12

Metastasis

i

I N 1 8 1 5, the year Napoleon was crushed and England could once more turn her strength to building an empire, the map of white settlement in New South Wales was hardly more than a patch, consisting only of Sydney and Parramatta. The rest was void, the scarcely penetrated green continuum of bush, with a few tracks winding their frail, dusty capillaries toward inland farms.

By 1825 this had changed. There were specks on the coast north of Sydney—Newcastle, Port Macquarie, Moreton Bay—scattered along a thousand miles of coastline and tenuously linked by ships; and Norfolk Island, which had been abandoned on Macquarie’s orders, was resettled.

These little footholds were hamlets of punishment. They had not been created by the hopes of settlers. A growing convict population, and increased severity from the authorities, had forced them into existence. They were, as the phrase went, “the Botany Bay of Botany Bay”—enclaves of banishment in a land of exile. The flood of convicts to Australia had now begun in earnest. From 1820 to 1831 the number of convicts serving sentences there would never be less than 40 percent of the total population. The creation of the penal out-stations was a response to crisis, even though, in practice, less than one prisoner in ten ever served time in one. If Australia was going to scare English criminals, the penal out-stations would have to terrify colonial ones.

By 1825, the English authorities knew—and in fact, had come to accept—that their ways of dealing with crime had failed in the past, were not working now and would be unlikely to succeed in the foreseeable future. The crime rate in England had not dropped; thus one had to conclude that transportation did not deter. The question of “reformation” was not quite as important, since so few people came back from Australia. In 1826, for instance, only about 7 percent of the convicts freed at the end of their sentences chose to return to England, an eloquent comment on what they believed their chances were there.¹

Nevertheless the criminal-justice system was by now addicted to transportation and had no real alternatives. In 1821 the government had built an experimental penitentiary at Millbank on the Thames, designed to hold eight hundred people—minor criminals, both men and women, whose offenses would have brought them 7 years’ transportation. It cost half a million pounds and was a failure; its cold cells and defective drains killed the prisoners like flies. Neither public nor government opinion was ready for wholesale jail reform yet; and, in the meantime, transportation was far cheaper than building new prisons. Besides, the idea of the penitentiary was seen as an American invention; no Tory and few Whigs desired to mimic the ideas of that rebellious ex-colony.

In 1822 the arch-conservative Lord Castlereagh killed himself in a fit of depression and Sir Robert Peel became home secretary. Peel oversaw the removal of some hanging statutes. But what replaced hanging, as punishment, was only more transportation. Peel was a timid reformer and, when it came to thinking about the practical issues of what one did with criminals, his imagination failed. “I admit the inefficiency of transportation to Botany Bay, but the whole subject . . . is full of difficulties,” he wrote to the Reverend Sydney Smith. “I can hardly devise anything as a secondary punishment in addition to what we have at present.” The hulks were full to bursting with a population of four to five thousand felons. He could not use public chain gangs, for they would “revolt public opinion” and the penitentiary had failed. Only Australia was left to cope with a swelling crime wave. “The real truth is the number of convicts is too overwhelming for the means of proper and effectual punishment.”²

There must still be a place of terror. About the volume of crime, and therefore of transportation, there was little doubt. After 1815, England began to pay the full price for its recent defeat in war, its collapsing labor relations and a succession of failed harvests. Semi-capitalized industry was destroying the old base of town manufacture, the apprentice system; enclosure and famine were sending the rural workers of England and Ireland into paupery. The crime rate leaped, and with it the numbers of transported convicts. From 1810 to 1814, an average of 678 felons a year went to Australia; this mere trickle could easily be absorbed, as unskilled labor, by the assignment system. But from 1815 to 1819, the yearly average trebled, to 2,090; from 1820 to 1824, it went to 2,756. The British Government could not have cut down on transportation even if it had wanted to. It therefore sought ways to make it more severe, more frightening—to remove the impression, as one Lord Chief Justice put it, that it was “a summer excursion.” None of its policymakers had ever been to Australia and all of them saw it through a narrow band of information. John Bigge’s reports, in their thorough detail and unbending class bias, were the authoritative text; and Bigge’s message confirmed the basic intention of the government: that Australia’s eventual fate as a community of free citizens mattered infinitely less than its expedient role as England’s social sewer. The Tories wanted a governor who would think less—much less—about the convicts’ future reclamation than about their present punishment.

Sir Ralph Darling (1775–1858) was their man: a tough, censorious, narrow-minded veteran of the Peninsular War, who arrived in Sydney at the age of fifty in 1825. Morally and intellectually, he was a duller being than George Arthur. He, too, had spent time in a hot climate as the British proconsul of a changing slave state. The prelude to his Australian service had been four years as British military governor of Mauritius, a colony of defeated France. As its virtual dictator, he had done his heavy-handed best to protect the frail rights of the 70,000 blacks on the sugar plantations against their French owners, demanding snap-to obedience and resenting every demurral from his policies. He carried these habits to Australia, where he soon alienated everyone except the Exclusives, who were cheered by his unquestioning obedience to London and his extreme dislike of anything that smacked of democracy, reform or (where convicts were concerned) ordinary mercy. “A cold, stiff, sickly person,” thought Sir James Dowling, a new puisne judge of New South Wales, on meeting Darling for the first time in 1828. “He had none of the frankness and ease of a soldier, and I absolutely froze in his presence.”³

Like Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land, Darling in New South Wales was determined to carry out the suggestions of the Bigge Report to the letter. He would roll back Macquarie’s liberalism, whose vestiges had lingered under Governor Brisbane. Instead of treating the prisoners on their merits, he wanted a rigid, undeviating standard of punishment, “with a view to the prevention of Crime at Home.”

The basis of this standard was the cat-o’-nine tails, whose whistle and dull crack were as much a part of the aural background to Australian life as the kookaburra’s laugh. “Flogging in this country,” one old hand in the 1820s remarked to the newly arrived Alexander Harris, “is such a common thing that nobody thinks anything of it. I have seen young children practising on a tree, as children in England play at horses.”⁴

Most floggings by then were confined to 25, 50, 75, 100 or, on very rare occasions, 150 lashes. By the standards of earlier days when punishments of 500 lashes were handed out by the likes of Foveaux and Marsden, such inflictions may sound light. But they were not; and in any case, a magistrate could stack up separate floggings for different aspects of the same deed.

Every stroke was noted and compiled, and in 1838 Governor Sir George Gipps submitted to Long Glenelg a summary of corporal punishment inflicted on convicts in New South Wales over the years 1830 to 1837:⁵

	NO. OF	TOTAL OF	AVG. LASHES	MALE CONVICT
YEAR	FLOGGINGS	LASHES	PER FLOGGING	POPULATION
1830	2,985	124,333	41	18,571
1831	3,163	186,017	58	21,825
1832	3,816	164,001	43	24,154
1833	5,824	242,865	41	23,357
1834	6,328	243,292	38	25,200
1835	7,103	332,810	46	27,340
1836	6,904	304,327	44	29,406
1837	5,916	268,013	45	32,102

Alexander Harris’s Settlers and Convicts, or Recollections of Sixteen Years’ Labour in the Australian Backwoods (1847) offers some vivid reflections on these commonplace events:

Officers, and especially young officers, when made magistrates, get irritated at the hardihood of a class of men whom they have made up their minds to despise; and the cat being a soldier’s natural revenge, they fly to it directly. . . .

I was sent for to Bathurst Court-house. . . . I had to go past the triangles, where they had been flogging incessantly for hours. I saw a man walk across the yard with the blood that had run from his lacerated flesh squashing out of his shoes at every step he took. A dog was licking the blood off the triangles, and the ants were carrying away great pieces of human flesh that the lash had scattered about the ground.

The scourger’s foot had worn a deep hole in the ground by the violence with which he whirled himself round on it to strike the quivering and wealed back, out of which stuck the sinews, white, ragged and swollen. The infliction was a hundred lashes, at about half-minute time, so as to extend the punishment through nearly an hour. The day was hot enough to overcome a man merely standing that length of time in the sun. . . . I know of several poor creatures who have been entirely crippled for life by these merciless floggings.⁶

Even 25 lashes (known as a tester or a Botany Bay dozen) was a draconic torture, able to skin a man’s back and leave it a tangled web of criss-crossed knotted scars.

The psychological damage inflicted by the lash was worse than the physical, and its traces were equally permanent. “It had the effect of demoralizing them to the very greatest possible extent,” a former surgeon at Macquarie Harbor, John Barnes, would testify to the Molesworth Committee; “I never saw a convict benefited by flagellation.” What the cat-o’-nine-tails instilled was not respect for discipline, but a sullen conviction of one’s own impotence in the face of Authority; this could only be expunged by violence or erased by one’s own death. Next to homosexual rape, flogging was the most humiliating invasion of the body that could befall a prisoner. Nothing in an ordinary man’s experience compared to the rituals of the cat: to be stripped and tied to the triangle, like an owlskin nailed to a barn door; to hear, through battering pain, the quartermaster-sergeant slowly calling out the strokes; this was to be drowned in powerlessness. It left the prisoner consumed with worthlessness and self-hatred, and Barnes spoke of convicts who, on first being flogged, “have become so very much degraded by the punishment, that they sometimes told me that they should never be satisfied until they had been executed for some further offence; they considered it a most unmanly form of punishment.” [Italics added.]⁷

The scarred back became an emblem of rank. So did silence. Convicts called a man who blubbered and screamed at the triangles a crawler or a sandstone. (Sandstone is a common rock around Sydney; it is soft and crumbles easily.) By contrast, the convict who stood up to it in silence was admired as a pebble or an iron man. He would show his shapes (strip for punishment) with disdain, and after the domino (last lash) he would spit at the feet of the man who gave him his red shirt. There were always more sandstones than pebbles. Ernest Augustus Slade, superintendent of the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney in 1833-34, believed that convicts always broke down under the lash and furnished the Moles-worth Committee with examples of both, culled from his past records. James Clayton, of the Phoenix, was given fifty lashes for being “absent without leave and neglecting his duty . . .”

