17

The End of the System

THE LONG ANGUISH of the System was over. What had it achieved? It might be gratifying to claim that it had failed altogether; that this not-so-small, not-so-primitive ancestor of the Gulag deterred no one in Britain and reformed no one in Australia; that as a penal system it was quite unproductive, a botched act of sublimation.

Certainly, there were things it did not do. If one accepts the “strategic outlier” argument—that the hidden agenda of convict colonization was to protect England’s Far Eastern trade with a refitting port on the coast of New South Wales—then it did fail. No big warships were rigged with the pine and flax that had so interested Captain Cook on Norfolk Island, and Australia’s contribution to the balance of military and trading power in Indian waters between 1788 and 1820 was nil. Perhaps the English colony on the eastern coast deterred the French from claiming the continent—or perhaps the French were not as interested in Australia as the English, fearful of Napoleon, assumed? The west and north coasts, facing the Indian Ocean and the Timor Sea, had strategic prospects, but the French did not try to claim them, even though England did not put a garrison into Western Australia until 1826.

Some Frenchmen—though not, as a rule, those who had actually been there—did admire the English penal experiment in Australia. “Eh! qui ne connait pas le consolant spectacle,” sang a penally inspired bard named Delille in 1830, in a work entitled “De La Pitié” (“On Pity”),

Qu’étale de bandits ce vaste réceptacle

Cette Botany-Bay, sentine d’ALBION,

Ou le vol, la rapine et la sédition

En foule sont venus, et, purgeant l’Angleterre,

Dan leur exil lointain vont féconder la terre?

La, l’indulgent loi, du sujets dangereux

Fait d’habiles colons, des citoyens heureux;

Soucit au repentir, excite l’industrie,

Leur rend la liberté, des moeurs, une patrie.

Je vois de toute part les marais déssechés.

Les déserts embellis, et les bois défrichés.

Imitez cet example: à leur prison stérile

Enlevez ces brigands, rendez leur peine utile.¹

To foreign eyes, the long experiment on the Fatal Shore generally seemed a success, as philosophy in action: “Imitate this example, take these brigands from their sterile prison, make their punishment useful.” It might have been more widely imitated, had there not been such a shortage of undiscovered continents in the early nineteenth century. France would presently pay England the sincere homage of imitation by constructing its own Pacific convict colony, a hellish one, in the New Hebrides.

The proponents of British transportation had hoped that, broadly speaking, it would do four things: sublimate, deter, reform and colonize. First, it would remove the “criminal class”—or a good slice of it—from England, and put it where it could do no further harm to the English polity and the interests of property. It was social amputation. What was the cause of crime? Criminals, who manufactured or, rather, secreted it from their inner nature, as snakes their venom or eels their slime. Get rid of criminals and you would get rid of, or at least greatly reduce, crime in Great Britain. Transportation had to fail in this, because the causes of crime lay further back in the social system: in poverty, inequality, unemployment and want, and in laws that had relentlessly created new categories of “transportable” crime. Transportation did rid England of many real sociopaths, men whose aggression and violence were built into their genetic labyrinth, but they were in a minority—and not a few were usefully absorbed by the System as overseers and floggers.

By the 1830s, the hopes of the English authorities had centered on a second aim. This was deterrence. Transportation would not only get rid of the guilty, but terrify the innocent away from crime. The problem with arguments about deterrence is the lack of figures on uncommitted crimes. One cannot know if the threat of a given punishment really did stop the thief at the windowpane.^* The crime rate in early-nineteenth-century England did not drop as a result of transportation, again because its roots lay too deep for any deterrent to reach. But what most complicated the matter was the difficulty of convincing the lower classes of Great Britain that Australia was a terrible place to go.

This had been a problem from the start. A verse entitled “The Convicts’ Departure,” jocose rather than satirical, written as early as 1790, raised the possibility that Botany Bay might prove a milky land, compared to the withered dug of Mother England—a place where

. . . every day

Nature is kindly giving,

Plenty to have, and nothing to pay,

This is the land to live in.²

Nobody on the early fleets can have believed this, but the notion of a colonial Eden was not readily dispelled by colonial experience, since the whole Pacific was faintly tinged (if not in learned discourse, then in popular fancy) with the sweetness of Otaheite. The idea that one might be better off there than in England—that, in the words of the ballad, it was “Better to range in a foreign land / Than in a prison perish”—persisted after the time of Governor Macquarie, who gave commonsense recognition to the fact that, despite the pretensions of the Exclusives, the stock of Australian life would be, for the foreseeable future, Emancipist and Currency. After Macquarie had gone, the contrast was still confirmed by the miseries of common English life—the growth of slums, the unemployment, the ruin of smallholders. Hence the proletarian idea that Botany Bay might not be so bad survived the policies that were meant to destroy it: the increased severity of the regimes of Brisbane, Darling and Arthur; the brutality of the chain gangs; and the outright ferocity of Macquarie Harbor, Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay.

Some of this may have sprung from the bravado of prisoners sending letters home to England, playing down their sufferings to soothe the anxieties of their wives and children, or merely wishing to seem unbowed by the System. Some, no doubt, was due to wishful thinking among those at home. But by the 1830s, with due allowance made for the harshness that went with assignment, some of it was true. The convict with manual skills, if he had the luck to be assigned to a decent master in the back country, stood a chance of living a better life than he might have done amid the penury of England’s rural depression. “The grand secret in the management of convicts,” an emigrant’s handbook of the early 1830s insisted, “is to treat them with kindness, and at the same time with firmness.” Most masters knew this from experience, though their “kindness” rarely had much sugar in it and their “firmness” could be that of petty pharaohs. “It is true,” wrote Edward Curr, superintendent of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, in 1831,

that convicts are sent out here as punishment. But it is equally true that it is not in the interests of the master to make his service a punishment, but rather to make the condition of the convict as comfortable as is consistent with economy. The interest of the master essentially contradicts the object of transportation.³

When he got his ticket-of-leave, the redeemed convict’s work was more in demand and his wages higher than in England or Ireland. As we have seen, New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land held no shortage of brutal masters, and a man could be crushed under the penal system like a toad beneath a harrow—but he could also remake his life. Those who went under did not write home; those who prospered sometimes did.

