ADB

Australian Dictionary of Biography.

AJPH

Australian Journal of Politics and History.

ANZJM

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Medicine.

Bigge NSW

John Bigge, “Report of the Commissioner of Inquiry into the State of the Colony of New South Wales,” Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers 1822, vol. 20, paper #448.

BL

British Library

BT

Bonwick Transcripts, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

Clark HA 1–4

C. M. H. Clark, A History of Australia, vols. 1–4.

CO

Colonial Office Records, Public Record Office, London.

Col. Sec.

Colonial Secretary.

CON

Convict Department Records, Van Diemen’s Land.

Con. Disc. 1, 1846

Correspondence re Convict Discipline, ordered to be printed February 9, 1846, containing: (1) Secondary Punishment, pp. 1–139; (2) Convict Discipline and (3) Convict Discipline and Convict Estimates, pp. 141–259.

Con. Disc. 2, 1846

Correspondence re Convict Discipline, ordered to be printed February 9, 1846, pp. 1–69, PP (HL) 1846, vol. 7.

Con. Disc. 3, 1846

Correspondence re Convict Discipline, ordered to be printed June 12, 1846, pp. 1–77, PP (HL) 1846, vol. 7.

Con. Disc. 4, 1846

Correspondence between the Secretary of State . . . and the Governor of New South Wales, respecting the Convict System Administered in Norfolk Island, Under the Superintendence of Captain Maconochie R.N., ordered to be printed February 23, 1846, pp. 1–169, PP (HL) 1846, vol. 7.

Con. Disc. 1847

Correspondence Relative to Convict Discipline, PP (HL) 1847, vol. 8, pp. 1–250.

Con. Disc. 1850

Correspondence Relative to Convict Discipline, PP (HL) 1850, vol. 11, pp. 1–282.

Con. Disc. 1853

Further Correspondence on Convict Discipline and Transportation, PP (HL) 1852–3, vol. 18.

Cook EL

Thomas Cook, The Exile’s Lamentations.

Corr. Military Operations 1831

Copies of all Correspondence between Lieutenant-Governor Arthur and His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, on the Subject of the Military Operations lately carried out against the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land, PP (HC) #259, pp. 1–86, September 23, 1831.

Crowley, Doc. Hist.

Frank Crowley, A Documentary History of Australia.

CSO

Colonial Secretary’s Office Records, Van Diemen’s Land.

DRO

Derbyshire Record Office.

FLB

Joseph Foveaux, “Letter Book, 1800–1804.”

GO

Governor’s Office, Tasmania.

HO

Home Office Records, Public Records Office, London.

HRA

Historical Records of Australia (Series 1).

HRNSW

Historical Records of New South Wales.

HS

Historical Studies of Australia and New Zealand.

JAS

Journal of Australian Studies.

JRAHS

Journal of Royal Australian Historical Society.

LF

Laurence Frayne, Memoirs of Norfolk Island.

LH

Labour History.

LRO

Lancashire Record Office, Preston, Lancashire.

MJA

Medical Journal of Australia.

ML

Mitchell Library, Sydney.

NLA

National Library of Australia, Canberra.

NSW

New South Wales.

NSWA

Archives Office of New South Wales, Sydney.

NSW V & P

Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council of New South Wales.

PC

Privy Council Papers.

PHR

Pacific Historical Review.

PP

Parliamentary Papers, Great Britain (Lords and/or Commons).

PRO

Public Records Office, London.

RAHJ

Royal Australian Historical Journal.

Robson, Hist. Tas.

Lloyd L. Robson, A History of Tasmania.

SC 1798

Report of the Select Committee on Transportation, PP 1798.

SC 1812

Report of the Select Committee on Transportation, PP 1812.

SC 1832

Report of the Select Committee on Secondary Punishments, PP 1832.

SC 1837–38 (i)

Report of the Select Committee on Transportation (“Molesworth Report,” part i), PP 1837.

SC 1837–38 (ii)

Report of the Select Committee on Transportation (“Molesworth Report,” part ii), PP 1838.

Shaw CC

A. G. L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies.

SMH

Sydney Morning Herald.

SPO

State Paper Office, Dublin.

THRA, PP

Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Papers and Proceedings.

TSA

Tasmanian State Archives, Hobart.

UTL

University of Tasmania Library, Hobart.

VDL

Van Diemen’s Land.

1.

Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon Versus New South Wales, p. 7.

2.

The numbers given for convicts transported vary widely; Shaw CC gives a total of some 156,000, Robson (The Convict Settlers of Australia) the same, others as high as 162,000.

3.

John Hunter, An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, p. 77.

4.

On the prevalence of imported stereotypes of landscape among colonial artists looking at Australian nature, and their gradual resolution toward naturalism in the work of Lycett, Earle and others, see Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850, esp. Chapter 9, “Colonial Interpretations of the Australian Landscape, 1821–35.”

5.

Arthur Bowes Smyth, “Journal,” ML Sydney. (This has been published as The Journal of Arthur Bowes Smyth, Surgeon, Lady Penrhyn, 1787–1789, ed. P. G. Fidlon and R. J. Ryan, Sydney, 1979.)

6.

The bloodlines of Australian animals were, by other standards, young. Fossil remains of vertebrates reaching back 200 million years have been found in other continents; in Australia, the earliest such evidence of mammalian life is only about 22 million years old, from the Miocene epoch. The three main and distinctive types of vertebrate that evolved in Australian isolation were ratites (large, flightless birds like the emu), monotremes (egg-laying mammals) and marsupials (pouched mammals).

On other continents, mammals had increased their genetic efficiency by developing into placentals, in which the embryo grows within the mother’s womb, fed by an umbilical cord or placenta. It enjoys this protection for months and so is born relatively well-developed. Marsupials, by contrast, are born when still embryos—hardly bigger than ants. The embryo remains inside the mother’s body for no more than a few weeks after fertilization, until it has used up the nutrients in the egg-sac; then out it comes, groping blindly like a grub through the savannah of belly fur, heading for the mother’s pouch and, inside that, her teat. There it stays until it is mature enough to get around on its own.

7.

J. C. Beaglehole, ed., The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, vol. 1, p. 359.

8.

C. Lockhart, replying to Circular Letter from Select Committee on the Aborigines, New South Wales V & P (1849): 20.

9.

Geoffrey Blainey, The Triumph of the Nomads, p. 17.

10.

On the as yet unsolved question of the origin of the Australian Aborigines, opinion divides between the “hybridists” and the “homogeneists.” A summary of their positions is given by A. G. Thorne in “The Racial Affinities and Origins of the Australian Aborigines,” in Mulvaney and Golson, eds., Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia, pp. 316–25.

Throughout the nineteenth century, and on into the twentieth, it was widely assumed that the Australian Aborigines were all of one racial stock and “practically uniformly homogeneous” (A. A. Abbie, “Physical Characteristics of Australian Aborigines,” in Australian Aboriginal Studies, pp. 89–107). The exceptions, in this theory, were the insular Tasmanians, believed to be descended from Melanesians who arrived after the rising of the Pacific and the isolation of Tasmania and who never visited the mainland.

A contrary “hybridist” argument was advanced in 1967 by the American anthropologist Joseph B. Birdsell (in his “Preliminary Data on the Trihybrid Origin of the Australian Aborigines,” in Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania, vol. 2, pp. 100–155). He proposed that there were three distinct waves of migration from the north in the Quaternary period. The first were a light-skinned, woolly-haired people, physically similar to the hill tribesmen of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, whom Birdsell called the Oceanic Negritoids. They were in turn absorbed or driven south by a second wave, the Murrayians (so called because their racial type was conspicuous among the Aborigines of the Murray River), who had straighter hair and sprang from archaic Caucasoid stock. The displaced Oceanic Negritoids, according to this theory, survived in a few pockets in the Queensland rain forests and, retreating south, occupied Tasmania—which was cut off from the continent soon afterward by the rising sea level.

The Murrayians, by this theory, then dominated most of mainland Australia, except for the extreme north. This area, the gateway of the continent, was then invaded by a third race, the Carpenterians, racially similar to the hill peoples of Malaya, who never moved south of Australia’s tropical zone.

This theory has been disputed by other anthropologists who argue in favor of a double Australian population; but all around, the evidence is so scanty that, in the words of D. J. Mulvaney, “a century after T. H. Huxley, it remains premature to pronounce for racial heterogeneity or homogeneity” (Mulvaney, The Prehistory of Australia, p. 64).

11.

Inland movement of coast: Mulvaney, Prehistory, p. 136.

12.

Ibid., pp. 147–52.

13.

On the distribution of tribes and territory around the area of Sydney at the time of European contact, see Norman Tinsdale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, 2 vols.; for the lora, vol. 1, p. 193. See also Blainey, Triumph, p. 31.

14.

Phillip to Banks, Dec. 3, 1791, cit. in John Cobley, Sydney Cove, 1789–1790, p. 117.

15.

Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, in New South Wales. . . . p. 230.

16.

On aboriginal canoes: William Bradley, A Voyage to New South Wales, Ms. facsimile ed. (Sydney, 1969), pp. 68–69.

17.

The boomerang scarcely appears in First Fleet accounts and there is no printed description of its use before 1804. Hunter does not mention it; and although a boomerang (or at least, a boomerang–like object, curved, symmetrically tapered and about 18 inches long) figures in the plate facing p. 292 of John White’s Journal, it is described as “an humble kind of scymitar,” which suggests that White cannot have seen it in action.

18.

George Barrington [pseud.], The History of New South Wales, p. 17.

19.

Hunter, Historical Journal, p. 60.

20.

Barrington, History, p. 20.

21.

Ibid., p. 10.

22.

Phillip to Sydney, HRNSW ii:129, May 15, 1788, for the Australian Aborigine as exemplar of “hard” primitivism in contrast to the indolent and peaceable Tahitian, see Smith, European Vision, pp. 126–27.

23.

John White, cit. in John Cobley, Sydney Cove, 1788, p. 30.

24.

Predatory aboriginal courtship: Barrington, History, p. 35.

25.

A. P. Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, rev. ed. (Sydney, 1974), pp 159–61.

26.

Hunter, Historical Journal, p. 64.

1.

John Gloag, Georgian Grace, p. 54. This attitude is still very much with us; its recent monument (1985–86) was a vast and theatrical loan exhibition in Washington, D.C., called Treasure Houses of England, in which the English country house was presented as the primary “vessel of civilization” and taken as epitomizing the “age” in which it flourished. Modern Americans, in particular, like to fantasize about being Georgian gentlemen.

2.

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1, pp. 342–43.

3.

Robert Blincoe to Central Board on Employment of Children in Manufactories, in PP 1833, xxi. D3:17–18.

4.

Josiah Wedgwood to Peel Committee, in PP 1816, iii:64.

5.

Joseph Badder to the Factory Commission of 1833, in PP 1833, xx. Cl:191.

6.

Theodore Price to the Peel Committee, in PP 1816, iii:125.

7.

Francis Place, cit. in Graham Wallas, Life of Francis Place, p. 163.

8.

L. Lacombe, Observations sur Londres . . . , p. 180.

9.

Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 59–60. This casual identification of any woman living out of wedlock as a “whore” would cause grave confusions about the actual morality of transported women convicts in Australia. The results of such assumptions are discussed in Chapter 8.

10.

Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers. . . , p. 176.

11.

Ibid., p. 92.

12.

Jonas Hanway, The Defects of the Police, p. 224.

13.

On Jonathan Wild, see Christopher Hibbert, The Roots of Evil, pp. 47–50.

Jonathan Wild’s career long predates transportation to Australia, but because of its effect on English views of the growth of crime it deserves a brief recapitulation here. Like thousands of other London toughs, Wild began as a pimp; but within a few years he had acquired two brothels and a circle of underground contacts—the human capital of the informer’s trade. Not content with managing whores and informing, Wild built a fortune on the insight, dazzling in its simplicity, that would make all magistrates regard him as a national treasure: Although it was illegal to act as a receiver of stolen goods (a “fence”), no law forbade you to tell owners where their stolen property was, or to share in a reward for that information. Thus Wild set up a profitable business in stolen goods without ever touching a stolen object. Instead of buying the candlesticks or watches, he took a list of the loot from the thief, item by item. He then went to the owner with the news that certain items had fallen into the hands of an “honest broker,” who had refused to buy them. The thief had fled, leaving the loot in the broker’s hands, and Wild had been designated to find the owner and arrange for their return—provided the fictitious broker were decently rewarded for his honesty and civic spirit. This suited the thieves well, as Wild paid better than ordinary fences who only gave about 10 percent of value on stolen goods. It satisfied the law, as he only shared in a legal reward, and the sketchiness of eighteenth-century records made it difficult to disprove the broker’s existence. It pleased the owners, because it was their one good chance of getting their property back. Most of all, it gratified Wild. He made £10,000 off it in fifteen years, the equivalent of a fairly large landed income.

