16
AMONG THE FORTUNE-HUNTING optimists who set sail from Sydney across the Pacific to San Francisco when the news of the California gold rush reached New South Wales at the end of 1848 was a corpulent bull-calf of a man named Edward Hammond Hargraves. He was thirty-one when he reached California, and with a fellow “Sydney Duck” he trudged, scrambled and panned for two years, not finding so much as an ounce of gold. English by birth, he had lived in Australia and knew the terrain west of the Blue Mountains, near Bathurst. Gradually, the conviction seized him that the Wellington district of New South Wales, 170 miles west of Sydney and about 50 miles from Bathurst, with its tawny hills, quartz outcrops and gullies, was very like the gold regions of California. At the end of 1850, having bottomed out like so many thousands of other Forty-Niners, Hargraves spent his last dollars on a passage back to Sydney. But he took his pan and rocking cradle with him, and on February 12, 1851, he and his guide, John Lister, rode down Lewes Pond Creek, a tributary of the Macquarie River near Guyong outside Bathurst.
As the horses picked their way along, Hargraves felt—as he put it later—“surrounded by gold.” He got down into the creek-bed with his pick and trowel, and scratched some gravel and earth from a dike of schist that ran athwart the gully. Four pans out of five produced gold. Hargraves was overcome. “This,” he exclaimed to Lister, “is a memorable day in the history of New South Wales. I shall be a baronet, you will be knighted, and my old horse will be stuffed, put in a glass case, and sent to the British Museum!”1
None of these happened, but something of infinitely greater consequence did. Australia was convulsed with gold fever. In April 1851, Hargraves bestowed on his district the biblical name of Ophir, and in May the newspapers announced it to be “one vast gold-field.” By May 24, a thousand diggers were tunnelling, cursing and exulting on the banks of Summerhill Creek, and the road over the Blue Mountains was choked with a footsore, sluggishly winding column of men: clerks and grooms, grocers’ assistants and sailors, lawyers and army deserters, oyster-sellers and magistrates, government officials and ex-convict shepherds, trudging beneath the weight of tents, blankets, crowbars, picks, shovels, pans and billycans hastily bought at gougers’ prices, stumbling toward unheard-of wealth in mud-balled boots under the driving rains of the Australian autumn. It was as though a plug had been pulled and the male population of New South Wales had emptied like a cistern, in a rush toward the diggings. Business, the Bathurst and Sydney newspapers reported, was “utterly paralysed. . . . A complete mental madness appears to have seized almost every member of the community.”2
By June the Ophir district was an impacted mass of clay-colored men, shoulder to shoulder, hacking in delirium at the fickle earth. Prospectors that month moved northeast to the banks of the Turon River and struck gold there, even more of it. An aboriginal stockman, who was not prospecting but idly chipping with his tomahawk at an outcrop fifty miles from Bathurst, found a mass of quartz that yielded 1,272 ounces of gold, the largest reef nugget in recorded history, bigger than anything found by the Forty-Niners in California. “Men . . . stare stupidly at each other, talk incoherent nonsense, and wonder what will happen next. . . . [A] hundred-weight of sugar or potatoes is an every-day fact, but a hundred-weight of gold is . . . beyond the range of our recorded ideas—a sort of physical incomprehensibility.” The Aborigine was not allowed to keep the gold but his employer, a Dr. Kerr, on whose land it was found, gave him and his brother some sheep, two horses, provisions and a few acres as a consolation prize.3
As the gold fever spread, prospectors realized that, geologically speaking, the newly constituted state of Victoria was simply an extension of New South Wales. In July, gold was found at Clunes, a hundred miles from Melbourne; and in September 1851, a septuagenarian digger named John Dunlop discovered the richest field of all, at Ballarat, a mere 75 miles west of the Melbourne Post Office. The word ran back to Melbourne that gold was everywhere. It lay scattered on the rocks and between the wiry tussocks, glistening as it had done for unregarded thousands of years; now the deepest obsessions of a frontier society would clamp themselves to it, and it would transform that society beyond recognition.
The gold belonged to the government, which demanded an exorbitant license fee of 30 shillings a month from the Victorian diggers. Nevertheless, by November 1851 more than 6,500 Victorian licenses had been issued and a cataract of gold was pouring from Ballarat as well as the Turon diggings, into the stout canvas bags, down to the holds of the waiting ships. The first gold shipment to London, on the Thomas Arbuthnot, was a mere 253 ounces. By the middle of 1852, there were perhaps 50,000 people on the diggings and the average weekly shipment on the gold-escorts from Ballarat and Bendigo was more than 20,000 ounces—half a ton a week. The Times declared, in November 1852, that the flood of Australian gold had become “perfectly bewildering”; by then, a single ship (the Dido) was expected with 280,000 ounces, or ten and a half tons, on board. All this was from the Victorian diggings, which in the month of August 1852 alone, despite nearly continuous winter rain and bitterly difficult working conditions for the diggers, had yielded 246,000 ounces of the “yellow stuff.”4
By then, Melbourne was both a ghost-port and a continuous saturnalia. Port Phillip Bay had become a Sargasso Sea of dead ships, rocking empty at anchor through a hundred tides and then a hundred more, bilges unpumped, their masts a bare forest. When a vessel arrived with her gold-hungry passengers and her hold crammed with mining tools and cheap furniture, the crews (and often the captains too) would desert as soon as she was unloaded, joining the thick human stream for Ballarat and Bendigo. Employers, stranded without labor, locked their offices and went on the road. “Cottages are deserted,” reported the lieutenant-governor of Victoria, Charles La Trobe, In October 1851,
houses to let, business is at a stand-still, and even schools are closed. In some of the suburbs not a man is left, and the women are known for self-protection to forget neighbours’ jars [quarrels] and to group together to keep house. . . . Fortunate the family, whatever its position, which retains its servants at any sacrifice, and can further secure supplies for their households from the few tradesmen that remain . . . all buildings and contract works, public and private, almost without exception, are at a standstill. No contract can be insisted upon under the circumstances.5
Shanty towns and bark huts proliferated to house the thousands of emigrants, frantic with hope, who poured off the ships from England and Ireland.
