15

A Special Scourge

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LORD STANLEY had never been to the antipodes or met a felon, but he glowed with ideological confidence in his new plan for mending the morals of both. It was meant to benefit England first, the convicts second, and Van Diemen’s Land not at all.

Stanley took the whole matter of convict discipline to be “an Imperial interest,” to whose running the interests of local free settlers were quite irrelevant. Let them complain about losing their cheap labor; that was not the Colonial Office’s problem. He only wanted to get criminals out of Britain cheaply, while satisfying the much louder and closer chorus of English MPs, clergy and editors, most of whom wanted the assignment system buried forever.

Stanley dispatched his plan in November 1842 and it reached Hobart early in 1843. It cancelled the last area in which convicts could be assigned—service on farms. Instead, the felons were to pass through five stages on their way to reformation and liberty.¹

The first was detention on Norfolk Island, usually for a year, to instill discipline. This penal antechamber could only take 750 new convicts a year direct from England. Hence, Norfolk Island was kept for long-sentence men, mainly lifers who, Stanley reasoned, were more apt to be desperate and so would need more isolation and discipline to make them tractable. The rest would go straight to Hobart, where, along with the current crop of men emerging from their time on Norfolk, they entered the second stage: the probation gangs.

Each of these gangs was to be made up of 250 to 300 men, laboring in the “unsettled districts,” on long, arduous government projects—building roads and bridges, clearing Crown land to improve its sale value or logging on the Tasman Peninsula. The gangers would need special religious instruction (for which Stanley wanted Franklin to gather more penal chaplains), but, if properly supervised on long-term projects, they might grow their own food. Stanley figured that if England sent out 4,000 men a year (the actual numbers were close to that: 4,819 men in 1842; 3,048 in 1843; and 3,959 in 1844) and the average term of probation ganglabor was 18 months, then twenty gangs of 300 men would absorb them all. Each man would cost about £18 to ship to Van Diemen’s Land, and £27 a year to feed; reckoning in £35,000 for the costs of Norfolk Island and £10,000 for overheads, Stanley thought the Probation System could maintain about 35,000 convicts in government service and continuous punishment for less than £300,000 a year, half the estimated cost of building penitentiaries for them all.²

That would be England’s only expense. After their probation labor the prisoner received a “probation pass,” which meant he could work for wages for an approved settler or for the local government of Van Diemen’s Land. The Crown would not contribute a penny to these wages. The convicts could work or starve—that was up to them and to their prospective employers. The probation pass led to the last two stages: the normal ticket-of-leave (allowing the man to choose his own master without a say-so from Hobart) and, lastly, a conditional or absolute pardon.

So much for the men. With less relish, Stanley turned to the women and children. Boy criminals would begin with a term of 2 to 3 years in Parkhurst Prison. “Every boy who enters Parkhurst,” declared one of Stanley’s underlings in Whitehall to the prison authorities there, in words that rang of iron and cold corridors,

is doomed to be transported; and this part of the sentence passed on him is immutable. He must bid a long farewell to the hopes of revisiting his native home, of seeing his parents, or of rejoining his companions. These are the hopes and pleasures which his crimes have forfeited. . . . [H]is future prospects in life depend entirely on his conduct at Parkhurst.³

If he behaved well at Parkhurst, the boy would get a ticket-of-leave on landing in Van Diemen’s Land “and virtually be pardoned,” although Whitehall did not explain how he was expected to survive thereafter. If his conduct was indifferent, he would start with a probationary pass, “which is far short of freedom.” A bad boy went to Point Puer at Port Arthur, where “every hardship and degradation awaits him, and where his sufferings will be severe.”⁴

As for the punishment of women, Lord Stanley entrusted his thoughts on this “more difficult subject” to Franklin in November 1842. Though as depraved as men, they could not be worked in probation gangs. The government could lock them up in Van Diemen’s Land or “permit them to enter, in some mode or other, into the mass of the population.” It could hardly revive assignment for them, because “respectable” settlers did not want them and, were they to be “assigned to the less scrupulous and less moral portion of the community”—namely, Emancipists—“they must continually be exposed to criminal solicitation, to grievous oppression, and often to personal violence.” Moreoever, they would confront Authority with their own version of the Cretan paradox, because even if they were solicited, oppressed and beaten, “little confidence is placed, or can be placed, in the truth of their complaints.”⁵

Nor could Franklin keep them in the existing Female Factories at Hobart and Launceston, which (Stanley had learned) were chaotic sumps where evil “is constantly perpetuating and increasing itself.” They held three classes of female convict, each as bad as the next: those who could not be assigned at all, those who were returned from assignment to the government for punishment, and helpless women pregnant with bastard offspring who were thrown back on the government’s hands. Conditions in such places, and in the Queen’s Orphan School in Hobart which took in illegitimates, were “sufficient to make the blood run cold,” wrote a clergyman who knew them well, the Reverend Robert Crooke (1818–1888). Crooke had been a catechist with the Convict Department in 1843, and he described the life of the seven hundred inmates of the Queen’s Orphan School. Pale and sick, these young prisoners were segregated, kept on low coarse rations and frequently punished.

The slightest offence, whether committed by boy or girl, was punished by unmerciful flogging and some of the officers, more especially females, seem to have taken a delight in inflicting corporal punishment. . . . The female superintendent was in the habit of taking girls, some of them almost young women, to her own bedroom and for trifling offences . . . stripping them naked, and with a riding whip or a heavy leather strap flagellating them until their bodies were a mass of bruises.⁶

Such institutions were jam-packed, so all the lieutenant-governor could do to house the newly arriving women convicts was rent secure buildings in Hobart, or else detain the ship they came on and keep them on board “until you shall be able to effect more permanent arrangements.” The long-term plan, on which Franklin was to start at once, was to put up a women’s penitentiary for at least four hundred prisoners within twenty miles of Hobart, whose construction the Home Government would pay for. Here, every female prisoner would spend at least six months on arrival and then receive a probation pass. The penitentiary was not built.

Stanley’s Probation System looked impressively machine-like and rational on paper, but it proved a cruel and wretched failure because it ignored both the economic facts of Van Diemen’s Land and the quality of its administrators. To succeed, it needed at least a prosperous economy and a strong cooperation between the Government House and the settlers. Neither existed in the last years of Franklin’s governorship. But Stanley, in his anxiety to have no one sully his plan, chose as Franklin’s successor a person so devoid of initiative that he hardly cast a shadow.

Sir John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot (1783–1847) was a Warwickshire baronet of sixty, whom scarcely anyone in public life except Stanley had even heard of; and Stanley, his patron, was indiscreet enough to call him (though not in public) “a muddle-brained blockhead.” Until his appointment in August 1843, Eardley-Wilmot had not devoted a moment’s thought to the colonies in general or to Van Diemen’s Land in particular. His qualifications were three: His duties as a county magistrate had given him an amateurish, paternal interest in prison reform and juvenile offenders;⁷ having been to Oxford with Stanley, and having joined Stanley’s embryonic third party on quitting the Whigs, he had a place on the Old Boy network; and he was dull enough not to be disloyal. To back him up, Stanley appointed as comptroller-general of convicts a leftover from Arthur’s day, the harsh and choleric Captain Matthew Forster. Such was the team that Stanley relied on to run the penal system and to keep at bay the colonists of Van Diemen’s Land, irate at being denied both assigned labor and self-government.

Under such conditions, the angel Gabriel himself would have been an unpopular lieutenant-governor. When the “battered old beau” (as one Hobart lady described Eardley-Wilmot on first glimpse) appeared with his three sons Augustus, Charles and Robert, all of whom promptly got public offices in Van Diemen’s Land, no one took to the new proconsul.

He could not persuade the settlers that Whitehall knew or cared what it was doing to their economy. The trade depression that had begun in Van Diemen’s Land in 1841 was still worsening. One black day in 1843, Eardley-Wilmot learned that there was only £800 left in his treasury, and he had to borrow £20,000 from banks and the military chest to pay the wages of pass-holders in government service. Every year the government revenues of Van Diemen’s Land fell by £20,000, and Eardley-Wilmot had to keep borrowing “in the style of a man continuing to sign checks before his bank manager caught up with him.”⁸ Across the Bass Strait, in New South Wales and the Port Phillip region, vast, cheap and fertile acreage beckoned the settler. In Van Diemen’s Land, grazing land was expensive, and the best of it was already taken up; so the government’s revenue from the sale of Crown land dwindled to almost nothing.

As with the public sector, so with the private. By 1844, it was cheaper to import cattle from the mainland than to buy locally raised animals. Sydney imported wheat from Valparaiso but charged a duty on grain coming from the “Tainted Isle,” Van Diemen’s Land. Men could not sell their farms, for there were no buyers; they could not hire labor, for they had no money. The farmers were even worse placed than the government to absorb the huge labor surplus that Stanley’s Probation System had created. At the low point of Eardley-Wilmot’s office the island had 16,000 unemployed prisoners and ex-convicts stranded in its collapsed economy —7,000 holders of probation passes, 5,000 ticket-of-leave men, and 4,000 of the conditionally pardoned.

Meanwhile, the flow of immigrants had dried up. In 1842, 2,446 emigrants had landed in Van Diemen’s Land; the next year there were 26, and in 1844 exactly one emigrant arrived. (In 1843–44, 3,618 people had emigrated from England to New South Wales.) In Launceston alone, 264 houses stood empty, abandoned by their owners, who had fled to the mainland to begin their lives again. In the first six months of 1845, 1,628 settlers left Van Diemen’s Land, a loss of some 5 percent of its free population.⁹

There was also a great deal of alarm about fugitives from the probation gangs, who were said to be roaming the roads and valleys of Van Diemen’s Land unchecked, plundering at will, spreading misery and vice like a contagion everywhere. Some of them were tattooed like South Sea Island chiefs and would have stood out in “respectable” company. The description on a “wanted” poster of one such absconder, Charles Stagg, a twenty-three-year-old laborer from Norwich who ran from the Seven-Mile Creek probation station in March 1843, enumerates his tattoos, which included the initials of most of his family as well as his past sweethearts:

Mary Stagg, Thomas Stagg, crucifix, 5 dots, shoe, crucifix, WS, man with stick, HK, dog, Gwynson, X Mary Robinson, Liberty, bracelet on right arm, Eliza Smith, O Sun and blue marks and rings all over right hand; man and woman, two men fighting, TS WS LS LHHS 1842, anchor, MSCS on left arm, blue dots and rings on fingers of left hand, H Stagg, William, crucifix, sun and moon on breast, ABCDEFGH on left leg, large scar on upper right arm.¹⁰

It would seem, however, that the tales of marauding gangs were somewhat exaggerated, for the poster listed some 465 convicts at large, cumulative since 1831. Many of these must long since have died, escaped on sealing boats or made their way across the Bass Strait to the mainland.