Parliament, startled by the sums he and others were pulling through this legal loophole, attempted to close it in 1718 with an act that made it a crime equal to theft to accept a reward for restoring goods without prosecuting the thief (4 Geo. I, c. 11, s. 4). In response, Wild merely shifted his tactics a little. He told the robbed householders who arrived in a daily stream at his office in Cock Lane to leave their money in cash in a designated place, and their possessions were returned to them the same day. Thus there was no record of Wild even handling the money, let alone the loot. Before long Wild had done business with thousands of criminals and knew them by name. He kept files on them, listing their specialties; with these, he boasted, he could hang any thief in London. His next step was to use his leverage as England’s top fence to shape the raw material of English crime, marshalling the scattered efforts of thieves, cutpurses and coiners across the nation into a corporate pattern. Starting with London, Wild organized gangs in every district of England. He had specialists trained in all kinds of theft and employed his own jewelers to melt plate and break up jewelry. He set up a rental service in burglars’ tools and ran stolen goods to Holland in his own cargo sloop. London was his hatchery; in it, he raised thieves like trout. There was little profit in turning in a young thief for petty pinching. Wild cajoled his recruits along, prodding them deeper into crime, appealing to their audacity until they matured as “forty-pound men,” criminals who would be worth handing over to the authorities. If anyone crossed him, Wild donned his role as thief-taker and haled him into court. It made no difference whether the charge was real or trumped-up, since Wild could produce as many witnesses as he wanted who would give whatever perjured testimony he needed. In the same way, he protected his friends by providing witnesses to swear to their innocence, retaining defense lawyers (there being no public defender) and, if necessary, bribing the more corruptible magistrates. He wielded his power with ruthless zeal, certain that the law was on his side. It was; for the authorities were more interested in the thieves he caught than the ones he raised, and as a thief-taker he was hugely successful. He boasted of sending seventy-two men to the gallows, and he secured the conviction of thousands of lesser fry. Despite its mock-official ring, the title he bestowed on himself—“Thief-Taker General of Great Britain and Ireland”—was not exaggerated: In the eyes of the London mob, the bourgeoisie, the magistrates and the penny press alike, Wild was the arm of the law.

He went down at last, in 1725, convicted under the act which for the last seven years had borne his name. At Tyburn, the bellowing crowd that had gathered to watch him die pelted him with stones and slops, and his last act was to pick the hangman’s pocket.

14.

De La Coste,——Voyage Philosophique d’Angleterre Fait en 1783 et 1784, vol, 1, p. 12, cit. in Radzinowicz, A History of the English Criminal Law and Its Administration Since 1752, vol. 1, p. 724.

15.

Cit. in Shaw CC, p. 39.

16.

Radzinowicz, History, vol. 1, p. 27, note 87.

17.

Ibid., vol. 1, p. 77.

18.

For a discussion of the rituals of the Rule of Law, see Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh and Edward P. Thompson, p. 17ff.

19.

Extract from Dorset County Chronicle [date unknown], 1831, incl. in Withers document file in TSA, Hobart.

20.

The ritual of the procession to Tyburn from Newgate lasted until 1783, and it appears to have been curtailed by the sheriffs of London and Middlesex for fear that the “mob” would take it over completely—a fear probably reinforced by the Gordon Riots of 1780. Hangings remained public for a while thereafter, but they were done in front of the entrance to Newgate. Michael Ignatieff (A Just Measure of Pain, pp. 88–90) compares this to the efforts of prison reformers to reclaim the subculture of prisons from the inmates, and to Colquhoun’s proposals for a metropolitan police force—“an attempt to establish state hegemony over collectivities of the poor whose defiance of public authority had long been tolerated or taken for granted.”

21.

J. P. Grosley, A Tour in London (London, 1772), vol. 1, pp. 172–73, cit. in Radzinowicz, History, vol. 1, p. 176, n. 50.

22.

Radzinowicz, History, vol. 1, p. 175, note 45.

23.

Text of the sexton’s prayer: Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, p. 175.

24.

The fullest eighteenth-century dictionaries of criminal slang and cant are Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London, 1785) and Anon., A New Canting Dictionary (London, 1725). The indispensable modem guide is Eric Partridge’s monumental A Dictionary of the Underworld (3rd ed., London, 1971).

25.

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Everyman ed., London, 1920), vol. 2, p. 447.

26.

Jonathan Swift, “Clever Tom Clinch Going to Be Hanged,” in Harold Williams (ed), The Poems of Jonathan Swift (Oxford, 1937), vol. 2, p. 399.

27.

Anon., Hanging Not Punishment Enough (London, 1701), cit. in Radzinowicz, History, vol. 1, p. 235.

28.

F. Gemelli, Viaggi per Europa (1701), vol. 1, p. 328, cit. in Radzinowicz, ibid., vol. 1, p. 182.

29.

Peter Linebaugh, “the Tyburn riot Against the Surgeons,” in Hay et al., eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree, p. 83.

30.

Figures from Radzinowicz, History, vol. 1, p. 190.

31.

On mercy and patronage, see Hay, “Property,” in Hay et al., eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree, p. 23.

32.

The source for these petitions, especially those relating to transportation, is in the Privy Council Papers in the Public Records Office, London, in-letters to the Home Office 1/67–92, covering the years 1819–44. I have quoted from a few of them in Chapter 5, but the immense wealth of information they offer on the social background, experiences and circumstances of individual convicts and their families awaits the attention of historians.

33.

John Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, p. 12.

34.

Ibid., p. 9.

35.

Fielding, Enquiry, p. 214.

36.

Howard, State of the Prisons, p. 21.

37.

Brisbane to Bathurst, Nov. 29, 1823, HRA xi: 181.

38.

Samuel Johnson, Jan. 6, 1759, in The Idler, vol. 1, p. 38.

39.

In 1786 Pitt wrote to William Wilberforce, who was pressing him for penal reform, to say that “The multitude of things depending, has made the Penitentiary House long in deciding upon. But I still think,” he added vaguely, “a beginning will be made before the season for building is over.” No beginning was made and in the summer of 1788 Pitt reassured Wilberforce that penitentiaries “shall not be forgotten.” Although Sir Samuel Romilly urged the government to pursue the idea of a national penitentiary, it remained in limbo until 1812, when ground was broken at Millbank, on the Thames, for the biggest prison in Europe—seven pentagonal blocks holding 1,200 prisoners, clustered around a chapel. It was theoretically modelled on Jeremy Bentham’s scheme for a centralized Panopticon, but it turned out, in practice, to be an almost uncontrollable maze. The Millbank Penitentiary was never an effective substitute for transportation. It was demolished to make way for the Tate Gallery.

40.

Smith, Colonists in Bondage, p. 92.

41.

Ibid.

42.

The Correspondence of King George III, ed. J. Fortescue, vol. 6, p. 415ff, cit. in Clark HA, vol. 1, p. 64.

1.

On the dissemination of information in the eighteenth century, see Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, pp. 21–23.

2.

Luis de Camoëns, Os Lusiadas, vol. 10, p. 139.

3.

On the Tordesillas line, originally meant to divide the Atlantic only but soon extended into a great meridian around the world dividing Luso-Castilian zones of influence in seas as yet unknown, see O. H. K. Spate, The Pacific Since Magellan, vol. 1: The Spanish Lake, pp. 25–29. On the Dieppe maps, and presumed Portuguese encounters with the eastern coast of Australia, see Russel Ward, Australia Since the Coming of Man, pp. 21–26, and K. G. Mclntyre, The Secret Discovery of Australia.

4.

There is some evidence, not conclusive, of Chinese contact with Australia in the fifteenth century. See D. G. Mulvaney, The Prehistory of Australia, pp. 41–44.

5.

William Dampier, Dampier’s Voyages, ed. John Masefield, vol. 1, pp. 350–51.

6.

Cook’s instructions from the Admiralty on the Southern Continent: James Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyage of Discovery, ed. J. C. Beaglehole, vol. 1, pp. 279–84, and J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook, pp. 147–49.

7.

On the doings of the Endeavour’s men two centuries ago at the now hopelessly corrupted paradise of Matavai Bay on Tahiti, the literature is vast. A summary is given by Beaglehole, Life of Cook, pp. 172–95.

8.

Joseph Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771, ed. J. C. Beaglehole.

9.

Banks, Journal, April 25, 1770. Thus the image of sterile Australia—the “old Cow” of a continent—makes its appearance at the very moment of contact.

10.

Cook, Journals, vol. 1, p. 399.

11.

Alan Frost, Convicts and Empire: A Naval Question, 1776–1811, p. 135.

12.

John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, vol. 1, p. 405. In 1781–85 Britain’s exports to the East Indies were worth less than £1 million and its imports a little more than £2 million. The corresponding figures for the Atlantic countries (Caribbean, North America, Newfoundland, Africa) were £4 million and £3.5 million.

13.

Harris to Carmarthen, Aug. 19, 1785, cit. in Frost, Convicts and Empire, p. 99.

14.

Harris to Carmarthen, Mar. 7, 1786, cit. in Frost, Convicts and Empire, p. 104.

15.

Admiral Hughes on spar shortage in India: cit. ibid., p. 66.

16.

Phormium tenax, the New Zealand flax plant which grew on Norfolk Island, superior in tensile strength and fiber to Gymnostatus anceps, the wild flax plant of the mainland coast, figured in the royal instructions to Phillip on the First Fleet, which mentioned its “superior excellence for a variety of Maritime purposes” and the prospect that it “may ultimately become an Article of Export.” Phillip was enjoined to “particularly attend to its Cultivation, and . . . send home . . . Samples of this Article.” Phillip’s Instructions, Apr. 25, 1787, HRNSW ii:89.

17.

James Mario Matra’s proposal, Aug. 23, 1783, HRNSW ii:1–6.

18.

Ibid.

19.

Addition to Matra’s proposal, Aug. 23, 1783, HRNSW ii:7.

20.

Howe to Sydney, Dec. 26, 1784, HRNSW ii:10. “The length of the navigation,” Admiral Howe remarked discouragingly, “subject to all the retardments of an India voyage, do [sic] not, I must confess, encourage me to hope for a return of the many advantages in commerce or war which Mr. M. Matra has in contemplation.”

21.

Young to Pitt, enclosed in Pepper Arden to Sydney, Jan. 13, 1785, HRNSW ii:11. Young stressed the possible revenue from trade in Australian products, mainly spices, “fine Oriental cotton,” sugar cane, coffee and tobacco. His main subject of enthusiasm, however, was Phormium tenax, “that very remarkable plant known by the name of the New Zealand flax-plant,” which Young believed could be grown in limitless quantities. “Its uses are more extensive than any vegetable hitherto known, for in its gross state it far exceeds anything of the kind for cordage and canvas, and may be obtained at a much cheaper rate than . . . from Russia.”

22.

John Call to Pitt [?], ca. August 1784, HO 42/7:49–57, cit. in Frost, Convicts and Empire, p. 203.

23.

Alexander Dalrymple, “A Serious Admonition . . .,” cit. in David Mackay, A Place of Exile: The European Settlement of New South Wales, p. 33.

24.

Shaw CC, pp. 46–47.

25.

For Rolle’s pressure on Pitt to transport the felons accumulating in the Devon hulks, see Mackay, Place of Exile, p. 21.

26.

Clark HA, vol. 1, p. 67.

27.

For King’s continuing interest in Norfolk Island flax, sustained in the face of discouraging indifference from his government, see Mackay, Place of Exile, p. 95.

28.