In the grog-shops and hotels that lined the filthy, traffic-jammed streets of the young city, where a man could sink up to his knees in mud and ordure merely by stepping off the curb, a round-the-clock orgy was conducted by “the worst-looking population eyes ever beheld”—the diggers and their hangers-on, their mates and their flushed doxies, drinking the gold away. One man, who had never tasted champagne before, bought a hotel’s entire stock of it and emptied every bottle into a horse trough, inviting all and sundry to suck it up. Miners lurched up and down the luxury shops, jamming huge tawdry rings on their girls’ fingers, demanding the most expensive dresses, lighting their pipes with £5 notes and pouring gold dust into the cupped hands of hackney-drivers. “They are intoxicated with their suddenly-acquired wealth, and run riot in the wildness of their joy,” noted an English gold-seeker, John Sherer. They were “just like so many unbroken horses caught in a desert where they never knew anything but hunger, and suddenly thrown into a rich paddock where they find nothing but plenty.”6 They treated their women like crude pashas, even the ones who seemed to have few prospects, like “Biddy Carroll,” fresh from Ireland: “Exceedingly stupid, lazy, and dirty, poor Biddy could make no friends,” and resembled “an unripe potato just dug from the soil with its jacket flying.” But soon she found her digger, and soon after that an acquaintance noticed in the saloon of a steamer
the simple, stupid, potato-like face of Biddy Carroll . . . the very perfection of a lucky, thoughtless, gold-digger’s bride. Her bonnet was of white satin, with a profusion of the most exquisite flowers, the whole enveloped in the folds of a rich white veil. She wore a superb lavender-coloured flowered satin dress, with a gorgeous barège shawl . . . a massive gold brooch . . . a massive gold chain, and her wrists encircled with handsome silver bracelets.7
The Biddies were not just amusing objects of condescension. In their gaudy store-bought finery, they were signs of class rupture. Gold disturbed the order of Anglo-Australian society—from pastoral “aristocrat” down to convict—with shudders of democracy. Gold wealth was not “democratic,” but it did expand the existing oligarchy. It would diversify both Australian markets and Australian production and help create the Australian bourgeoisie. The clay-stained digger, a butcher in his former life, who still carried the grease-stink of tallow in his hair and the argot of the diggings on his tongue, would soon have his Axminster-carpeted drawing room in Toorak. The cash his gold set in circulation would construct suburbia. His spending habits would raise more merchants to comfort. Fortunes were made by diggers—and extracted from them. Gold did respect class. It slightly favored the low: A horny-handed navvy, miner or seaman with muscles hardened by years of manual work could sink a shaft twenty feet to the blue auriferous strata of Bendigo in the time that it took a refined “new chum,” his hands pulpy and blistered, to scratch away three feet of earth. “Everything had assumed a revolutionary character,” wrote Sherer, adding that
all the aristocratic feelings and associations of the old country are at once annihilated. Plebeianism of the rankest and . . . the lowest kind at present dwells in Australia; and as riches are now becoming the test of a man’s position, it is vain to have any pretensions whatever unless you are supported by that powerful auxiliary. It is not what you were, but what you are that is the criterion.8
“We be the aristocracy now,” miners were heard to say as they rollicked in the Melbourne grog-shops, “and the aristocracy now be we.”
ii
THERE WAS, however, a specter at this feast of truculent egalitarianism: the Old Hands, or ex-convicts. Victorians took a considerable, indeed an exaggerated pride in the thought that their colony had not—or at least, not primarily—been a convict settlement. In 1835, the pioneering land-grabber John Batman had “bought” some 600,000 acres in the Port Phillip Bay area, including the present site of Melbourne, from three chiefs (confusingly named Jagajaga, Jagajaga and Jagajaga) for some blankets, knives, shirts and mirrors. Pioneers had gone south from the “Middle District” of New South Wales with their bands of assigned men; and nearly 2,000 Exiles had landed at Port Phillip in the 1840s. But until then, Victoria had no institutions for exploiting convict labor; this helped its free population feel more virtuous than the raffish Sydneysiders and tainted Vandemonians. Some settlers—not gold-seekers, but more sober and conscientious men—had gone there partly because it had no “convict taint,” expecting security and a low crime rate.
They were not merely dismayed but outraged when gold brought a rush of emancipated convicts from Van Diemen’s Land. Thousands of criminals—for in the eyes of the “respectable,” an ex-convict was a felon still—were flooding into Melbourne and fanning out all over Victoria. Nobody knew exactly how many there were, because they were all free and did not have to present passes when moving from one colony of Australia to another. The pessimistic guess was that one digger in ten had been a government man. Soon, every unsolved crime in Victoria (and not a few in New South Wales) was automatically blamed on the “Vandemonians,” or simply the “Demons,” as these undesirables from Van Diemen’s Land were called. And in fact, an unusually high number of offenders convicted for crimes in Victoria between 1851 and 1853 turned out to be ex-convicts who had crossed Bass Strait.