A further source of irritation was that Eardley-Wilmot had been ordered to go after free settlers for the arrears on their quit-rents. These small sums had mounted up, having remained unpaid for years on land granted in Arthur’s time or earlier; Stanley felt that collection of these taxes could offset the drop in Crown land sales. The settlers bridled at that, and even worse was the demand for taxes to carry the cost of both the judiciary and the police. The Van Diemen’s Land police force was huge in ratio to the free population. The costs of the police, the judiciary and the maintenance of paupers came to £52,437 a year, or nearly a pound a head for every man, woman and child, free and bond, in Van Diemen’s Land.¹¹

The colony was sliding into bankruptcy. Eardley-Wilmot bore all the blame for this and was even more execrated than Arthur. Yet the sad fact was that he sympathized with the plight of the settlers and took their side in his dispatches to Whitehall, much to Lord Stanley’s annoyance. He urged Stanley to drop the minimum price of Crown land below £1 an acre, as an inducement to new settlers; and he tried to get credit to use the mass paid labor of otherwise unemployable pass-holders on public works, to be underwritten by Britain but paid for, in time, by tolls and service charges. He also pressed the Treasury to pay the cost of the jail and police system; eventually, in early 1846, it agreed to pay two-thirds.

This gesture came too late to appease the settlers. Between October and November 1845, Eardley-Wilmot faced a political crisis in his Legislative Council. The Legislative Council of Van Diemen’s Land was not an elected body, and, since Arthur’s day, it had usually been content to act as a rubber stamp. It consisted of the lieutenant-governor, six government officials and eight non-official members drawn from the ranks of free citizens, usually opulent ones. Six of the latter—the “Patriotic Six,” as their supporters called them—resigned over the police-funds issue and left the council without a quorum. They claimed they had been refused information on police budgets and convict administration, and that when they pressed for it Eardley-Wilmot and the official members had called them “factious” and “disloyal.” Although Eardley-Wilmot managed to replace the six, he could not keep a lid on the demands for representative government and the end of transportation, which by now had fused into the single obsessive issue of political life in Van Diemen’s Land.

But Whitehall would not listen. All Eardley-Wilmot could show after two years of pleas was a lengthy rebuke from Stanley, complaining that he had not filed proper reports on the working of the Probation System. By then, Van Diemen’s Land boasted sixteen probation stations: four (mainly for logging and coal-mining) on Tasman’s Peninsula, five for agriculture on the coast of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, one to build the female penitentiary at Oyster Bay, two on Maria Island, one on the east coast and three, whose gangers labored to build roads and bridges, in the interior of the island. There were eight hiring depots from which the free settlers could recruit pass-holders, but traffic through them was sluggish. All this presented a lot of ground for reports to cover. Eardley-Wilmot did not take to scrambling down the coal mines or through the forests of Tasman’s Peninsula to see how well the probation gangs were shedding their vices by splitting shingles and felling 150-foot eucalypts, and so he was often content to scrawl mere covering-notes on the detailed statistical reports of his comptroller-general of convicts, Forster. But Stanley’s complaints typified his imperial and solipsistic view of the antipodes. To him, Van Diemen’s Land was not a complex little society with severe economic problems; it was more abstract—a receptacle, a social void whose sole purpose was to swallow criminals. He did not want to hear that “his” convicts could not be fully employed in “his” colony. Realizing that the Probation System was about to fail, and that he might be blamed for it, Lord Stanley got ready to fling Sir Eardley-Wilmot to the Tasmanian Devils. He would make sure that the chaos in Van Diemen’s Land was seen not as his system’s fault but as the proconsul’s.¹²

Stanley gave the draft of his strongly critical dispatch to the government printer, who published it for the House of Commons in February 1846. The first Eardley-Wilmot saw of it was in print. He was aghast at Stanley’s maneuver, which denied him the chance to have his letters of rebuttal printed along with the Colonial Office’s criticisms and pilloried him before government and press as incompetent, lazy and vague. Eardley-Wilmot dug in.

The Colonial Office was getting set to dismiss him when, in 1845, Lord Stanley quit the Colonial Office for a larger political sphere. He was replaced by the thirty-six-year-old junior minister William Ewart Gladstone. Gladstone depended for his knowledge of Australian matters on the permanent under secretary to the Colonial Office, one of the preeminent civil servants of the nineteenth century (and the grandfather of Virginia Woolf), Sir James Stephen. Stephen felt Britain had been wrong in overloading Van Diemen’s Land with convicts, and he was very skeptical of Stanley’s Probation System. But he was also sure of Eardley-Wilmot’s incompetence and he took up the issue which, he knew, would turn the morally priggish Gladstone against the foundering lieutenant-governor.

Ever since the Probation System had been installed, lobbyists had been harping on a subject peculiarly repugnant to the Victorian sense of public morality: that, thanks to those isolated bush gangs of toiling, degenerate men, Van Diemen’s Land was now a hotbed of sodomy. Letters and witnesses came across the oceans to Whitehall, testifying to the collapse of all moral values in the stained island. They made Van Diemen’s Land under Eardley-Wilmot sound infinitely worse than Capri under Tiberius.

Francis Russell Nixon, Bishop of Van Diemen’s Land, carried the most weight among them. The epidemic of unnatural crime, he assured Lord Grey, “unless sternly arrested in its growth, must not only ensure the moral degradation of the colony, but draw down divine vengeance upon it.” Nixon believed that all the convicts, without exception, left the probation gangs worse than they entered them. He quoted letters to him from despairing gang chaplains. “I cannot depict the horrors committed here daily by miserable men, who know better, but who cannot escape from their wretched condition.” Parties of convicts slunk off together into the bush to gratify their lusts. In the “tench” or penitentiary (in fact, an ordinary prisoners’ barracks) in Hobart Town, where twelve hundred were kept, “The most disgusting crimes that ever stained the character of man are perpetrated . . . and without the least possible way of preventing it.” In the coal mines near Port Arthur, two men had raped a boy convict, “an offence hitherto, I believe, unheard-of in a Christian country.” They hanged for it, but the medical officer at the mines, Dr. Motherwell, found twenty men “labouring under disease from unnatural crimes.” The spread of rectal gonorrhea, Bishop Nixon warned, was “a special scourge” from God, “a mark of his increased wrath, for the yet greater abomination.”¹³

Nor was the evil confined to men. The Female Factory at the Cascades in Hobart swarmed with lesbians. In August 1841, Franklin had set up a committee of inquiry to review the facilities for discipline of female prisoners in this dank, miserable and overcrowded building, along with its twin institution in Launceston. Its semi-confidential report appeared in February 1843, with its descriptions of women convicts in the “very act of exciting each other’s passions—on the Lord’s Day in the House of God—and at the very time divine service was performing.”¹⁴ By then the local press was printing stories about the “fiendish fondness” of Sapphic practices in the factories, and in November 1843 Eardley-Wilmot sent a secret dispatch of his own to London on this subject. He told Stanley that women in the Female Factories “have their Fancy-women, or lovers, to whom they are attached with quite as much ardour as they would be to the other sex, and practice onanism to the greatest extent.”¹⁵

At least one convict, the Chartist exile John Frost (and he can hardly have been alone in his opinion), believed that the British Government maintained the probation gangs in all their turpitude in order to crush the spirit of class resistance. “The authorities of Van Diemen’s Land were indifferent to the commission of this great offence,” he told a shocked English audience some years after his release. “Smoking was deemed a greater offence than that of Gomorrah, and published with greater severity.”¹⁶

Eardley-Wilmot, far away in Hobart Town, protested that although the vice denoted by asterisks in the Parliamentary Papers certainly existed in Van Diemen’s Land, one found it in the army and navy, too, and in all “large assemblies of the male sex.” In vain, he relayed to Stanley the opinions of the medical officers on the probation and hiring stations, as diligently collected by his comptroller-general. They showed only seventy cases of the sexual disease in a gang population of 10,000 men. Seven in one thousand, he agreed, were too many, but even so, the scarestories had largely been made up by his critics to discredit the Probation System.¹⁷

None of this appeased the local press, the clergy, the settlers or the Colonial Office. In July 1846, twenty-five Van Diemen’s Land clergymen (most of its Anglican establishment) signed a petition to Grey begging for the end of the Probation System, as an incubator of homosexuality.¹⁸ In London, embarrassing stories had been current in the press for some time. “Van Diemen’s Land is in a bad state,” wrote an anonymous pen in the London Naval and Military Gazette in October 1845. “Crimes the most horrible are of daily occurrence. All the females have left the bush and have taken refuge in the towns, and . . . are subject to every kind of insult. Sir Eardley-Wilmot sets a bad example himself. No people of any standing will now enter Government House except on business. No ladies can.” Satires and moral versicles made their clumping appearance:

Shall fathers weep and mourn,

To see a lovely son

Debas’d, demoraliz’d, deform’d

By Britain’s filth and scum?

Shall mothers heave the sigh,

To see a daughter fair

Debauch’d and sunk in infamy

By those imported here?

Shall Tasman’s Isle so fam’d,

So lovely and so fair,

From other nations be estrang’d—

The name of Sodom bear?

Till Nature’s GOD, provok’d,

Stretch forth His mighty arm;

And in relentless fury, pour

His righteous judgments down.¹⁹

It was not exactly—the anonymous tongues now began to whisper—that the man in Government House condoned this frightful state of affairs; still less that he himself, despite the loneliness he must feel now and then in the antipodes without a wife, was touched by the hot breath of the Cities of the Plain. It was just that his behavior gave rise to idle rumors about quirks that, though doubtless innocent in themselves, clouded his office. He gave dinners in Lent, to the scandal of Bishop Nixon, who had already quarrelled with Eardley-Wilmot over the lieutenant-governor’s right to appoint religious instructors to the probation gangs. He had been seen putting his arm around girls’ shoulders on the sofa in Government House. He had flirted at a formal dinner party with Julia Sorell, the granddaughter of a leading settler and future grandmother of Aldous Huxley. Manifestly, there must be some ratio between this permissiveness at Government House and the unspeakable, furtive ecstasies of the probation gangs. Fish rot at the head.

Gladstone’s reaction to all this was predictable. He flew into a moral rage, and at the end of April 1846 he wrote two letters of dismissal to Eardley-Wilmot. The first one was public, announcing that in view of the lieutenant-governor’s utter failure to safeguard the morals of the convicts under the Probation System, he was dismissed. The very absence of external signs of the vice of Sodom that Eardley-Wilmot had reported, Gladstone wrote with crushing illogic, showed how deeprooted it was, how well sheltered from the light. Eardley-Wilmot was not being fired for mismanaging the transition from assignment to probation (anyone, Gladstone seemed to imply, could have failed at that) but for not displaying enough “assiduity,” “anxiety” and “prudence” in moral reform. Accordingly, Gladstone was transferring Charles La Trobe, the superintendent of Port Phillip, to Hobart to take over until a new lieutenant-governor was named.