The skin was lacerated at the fifth lash and there was a slight effusion of blood; the prisoner subdued his sense of pain by biting his lip. The skin of this man was thick to an uncommon degree, and both his body and mind had been hardened by former punishments, and he is also known to be what is termed “flash” or “game.” . . . [I]f all his former punishments . . . had been as vigorously administered as this last, his indomitable spirit would have been subdued.

By contrast, there was poor James Kenworthy of Camden, a pilferer:

The first lash elicited loud cries from this prisoner; at the 18th lash the blood appeared; at the 25th lash the blood was trickling; at the end of the 32nd, flowing down his back. . . . [H]e would have been sufficiently punished at the 25th lash. He says he was never flogged before. . . . [H]e was very fat, with a thin skin. The sufferings of this prisoner were evinced by his unnerved state of body when cast loose; he could hardly stand.⁸

The System in the 1830s had a passion for bureaucratic exactitude about pain. In 1833 Governor Bourke, Darling’s successor, received many complaints from local benches that 50 lashes, the most that one magistrate could impose for a single offense, was not enough, and that the government-issue cats were positively feeble. Accordingly, a circular went forth to all police magistrates in New South Wales, demanding a report on standard cats, samples of which were enclosed for consumer testing.⁹

The answers were illuminating but contradictory.¹⁰ George Holden, police magistrate at Campbelltown, could give no “categorical answer” about the standard cat except that it was too ill-made to last more than 150 lashes. The nine tails should be stiffer and lighter, but

it involves a fearful responsibility, which I cannot bring myself to assume, to decide precisely how much torture ought to be systematically inflicted by law on any set of men. . . . I do not profess to have yet acquired the power of witnessing the infliction of pain with such unmoved nerves.

Besides, his flogger seemed to lay it on without “that peculiar art in the flourish of the scourge which [is] employed . . . in Hyde Park Barracks, and so greatly adds to the pain.”

The Draco of Hyde Park Barracks, Ernest Slade, thought the standard cats quite adequate “when properly wielded” but reminded the colonial secretary that scourgers must not be overworked—they should give no more than 150 lashes a day—and that, due to the nature of their unappreciated task, they ought to have special protection.

One “J.P.” wrote in from Bathurst to say that the cats came undone at the ends and did not cut the back enough. The Goulburn police magistrate poured scorn on the instruments. The lashes came off the handles after 20 strokes; the thread whipping on the end of each tail came undone, so that “altho’ it bruises, bleeding but seldom is caused, consequently the offender escapes that acute pain and smarting to the extent so desirable should be experienced under the lash.” The cord should be harder, the tails a foot longer, and “it would be preferable were they to terminate in small knots.”

For Darling and his successors in the 1830s, however, flogging merely represented the episodic peak of punishment within a consistent environment of misery. Every male convict would be put in irons on arrival and sent out to labor on public works for time, “at the expiration of which, I had purposed to assign them to Settlers; and in the event of misconduct, of replacing them in the Road Gangs.” The taste of road-gang life would by then “have rendered their assignment to the Settlers a desirable release from a painful and degraded situation; and in proportion to their dread . . . they would have behaved to their Masters.”¹¹

Darling could not put this into practice; there was too much demand for assigned labor. But he did put many more convicts into government work on the gangs, pulling them out of “the very refuse of the whole Convict Population.”¹² The roads absorbed this human trash. By 1828, Darling was congratulating himself on having 1,260 second-sentence men in the road gangs of New South Wales, more than in all the penal settlements.¹³ All this, he proudly informed London, was very cheap: The convict overseers got a “gratuity” of around £16 a year, and with the salaries of free superintendents the complete payroll for the roads in 1827–28 was only £1,621 18s. 9d. No private contractor using assigned labor could possibly charge so little.¹⁴

The convict memoirist Thomas Cook found what road-gang life was like when he was sent to labor against raw bush and sandstone at Honeysuckle Flat on the Great Western Road over the mountains to Bathurst:

With a sheet of Bark for my bed, the half of a threadbare Blanket for my covering, and a Log for my pillow, the action of the frost was so severe on my limbs that it was with difficulty I could find the use of them, and then only by frequenting the fire at intervals during each night. As I arose, after experiencing all the horrors of a restless and perishing cold Night, the rugged mountains covered with snow, and the frozen Tools for labour stared me in the face before the stars were off the skies; and many a tear did I shed, when contemplating upon my hard fate, and the slight offence for which I had been doomed to participate so largely in the bitters of a wretched life.¹⁵

Cook began in the lesser kind of punishment gang, an “out-of-iron gang.” These did most of the road-building in New South Wales (after 1828 there were, at any time, between 1,200 and 1,500 convicts laboring in them), but they were miserably unproductive. Most of their members had either been rejected by settlers as unfit to be assigned workers or else were working out short sentences (six months or less) for petty colonial offenses. “The mere fact of their being returned on the hands of Government in a community where the demand for labour is very urgent and clamorous,” wrote Richard Bourke, Darling’s successor, meant that such men “must be notoriously idle and worthless.” Their “trusty” convict overseers were corrupt. They would form “select parties” of gangers to go food-stealing by night. Cook reported how some of his fellow gangers frightened two fat bullocks over a cliff at Mount Victoria by rolling boulders down at them and ate steak for days. Prisoners also kept escaping from the out-of-iron gangs; they would run off into the bush, live for a while (but not, as a rule, very long) by scavenging and robbery and then get retaken. The number of these bushrangers made travel, especially over the Blue Mountains, a risky business, since most of them were more like famished muggers than the altruistic Robin Hoods of Australian folksong.¹⁶

Clearly, there was room for improvement, and Darling and Bourke pinned their hopes on the iron gangs. Their members (by 1834, Bourke reported, there were over 800 men serving sentences of 6 months to 3 years in them) were all twice-convicted and they worked and slept in irons. “They have no time for recreation. . . . [T]heir lot is felt by themselves as one of great privation and unhappiness.” As the road advanced, the iron-gangers dragged their nocturnal prisons with them—huts on wheels, each sleeping eighteen to twenty-four convicts. Sometimes more permanent stockades and fixed huts were provided, from which the gangers had to march out to their sites in irons. The superintendent could make them run to work in double time, pricked on by the soldiers’ bayonets.¹⁷ When Thomas Cook was condemned to a year in an iron gang on the Great Western Road he and his fellow gangers suffered in this way

for some 10 or 15 days when the men (finding themselves so much advanced in debility, and their legs so far injured by the friction of the Irons that they could no longer bear against it) offered a determined resistance . . . which led to a deal of traffic in human flesh and blood, by the soldiers with their Bayonets, and the Scourgers with their Cats.

As for the summary punishments,

The mode of Trial was a mere mockery of justice. I have known instances where the Officer would not even stay one moment to enquire into the merits of the charges, but would sit on his horse and sentence 14 or 15 men standing a distance away (sometimes a whole Gang) to 50 and some 100 lashes each, without an oath, on hearing ten words from the lips of their villainous accusers. This system of severity was so rigorously pursued that some of the longer-sentenced men were goaded . . . either to end their days on the Gallows, or better their condition by taking to the Bush.¹⁸

Not all the recidivist convicts could go in the chain gangs. Iron gangs needed too many guards. There was a case for penal settlements whose remoteness would deter escape, whose severity and frightening unfamiliarity would instill “salutary terror.”

The need for such places had been argued at some length in John Bigge’s report, which took the Exclusivist, pro-rural view and stressed that Sydney was an incubator of crime.¹⁹ Bigge claimed that in 1820 there had been one fresh crime for every three convicts in Sydney, as compared to one for every eight in Windsor and far less in the outlying districts. The answer was to get the serving felons out of the towns and into the country—to put the recidivists in distant penal stations, where they could not corrupt the others and where the news of their sufferings would be an example to all. Only thus, Bigge thought, could the government relieve the “constant pressure of new arrivals” and “the uneasiness I felt at the constant arrivals of convict ships.” The convicts were silting up in Sydney, unclassified, mingling too easily with the free, and giving the lie to talk about the “terror” of transportation. “The great cause of the diminished effect of transportation has arisen from the increase in the numbers transported,” Bigge argued:

All the evils of association, the difficulties of superintendence and control, whether arising from the extension and variety of the employments, or from the more laborious duties of the magistrates and superintendents, have arisen chiefly from this source.²⁰

Besides, the settled districts around Sydney were getting almost too comfortable and Bigge thought it “hopeless” to expect that they would confront convict work gangs with “all the hardships, privations and severities [of their] unsettled state.” Convicts at gang labor should get no room for initiative and work only at such uniform tasks as grubbing out the giant roots of gum trees left in the ground by earlier clearing-parties. There would be plenty of exhausting work along the north coast, to which Bigge urged the government to send them. Under the fiery Tropic of Capricorn, the combination of raw bush and hostile Aborigines would be a powerful deterrent to escape. And once the bush was cleared, the convict gangs would move out and the settlers could go in.²¹

Lord Bathurst and Macquarie’s successors, Brisbane and Darling, all accepted this plan of northward colonization into the punitive tropics. It was set in full motion by Brisbane and perfected by Darling. Since the fate of prisoners in such places would bulk large in the imagery of the System, they are worth considering in some detail.

ii

THE FIRST PENAL out-station on the mainland was Newcastle, founded where the Hunter River flows into the Pacific about seventy miles north of Sydney. This river mouth had been a Cretaceous swamp and, on the flat rocks at the base of the cliffs, the ocean water swilled green and blue around the stumps of petrified trees, whose growth rings could still be read. Of more interest to the early settlers, however, was another relic of that swamp: a seam of coal, three feet thick, that ran near water level through Nobby’s Head, the southern jaw of the river entrance. This seam, first noticed in 1795, gave the place its first name: Coal Harbor.