For most of the Vandemonians, the gold rush was their last desperate gamble. The economy of Van Diemen’s Land was so primitive compared to that of the mainland, and the chances of getting enough land to compete against the established pastoral families so remote, that any man with blood in him would rather try for gold across the Strait. The depression was past but the labor market for ex-convicts stayed badly shrunk. On the goldfields, expirees might get rich, and even when poor they carried a certain glamor in the eyes of impressionable “new chums”:
The new chum sits on the logs about the fire listening to the tales of crime and adventure of some “old hand” or convict. Some of these men have now great quantities of Gold and now that they are independent, boast of their former bad deeds. The greater the criminal the more he is respected.9
The Victorian authorities sided with the Anti-Transportation League of Van Diemen’s Land. In February 1851, the mayor of Melbourne had congratulated two of its prime movers, the historian and Congregational minister John West and the pastoralist William Weston—who had come there to form a “League of Solemn Engagement” of the Australian colonies never to accept convict labor again—on their “patriotic exertions.” Victoria, too, the Mayor declaimed, was making “efforts to avert the attempt made by our fair Province with the outpourings of British crime,” and
the proximity of our colony to yours gives us a vital interest in assisting you to stem the tide of convictism now flowing in upon Van Diemen’s Land. Rest assured that the colonists of Victoria will go with you heart and hand.10
Naturally, when Victoria became a separate colony a few months later, anti-convict sentiments rose higher still. In February 1852, the mayor, aldermen and citizens of Melbourne wrote a petition to Queen Victoria, protesting against transportation of “Criminals of the deepest dye” to Van Diemen’s Land, whence, after “a brief period of probation,” they crossed to the colony which bore her own name, contaminating and degrading it:
The unlimited influx of manumitted convicts from Van Diemen’s Land is an intolerable grievance calculated rapidly to alienate the affections of Your Majesty’s dutiful subjects. . . . [W]e should be guilty of deceit if we withheld from Your Majesty the fact that there is a large and increasing population growing up to maturity amongst us who have no such feelings [of loyalty] towards the Parent State; who feel deeply the disgrace of belonging to a colony which is regarded by other nations as a portion of Britain’s great emunctory of crime.11
There was silence from Balmoral and a perfunctory reply from Downing Street. But the tone of the mayor’s address was not feigned. The grievance ran deep, and it soon produced an obnoxious law, passed with bellows of popular acclaim by the newly formed Legislative Council of Victoria in September 1852: the “Convicts Prevention Act.” It was framed, as La Trobe remarked in forwarding it to London, with “zeal and haste,” and it ignored “many salient principles of constitutional liberty”; but it was so popular, the crime rate was so high and the expenses of the police so ruinous that he had signed it anyway.
Anyone coming to Victoria from Van Diemen’s Land now had to prove he was unconditionally free. The penalty for not doing so was three years’ hard labor in irons. The particular injustice of the act was that it discriminated against holders of conditional pardons, convicts who by law were allowed to go anywhere within the Australian colonies, so long as they did not go back to England. It condemned them to stagnate in the economic backwater of Van Diemen’s Land. In the wide powers of arrest and search it granted the Victorian police, it resembled the hated Bushranging Act of thirty years before. But in the atmosphere of Melbourne in 1852, it bordered on political suicide to speak for the “rights” of exconvicts. The fear of a real rupture between the colonists and the Crown made La Trobe think it “highly desirable . . . to show every disposition to co-operate heartily with the Colonists . . . under the extraordinary circumstances of the times.”
Not all interests in Australia agreed—especially not the graziers, who had been hardest hit by the flight of labor to the goldfields. The gold rush, even in winter, was draining pastoral labor; by spring, the shortage would be catastrophic. The only thing that could save these northeastern estates from the drain of labor into the “middle districts” of New South Wales was a prompt infusion of felons, who would not be able to quit their assigned posts to hunt gold. “At no previous crisis in the history of this Colony was a large and continuous supply of such a class so much required, or so likely to be productive.”12
The lack of cheap labor for the sheep- and cattle-runs of Queensland had been apparent even before the gold rush. In January 1850, a son of one pastoral clan, the Leslies, reported to his father that they had held public meetings to ask the secretary of state for convicts, as “we must have more labor than Emigration will supply. . . . The Emigrants we get are the sweepings of the parish workhouses, not a bit more moral than the Exiles, and much lazier & independant; we ask for half & half Exiles & Emigrants, and if we do not get them we will send for Chinese.”13
The issue split the Queenslanders, as it did the rest of white Australia: on one side, the squatters and pastoralists, wanting convicts; on the other, the free country workers, the clergy, the shopkeepers and almost everyone else from the town of Brisbane, agitating against the Stain and the Taint. But at the national level, the pastoralists were out-numbered. Although they could discount “unwashed” hands raised in their own woolsheds, they could not pretend that, in real political life, those hands were invisible.
Everywhere else in Australia, with one exception, it was the same. Victoria was dead set against the Stain, and so was South Australia, which in December 1851 had sent its own petition to Lord Grey reminding him that the appearance of ex-convicts from Van Diemen’s Land within its boundaries was ruining the morals of its people.
The exception, of course, was Van Diemen’s Land itself. It had had no gold rush. It had not benefitted from immigration; few people wanted to start a new life in the colonial source of the Stain. Too many of the young, the hard-handed, the energetic and the ambitious had been sucked out of it by the gold rush. Van Diemen’s Land was an economic cripple; there, it was convictry or beggary, a point made over and over again by the pastoralists. The Anti-Transportation League could afford the luxuries of moral indignation and preach as it pleased—but the fact remained that every convict who arrived in Van Diemen’s Land was eagerly snapped up by the graziers. There was no waiting-list for convict servants in Hobart before mid-1851, but when 292 prisoners arrived on the Fairlie in mid-1852 there were 1,259 applications for their services.14
Social prejudices remained, a “phalanx of antipathy,” as one Hobart paper called it in 1851, among landed gentry against convicts and Emancipists. Most employers would take a free worker over a convict one any time, given the choice. But they did not have the choice, because the free workers had gone to the diggings. Thus the oligarchs of land—such families as the O’Connors and Lords, the Bisdees and Talbots, the Headlams and Bayleys, who between them disposed of more than a quarter-million acres of the green sullen island—stolidly dispatched their petitions to London; one of these respectful memorials in defense of the plantation society was signed by 459 graziers and merchants.
