that the coming spring of 1830 would produce a bloodbath. The Big River and Oyster Bay tribes had become “too much enjoined in the most rancorous animosity to be spared the most vigorous measures against them.”94 In a meeting with his Executive Council late in August 1830, Arthur succumbed to the pressure and agreed to a spring offensive against the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes.
It took the form of an immense pheasant-drive, under the command of Major Douglas of the 63rd Regiment. Every white man in Van Diemen’s Land, Arthur reported to London, joined in it “with the most zealous and cheerful alacrity.”95 The main line of hunters stretched across two-thirds of the island, from St. Patricks’ Head on the east coast to Quamby Bluff in the Western Tiers; it was supported by two flanking lines, one in the east and the other in the southwest, to catch any Aborigines who slipped by the ends of the main line. Some 2,200 men formed the Black Line—550 troops from the 17th, 57th and 63rd Regiments, 700 convicts, and the rest free settlers. They carried between them a thousand muskets, 30,000 rounds of ammunition and 300 pairs of handcuffs with which to subdue the resistant natives. Off they set on October 7, 1830: redcoats sweltering in their woollen uniforms under the load of knapsacks and muskets, mounted dragoons plodding forward in a clink of steel and a creaking of leather, stout farmers with their fowling pieces, cornstalk boys with red faces and hard eyes. Keeping the line as best they could, they surged slowly downward toward the Tasman Peninsula along paths determined for them by the officers of the Survey Department, hallooing and cursing and beating the bush for its black wraiths, firing musketry into the air and blowing bugles. Their movements, Arthur reported, were “much better executed than could have been anticipated.” At night the bush flickered with guard fires and one man in three stood sentry duty to prevent the escape of the crafty foe.”
It took the Black Line seven weeks to converge, like the closing of a fishing net, on the peninsula. A few Aborigines were spotted, and there were some brief skirmishes; two Oyster Bay tribesmen were captured and two others shot, but Arthur was certain that the main mass of them were fleeing ahead of the Black Line toward the Tasman Peninsula. “The forces are now . . . moving forward in full hopes of success,” he reported from the town of Sorell on November 20, 1830.
When the net closed, it was empty. The Black Line had caught two Aborigines, a man and a small boy. All the rest had slipped through. The enterprise had been a fiasco, and for once Arthur’s detailed and prolix reports to London became terse, almost evasive. Yet the Big River tribe had been driven into comparative seclusion beyond the Western Tiers, and the Oyster Bay tribesmen were split up and forced from their habitual territory; so, from the whites’ point of view, the episode could be called a strategic victory, even though it did not produce all the results Arthur hoped for. It also suggested that there were fewer Aborigines in the settled districts than Major Douglas had supposed.96 This did wonders for the settlers’ morale. Arthur felt he could move from a military solution to one of “pacification.” This new strategy took the mild, quietly convivial and persistent form of an emigrant house-builder from London, George Augustus Robinson (1788-1866), the “Conciliator.”97
Robinson had been interested in the Aborigines from the moment he arrived in Van Diemen’s Land. He had a philanthropic vision: He would bring these chafed and resentful people, by mildness and understanding, into the fold of white law and religion—but not before he, unlike all previous missionaries and go-betweens, had come to understand their ways and language. In 1828, in the lull before the final desperate retaliations of the black tribes, Arthur had advertised for a man who might be able to conciliate them. Robinson had put himself forward and was accepted. He tried to evangelize the blacks on Bruny Island in 1829, but his real work began the following year, when he went on an arduous eight-month trek into the wilderness of the southwest and west coast searching for surviving tribal groups of Aborigines. He had a party with him made up of trusty convict servants, an aboriginal chief from Bruny Island named Woorrady and another from the Swanport district named Eumarrah, four black tribesmen and three women.
One of the latter was a bright, promiscuous girl named Trucanini, about eighteen years old, also from Bruny Island.98 She was very small, only 4 feet 3 inches high, and had pronounced curly whiskers; in other respects, all white witnesses agreed, she was remarkably attractive—for an Aborigine. As a child, she had seen her mother stabbed to death in a night raid by whites; later, a sealer named John Baker had kidnapped two of her tribal sisters and her blood sister, Moorina, and taken them in slavery to the tribe of white pirates that lived on Kangaroo Island, far to the west off the coast of South Australia. Her stepmother was abducted by the convict mutineers of the brig Cyprus and must have died as they were seeking China; she was never heard from again. Around 1828, she was crossing from the mainland to Bruny Island with several tribesmen, to one of whom she was “betrothed,” in a boat manned by two convict loggers. In mid-channel, the whites seized the black men and threw them overboard; when they grabbed for the gunwale and tried to haul themselves up, the loggers chopped their hands off and left them to sink. They then rowed her ashore and raped her. Trucanini, one would presume, had every reason to hate the whites. In fact she sought their company thereafter and was busy becoming a sealers’ moll, sterile from gonorrhea, hanging around the camps and selling herself for a handful of tea and sugar, when Robinson and his guide Woorrady persuaded her to come on their long, strange journey of “conciliation” to the remaining tribes of Van Diemen’s Land.
They all set off in the winter of 1830, ill-equipped and badly provisioned, and suffered appalling hardships from exposure, hunger and scurvy. But they worked their way around the west coast, from Port Davey to Macquarie Harbor and thence to Cape Grim, the aptly named northwesternmost tip of Van Diemen’s Land. From there they struck east along the coast and reached Launceston early in October, just after Arthur’s Black Line had begun working south.