In Convicts and Empire, Alan Frost claims a place in the Napoleonic Wars for the infant colony of Sydney. “It is one of history’s niceties,” he claims, “as it is a tribute both to their percipience and their political longevity, that those who in the mid-1780s created [the colony as strategic outlier] called it onto the stage of war with the Emperor Napoleon.” Yet Australia’s “role” against Napoleon consisted of a passing thought by Pitt, in 1804, that Valparaiso might be attacked by a trans-Pacific expeditionary force from Sydney; and of Grenville’s unexecuted plan to attack Chile, Peru and Mexico with a force that included men from the New South Wales Corps and “100 convict pioneers . . . seasoned to work in the sun.” Nothing came of either. Australia’s “role” in the struggle against Bonaparte was nil.

29.

Nepean, CO 201/2:15 and HO 42/7:24.

30.

In preparing the “Heads of a Plan” for announcement by Lord Sydney, Nepean leaned heavily on the argument and phrasing of Matra’s 1783 proposal for the Botany Bay settlement. The “Heads of a Plan” on flax in 1786: “The threads or filaments of this New Zealand plant are formed by nature with the most exquisite delicacy, and may be so minutely divided as to be manufactured into the finest linens.” Matra on the same, in 1783: “The threads or filaments of this plant are formed by nature with the most exquisite delicacy, and they may be so minutely divided as to be small enough to make the finest Cambrick.”

31.

“Phillip’s Views on the Conduct of the Expedition and the Treatment of Convicts,” 1787, HRNSW ii:53.

32.

Charles Bateson, The Convict Ships, 1787–1868, pp. 96–98.

33.

Phillip to Nepean, Mar. 18, 1787, HRNSW ii:58.

34.

Phillip to Nepean, Jan. 11, 1787, HRNSW ii:46.

35.

Philip Gidley King, The Journal of Philip Gidley King, Lieutenant, R.N., 1787–1790, p. 6.

36.

Phillip to Sydney, Feb. 28, 1787, HRNSW ii:50.

37.

Phillip to Sydney, Mar. 12, 1787, HRNSW ii:56–57.

38.

Phillip to Nepean, Mar. 18, 1787, HRNSW ii:59.

39.

The basic source for the identity of the First Fleet convicts is a thorough compilation from sessions papers and assizes records published by Dr. John Cobley in 1970, The Crimes of the First Fleet Convicts. Defects and ambiguities in the records make it uncertain how many prisoners actually were shipped on the First Fleet. Cobley’s figure is 778, both male and female; Crowley’s (in A Documentary History of Australia, vol. 1) is 736; Lieutenant King’s count, before sailing, was 752; and so on.

40.

“Botany Bay: A New Song” is in Ballads collection, ML, Sydney.

41.

[Alexander Dalrymple], A Serious Admonition to the Publick on the Intended Thief-Colony at Botany Bay.

42.

Whitehall Evening Post, Dec. 19, 1786, cit. in C. M. H. Clark, Sources of Australian History, pp. 75–77.

43.

“Memorial from the Marines,” written on Scarborough, May 7,1787, HRNSW ii:100–101.

44.

Phillip to Sydney, June 5, 1787, HRNSW i:107.

45.

Watkin Tench, A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay, p. 3.

46.

Ralph Clark Journal, May 13–14, 1787, Journal and Letters, 1787–1792 (Sydney, 1981).

47.

Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America, vol. 1: The Southern Voyages (New York, 1974), p. 222.

48.

Tench, Narrative, p. 19.

49.

John White, Journal, July 1787, p. 39.

50.

Ibid., pp. 30–31.

51.

Clark, Journal, July 3, 1787.

52.

Phillip to Nepean, Sept. 2, 1787, HRNSW ii:112.

53.

White, Journal, p. 45.

54.

Arthur Bowes Smyth, Journal, Nov. 12, 1787.

55.

Ibid., Dec. 10, 1787.

56.

Ibid., Jan. 10, 1788.

57.

White, Journal, Jan. 1788, p. 113.

58.

Ibid., p. 114.

1.

The prepossessing description of Botany Bay was given by Capt. James Cook in his Journal, Mar. 1, 1770. Joseph Banks, in his summary of the New South Wales coast written aboard Endeavour in August 1770 (Banks, Journal, ed. Beaglehole, vol. 2, p. 111ff.: “Some Account of that part of New Holland now called New South Wales”), was much more skeptical. “Barren it may justly be call’d and in a very high degree. . . . [U]pon the Whole the fertile Soil Bears no kind of Proportion to that which seems by nature doomed to everlasting barrenness. Water is here a scarce article. . . . [A]t the two places where we filld for the ships use it was done from pools not brooks. Cultivation could not be supposed to yeild much towards the support of man.”

A few pages later he softened these strictures a little, remarking that “Upon the whole New Holland, tho’ in every respect the most barren countrey I have seen, is not so bad that between the productions of sea and Land a company of People who should have the misfortune of being shipwrecked upon it might support themselves.”

2.

Lieut. Philip Gidley King, Journal, Jan. 20, 1788, pp. 34–35.

3.

Ibid.

4.

Ibid.

5.

Arthur Bowes Smyth, Journal, Jan. 21, 1788, pp. 57–58.

6.

Watkin Tench, A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay, pp. 57–58, and John White, Journal, p. 117. Apparently the tune (that of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”) was retained among the Aborigines, for George Thompson (Slavery and Famine: An Account of the Miseries and Starvation at Botany Bay, p. 16) would describe them paddling their canoes while singing it—“they have the French tune of Malbrook very perfect: I have heard a dozen or twenty singing it together.”

7.

Phillip to Sydney, May 15, 1788, HRNSW ii:121–22.

8.

David Collins, An Account of the English Colony at New South Wales, vol. 1, p. 5.

9.

Tench, Narrative, p. 60.

10.

Jean-François de la Pérouse, A Voyage Around the World . . . Under the Command of J. F. G. de la Pérouse, vol. 2, p. 180.

11.

Phillip to Sydney, May 15, 1788, HRNSW ii:123.

12.

Ralph Clark, Journal, Feb. 1, 1788, Journal and Letters, 1787–1792. (The original Ms. is in ML Sydney.) On the indolence of convicts, see Phillip to Sydney, HRNSW ii:123.

13.

Bowes Smyth, Journal, Feb. 6, 1788.

14.

Ibid., Feb. 7, 1788, pp. 67–69. Bowes Smyth’s opinion that Phillip’s Commission was “a more unlimited one than was ever before granted to any Governor under the British Crown” was shared by other officers, including Ralph Clark: “I never heard of any one single person having so great a power invested in him.” George Worgan, the naval surgeon who brought the first piano to Australia on the Sirius, felt that the “feeling and concern” of Phillip’s delivery did honor to his humanity, “and it really is a Pity, he has the Government of a set of Reprobates who will not suffer him to indulge himself in a Lenity, which he sincerely wishes to govern them by.” G. B. Worgan, Journal, Feb. 9, 1788.

15.

Phillip in HRNSW ii:155–56, July 9, 1788.

16.

On the construction of the first settlement’s huts, see J. M. Freeland, Architecture in Australia, pp. 12–17.

17.

Thomas Watling, Letters from an Exile at Botany-Bay. . . , p. 17. The use of sheeps’ hair in the mortar (not wool) was inevitable; the first Australian sheep were hairy animals from the Cape, raised for their meat not their fleece.

18.

Ross to Col. Sec. Stephens, July 10, 1788, HRNSW ii:173.

19.

Bowes Smyth, Journal, Feb. 25–26, 1788, pp. 74–75.

20.

HRNSW 1/ii:89. N. G. Butlin, in Our Original Aggression, proposes that the officers of the First Fleet, with the connivance of Phillip, deliberately infected the Aborigines with cholera as a form of germ warfare. There is no direct or persuasive evidence for this, and the distress with which the First Fleet diarists observed the epidemics among the tribespeople argues strongly against it.

21.

George B. Worgan, Journal, May 24, 1788.

22.

Ibid.

23.

Daniel Southwell, HRNSW ii:666.

24.

Worgan, letter to Richard Worgan, June 12, 1788, Ms. in ML, Sydney.

25.

Watling, Letters from an Exile, pp. 7–8.

26.

Ibid.

27.

Ibid.

28.

Collins, Account, vol. 1, p. 17.

29.

Extract of Journal of Richard Williams (seaman on Borrowdale) in broadsheet Q991/W, ML, Sydney.

30.

HRNSW ii:746–77.

31.

Bowes Smyth, Journal, Feb. 23, 1788, p. 74.

32.

Ross to Nepean, HRNSW ii:212.

33.

Campbell to Lord Ducie, cit. in Cobley, Sydney Cove, 1788, p. 191.

34.

Phillip to Sydney, July 9, 1788, HRNSW ii:150.

35.

Clark, Journal, Feb. 28, 1790.

36.

King, Journal, May 10, 1788.

37.

Tench, Account, p. 37.

38.

Southwell to Rev. W. Butler, Apr. 14, 1790, cit. in Cobley, Sydney Cove, 1789–1790, p. 183.

39.

Collins, Account, p. 81.

40.

Tench, Account, pp. 39–40.

41.

King, HRNSW ii:431.

42.

Clark, letter to Capt. Campbell, Feb. 11, 1791, in Clark, Journal and Letters, 1787–1792.

43.

Clark, Journal, May 21, 1790.

44.

Phillip to Sydney, HRNSW ii:211.

45.

Kidnapped Maoris: King, Journal, Nov. 1793, pp. 177–78. King had made the young Maoris “a very serious promise of sending them home” [Journal, May 1793, p. 135] and he honored it, though not soon enough for either of them. “Woodoo like a true Patriot thinks there is no country People or Customs equal to those of his own, which makes him less curious in what he sees about him, than his companion Tooke.” [Journal, November 1793, pp. 178–79.]

46.

Tench, Account, p. 43.

47.

Letter from anonymous convict woman dated Port Jackson, Nov. 14, 1788, in HRA ii:746–47. Rev. Richard Johnson to Henry Fricker, Apr. 9, 1790, at C232 in ML, Sydney.

48.

Southwell to Rev. Butler, Apr. 14, 1790.

49.

Anonymous male convict, cit. in Cobley, Sydney Cove, 1789–1790, pp. 165–66.

50.

Tench, Account, p. 42.

51.

Collins, Account, p. 88.

52.

Watling, Letters from an Exile, p. 18.

53.

“We shall not starve”: Phillip to Nepean, Apr. 15, 1790, HRNSW ii:330.

54.

Arrival of Lady Juliana: Tench, Account, p. 46.

55.

Phillip to W.W. Grenville, HRA i:194–97, Jul, 17, 1790.

56.

Collins, Account, cit. in Cobley, Sydney Cove, 1791–92, p. 129.

57.

For the New South Wales Corps, see George Mackaness, Life of Vice-Admiral Bligh, vol. 2, p. 117–18; Herbert V. Evatt, Rum Rebellion, passim; Clark HA, vol. 1, pp. 150, 166.

58.

Collins, Account, vol. 1, p. 187.

59.

Phillip to Grenville, July 17, 1790, HRA i:194–97.

60.

Phillip to Dundas, Mar. 19, 1792, HRNSW ii:597.

61.

“Reminiscences of Henry Hale to Mrs. Caroline Chisholm,” in Samuel Sidney, The Three Colonies of Australia, p. 43.

62.

George Thompson, Slavery and Famine, pp. 35–36. Phillip to Dundas, Oct. 2, 1792, HRNSW ii:645.

63.

HRNSW ii:664. I am assuming a (very approximate) conversion rate of 50:1 between modern and late eighteenth-century sterling. See Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, p. 13.

64.

Parliamentary History, vol. 28, pp. 1222–24.

65.

See Appendix 1, “Governors and Chief Executives of New South Wales During Convict Period, 1788–1855,” for the various governors’ dates of office.

66.

Grose to Dundas, Feb. 16, 1793. HRA ii:14–15.

67.

Crowley, Doc. Hist., vol. 1, p. 63. Shaw CC, p. 66.

68.

Roe, “Colonial Society in Embryo,” HS, vol. 7, no. 26 (May 1956), p. 157.

69.

S. Macarthur-Onslow, ed., Some Early Records of the Macarthurs of Camden, pp. 45–46.

70.