The Australasian Anti-Transportation League did not doubt the justice of its mission. Its letterhead was a flag with the Southern Cross and the extravagantly righteous motto In hoc signo vinces. These had been the words spoken in a dream to Constantine the Great, “In this sign you will conquer”; and under the aegis of the Cross, he had gone on to defeat the pagan armies of Maxentius at the Mulvian Bridge in 312 A.D. Likewise, the Leaguers intended to defeat what passed for Rome in Australia, the Colonial Office. The League’s rhetoric, its tub-thumping about defilement and the Stain, went down like cream in the other colonies—except among the descendants of Emancipists, who resignedly kept their peace when the adjectives rained on their fathers and grandfathers from the platforms of abolition. But the Vandemonians choked on it. Too many of them—perhaps four people out of five by 1850—were related to convicts on one or both sides of their lineage, and although this was a social embarrassment to be passed over, if possible, in silence, they did not want to listen to harangues on the extent of their own pollution. As a result, the League was obliged to pack the empty seats at its dinners in Hobart and Launceston with free tickets; Vandemonians did not want to pay good money to hear their parents insulted.15
The battle between the League and the government of Van Diemen’s Land, over the issue of the unfair Convict’s Prevention Act that had been sponsored by the League’s branch in Victoria, inflamed a real class struggle in Hobart. Its theater was the campaign for the Van Diemen’s Land Legislature elections, due in January 1853, whose chief issues were the shift of responsibility to local, municipal government (which Denison favored) and the ending of transportation (which he opposed). The 1851 elections had been won by men sympathetic, in the main, to abolition—friends of the Australasian League. Could the Leaguers in Van Diemen’s Land repeat their victory?16
One could not be sure. The Victorian Convicts’ Prevention Act had put them in an awkward bind. Many of them did not want to offend the Crown with a law that, in effect, denied the validity of conditional Royal pardons for convicts. It seemed, and was, a tyrannous statute, unfair to other Tasmanians. Sir William Denison’s government saw its perfect opportunity to reverse anti-transportation propaganda by depicting the Leaguers, through the government-aligned press, as reactionaries who wanted to keep conditionally pardoned convicts in permanent subjection, as oligarchs (“former merciless white slave drivers, and now new-fangled Leaguers”) in liberals’ clothing.17 As the spring of 1852 gave way to the early Tasmanian summer, long-suppressed political emotions in Hobart boiled over in a way that recalled the bitter disputes of Emancipists and Exclusives in Sydney forty years before, in the time of Macquarie. All the euphemisms in which local political discourse had veiled the convict system and its class divisions were dropped, as Denison’s supporters found an alliance with the ex-convict interest against the League. Insults and propaganda flew. During the campaign, readers of government-sympathizing newspapers like the Guardian were switched to a diet of pro-Emancipist sentiments and even treated to surveys of Australian history in which the convicts emerged as the sole heroes. At meetings, speakers for the League were howled down by what one of the Leaguers’ journals, the Times, called “The Slumocracy,” which “the patronage of Sir William Denison raised . . . into vigor.” The Leaguers accused their lieutenant-governor of fomenting “a war of classes” and called his administration—in a bizarre foretaste of later political rhetoric —“the Red Republican Government of Van Diemen’s Land.”18 But when the votes were counted in January 1853, the tallies showed a heavy majority for Denison and the lower-class ex-convicts whose feelings he had adroitly manipulated.
Nevertheless, the British Government did listen to the League, to critics at home and to the wealthier mainland colonies. It rebuked Denison for his “partiality” when he reported the election as a proof of his popularity. In England, the pressure to transport was slackening and, for the first time in living memory, there were actually vacant cells in government prisons at home. The government had built more jails in 1851, for instance, the grim commodious prison of Dartmoor opened, and a new jail had been built at Portsmouth to replace the crowded hulks. By 1852, there was prison space for 16,000 convicts in England.