The second letter was private, short and even nastier. It told Eardley-Wilmot that in view of unspecified rumors circulated by unnamed persons regarding aspects of his unofficial conduct which it was “perhaps unnecessary” that Gladstone should discuss, he must not expect another official post.²⁰

Thus the “battered old beau” with his flirtatious post-prandial ways was at last broken on the iron wheel of Gladstone’s sanctimony. He tried to defend himself; he protested against the “grossest falsehoods that ever oppressed an English gentleman,” “the most extraordinary conspiracy that ever succeeded in defaming the character of a Public Servant”; he appealed to Gladstone to name his accusers and state their charges; he forwarded petitions in defense of his character, bearing many respectable signatures. It was all to no avail. In February 1847, a few weeks short of his sixty-fourth birthday, Sir John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot slipped beyond the reach of his tormentors in the Colonial Office and died in Hobart, reputedly of a broken heart. At once, the Colonial Timesdeclared that he had been “murdered.” The settlers who had detested and abused him performed a brisk volte-face, awarding him a state funeral with a solemn procession through the crepe-decked town, during which Anglican clergy and Catholic priests fell over one another in their haste to lead the hearse. They then subscribed for a spindly stone monument in the Neo-Gothic style, the largest tomb ever erected to the memory of a governor on Australian soil. By the time it had been installed above the remains of Sir Eardley-Wilmot, the interim governor Charles La Trobe had come to Van Diemen’s Land, made his report and returned with almost palpable relief to his duties across the Strait in Port Phillip. He told Lord Grey what everyone, in and out of the colony, knew by now—that the Probation System was an utter fiasco, that “whatever principle of reformation might be included in the theory,” its only result in practice was to degrade, that it was “vicious . . . a fatal experiment,” and that the sooner it ended the better for the credit of the nation and of humanity.²¹ In 1846, Her Majesty’s Government suspended all transportation of convicts to Van Diemen’s Land for two years. By then, the last lieutenant-governor to preside over the System on that island, Sir William Denison, had arrived in Hobart to confront the problems that had defeated Eardley-Wilmot and would in due course baffle him. Among the thorniest of these was the management of Norfolk Island.

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THE ADMINISTRATIVE CONTROL of Norfolk Island passed from New South Wales to Van Diemen’s Land in 1844, and by then an ill wind had blown through the barracks at Kingston and Longridge. Captain Alexander Maconochie had been recalled from the island in 1843, and replaced by the last military commandant of that ill-omened rock to be appointed from New South Wales: Major Joseph Childs, a fifty-six-year-old marine officer. He was Maconochie’s opposite in every way—a dull, vacillating military hack, distinguished only by his severity.

For severity was what Lord Stanley wanted—and he wished to see it directed, in particular, against “crimes unattended with violence”: namely, sodomy. From the second-hand reports Gipps wrote before he actually saw Maconochie’s system for himself, Stanley concluded that the new “leniency” of Norfolk Island incubated all crimes, but especially the unmentionable ones. Since going there in February 1843, Gipps had changed his mind—but too late to change Stanley’s. Work them till they drop, skin them alive if they get out of line and make no exceptions—this, in essence, was the formula he transmitted to Gipps as the first stage of his Probation System for men on Norfolk Island. “Nothing but constant vigilance and inflexible rigour in enforcing the appropriate Punishments will be sufficient to restrain the immoralities to which I refer.”²²

The idea that two thousand men, mostly in their twenties and thirties, could be incarcerated on a distant island, deprived of any contact with women, treated so harshly that their only emotional solace could come from one another and then “restrained” from sodomy by incessant flogging is a curiously abstract one; but it seemed real to Whitehall. All their evil proclivities, including the sexual, could be vaporized in the tension between, in Stanley’s words, “an invigorating hope and a salutary dread.”

There was not much hope on Norfolk Island. From the moment Childs was rowed through the foaming reefs of Kingston from the Maitland in February 1844, the trust Maconochie had struggled to establish between convicts and Authority caved in. There was no longer the sense of a responsive chain of command, or of access to the commandant. Childs’s idea of authority, formed in the harsh mold of the British Marines, destroyed part of that; and the rest was annihilated by his lazy habit of leaving summary punishments to the turnkeys, the overseers and to his resident stipendiary magistrate, Samuel Barrow. Barrow, twenty-eight years old when he arrived from Van Diemen’s Land in August 1845, had been a junior barrister in London. His real talent, however, was less for legal argument than for gross arbitrary sadism. For that, he was the right man in the right place at the right time. If the ornate diction of Lord Stanley’s dispatches provided the theory of Norfolk Island after Maconochie, Childs and Barrow between them supplied the practice, and the treatment of prisoners there became as bad as it had been in the “murdering times” of Morisset. All the men on Norfolk Island were, in Childs’s apoplectic language, “the worst men that the annals of criminal jurisprudence can hold forth to the world as an example of all combined evil.”²³

One did not treat such demons softly, although in fairness to Childs one should note that not all of them were handled with equal severity. One convict who passed through Childs’s regime on Norfolk Island, the former military officer John Mortlock, would describe Childs as “a gallant marine officer” who gained the “entire respect” of the convicts with his “discreet management.” Perhaps all that this judgment shows is that military officers shared the same views on discipline; and Mortlock was never flogged. All the same, he recalled, it was thanks to the “delightful scenery and heavenly climate” of Norfolk Island “that I do not look back upon my residence there with unmixed horror.”²⁴

“Many of my shipmates were flogged daily,” Mortlock recalled, “in the barrack yard, under my windows, on complaints often made with a wicked purpose by their overseers; though I could shut my eyes, the horrid sound of the ‘cats’ upon the naked flesh (like the crack of a cartwhip) tortured my ears. . . . Petty ‘dogs in office,’ in order to strike terror, would commonly threaten ‘to see the back-bone.’”²⁵ Thomas Rogers, a curate from Dublin who was posted from Van Diemen’s Land to Norfolk Island in September 1845 as its sole religious instructor (such convict-department comforters being stipulated by Stanley’s Probation System), claimed that Childs had 26,024 lashes inflicted in the last sixteen months of his command. On some mornings

the ground on which the men stood at the triangles was saturated with human gore as if a bucket of blood had been spilled on it, covering a space three feet in diameter and running out in various directions in little streams two or three feet long. I have seen this.²⁶

But it was in the summary punishments—inflicted by Barrow and his underlings without interference from Major Childs—that the crude ingenuity of the new regime showed itself. The cat was banal; the elite of convicts, the “pebbles” or “iron men,” had their own infrangible code of contempt for it. One prisoner in Childs’s day had a message to the “skinner” tattooed on his back: FLOG WELL AND DO YOUR DUTY.²⁷ “Salutary dread” required something more. In a report made to Eardley-Wilmot in October 1845, Childs had bewailed the limits of punishment set by the Colonial Quarter Sessions Act, as they were “too confined for the class of men we now have to deal with, for whom chains have no restraint, and the lash no terror.”²⁸ He turned a blind eye while Barrow and his men devised methods of summary discipline. The main ones were the “tube-gag,” the “spread-eagle,” the “scavenger’s daughter” and the water-pit.

The tube-gag was an adaption of that ancient English instrument of torture for women, the “scolds’ bridle.” It looked like a small leather head-harness, except that instead of a bit it had a cylinder of hardwood, four inches long and an inch and a half in diameter, fastened into a broad leather strap that buckled across the face. When this gag was forced into the victim’s mouth and the straps cinched, the man could only breathe through a small hole in the wooden plug, with great difficulty, emitting what the Reverend Rogers described as a “low indistinct whistle” accompanied, if he had resisted the gag and lost a tooth or two, with some red foam. The first prisoner on whom Rogers saw the tube-gag used was blind; for talking in his sleep, he was dragged from his cell, gagged and left for three hours with his arms shackled around a post behind him and tears streaming from his sightless eye-sockets.

The “spread-eagle” was simpler, though often used in concert with the gag. The prisoner was ironed to three ringbolts, arms fully out-stretched, feet together, face to the wall, and left in this tiptoe crucifixion for six to eight hours. Some remained paralyzed for days afterward. A more refined implement for inflicting a similar torture was a raised iron frame six feet by two, on which the victim was strapped with his head and neck projecting unsupported off one end. If he tried to keep his head up, he would suffer anguish from muscular cramps. If he let it flop down, he would suffocate. The “scavenger’s daughter” consisted of binding the convict with his head against his knees and leaving him until he fainted from the pain of cramps. The water-pit was an underground cell with salt water to waist height; men were left there in darkness for days at a stretch, unable to sleep for fear of drowning.

No wonder, then, that all sense of contract with authority disappeared and that the island lurched toward anarchy. In 1846 the Reverend Thomas Rogers’s predecessor, an Anglican clergyman named Thomas Begley Naylor who had been chaplain on Norfolk Island from 1841 to September 1845, wrote a detailed report on Childs’s regime to Lord Grey. “Revolting things have been done, in silence and without remedy,” things for which “nothing else but the complete isolation of the island can account for.” All was favoritism, spying and evasion, and chaos prevailed beneath Childs’s claim to have restored an order “lost” by Maconochie’s misplaced compassion. Villains were put in soft clerical jobs,^* while harmless and indeed innocent prisoners, such as the unfortunate lawyer William Henry Barber, wrongly transported for a fraud on the Bank of England and later to be exonerated by Parliament, were given the filthiest and most degrading tasks. Childs had no system of discipline “conscientiously or intelligently carried out”; all he did was feed and clothe the demons and keep them nominally busy.²⁹

Far from repressing homosexuality, Naylor reported, the overcrowding and lack of segregation on Norfolk Island encouraged it. “A parade of separation is kept up, but the communication is complete, and at times unrestricted.” The bad apples always contaminated the good, in “a heterogeneous mass of moral pollution painful to contemplate.” First-time offenders and even innocent men “are immediately on their disembarkation thrust among the veriest monsters of crime, from the cold-blooded murderer trebly convicted, to the wretch whose enormity Blackstone characterises as ‘inter Christianos non nominandum,’ without a possibility of escaping.” In the end, Naylor warned Lord Grey, in the tone of eschatological prophecy that would soon become a common trope in discussions of the Probation System, “the curse of Almighty God must sooner or later fall in scorching anger upon a nation which can tolerate the continuance of a state of things so demoniacal and unnatural.”³⁰

The report horrified Lord Grey. Naylor had hoped to publish it as a pamphlet (and Maconochie, to whom it was delivered, dissuaded him from doing so) but its private impact in Downing Street was immediate. One could not read, he noted, such a litany of “guilt, wretchedness and mismanagement,” on which a clergyman had staked his name, without intense disquiet; Naylor’s revelations were “too probable” to pass over. The new lieutenant-governor, Sir William Denison, was on the point of sailing from Portsmouth for Hobart. At the end of September 1846, Grey’s instructions went to Denison. Her Majesty’s Government must not even take the chance of prolonging evils so fearful in their nature. Denison must evacuate Norfolk Island and bring all its prisoners to Tasman’s Peninsula “with the least possible delay.” But he had second thoughts in November, and warned Denison that “practical difficulties, not to be foreseen at this distance” might defeat the move. They did, and Norfolk Island was not “broken up” for another decade.³¹

But meanwhile, before Gladstone’s ax fell on him, Eardley-Wilmot had asked for a report of his own. He knew nothing of Naylor’s damning letter but was worried by the rumors in the hostile colonial press. His own morals were under attack and he could not afford to seem dilatory. In April 1846, Eardley-Wilmot’s comptroller-general of convicts, William Champ, directed an investigator to sail there and, as he delicately put it, report on the “many points . . . which might naturally fail to attract the attention . . . of Major Childs.” The investigator was a magistrate in the Van Diemen’s Land convict department, Robert Pringle Stuart, and he arrived at Norfolk Island in May 1846. He completed his investigation in two weeks, and his voluminous report reached Eardley-Wilmot by the end of June.