Try as it might, the British Government could not stop the flow of impressions this opened. It gave orders to increase the severity of the penal stations, and under Governor Darling some 20 to 25 percent of all male convicts in New South Wales suffered appalling conditions, either in the chain gangs or in the penal out-stations. The Home and Colonial Offices kept urging their proconsuls in Australia to make the System harsher, more certain in retribution, more machine-like—right up to the moment when transportation to Van Diemen’s Land was abolished.

Successive governments, Whig and Tory alike, made no secret of their view that transportation was meant to inflict relentless suffering rather than to reform the criminal. But Britain could not come out and tell the public at large how bad things really were in Norfolk Island or the Blue Mountain chain gangs, for fear of looking sadistic; or how lenient they could become in assignment, lest its System seem weak. The first was left to the reformers, the second became a kind of folk-whisper that sounded louder than the voice of Whitehall in the ears of hedgers or coachmen.

This was not the first time that the low of England had balked at believing the high, but the size of the credibility gap on transportation is perhaps indicated by the fact that Charles Dickens should have contemplated leaping into it on the government’s behalf. On July 2, 1840, he wrote to Lord Normanby, the literary Whig home secretary, pointing out that most English criminals now thought of transportation as a passport to opportunity and even wealth, and offering to write “a vivid description of the terrors of Norfolk Island and such-like places, told in a homely narrative with a great appearance of truth and reality and circulated in some very cheap and easy form.”⁴ One would like to know what Dickens would have made of Maconochie, for the Scottish reformer—brave, compassionate, fixated and priggish—was a very “Dickensian” creature; but he never went. Dickens’s polemical reporting on prisons would come two years later, in his journals of a visit to America. In 1851, of course, with the discovery of gold, any lingering terrors eastern Australia might still have held for English laborers were outweighed by the possibility of making a fortune.

The only fully drawn character from penal Australia in Dickens is the returned convict Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations (1860); and Magwitch sums up the distaste verging on dread with which some middle-class Englishmen (Dickens included) viewed the transported convict “making good” in exile. As a child, the hero, Pip, has saved Magwitch from the gallows by helping him evade his pursuers in the fens; but Magwitch is betrayed by a “gentleman” crook and disappears to Australia, swallowed by the black hulk, “a wicked Noah’s Ark.” The plot turns on a mysterious benefaction that transforms Pip, in his young manhood, into a “gentleman.” The money is revealed to have come from Magwitch, who has gone back to Australia, made a fortune and, in gratitude, endowed the one human being that ever showed him compassion. Magwitch is a figure edged with terror: coarse, brutalized, possibly a cannibal. ^* His energy is demonic, his thirst for revenge insatiable. And it turns out that his anonymous, obsessively prompted generosity to Pip is another kind of revenge, a black joke against English and colonial class relations. Pip will be his revenge on the Exclusives, who still spurn him as a risen felon. Do gentlemen make convicts? Then a convict will “make” and “own” a real gentleman, not a colonial facsimile. He will show the truth about gentility: It can be bought. He will hug the knowledge of that for the rest of his life. Under the skin of generosity, there is slavery in reverse. “And then, dear boy, it was a recompense to me, look’ee here, to know in secret that I was making a gentleman,” Magwitch tells the horrified Pip:

The blood horses of them colonists might fling up the dust over me as I was walking; what do I say? I says to myself, “I’m making a better gentleman nor ever you’ll be!” When one of ’em says to another, “He was a convict, a few year ago, and is an ignorant common fellow now, for all he’s lucky,” what do I say? I says to myself, “If I ain’t a gentleman, nor yet ain’t got no learning, I’m the owner of such. All on you owns stock and land; which on you owns a brought-up London gentleman?” This way I kep myself a-going.

He tells Pip the truth about his upbringing to close the circle of revenge. Magwitch’s sufferings have put him beyond taking pleasure in another’s gratitude:

Do I tell it, fur you to feel an obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head so high that he could make a gentleman—and, Pip, you’re him!

It occurs to Pip that he is now a convict, too; Magwitch has been “loading wretched me with his gold and silver chains for years.” No wonder that “the repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast.”

Thus in the person of Magwitch, Dickens knotted several strands in the English perception of convicts in Australia at the end of transportation. They could succeed, but they could hardly, in the real sense, return. They could expiate their crimes in a technical, legal sense, but what they suffered there warped them into permanent outsiders. And yet they were capable of redemption—as long as they stayed in Australia.

The redemption of sinners came a distant third on the aims of transportation. Yet it may be that more people were reformed in Australia—in the sense that they came out of bondage meaning to work for their living and obey the law, and were not convicted again—than were ever “deterred” from crime in England. This was due to the assignment system. Assignment did give its “objects” a chance. Not evenly, or consistently, or reliably—but often; whereas the more schematized, “ideological” punishment of Lord Stanley’s Probation System in the 1840s was a demoralizing fiasco, and all the worse because Her Majesty’s Government tried to do it on the cheap.^*

For all its flaws (and one cannot imagine a prison system without defects) the assignment system in Australia was by far the most successful form of penal rehabilitation that had ever been tried in English, American or European history. In assessing it one must remember that many of its critics, in dwelling on the cruelties and injustices that took place within it, were doing so not as objective reporters but as proponents of rival ideologies of punishment. From Bentham with his Panopticon to Lord Stanley with his Probation System, every one of them opposed assignment in the name of penal Utopias which, when tried, were worse. The assigned man’s work was hard (unless he was lucky enough to get work as a domestic servant or a clerk, as many did). But it was not necessarily harder than the kind of work a settler had to do for himself; and to judge by the surviving letters of assigned men who had been rural workers before, it was not worse than the labor of a farm-hand in Britain, despite the flies, the snakes and the heat. Enemies of the System got used to calling this work, and the condition of those who did it, slavery. But it was not slavery. The assigned man worked within a vigilantly sustained framework of laws and rights. Some of the masters were cruel, others irresponsible, some exploitative and a few openly sadistic. But most were none of those things; they were hard, imperfect men struggling to wrest survival or something more from the stingy Australian earth, and many of them had been transported themselves. Few of them perceived their assigned servants as a seigneur did a serf, and those who wished to were frustrated by the law.