Robinson was to venture upon five more such expeditions, and by the end of 1834 Robinson had made contact with every tribe and group of Aborigines left in Tasmania. Always the method was the same: opening civilities with presents and food, and a winning of the shy or hostile blacks’ confidence with the help of Woorrady and Trucanini; a compilation of their basic vocabularies; notes on their ceremonies and religious customs, as far as he could determine them; a friendly parting, and then a new visit with promises of sanctuary. If they would “come in” with him, the Conciliator told these dying and frightened remnants of their race, they would be given a safe haven where no white man would persecute them, where they would have food and clothing and peace. Slowly, the blacks followed him; and when he brought in the last of the once-feared warriors of the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes—a pathetic group of sixteen people—he was greeted like a Roman conqueror in Hobart. A colonial artist, Benjamin Duterreau, painted him posed with “his” Aborigines; the girl on the right, leading a doubtful native by one hand and pointing at Robinson with the other, is Trucanini, the archtraitor to her race.
Thus, by 1834, the last Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land had followed their evangelical Pied Piper into a benign concentration camp, set up on Flinders Island in Bass Strait. There, Robinson planned to Europeanize them. They were given clothes, new names, Bibles and elementary schooling. They were shown how to buy and sell things, so that they might acquire a reverence for property. They were allowed to elect their own police. In the main, however, they simply died—of accidie, deracination and new diseases. In 1835, only 150 Aborigines were left. Little by little, they wasted away and their ghosts drifted out over the water. Robinson left Flinders in 1839 and returned to the Australian mainland. His successors chose to treat Flinders Island as a jail, and its dwindling colony of Aborigines as prisoners. Occasionally a girl would be flogged, but only for moral offenses. In 1843 there were fifty-four Aborigines alive. Three years later, amid blood-curdling prophecies of a new black war from the colonial press, the survivors were returned to the mainland and settled on a property at Oyster Cove on the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, near Hobart. There they guzzled rum, which was thoughtfully provided by their keepers; they posed impassively for photographers in front of their filthy slab huts; and they waited to die. In 1855 the census of natives was three men, two boys and eleven women, one of whom was Trucanini.
The last man died in 1869. His name was William Lanne and he was described as Trucanini’s “husband,” although he was twenty-three years her junior. Realizing that his remains might have some value as a scientific specimen, rival agents of the Royal College of Surgeons in London and the Royal Society in Tasmania fought over his bones. A Dr. William Crowther, representing the Royal College of Surgeons, sneaked into the morgue, beheaded Lanne’s corpse, skinned the head, removed the skull and slipped another skull from a white cadaver into the black skin. This gruesome ruse was soon unmasked, for when a medical officer picked the head up, “the face turned round and at the back of the head the bones were sticking out.” In pique, the officials decided not to let the Royal College of Surgeons get the whole skeleton; so they chopped off the feet and hands from Lanne’s corpse and threw them away. The lopped, dishonored cadaver of the last tribesman was then officially buried, unofficially exhumed the next night and dissected for its skeleton by representatives of the Royal Society. It was, one of them remarked with some understatement, a “dirty job.” Lanne’s skeleton then disappeared; and the head, which Crowther consigned by sea to the Royal College of Surgeons, vanished too. It seems that the ineffable doctor had packaged it in a sealskin, and before long the bundle stank so badly that it was tossed overboard.
Trucanini wept and raged inconsolably when she was told of the fate of Lanne’s body. She had long been frightened of death and of the evil spirit Rowra who would exact the revenge of the dead tribes she had betrayed; but now a further terror joined those. She begged a clergyman to make sure that when she died, she would be wrapped in a bag with a stone at her feet and dropped into the deepest part of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel—“because I know that when I die, the Tasmanian Museum wants my body.” By 1873, the last of her black companions was dead and Trucanini was taken to Hobart, where she lingered on in a wretched aura of colonial celebrity, invented by the whites, as the “Queen of the Aborigines.” One May evening in 1876 she was heard to scream, “Missus, Rowra catch me, Rowra catch me!” A stroke felled her, and she lay in coma for five days. Her last words, as the dark peeled back for a moment from her terrified consciousness, were, “Don’t let them cut me, but bury me behind the mountains.”
The government arranged a funeral procession for the last Tasmanian on May 11, 1876. Huge crowds lined the pavements to watch her small, almost square coffin roll by; they followed it to the cemetery, and saw it lowered into a grave. It was empty. Fearing some unseemly public disturbance, the government had buried her corpse in a vault of the Protestant Chapel in the Hobart Penitentiary the night before. So Trucanini lay not “behind the mountains,” but in jail. In 1878 they dug her up again and sloughed the flesh off her bones, then boiled them and nailed them in an apple crate, which lay in storage for some years. The crate was about to be thrown out when someone from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery read the faded label. The bones were strung together, and the skeleton of Trucanini went into a glass case in the museum, where it remained until feelings of public delicacy and humanitarian sentiment caused it to be removed, in 1947, to the basement. In 1976, the centenary of her death, the authorities—not knowing what else to do with this otherwise ineradicable dweller in their closet—had it cremated, and the ashes were scattered on the waters of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. Just 140 years had passed since the day in 1836 when the virtuous and unbending proconsul, Sir George Arthur, had been ushered weeping onto the Elphinstone at the New Wharf and, to the cheers of several hundred free Vandemonians, had sailed away to England, his baronetcy and the deserved gratitude of the Crown.