Little is known of Stuart’s character, beyond the fact—obvious from his report—that he had an avid eye for detail, considerable skill in sifting and marshalling evidence, and knew the general penal environment well. One historian recently complained that his report “reads like that of a man without humour,”³² but to wring laughs from such material would have taxed the most determined comedian.

His findings parallelled Naylor’s. The physical state of the system on Norfolk was miserable—the rations underweight, the grain foul, the meat of the poorest quality, the maize-flour bread (known as “scrubbing-brushes” for the inflammation its abrasive bran produced in the prisoner’s guts) scarcely edible. The service buildings, from the kitchens to the fouled latrines, provoked Stuart’s disgust and the prisoner’s simmering, mutinous resentment. Ophthalmia, gonorrhea and dysentery were endemic. The jail was an unventilated pigsty and the main barrack building at Kingston a bagnio: more than eight hundred men were locked in the barracks every evening after work, the lights went out, and what went on afterward was not the guards’ business. Stuart paid it a surprise visit at eight o’clock one hot night and saw a flurry of “men scrambling into their own beds from others, in a very hurried manner, concealment being evidently their object.” Prostitution was widespread; lads sold themselves for tobacco, new boots, or a lump of bread kneaded together with fat. Rape was not merely common, but inevitable.³³

What especially shocked Stuart (and its effect on the officials who read his report may be gauged from the fact that, when it was eventually printed for the Lords and Commons in 1847, nearly all references to homosexuality were edited out) was that the virtuous forms of sexual life were parodied and inverted on Norfolk Island—not just rape and whoring, but marriage. “The association is not unusually viewed by the convicts as that between the sexes is ordinarily regarded; is equally respected by some of them; and is as much the source of jealousy, rivalry, intrigue and conflict . . . in others.” Some of the demons were faithful to one another, and “the natural course of Affection is quite distracted. . . . [They] manifest as much eager earnestness for the society of each other as members of the opposite sex.” In general, it was the English who turned to sodomy; the Irish Catholic prisoners abjured it.³⁴

Despite the hysterical level of official violence, general discipline was poor. The morning muster was “unseemly, disorderly . . . in fact the mere nomination of the members of a promiscuous crowd,” with “English and colonial prisoners intermixed, some lounging about with folded arms, others standing with their hands in their pockets, all either in conversation, uninterrupted, or otherwise engaged at their pleasure.” When new men arrived from England, gangs of twenty to thirty Old Hands would pick the locks on their ward, rush in, beat them up and steal their belongings. No one stopped these forays, even when a group of bewildered New Hands just off the transport Mayda, when escorted down to the sea to wash, were plundered on the beach “notwithstanding the efforts of the constabulary.” Convicts swore most opprobriously at their guards and got away with it; houses were robbed in broad daylight; one hardened Old Hand (as Naylor had reported) actually knocked down the commandant himself, bruising him severely. Most extraordinary of all, the convicts—or a hard core of them, numbering perhaps one hundred—often went on strike, openly refused to work and submitted “only when terms had been arranged to their satisfaction.” Not one of them was punished or even tried. Their usual complaint was inedible food. On February 25, 1846, they struck over a different issue: The day was Ash Wednesday, a Catholic holiday, and they would not go to work until a military party levelled its muskets and made ready to shoot them. Childs’s civilian officers, however, were not up to enforcing regulations without the help of the military, which could not be invoked every day. “The spirit of disobedience thus strengthened in the refractory,” Stuartgloomily noted, “is, from impunity, reflected by the many, and provokes imitation.” The hard-core men carried knives openly, threatened their overseers with them, and ruthlessly avenged any “peaching” by other prisoners. Anyone who betrayed a fellow prisoner to Authority was denounced as a traitor or “dog,” and his punishment was swift: The men would kill him, or at least mutilate him by biting his nose and ears off, an operation known as “taking the dog’s muzzle.”

As the guards and overseers had so little control over what went on inside the barrack walls, the prisoners were able to create their own rule. Its center was the enclosed lumber-yard, a building next to the main barracks compound which also held the kitchens. It became a sanctuary where few guards or officers dared to go. The yard was ruled by the “Ring,” a carceral mafia whose control over the lives of prisoners was both inescapable and minutely enforced. Its members did not fear to kill constables when they brought evidence against them; one such informer was found eviscerated in the bush near Longridge, his guts replaced by the entrails of a sheep. Later tales of the System, as composed by Marcus Clarke and Price Warung, surrounded the Ring with the awful glamour of a secret society, a freemasonry of evil, complete with elaborate initiation ceremonies, distinguishing tattoos (stamped on the neophyte’s hide with needles and gunpowder) and a communal chant or oath:

Hand in Hand

On Earth, in Hell,

Sick or Well,

On Sea, On Land,

On the Square, Ever.

Stiff or in Breath,

Lag or Free,

You and Me,

In Life, in Death,

On the Cross, never.³⁵

Such are the embellishments of fiction, but there is no doubt that the Ring had existed on Norfolk Island since the late 1830s and that it was very much feared. It gave the hardened and depraved, Stuart wrote,

an absolute power, which is exerted in the most tyrannical manner over the majority, many of whom, I firmly believe, desire to conduct themselves becomingly, but have not sufficient courage to enable them to defy the threats, rendered more alarming by the almost hourly exhibition of them being carried into effect, or to resist the determined, vicious confederacy by which they are oppressed. There are no means of protecting a man who may have brought himself odium on account of good conduct, or . . . having given evidence against any member of the so-called “Ring.” A more miserable position than that of such a man cannot be conceived.³⁶

There was more, in the same vein. When Stuart finished his report to Champ, and Champ “with the deepest regret” laid it before Eardley-Wilmot, and Eardley-Wilmot called a special meeting of the Executive Council on July 1, 1846, to consider what to do about it, that was the end of Major Childs. The council voted unanimously to get rid of him at once. Against Eardley-Wilmot’s protests, they agreed to relieve Major Childs without notice, lest “matters might be brought to a crisis, and the island be subjected to all the horrors of an open mutiny.”³⁷

And in fact, as they sat in council on July 1, a mutiny did break out on Norfolk Island. It was a food riot. The prisoners never had enough food, and what they got gave them dysentery. The wretched victuals on Norfolk Island were a permanent and galling proof of Britain’s contempt for them. In July 1846, it only took a pinprick to release an explosion of hatred.³⁸

July 1 was the date of the half-yearly survey of all stores and equipment. William Forster, the superintendent, was in charge of the inventory, and on June 30 he went into the lumber-yard and its cookhouse to look for kitchen gear and cookpots. He did not want to make trouble with a close search, but he thought many dishes and mess-kits were missing (the inmates cut up large vessels and tinkered them into small ones, for sale to guards or other prisoners) and decided to come back after the eight hundred convicts were locked in barracks. That evening he found “a great number” of pots, pans and knives hidden around the lumber-yard, along with hoards of maize-meal that members of the Ring had skimmed for themselves from the regular rations. Foster had it all carried to the convict barracks store and locked away for the night, for inventory.

Next morning the prisoners turned out for their breakfast and found that “their” kettles and pans, along with their private hoards of flour, were gone. Their loss maddened the elite of the ring and they surrounded the muster officer, Patrick Hiney, shouting confused threats. Then, noticing the open gate of the lumber-yard, a mob of men ran outside, made for the barracks store, broke the locks and returned in triumph with their maize-flour and cooking gear. They settled down to boil water and make porridge. None of the guards interfered. But half an hour later, as constables and overseers gathered outside the gates to march the prisoners off to the day’s labor, there was a shout from inside the lumber-yard: “Come on, we will kill the——.”^* For the second time that morning, a mob of fifty or sixty men came boiling from the gates, led now by one of the hardest cases in the Ring, a twenty-six-year-old twice-convicted bushranger from Van Diemen’s Land named William “Jackey-Jackey” Westwood. They grabbed whatever weapons lay to hand—axes, shovels, slabs of wood for clubs—swinging furiously at their guards as they rushed at the constables’ cottages and then toward the house of the hated stipendiary magistrate, Samuel Barrow. They left four corpses behind them, men who had barely been able to react before their skulls were caved in by the mutineers. But they had no plan, and as they charged gasping and cursing toward Barrow’s cottage they saw a line of soldiers bearing down on them, muskets levelled and bayonets fixed. The mutineers faltered, turned, and ran back to their only haven, their “Alsatia” (as Stuart’s report had termed it), the lumber-yard. The bloody episode had lasted only minutes, but the reprisals were thorough. Barrow arrested more than fifty prisoners, and they crammed the filthy old jailhouse (which had not been enlarged or improved since Morisset’s time) to bursting. Most of them were summarily sentenced to a year’s hard labor in chains, and the presumed ringleaders were loaded with iron and reeved by their fetters to a long chain cable to await the arrival of a judge who could hold the necessary trial. Before the mutiny there were nine men in the lockup on other capital charges, and Childs had already sent for a criminal court justice. He arrived on the Lady Franklina few weeks later, not knowing the mutiny had happened and unprepared for the sight of several dozen capital defendants. His name was Francis Burgess, and on board with him was the newly appointed commandant of Norfolk Island, John Price.