Assignment had been the early form of today’s open prison. Instead of herding men together in gangs—in which bad apples automatically dominated—assignment dispersed them throughout the bush and kept them in working contact with the free. It fostered self-reliance, taught them jobs and rewarded them for doing them right. It put them on the frontier and did not leave them to rot. Of course, one can overrate the virtues of assignment. But as a rough-and-ready way of getting convicts back into society as self-sustaining workers, it was better than the soul-crushing, totalitarian machinery of the Philadelphia System applied at Pentonville to “reform” Lord Stanley’s probationers and Lord Grey’s exiles before they took ship to Australia.

Its results were uneven. For a decade and more after transportation to New South Wales ended, colonial society wanted to believe that the residue of convict evil produced most of its crime. In 1835, at the peak of transportation to New South Wales, its courts had handed down a total of 771 convictions for all indictable offenses committed against property or against any person within the colony—a rate of nearly 1,100 convictions per 100,000 inhabitants. From there, the annual number of convictions fell slowly, but the population, swollen by immigrants, grew rapidly, so that by 1851 the conviction rate was just over 290 per 100,000, and by 1861 it was 122—about a tenth of its level in 1835. The conviction rate for New South Wales in 1835 had been about ten times that of England. By 1861, it was only twice as large.⁵

Without doubt, the crime rate fell as the Stain was diluted by immigration and the original felons died off. But did its fall argue reformation as well? In 1841 about three men in five in New South Wales had originally been transported. In 1851 about three in ten had been—still a lot. Very few of the convictions (about 6 percent) were for crimes committed by the Currency (native-born Australians)—partly because so many of these were children, but largely because the Currency adults, despite the jabber about hereditary stains, were diligent family-oriented workers with a stake in their community. By contrast, convicts or Emancipists (all of whom, by definition, were adults) were the defendants in 70 percent of all criminal trials that yielded convictions in New South Wales in 1841.

As the historian Michael Sturma has shown, one should see this seeming endurance of a propensity for crime in the light of other factors. New South Wales remained a police state well after it finished receiving convicts in 1840. “Its machinery for social control was directed largely to the coercion of convicts. They were subject to more stringent regulation, kept under closer surveillance by the police, and treated differently by the courts.”⁶ The police leaned on Emancipists as well, legally free though they were. It was far harder for an offender to disappear in a tiny outback town or even in Sydney than in the vast and pullulating anonymity of London. Hence, ticket-of-leave men and Emancipists were more likely to be charged and convicted. They had the worst jobs, the least capital, the lowest education. Hence they were more likely to steal, fight and get drunk. In sum, Australia presented them with much the same social disabilities that had pushed them into crime in Britain, and one thing more: the unrelenting, go-getting, land-grabbing, cash-and-gold-obsessed materialism of free Australian colonists, acting in a vast geographical space but a small social one. Nowhere in the world was the Victorian equation between wealth and virtue rammed home more brutally than in mid-nineteenth-century Australia. With such a social ethic, it is perhaps surprising that the conviction rate was not higher. Indeed, such gross figures as 666 superior-court convictions in New South Wales out of a total population of 265,503 do not begin to justify the rantings and wailings of local Jeremiahs on their obsessive subject, colonial morality.

The fourth, and last, aim of transportation was colonization. Here, si monumentum requiris, circumspice. If Australia had not been settled as a prison and built by convict labor, it would have been colonized by other means; that was foreordained from the moment of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay in 1770. But it would have taken half a century longer, for Georgian Britain would have found it exceptionally difficult to find settlers crazy or needy enough to go there of their own free will. As James Matra had pointed out before the First Fleet sailed, no one would take such a voyage to such a place “from romantick views.” To ask what Australia would have been without convicts is existentially meaningless. They built it—if by “it” one means European material culture there—and their mute traces are everywhere: in the peckings and scoops of iron chisels on the sandstone cuttings of Sydney, hewn with such terrible effort by the work gangs; in the fine springing of one bridge at Berrima in New South Wales, and the earnest, slightly bizarre figures carved on the face of another at Ross in Tasmania; in the zigzags of the Blue Mountain road, where traffic now rolls above the long-buried, rusted chains of the dead; less obviously, in the fruitful pastures that were once primeval gum forest:

Shame on the mouth

That would deny

The knotted hands

That set us high!⁷

What these people bequeathed to Australian character, or to our sense of ourselves as a nation, is much more debatable than the economic results of their labor. Probably it was not what Australians like to think—the truculent independence on which, with shaky justification, we are apt to pride ourselves.

To see the opposite effects of the System on those who lived it out, one may consider Tasmania, which stagnated. Its population had crept from 69,000 in 1851 to 102,000 in 1871, not even doubling in twenty years. Visitors at the end of the 1860s saw apathy and depression everywhere: silent streets, building at a standstill, farmers sinking into rural solipsism, empty docks, a static populace heavy with old people and children but deserted by the young and energetic, who had gone across Bass Strait. The flood of immigrants to Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales passed Tasmania by. The island was decaying, like the Southern slave states of America after Abolition. Convicts remained an inescapable presence, a gray-and-yellow ghost in a dying house. Although Her Majesty’s Government had stopped sending prisoners to Tasmania so long ago, the long-sentence men remained there and had to serve out their years of stipulated punishment; the imperial convict system was not fully dismantled until 1886.