In 1801 Governor King sent sixteen refractory convicts to mine coal there, under military guard. They were soon recalled, as it was too difficult to supply this tiny outpost, but in 1804, after the Irish rose at Castle Hill, King dispatched thirty-five of them to labor in the cliff seam. The convict population of Newcastle, as the place was soon named, grew fitfully. By the end of 1804, it was 128; by 1817 it was 553; and in 1821 there were 1,169 people living there, including a handful of free settlers and Emancipist farmers. By then, the economic mainstay of the settlement was no longer coal but timber.

Vast stands of cedar, the prime joinery timber of colonial Australia, grew in the Hunter River Valley. Men with crosscut saws could rip the great trunks down into tabletops three inches thick, six feet wide and as long as you wanted—the red-gold, ponderous, subtly aromatic slabs that are unobtainable today, but were then as common as pine. Cedar was a government monopoly. Contractors took their ships to Newcastle and bought it convict-sawn, at 3d. per superficial foot. The panelled doors of Macquarie’s Sydney—the moldings, the dadoes and cabinets, even the floors—were made of it.

Most prisoners at Newcastle worked in the cedar gangs. By 1820, the shore forests were so depleted that the cedar-getters had to go seventy miles upstream to find large trees. These expeditions lasted a month or more and were of course overseen by military guards who supervised the task-work; the quota for a thirty-man gang was about one hundred trunks a month. Once felled and lopped, they would be lashed together into a single big raft; sheltered by a rough hut on its “deck,” the whole gang would float back down to Newcastle in style.²²

Standing orders kept the settlement isolated. If a private vessel put in there without a license, she was scuttled and her crew imprisoned. Licensed boats had to unship their rudders and surrender them to the harbormaster. These measures not only prevented escapes but discouraged cedar-poachers.

Life at Newcastle was hard, and successive commandants were ordered to keep it so. It was a dirty infant of a town, consisting of parallel rows of convict-built slab huts and a barracks holding some 250 men considered dangerous. There, they slept in cribs a little more than four feet wide, three men to a crib. (The practice of bedding the men by threes and not in pairs was supposed, optimistically, to reduce unmentionable crime.) In summer this shantytown was oppressively hot, the thermometer rising to 105° in the shade, with burning northerlies sometimes pushing it to 115°. One young guard officer, Lieutenant William Coke, a scion of the great family of Holkham Hall, found the climate deadly:

Often at half past 7 in the Evening we cannot bear our Coats on & are laying down panting for breath, & in a quarter of an Hour afterwards on leaving the Mess we are cold, shivering and wishing for a fire. These sudden changes kill many people. Soldiers and the Inhabitants die very quick here, what with drinking & being exposed to the sudden changes of the weather.²³

Everything in Newcastle seemed either exhausting or boring, but that was what commended it to the authorities. The wildlife lacked charm. “If a snake bites you in this country,” Coke wrote home to England, doubtless meaning to make his sisters’ skin crawl, “instant death follows; one of the most deadly & common Snake’s bite is so bad that the person bit only shivers and falls dead immediately.”²⁴ There were sandflies, mosquitoes, cholera, dysentery, catarrh and, as an extra irritation, a large perambulating sand dune—unwisely stripped of scrub so that escaping convicts could not hide in it—which kept creeping into the town and had to be shovelled back.

Convict diggers, some of whom had been coal miners in England, worked ten to twelve hours a day. The old exposed seam on the face of Nobby’s had been abandoned after 1817, for fear that the undermined sandstone above would crash into the sea. Now the miners went down a shaft, lowered more than 100 feet by a windlass, their leg-irons jingling forlornly in the dark. Conditions in it were dreadful, what with seepage from the sea above, rockfalls and bad air. The miners suffered from “black lung,” asthma and rheumatism. At the end of the day they had no change of clothes, and sometimes no blankets. They had to mine twenty tons of coal a day.²⁵

The most hated labor, worse than the mine, was lime-burning. Sydney had no mineral lime for mortar. But immense beds of oysters grew a few miles north of Newcastle, and the more refractory convicts were sent to gather and burn them. This meant trudging barefoot all day in mud thick with knife-sharp oyster shells, carrying baskets of quicklime across the tidal flats to the waiting boats. When water splashed into the unslaked lime it burned their unprotected eyes and their scabbed backs. Bigge noted that the lime-burners’ eyes suffered from the smoke “but not to a greater degree than in England,” and thought the convicts blinded themselves to malinger. But the hospital gave little solace to the sick; it was a mere shed, without proper supplies or even soap (which prisoners had to cook up themselves from pot-grease and ashes). In 1816 there were only enough blankets there for one patient in eight.²⁶

In 1818, to exhort his lime-burners to greater efforts, Lachlan Macquarie visited the oyster beds of Newcastle. He arrived in full gubernatorial fig, with a retinue of fifty people and a four-piece band. The musicians brayed and fiddled, the governor inspected, and what the convicts thought is not recorded. He and his band then went off to lay the foundation stone of a breakwater, to be named Macquarie Pier; convict gangs spent many months dragging rocks underwater to build this hated amenity but it was never finished.

The main preoccupation among the Newcastle prisoners was escape. To discourage it, the commandants made their officers treat the local Aborigines well, cajoling them with small gifts or tobacco and sugar or, for exceptional services, blankets. In this way, Bigge noted, the Aborigines had become “very active” in recapturing prisoners:

They accompany the soldiers who are sent in pursuit, and by the extraordinary strength of sight they possess . . . they can trace to a great distance, with wonderful accuracy, the impressions of the human foot. Nor are they afraid of meeting the fugitive convicts in the woods, when sent in their pursuit, without the soldiers. . . . [T]hey wound and disable them, strip them of their clothes, and bring them back as prisoners. . . . [N]otwithstanding the apprehensions of revenge from the convicts whom they bring back, they continue to live in Newcastle and its neighbourhood, but are observed to prefer the society of the soldiers to that of the convicts.²⁷

Thus the black police tracker made his first appearance in Australia; and one more grudge was added to the growing hatred of convict white for tribal black.

The prisoners bolted singly and in parties; some reached the Hawkesbury district, where they hoped to find shelter with assigned shepherds. They arrived gaunt and naked, reamed out by diarrhea, barely able to walk after a three-week diet of bugs, roots and raw snake meat. Once recaptured, some men tried again; one convict at Newcastle in 1810 had five escapes on his record. The punishments for those recaptured were “inflicted with more severity than at other settlements,” Bigge thought. Other punishments included chain-gang labor, and, for women (a few of whom had ended up in Newcastle on second convictions, despite the general policy against sending women to penal stations), humiliating spiked iron collars, riveted around the neck.²⁸

The symbolism of rank was jealously maintained. Tipping the cap or touching the forelock was imposed as a fetishistic ritual on the prisoners; sometimes, as at Norfolk Island, they were required (on pain of flogging for “disrespect”) to salute not only any passing soldier, but certain objects associated with soldiering—an empty sentry-box, for instance. These orders came from Major James Morisset, who had succeeded Captain Wallis as commandant at Newcastle. A free trader from Sydney named John Bingle was struck by the relentless way that Morisset ran the Newcastle station; he had “never seen arbitrary power carried to such an extent . . . [I]t seemed very un-English.”²⁹

Death sentences for absconding seem to have been handed out with abandon by the military court at Newcastle, if young Lieutenant Coke was not exaggerating in his letters home:

The Lieutenants and Ensigns have no duty here, except sitting on the Criminal court and seeing men hung.—The jury here is formed of seven Officers, every day we sit we get 15 shillings allowed us each for our trouble.—The Court in general consists of one Judge, one Counsel against the prisoner, & the Witnesses, seldom indeed does any person come here as a Spectator & the prisoners seldom employ a man to defend them, we sometimes condemn five in a day to be hanged: it is more in appearance like an Inquisition as the Prisoners seldom call Witnesses, & men are condemn’d with little ceremony.³⁰

What is extraordinary is Coke’s matter-of-factness, his assumption that the convicts had no rights. Why did the prisoners not defend themselves? Because they believed they had no chance with the “deliberations” of this military Star Chamber. Not all the hangings seem to have been carried out; the usual procedure by the late 1820s was to commute the capital sentence or, in some cases, to send the third-time offender straight to Norfolk Island, a punishment in some ways worse than hanging. But such a passage suggests how the System could degenerate once minor officials felt that a governor like Ralph Darling cared little for “convict rights.”

However, by the 1820s the usefulness of Newcastle as a place of secondary punishment was waning. The place was no longer isolated, because more and more free settlers were anxious to farm the rich plains of the Hunter River Valley. The cedar forests were vanishing and, although the coal mines were still being worked by convicts—including some Chartist political prisoners³¹—in the 1830s, they could not absorb very much labor. Besides, Bigge reported to his government, the good farmland along the Hunter River made the convicts’ lives too easy. In earlier years, when the settlement only spread a mile or two inland, all crops had to be raised on the poor, sandy coastal soil, so that Nature combined with Authority “to render hard labour an indispensable condition of existence.” Fertile soil contradicted the purpose of the settlement. So after 1823, Newcastle was thrown open to free trade and settlement. Its convicts stayed on—there were more than 1,600 by 1827—but it was no longer simply a jail for the twice-convicted. That role was assumed by a new settlement started in 1821, 270 miles north of Sydney: Port Macquarie.

Port Macquarie (not to be confused with Macquarie Harbor) was meant for incorrigible life-sentence prisoners convicted of second offenses in New South Wales. Discipline under its first commandant, Francis Allman, was severe; a man could get 100 lashes for trying to smuggle a letter out, or a month in the cell for merely possessing a piece of writing paper. (One sees why convict diaries were nonexistent, and convict memoirs rare.) One veteran of the Port Macquarie iron gang recalled how

the hills [we] cut through were so steep that a man could not comfortably ascend one of them without irons on his legs, let alone with them—but the hills had to be broken down by men with sore backs, and if one man happened to collide with another who had recently been flogged, it would be—“Oh, G—! Mind my sore back.” Those were hard times; hard worked and half starved.³²

The rubbing of the leg-rings on their flesh, Port Macquarie men used sardonically to say, “put plenty of iron in the blood.”