Burgess fell ill a few days after the hearings started. He had to go back to Hobart on the Lady Franklin, and the court opened again in late September before a new judge, Fielding Browne. In the meantime Barrow and Price between then had developed the prosecution as a perfect opportunity to break the Ring. They indicted all the known Ring members they could, committing twenty-six men to trial; eventually, fourteen were tried on five counts of murder and abetting. Despite the protests of the chaplain, Thomas Rogers, none of them was allowed a defense lawyer; and when Rogers helped the prisoners draft a petition to the judge asking for counsel, the request was ignored. Several defendants were illiterate and could not read the depositions against them. The “jury” was only a tribunal of five military officers. Twelve witnesses were heard from the Crown but none for the defense, and as they gave their evidence the men in the dock hooted and cursed at them, trying as best they could to mock the processes of this kangaroo court. On October 5, twelve men out of fourteen were sentenced to death. No reprieves were given, although “Jacky-Jacky” Westwood wrote for the Reverend Rogers a last declaration exonerating four of the accused:

I, William Westwood, wish to die in the communion of Christ’s Holy Church, seeking the mercy of God through Jesus Christ Our Lord, amen. I acknowledge the justice of my sentence; but as a dying man I wish to say that I believe four men now going to suffer are innocent of the crime laid to their charge, namely Lawrence Cavenagh, Henry Whiting, William Pickthorne, and William Scrimshaw. I believe that I never spoke to Cavenagh on the morning of the riots; and those other three men had no part in the killing. . . . I die in charity with all men, and I ask your prayers for my soul.

Rogers had persuaded Westwood and other condemned men to write out their last statements instead of declaiming them, as was the custom, from the scaffold; Price, Barrow and the guards feared that their speeches might spark another riot.

On October 13, the men were hanged in two sets of six on the gallows that looked over Kingston beach and the Pacific beyond, before the assembled convicts, with all the military standing by with primed muskets to crush any restiveness.^* No voices were raised but those of the condemned, who joined together in singing a hymn. Rogers had sat up all night with them, praying; he and the Roman Catholic chaplain, Father Bond, walked with the men to the scaffold, where their irons were struck off although their arms remained “severely pinioned.” The trapdoor crashed, the bodies fell, the ropes thrummed on the beams. The mutineers’ corpses were cut down, coffined, loaded unceremoniously into bullock-carts and dumped in an old sawpit outside the consecrated ground of the cemetery, by the sea’s edge. Rogers, cassock flying, trotted up too late for the burial; by the time he reached the edge of the mass grave, where the new commandant had stood grimly staring at the remains of the Ring, the gravediggers had done their work and the coffins were already under earth. As a token of infamy, the sawpit was unmarked, but the hump of earth over the bodies remained clearly visible decades later; it received the name of “Murderers’ Mound.”

iii

WITH THIS MASS execution, the career of the most notorious of all the commandants of Norfolk Island began.

John Giles Price (1808–1857) was the fourth son of a Cornish baronet, Sir Rose Price of Trengwainton. A family fortune had been raised on sugar and slaves in the Caribbean, but by John Price’s time it was all dissipated and he was only one of fourteen children begotten by this philoprogenitive minor aristocrat. Out he went to the colonies in 1836, a man in his late twenties armed with good letters of introduction but little capital. But in the pathologically snobbish society of Hobart Town, letters and a dash of noble blood counted for a lot. Lieutenant-Governor Arthur gave Price a generous land grant on the Huon River and more assigned servants than most new arrivals could expect. In 1838 Price married the niece of Arthur’s successor, Mary Franklin. His farm was successful and his skill at running assigned convicts was noted. He was appointed muster-master of the Convict Department, then assistant police magistrate. His wife bore him five children in rapid succession. Price’s colonial future was assured, despite a bout of illness after he moved to Hobart Town to take up his administrative duties. He was praised for his abilities as a classical scholar, athlete and oarsman; he was a skilled carpenter, turner, blacksmith, locksmith and tinker; he could even cook and sew; and, like some camp commandants in Europe a century later, he loved children. But it was his reputation for being tough and methodical that caused poor Eardley-Wilmot, in casting around for someone to redeem Norfolk Island from the miseries of Childs’s incompetence, to pick Price. Eardley-Wilmot got more than he bargained for.

John Price has remained one of the durable ogres of the Australian imagination for more than a century now. This was largely because he was the original of the brutal island commandant Maurice Frere in the Great Australian Novel of the nineteenth century, Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life. Clarke could hardly have invented a more interesting villain than Frere, but he hardly needed to; the lineaments of the man Australians have loved to hate ever since were traced in the official correspondence of Norfolk Island, in the indignant letters of Price’s main opposition there, the Reverend Thomas Rogers, and in the various Parliamentary Papers that refer to him or contain his views on convict management. Clarke drew copiously on all of these, particularly on Rogers’s Correspondence Relating to the Dismissal of the Rev. T. Rogers from his Chaplaincy at Norfolk Island (1849), which remains a source of unremittingly pejorative information on Price. (In His Natural Life, Norfolk Island’s frail, morally tormented, alcoholic chaplain, the Reverend James North, who unsuccessfully opposes the demonic energies of Frere, is based on Rogers, and most of his reflections are taken verbatim from Rogers’s letters.) The habits of Frere the character were essentially those of Price the prototype, and so was the appearance: six feet tall (unusually tall for an Englishman in the mid-nineteenth century), with Herculean shoulders and a thick bull neck, his legs slightly bowed like those of a pit bull, “a round bullet head of the true Legree type,” a strong flushed face, sandy-red hair oiled in waves, and a cold gray stare through a monocle jammed in his eye. Price’s monocle looked incongruous and struck more than one prisoner as a sign of “flashness,” a puzzling intrusion of lower-class vulgarity into the world of Authority. This was confirmed by his dress. “He was dressed something after the style of a flash gentleman,” recalled a former Norfolk Island lag named Henry Beresford Garrett, who had remained so obsessed with Price that in the 1870s, years after both had left the island, he wrote a lengthy manuscript about him called The Demon:

On his round bullet head a small straw hat was jauntily stuck, the broad blue ribbon of which reached down between his shoulders, a glass stuck in one eye, a black silk kerchief tied sailor fashion around his bullneck, no vest but a bobtail or oxonian coat, or something like a cross between this and a stableman’s jacket seemed to be bursting over his shoulders. A pair of rather tight pants completed his costume, except for a leather belt, six inches broad, buckled around the loins. In the belt two pepperbox revolvers were conspicuously stuck.

. . . [A]ssured by the presence of the soldiers and the guard, he struck an attitude by placing his arms akimbo, and again spoke.

“You know me, don’t you? I am come here to rule, and by God I’ll do so and tame or kill you. I know you are cowardly dogs, and I’ll make you worry and eat one another.”³⁹

Such were Price’s first words to his “lambs,” on his first visit to the Kingston barracks in 1846.

When Clarke changed Price’s name to Frere in his novel, it was not a casual gesture. Frère, of course, means “brother,” and Price’s peculiar relationship to the convicts fascinated Clarke. Unlike all previous commandants, Price went to great lengths to deal with them as an insider. He learned their flash argot and always spoke to them in it, with none of the slips and malapropisms that betray a man using a foreign tongue. How had he learned it? Nobody knew, and many of the prisoners on Norfolk Island apparently believed that he had “done time” himself. He was rumored to have lived a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence in the doss-houses and kens of Hobart Town, mixing freely with hard cases who accepted him as one of them. There were also some missing years in England, from 1827 (when he matriculated at Brasenose College in Oxford, though without taking a degree) to 1836, when he sailed for Van Diemen’s Land. It may be—although the evidence for it, as we shall see, is ambiguous and circumstantial—that Price was homosexual and had picked up his fluent criminal slang when cruising for rough trade.

Price was extremely proud of his reputation for special insight into the “criminal mind,” which he believed gave him special latitude. To confirm it, he would air weirdly contorted views on the irremediable and uniform evil of the prisoners under his charge. There was, for instance, no doubt that the brief mutiny of July 1, 1846, was a protest against semistarvation. Price knew this perfectly well, for his first act after the mutineers were hanged was to increase the rations at the Kingston barracks. But at the end of 1846, Price cynically explained to William Champ, the comptroller-general in Van Diemen’s Land, that the outbreak was caused by sodomy. Without their confiscated kettles, the prisoners could not make culinary treats for “the objects of their lusts, and . . . this aroused their savage and ferocious passions to a pitch of madness.”⁴⁰

By turns fascinated and repelled by the spectacle of convict evil, Price set himself up as its authoritarian mirror and, as his biographer John Barry remarked, entered “a psychopathological love-hate relationship” with the prisoners of Norfolk Island. He had to dominate them by their own standards, to show that he was their master, even without the backing of the System. Hence his obsession with knowing the convicts: their slang, the way they thought, their desires. To speak their language was to demoralize them, to show that their world was open to him while his remained closed to them. To this end, he deployed the jocular, domineering, fake-egalitarian cruelty that is still one of the bad dreams of Australian life. Price was certainly bad and possibly mad, but no one could have called him stupid. No wonder Australians still remember him, though they have forgotten Morisset the blundering martinet and Maconochie the humane reformer.

Price had no time for Maconochie’s “soothing system,” to which he attributed all the disorganization he inherited on Norfolk Island. He ruled by terror, informers and the lash, to which he added the public force of his own indomitable character; he was known to walk into the lumber-yard unescorted and, before five hundred hostile men, face down a convict who showed signs of rebellion. He once stared down a convict who snatched the pistol from his belt, taunting the man as a coward and a dog, until the prisoner handed back the weapon and fell beaten to his knees.

The informer system had been usual on Norfolk Island long before Price arrived there; so, of course, had the lash. The question in assessing Price’s regime is how far he went in arbitrary cruelty and despotic abuse, beyond the degree of “responsible” brutality that the government expected a Norfolk Island commandant to deploy.

The main evidence came from two clergymen. The first was Thomas Rogers, who witnessed the first months of Price’s regime up to early 1847, when he was recalled to Van Diemen’s Land by Dr. J. S. Hampton, the new comptroller-general of convicts who favored Price and wanted to protect his position. Fired from the Convict Department, unable to move the authorities against Price and widely dismissed by officials from Denison down as a slandering crank, Rogers was nonetheless supported by some of his church superiors. In 1849 he published his Correspondence, which described what he had seen on Norfolk Island in prolix, indignant but convincing detail. Significantly, neither Price nor Denison made any effort to refute it, although Rogers was reprimanded for using official documents without permission.

The second clerical witness to Price’s regime was Robert Willson (1794–1866), a priest from Nottinghamshire who had risen, by 1844, to become the first Roman Catholic Bishop in Tasmania. Willson visited Norfolk Island three times: in 1846 (when Childs was still commandant), in 1849 and in 1852. In 1849 he was struck by the success Price had had in cleaning up the chaos of Childs’s regime. Not until 1852 did his doubts about method really surface, in a long and appalling report he laid before Lieutenant-Governor Denison. Price, it seems, implored him not to send it. “I am sorry to see you carried away by the stories of these men; you know what a miserable lot they are; do not permit their stories to make any impression upon you.” Willson was outraged: “When I was last in England I told the Government to take away one third of the convicts on the island, and now I will recommend the Government to take the whole.” At this, Price burst into tears and begged Willson “not to ruin him.”⁴¹

Rogers’s first charge was that Price’s transactions with the convicts on Norfolk Island were cynical. Price did not believe that reformation was possible; he assumed that good behavior was a sham and that everything any prisoner said about his own state of mind or moral progress was a lie. “Whenever a fellow is recommended to me by the religious instructor or the surgeon superintendent,” Price declared, “I always set that fellow down as the greatest hypocrite of the whole lot.” In 1846 the transport John Calvinlanded its 199 prisoners on Norfolk Island to begin their trudge through the Probation System, and one convict was recommended by the surgeon superintendent as “an inoffensive man with very fine feelings.” “Oh, I’ll soon take them out of him!” Price replied.⁴²

On the other hand, he wanted the worst men he could draft as constables and overseers. “In selecting men for the police one day,” Rogers related,

Mr. Price asked a man what he had been at home, the man replied he had been a farm servant; “well then,” was the remark, “you are not thief enough for me.” Another who professed to have been an “honest traveller” in England, i.e., a thief by profession, was made a police man.