Economic stagnation condemned the island to live with its past; long after the rough developing energies of the mainland colonies had transcended the “convict stain,” the Dr. Jekyll of Tasmania remained paired with the sinister Mr. Hyde of Van Diemen’s Land. Convictry lived on in a hundred pervasive ways. It seemed to be rooted in the very landscape, cankering its lavish and picturesque beauty, as the Irish political prisoner John Mitchel remarked in his journal in 1850:

Trees of vast height wave their tops far beneath our feet: and the farther side of the glen is formed by a promontory that runs out into the bay, with steep and rocky sides worn into cliffs and caves floored with silvery sand, shellstrewn, such as in European seas would have been consecrate of old to some Undine’s love . . . and over the soft, swelling slope of the hill above, embowered so gracefully in trees, what building stands? Is that a temple crowning the promontory as the pillared portico crowns Sunium? Or a villa, carrying you back to Baiae? Damnation! It is a convict “barrack.”⁸

Instead of Paestum, Port Arthur. Instead of the train of classical satyrs, the road gangs “harnessed to gravel-carts . . . their hair close-cropped, their close leathern caps, and hangdog countenances . . . evil, rueful and abominable . . . vacant but impudent.”⁹ Instead of Claudian or Turneresque nymphs in this landscape, a pass-holding woman servant in the charge of a convict constable, “a hideous and obscene-looking creature with a brandy-bloated face and a white satin bonnet, adorned with artificial flowers.”¹⁰ Tasmania was a place of social counterfeits and off-key echoes, where “the convict-class is regarded just as the negroes must be in South Carolina,” and ex-convict shepherds “whistled nigger melodies in the balmy air.”¹¹ The main veneer, however, was Englishness. In Tasmania one found every kind of frustrated longing for British privilege and British aristocracy, but the only proper coat-of-arms would be “a fleece, and a kangaroo with its pocket picked; and the legend Sic Fortis Hobartia crevit, namely, by fleecing and picking pockets.”¹² It was, to Mitchel’s piercing though jaundiced eye, a pathetic replica accurately made from wrong materials:

At one o’clock up comes the Hobart Town and Launceston day coach, which . . . is precisely like what an English stagecoach was before the railroads had swallowed them all up. The road is excellent, the horses good. The coachman and guard (prisoners, no doubt) are in manners, dress and behaviour as like untransported English guards and coachmen as it is possible to conceive. The wayside inns we passed are thoroughly British; even, I regret to say, to the very brandy they sell. The passengers all speak with an English accent. . . . Every sight and sound . . . remains me that I am in a small, misshapen, transported, bastard England; and the legitimate England itself is not so dear to me that I can love the convict copy.¹³

Even allowing for Mitchel’s unconstrained spleen—Tasmania was his prison, and he an Irish nationalist—no visitors were writing of the mainland colonies in such terms by 1850.

The toxins of convictry would linger in Tasmania for another generation after 1853. There was no sudden purging of the Stain, and even its old name stuck to it like tar; “Vandemonians,” in the eyes of the free Australian working class, were either criminal drones or tyrants. “During the last twenty years,” wrote a journalist as late as 1882,

I have been thrown among some hundred of immigrants, and I can safely say that not one in a hundred of them knows this island by the name of Tasmania; but it is well-known as Van Diemen’s Land; the land of white slavery.

No new felons were coming, but the old ones remained, and the census of 1857 showed that half the adults of both sexes on the island (and 60 percent of the adult men) were either convicts or Emancipists.¹⁴ It took the Old Hands another thirty years to die off, and in the meantime they supplied most of the crime in Tasmania. In 1848—49 convicts and Emancipists formed 68 percent of the population but committed 93 percent of its serious crimes. In 1866–67, although only about 35 percent of the adults there had gone through the System, the convicts and Emancipists were responsible for 70 percent of the crime. In this period, Tasmania had the highest crime rate in Australia: 1.72 Supreme Court convictions per 1,000 people, as against 1.3 in New South Wales, 1.18 in Victoria and 0.61 in South Australia.

Meanwhile the refuse of the System—the broken, the unhinged, the helpless, the mad and the abandoned—clogged the institutions of Tasmania. What transportation produced in them was not Victorian “manliness” but abject neurosis. Ticket-of-leave men from the Probation System were scattered all over the interior—debilitated, muttering oddjobbers who were known, with the usual finesse of Australian slang, as “old crawlers.” In 1867, a clergyman recalled meeting one of the “old crawlers” in the employ of a former naval officer. The retired salt boasted that he had had his man “flogged times without number. . . . I have put a rope around his neck, and on horseback dragged him back and forth through that pond. . . . But it was all of no use, the man will not leave my service.” At which the Reverend John Morison reflected that the worn-out incorrigible “must have been so habituated to punishment that it had become a kind of necessity to him, and likely he felt at times uneasy if he did not receive any; all that was human in his nature must have been well-nigh lashed out of him, leaving nothing but . . . the nature of a spaniel dog.”¹⁵

A few “old crawlers” did not crawl. One of the frissons of Anthony Trollope’s visit to Tasmania was his journey to Port Arthur in January 1872. There, he interviewed one of its last fifteen or so prisoners, an Irishman from Londonderry named Dennis Doherty, one of “the heroes of the place . . . who told us that for forty-two years he had never been a free man for an hour.” Doherty was tall, heavily tattooed, with a large cleft chin and one small gray eye. He had enlisted in the 16th Lancers as a boy, and he was still a lad of eighteen in May 1833 when a courtmartial in Guernsey sentenced him to 14 years’ transportation for desertion. From that point on, he traversed the whole of the System. In 1837 the Sydney Supreme Court sentenced him to life imprisonment on Norfolk Island as a bushranger. After four years, he feigned madness well enough to be repatriated to Sydney. He was reconvicted at Berrima Quarter Sessions, in New South Wales, for bushranging in 1841, and returned to Norfolk Island for his second life sentence. A year later, he went on the Probation System to Port Arthur. In 1844 he was sent back among the hard cases to Norfolk Island. On the way he tried to seize the brig Governor Phillip, for which he received his third life sentence. In 1853 Doherty returned to Van Diemen’s Land, or Tasmania as it was now called, to serve out the rest of his probation. Two years later, he received his fourth life sentence for assaulting a man with a stolen gun. And so it had gone on. Over the years, Doherty told the astonished Trollope, he had received more than 3,000 lashes. “In appearance,” the writer noted, “he was a large man and still powerful, well to look at in spite of his eye, lost as he told us through the miseries of prison life. But he said that he was broken at last.” Doherty had made his last escape attempt three weeks before and had been brought back “almost starved to death”:

He had been always escaping, always rebelling, always fighting against authority, and always being flogged. There had been a whole life of torment such as this; forty-two years of it; and there he stood, speaking softly, arguing his case well, and pleading while the tears ran down his face for some kindness, for some mercy in his old age. “I have tried to escape; always to escape,” he said, “as a bird does out of a cage. Is that unnatural; is that a great crime?” The man’s first offence, that of mutiny [sic], is not one at which the mind revolts. I did feel for him, and when he spoke of himself as a caged bird, I should have liked to take him out into the world, and have given him a month of comfort. He would probably, however, have knocked my brains out at the first opportunity. I was assured that he was thoroughly bad, irredeemable, not to be reached by any kindness, a beast of prey, whose hand was against every honest man, and against whom it was necessary that every honest man should raise his hand. Yet he talked so gently and so well, and argued his case with such winning words! He was writing in a book when we entered his cell . . . “Just scribbling, sir,” he said, “to while away the hours.”¹⁶

Dennis Doherty was then fifty-seven, and his conduct record, which Trollope had not been able to see, bears out what he said of his life. It is a litany of almost inconceivable suffering and defiance, pages long—lashes, chains, gang labor, solitary confinement, for offenses that ran from “Absconding” and “Mutiny” to “Having a Crayfish in his possession without authorization.”

By the 1870s, Tasmania had more paupers, lunatics, orphans and invalids than South Australia and Queensland combined, concentrated in a population less than half of theirs. Despite the labor shortage, most ex-convicts were discriminated against, usually with a sullen reflexive viciousness, by the freeborn. They were regarded as lazy, improvident, unworthy to own land; and as the Victorian animus against homosexuals grew ever stronger in Australia after 1850, so did the belief that most convicts were sexually tainted. “The growing dread of the frightful practices to which it is well known many of them are addicted,” remarked a Parliamentary committee in 1860, “render[s] their search for employment often tedious and difficult.” In contrast to the ex-convicts of New South Wales, the felonry of Tasmania was so fettered by social prejudice that it could never rise. Moreover, the laws governing their work and their relations to their employers retained, dilute but unmistakable, the iron and gall of the System. Thus, under the 1856 Master and Servants Act, masters had the power to arrest their servants, and it was quite legal for an employer (or any member of his family) to put a hired hand in custody on suspicion of an offense and keep him confined for a week without trial. The extraordinary fact was that this law remained on the statute books of Tasmania for more than a generation; in 1882, the Legislative Council rejected efforts to repeal the employer’s right of arrest. This would not have happened so late in New South Wales, with its working-class resentment of authority, its ethos of mateship and its mistrust of “boss-cockies.”

By and large, Tasmanian Emancipists showed very little sense of themselves as a political group, so that “the large ex-convict component in the population probably retarded the growth of radical and working-class politics.”¹⁷ Probably this was because so few Irish convicts were sent there. Forty percent of all transported felons went to Van Diemen’s Land. But in the period 1812–1853, only fifty-one transports sailed from Ireland to Hobart, an average of hardly more than one ship a year.¹⁸ As a result, the proportion of Irish to English convicts was far, far smaller in Van Diemen’s Land than in New South Wales; and the percentage of Catholics was about half that on the mainland—17 percent of the white Tasmanian population, bond and free. The Irish were not a powerful minority in Tasmania, and they never became one. The residual clan collectivism that they had brought to New South Wales, which would give such a strong root to the anti-authoritarian, stick-together ethos of the mainland workers, scarcely existed in Tasmania. The exaggerated “Englishness” of post-penal Tasmania was one result of this, since the thin colonial elite etched its values on the classes below it.

So Tasmania is a problem for those who would like to believe that most Australian bush virtues—intransigence, sticking to your “mate,” distrust of judge, trap and nob, unpolished self-reliance, democratic and brusquely dissenting temper—were created by the convict system. If this were so, one would naturally expect these traits to be vividly emblazoned on the social fabric of Tasmania, the colony with the highest density of convicts and their descendants. But they were not. Workers were less sure of themselves as a class there than in New South Wales, because they were selling their labor in a buyer’s market: Tasmania nearly always had a glut of hands, New South Wales a shortage. Moreover, Tasmania had little sense of the frontier and hence no context in which the “bush ethos,” however sentimentalized, could flourish. It could not expand, and this marked its people. It remained a close-settled, leaf-green microcosm, where the roving bush-worker, beholden to no squatter and picking up his check where he wandered, was a complete anomaly. Nomads made respectable Tasmanians wince; they thought of escaped probation gangers.

What convictry left to the island, then, was the very opposite of its supposed legacy in New South Wales: a malleable and passive working class, paternalistic institutions, a tame press and colonized Anglophile values. The idea that rebels are the main product of oppression is a consoling fiction. In any penal society the rebel is always the exception and never the rule. Tasmania was a factory, a “mill for grinding rogues honest,” which turned out an unleavened human mass, a submissive lumpenproletariat of men and women, cudgelled into humility by repetitive task-work and the all-pervasive threat of corporal punishment. They had learned to eat out of the hand of Authority, because Authority had always fed them. They illustrated the melancholy truth of Vauvenargues’s maxim: “Servitude debases men to the point where they end up liking it.” And because there were so many of them in proportion to the free population, immigration being so slight, Authority was harder on them than in post-penal New South Wales. The depth of virulence of Tasmania’s obsession with the Stain still astonished visitors from the mainland in the 1890s, even though by then hardly any Old Hands remained alive.

Yet there is no doubt that bitter memories of the System were sometimes a deep source of energy of Australian independence—on the mainland. John Fawkner (1792-1869), the “Grand Old Man of Victoria,” who with John Batman settled Port Phillip Bay and founded Melbourne on the Yarra River in 1835, was a convict’s son, who shipped with his father to the first settlement of Hobart Town in 1803. Growing up with convicts, he sided with them as a class. When he was twenty-two, his sympathies were confirmed in blood and agony: He helped seven prisoners build a lugger to escape to South America, but it was captured and Fawkner, implicated, received 500 lashes. He carried the cat’s claw-marks on his skin—the essential text of a power he loathed—for the rest of his life. But he also worked and cheated, made money, turned himself into a “bush lawyer,” started newspapers of liberal-radical bias in Van Diemen’s Land and then in Victoria, and campaigned vituperatively for the rights of convicts and small settlers. Fawkner spent fifteen years on the Legislative Council of Victoria as a populist gadfly, “the tribune of the people.” His target was the big sheep-grazing families that had “locked up the land” for themselves, growing fat from convict labor and hungry for more. He saw transportation itself, not the transportees, as the shame of Australia; he wanted to foster a society of yeomen farmers. Fawkner’s stubborn, cantankerous altruism was rooted in his experience of convict Tasmania, but it only became politically effective in the wider arena of the mainland.