Prison was cheaper than transportation by now, at least for short sentences. It cost £100 to keep a man in Van Diemen’s Land for the run of his sentence, but prison in England cost the government £15 per man per year. Since only a small minority of British prisoners drew sentences of more than a year in home prisons (only 5,000, in all, between 1842 and 1850, as against 30,000 men and women transported for 7 to 10 years to Van Diemen’s Land in the same period), it was now feasible to reduce transportation by stepping up the length of sentences in English prisons. The penitentiary, for which Jeremy Bentham had beaten the philosophical drum so long and tiringly fifty years before, was clearly destined to replace Botany Bay.19
In April 1850, Lord Grey rose in the House to make one of the last defenses of transportation. He still planned to send his Exiles out when and as they were needed. In fact, to assuage the northeastern graziers, he had dispatched two ships direct to Moreton Bay, Mount Stewart Elphinstonein May 1849 and Bangalore in January 1850; and as long as the Legislative Council of New South Wales was controlled by grazing interests, he wanted to keep alive the option of sending felons there. Convicts had created the economic base that made free emigrants want to go to Australia—and 31,000 such emigrants had gone there in the last year. Grey conceded that “confinement and penal labour . . . ought to be chiefly inflicted at home,” and that “free colonies have a right to expect that convicts should not be sent to them without their own consent.” But he was not going to abandon transportation on principle—especially not to Van Diemen’s Land. The island had been founded as a penal colony; it had never had any other purpose. England had spent “millions” equipping it as a jail, and
the free population which has established itself there for the sake of the pecuniary advantages of that expenditure, has no right whatever to expect that the policy of this country should be altered when they think proper to demand it, and that we should be compelled again to incur the heavy expense of preparing some new settlement. . . . I conceive that authority ought to be firmly maintained and asserted, and that Van Diemen’s Land should continue to be used for the reception of convicts.20
Whatever the justice of Grey’s position—and justice it had, for all its lack of appeal to colonial feelings—his hopes (and the graziers’) were overridden by the gold discoveries of 1851. Gold was the mineral that put an end to transportation, because its discovery plucked off the last rags of terror that clung to the name of Australia. With a quarter of Britain, from navvies to viscounts, clamoring for tickets to the southern goldfields, who was to think that a trip to El Dorado at government expense constituted a fearful punishment—especially if, as rumor had it, convicts got a conditional pardon as soon as they stepped ashore at Hobart? As Governor-General Fitzroy remarked, “few English criminals . . . would not regard a free passage to the gold-fields via Hobart town as a great boon.”21
There were still people who thought of convict labor as an economic panacea. But they were mostly cranks.22 The English press, led by the Times, was by now solidly against transportation. Grey had few allies in either house of Parliament, except for some of the more reactionary Law Lords; and in any case, his government lost office in 1852. His Tory successor as secretary of state for the colonies was Sir John Pakington, who acted without delay. In mid-December 1852, Pakington wrote to Lieutenant-Governor Denison in Van Diemen’s Land. He pronounced himself “not unaware” of the continuing arguments for transportation. Part of the rage to abolish it “may . . . be ascribed to the prevalence . . . of one deplorable crime, in consequence of the temporary overcrowding of the convicts”—to wit, sodomy. But better arrangements had checked that; and certainly “the readiness and almost indeed the avidity” with which settlers snatched convict labor from each arriving ship proved that the demand for them was real. However, the pro-transportationists had not formed an effective lobby, and “whatever may be the private opinions of individuals who have not come forward on this question, numerous public meetings and all the legislative authorities in these colonies have declared themselves strongly against transportation.” He would not provoke Australians to “a furious opposition” that would end with hatred of the Crown. Finally there was the gold, whose very existence made it “a solecism to convey offenders, at the public expense, with the intention of at no distant time setting them free, to the immediate vicinity of those very gold fields which thousands of honest labourers are in vain striving to reach.”23
With this, transportation to Van Diemen’s Land came to an end. The last convict transport, the 630-ton ship St. Vincent, had sailed for Hobart on November 27, 1852. Van Diemen’s Land officially ceased to be a penal colony thirteen months later; and with a collective whistle of relief, its citizens proceeded (as they hoped) to get rid of the “demonic” image of their island once and for all, by giving it the name of its Dutch discoverer: Tasmania, for the navigator Abel Tasman.
The formal end of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land came with the Jubilee of the colony—August 10, 1853, the fiftieth anniversary of the day the first settlement was pitched at Risdon Cove. It provoked a flutter of doggerel in the press. “Hurra for the noble Leaguers!” the Hobart Town Daily Courier exclaimed,
Hurra for our British Queen!
Hurra for the tread of Freemen
Where Bondsmen erst have been!
Peal on, ye shrill-voiced heralds!
Your thrilling music tells
Tasmania’s happy future;
Peal on, ye English bells!
From city hall to cottage,
O’er all our island homes,
Ring round your benediction!
The Unstained Future comes!
Not to be outdone, an editor in Launceston composed a pastiche to the tune of “God Save the Queen.” Thousands of copies were printed on a press which, mounted on a bunting-lined cart, was drawn in procession through the town:
Sing! for the hour is come!
Sing! for our happy home,
Our land is free!
Broken Tasmania’s chain,
Wash’d out that hated stain,
Ended the strife and pain!
Blest Jubilee!
The cart, symbol of the power of the colonial press in its struggles for Abolition against foot-dragging officialdom, was preceded by groups separated by bannermen: members of the Legislative Council, the mayor and the corporation, a phalanx of native-born colonists marching four abreast, public societies with their regalia, and “the hope and staff of the colony,” its children. They marched under a triumphal arch of pasteboard, decked with fronds of native wattle, to the sprightly tooting and flourishing of a brass band. There was feasting at Ross; and in the town of Oatlands whole sheep were roasted, while the colonial boys played cricket, climbed poles and fell to the breathless pursuit of a greased pig. It darted frantically among the spectators, smearing their moleskins until someone collared it. One “facetious bystander” extolled the animal as a symbol of the fight for Abolitionists’ rights: “That pig, greasy, long-winded and cunning though he was, was caught at last by patience and perseverance.”24
There were only a few sour notes. The next day, the Hobart Town Daily Courier reported the “ill-advised and unwarranted setting up of an effigy in the back of Messrs. Marsh and Chapman’s timber-yard.” It was removed before it could be burned. The paper did not say whose effigy it was, but everyone knew it was Denison’s. He had offended the colonists, when they asked him to convey their satisfaction with the new policy to the people of England, by replying: “The people of England do not care for you one straw; the Houses of Parliament look upon you as the fly on the wheel.” At this, the press branded him “a coarse-minded, vindictive, ungenerous man,” but Denison had read worse. Abolition was rung in with triple bob-majors on the church bells, not saluted from Battery Point by army cannon. Perhaps the lack of unanimity was appropriate; on the other side of Australia, transportation had begun all over again.25
iii
THE LAST PLACE to receive English convicts was Western Australia, the western third of the continent where few had been and fewer, apparently, wanted to go: a colony with a body the size of Europe and the brain of an infant. Except for some coastal patches, it was all desert, pebbles, saltbush and spinifex—the right spot, in the Australian phrase, “to do a perish.”