John Easty, “A Memorandum of the Transactions of a Voyage from England to Botany Bay in the Scarborough Transport . . . ,” Dixson Library, Sydney; entry for Sept. 30, 1792. Easty’s opinion as to the severity of discipline under King on Norfolk Island is not supported by King’s own journal, with its (on the whole) moderate record of flogging. A private in the Marines, and subject to harsh discipline himself, Easty showed a lively sense of injustice when noting the punishments inflicted on others. Thus at Cape Town [Nov. 7, 1787] he found the Dutch authorities “very Strict sort of People . . . they hang them for the Lest thing in the World allmost and for anything that is very Bad they rack them and Break their Bones one by one and hang them upon a Gibett like a Dog.”

71.

King to Dundas, Mar. 10, 1794, HRNSW ii:137.

72.

King’s report, in HRNSW ii:145.

73.

Grose to King, Feb. 25, 1794, HRNSW ii:130–31.

74.

On Maj. Joseph Foveaux, see ADB entry and Mss. catalogued under Foveaux in ML, Sydney, especially Foveaux’s “Letter Book, 1800–1804” (MLA1444), hereafter referred to as FLB.

75.

Foveaux to King, Nov. 16, 1800, FLB.

76.

Robert Jones, “Recollections of 13 Years Residence at Norfolk Island,” ca. 1823.

77.

Ibid.

78.

Ibid.

79.

Ibid.

80.

Ibid.

81.

Foveaux to King, Jan. 13, 1801, FLB.

82.

Foveaux to Duke of Portland, Sept. 17, 1801, letter at Af 48/4, ML, Sydney.

83.

Jones, “Recollections.”

84.

On Richard Atkins, see ADB entry; John Grant, letter 15, July 13, 1804, Ms. 737, NLA, Canberra.

85.

Alan Frost, Convicts and Empire, pp. 168–69.

86.

Ibid., p. 172.

87.

Liverpool to Macquarie, HRNSW vii:562–63.

88.

On the numbers, distribution and tribal organization of the Van Diemen’s Land Aborigines, see Robson, Hist. Tas., pp. 13–25, esp. pp. 17–18. Lyndall Ryan (The Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 14) follows Rhys Jones in assuming a population of 3,000 to 4,000 Aborigines at the time of European settlement. This figure is disputed, on no very clear evidence, by present-day aboriginal descendants, whose guesses run as high as 8,000 to 10,000.

89.

The word “tarpaulin” is common eighteenth-century slang for “career naval officer.”

90.

For Bentham’s pursuit of Collins, see Bentham Papers, Add. Ms. 33544, fols. 20–21, 41–42, 57–58, BL.

91.

George Prideaux Harris at Port Phillip, to Henry Harris: Harris Family Papers, Add. Ms. 45156, fols. 14–15, BL. James Grove, undated letter 2, in “Select Letters of James Grove,” ed. Earnshaw, THRA, PP.

92.

George Harris, Add. Ms. 45156, fol. 16, BL.

93.

King to Collins, Nov. 26, 1803, HRA iii:39, and Dec. 30, 1803, HRA iii:50. Collins to King, Dec. 30, 1803, HRA iii:50, and Jan. 27, 1804, HRA iii:53.

94.

Collins to King, Feb. 28, 1804, HRA iii: 217–18.

95.

Memo by Lieut. Edward Lord in “Select Letters of James Grove,” ed. Earnshaw, pp. 38–39.

96.

James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, p. 21.

97.

William Maum to Robert Nash, Jan. 28, 1808, Calder Papers, ML, Sydney.

98.

Robson, Hist. Tas., p. 71.

99.

Jones, “Recollections.”

100.

James Grove, undated letter 4, in “Select Letters of James Grove,” p. 38.

101.

Memo by Lieut. Edward Lord, ibid., p. 39.

102.

George Harris, Add. Ms. 45156, fol. 16, BL.

103.

Mary Gilmore, “Old Botany Bay,” 1918.

1.

Thomas Holden to Molly Holden, DDX 140/7:4, LRO.

2.

Peter Withers to Mary Ann Withers, April 1831, TSA, Hobart.

3.

Richard Dillingham to Betsey Faine, Dec. 28, 1831, letter 2, Bedfordshire County Archive.

4.

John Ward, “Diary of a Convict,” transcript pp. 39–40, in Ward Papers, NLA.

5.

Thomas Holden to Molly Holden, DDX 140/7:8 and 10a, LRO.

6.

Peter Withers to Mary Ann Withers, TSA, Hobart.

7.

Ibid.

8.

Deborah Taylor to Sir Robert Peel, Apr. 8, 1830, PC 1:78, PRO.

9.

Jane Eastwood to Sir Robert Peel, Apr. 12, 1830, PC 1:78, PRO.

10.

Ibid.

11.

Isherwood et al. to Viscount Sidmouth, May 12, 1819, PC 1:67, PRO. R. Downie to Peel, Apr. 15, 1830, PC 1:78, PRO.

12.

Richard Boothman to his father, Feb. 10, 1841, DDX 537:5, LRO.

13.

Richard Taylor to his father, Apr. 14 and Apr. 22, 1840, DDX 505:2 and 3, LRO.

14.

R. Taylor to parents, May 1840, 505:4, LRO.

15.

R. Boothman to father, May 18 and June 16,1841, DDX 537:11 and 13, LRO. R. Brown to father, May 2, 1841, DDX 505:15, LRO. T. Holden to mother, June 1812, DDX 7:7, LRO.

16.

“The Borough,” letter 18, in George Crabbe, Poems, ed. A. W. Ward, vol. 1, p. 458, cit. in Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia, p. 10.

17.

Wentworth Papers, pp. 31–32, ML, Sydney.

18.

T. Holden, DDX 140/7:8, LRO. R. Boothman, DDX 537:11, LRO.

19.

Petition of Mrs. Silas Harris, May 2, 1819, PC 1:67, PRO.

20.

William Tidman to Sidmouth, Feb. 8, 1819, PC 1:67, PRO. Mrs. Lycot to Sir George Paul, end. in Paul to Sidmouth, May 12, 1819, PC 1:67, PRO.

21.

Helen Guild, petition dated April 1830, PC 1:78, PRO.

22.

T. Holden to mother, DDX 140/7:6, LRO.

23.

T. Holden to Molly Holden, DDX 140/7:9, LRO. Henry Bennett, A Letter to Viscount Sidmouth, on Transportation, p. 24. Ward, “Diary of a Convict,” p. 42.

24.

Ward, ibid., p. 44.

25.

Mansfield Silverthorpe, Ms. no. 9, Norfolk Island Convict Papers.

26.

Woomera [pseud.], The Life of an Ex-Convict, printed extract in ML, Sydney, p. 2. Ward, “Diary of a Convict,” p. 78.

27.

George Lee to Sir Henry St. J. Mildmay, Jan. 24, 1803, Bentham Papers, BL, Add. Ms. 33544, ff. 14–15.

28.

Little boy: Bennett, Letter to Viscount Sidmouth, p. 25. James Grove, letter 1 in “Select Letters of James Grove.” Silverthorpe, Ms. no. 9, Norfolk Island Convict Papers.

29.

John Mortlock, Experiences of a Convict, p. 55.

30.

Bennett, Letter to Viscount Sidmouth, p. 30.

31.

Mortlock, Experiences, p. 53. Ward, “Diary of a Convict,” p. 83.

32.

Silverthorpe, Ms. no. 9, p. 66.

33.

Silverthorpe., ibid. Ward, “Diary of a Convict,” p. 90. Mortlock, Experiences, p. 53.

34.

Ward, ibid., p. 40.

35.

John Nicol, The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner, pp. 114–15.

36.

Bennett, Letter to Viscount Sidmouth, p. 29.

37.

Simon Taylor to his father, May 1841, DDX 505:17, LRO.

38.

Contract system: see Charles Bateson, The Convict Ships 1787–1868, pp. 12ff.

39.

Death rate during the Atlantic crossing and in the Navy: see Shaw CC, p. 117.

40.

The death rate in the early 1830s was increased by three bad shipwrecks. In 1833 the Amphitrite ran around near Boulogne before she even cleared the English Channel, drowning 106 women convicts. In 1835 the George III sank in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, near Hobart, after a scurvy-ridden outward voyage; captain and crew were slow to unbar the hatches, and 127 male prisoners drowned. The same year, Neva was wrecked in the Bass Strait, killing another 138 women. If allowance is made for the loss of life from these wrecks, one sees that the convicts’ general death rate from disease and neglect en route had, by naval standards, become very small by the 1830s.

41.

Capt. William Hill to Wathen, July 26, 1790, HRNSW ii:367.

42.

Thomas Milburn, “Copy of a Letter from Thomas Milburn in Botany Bay to his Father and Mother in Liverpool,” broadsheet, Aug. 26, 1790, ML, Sydney.

43.

Hill to Wathen, July 26, 1790, HRNSW ii:367.

44.

Rev. Richard Johnson to Thomton, HRNSW ii:387–88.

45.

The design of the Great Seal: HRNSW ii:389. In England, Erasmus Darwin, poetaster and grandfather of the great naturalist, was moved to pen his Visit of Hope to Botany-Bay to accompany a medallion made by Wedgwood out of Sydney clay, a verse less remarkable for its social realism than for its prediction of the Sydney Harbor Bridge:

Where Sydney Cove her lucid bosom swells,

Courts her young navies, and the storm repels;

High on a rock amid the troubled air

HOPE stood sublime, and wav’d her golden hair;

Calm’d with her rosy smile the tossing deep

And with sweet accents charm’d the winds to sleep;

To each wild plain she stretch’d her snowy hand,

High-waving wood, and sea-encircled strand.

“Hear me”, she cried, “ye rising Realms! record

Time’s opening scenes, and Truth’s unerring word—

There shall broad streets their stately walls extend,

The circus widen, and the crescent bend;

There, ray’d from cities o’er the cultured land,

Shall bright canals, and solid roads expand.—

There the proud Arch, Colossus-like, bestride

Yon glittering streams, and bound the chafing tide— . . .

And so on. Hope was easier to see in England than in Sydney.

46.

Short rations on Queen: Bateson, Convict Ships, p. 137.

47.

Capt. William Hill, cit. in Shaw CC, p. 112.

48.

For conditions on the Hillsborough before her departure from Australia, see Jerome Fitzpatrick to Baldwin, Aug. 25, 1801, Pelham Papers, BL, Add. Ms. 33107, pp. 407ff. A vivid account of the voyage (Voyage to Sydney in the Ship Hillsborough 1798–99, and a Description of the Colony, Ms. in Dixson, published for the Library of Australian History, 1978) was written by the convict silversmith William Noah, a native of Shropshire who, at forty-three, had been sentenced to death at the Old Bailey in April 1797 for stealing two thousand pounds of lead, value £23, from a plumber in Westminster. Captain Hingston’s attitude to the convicts may be gauged from Noah’s account of his wife’s attempt to visit her condemned husband on Dec. 4, 1798, before the Hillsborough sailed:

I was very mich Suppris’d on looking thro’ the port Holes of the Ship to see my Wife come Off in a Werry & a longside. I immediately wrote to Capt Hingston begging the Indulgence to speak to her on the Deck but had no Answer finding her still along side I wrote a Second Stating to him that she had Came from London with what she must have Experienc’d from the Cold & that it might be a final Leave I being banish’d to a Distant Land, this last sofed’d his Heart & after her being a Longside two Hour’s I was Orderd on Deck when with a Brutal Kind of Behavior she was admitted with a Box she had brought for me. . . . [Hingston] fell in a Violent Passion askin how many Boxes I meant to have, Swearing If any thing was in it off Tools he would throw the [w]Hole into the Sea & unfortunately I had Orderd a few Ingravers & Others small tools . . . the Maj[ority] of which he found she was then Immediately Orderd out of the Ship with the Tools and I with the most Horrid Language down to my Miserable Place of Confinement no One Can feel the Horror of an Unhappy Mind I was Disconsolate & felt the Horrors of Cruel Misfortunes.

49.

Conditions and medical officers on the Royal Admiral: see Bateson, Convict Ships, p. 43.

50.

Ibid. pp. 45–46.

51.

Ibid., pp. 160–65. Massey’s Journal Book, 1796, typescript extract at Ab. 93, ML, Sydney. Beyer was on his third voyage to Sydney; he had been Captain Anstis’s surgeon on Scarborough in the Second Fleet.