By the mid-1830s, the struggle for Emancipists’ rights had been won, and it would never pay another Australian politician—as it had paid Wentworth, on his long progress toward fantasies of colonial aristocracy—to campaign for ex-convicts as a group. The idea of a convicts’ party was absurd, and there were no political advantages in displaying one’s own convict past—or that of one’s parents. On the contrary: The drawbacks were extreme. Australians, especially well-to-do and powerful Australians, retained no sympathy with or interest in the convict past. They only wanted to forget it. The exceptions were mostly working-class Irish, mainly in New South Wales, among whom convict memory was concentrated and to some degree fetishized. It survived because it linked up to an older tissue of recollection, the general pattern of English oppression of the Irish. It tended to produce a dug-in clannishness, the attitude of a “mental ghetto . . . a thought-universe of harsh conflict,” as the historian Miriam Dixson called it.¹⁹

If it did contribute to Australian egalitarianism, then it did so in a most unamiable way. In the 1830s, astute observers like Maconochie and his associate Alexander Cheyne felt that the primary division of Australian society into two classes, the bond and the free, tended to flatten distinctions of class between free men by concentrating their hostility on the convicts below them. “The habit which most of the free contract,” Cheyne told the Molesworth Committee,

of thinking and speaking of and treating the convicts contemptuously, is, by a very natural process extended to the whole species; and hence the want of respect and deference to others which is so universally manifested.²⁰

By the same token, the importance of being a free man and not a convict “has a tendency to break down the distinctions conceded in the mother country, and thus to place the whole free population on a nearly equal footing.” Contempt was repaid in hatred; convicts and ex-convicts “regard with settled antipathies, nearly amounting to hatred, all who have not been, or who are not prisoners; and, when not repressed by self-interest, this is plainly exhibited.”

Not all the roots of Australian egalitarianism can be idealized. Bush comradeship was real, but so was the defensive, static, levelling, two-class hatred that came out of convictry. From it ran an undertow of impotent dreams of vengeance, as in the hope of Australia’s republican bush poet of the late nineteenth century, Henry Lawson, that the poor man would be educated up and the rich man educated down. By the turn of the century, most connections between early Australian socialist temper and the resentments of the convict past were conventional matters of ritual invocation—or else, they were buried by workers who cherished their right to be respected and no more wanted to be identified with criminal ancestors than the Chartists of an earlier day in England had wished to be associated with thieves and footpads. When such connections surfaced, they took their popular, idealized form, with the convicts presented as shining innocent poachers, Chartists and apple-stealing children, and the bushrangers as Robin Hoods.

The “convict past” is a shadowy behavioral catch-all today. Thus, it made Australians cynical about Authority; or else it made them conformists. As so many Australians are conformist skeptics, the “convict legacy” is seen to be all the more pervasive. Perhaps there are roots of social conduct that wind obscurely back to the convict era, and the familiar Australian habit of cursing authority behind the hand while truckling to its face may well be one of them; it may also be that Australian sexism receives some of its force from the brutal psychic legacy of carceral life. But since the vast majority of European Australians are the descendants either of Anglo-Irish-Scots who arrived after 1850, or of Greeks, Italians, Hungarians, Baits, Poles and Germans who emigrated after 1945, this seems a sterile line of inquiry.

Would Australians have done anything differently if their country had not been settled as the jail of infinite space? Certainly they would. They would have remembered more of their own history. The obsessive cultural enterprise of Australians a hundred years ago was to forget it entirely, to sublimate it, to drive it down into unconsulted recesses. This affected all Australian culture, from political rhetoric to the perception of space, of landscape itself. Space, in America, had always been optimistic; the more of it you faced, the freer you were—“Go West, young man!” In Australian terms, to go west was to die, and space itself was the jail. The flowering of Australian nature as a cultural emblem, whether in poetry or in painting, could not occur until the stereotype of the “melancholy bush,” born in convict perceptions of Nature-as-prison, had been expunged. A favorite trope of journalism and verse at the time of the Australian Centennial, in 1888, was that of the nation as a young vigorous person gazing into the rising sun, turning his or her back on the dark crouching shadows of the past. A “Centennial Song” published in the Melbourne Argusstruck the right note of defensive optimism, coupling it with an appeal to censor early Australian history—or, preferably, not to write it at all:

Is it manly, fair or honest with our early sins to stain

What we aimed at, worked for, conquered—aye—an honest, noble name?

And those scribes whose gutter pleasure is to air the hideous past,

Let us leave them to the loathesome mould in which their mind is cast.

Look ahead and not behind us! Look to what is sunny, bright—

Look into our glorious future, not into our shadowed night.

At the heart of each proclamation of renewal was a longing for amnesia. And Australians embarked on this quest for oblivion with go-getting energy. They wanted to forget that their forefathers had ever been, or even rubbed shoulders with, government men; and before long, they succeeded.

Nobody could deny that convicts had once been in Australia. Indeed, some of the “old crawlers” were still alive, though only just, in 1888. But they were not invited to crawl in the parades, and the Centenary was not heavy with historical retrospection. One dipped one’s brush in the Stain, to put in a little darkness behind the radiant bouquet of wattle, wheat, Union Jacks and Golden Fleeces that symbolized Australia’s present and future prosperity. One hinted, in the text of commemorative albums that bore cartouches of kookaburras and paddle steamers stamped in gold leaf on their covers, that dreadful things had been done in the remote colonial days of Australia, but new pages must not be sullied; that it was time to draw the curtain at last on so much indignity and suffering and to contemplate the Dawn. “The convict stage is now forgotten as a dream,” wrote one of these Centennial boosters. “Today New South Wales . . . has an annual import and export trade of nearly £50,000,000, . . . 1727 miles of railway, . . . 19,000 miles of telegraph wires.” In Tasmania, “slowly but surely Nature is reclaiming her own, and is effacing the memorials of an infamy which none care to look back upon. Chapter after chapter might be written on the annals of Port Arthur, but they would be inconsonant with the tone [of] these pages.”²¹

Whenever they could, the instruments of official culture tried to play down the obdurate attachment of the Australian rank and file to its bushranger folk-heroes, to the distant memory of Bold Jack Donohoe and the recent one of Ned Kelly. The memory of the English officer and his punishment-book, of the whole detested machinery and practice of forced labor and flogging, was shifted into the background as one of the things on which it was unhealthy to “dwell.”