Its first settlement nearly did just that. In 1826, Governor Darling sent a detachment of soldiers and fifty convicts to occupy King George’s Sound, the present site of Albany on the southwestern tip of the continent. In establishing a military base there, he hoped he would deter the white desperadoes—escaped convicts and Yankee whaling riffraff with their black slave-harems—who had set up their half-wild tribal communities all along the southern coast from Bass Strait to Kangaroo Island and westward to King George’s Sound.
The settlement lasted five years, every day of them an ordeal. Officers went half-mad with loneliness and boredom. As for the convicts, the most that can be said is that, with hostile blacks and saltbush desert right behind them and the cobalt grin of a shark-infested ocean in front, none of them tried to escape. Eventually, Darling conceded that no free settler would ever want to go to the Sound, and that the military base was too frail to do much against the sealers. In 1831 he had the garrison and its surviving convicts withdrawn.
By then, another plan for Western Australian settlement had formed. It centered on the Swan River, and its mover was a gallant young post-captain in the navy, James Stirling (1791–1865), who had married into a family influential both in Westminster and in the East India Company. In 1826 Stirling was given a ship and told to remove the survivors of a dispirited garrison experimentally put on Melville Island, and the Timor Sea near the present site of Darwin. This northern outpost had been meant to discourage the French from landing, but they had never even tried to, perhaps because it was so far off the shipping routes. It had lasted two years and was now on its last legs, rotting from heat, dysentery and terror of the blacks. To avoid the monsoon season, Stirling took the long route around the 4,300-mile coast of Western Australia, imagining as he went a settlement that would keep the French off and be a staging-port for British ships. The mouth of the Swan looked promising, and in March 1827 he spent a delighted two weeks there. Then, picking up the Melville Island garrison, he proceeded to Sydney, composing on the way the first of a stream of memos to Governor Darling and the authorities in England. He urged a settlement at Swan River (Hesperia, he wanted to call it, since it faced the westering sun). He himself would be its lieutenant-governor.26
Not until 1828, with a change of government in London, did Stirling make much headway. Family influence played a major part. Both the new head of the Colonial Office, Sir George Murray, and his assistant, Horace Twiss, were friends of Stirling’s father-in-law. Stirling proposed to them that a syndicate of private capitalists should raise the money to establish settlers at Swan River. The government liked the sound of this—a Crown colony developed by private funds, as Pennsylvania had been by William Penn and Georgia by Colonel Oglethorpe.
Enter, at this point, a young English landowner, the second son of a cotton-manufacturer, something of a wastrel but marked with gentility and imbued with the desire to cut a great figure on the colonial stage: Thomas Peel (1793–1865). An hour’s conversation with Captain Stirling had convinced him that the Swan River held his future, and he appeared before the government with a hastily convened syndicate of investors, who offered to transfer ten thousand settlers with all their stock and gear to Western Australia in return for a Crown grant of four million acres. The government counter-offered one million. At this dampening stinginess the syndicate evaporated, and Peel, who had much less money than Stirling thought, had to find a new backer. He did, but not one he wanted to acknowledge publicly: an ex-convict named Solomon Levey (1794–1833) who, transported in 1814 for stealing a chest of tea, had risen in Sydney as a merchant, banker, landowner and, eventually, philanthropist. The firm of Cooper and Levey, founded in 1826, was one of the biggest trading concerns in the South Pacific. Levey was an astute, generous man, but not—as it turned out—quite astute enough. He had always craved the respectability, the sense of access that had been twice denied him as an ex-convict and as a Jew. The chance to underwrite an ambitious imperial scheme with an aristocratic goy, a relative of the great Sir Robert Peel, dazzled him. Thomas Peel, for his part, insisted on keeping Levey’s partnership secret, so that the Swan River scheme would not be tainted by Jewishness and felonry. The company they formed was called Thomas Peel & Co.27
The Colonial Office agreed to give this company 250,000 acres on the Swan, and 250,000 more after it landed 400 settlers, who would receive grants of 200 and 100 acres each. These settlers had to arrive by November 1, 1829. After twenty-one years—by mid-century—Thomas Peel & Co. was to get another 500,000 acres. Captain James Stirling, master of many ships and darling of the Colonial Office, would be lieutenant-governor of the new colony, with 100,000 acres of his choice. Peel would go with him to manage the company’s affairs.
In May 1829, the frigate Challenger sailed into the Swan River estuary, and its master, Captain Charles Fremantle, took formal possession of one million square miles of territory,* naming it Western Australia—the first time the word Australia had been officially used. (Curiously enough, he was told to ask the Aborigines if they consented to this; but neither Fremantle nor anyone else on board spoke their language, and one could hardly convey so heroic a territorial concept to savages by pointing and waving.) Meanwhile, in England, the first Swan River colonists, all free men and women with promises of Arcadia dancing in their heads, were signed up, assembled and embarked on the Parmelia. No one had tried to survey the area or to map any part of its coastline, a fact that became embarrassingly evident at the end of the long voyage when Captain Stirling, catching sight of the mouth of the Swan River and the Challenger at anchor, became so anxious to make port that he steered a shortcut between an island and the shore and ran his ship, with all its colonists, onto the rocks. No one was drowned, and a few days later the young lieutenant-governor kedged Parmelia off. The Swan River pioneers had their first taste of Australian life, huddled disconsolately under canvas in the pouring rain surrounded by the emblems of the civilization they were to plant in the wild: cases of flour, trunks full of nankeen and velvet, Georgian furniture, rusting shovels, an upright piano cocked listing in the sand. They slapped at mosquitoes and scratched at sand-fleas while gazing on the barren coast, the prostrate creeping plants and the steaming rocks; their hearts sank. Not being convicts, the ladies could not curse.