52.

Fitzpatrick to Rev. Charles Lindsey, re conditions on Hercules and Atlas, Pelham Papers, Add. Ms. 33107, pp. 200–203, BL.

53.

Fitzpatrick to Pelham, ibid., p. 341ff.

54.

Shaw CC, p. 114. Macquarie to Bathurst, Dec. 12, 1817, HRA ix:510.

55.

Fitzpatrick to Baldwin, Pelham Papers, Add. Ms. 33105, BL, p. 242ff.

56.

Redfern to Macquarie, HRA viii:275ff.

57.

Figures from Bateson, Convict Ships, Appendix 7b.

58.

As merchantmen, most transports had been designed to squeeze as much cargo space as possible from the tonnage laws that governed the payment of harbor dues up to 1835. The rule of thumb in this tonnage calculation assumed that a hull’s depth was half its beam. Hence the owners sought to fool the tax man by building ships as narrow and deep as possible. This was fine for cargo, but terribly uncomfortable for convicts, as narrow hulls were less stable than beamy ones and rolled violently. As free emigration to Australia began to take hold in the 1830s, so the quality of convict shipping declined—for it was much more profitable for owners to take paying passengers than to accept government charters.

59.

John Boyle O’Reilly, Moondyne, pp. 186–89.

60.

George Prideaux Harris to family, n.d. (Jan. 1804), BL, Add. Ms. 45156, p. 9v.

61.

Alfred Tetens, Among the Savages of the South Seas, p. xxii.

62.

John Gorman, Log-book, untitled Ms. 1524, NLA, Canberra.

63.

Mellish, “A Convict’s Recollections of New South Wales,” p. 49.

64.

Charles Cozens, The Adventures of a Guardsman, p. 98.

65.

Ibid., pp. 95–96.

66.

Ibid., pp. 103–4.

67.

John Gregg, Journal on convict ship York, 1862, Ms. 2749, NLA.

68.

William Coke to his father, Apr. 20, 1826, Coke letters, D.1881, DRO.

69.

Ibid.

70.

Tetens, Among the Savages, p. xxiii.

71.

Ibid., p. xxiv.

72.

T. Holden to parents, DDX/140:12, LRO.

73.

John Smith, Surgeon’s log on transport Clyde, Ms. 6169, NLA, Canberra.

74.

Murray to Smith, Sept. 13, 1838, encl, in Ms. 6169, NLA, Canberra.

1.

William Blake, “Vala, Night the Ninth,” in The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, London, 1966, pp. 359–60.

2.

J. L. Hammond and B. Hammond, The Village Laborer, 1760–1832, p. 239; G. Arnold Wood, “Convicts,” JRAHS, vol. 8, no. 4 (1922), p. 187.

3.

See C. M. H. Clark, “The Origins of the Convicts Transported to Eastern Australia, 1787–1852,” HS, vol. 7, no. 26 (May 1956), pp. 121–35, and vol. 7, no. 27 (June 1956), pp. 314–27; and see also Lloyd L. Robson, The Convict Settlers of Australia.

4.

C. M. H. Clark, Select Documents in Australian History, 1788–1810, pp. 406–8.

5.

Robson, Convict Settlers of Australia, Appendix 4, table 4(e). I have rounded off the percentages.

6.

Ibid., Appendix 4, table 4(d).

7.

Ibid., Appendix 4, tables 4(b) and (r).

8.

Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty, p. 291. For her discussion of class language, see pp. 281–304.

9.

Ibid., p. 295.

10.

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 3, p. 381.

11.

Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, pp. vii–xi.

12.

Edward P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 59–66.

13.

Fraser’s Magazine, June 1832, pp. 521–22, cit. in J. J. Tobias, Crime and Industrial Society in the 19th Century.

14.

Eclectic Review, vol. 2 (April 1854), p. 387, cit. in Tobias, ibid.

15.

Himmelfarb, Poverty, p. 397.

16.

Ibid., p. 399. “Ragged-schools” were charity schools for pauper children.

17.

Petition from S. Nelson to Home Secretary, Ms. in NLA, Canberra. Isaac Nelson survived the voyage and—gentle soul—became one of the first schoolteachers in Australia, under the Rev. Richard Johnson.

18.

On the wreckers’ assumption of their traditional “rights,” see John G. Rule, “Wrecking and Coastal Plunder,” in Hay et al., eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree, pp. 181–84.

19.

Peter Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales, vol. 2, p. 234.

20.

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 4, pp. 25–26.

21.

G. Parker, Life’s Painter of Variegated Characters, 1789, cit. in Eric Partridge, Dictionary of the Underworld.

22.

Partridge, ibid.

23.

On Barrington, see HRA i:1–4 and ADB entry.

24.

Dickens, Oliver Twist (London: Penguin Books, Penguin Classics, 1966), pp. 390–91.

25.

Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 1, pp. 411 and 467.

26.

Peter Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England, 1833, chapter 4.

27.

Thomas Holden, letter to parents, 1812, DDX 140/7:13, LRO.

28.

On Muir’s trial and those of other “Scottish Martyrs,” see Anon., The Political Martyrs of Scotland Persecuted During the Years 1793 and 1794 (Edinburgh, 1795).

29.

Ibid.

30.

Lauderdale’s objection was that the 1703 Act under which Muir and Palmer had been convicted limited their punishment to banishment, not transportation. Banishment meant only “exclusion from a community,” whereas transportation “implies that exclusion executed in a compulsory and commonly ignominious Manner, always aggravated by Confinement and . . . the obligation of laborious Servitude.” Lauderdale et al. to Dundas, Dec. 14, 1793, WI/5007 in Whitbread Papers, Bedford.

31.

Gerrald to Margarot, 1794, Ms. at Ag. 14, ML, Sydney.

32.

Muir to Moffatt, Dec. 13, 1794, Ms. in ML, Sydney.

33.

Thomas Fyshe Palmer, A Narrative of the Sufferings of T. F. Palmer, p. 35.

34.

Palmer, letters dated Apr. 23 and May 5, 1796, ML, Sydney.

35.

Thomas Muir, “The Telegraph: A Consolatory Epistle,” unpublished Ms. at Am. 9, ML, Sydney. “Telegraph” here means a semaphore.

36.

Hill and Newton to Cooke, Mar. 12, 1797, Rebellion Papers 620/29:58 and 196, SPO, cit. in Shaw CC, p. 170.

37.

Hugh Reid, statement in summary of evidence on Marquis Cornwallis mutiny, HRA i:657–58.

38.

Hunter to Portland, Nov. 12, 1796, HRA i:674–75.

39.

Irish convicts in Australia: HRA x:203–4. Hunter to Portland, Mar. 3, 1796, HRA i:555–56.

40.

David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. 1, pp. 380–81, and vol. 2, p. 57.

41.

Hunter to Portland, Feb. 15, 1798, HRA i:131.

42.

Number of Irish convicts in New South Wales in 1798: T. J. Kiernan, “Transportation from Ireland to Sydney 1791–1816” (M.A. thesis), p. 59.

43.

James Carty, ed., Ireland from Grattan’s Parliament to the Great Famine, 1783–1850: A Documentary Record, p. 69.

44.

Cornwallis to Major-General Ross, cit. in Carty, Ireland, pp. 95–96.

45.

Shaw CC, p. 170.

46.

Kiernan, “Transportation,” Appendix II, p. 29. Opinions differ, however, on the number of “politicals” in these Irish shipments. George Rude, in Protest and Punishment (1978), takes the stringently reductionist view that only 241 Irish were “politicals.”

47.

Hunter to Portland, Jan. 10, 1798, HRA ii:118.

48.

Elizabeth Paterson to Capt. Johnson, Feb. 10, 1800, in Ms. Ap. 36:5, ML, Sydney.

49.

King to Cooke, July 20, 1805, HRA v:534.

50.

Hunter to Portland, Mar. 20, 1800, HRA ii:223.

51.

Irish Conspiracy Papers, HRA iii:575 et seq. and 582–83.

52.

Samuel Marsden, “A Few Observations on the Toleration of the Catholic Religion in New South Wales,” Ms. 18, Marsden Papers, ML, Sydney.

53.

Hester Stroud, deposition to Marsden, Irish Conspiracy Papers, HRA iii:641.

54.

Joseph Holt, “Life and Adventures of Joseph Holt. . . . ,” Ms. in ML, Sydney, pp. 293–95. I have corrected the distractingly erratic spelling and some of the odder punctuation of this passage.

55.

King’s court of inquiry into Irish insurgents: Oct. 1, 1800, HRA iii:650–51.

56.

Elizabeth Patterson to “Mrs. B.,” Oct. 7, 1800. Bentham Papers, Add. Ms., BL, pp. 423–24.

57.

King to Portland, HRA iii:8–9.

58.

Punishment of Father O’Neil: HRA iii:759. Irish efforts to get a priest to the colony, and King’s eventual permission to Father Dixon to say Mass and administer the sacraments: King to Hobart, May 9, 1803, HRA iv:82–83.

59.

“Situation shocking to Humanity”: King to Transport Commissioners, HRA ii:532.

60.

On Hassall’s description of the start of the Irish rising at Castle Hill, see Castle Hill Rebellion Papers, Bonwick Transcripts, vol. 1, box 49, pp. 234–35, ML, Sydney.

61.

Major George Johnston refuses to parley with Paterson: HRA iv:570.

62.

Johnston to King, end. 4 in King to Hobart, Mar. 12, 1804, HRA iv:568.

63.

John Grant, Journal, pp. 47–48, Ms. 737, Grant Papers, NLA, Canberra.

64.

King to Hobart, Apr. 16, 1804, HRA iv:611.

65.

“Occasionally removed from one Settlement to another”: King to Hobart, Apr. 30, 1805, HRA v:305. Poteen stills: HRA v:571.

66.

George Rude, Protest and Punishment, p. 249.

67.

Leslie C. Duly, “Hottentots to Hobart and Sydney: The Cape Supreme Court’s Use of Transportation, 1828–1838.”

68.

On Canadian protesters see Rude, Protest and Punishment, pp. 42–51 and 82–88.

69.

Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, p. 76.

70.

Thompson, English Working Class, pp. 347–48.

71.

Cook to Churton, Jan. 20, 1831, copy in “The Exile’s Lamentations,” MS at A1711, ML, Sydney, and cit. in Clune, The Norfolk Island Story, p. 157.

72.

Thompson, English Working Class, p. 250.

73.

Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude, Captain Swing, p. 262.

74.

Ibid., pp. 245–46.

75.

Richard Dillingham, letter to parents, Sept. 29, 1836, Dillingham Papers, Ms-CRT. 150:24, Bedfordshire County Record Office.

76.

Peter Withers, letter to brother, Ms. letters in TSA, Hobart.

77.

James Backhouse and G. W. Walker, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, Appendix J, letter 3.

1.

Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, in New South Wales, p. 141. Some of the “Chinese travellers,” he found (Account, p. 138), believed that China was only a hundred miles to the north of Panamatta, and separated from Australia by a river. Others were not so sure, but they had gone along “on account of being over-worked, and harshly treated . . . [T]hey preferred a solitary and precarious existence in the woods, to a return to the misery they were compelled to undergo.” The China myth, Phillip correctly thought, was “an evil that will cure itself” (Phillip to Nepean, Nov. 18, 1791, HRA i:309). For Collins’s views on it and the Irish who held it, see Collins, An Account of the English Colony at New South Wales, vol. 1, pp. 154, 162–63, and vol. 2, pp. 54–55, 57. In 1791, according to John Hunter (An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, pp. 563–64), no less than forty of them were missing in the bush.

2.

Hunter to Portland, Feb. 15, 1798, HRNSW iii:359. Collins (Account, vol. 2, p. 57) adds that the Irish imagined this colony of whites to lie some 300 to 400 miles southwest of Sydney.

3.

King to Hobart, May 9,1803, HRA iv:85. King to Hobart, enclosure of Govt. & General Order dated March 1803, in Aug. 7, 1803, HRA iv:337.

4.