Port Macquarie had a high proportion of Specials. Darling had them sent there so that they could not make trouble in Sydney; he did not want literate convicts adding to the rhetoric of Wentworth and the Sydney Monitor. Some of them were harmless creatures, like the Irishman James Bushelle, who, in cahoots with “a broken-down French gambler,” had toured the jewelry shops of London masquerading as a Polish prince, with gum on his fingertips, substituting fake diamonds for real ones. He drew life in New South Wales, and on being reconvicted at Port Macquarie he found a niche as a tutor to some of the free settlers who had begun to trickle in after 1830, “instructing the young ladies both married and single,” as he put it,

in music, dancing, French and Italian . . . who met occasionally to enjoy the pleasure of a German Waltz or a Spanish Quadrille in this recent Emanation from the forest; where hitherto the sound of music, or the voice of merriment, had never been heard; where no sounds, but the cooees and howlings of the Black man, the groans of the convicts under the excruciating Lash, or the croaking of the wild Cockatoo, ever pierc’d the Skies or disturb’d the Ambient Air.³³

Thus, the first uncertain pipings of the Muses were heard at Port Macquarie.

But among other Specials, “relaxation, petty traffic and abuse” reigned. They seized every privilege they could get; they truckled to authority (“When an overseer spoke to him,” it was said of one Special, “he had the appearance of a goose looking down a bottle”) and made tyrannous overseers themselves. Solidarity might rise between prisoners on the run or men who had been through the assignment system; in the penal stations, rarely. Convict overseers in such places—and on the chain gangs—were notoriously cruel. “The worst wretches that a man could be put to work under were those who had been sent to the country themselves. They were far worse than men who came out free.”³⁴

As at Newcastle, escape attempts were common. But few succeeded, particularly since the Aborigines proved eager to help catch bolters. As the area opened up to free settlers at the end of the 1820s, security faltered and after 1830 the place became a grotesque mixture of jail and infirmary, “a demi penal settlement.”³⁵ The crippled, the mad and the blind were dumped into it along with the Specials. In the late 1830s, Port Macquarie boasted a gang of one-armed stonebreakers and another of blind men, who in 1835 could be seen “manacled to a chain, and so marched to and fro on the causeway facing the window of the Commandant’s quarters for 2 or 3 successive days for his amusement.” The “blind mob” had a high reputation as thieves, deft enough to ease a man’s rolled-up trousers from under his head as he slept and take the coins from his pocket, or grope melons out of an officer’s garden patch by moonlight. Cross one, and he might put a tiger snake’s head, fangs up, in your boot.

Most conspicuous of all were the “men on timber,” amputees with wooden legs who were unsuitable for gang labor elsewhere in the colony. They served as delivery men, humping packages inland for free settlers. When not employed, they would lie sunning themselves and gazing at the sea, guzzling rum, of which there was plenty at Port Macquarie, cooked up in illicit convict stills from the sugar cane that flourished there. Real men drank it laced with tobacco juice, a mixture believed to kill the pain of a flogging.

One of the amputees’ main recreations was fighting. Since they could not stand toe-to-toe like regular pugilists, their friends would perch them face-to-face on the thwarts of a dinghy; each combatant was propped up by a man at his back, “and in this fashion they would fight away in great style” until one of them could no longer sit up. They also played practical jokes. The overseer of the one-armed stone-cutting gang was a Jew with two wooden legs. One day, as he lay dozing drunk in the sun, another Jewish prisoner

collected a quantity of old maize stalks and other fuel, and set fire to his wooden legs. . . . They were not burning long, however, before he awoke and found one to be shorter than the other; and it was a sight for sore eyes to see him walking down to the Old Broken Barracks, singing out to everyone that he met—“That Jew-looking bugger down there has burnt my legs nearly off.”³⁶

Other pranks involved animals. Convicts would wire two tomcats’ tails together and drape them over a doorknob at night. They would slide a live shark into a drunkard’s bed. Almost anything would do to relieve the tedium of Port Macquarie, where Brueghel would not have lacked subjects.

Discipline in the 1830s was uneven but harsh. Thomas Cook, sent there from the iron gang as a Special in the summer of 1835, found a commandant who (he alleged) thought nothing of flogging old men and cripples, and boasted “that he would make the Deaf to hear, the Dumb to speak, the lame to walk, the blind to see, and the foolish to understand” with his colonial cure-all, the lash. Soon after arriving, Cook came down with dysentery, but he did not report to the surgeon “for the name he bore among my fellow prisoners as a Butcher.” For this, he was heavily ironed and ordered by the commandant “in a voice like thunder” to extra labor, under the eye of Roach, the chief flogger. But there was some pity in Roach. Not all such men were the blood-boltered sadists of convict lore:

At this time the Scourger (whose calling one would have supposed had long since excluded almost every kindred feeling from his breast) was begging of me to keep my Tool in motion, until the Commandant took his ride out, and promising to do my work for me. In about an hour the Commandant left the settlement, and the Scourger, putting down his arms, worked excessively hard so as to save me from the Punishment with which I must otherwise have been visited.³⁷

Nevertheless Cook was sure he would die at Port Macquarie and decided to flee, “under the impression that there existed some hope of my being able to effect a final escape to England.” There was none. He walked out of the settlement, which had no wall but the bush, and went eighty miles south before realizing he was totally lost. Sick with the flux, he survived a week on roots and wild nettles until the Aborigines caught him and gave him to an armed search-party of constables. That did not deter him; in all, Cook tried three times to escape from Port Macquarie, with no success.

iii

GOVERNOR BRISBANE decided to plant another penal station on the mainland, so remote that its prisoners would give up all hope of escape. It would be in the Deep North, as Australians call Queensland, where the sun’s heat would bake and baste the sin out of them. In 1823 Brisbane sent an exploring party under his surveyor-general, John Oxley, to look at Moreton Bay, a big coastal inlet noted by Cook fifty years before. It was 450 miles north of Sydney, far enough to discourage any bolter. If it had a river, it might be settled.

Oxley and his men reached Moreton Bay by sea without incident and carried out a rough survey. They found a river, rich soil, plenty of fresh water, and friendly Aborigines. The shallow bay teemed with fish; they could wade out and catch mullet and snapper with their hands. The mangroves were encrusted with little milky oysters in ruffled shells, and in the ooze between their roots lived regiments of huge, delicious mud crabs. Up the river, as a former convict would remember in years to come, “it looked as though some race of men had been here before us, and planted this veritable Garden of Eden.” The riverbanks were tropical jungle, laced with blue-and-white flowering vines; stately white lilies grew in masses from the tidal mud. Colonies of black Funereal Cockatoos stared from the palm trees, nodding their wiry crests and occasionally flapping clumsily into the air, like croaking umbrellas. Kingfishers flashed through the deep shade.³⁸

It looked almost too good for convicts, and surely survival would not be a problem: The first human beings Oxley and his men encountered, to their stupefaction, were two naked, scarred and sunburnt white men, who had been wrecked on the coast a year and a half before and were “in healthy state and plump condition,” thanks to the local Aborigines, who had adopted them. In fact, Oxley’s report on Moreton Bay was so encouraging that when it reached London, Lord Bathurst decided that the area should be thrown directly open to free settlers. But his opinions on this took months to reach Sydney, and in the meantime Governor Brisbane had given orders to start a penal settlement there. He wanted it “to receive and maintain a great number of persons.” The convicts’ slave labor was “the best means of paving the way for the introduction of free population, as the example of Port Macquarie abundantly testifies.”³⁹ He put it in charge of Lieutenant Henry Miller of the 40th Regiment. In September 1824, Miller sailed north with fifty settlers, thirty of whom were convict volunteers who hoped to win an early ticket-of-leave. They started on the edge of Moreton Bay, at the present site of Redcliffe.

Governor Brisbane expected the new settlement to become self-sufficient within two years, by growing maize. However, because of the inefficiency of penal labor, it did not; one cannot build an economy quickly with work designed to punish the builders. Work performed quickly was not punishment enough; the labor had to be “arduous.” Miller had the convicts working twelve hours a day, dawn to dusk. Horses, draft animals and ploughs were all proscribed. As in the “starvation years” in Sydney, every inch of ground had to be inefficiently tilled with hoes, which kept breaking, and there was no animal manure. The convicts became afflicted with scurvy, and conditions were so squalid that they also fell victim to filth diseases like dysentery and trachoma.

Pioneering was bad enough, but doing it under such handicaps was absurd. The Eden-like prospect of Moreton Bay disintegrated fast, as such fantasies always did in Australia. The soil at Redcliffe was poor and the first seeds died in the ground; there was not enough building timber, and even the grass for thatch had to be dragged for miles; medicine ran out, and the place was infested with flies, ticks, scorpions and venomous snakes. Lieutenant Miller was driven near to distraction by all this, but he soldiered on:

Nothing was undertaken that I did not plan, nothing was carried on that I did not inspect, literally, under a burning sun earning my bread in the sweat of my brow; I passed toilsome and miserable days, anxious and restless nights, and underwent privations . . . greater than any I had been called upon to sustain during years of [army] service.⁴⁰

But toward the end of 1824, Governor Brisbane visited the Brisbane River, flatteringly named after him, and decided that the settlement should be moved to its banks. After several months of indecision he ordered Miller to make the move in February 1825. The huts were laboriously dismantled—every iron nail pulled out, straightened and saved—and the commandant’s official residence, a prefabricated cottage brought in kit form from Sydney, was taken down and stowed. In July, they took everything twenty-seven miles up the river to the present site of Brisbane, Queensland’s capital. “The difficulties of this task,” Miller sighed, “with my original few [convicts] wasted and enfeebled by sickness, were so many and so great that none but an eye-witness could in the least form an opinion of them.” Then the governor dismissed him. “I was removed to cover the mistakes of others,” Miller protested, and in fact he had been: Brisbane needed a scapegoat for his own failure to equip the settlement properly.⁴¹

His successor, Captain Peter Bishop of the 40th Regiment, was a fairly humane man by colonial standards. He saw that the convicts would never work well under the severe discipline and the gruelling heat unless they had “a little reward for it,” an ounce or two of tea or sugar. (Such gifts had also cemented good relations with the Aborigines around Brisbane Town, who, as at Newcastle and Port Macquarie, soon learned to catch runaway convicts and bring them in.)⁴² But he had only two hundred convicts, few of them skilled tradesmen; and although some crops grew, only twelve acres were cultivated, because no one had enough farming experience to be superintendent of agriculture. When Bishop left Brisbane Town in March 1826, it was still only a straggle of cockeyed, leaking slab huts, without a hospital, a granary or even a jail. But the new commandant would change all that. He was Captain Patrick Logan of the 57th Regiment, and his regime would reflect the ironclad severity that the new governor, Ralph Darling, who appointed him, was determined to impose on the prisoners of Australia.