Price defended such appointments on the well-worn ground that one must set a thief to catch a thief, but the consistency with which he put “hard” men in minor offices and kept “soft” ones underfoot was perverse. No less so was his purge of the civil officers on Norfolk Island. Everyone who showed signs of opposing his autocratic rule was suspended or recalled to Hobart, until no one stood between Price and the prisoners. Rogers, before he had to leave in 1847, recorded the pervasive terror of informants Price fostered and the capriciousness with which prisoners could be punished. One prisoner was flogged for mislaying his shoelaces. A man named Peart got seven days in chains for saying “good morning” to the wrong person. Another was seen walking along waving a twig; a constable saw him and demanded to know what he was up to and where he was going. “Why, I might be after a parrot,” the prisoner replied, and was flogged. A cart-driver came before Price on the charge of “having a tamed bird” and got 36 lashes. A stockman named Higson was passing by a garden plot when the gardener asked him to “give this tree a push, I want to roll it down the hill to mend the garden fence where your bullocks come in.” Obligingly, the stockman did so and was seen by a constable, who charged him with “pushing a tree with his foot.” Price awarded him 36 lashes on the back and 36 on the buttocks, and within less than two weeks after that he was flogged twice more, once with 100 lashes for having tobacco and hiding in the bush. It had been the custom among the convicts to wash the back of a newly flogged man, to press down his mangled skin and dress it with cool banana leaves; Price had anyone seen with a banana leaf in his possession summarily punished.

Punishments for less trivial offenses were in proportion; and Price’s orders were meticulously carried out by his chief constable, a ticket-of-leave man named Alfred Essex Baldock (1821–1848), whom Rogers called “of most unprincipled disposition . . . perfidious and unfeeling towards his fellow-prisoners . . . the servile creature of the commandant in everything.” Some men, after flogging, would be laced into a strait-jacket and tied down to an iron bedstead for a week or two, so that their backs mortified and stank. Others were “strapped down” without a flogging, but for as much as six weeks at a time, after which the victim “looked more like a pale distended corpse than a living being, and his voice . . . could scarcely be heard.” For striking Baldock, a convict named Lemon was bludgeoned unconscious by the constables, tube-gagged, and chained up with his arms, one broken, behind him around a lamp post. Cells were frequently whitewashed to cover the blood which, Rogers alleged, spattered the walls to a height of seven feet. In one fetid punishment cell, known as the “Nunnery,” Price would keep a dozen men with a latrine-bucket in a space six by twelve feet when the outside temperature was 100°F.; “I had to step out into the yard at first,” Rogers confessed, “to save myself from fainting.” Men were sentenced to work “on the reef,” cutting coral in water up to their waists, in 36-pound leg-irons; they were condemned to fourteen days’ solitary for “having some ravelling from an old pair of trousers,” or “being at the privy when the bell rang.”

Price defended his “severities,” without (of course) going into detail about them, on the ground the prisoners were wild beasts who would rise and take the island if they got an inch of slack. Rogers disagreed: Except for some twenty or thirty “villains,” the two thousand prisoners “were as manageable by the common methods of just and firm and rational government as the peasantry of Kent or Devon.”

The commandant had his wife and children on the island, but his “constant companion,” according to Rogers, was Baldock, who went “riding with him to out-stations and shepherds’ huts in the bush, and attending him and advising him constantly.” Rogers seems to have thought that the two men were lovers, and that this explained Baldock’s invulnerability to reproof. In Van Diemen’s Land, former officers of Baldock’s probation gang assured Rogers that “he was so strongly suspected of being addicted to unnatural crime that he was ordered to be placed at nights in one of the sleeping cells.” There is no conclusive evidence of a liaison between Price and Baldock, although when the chief constable was drowned (to the unbounded joy of the prisoners) after his rowboat turned turtle on the Kingston reef, Price set up an unusually large and elaborate gravestone to him, much in contrast to the mass grave of Murderers’ Mound, with the grieving quatrain:

’Tis His Supreme prerogative

O’er subject Kings to reign.

’Tis just that he should rule the world

Who does the world sustain.

The Reverend Rogers’s strictures on the “subject Kings” of Norfolk Island, however, were not acknowledged by Sir William Denison when his Correspondence was printed in 1849. Price was shielded by another friend, the dismally cynical opportunist (and future governor of Western Australia) Dr. J. S. Hampton, who wrote a whitewashing report on the prisoners’ condition and strenuously denied that anything odd was happening.

Yet the suspicion that the commandant was out of control, that the island’s remoteness from Hobart had permitted some cancer of his soul to metastasize wildly, could not entirely be allayed. Price’s rule grew worse as his paranoia thickened, and in 1852 he received a dispatch from Denison’s desk querying the enormous inflictions of the lash he himself had reported. His Excellency, Price learned, “regrets very much that you should have considered such punishment necessary to so great an extent” and “trusts that you may . . . adopt . . . means of enforcing proper discipline without recourse to such frequent infliction of this mode of punishment.”⁴³

In reply, Price railed against the character of the convicts—“cullings,” “incorrigibles,” “desperadoes,” among whom “persuasion is useless, advice is thrown away.” He defended the “beneficial effect” of flogging. “Stringent the regulations are,” he wrote, “and stringent they must be, but they are not more so than those imposed on soldiers, indeed on boys at public schools in England.”⁴⁴

But in that month, March 1852, Bishop Willson was moved by rumor and report to make his third visit to Norfolk Island. He was appalled by what he saw there and penned a thirty-page report to Lieutenant-Governor Denison. It described mass floggings, blood-soaked earth, and an atmosphere of “gloom, sullen despondency, despair of leaving the Island.” He saw hideously overcrowded cells, men loaded with 36-pound balls on their chains, wizened pallid creatures staring at him “with their bodies placed in a frame of iron work.” He found the sole medical officer so much in cahoots with Price that he claimed a desperately sick prisoner had to be kept in an airless cell because ventilation would be “prejudicial” to him. Hampton, in turn, tried to discredit Bishop Willson’s report with obfuscations and quibbles. Price burst into tears and begged the Bishop to suppress his report. But Willson filed it, placing the blame squarely on Price and “the system which invests one man at this remote place with absolute, I might say irresponsible power of dealing with so large a mass of human beings.”

Price had tendered his resignation once, at the end of 1850, citing the difficulty of bringing up his children well in “this Lazar house of crime.” He got a raise in salary instead. But by now, Denison feared he might become a serious embarrassment to the Crown. He felt that there was a connection between Price’s “illness”—whose nature was not specified in official correspondence—and the morbid ferocities of his rule. Denison had already cut the size of the convict population of Norfolk Island by half in 1847, in deference to Grey’s wish to abandon the island altogether; most of the probation prisoners had gone down to Van Diemen’s Land, leaving a hard core of about 450 “colonial” or twice-convicted offenders. But the military force on Norfolk Island had not been reduced, and very expensive it was, while civilian officers could not be found at any price, because of the rush to the newly discovered goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo.^* In any case, Denison could read the larger political signs, all of which pointed to the abolition of transportation to Australia. It would be better to get rid of this remote penal outrider and concentrate all the management of convicts on Van Diemen’s Land. Denison therefore ordered his Convict Department to start drawing up plans for a maximum-security penitentiary at Port Arthur, modelled on the Separate System of Pentonville—which would receive the hard cases of Norfolk Island.⁴⁵

John Price was happy to leave; he had been there more than six years, he was sick of the eyes of prisoners, and he had a garden to cultivate in Van Diemen’s Land. No censure was passed. The new secretary of state for the colonies, the Duke of Newcastle, scanned Bishop Willson’s report and its accompanying drafts of exculpation from both Price and Hampton, and concluded that since Norfolk Island was about to be abandoned, one need investigate no further. Let the dead stay dead; let old wounds not be re-opened. John Price had done his duty according to his lights, with indefatigable prowess. He had been a good servant of the Crown, if a touch zealous. But excess of zeal in defense of penalty was no crime, the secretary of state reflected, closing the books on Norfolk Island.

Price farmed for a while, but he could not keep away from prison management. Within a year, in January 1854, he accepted a job on the mainland as inspector-general of penal establishments in Victoria. One of his tasks was to run the five prison hulks moored in the port of Melbourne, at Hobson’s Bay off Williamstown. The regime on these vessels became a new byword for ferocity. The worst of Norfolk Island had come to the mainland: the tube-gagging and spread-eagling, the bludgeon-handle jammed in the mouth in tobacco searches, the rotten victuals, the loading with irons, the beatings, ringbolts and buckets of sea water. Before long, a warship had to take up station next to the hulks, its guns double-shotted so that, if the prisoners mutinied and the guards had to flee, it could sink the hulk and send its ironed men to the bottom.

On March 26, 1857, Price paid an official visit to the quarry at Williamstown where gangs of hulk convicts were laboring. He had come, as his office demanded, to hear their grievances; and with his usual bravado, he walked straight into the midst of them, escorted only by a small party of guards. A hundred prisoners watched him marching up the tramway that bore the quarried stone from the cutting-face to the jetty. Quietly they surrounded Price, and their circle began to close. There was a hubbub of hoarse voices, a clatter of chains, a scraping of hobnails on stone. Rocks began to fly. The guards fled; Price turned and began to run down the tramway when a stone flung from the top of the quarry-face caught him between the shoulderblades and pitched him forward on his face. Then, nothing could be seen except a mass of struggling men, a frenetic scrum of arms and bodies in piebald cloth, and the irregular flailing of stone-hammers and crowbars.

iv

PRICE’S REIGN on Norfolk Island had been the last paroxysm of the System’s cruelty, a nightmare sweated out by a dying organism. Elsewhere, the transportation of convicts to Australia was winding down. But the process was slow, because Britain did not want it to end. In Whitehall and Downing Street, after 1846, there was still the hope that it might be kept alive. Her Majesty’s Government was not going to cave in before the colonial abolitionists just because the Probation System had failed. England still had to purge itself of convicts, the “excrementitious mass” Jeremy Bentham had written of a generation before; it needed space for thousands a year. Most judges, bishops and politicians agreed that transportation was still the way to get rid of them, given the surge in penal convictions. The Report of the 1847 Select Committee on Criminal Laws, Juvenile Offenders and Transportation was quite categorical on that: “The punishment of transportation cannot safely be abandoned.”⁴⁶ So various projects were mooted, with a view of relieving the pressure on Van Diemen’s Land and sneaking the convicts onto the mainland through the back door. The first of these was promoted by Gladstone during his six-month term as secretary of state for the colonies, in early 1846.