On Mary Bryant, see ADB, vol. 1, pp. 173–74; C. H. Currey, The Transportation, Escape and Pardoning of Mary Bryant; and F. A. Pottle, Boswell and the Girl from Botany Bay. For the voyage, see James Martin, Memorandoms. This is an edition of Martin’s own “Memorandoms,” acquired by Jeremy Bentham and preserved in his papers in the British Library. Martin had been sentenced to 7 years’ transportation at the Exeter Assizes for stealing “161/2 lb. of old Lead and 4½ lb. of old Iron property of Lord Courney powdrum cacle near Exeter.” He had struck up a friendship with the Bryants both on the hulk and on Charlotte, and escaped with them from Sydney Harbor. When, after his adventures, he returned to London, he wrote down an account of their sufferings on the epic small-boat voyage. It found its way to Jeremy Bentham, who was collecting evidence of the injustices and failures of transportation for his Letter to Lord Pelham (1802) and A Plea for the Constitution (1803), reprinted as Panopticon Versus New South Wales (1812). However, there is no reference to James Martin or his “Memorandoms” in Bentham’s published works.

5.

Collins, Account, pp. 129–30.

6.

John Easty, “A Memorandom of the Transactions of a Voyage from England to Botany Bay in Scarborough Transport,” entry for Mar. 28, 1791.

7.

All quotations are from the account of the voyage in Martin’s “Memorandoms.”

8.

Tench, Account, note to p. 108.

9.

On Boswell and Mary Bryant in England, see Pottle, Boswell and the Girl from Botany Bay.

10.

For Parsons’s satire on Boswell’s imagined affair with Mary Bryant, see Pottle, ibid., and Brady, James Boswell: The Later Years, pp. 464–65.

11.

Hunter to Portland, Jan. 10, 1798, HRNSW iii:346.

12.

Baudin to King, May 9, 1803, HRA iv:151.

13.

Macquarie to Bathurst, May 16, 1818, HRA ix:793.

14.

Memo to Lt.-Gov. Arthur on Bass Strait sealing, May 29, 1826, at reel 600, NSWA, Sydney.

15.

Hobart Port Regulations, Apr. 13, 1830, CSO 1/445:1922, TSA, Hobart.

16.

On the sandalwood trade and escaped convicts in the Pacific, see Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches, pp. 119ff., 129ff.

17.

Cook EL, pp. 177–78.

18.

Hunter to Portland, Jan. 10, 1798, HRNSW iii:345. Collins (Account, vol. 2, p. 35) gives an account of the seizure of the Cumberland.

19.

On the seizure of the Harrington, see Sydney Gazette, May 22, 1808.

20.

The Australian, Feb. 23, 1827, cit. in Crowley, Doc. Hist., vol. 1, pp. 349–50.

21.

On the piracy of the Cyprus, see Arthur to Murray, Sept. 11, 1829. TSA, CON 280:31; John West, The History of Tasmania, p. 425ff.; Lloyd L. Robson, A History of Tasmania, p. 150. The version of the ballad “The Cyprus Brig” is from Gary Shearston’s recording Bolters, Bushrangers and Duffers, CBS #BP 233288. The Cyprus episode forms an important part of the narrative of Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life.

22.

On James Porter and the voyage of the Frederick, see Porter’s “Memoirs,” typescript of an unpublished Ms. at MSQ 168, Dixson Library, Sydney. All quotations of Porter are from this source. General outlines of the voyage are given in the rare Anon., “Narrative of the Sufferings . . . of the Convicts Who Piratically Seized the ‘Frederick,’” ca. 1838 (copy in ML at 910.453/29A1), and in West, History of Tasmania, p. 429ff.

23.

SC1837–38 (ii), “Papers Delivered in by John Barnes, Esq.” (B, “List of Prisoners Who Absconded from Macquarie Harbour . . .”).

24.

Pearce’s origin, physical appearance and deeds have been, due to his subsequent history, the subject of much journalistic fantasy. The one reliable study is Dan Sprod, Alexander Pearce of Macquarie Harbour. Primary sources are: (1) “Narrative of Escape from Macquarie Harbour” (the “Knopwood Narrative,” based on Pearce’s interrogation after capture by the Rev. Robert Knopwood), Ms. 3, Dixson Library, Sydney; (2) manuscript in National Library of Australia, Ms. 3323, ff. 1–5; and (3) deposition made before Cuthbertson at Macquarie Harbor and entered in SC 1837–38 (ii). Except where noted I have taken all direct Pearce quotes from (3).

25.

For the chronology and route of Pearce’s escape, see Sprod, Alexander Pearce, pp. 64–81.

26.

“Knopwood Narrative.”

27.

W. S. Sharland, “Rough Notes of a Journal of Expedition to the Westward . . . ,” in Tasmanian Parliament Legislative Council Papers, 16, 1861, as Survey Office Reports, 1861, 1, p. 6.

28.

“Knopwood Narrative.”

29.

Ibid.

30.

Ibid.

31.

For Pearce’s second escape from Macquarie Harbor, with Cox, see Sprod, Alexander Pearce, pp. 99–106, based on evidence of John Barnes to SC 1837–38 (ii), Appendix 1, 56(d).

32.

Barnes to SC 1837–38 (ii), Appendix 1, 56(d), p. 316.

33.

Pearce’s “Bisdee” confession, Jun. 20, 1824, in Sprod, Alexander Pearce, p. 105.

34.

On the emergence of Van Diemen’s Land bushrangers and their relative immunity from capture and prosecution, see Robson, Hist. Tas, Chapter 6, esp. pp. 79–83.

35.

West, Tasmania, p. 364.

36.

On Brown, Lemon and Scanlan, see Paterson to Castlereagh, May 7, 1818, HRA iii:685–86; Robson, Hist. Tas., p. 80; and Charles White, History of Australian Bushranging, vol. i, pp. 3–4.

37.

Macquarie’s proclamation: May 14, 1814, HRA viii:262 and 264–65. Davey’s proclamation of martial law: West, Tasmania, p. 360, and Robson, Hist. Tas., p. 81.

38.

Petition to Davey by Humphrey, Sept. 30, 1815, CON 201:79. Robson, Hist. Tas., p. 88.

39.

Howe to Davey, CSO 1/223:5399, a contemporary copy of Howe’s lost original. I have amended the spelling and punctuation slightly, for clarity’s sake. Davey mentioned in dispatches that the original was “written in blood,” presumably that of a sheep or a kangaroo. Of course there were few inkwells in the Tasmanian bush, but one may still admire Howe’s dramatic gesture.

40.

Wylde to Macquarie, encl. 2 in Macquarie to Bathurst, Jul. 17, 1821, HRA x:512–15.

41.

Ibid.

42.

Macquarie to Bathurst, Jul. 17, 1821, HRA x:509.

43.

On Brady, see ADB entry and bibliography; Robson, Hist. Tas., pp. 141–44; George Boxall, The Story of the Australian Bushrangers, p. 41ff; and White, Australian Bushranging, vol. 1, pp. 40–53.

44.

John Barnes, testimony in SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 41.

45.

The Australian, Nov. 11, 1834.

46.

T. L. Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, vol. 1, p. 9.

47.

Bourke to Goderich, Mar. 19, 1832, HRA.

48.

Alexander Harris, Settlers and Convicts, p. 35.

49.

White, Australian Bushranging, vol. 1, pp. 102–3.

50.

See Russel Ward, “Felons and Folksongs,” passim.

1.

Lloyd L. Robson, The Convict Settlers of Australia, pp. 77–78.

2.

Ibid., Appendix 4, table 4(0), p. 187.

3.

Shaw CC, p. 164.

4.

Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, p. 286. Summers attributes the emblematic phrase “damned whores” to Lieutenant Ralph Clark of the First Fleet, who allegedly uttered it on seeing the Lady Juliana, female transport of the Second Fleet, sail into Sydney Harbor in June 1790. “No, no—surely not! My God—not more of those damned whores! Never have I known worse women.” A sharp-eyed fellow, for at the time of Lady Juliana’s arrival he was actually a thousand miles away, stranded on Norfolk Island.

5.

Sydney to the Treasury Commissioners, “Heads of a Plan,” Aug. 18, 1786, HRNSW i:18. One may note, without dwelling on it, the sense of Pacific geography implied by Lord Sydney’s notion that New Caledonia and Tahiti were “contiguous” to New South Wales.

6.

Before he sailed for Australia, Phillip briefly considered a scheme of licensed prostitution in New South Wales. “The keeping of the women apart merits great consideration, and I don’t know but it may be the best if the most abandoned are permitted to receive the visits of the convicts in the limits allotted them at certain hours, and under certain restrictions; something of this kind was the case in Mill Bank formerly. The rest of the women I should keep apart.” (“Phillip’s Views on the Conduct of the Expedition and Treatment of the Convicts,” HRNSW ii:52.) Maybe the general promiscuity of the early settlement made this idea unnecessary. On Phillip’s policy of encouraging convict marriages—most of which lasted—see HRNSW ii:52; and Watkin Tench, A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay, p. 63: “To prevent their intercourse was impossible; to palliate its evils only remained. Marriage was recommended, and such advantages held out to those who aimed at reformation, as have greatly contributed to the tranquillity of the settlement.”

7.

Thomas Watling, Letters from an Exile at Botany-Bay . . . , pp. 18–19. Does his “whore and rogue together” indicate a reading of Dean Swift?

Under an Oak, in stormy weather,

I put this Whore and Rogue together:

And none but Him Who rules the thunder

May put this rogue and whore asunder.

8.

Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, pp. vii–xi. Mayhew conflating promiscuity with prostitution: see Mayhew and Hemyng, “The Prostitution Class Generally,” in Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 4, cit. in Sturma, “The Eye of the Beholder,” p. 6.

9.

Sturma, ibid., pp. 8–10.

10.

For a discussion of Marsden’s Register and the effects it had on the perception of colonial “immorality,” see Portia Robinson, The Hatch and Brood of Time, vol. 1, pp. 75–77.

11.

Ralph Clark, Journal, June 23, 1787.

12.

Ibid., June 28, 1787.

13.

Ibid., July 16, 1787.

14.

“Ten thousand times worse”: ibid., May 16, 1787. “I would have flogged the four whores also”: ibid., June 19, and July 3, 1787.

15.

Ibid., July 18, 1787.

16.

“Surely an angel”: ibid., Dec. 9, 1787. “If they were to lose anything”: ibid., Oct. 11, 1787. “I was going down to Tregadock”: ibid., Nov. 20, 1787. “She was better than half dead”: ibid., May 24, 1790. “I wish the almighty”: June 21, 1790.

17.

For Nicol’s account of women convicts on the Lady Juliana, see John Nicol, The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner, pp. 111–23.

18.

Ibid.

19.

Lord Auckland, draft of letter, Aug. 25, 1812, in Auckland Papers, BL, Add. Ms. 34458, pp. 382–84.

20.

John Capper to SC 1812, Appendix 1, p. 77.

21.

S. Hutchinson to J. Foyle, Sept, 5, 1798, letter at Ab. 67/15, ML.

22.

Thomas Robson to SC 1812, Appendix 1, p. 52.

23.

William Bligh to SC 1812, Appendix 1, p. 32.

24.

T. W. Plummer to Macquarie, May 4, 1809, HRA vii:120.

25.

Castlereagh to Macquarie, May 14, 1809, HRA vii:84.

26.

G. H. Hammersley, “A Few Observations on the Situation of the Female Convicts in NSW,” ca. 1807, in Hammersley Papers, A 657, ML.

27.

The opinion of the Atrevida’s lieutenant is given in Crowley, Doc. Hist., vol. 1, p. 57.

28.

Michael Hayes to his sister Mary, Nov. 2, 1802, ML, Sydney.

29.

Ibid.

30.

Bigge NSW, p. 20.

31.

Ibid.

32.

For general descriptions of the Female Factory in 1815, before its reconstruction by Greenway, see Samuel Marsden, “An Answer to the Calumnies of the Late Governor Macquarie’s Pamphlet” (1826), p. 18ff. (Marsden Papers, ML, Sydney), and (for the Factory in 1820) Bigge NSW, pp. 68–74. For regulations of the Female Factory and classification of its inmates, see “Rules and Regulations for the Management of Female Convicts at the New Factory at Parramatta,” Sydney 1821, ML, Sydney.

33.

Anon., in HRA ix:198–99. Macquarie to Bathurst, Dec. 4, 1817.

34.