But Stirling was indefatigable. He named a port town, Fremantle, at the mouth of the Swan; and then led a party upstream, between embowered banks where the arch-symbols of antipodean inversion that had given the river its name, the black swans, dibbled their red bills in the water. Nine miles from the sea, he chose a spot for the main city, Perth. By December 1829, when Thomas Peel sailed in with ninety more colonists, two shantytowns marked the white man’s foothold on the coast. It was typical of Stirling that, as the age of Sail turned to that of Steam, he had separated the capital from the port by a stretch of river navigable only by rowboats.
The fertility of the land proved, as so often it had done to Australian pioneers before, a mirage. Either the soil was barren, or it was so thick with trees that the work of clearing and stumping defeated all but the most iron-willed settlers. Not until 1835 did the Swan River colony grow enough wheat to feed itself. Stirling was constantly sending to the Cape for emergency supplies, but the British Government did not want to spend money underwriting what had been presented to it as a legitimate commercial speculation. Hence, the settlers lived on the edge of famine most of the time. Stirling won their gratitude, if little else, by sailing to England in 1832 to beg assistance; the Colonial Office sent Stirling back to Western Australia with a flea in his ear for leaving his post without permission.
As lieutenant-governor, Stirling had to spend every grain of his charm and authority to keep the anxieties of his “genteel colonists” at bay, so that their morale would not cave in. He never let them forget their Englishness. They dined at the vice-regal tent in formal dress, decorations optional; he presided over balls, picnics and hunts. Not without difficulty, he got Anglican chaplains to make the immense voyage to Western Australia so that their rites and sermons could furnish the little colony with its necessary social glue and spiritual comfort.
Yet such efforts were mainly cosmetic. Nothing could abolish the miseries of the land or the frictions of the harassed little community, promised Arcadia but given sand. One settler noted that the doctors were kept busy with “casualties and accidents, arising from grog drinking, and guns and gunpowder in the hands of persons not accustomed to their use till they came here.” Thomas Peel, their financial promoter, disintegrated almost as soon as he arrived. His chosen acreage south of Fremantle, poor land to begin with, was swept by a bushfire; in May 1830, the Rockingham, carrying settlers for his land, was wrecked on the same rocks that had nearly destroyed Parmelia. In a paroxysm of rage, he challenged her captain to a duel and got shot in the right hand. He seemed so choleric and crazy that no one would work for him. Supplies he promised never arrived. Promissory notes on Cooper & Levey, in which many workers had been paid, were dishonored by Daniel Cooper in Sydney (without, it should be mentioned, the knowledge of Solomon Levey in London). Settlers sued Peel for their wages; he countersued for their passage money. He sent no reports to Levey and did not set aside the 125,000 acres meant to recompense his unacknowledged partner for the £20,000 he had sunk in the Swan River scheme. In 1832, Levey had to ask the Colonial Office what on earth was happening at Swan River—and the Office was loath to tell him, for it had no record of Levey’s financial involvement. Peel had not revealed that his one solid backer was an Emancipist Jew.
Levey died the next year, 1833, his spirits broken by this utter fiasco. Peel lived on in Western Australia for another thirty years, slipping into poverty, juggling his land-grants, selling a few acres here and there to keep going—not that there were many takers. In his old age, he could sometimes be glimpsed riding alone through his vast acreage of worthless bush, wearing a frayed pink coat like the hunting squire he had tried, and failed, to become.
In 1832 the Swan River colony had slightly under 1,500 white colonists; five years later it had scarcely 500 more. By 1839, when Stirling left, it could support itself after a fashion, but all its wheat and flour still had to be imported from Hobart. Each year, it exported a token few hundred bales of wool to England, nothing else. In December 1850, after two decades of settlement. Western Australia had only 5,886 colonists—two-thirds of whom, according to its governor, Charles Fitzgerald, in a report to Lord Grey, “would quit this colony tomorrow.” Sheep that had cost £4 to £5 a head were going begging at half a crown. The price of their wool had plummeted to 9d. or even 6d. a pound, leaving the grazier no margin at all. All was “depression, stagnation, and, I may say, despair.”28 One last possible fount of manpower remained to save them: convicts.
In 1846 some West Australians petitioned Whitehall “to make and declare their Colony a Penal Settlement Upon an Extensive Scale.”29 Grey was delighted. Here, at least, was one colony wise enough to realize that Britain’s long enterprise of social excretion could do good, manuring the antipodean sand. If Western Australia clamored for felons, Grey reasoned, the Anti-Transportation League would look weaker. At least it could not claim a complete moral monopoly among the white settlers of Australia.
And so, just as transportation was drawing to a close in the east of Australia, it began in the west. The first convict ship to Western Australia, the Scindian, with 75 felons, 54 guards and the usual officials on board, appeared off Fremantle in June 1850. In January 1868, the thirty-seventh and last convict ship, the Hougoumont, disgorged 279 prisoners there—including a number of Irish Fenians, most prominent of whom was the writer and editor John Boyle O’Reilly, soon to make a spectacular escape on a ship chartered by fellow Irishmen in America. In those eighteen years, 9,668 convicts, all men and most of them able-bodied, were sent to Western Australia over the continuous protests of the other Australian colonies. They did not improve the moral tone of the raw West, but they saved its economy. As in the past, slave labor got the wheels turning.