Gladstone proposed drawing a line across the map of New South Wales at 26°S., just above Brisbane. The land north of it would form a new and separate colony, North Australia. The “Gladstone Colony” would be a vast low-security jail, settled by convicts with conditional pardons and tickets-of-leave who would be moved up from Van Diemen’s Land. Prisoners from England would get conditional pardons as soon as they stepped ashore. In this way, Van Diemen’s Land would find room for more freshly transported felons from England.

Naturally, this struck the island’s free settlers as a very poor solution. Van Diemen’s Land was saturated with convicts. By 1846, almost half its total population were criminals under sentence; out of 66,000 people, 30,300 were bond. If one reckoned in the number of former convicts among the free population (perhaps another 15,000), prospects for the Exclusive minority looked bad. They saw themselves as a small archipelago of decency in a rising sea of moral pollution; anything that let in new convict blood had to be opposed.

The Gladstone Colony was even more unpopular in Sydney, since its plan did not include a convict-proof fence along the 26th parallel. What would stop a new seepage of outcasts into New South Wales? Yet it was tried. Early in 1847, settlers landed at its intended capital, Port Curtis, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. But it did not take root: Short of food, harassed by Aborigines, tropical rain, baking sun, bad water and whining clouds of insects, the colonists succumbed to despondency.

Meanwhile Gladstone moved upward from the Colonial Office and his place was taken by Lord Grey, who—to the immense relief of its settlers, who heard the glad news in April 1847—ordered the evacuation of Port Curtis. If Gladstone’s scheme was meant to place convicts as pioneers in the wilderness, Grey explained to Parliament, it would have been better to put them in the wild parts of Van Diemen’s Land; but his predecessor’s “real object . . . was to send them through North Australia as it were through a sieve into New South Wales.” It was one thing for emancipated convicts to start a new life in neighboring colonies; “this cannot, with justice, be prevented.” But it was quite another, and most unfair, to dump them next to New South Wales and let them percolate south into a society that did not want them.⁴⁷

But Grey had some tricks of his own up his sleeve. Realizing that no more convicts could be sardined into Van Diemen’s Land, he announced in 1846 that transportation would be suspended for two years. In 1845, 2,870 prisoners of both sexes had landed there. The figure for 1846 was 1,126; for 1847, 1,269; and for 1848, 1,434. More than a thousand of the male convicts arriving in Van Diemen’s Land during 1847–48 had been relocated from Norfolk Island, so the cut in transportation from England was large.

However, Grey in 1847 had told Lieutenant-Governor Denison that “it is not the intention” of Britain to resume transportation when the two years were up; and his under secretary, Sir James Stephen, told the Treasury a few days later that “Her Majesty’s Government have decided upon altogether abandoning the system of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land.”⁴⁸ Denison, on reading Grey’s dispatch, assumed that it meant what it said and that abolition was just around the corner; so, to their joy, did the free settlers of Van Diemen’s Land. Both were wrong. Grey, speaking for perfidious Albion, had a new system in mind, euphoniously called “assisted exile.”

His idea was to combine penitentiaries at home with transportation abroad. Let the sinners first do time in Pentonville; once subdued by its awful mental rigor, let them have conditional pardons and be sent to Australia to complete their sentences. Even if Van Diemen’s Land (whose economy, by 1847, was showing distinct signs of revival) could not absorb them, then the labor-hungry pastoral settlers of New South Wales and Port Phillip certainly could. The sequence would be: first, “separate confinement” in England followed by a spell of “associated labor” in the naval dockyards; then “assisted exile” to the antipodes. Once there, the men would not be exposed to the evils of the Probation System; they would be dispersed to settlers across the country districts and the outback. They could also take their wives and families, if their moral qualities seemed adequate. Thus the colonists could not complain of being deluged, once more, in transportation. “The penal system known as transportation will not be renewed,” Grey told Denison in 1848. “The diffusion of men, instead of placing them in Penal and Probation Gangs, totally changes its character.”⁴⁹ And since Grey had a politician’s sense of an acceptable name, the subjects of his penal experiment would not, under any circumstances, be called “convicts”; instead, they would be “exiles.”⁵⁰

This idea had been revolving in Grey’s mind for almost ten years. He first produced it during the sessions of the Molesworth Committee on transportation, where in 1837, as Viscount Howick, he suggested it to James Macarthur, the pastoral king of New South Wales. “Suppose,” he asked, “criminals were to be punished in England with a certain number of years’ imprisonment, and after that to be banished to New South Wales, [where they would] be placed under the surveillance of the police in the same manner of ticket-of-leave men, what do you think would be the effect?” “In a modified shape, the same as . . . transportation,” Macarthur replied.⁵¹ Before Grey received the seals of the Colonial Office, the experiment had already begun. In 1844, the transport vessel Royal George had landed twenty-one convicts at Port Phillip Bay, the first felons to arrive in the future state of Victoria since the abortive attempt at a convict settlement there back in 1803. They had all done terms in Pentonville, the new penitentiary in Britain.

These “Pentonvillains,” as they were promptly nicknamed, were snapped up by labor-hungry settlers, who asked for more. Edward Curr, a rock-ribbed conservative who had become the manager of the ill-fated, Van Diemen’s Land Company twenty years before and, after it failed, had taken up wide acres in the Port Phillip district, led the settlers’ case. Free labor was not to be had, so wages were high, and this attracted “whole shoals” of former convicts from Van Diemen’s Land and the “Middle District” of New South Wales. It would be better to have the Pentonville men, who might have been partly reformed by the penitentiary machine, than these frequently dubious characters. The grand question, Curr argued, was the need for cheap labor, and neither he nor his fellow squatters stood ready to be “ruined for virtue’s sake.”⁵²

Others disagreed. In the view of the Melbourne editor and alderman William Kerr, the “Exiles” threatened to depress not only the wages but the moral tone of the colony; and their introduction, “free of all manner of restraint,” would be a wanton injustice to all free citizens.⁵³

Thus the lines of class conflict over the arrival of Exiles were drawn. It was city versus country, worker versus squatter. The prospect that transportation to mainland Australia would begin again bypassed the old and by now demographically feeble division between Exclusive and Emancipist in the vast territory of New South Wales. Some Emancipist families were now very rich and wanted cheap convict labor; many a free emigrant rebelled at the idea of losing wages to a flood of Exiles. Even among the sons and daughters of “old” Exclusive families, who preened themselves on having been in the colony for fifty years or more, the convict presence was no longer pervasive, no longer a threat to order; out of a total population of 187,000 people in New South Wales in 1846, fewer than 11,000 were convicts still under sentence. Compared to the dark taint of Van Diemen’s Land, convictry (in the eyes of those who wanted more of it) was a mere tinge, rapidly fading. It was time to think about its advantages again.

Thus, on the issue of Exiles, the squatters won—at first. In 1845–46, 517 “Pentonvillains” disembarked at Melbourne and found instant employment. Late in 1846, a committee set up by the New South Wales Legislative Council reported to Gladstone that the “vast solitude” of outback New South Wales seemed “to have been assigned by Providence to the British nation as the fittest scene for the reformation of her criminals.”⁵⁴ The Legislative Council itself disagreed at first, but when Grey offered to send one free emigrant for every convict, and wives and families of the Exiles as well, it changed its mind. The stage was now set for the wholesale revival of transportation to the Australian mainland, even to Sydney, under the name of Grey’s Exile scheme. In 1847, 536 convicts arrived in Port Phillip; in 1848, 455.

But then, hitches began to appear. The “vast solitudes” no longer seemed quite so empty, because England’s general economic depression of 1847 caused a surge of free emigration. From 1847 to 1849, some 30,000 emigrants sailed from England to take their chances in New South Wales. It was no longer so easy to find work for the Exiles who came to Port Phillip in 1847–48; the demand for convict labor had ebbed. Moreover, given the low state of the British economy, Grey did not feel he could ask the Treasury to pay for the plan of sending out a free settler for every Exile. So he dropped that part of his agreement with the Legislative Council of New South Wales. Instead, in August 1848, he secured an Order-in-Council declaring that convicts could once more be sent to New South Wales at the will and pleasure of Her Majesty’s Government, and he dispatched a transport loaded with 239 male prisoners, the Hashemy, direct to Sydney. She was the first convict ship to enter the immense gates of Sydney Harbor in a decade, and the splash of her anchor on June 11, 1849, at Circular Quay—where, like some stained cuckoo, she nested amid five ships loaded with more than 1,400 newchum immigrants—was promptly taken as the sign of a complete breach of faith between Lord Grey and Queen Victoria’s loyal subjects in Australia.

It provoked the biggest show of mass public indignation in the colony’s short history. In driving rain, crowds assembled at the Quay—five thousand by the Abolitionists’ count, seven or eight hundred according to the police. The governor, Sir Charles Fitzroy, watched them pouring down George and Macquarie Streets; the shopkeepers along the quay prudently locked up their shutters as soldiers with fixed bayonets took up their stations outside Government House and the perimeter of the Quay, by now a squelching bog, was ringed with police. But there was no violence. Speaker after speaker clambered on top of the improvised dais (an omnibus) harangued the crowd and was rewarded with thunderous cheers. Robert Campbell, nephew of the great colonial merchant whose brick warehouses and wharf stood nearby, a man who had been campaigning against transportation for twenty full years, declaimed that “they would be content to subdue the land and replenish it without the introduction of British crime and its attendant British misery.” John Lamb, a retired naval commander and now a leading businessman with a seat on the Legislative Council of New South Wales, moved the first of the anti-transportation resolutions, drafted by a rising Australian politician named Henry Parkes—a “deliberate and solemn protest” against transportation:

FIRSTLY—Because it is in violation of the will of the majority of the colonists, as is clearly evinced by their expressed opinions on this question at all times.

SECONDLY—Because numbers among us have emigrated on the faith of the British Government, that transportation to this colony had ceased for ever.

THIRDLY—Because it is incompatible with our existence as a free colony, desiring self-government, to be the receptacle of another country’s felons.

FOURTHLY—Because it is in the highest degree unjust, to sacrifice the great social and political interests of the colony at large to the pecuniary profit of a fraction of its inhabitants.

FIFTHLY—Because . . . we greatly fear that the perpetration of so stupendous an act of injustice . . . will go far in alienating the affections of the people of this colony from the mother country.