Rev. Samuel Marsden, “An Answer,” pp. 23–24.

35.

R. Durie to J. T. Campbell, Mar. 3, 1811, NSW Col. Sec. in-letters bundle 5, Nos. 1–64, pp. 99–100, ML, Sydney.

36.

Thomas Reid, Two Voyages to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, cit. in Margaret Weidenhofer, The Convict Years, p. 77.

37.

J. F. O’Connell, A Residence of Eleven Years in New Holland, p. 54, cit. in Crowley, Doc. Hist., vol. 1, p. 310.

38.

Mellish, A Convict’s Recollections, p. 54.

39.

Summers, Damned Whores, p. 281.

40.

J. E. Drabble to J. Lakeland, Hobart, May 1, 1827, CSO 1/324:1704, TSA, Hobart.

41.

Sydney Gazette, Oct. 31, 1827, cit. in Summers, Damned Whores, p. 285.

42.

Peter Murdoch to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 118.

43.

Robert Jones, “Recollections of 13 Years Residence on Norfolk Island,” Ms. in ML, Sydney.

44.

James Mitchell, memorandum ca. 1815, typescript Ms. 27/c. in Stenhouse Papers II, ML, Sydney.

45.

Joseph Holt, “Life and Adventures of Joseph Holt,” Ms. A2024, ML, Sydney.

46.

Ibid.

47.

Ibid.

48.

Ibid.

49.

James Mitchell, Ms. memorandum in Stenhouse Papers II, Ms. 27/c, ML, Sydney.

50.

Jones, “Recollections.”

51.

Lepailleur’s journal, covering the years 1839–44, is in the Archives Nationales de Québec; a translation is expected for publication by F. Murray Greenwood of the University of British Columbia. On Lepailleur and his comrades in Australia, see Beverley D. Boissery, “French-Canadian Political Prisoners in Australia, 1838–39” (Ph.D. diss.), and Beverley D. Boissery and Murray F. Greenwood, “New Sources for Convict History.”

52.

Lepailleur, “Journal.”

53.

Bishop William Ullathorne, Autobiography, p. 152.

54.

Caroline Anley, The Prisoners of Australia, cit. in Crowley, Doc. Hist, vol. 1, p. 461.

55.

The Australian, Apr. 7, 1825.

56.

For one chronicler of homosexuality in Australia, this promise of fierce punishment was “evidence” of Phillip’s own homosexuality; it was, he claimed, meant to deflect attention from “rumors” of his own supposed “interest in young seamen.” (Martin Smith, “Arthur Phillip and the Young Lads,” p. 15.) This is wishful thinking. No jot of evidence suggests that the pater patriae was homosexual, or that such rumors existed. All military governors of Australian colonies found homosexual prisoners utterly repugnant; Arthur, for instance, called one pair of convict lovers “horrible beasts” (Jan. 27, 1832, CSO 1/572:12924).

57.

George Lee, letter to Sir H. St. J. Mildmay, Jan. 24, 1803, Bentham Papers, Add. Ms. 33544, BL, pp. 14–15. Jeremy Bentham, draft letter re hulk conditions, ibid., p. 105ff.

58.

See, for example, Backhouse and Walker, Ms. “Reports” in ML, at B706–7, i/27:231ff.

59.

Ullathome’s reflections on immoral Australia: William Ullathorne, The Catholic Mission in Australasia, p. iv.

60.

John Stephen, Jr. to SC 1832. Minutes, p. 30. Allan Cunningham, ibid., p. 36.

61.

Report of SC 1837–38 (ii), Appendix 1/57, “Return of the Number of Persons Charged with Criminal Offences,” p. 317.

62.

John Russell to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 60.

63.

Ullathorne, Catholic Mission, p. 17.

64.

Cook EL, pp. 19–20.

65.

Ibid.

66.

Ibid., p. 46.

67.

Ibid., p. 41.

68.

Ibid., pp. 174–75.

69.

Ibid., p. 173.

70.

Thomas Arnold to SC 1837–38 (ii), Sept. 27, 1837, Appendix E/45. Robert Pringle Stuart, 1846 Report to the VDL Comptroller-General, reprinted in Eustace Fitzsymonds, ed., Norfolk Island 1846: The Accounts of Robert Pringle Stewart and Thomas Beagley Naylor, p. 46. Ullathorne to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 25.

71.

Thomas Beagley Naylor, “Norfolk Island, the Botany Bay of Botany Bay: A Letter . . . to the Rt. Hon. Lord Stanley, Secretary of State for the Colonies” (1846). Original in TSA, GO 1/63; reprinted in Fitzsymonds, ed., Norfolk Island, pp. 17–18. The reports of both Naylor and Stuart were printed by the English Government in Correspondence Relative to Convict Discipline and Transportation, presented to both Houses of Parliament, Feb. 16, 1847. But both were heavily bowdlerized, all proper names were omitted, and all reference to homosexual practices was suppressed—either to protect the delicate sensibilities of Parliamentarians, or to minimize the damage to the already much-bruised name of the transportation system.

72.

Stuart, Report, in Fitzsymonds, ed., Norfolk Island, pp. 45–46.

73.

Ibid., p. 47.

74.

George III’s instructions to Phillip: HRNSW ii:52.

75.

C. D. Rowley, Aboriginal Policy and Practice, vol. 1: The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, p. 19.

76.

J. Arnold, letter to his brother, Mar. 18, 1810, at A1849, ML, Sydney. P. G. King, “Observations on the New Zealand Natives,” HRA vi:7.

77.

Macquarie to Bathurst, Oct. 8, 1814, HRA viii:369–70, and Mar. 24, 1815, HRA viii:467.

78.

F. Debenham, ed., The Voyage of Captain Bellingshausen to the Antarctic Seas 1819–1821, cit. in Crowley, Doc. Hist., vol. 1, p. 264.

79.

Geoffrey Blainey, The Triumph of the Nomads, pp. 108–9.

80.

Decision by J. Burton in Rex v. Jack Congo Murrell (1836), cit. in Rowley, pp. 15–16.

81.

Proclamation by King, June 1802, HRA iii:592–93. Atkins to King, July 8, 1805, HRA iv:653.

82.

William Walker to Rev. W. Watson, 1821, cit. in Jean Woolmington, ed., Aborigines in Colonial Society, 1788–1850, p. 86. “It was an observation of the Governor’s that will never lose its impression on my mind,” remarked the Wesleyan missionary in this letter to his colleague in London.

83.

Economic warfare by Aborigines: Reynolds, Other Side, p. 121.

84.

Aboriginal perception of white settlement and land ownership: Reynolds, Other Side, p. 64ff.

85.

Benjamin Hurst to Latrobe, July 22, 1841, BT Box 54 in ML, Sydney, cit. in Woolmington, ed., Aborigines, p. 38.

86.

Edward M. Curr, cit. in ibid., pp. 63–64.

87.

Reynolds, Other Side, pp. 121–24.

88.

E. Deas Thomson to James Dowling, Jan. 4, 1842, HRA xxi:655–56. SMH, Dec. 26, 1836, cit. in Woolmington, ed., Aborigines, p. 54.

89.

The Colonist, June 20, 1838, cit. in Woolmington, ed., Aborigines, pp. 55–56.

90.

Thomas Holden, letter to his wife, ca. 1815, DDX 140/7:18, LRO.

91.

James Gunther, Journal, Dec. 30, 1837, cit. in Woolmington, ed., Aborigines p. 69.

92.

The most famous of these was William Buckley (1780–1856), an English militiaman from Cheshire who stood 6′6″(double prime) in his bare feet and had been transported for life, in 1802, for receiving stolen cloth. He absconded from the tiny settlement on Port Phillip in Victoria in 1803 and had the luck to run into an aboriginal tribe, the Watourong who mistook him for the reincarnated spirit of their dead chief. (It was an almost universal belief among Aborigines, irrespective of tribe, that the spirits of the dead returned in the form of “peeled” men, ashen white or gray. The color white was associated with death and resurrection.) Thus, in the guise of an enormous spirit, Buckley lived with the Watourong for thirty-two years before giving himself up. The sheer improbability of this gave rise to an Australian expression that still survives: “Buckley’s chance,” meaning no chance at all.

93.

On the conditions of inland life, and the attitudes of lower-class settlers to aboriginal tribes on the frontiers of settlement in penal New South Wales, see David Denholm, The Colonial Australians, p. 37ff.

94.

Wentworth, in the SMH, June 21, 1844.

1.

For a critique of the idea of penal Australia as a “slave society,” see John B. Hirst, Convict Society and Its Enemies, esp. pp. 21–25, 31, 82.

2.

Robert Gouger [pseud, of E. G. Wakefield], A Letter from Sydney, pp. 12–13. Wakefield had not visited Sydney, and his views on the difficulties facing the uninitiated settler in an economy where land was given away were meant as propaganda for his “sufficient price” emigration scheme, whereby the price of Australian crown land was raised so that only substantial colonists could afford it. However, his sketch of this fictional servant carried a nugget of truth.

3.

Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery, p. 43. For a contrary view on the efficiency and adaptability of southern slave labor, which argues that southern slave agriculture was 35 percent more efficient than northern family farming, see William Fogel and Stanley Enderman, Time on the Cross (New York, 1974).

4.

Hirst, Convict Society, p. 65.

5.

Gouger [Wakefield], Letter, p. 37.

6.

E. G. Wakefield, The Art of Colonization, pp. 176–77.

7.

King to Castlereagh, HRA v:748–49.

8.

Meredith to Burnett Dec. 30, 1828, in Meredith, Correspondence, p. 8, cit. in Shaw CC, p. 218. On the proportion of assigned “mechanics” in Van Diemen’s Land under Arthur, see Shaw CC, p. 217.

9.

Murray to Darling, Jan. 30, 1830, HRA xv:351ff.

10.

“In what can Britain show”: anon. article in Virginia Gazette, May 24, 1751, cit. in Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage, p. 130. John Pory, cit. in ibid., p. 13.

11.

Smith, Colonists, p. 13. For a discussion of the legal differences between the old, American system of indenture and the new, Australian assignment system, see Murray to Darling, Jan. 30, 1830, HRA xv:351ff.

12.

King, General Order of Oct. 31, 1800, in NSW General Orders and Proclamations, Safe 1/87, ML, Sydney, cit. in Crowley, Doc. Hist., pp. 97–98.

13.

King, General Order published in Sydney Gazette, Jan. 14, 1804.

14.

David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, p. 11.

15.

Margarot to SC 1812, Appendix 1, Minutes, p. 54.

16.

SC 1812, Report, p. 4.

17.

Bligh to SC 1812, Appendix 1, Minutes, p. 43.

18.

Richardson to SC 1812, Appendix 1. Minutes, p. 57. King to Portland, Dec. 31, 1801, HRA iv:655–56.

19.

Thomas Holden, letter in LRO, DDX 140/17:18.

20.

Bigge NSW, p. 77.

21.

Bligh to SC 1812, Appendix, 1, p. 46.

22.

John Palmer to SC 1812, Appendix 1, p. 61. George Johnston, ibid., p. 73.

23.

Campbell to SC 1812, Appendix 1, p. 68ff.

24.

Brisbane to Undersecretary Horton, Nov. 6, 1824, HRA ix:414–15.

25.

John Broxup, Life of John Broxup, Late Convict at Van Diemen’s Land, p. 11. Addition (by scribe) to letter from Richard Dillingham, Sept. 29, 1836, in Harley W. Forster, ed., The Dillingham Convict Letters.

26.

Brisbane to Bathurst, Nov. 6, 1824, HRA ix:413–14.

27.

John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century English Industry, p. 201.

28.

Macquarie to Castlereagh, Apr. 30, 1810.

29.

Mellish, A Convict’s Recollections of New South Wales, p. 51.

30.

Macquarie, General Order, Dec. 15, 1810, in NSW General Orders and Proclamations, safe 1/87, ML, Sydney. The towns in question were Windsor, Richmond, Wilberforce, Castlereagh and Pitt Town; Macquarie’s decision to name a town after William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery leader, reflected a mutual admiration between the two men.

31.

See M. H. Ellis, Francis Greenway; J. M. Freeland, Architecture in Australia, pp. 30–41; and Morton Herman, Early Australian Architects and Their Work, passim.

32.