Between his arrival at Moreton Bay and his violent death there four years later, Logan became a legend among the convicts—so much so that he was the only commandant of an Australian penal station to have a whole ballad dedicated to him, “The Convict’s Lament on the Unfortunate Death of Patrick Logan,” which was called “Moreton Bay,” for short.

One Sunday morning as I went walking, by the Brisbane’s waters I chanced to stray,

I heard a prisoner his fate bewailing, as on the sunny river bank he lay:

“I am a native of Erin’s island, but banished now to the fatal shore,

They tore me from my aged parents and from the maiden I do adore.

“I’ve been a prisoner at Port Macquarie, Norfolk Island and Emu Plains,

At Castle Hill and cursed Toongabbie, at all those settlements I’ve worked in chains;

But of all those places of condemnation, in each penal station of New South Wales,

To Moreton Bay I’ve found no equal: excessive tyranny there each day prevails.

“For three long years I was beastly treated, heavy irons on my legs I wore,

My back from flogging it was lacerated, and often painted with crimson gore,

And many a lad from downright starvation lies mouldering humbly

beneath the clay,

Where Captain Logan he had us mangled on his triangles at Moreton Bay.

“Like the Egyptians and ancient Hebrews, we were oppressed under Logan’s yoke,

Till a native black who lay in ambush did give our tyrant his mortal stroke.

Fellow prisoners, be exhilarated, that all such monsters such a death may find!

And when from bondage we are liberated, our former sufferings shall fade from mind.”

Preferably sung a capella in a high nasal drone, this survived in many variants and was perhaps the most popular anti-authoritarian ballad of colonial Australia. Ned Kelly, last and greatest of the folk-hero bushrangers, the son of poor Irish Currency, put it into prose in his “Jerilderie Letter.” Openly addressed to the people of Australia, in 1879

Port McQuarrie Toweringabbie Norfolk island and Emu plains and in those places of tyranny and condemnation many a blooming Irish man rather than subdue to the Saxon yoke were flogged to death and bravely died in servile chains.

Of all the Australian camp commandants, it was Logan who had the worse reputation for cruelty. The convicts regarded him as an ogre and his subordinates as grotesque monsters. Stories—almost certainly untrue—were told about his chief flogger, a man with deformed legs named Old Bumble (because he staggered along like a bee walking), who would wash off the bloody thongs of his cat-o’-nine-tails in a can of water and drink the contents. Logan was said to have flogged men to death for the pleasure of it and driven “hundreds” into the grave by working them in chains until they dropped. The convict resister, wrote a former Moreton Bay prisoner named William Ross in a pamphlet written after Logan’s death,

would be tortured with flogging and slavery until the spark of life had fled, when he would be buried like a dog. . . . Such conduct is horrid, and ought not to have been permitted; but unfortunately, Logan had the greatest interest with the never-to-be-forgotten Governor D[arling], who backed him in every tyrannical work.⁴³

Such was the Logan to frighten children, the infamous Beast of Brisbane. In later years, efforts would be made to exonerate him as a capable explorer who battled against shocking conditions. The best likeness of Logan offers few clues to him. What is one to read in Logan’s stern face with its pale, high cheekbones, level stare and slightly twisted mouth, raised on its formal Georgian plinth of white linen? Only that he looks as authoritarian as any other man of his day, rank and calling. Soldiers liked to be depicted like that—and Logan, before he was anything else, was a soldier.

He had been born in Scotland in 1792, and he joined the 57th Regiment at the age of eighteen. For the next fifteen years he served his King all over the world: against Napoleon in Spain and France, in the American War, on garrison duty in Ireland, and finally in Australia, where he arrived in 1825. Because his whole life had been shaped by the army, Logan—like almost any other career officer—took for granted the army’s assumptions about human nature; and the chief of these, in the early nineteenth century, was that the motley rabble who comprised the rank and file could only be turned into soldiers by unremitting discipline backed up by summary flagellation and the threat of the firing squad. Drill and the cat, not mercy or appeals to esprit de corps, had made the machine that defeated Napoleon. Logan’s own regiment was noted for its severity. Why soften this proven system for worse scum, the convicts? “A little severity,” Logan wrote a year after taking command at Moreton Bay, “was absolutely necessary to convert the settlement into anything like a place of punishment.”⁴⁴

On paper the commandant’s powers were strictly limited. Logan could inflict summary punishments to 50 lashes, but standing orders warned that extra labor and solitary confinement should be preferred to the lash. However, the more detailed instructions he received from Governor Darling in 1829 made “every person, whether free or bond . . . subject to his orders” and gave official sanction to an inescapable fact: At distant places like Moreton Bay there was no way to keep an eye on the commandant, and therefore he could rule his small kingdom of pain as an absolute despot. He was the only magistrate, and through him all justice—other than trial for new felonies, which had to be held in a full Sydney court—was interpreted. His officers would stand behind him whenever questions were asked; so, as a rule, would free settlers (especially since Logan had absolute and summary power over their movements and could expel any one at will). Convicts, of course, had no voice. No convict could hope to persuade a Sydney court of the commandant’s tyrannies; most of them were illiterate, and in any case all affidavits had to be sworn before Logan.⁴⁵

When Logan arrived, he had a labor force of about one hundred convicts. By the end of 1826, it had doubled; in 1828 he had 415; and by February 1829, he had 772. The peak convict population was 1,020, in 1831⁴⁶ Thus, although the labor supply grew steeply during Logan’s reign, it was never large enough for ambitious building programs—a problem compounded by Darling’s vacillations about the nature of the settlement and whether it should have free settlers or not. Under these conditions, Logan found it hard to make long-range plans. Yet by mid-1827, he had 120 acres under wheat and another 300 prepared for maize, while on the bank of the Brisbane River a town was shaping up, with a grid of beaten-earth streets, compacted by the soldiers’ boot and the dragging of the prisoners’ irons, and with a hospital, barracks, stores, and even a few stone cottages among the warped timber hovels.

It was done at a certain cost, which the convicts paid. Many of them worked as naked as Aborigines in the sun, except for their irons, and had to eat “Snakes, Pigs that have died of disease, Cabbage leaves . . . and every filth that was thrown into the streets.”⁴⁷An older hand, who escaped so often that he served a total of 26 years on a 7-year sentence for petty larceny, spent 7 years at Moreton Bay alone:

I lost one of my eyes and the use of one of my hands. I suffered a great deal of hardship because I was unable to do the work allotted to me, and the punishment was very severe . . . [M]ost of the men at the Settlement were in irons . . . I had chains on my leg for four years . . . [I]t was through being ill-treated by the overseers that I lost the use of my hand—they struck me with whatever was handiest.⁴⁸

Although the punishment registers for Moreton Bay in Logan’s time are lost, its seems clear that Logan habitually worked prisoners in irons, whatever their sentences.⁴⁹ He was also a relentless flogger. One sample record of the floggings he handed out has survived; they were noted in a journal kept by some convict clerk for Peter Spicer, the superintendent of convicts, and show that from February to October 1828, Logan ordered 200 floggings, for a total of 11,100 lashes.

The flogging cannot have abated much after October 1828, because Logan was facing an explosive situation in his settlement. The crops failed in the summer of 1828–29. And there were epidemics of trachoma and dysentery. The crude death rate at Moreton Bay shot up to 35 per 1,000 per month, and Logan chose this of all moments to put the settlement on half rations. In the midst of this social catastrophe, there was a great rise in the number of convicts hospitalized for the special affliction of Moreton Bay, coyly Latinized in the records as “flagellatio.”⁵⁰

Logan’s subordinates, to be sure, were not much help. Peter Spicer was a ludicrous incompetent, while Henry Cowper, the settlement’s surgeon, appeared to his newly arrived assistant in 1830 as

a most uncouth individual, an excessive grog-drinker and smoker, and the most ill-tempered and quarrelsome man I ever saw . . . I really think he is half insane. However, he is aware of his dreadful temper, for he speaks about it and says he is quite sure he will yet be confined in a madhouse.⁵¹

No wonder, then, that the prisoners tried to run away. Any chance of escape, no matter how thin, was preferable to life in this Georgian snake pit where even their turds were inspected for undigested kernels of stolen corn. In 1828–29, 126 prisoners (about one in ten) bolted into the bush and headed south, clutching what pitiful supplies of flour, fat and corn they had managed to steal and save, prepared to risk being killed (and, most of them believed, eaten) by Aborigines. Sixty-nine of them walked or were dragged back to the settlement, half-dead from exhaustion, to face 100, 200 or even 300 clawing strokes of the cat and be loaded with 20-pound irons for the rest of their sentences, to which Logan (as magistrate) would usually add another three years. (This was illegal and fell outside his powers as magistrate; but it drew no rebuke from Darling.) The fate of the rest is unknown. Most died. No prisoner was ever officially said to have reached freedom from Moreton Bay. Some may have done it, for several actually got as far down the coast as Port Macquarie before they were taken.