An English emigrant barrister, Robert Lowe, the future Viscount Sherbrooke, a half-blind albino with a stentorian voice and a feel for the main vein of popular sentiment, scrambled onto the bus roof to declaim that “the stately presence of their city, the beautiful waters of their harbour, were this day again polluted with the presence of that floating hell—a convict ship.” He denounced “this attempt to impose the worst and most degrading slavery on the colony” as the outcome of “that oppressive tyranny which had confiscated the lands of the colony—for the benefit of a class,” the squatters. This meeting, he shouted into the brief lulls between the cheers of the crowd, was the prelude to an Australian republic, as the Boston Tea Party had been to the American. “In all times, and in all nations, so will injustice and tyranny ripen into rebellion, and rebellion into independence.”⁵⁵

The meeting wound to its end, by which time (some of the more perceptive listeners noted) not a single Emancipist or descendant of a convict had spoken; and the anti-transportation orators went to Government House and asked to present their petition to Governor Fitzroy. He agreed to see them the next day. Fitzroy told Lowe that he would pass their protest on to Her Majesty, but the convicts from the Hashemy would stay; on that, there could be no negotiation. So another monster rally was called at Circular Quay for June 18, to ask for the dismissal of Lord Grey. Lowe moved for dismissal, and Henry Parkes rose to speak against Grey, “a nobleman who never bestowed a thought upon New South Wales in his life, till some political chance or accident gave him his ministerial position.” But because there had been a buzz of speculation about a Yankee-style revolt in Australia, he added that he did not see what good would come from such comparisons. Free Australians “were not at a state of advancement to be benefited by separation from the mother country, even if we had cause to desire separation. . . . We possessed little of the stern and sturdy spirit of the old American colonists.” So much, in Parkes’s view, for the legendary independence of Australians. He was righter than even he could have supposed, for a century and a quarter later Australia would continue to cling to the British Commonwealth.

Fitzroy wrote to Lord Grey, assuring him that the anti-transportation lobby in Sydney was merely a faction, whose sole audience was the mob. Their notion that the secretary of state for the colonies had committed a breach of faith with the colonists was quite unjust, Fitzroy thought.⁵⁶ And indeed, the political crisis over the Hashemy did die out quite soon. When yet another convict ship, the Randolph, arrived in Port Phillip with 295 convicts, the citizens of Melbourne persuaded La Trobe to bar it from anchoring—but her captain merely sailed north and unloaded his bedraggled cargo in Sydney, without provoking a single meeting or speech. After that, two more vessels, the Havering and the Adelaide, disembarked a total of 593 Exiles at Sydney Cove. They were the last, and they caused no incident.

Nor did their passengers perceptibly degrade the tone of the colony. They were quite like ordinary people. “Dear Wife you can come out to me as soon as it pleases you,” one of them wrote after he was settled with a master upcountry.

will provide for you a comfortable Situation and Home as good a one as ever lies in my power. . . . When you come ask for me as an emigrant, and never use the word Convict or the ship Hashemy on your voyage, never let it be once named among you, let no one know your business but your own selves. . . . Dear Wife this is a fine Country and a beautiful climate it is like a perpetual Sumer, and I think it will prove congenial for your health, No wild beast or anything of the sort are here, fine beautiful birds and every thing seems to smile with pleasure. . . . [T]his is just the country where we can end our days in peace and contentment when we meet.⁵⁷

This encomium from a satisfied Englishman was printed in the most popular English magazine of the time, Household Words, whose editor was none other than Charles Dickens. To say that Dickens “edited” it is to understate the degree to which his views permeated the publication. On Australia, which he never visited, he had a most explicit line; and it had been given him by a journalist who had never been there either, although he pretended he had: Samuel Solomon (1813–1883), who wrote extensively on railways and agriculture under the pen name of Samuel Sidney. Sidney was quite well-informed about Australia (his brother had settled there and come back in 1847), and his many readers knew so little about it that for ten years they accepted him as an expert—indeed, as the popular authority—on matters Australian. He published a magazine, Sidney’s Emigrant’s Journal (1849–50), as well as a number of books, beginning with A Voice from the Far Interior of Australia (1847), and ending with The Three Colonies of Australia (1852), subtitled “How to Settle and Succeed in Australia,” which—coinciding as it did with the discovery of gold—was a roaring popular success. Sidney was an engaging mélange of social idealist and literary con man, like many another influential journalist. His heart yearned for the vision that the Industrial Revolution was banishing from England; pastoral Arcadia inhabited by sturdy forty-acre yeomen. He believed this paradise of the common man could be revived in Australia, by emigration. “There are thousands in this country pining in indigence, who if removed to a suitable colony would be able to attain decent independence.”⁵⁸

For this picture of Australia, Sidney drew heavily on Alexander Harris’s Settlers and Convicts (1847), the first book on the life of free workers there—anti-System, anti-squatter, squarely on the side of self-help, extolling the comradeship of hard labor among farmers and cedar-getters in the bush. The yeomen of England had fallen into the decay foreseen by Cobbett; they were the fretful prey of agitators, Chartists, ideologues of every kind. On the vast democratic grasslands of Australia Felix they would find their natural station.

Such arguments were endorsed by reformers better-known today than Sidney: by Harriet Martineau, and the brave Roman Catholic philanthropist Caroline Chisholm, “the emigrant’s friend,” who had labored immensely from 1840 to 1846 in New South Wales, meeting every migrant ship, finding jobs for their bewildered women passengers, setting up shelters and employment agencies throughout the interior for newly arrived immigrants, and tirelessly escorting groups of “new chums” into the bush on her white horse, Captain.⁵⁹ On her return to London, Mrs. Chisholm won the ear of Lord Grey and Sir James Stephen, the permanent under secretary at the Colonial Office. In 1849 she formed a Family Colonization Loan Society, underwritten through Coutts Bank at the behest of the philanthropic Baroness Burdett-Coutts, with a board of London merchants; it lent migrants their passage money, found them work in Australia, and collected the loans in small installments at no interest. She had interviewed hundreds of immigrants in Australia and their words became the first-hand stuff of her pamphlets. Chisholm was fervently committed to yeoman emigration and small farming. She had a natural ally in Samuel Sidney. Both found a mutual one in Dickens, who spread their opinions in every issue of Household Words and enthusiastically incorporated them into his novels. It was exactly along the lines of emigration proposed by Chisholm and Sidney that the feckless and debt-ridden Wilkins Micawber, at the happy end of David Copperfield(1849–50), took his chances in Australia along with Mr. Peggotty, Em’ly and Gummidge, finding a happy haven at Port Middlebay, Dickens’s name for Melbourne. Micawber is redeemed by the work of his hands. “I’ve seen that theer bald head of his, a-perspiring in the sun, Mas’r Davy, till I a’most thowt it would have melted away,” says Peggotty, the Yarmouth fisherman who knows what work is. “And now he’s a Magistrate.”⁶⁰

Dickens, Sidney and Chisholm: a formidable team of persuaders, backed by such sympathizers as Harriet Martineau and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who was himself to become a strikingly inept secretary of state for the colonies in 1858. They knew who deserved their sympathy—and who did not: the villains in the drama of colonial opportunity they were writing, the graziers of Australia, the selfish squatters, nostalgic for cheap slave labor and bitterly determined to preserve transportation. “Unlock the land!”—such was the cry, both in England and New South Wales, on behalf of the forty-acre yeomen. Were the big pastoralists deliberately sabotaging free immigration? In hindsight, it seems that they were not; they were desperate for labor much of the time, and paid for it when they could get it—but there was little doubt that the most reactionary would rather have had convicts. However, experience had also shown that, although Australian prospects could be seen by Englishmen (and sometimes, under the spell of Dickens’s prose, by Australians as well) through a rosy haze of Pickwickian stereotypes, small farmers in 1850 remained as vulnerable to drought, fire and flood as they had been along the Hawkesbury in the days of Governor Bligh. The land was not Arcadia; the bush could flare up and incinerate ten years of a forty-acre man’s work in a day; even in good times, it took three acres to sustain one sheep. But such realities were moved into the background by the largely urban polemicists who now urged the abolition of transportation not just as a moral good in itself but as a blow against land monopoly, a condition of successful emigration and a cure for England’s discontents.

In Australia, the focus was different. The image of the earnest yeoman frustrated by squatters’ greed was politically potent, sure enough, but the stereotype of convict evil was fixed beyond the power of any individual’s experience to alter it. Get rid of convictry, keep the imperial attachment—such was the local reformers’ tune. No bunyip Demosthenes preaching abolition would open his mouth against the pollutions of English crime without unfurling a long red-white-and-blue preamble assuring Her Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria, of his undying, wholehearted and grovelling fealty to the British Crown. The end of transportation was reached through a cumbersome accommodation between morally indignant colonials who could not make good on their threats and imperialists who felt weary of an obsolete penal system and yet could not cancel it at a stroke for fear of seeming malleable to Australian pressure. Anti-transportation views, by the late 1840s, were a commonplace of every pulpit sermon and most political meetings. Abolition was, as one British officer in New South Wales remarked, “the only movement at all resembling a popular émeute” in “the usually drowsy, well-fed and politically apathetic Sydney.”⁶¹ The same was true in Melbourne, and in Van Diemen’s Land, where in 1849 an Anti-Transportation League was formed under the leadership of the island’s leading publisher, Henry Dowling, Jr. (1810–1885), the landowner Richard Dry (1815–1869) and John West (1809–1873), a fervidly eloquent Congregationalist minister who, when not inveighing against the System from lecture halls and pulpits throughout the island, wrote the first and for many years the best history of Van Diemen’s Land.

But for all the protests, the meetings and the airing of grievances at the enforced Stain, there was never any question of secession. Nobody, in or out of the League, wanted that. Meanwhile, Grey’s two-year moratorium on transportation to Van Diemen’s Land ran out in 1848, and the machinery of exile, obedient to his Lordship’s peevishly stubborn character, began once more to roll in the direction of Hobart and Launceston. Sir William Denison, the lieutenant-governor, could do no more than pooh-pooh the “moral pretensions” of the League and find what work could be found for Lord Grey’s Exiles. He also tried, with less success, to assure the free settlers that the new arrivals—having done their stint in Pentonville—were of better stuff than the old and that eight or ten convict ships a year did not mean a breach of faith by the Colonial Office. As the economy of Van Diemen’s Land struggled erratically out of its catastrophic slump, Denison grew optimistic about the number of convicts it could absorb in private employment: first 1,500 a year, then 2,000. The actual arrivals were 1,434 men and women in 1848, 1,847 in 1849 and a leap to 3,406 in 1850. “I have succeeded in getting back the assignment system in a modified form,” he boasted. Grey, however, did not wish to hear about assignment; and the Abolitionists did not want to have it, modified or no. The League’s work played a large part—larger than it is usually credited with—in killing transportation to Van Diemen’s Land. But what finished it off was Lord Grey’s retirement from the Colonial Office, and the discovery of gold in Australia.