The monument of the System in Western Australia was a long, low, white building overlooking the sea at Fremantle—the convict barracks, known as the “Establishment.” It held the prisoners who had to work in chain gangs in and around Fremantle. Other groups of serving convicts, not in chains, were housed in depots at Perth and in the country districts, where they made roads, raised public buildings and in general improved the public face of Western Australia. After doing a specified part of his sentence, each prisoner became eligible for a conditional pardon—4 years for a 7-year sentence, 5 years and 3 months for a 10-year sentence, and so on.30 He could then do wage-labor for a free settler until his time was up. Before his ticket-of-leave, he could only work for the local government.
The lash, by now only an execrated memory in the older Australian colonies, was part of the discipline here but not its basis. In 1858 the superintendent of convicts avowed that he wanted it reserved for “cases of brutal assault,” not even for escape attempts, for “when we consider the utter impossibility of effecting escape in the bush,—the colony being in reality what it is commonly described to be, a vast natural prison, —we ought in awarding punishment to reflect that the unfortunate culprit has already received the most impressive of all kinds of persuasion, viz., actual suffering from starvation.”31
The colony was greedy; it wanted to get as many “government men” as it could, and extract as much profit from their labor as possible. In February 1858 the comptroller-general’s office in Fremantle asked the Colonial Office for a guaranteed one thousand prisoners a year, since “the prosperity of the Colony must mainly depend on the number of convicts sent here.” With less success, it asked the British Government to pay for “materials, powder, cartage, plant, &c” in road, dock and bridge building, as well as the prisoners’ transportation, food, clothing and tools. Western Australia was so poor, it added piteously, that paying for such things “is wholly out of the question.” Popular as government labor was in Western Australia (both the Anglican and the Catholic Bishops of Perth fruitlessly requested convict labor to erect their rival episcopal palaces), the whole idea of its continued influx was regarded with horror and dismay back East. The Stain was powerful stuff; this “moral sewage” could cross deserts, contaminate seas, seep its noxious way thousands of miles east and surface on the newly purged coast of Australia. Where did the Western Australian convicts go when their sentences ran out? To New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia—or so indignant citizens believed. The one issue on which all the participating members could agree at the first Australian Intercolonial Conference, held in Melbourne in 1863, was that transportation to Western Australia had to stop. A British Royal Commission on Penal Discipline chose this heated moment to urge that all male convicts sentenced to any length of sentence should be sent to Western Australia.32
At this, the Victorian Anti-Transportation League, which had atrophied for want of a cause, sat up with a jerk and addressed a solemn plea to the people of Great Britain. “The happy homes of tens of thousands of families who were lately your neighbours,” it intoned, were about to be “desolated, by the presence of a convict curse . . . productive of abominations too horrible to be named.” If Western Australia could not survive without convicts, let its free settlers go elsewhere. But South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and New Zealand would no longer consent to indirectly serve as “the refuge for Britain’s outcasts, the hiding places for her sin and shame.” The fact that a convict had to have served his sentence before leaving Western Australia, and hence was no longer a convict but a free man, was immaterial.33 Nobody knew how many demons and villains really came east—a popular though certainly exaggerated figure was six men in ten—but there was no doubt that it would be easily done by ship. Certainly no one ever heard of an ex-prisoner doing it on foot. And if (as one of the Macarthurs suggested in a letter to the London Daily News) only six hundred felons a year got into the eastern states, that was six thousand in ten years, and each of them capable of corrupting at least a dozen innocent folk.34 The mere arithmetic was enough to freeze a man’s blood.
The facts pointed another way. Only about one ticket-of-leave holder in Western Australia in three was convicted of a second offense; less than one in twenty of these offenses was “serious,” and two convictions in five were for drunkenness or attempted escape. Escapes had become more frequent between 1862 and 1867, under the odious and corrupt governorship of J. S. Hampton, the former ally of John Price on Norfolk Island.35
But this time the Abolitionists won. Her Majesty’s Government was no longer prepared to trade the convenience of draining six hundred felons a year into Western Australia for the grave risk of alienating all the eastern colonies, which had the population, the money, the resources, the trade—everything, in fact, that made a colony worth having. Early in 1865, Lord Palmerston’s cabine, announced that transportation would end within three years. And so it did: On January 10, 1868, the last convict ship to Australia landed its cargo of sixty Fenian political prisoners and more common assorted malefactors at Fremantle, eighty years to the month, if not quite the day, since Captain Arthur Phillip brought the First Fleet to its anchorage in Sydney Cove.
The loss of convicts was an economic disaster for Western Australia. For two decades it had had the free labor of some fifteen hundred men, at a cost to England of £100,000 a year; and as a Fremantle editor put it, “we now awake from our normal state of apathetic indifference to find ourselves on the verge of ruin.” Virtually all it had to show for those twenty years were some mines that could no longer be worked, since free labor did not want to go down them; a network of roads around Perth that petered out in the bush; some handsome Victorian public buildings, a few bridges and dredged channels, and a half-empty jail barracks at Fremantle. The population of Western Australia in 1871 was 25,447, of whom about 9,000 were convicts or their descendants.
The 1871 Census revealed that in population growth, the colonies that shed the System first (or, like South Australia, had never had it) had zoomed ahead of both Western Australia and Tasmania. In the twenty years since 1851, the white population of New South Wales had gone (in round figures) from 197,000 to 500,000; Victoria, from 77,000 to 730,000, a tenfold increase set off by the gold rush and sustained by land development; South Australia, from 66,500 to 189,000. Queensland’s population had quadrupled since 1861, to 122,000 souls. But the last of the convict colonies, Tasmania and Western Australia, would be stuck for decades in their hangover from the malign indulgence of semi-slave labor.