Meanwhile relations got worse with the Aborigines, whose stance toward the colonials by the late 1820s had changed from curiosity to open hostility. Convicts were ready to kill any black they met in the bush, if they could; the spiral of violence grew, and by early 1828 Logan had to report that armed bands of Aborigines, sometimes fifty men at a time, were attacking the maize fields.⁵² However, the convict tradition that Logan retaliated for these crop raids by shooting an Aborigine and hanging up his stuffed skin in the maize fields as a warning may be unfounded—although similar things were done in New South Wales.⁵³

Governor Darling countenanced what Logan was doing at Moreton Bay, but word of it leaked out into the community. Almost certainly it was meant to: the settlement needed a terrible reputation among convicts if it was to become a deterrent. The problem was not so much Logan’s severity as his rumored capriciousness. By 1830, voices in Sydney were asking what was really going on at Moreton Bay. The leading voice was that of Edward Smith Hall (1786–1860).

Hall, the son of a minor English banker, had emigrated to New South Wales in 1811. Even in England he had involved himself in religious and social work, and he was a friend of the Abolitionist William Wilberforce. This recommended him to Lachlan Macquarie, who granted him more than 2,000 acres of pastoral land over the years. Hall failed utterly as a farmer, and his record as an officer of the fledgling Bank of New South Wales was not much better. But to a man of hot conscience and philanthropic instincts, penal Australia—especially after Macquarie left it—offered a vast acreage to rake muck in. Hall found his vocation as a newspaper editor. In 1826 he and a partner in Sydney founded the Monitor. Its broad political aims were like those of Wentworth’s Australian: trial by jury, government by representative assembly, and the defense of civil liberties against Darling the martinet. More than the Australian, whose constituency was the Emancipists, the Monitor was concerned (or seditiously obsessed, some officials thought) with the plight of convicts under sentence whether privately mistreated as assigned servants or officially ground down on the chain gangs and at the penal stations.

Darling was Hall’s bête noire. His leaden autocracy, Hall editorialized, had made New South Wales “singularly prone to espionage, suspicion, and a servile dread of offending the higher authorities.” Through the Monitor and in a series of open letters to the colonial secretary in England, he accused him of negligence, unconstitutional disregard for the “ancient mild Laws of England,” graft, favoritism to rich colonists, jury-packing, indifference to “proven” cases of official torture, and “prostituting his Authority and influence as Governor to feelings of private resentment.”⁵⁴

Hall’s first big clash with Darling on events, rather than policies, came in 1826 over the Sudds-Thompson case. Joseph Sudds and Patrick Thompson, privates in the 57th Regiment, had come to believe (like many of their comrades in New South Wales) that the life of a serving convict, bad as it was, was still easier than a rank-and-file soldier’s. A soldier who committed a crime in Australia faced transportation to a penal settlement. To get out of the army, Sudds and Thompson robbed a Sydney shop and made no effort to escape arrest. They were tried and sentenced to 7 years in a penal settlement.

This enraged Darling, who felt the news that His Majesty’s soldiers preferred the life of a condemned convict would make either the army seem brutal (and discourage enlistment) or transportation mild (thus encouraging crime). He took it on himself, quite illegally, to cancel their prison sentences and send them to the iron gangs for 7 years. This was preceded by a ceremony of disgrace: dressed in the convicts’ “canaries” (the yellow and gray uniform of felonry) and wearing massive spiked collars linked to their leg-fetters by 13-pound chains, Sudds and Thompson were drummed out of their regiment and into jail, where they languished in their irons. But to Darling’s great embarrassment, Sudds—who had suffered from “dropsy”—fell ill from this treatment and died a few days later. Darling had not known Sudds’s medical history, if only because he had not asked about it; certainly he did not mean to kill the man. But the results of his “exemplary” punishment made such measures seem Draconian and provoked a wave of revulsion among all Emancipists. From the Australian and the Monitor, Wentworth and Hall accused the governor of murder, torture and Nero-like perversions of justice.

Darling fought back stiffly but as best he could against Wentworth (“a vulgar, ill-bred fellow”) and Hall (“a fellow without principles, an apostate missionary”). From that point on, all criticism was sedition. “The opposition papers,” he complained to Bathurst, “must destroy that Confidence which the people generally ought to place in the Government, and in a Colony composed as this is produce, if not checked, anarchy and revolt.”⁵⁵ He saw, as anyone could, that the Sudds-Thompson case was a heaven-sent lever for the “democrats” to press their claims for trial by open jury and a representative assembly. So he made a clumsy lunge against the opposition press. He tried to muzzle the Australian and the Monitor by imposing newspaper licenses, which would be withdrawn if they printed a “blasphemous or seditious libel.” John Macarthur also urged him to kill their circulation with a stamp duty of 4d. per copy. Both measures had already been proposed by the autocrat of Van Diemen’s Land, George Arthur. But all legislative bills had to be reviewed by the chief justice of the colony, Sir Francis Forbes.

Forbes thought his narrow-minded zealot of a governor had “less knowledge of the laws of his country than any gentleman filling his high official station whom it was ever my fortune to meet.” He took most of the bite out of Darling’s acts, until they could no longer silence the press—although they could certainly harass it. Hall, in return, kept up his invective against Darling and the Merinos and suffered seven prosecutions for criminal libel. In 1829 Darling at last managed to imprison him, but Hall continued to edit the Monitor from his cell and send long diatribes against the governor to officials in England. And it was in the Sydney jail, in March 1830, that Hall was handed the document that he believed would topple Captain Logan, disgrace Darling and force reform at Moreton Bay.

It was a manuscript left in the condemned cell of Sydney Jail by a convict named Thomas Matthew; he had left it hidden when he was taken out to be hanged. Matthew had been a “troublesome” convict. On the way from Sydney to Moreton Bay, he plotted a mutiny on the transport City of Edinburgh; the plan failed, because a prisoner named John Carrol ratted on the ringleaders. Matthew bided his time and smashed Carrol’s skull with a pickax at Moreton Bay. He was brought down to Sydney, tried and cast to die.

His death-cell letter explained that his own life was of no value to him. It told of life at Moreton Bay under “such a herd of tyrants that never met together in one place before.” The convict overseers “murder many a bright man,” but the prisoners could bring no charges against them, because they had to be made to Logan. The jail gang overseer, named Trenand, killed a prisoner with a spade in front of ten convict witnesses, “but such was their terror [that] none of them dared to mention it, for fear of being flogged to death.” Overseers stole the prisoners’ bread; men died in the fields and the cells “from want of attention and food” and were flogged to death “for stealing a cob of corn.” Some convicts were so weak that they had to crawl out to field labor. And Logan in one of his “mad fits” had all the cripples dragged from hospital and flogged “in their crutches.” Matthew claimed he had seen men so broken by the first half of a flogging that they had to be brought back to the triangles the next day in a wheelbarrow to be strung up for the second half.

Hall published this letter in the Monitor on March 27, 1830. He also declared, from jail, that he would prosecute Captain Logan for the murder of a convict named William Swann, who (Hall alleged) had died of ill-treatment at Moreton Bay in 1827. But here he was wrong, for Swann had died of dysentery in the hospital—or so surgeon Cowper swore in an affidavit.⁵⁶ Captain Logan now wrote a stiff note to the colonial secretary demanding Hall’s prosecution for criminal libel. In June, the Executive Council questioned both Reverend Vincent, the former Moreton Bay chaplain, and Surgeon Cowper. Cowper denied outright that there had ever been any cruelty, let alone murder, at Moreton Bay, and said nobody named Trenand had ever been an overseer there. The clergyman did remember Trenand, “who was said to be of a cruel disposition, and in the habit of beating and abusing the prisoners,” but denied that he had heard of him killing a prisoner with a spade. Asked whether men were killed unofficially by guards there, he hedged. “Certainly not to justify the statement in the paper,” was his strange reply.⁵⁷ Neither man remembered seeing cripples flogged or confirmed the more lurid accusations of arbitrary torture in Matthew’s gallows document. Prompted by Darling, the Executive Council advised the attorney-general to issue yet another writ for criminal libel against Edward Hall, that spreader of “sedition and levelling.”

The case never came to trial. Logan was about to leave for India—a posting now made necessary by the terrible reputation his regime at Moreton Bay had earned from the Emancipist press. By October 1830, his successor as commandant, Captain James Clunie of the 17th Regiment, was already learning the ropes at Moreton Bay. But Logan was not to leave Australia until he had given his sworn testimony in the trial of Hall and the Monitor, and while awaiting this call to Sydney he filled in time making exploratory sorties into the Brisbane Valley, upriver from Moreton Bay. On October 17, during one of these rides, his party lost him in the labyrinth of scrub.

Four days later a search-party found his saddle, its stirrup-leathers cut with a stone ax. Bands of convicts, led by Cowper and others, combed the bush for another week. In a clearing that bore the marks of many aboriginal feet, as though a wild dance had been held there, they found some pages of his notebook trampled in the dry grasses, along with a bloodstained tatter of his waistcoat and a part of his compass, broken and discarded by prying stone-age fingers. The next morning, about a mile away, the searchers found Logan’s horse dead and swollen in a creek-bed, with sticks incomprehensibly strewn over it. Up the steep bank of the stream was a shallow grave. Logan’s bare feet, partly eaten, protruded from the earth and his boots lay to one side. The blacks had speared him to death and buried him facedown, but the wild dogs had begun to dig him up; now he was black with flies and beyond eating. When his body was brought back to Moreton Bay, the convicts “manifested insane joy at the news of his murder, and sang and hoorayed all night, in defiance of the warders.”⁵⁸

So anxious were they to claim his death as their own revenge that they invented a different version: The hated commandant had been seized by his own convict servants in the bush, flogged nearly to death, finished off with a stone and buried facing downward, “looking down to Hell, for that’s where he’s going.” Then came the ghost stories. On the day Logan died, it was said, he appeared immobile and silent on his ghastly horse on the far bank of the Brisbane River; but when the ferryman rowed over to collect him, no one was there. Thus, Patrick Logan began to pass into popular legend at the moment of his death; the ballads came soon after. There was no libel trial for Edward Hall, this time. In fact Governor Darling, perhaps hoping to reduce the hail of innuendo and invective from the colonial press that beat around his head, took a deep breath and made the sole placatory gesture of his governorship: He freed Hall in November 1830, soon after the news of Logan’s killing reached Sydney.