Australian politicians conceived and ran the Centenary as a lavish feast of jingoism, a tribute to the benevolent, all-embracing British Empire. Without Britain’s market, Australian business could not survive; without her institutions, especially the Monarchy, Australian morality would decay; without her dreadnoughts, Australian blood would be yellowed by hordes of invading junks. Bunting, flags, parades, speeches and more bunting were rammed down the popular throat, and only republicans gagged on them.

The organ of their protest was The Bulletin, that anti-imperialist paper, which excoriated the whole idea of the Centennial as a slavish feast of Australian dependence. Australia, it argued, began its first hundred years as a penal colony, but was finishing them as an economic and political one. Its irons had been struck off but nothing else had changed. One of its cartoonists made this point with a pair of drawings: the first, labelled 1788, of an Irish convict dancing a jig in his chains for the amusement of an English officer; the second of a modern bush-settler in his cabbage-tree hat, doing the same dance for John Bull in 1888. In an editorial headlined “The Day We Were Lagged,” The Bulletin called the celebrations “a feeble, fifth-rate drunk—a sort of combined scalp dance and gin conversazione—in honour of the meanest event in [our] short history.”²² The Australian Centenary was a “feeble copy” of the American one of 1876: “The elements of grandeur are entirely wanting. The great Republic rejoiced, not on account of an empty flight of years, which pass alike for man and beast . . . but in honour of the triumph of liberty over grasping tyranny. Australia, on the other hand, celebrates a century which begins and ends alike in nothing. A hundred years have left her as they found her—a name but not a nation, a huge continent content to be the hanger-on of a little island.”²³ However unwelcome these sentiments, there was a good deal of truth in them, and even more in the connection The Bulletin drew between imperialisms past and present:

The day which inaugurated a reign of slavery and loathesomeness and moral leprosy—is the occasion for which we are called upon to rejoice with an exceeding great joy. Yet there might be a palliation even for this, if Australia could show that she had shaken off the old fetters and the old superstitions of that dark era. . . . [B]ut the old slavish taint still clings to her garments, and her chains of iron are merely exchanged for chains of gold.²⁴

English capital, the editorial went on, was imported every day to develop Australian resources—“and, naturally enough, the English capitalist takes the resources themselves for his pains.” It was better to be poor and independent, The Bulletin urged, pointing to Chile, Mexico, Switzerland, and above all the Boer Republic, whose “little army of farmers almost exterminated the gaudy troops of England and slaughtered their aristocratic commander at Matuta Hill. . . . [E]ven the effeminate soldiers of Egypt made a gallant struggle before their native land sank into a feudatory of England, but Australia, by the mouth of such ‘representative statesmen’ as GILLIES and PARKES, declares herself to be something meaner than Egypt and lower than the Boer Republic. The declaration is one which fits the occasion and does honour to the anniversary of the day on which our first families were—exported.”²⁵

Nothing could be allowed to diminish the gratitude Australians were meant to feel for the imperial umbrella. The essence of colonization was that they could claim no history of their own. Some thirty years before the Centenary, the English gold-seeker John Sherer had complained of the historical blankness of the antipodean landscape, where nothing recognizable had happened for millennia:

There can be no walk, no journey of any kind, more monotonous than one through the bush. . . . There is no association of the past connected with it. Your sight is never regaled with the “ruins grey” of some fine old fortress. . . . Imagination is at a standstill—fairly bogged, as your body may be in the mud-swamp. There are no sacred groves . . . No time-hallowed fanes, sanctified by the recollections of hospitable deeds . . . No fields, recalling the downfall of tyranny . . . Nothing whatever to visit as a spot noted as being capable of exalting the mind by the memories with which it is associated. No locality, memorable as the haunt of genius. No birthplaces of great men . . . Nothing of this kind; all is dully-dead, uninspiring mud-work.²⁶

But if the landscape carried no such litany of association, Australian children would; they were made to read the novels of Walter Scott and the deeds of Sir Francis Drake, to recite like parrots the names of English kings, the dates of unexplained events like the Rump Parliament and the Gunpowder Plot, the lengths of European rivers they would never see—while, as the poet Henry Lawson complained in the Republican in 1888, they were shown nothing of Australian history earlier than 1850. Educators played their part, with the result that it became impossible to find, in any history book used in Australian schools up to the mid-1960s, a satisfactory or even coherent account of penal Australia. For what was this meager “history”? A chronicle of provincial misery; a minor episode in English imperial policy, best forgotten. What was distant in time and space was real; what was close had been sublimated into the substance of bad social dreams.

Amnesia and shame nibbled at the edges of the record, without altering it much. A citizen might ink over his family name in a ship’s bound indent; the record books of trials and convictions at country benches in New South Wales would sometimes be burnt, so as not to inflict social pain on innocent descendants. But the mountain of paper the System left behind it was too huge to be removed.

Paper outlives stone and brick. Most of the buildings directly associated with the System in Australia are long gone. Most historically significant structures raised in New South Wales before 1835 or in Tasmania before 1850—churches, stores, town halls, courts, villas, station homesteads, bridges—were built, wholly or in part, by convict labor. Many of them remain, especially in Tasmania, which did not have enough money to pull them down and build new ones. But there seemed little point in keeping obsolete jails and barracks standing as souvenirs of a haunted past, and the few that survive only narrowly escaped a general demolition. On Norfolk Island, the pentagonal New Jail and the huge Prisoners’ Barracks at Kingston, along with many lesser structures, were torn down for building-stone by the new inhabitants who moved in after the last convicts left—the descendants of Fletcher Christian’s mutineers and their Tahitian women, relocated from Pitcairn Island in 1856. Except for the eroded foundations of cells that protrude illegibly from the green carpet of turf, little is left in the compound, and even the walls and gates themselves, raised so high by the sweating gangs, were narrowly saved from being bulldozed to create a picnic park in 1959. At the head of Sydney Cove, now renamed Circular Quay, nothing speaks of the convict past; a banal modern sculpture of two joined bronze ellipses, which might represent leg-irons, turns out to be an allegory of the bonds of friendship between Sydney and Portsmouth. There is no monument of any kind to the men and women of the First Fleet, and none appears to be planned for the Bicentennial in 1988.