But Hall was not grateful; nor did the Sydney democrats think this gesture outweighed Darling’s record of cruelty to convicts and favoritism to colonial Tories. Darling might have remained in office despite his colonial enemies—for Australians had not put him there, and they could not remove him—but England itself was moving away from the Tory extremism that Darling, an army man serving this arch-reactionary government of Wellington, embodied.

By 1830, the movement for parliamentary reform had percolated from working men to the very middle classes who, in 1819, had reacted indifferently or timidly to the Peterloo Massacre and who distrusted the idea of “reform.” And as the English middle classes became more aware of the appalling inequities built into the power structure—symbolized by the postwar sufferings of the countryside and the scandal of the “Rotten Boroughs”—so the social base of the reform movement broadened, and the Whigs, led by Lord Charles Grey, could move against the Tories’ monopoly of power. There was, moreover, the example of the French Revolution of 1830, which persuaded some liberal Whigs that populist moves, led by bourgeois interests, did not—as the Tories had warned since 1789—lead to Jacobinism and tumbrils. Lafayette and Louis-Philippe were plainly not the same as Marat and Robespierre. In November 1830, Wellington’s government fell and the new king, William IV, instructed Lord Grey to form a government. Under Grey, the Reform Bill passed, though only by one vote.

Grey was not liberal: “There is no one more decided against annual parliaments, universal suffrage, and the ballot than I am,” he told the House. “My object is not to favour, but to put an end to such hopes and projects.”⁵⁹ But his son, Henry George Grey, known as Viscount Howick, did not share all the father’s views. In particular he had been fired by Wilberforce’s campaign against slavery, and he was not unaware of the comparisons drawn between slavery and convict transportation. Nepotism put Howick in his father’s ministry in 1830 as under-secretary for the colonies, under Viscount Goderich. In Howick, the stream of complaints from Australia about Governor Darling found a sympathetic ear. The world had moved somewhat, and even at the limits of Empire there was less room for a a dull, gold-braided martinet who believed more in the lash than the ballot-box. Howick particularly disliked Darling’s attempts to muzzle public speech in New South Wales; and when the governor’s six-year term ran out in 1831, there was no move to renew it. So Darling left Australia.

His departure was marked by wild jubilations from the Emancipists. Hall’s Monitor announced that an “illumination” would rise over its editorial office the night Darling sailed, bearing the incandescent phrase “He’s off.” “THANK GOD—We have shaken off the incubus at last!” Wentworth exclaimed in the Australian, and held open house for every Emancipist in the colony on the grounds of his estate at Vaucluse, over-looking Sydney Harbor, whose perimeter had been surrounded by a shallow trench filled with Irish earth to keep the Australian snakes out. Some four thousand people converged on Vaucluse House by gig, horse, donkey and Shank’s pony, and hoed into a feast more Brobdingnagian than Lucullan, involving a whole roast ox, twelve sheep, thousands of loaves of bread and incalculable quantities of ale and spirits. The pro-Darling newspaper, the Sydney Gazette, asked its readers to imagine

the roaring, bawling, screeching, blaspheming, thumping, bumping, kicking, licking, tricking, cheating, beating, stealing, reeling, breaking of heads, bleeding of noses, blackening of eyes, picking of pockets, and what not . . . the orgies of the lowest rabble of Botany Bay, congregated in the open air, shrouded by the curtain of night, released from the eyes of the police, and helewated by the fumes of Cooper’s gin . . . [T]hese contemptible proceedings have excited universal disgust and abhorrence among decent people.⁶⁰

But that night the Emancipists and Currency voted obstreperously with their bellies; there were few tears when Darling sailed, and no new appointments for him when he reached England.

Darling’s departure, and his replacement by the comparatively liberal Richard Bourke, made convict life at Moreton Bay slightly better—but not much. Thanks to Logan’s slave-driving, the settlement now had better buildings and a regular supply of water (whose pipes were each laboriously hollowed from an ironbark log); accordingly, the disease rate slowed down, although trachoma would linger among convicts and then among poor-white settlers on the Brisbane River for half a century longer. Logan’s successor, Clunie, was a flogger but a less capricious one, and the convicts did not think him such a tyrant. Fewer of them tried to escape, but that was because they had given up hope: Relations between whites and blacks at Moreton Bay had degenerated so far that convicts now expected to be killed by the natives if they went bush. Allan Cunningham, who had been there in 1828–29, later reported that escaped convicts had been “taking liberties with”—raping—aboriginal women.⁶¹ This must have been the last straw. However, the territories of those offended tribes lay south of Moreton Bay.

Other convicts went north, in the hope of reaching China, and at least one of them not only survived but became famous for his escape (although he did not reach China). This was John Graham, a resourceful Irishman who had been transported in 1824 for stealing a few pounds of hemp from a linen-maker. Assigned at first to a master in Parramatta, he got to know the local Aborigines and learned from them some tricks of survival in the unfamiliar bush. Then, for a second offense, he was transported to Moreton Bay in 1827. After a few months of Logan’s brutalities he bolted north, managing to avoid the Aborigines and live, unaided, off the land. When at last he did blunder into contact with a tribe, he had the improbable luck to be greeted by one of its women as the white ghost of her dead warrior-husband. Thus he entered the tribe and lived with it from 1827 to 1833, before walking back to Moreton Bay and surrendering to the surprised Clunie. No convict, other than Buckley in Victoria, had ever acquired such intimate, detailed knowledge of aboriginal life and ritual, but it did not make Graham any more sympathetic to the blacks once he was back in white company. He denounced them as “frightful clans and hordes of cannibals and savages,” hoping to convince the authorities that he had suffered so much among them that his sentence should not be prolonged.⁶²

Under Clunie, Moreton Bay took shape as a town, the embryo of the city of Brisbane. Its crude economy of forced labor had diversified, expanded by artisans from the “First Class” of convicts—minor offenders who had shown an unblemished record over their first years of imprisonment there. Tailors sewed gray-and-yellow uniforms out of the coarse, felt-like “magpie cloth” or “canary stuff”; and there were cobblers, tanners and candlemakers, smiths, coopers, joiners and wheelwrights—a thriving little economy that contained the seeds of surplus and trade, and whose labor was exploited in various ways by the overseers and officers. The convicts had more food now and placed an enormous value on small luxuries like tea and sugar. The tea was coarse green stuff full of twigs, known as “posts-and-rails”; the brown sticky sugar was nicknamed “coal tar,” but it would improve a sweet potato duff and give strength to the insipid mock-coffee the prisoners made from burnt corn kernels.

By the end of 1835, when Captain Foster Fyans of the 4th (King’s Own) Regiment succeeded Clunie as commandant, the old starvation days under Logan were just a memory—though a bitterly preserved one in convict lore. But the rest of prison life went on much as before beneath the shadow of the triangles. Fyans took a sardonic pleasure in describing the rituals of the cat-o’-nine-tails to George Walker and James Backhouse, two Quaker missionaries on a tour of the Australian penal colonies:

“Friend,” said Friend Backhouse, “I wish thee much to explain the punishments. First, friend, the number of stripes in whipping?”

My reply was, from twenty to a hundred or two hundred lashes, that was our limit:–when two long and hollow groans followed. “The first lash, Friend, the skin rises not unlike a white frost, Friend. The second lash, Friend, often reminds me of a snowstorm. . . . [T]he third lash, Friend, the back is lacerated dreadfully.” Half a dozen of groans. “The painful feelings then subside, Friend, for the blood comes freely.” Long groans and heavy moans, and the Friends said some prayers; when out the notebooks came. . . . I then proposed to flog a fellow that they might see the process, and be better able to judge. “No, Friend, we thank thee.”⁶³

But by then the main form of punishment at Moreton Bay was not the lash, but the treadmill. In 1827, Logan had built a windmill there (it still stands, though converted into an observatory, and is one of the few remaining buildings of the convict period in Brisbane); and two years later a treadmill was added to it, so that convicts could grind corn when the wind did not blow—a practical machine that doubled as an instrument of mass punishment. The treadmill was like a waterwheel, but it was forty feet long, with wooden treads nine inches wide. As many as fifty convicts could be punished on it at once. The convicts’ names for it were expressive: the everlasting staircase or, because the stiff prison clothes scraped one’s groin raw after a few hours on it, the cockchafer. The prisoners went up a flight of steps and stood ready on the horizontal blade of the mill. They had a fixed handrail to hold. The overseer pulled out an iron bolt and the wheel began to turn: “You would hear the ‘click, click’ of their irons as they kept step with the wheel, and those with the heaviest irons seemed to have a great job to keep up. Some poor wretches only just managed to pull through until they got off.”⁶⁴ The mill stood for progress—the rationalization of punishment. It was a more philosophical instrument than the cat.

From 1835 on, the exclusively penal nature of Brisbane Town and its outlying settlements began to fade. The lash could still be heard in the streets, and the centipedes of ironed men, their chains rusty with tropical dew, still shuffled from barracks to work, their heads bowed; but their numbers were declining, and when Fyans took over there were only about four hundred male convicts there. By 1840, the prisoners’ barracks and the Female Factory stood empty. All convicts still under sentence had been recalled to Sydney, and the assignment system had been discontinued. Now the free settlers of Brisbane had to manage without government-sponsored slave labor, for the place was no longer isolated. It even had a post office. And the broken, marginal Aborigines, stupefied with cane liquor, dozing like lumps of shadow in patches of shade, confirmed the total victory of white civilization. By 1840, squatters had found a stock route north to the rich plains of the Darling Downs, inland from Brisbane. So the pastoral economy of modern Queensland began with the emancipation of Brisbane, for “Nature has pointed out that spot,” the Australianeditorialized in 1842, “as the site of the northern capital of Australia.” A week later, Governor Gipps formally declared that Moreton Bay was no longer a penal settlement. Settlers and visitors could come and go as they pleased. Military rule was over. So ended the last of the penal stations on the Australian mainland; and when the first Queensland Parliament was convened some years later, it met, by an irony that Logan might have appreciated, in the upper floor of the largest building in Brisbane—the old convict barracks, built to house a thousand men. But soon this unloved souvenir, like so many buildings that spoke of Australian darkness, was razed.

iv

THE SPOT THAT now represented the quintessence of punishment was Norfolk Island. Governor Brisbane had turned his attention to it in 1824, the year Moreton Bay was settled. After reading the Bigge Report, Lord Bathurst had ordered him to prepare a place of ultimate terror for the incorrigibles of the System. As long as convicts were on the mainland, they could escape; and so Bathurst told Brisbane to re-occupy Norfolk Island, which had been abandoned ten years before at the merciful behest of Governor Macquarie. This speck of land, floating in the infinite waste of the Pacific a thousand miles east of Sydney and four hundred miles north of New Zealand, would once more serve as “a great Hulk or Penitentiary,” the nadir of England’s penal system. Its old form had been bad enough. As Governor Hunter declared in 1812, its prisoners “felt [it] was a very severe sentence; they would sooner have lost their lives.” Now it would get worse, and although no convict could escape from it, rumor and reputation would. In this way, the “Old Hell,” as convict argot termed it, would reduce mainland crime by sheer terror.⁶⁵

Brisbane wrote to England, outlining his new kakotopia. On Norfolk Island, the genial stargazer promised, all pretense at reform would be dropped. Its sole purpose would be to provide “the ne plus ultra of convict degradation.” The island could not support many prisoners, and those it contained must be the absolute worst of those double-damned by the System. Hence, most of them would be men convicted of fresh hanging crimes in the colony, whose sentences had been commuted to life imprisonment. “The felon, who is sent there, is forever excluded from all hope of return,” and although mainland convicts in government service or on the assignment system had some legal rights, those on Norfolk Island “have forfeited all claim to the protection of the law.” To ensure their reduction to mere ciphers, Brisbane urged that

if it were not too repugnant to the Laws of England, I should consider it very fitting to have Norfolk Island completely under Martial Law, which would not only form part of the punishment in itself, but save the complicated machinery of Civil Courts, or sending people for trial [to Sydney]. . . . My experience convinces me that there is nothing so effectual in dealing with convicts as Summary Proceedings.⁶⁶

This, Bathurst would not grant; but in practice, the future commandants of Norfolk Island were invested with such sweeping powers short of arbitrary hanging that their rule was all but absolute.

The prisoners must be promised nothing and given only the dimmest sense of a goal toward which they could work. “No hopes of any mitigation of their sentences . . . should ever be held out to them,” and they could only get off the island after a minimum of 10 years, whose last 5 must show a perfect behavior-sheet.⁶⁷ That record, of course, could be wiped out by the whim of an officer, the merest grudge-word of an informer. And even if the prisoner finished his Norfolk Island sentence and returned to the mainland, he must serve out the rest of his original sentence in full. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’intrate—Dante’s words on the adamantine gate of Hell became the obligatory text quoted by educated visitors to Norfolk Island (not that there were many of them) over the next fifteen years. The island would be a machine for extinguishing hope.

For this purpose it was ideal, for it concentrated and epitomized the sense of delusive beauty, beauty empty at the core and flaking into viciousness, uselessness and indifference, that had been part of English reactions to Australian landscape ever since the arrival of the First Fleet. From an approaching boat, Norfolk Island is an apparition, a rolling cap of green meadow and spiring trees, raised out of the Pacific on pipes and pillars of basalt as though offered to one infinite blueness by another. It was no harbor. Most of its coast is sheer cliff, black planes of rock laced with red oxides. There are only two landing-places. One is at Cascades Bay on the northeast side, where boats and crew have to be plucked from the water by a derrick. The other, chiefly used in convict days, is at Sydney Bay, where the ruins of the Kingston penal settlement stand. A reef blocks the whole approach to the shore; ships stood off and unloaded their freight of chained convicts into whalers, which had to be rowed over the reef through its boiling cross-rips—a terrifying ordeal for all but the stoutest tar.

They struggled ashore in Paradise. There was a little crescent beach of white sand where, still by an arm of the reef, the water lapped in aquamarine clarity. Green hills encircled the flat, swampy table where the first settlement had been pitched forty years before; their folds ran down to the sea, and in them ran cascades of bright water shaded by hibiscus and palms. Great ropes of jasmine, on stems thick as a man’s wrist, hung in swags from the branches of the Norfolk Island pines. There were groves of sugar cane, figs, guavas and lemons, the wild descendants of specimens brought by the First Fleet from Rio and the Cape in 1788. The Norfolk Island birds had forgotten man had ever been there; one could pick them out of the bushes, like fruit. Even today, a walk along the cliffs—where the green meadow runs to the very brink of the drop and the bushes are distorted by the eternal Pacific wind into humps and clawings that resemble Hokusai’s Great Wave copied by a topiarist—is a fine cure for human adhesiveness. One sees nothing but elements: air, water, rock and the patterns wrought by their immense friction. The mornings are by Turner; the evenings, by Caspar David Friedrich, calm and beneficent, the light sifting angelically down toward the solemn horizon. “My object,” wrote Governor Darling in 1827, “was to hold out that Settlement as a place of the extremest Punishment, short of Death.”⁶⁸

The first party of convicts—fifty-seven of them, picked for their skill as artisans—landed in June 1825 and began setting up new quarters out of stone and plank scavenged from the abandoned Kingston settlement. Over the next five years, the population grew and an unremarkable succession of military officers ran the island.^* The authorities did not fix on a long-term commandant until 1829. The man they chose was a lieutenant-colonel of the 80th Regiment, James Thomas Morisset (1780–1852).

Morisset had proven tastes and abilities for the work. At the age of forty-nine he was an old soldier; in fact, the army had been his entire life, from the age of eighteen, when he joined the 80th and began a steady rise through the ranks of service in India and Egypt. He was a career officer with no family money to buy him a commission. In the Napoleonic Wars, he fought as a captain in Spain and was gravely wounded at the battle of La Albuera. In 1817 he was posted with his regiment to New South Wales, where he took over command of the Newcastle penal settlement from Captain James Wallis. Through what Hall would later call “the timidity and suspicion of his natural temper, and his proneness to severity,” Morisset soon became a terror to the convicts, infamous for the harshness of his punishments. As commandant he was also magistrate, and in order to spare settlers up the Hunter River the bother of coming to Newcastle in order to bring charges against their assigned servants, he would make excursions upstream in a boat with two flagellators and a portable set of triangles so that he could hand out summary lashings on their farms.

No portrait of Morisset survives, and his appearance would have taxed the meager resources of any colonial artist. He was slender, elegantly dressed (by Buckmaster, one of the more fashionable London military tailors) and fond of gold embroidery; even his forage cap was covered with it. But the look of the military dandy was brusquely contradicted by his face. At La Albuera, a 32-inch mine-shell had exploded near him and left him with the mask of an ogre. His mouth ran diagonally upward and made peculiar whistling noises when he spoke. One eye was normal, but the other protruded like a staring pebble and seemed never to move. The cheekbone and jaw on one side had been smashed to fragments and, without cosmetic surgery, had re-knit to form a swollen mass like “a large yellow over-ripe melon”; he would defiantly thrust this cheek forward in conversation, as though daring his interlocutor to look away.⁶⁹ For Morisset was not without bravado, and he was determined to convert his wound into a badge of bitter honor in the eyes of his equals and superiors.

For his inferiors, the convicts, more dangerous sublimations lay within the dapper frame and the twisted gourd of shiny tissue. He “knew” them; and when he returned to London on leave after eight years in Australia—the last two as commandant at Bathurst, beyond the Blue Mountains—he could not get the convicts out of his mind, for their management had become an obsession. He went every day to Bow Street; he haunted the police offices; he learned to talk underworld cant. “I am the man to keep these scoundrels in order,” he boasted later. “I assure you, Sir, if the Duke of Wellington searched through the Army of Great Britain he could not equal me; I understand all their priggings.”⁷⁰ And while in London, he waited on Lord Bathurst and begged for Norfolk Island.

Bathurst knew talent when he saw it. He was worried about the rabble’s changing attitude to transportation. Too many letters had come back from Emancipists and from assigned convicts who had found easy masters, praising the conditions of life in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, where wages were high and a man could make a new life for himself with his two hands. Bathurst did not want Australia to lose its reputation. Morisset seemed just the man to help Darling put a dose of iron back in the convict soul. The increase of terror (a word Bathurst used often in dispatches to Darling) must begin from the bottom of the System, which meant Norfolk Island. So Morisset went back to Australia as a lieutenant-colonel in 1827. There was some delay in getting him to Norfolk Island. He had married a young woman named Emily Vaux in 1826, but Darling wanted no women in Norfolk Island, because their presence would confuse the schematic purity of discipline in that Mount Athos of English misery. “I laid it down as a rule,” Darling explained, “that women should not be sent to the Settlement, and the few free women . . . belonging to the troops and the people there, were accordingly withdrawn.”⁷¹ He was reluctant to have only one woman, the commandant’s wife, in residence there. Yet it seemed unfair to separate Morisset from the meek young bride whom—with some difficulty, one may surmise, considering his looks—he had wooed and won and then brought so far to Australia. In February 1829, the Morissets sailed for Norfolk Island with their two children. These infants were to see strange sights.