Yet despite neglect, amnesia and a thousand unconscious acts of censorship, the System did continue to flourish in popular memory—as Grand Guignol. One of the few tourist attractions of Hobart in the 1880s was the Success, a convict hulk that had lain in Port Phillip Bay for years and had acquired a delectably bloody reputation, as its prisoners had joined in the killing of “The Demon,” John Price. Entrepreneurs had bought her and fitted her out with dummy convicts and an imposing array of fetters, gratings, handcuffs, punishment-bands, balls, chains and cats, all genuine (such things had not become expensive colonial antiques at the time), along with the black iron armor worn by the bushranger Ned Kelly at his last stand at Glenrowan. When most of the population of Tasmania had trooped through her, the owners sailed Success to Sydney in the hope of bigger crowds. She was promptly censored: Scuttled in the dead of night by indignant citizens who did not wish to be reminded of the Stain, Success sank at her moorings with the loss of all waxworks.

The locus classicus remained unsinkable. Port Arthur was closed down in 1877. By then, its roster of inmates had dwindled to 64 convicts still serving their accumulated sentences, 126 paupers and 79 lunatics. They were transferred to Hobart; the convicts came ashore in handcuffs and leg-irons, even though most of them were old and infirm, before a gaping and giggling crowd.

In its last years it had been visited not only by Anthony Trollope but by the young Australian novelist and journalistic hackabout Marcus Clarke, who had pored over a mass of documentation on convictry in the Melbourne Public Library and, inspired by Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, had decided to write his own epic of crime and punishment. Clarke’s His Natural Life began running as a serial in the Australian Journal in March 1870. It ran for two years, and in the end it lost most of its readers. But its appearance as a book in 1874 revived it—and, with it, came a revival of popular interest in the System and its dreaded epitome, Port Arthur.

Clarke and his followers impressed the full character of Grand Guignol on the place, for they knew their audience. Why, not so long ago, did one hear “oral traditions” (tall stories for tourists) about collective suicides of children jumping, like lemmings, from the cliffs at Point Puer to evade the miseries of flogging and rape; about slavering convicts eating the dead in the darkness of Commandant Booth’s mineshafts? Because, given the lack of serious historical writing about transportation for more than seventy years after Clarke’s novel was published, its stories became “true.”

Port Arthur inhumanity had been made its central myth long before—by George Arthur’s enemies in the Van Diemen’s Land press. In the 1870s, when Clarke and Price Warung (followed by a horde of penny-a-liners] began to write their versions of the System, the myth had become “reality” and so could be re-invested with fantasy. Hence Clarke’s goriest episodes, such as the cannibalism of Gabbett at Port Arthur (a thinly disguised version of the escape of Pearce), were shifted from Macquarie Harbor in the 1820s to the Tasman Peninsula in the 1830s, and used to “typify” the System. Likewise, Clarke’s suicide of Tommy and Billy, the little Point Puer boys who jump from the cliff, is one of the finest heart-wringers in Victorian fiction—a penal answer to the death of Little Nell:

“I can do it now,” said Tommy. “I feel strong.”

“Will it hurt much, Tommy?” said Billy, who was not so courageous.

“Not so much as a whipping.”

“I’m afraid! Oh, Tom, it’s so deep! Don’t leave me, Tom!”

The bigger baby took his little handkerchief from his neck, and with it bound his left hand to his companion’s right.

“Now I can’t leave you.”

“What was it the Lady that kissed us said, Tommy?”

“Lord have pity on them two fatherless children!” repeated Tommy.

“Let’s say it, Tom.”

And so the two babies knelt down on the brink of the cliff, and, raising the bound hands together, looked up at the sky, and said, “Lord have pity on us two fatherless children!” And then they kissed each other, and did it.²⁷

Nothing like this ever happened at Point Puer, but the tourists loved it. On fine weekends in the late 1870s and through the ’80s, hundreds of trippers would descend on it from Hobart in paddlewheel steamers, shrieking with agitation as they were locked for a few minutes in the pitch-black, stony silence of the Dumb Cells, chattering happily as their boots crunched through the debris in the echoing penitentiary dormitories. Sometimes a visitor would be able to buy a rusty leg-ring or a rotted hobnail boot from one of the “locals” who, now that Port Arthur had been officially renamed Carnavon and re-incorporated as a town, were trickling back to the Tasman Peninsula. The appetite for carceral souvenirs had not been lost on a Hobart photographer named John Watt Beattie, who documented the buildings and some of the surviving Old Hands of Port Arthur and even visited Norfolk Island. He also printed postcards of prison emblems—elaborate still lifes of leg-irons, cuffs, keys, guards’ carbines and paraphernalia from the Model Prison, surrounded by swags of leaves and wildflowers.

It was well that he made such records of the detested past, for not long afterward the long-impending fate of Sodom struck the Tasman Peninsula. First, there was an earthquake; then, in 1897, a bushfire consumed the penal settlement. It raged in the great four-story penitentiary for two days and nights, and the Model Prison, that ominous replication of Pentonville in the south, once the silent hive of hooded and numbered human drones, was gutted. Many Tasmanians had difficulty concealing their glee and wished only to demolish the ruins. The visitor today, wandering through what remains of the penitentiary with other tourists, can hardly grasp the isolation it once stood for. Perhaps that is easier deduced from Nature itself, from the barely penetrable labyrinth of space that England chose as its abode of crime; and to see that, one need only go to the black basalt cliffs that frame the Tasman Peninsula, crawl through the bushes to their unfenced rim and gaze down on the wide, wrinkled, glimmering sheet of our imprisoning sea.