Macquarie to Bathurst, Sept. 1, 1820.

33.

Appendix to Bigge NSW, cit. in Shaw CC, p. 92.

34.

Macquarie to Bathurst, Dec. 4, 1817, HRA ix:507–9.

35.

M. M. Robinson, “Ode for the Queen’s Birthday, 1816,” in Brian Elliott and Adrian Mitchell, eds., Bards in the Wilderness, p. 12.

36.

J. D. Lang, “Colonial Nomenclature,” in ibid., p. 29.

37.

Figures from Shaw CC, pp. 98–99.

38.

R. B. Madgwick, Immigration into Eastern Australia, 1788–1851, pp. 30–32.

39.

Macquarie to Bathurst, Mar. 24, 1819, HRA x:88.

40.

Mar. 18, 1825, HRA xi:549.

41.

Bathurst to Bigge, HRA x:4ff.

42.

Margarot to SC 1812, Appendix 1, p. 54.

43.

Petition of Robert Townson, NSWA, Mechanics’ Bond Accounts 4/4525, 4/1775, p. 173.

44.

Gipps to Glenelg, HRA xix:604–5.

45.

Bourke to Goderich, HRA xvi:625, cit. in Bigge NSW, p. 75.

46.

Bigge NSW, p. 75ff.

47.

Goderich to Bourke, Aug. 22, 1831, HRA xvi:330. Bourke to Goderich, May 4, 1832, HRA xvi:640.

48.

Darling to Goderich, July 14, 1831, HRA xvi:299.

49.

W. C. Wentworth to Committee on Police, 1839, pp. 88–96, cit. in Hirst, Convict Society, p. 185.

50.

Bourke to Goderich, Apr. 30, 1832, HRA xvi:624–26.

51.

The clothing issue was fixed at three shirts a year, two sets of jacket and trousers (wool for winter and light wool or cotton duck for summer), and a strong pair of leather shoes. The weekly food ration was 12 lb. wheat (ground by the convicts themselves, in small iron handmills), 7 lb. fresh beef or mutton, two ounces of salt and two of soap. When grain or fresh meat were short, the master could substitute maize flour and salt pork. It will immediately be seen that, though monotonous and lacking in vegetables, this was a solid diet; no one could starve on a pound of meat a day. “They can make a meal”: Broxup, Life, p. 7.

52.

Port Macquarie Bench Book, June 13, 1836, NSWA 4/5639, cit. in Alan Atkinson, “Four Patterns of Convict Protest.”

53.

Atkinson, ibid.

54.

George Taylor, letter, CSO 1/624/14148, TSA, Hobart.

55.

Deposition of James Davis, Dec. 10, 1829, HRA xv:306–7. Thomas Argent: HRA xv:305.

56.

CSO 1/568/12796, TSA, Hobart.

57.

Sydney Gazette, Aug. 18, 1825.

58.

Darling to Murray, Feb. 16, 1829, HRA xiv:646.

59.

Gipps to Glenelg, Oct. 8, 1838, HRA xix:604.

60.

Cook EL, pp. 33–34.

61.

Sydney Gazette, Feb. 1, 1826.

62.

George Loveless et al., A Narrative of the Sufferings of . . . Four of the Dorchester Labourers, p. 16.

63.

Hirst, Convict Society, p. 109.

64.

Goodwin to Lang, Sept. 21, 1850, A2226, Lang Papers, vol. 6, pp. 492–95, ML, Sydney.

65.

James Brine, in G. Loveless et al., A Narrative, pp. 11–12.

66.

Edward J. Eyre, “Autobiography,” Ms., p.45.

67.

Alexander Berry, Reminiscences, cit. in ADB, vol. 1, p. 95.

68.

Berry to Wollstonecraft, June 7, 1823, and Oct. 13, 1825, cit. in Shaw CC, p. 222 from Berry Papers, xi/xii, ML, Sydney.

69.

James Macarthur to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 164. James Atkinson, An Account of the State of Agriculture and Grazing in New South Wales, pp. 112–16. T. P. Besnard, A Voice from the Bush in Australia: Shewing its Present State, Advantages, and Capabilities (1839), pp. 20–21, cit. in Crowley, Doc. Hist., pp. 478–79.

70.

Eyre, “Autobiography,” Ms., p. 46.

71.

Parents to Holden, DDX 140/17:14, LRO; wife to Holden, DDX 140/17:16, LRO.

72.

Bigge NSW, p. 76.

73.

Bourke to Goderich, Apr. 30, 1832, HRA xvi:625.

74.

Bigge NSW, pp. 76–77.

75.

William Vincent, letter to his mother, Aug. 17, 1829, in SC 1837–38 (ii), Appendix, p. 354.

76.

Peter Withers, letter to his brother, TSA, Hobart.

77.

Withers, ibid.; Richard Dillingham, The Dillingham Convict Letters, ed. H. W. Foster (Melbourne, 1970), pp. 21–23 [Sept.–Nov. 1838].

78.

Petition of Thomas Jones, Apr. 8, 1830, PC 1/78, PRO.

79.

Bigge NSW, p. 103.

80.

Richard Whately, “Transportation,” in Miscellaneous Lectures and Reviews, pp. 258–59, cit. Clark, ed., Select Documents in Australian History, 1788–1850, p. 151.

81.

[O.P.Q.] in New South Wales Magazine, vol. 1 (August 1833), pp. 16–17.

82.

Eyre, “Autobiography,” Ms., pp. 46–47.

83.

John Standfield, in G. Loveless et al., A Narrative, pp. 5–6.

84.

Shaw CC, p. 226, quoting Anne McKay, p. 355. Eyre, “Autobiography,” Ms., p. 47.

1.

Peter Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales, vol. 1, pp. 44–45.

2.

“A Settler,” SMH, Jan. 16, 1839, cit. in John B. Hirst, Convict Society and Its Enemies, p. 207.

3.

Louisa Anne Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales, pp. 52–53.

4.

Arthur Bowes Smyth and Ralph Clark, Journals, Feb. 7, 1788.

5.

On John Macarthur, see ADB entry (vol. 2, pp. 153–59); Macarthur Papers, ML, Sydney; M. H. Ellis, John Macarthur; and S. Macarthur-Onslow, ed., Some Early Records of the Macarthurs of Camden.

6.

Macarthur’s attempts to broaden his business interests beyond the pastoral were almost uniformly unsuccessful, so much so that by 1812 his unwise investments in Pacific trade had all but cancelled his profits from wool. He was the worst of company men. No one could work with him and expect to be treated as an equal partner. He boasted that he had “never yet failed in raining a man who had become obnoxious to him.” His grand disaster was a chartered company set up to corner the production of wool in Australia. Macarthur had dreamt of such a monopoly since at least 1804, but not until twenty years later did he bring it into existence with the all-important backing of the British Government: the Australian Agricultural Company, endowed with a million acres of land near Port Stephens, north of Sydney, and capitalized by private subscription at £1 million. No corporation of this size had ever been set up in the Pacific, and despite its early success Macarthur wrecked it within four years. By 1828 his meddling had become so intrusive that the AAC’s shares sank from their original £100 to £8.

7.

Macarthur’s timing: S. Cottrell to E. Cooke, July 14, 1804. Lord Camden’s land grant to Macarthur: David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. 1, pp. 437–38.

8.

On sheep-breeding in early colonial Australia, see Eric Rolls, A Million Wild Acres, pp. 23–27.

9.

James Mudie, The Felonry of New South Wales, pp. 12–13.

10.

James Macarthur to John Macarthur, Sr., June 24, and July 11, 1820, cit. in John M. Ward, James Macarthur, Colonial Conservative, p. 45.

11.

On the southern “fisheries” of whales and seals, see Alan Moorehead, The Fatal Impact, pp. 195–204.

12.

Unsigned memo on Bass Strait sealing to Lieut-Gov. Arthur, May 29, 1826, on microfilm reel 600, NSWA, Sydney.

13.

The numbers of native women kidnapped in this way cannot be accurately assessed, but the traffic had two chief results. First, it stamped the aboriginal tribes with an ineradicable hatred of whites and depleted their birthrate. Second, and paradoxically enough, it ensured the survival of the Tasmanian Aborigines. After their extermination on the main island of Tasmania, a small group of aboriginal descendants continued to exist on Cape Barren Island in Bass Strait. (See Chapter 11.) For an account of the sealers’ incursions, see Anne McMahon, “Tasmanian Aboriginal Women as Slaves”; on the Cape Barren Islanders, see Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians.

14.

On Campbell’s deflance of the East India Company’s embargo on oil and sealskin from Australia, see Alan Frost, Convicts and Empire, p. 193ff.

15.

J. Arnold, letter to his brother, Feb. 25, 1810, A1849, ML, Sydney, cit. in Crowley, Doc. Hist., vol. 1, p. 171.

16.

London Times, July 14, 1838. On Terry, see ADB entry (vol. 2, pp. 508–9); P. E. Leroy, “Samuel Terry” in JRAHS, vol. 47 (1961). On the rumors against Terry, see Bigge NSW, p. 141: Terry was alleged to keep ready-written powers of attorney in his public house, which fuddled ex-convicts would sign when drunk. “By these means, and by an active use of the common arts of over-reaching, Samuel Terry has been able to accumulate a considerable capital, and a quantity of land . . . inferior only to that which is held by Mr. D’Arcy Wentworth.” The allegations that he fleeced other exconvicts began with the Rev. Samuel Marsden. At his death, the “Botany Bay Rothschild” (who was, in fact, a Gentile) left his widow with £10,000 a year, an estate of £250,000, and vast land holdings that included the whole of Martin Place, the hub of modern Sydney.

17.

On Crossley, see ADB entry (vol. 1, p. 262). Crossley was charged with posthumously altering the will of a clergyman, on the man’s very deathbed, in favor of one of his own friends. He is said to have pleaded that there was, in fact, “life” in the Reverend’s body at the moment the will was doctored. He had made sure of this by popping a live fly in his client’s mouth, pushing it shut, and then placing in the dead hand a pen with which the signature was written. The court surprisingly acquitted him, but before long he was on his way to Botany Bay for seven years, for perjury in another malpractice case.

18.

Although Bent’s sole motive was bigotry, he attempted to give his decision a legal veneer by basing his refusal to hear convict attorneys on the statute 12, Geo. I, c. 29.

19.

On Redfern, see HRA i:6–10; E. Ford, The Life and Work of William Redfern; and E. Ford, “Medical Practice in Early Sydney,” MJA, July 9, 1955.

20.

Barron Field, “On Reading the Controversy between Mr. Byron and Mr. Bowles,” in Brian Elliott and Adrian Mitchell, eds., Bards in the Wilderness: Australian Colonial Poetry to 1920, p. 18.

21.

On Lewin, see Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, pp. 158–62. A relatively large number of convict artists were transported for the crime closest to their profession, forgery. The colony also had its free amateurs: naval draftsmen like the unidentified “Port Jackson Painter,” who came with the First Fleet, and George Raper; and army officers who dabbled in painting, like Capt. James Wallis of the 46th Regiment.

22.

John Grant, “Verses Written to Lewin, the Entomologist,” 1805, in Grant Papers, Ms. 737, NLA, Canberra.

23.

On Lycett and the beguiling modifications of Australian landscape in his “Views,” see Smith, European Vision, pp. 179–81.

24.

On Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, see J. Curling, Janus Weathercock (London, 1838); and R. Crossland, Wainewright in Tasmania (Melbourne, 1954). A sickly but eager esthete and something of a Georgian dandy, Wainewright was both painter and art critic, writing for the London Magazine in the 1820s under the pseudonyms of Egomet Bonmot and Janus Weathercock. He exhibited paintings strongly indebted to Henry Fuseli at the Royal Academy from 1826 onward. Wainewright lived beyond his means, and his fall from grace into the Antipodes began when he forged powers of attorney in order to get his hands on a capital sum of £5,250 left him by his grandfather and transferred, in trust, to his wife. Thirteen years later he was arrested and tried for (as he saw it) taking his own money. The governor of Newgate Prison persuaded him to plead guilty in return for a light sentence. Instead, to Wainewright’s horror, he was transported for life.

The unhappy artist arrived in Hobart at the end of 1837 and was put in a chain gang on the roads. His health collapsed and he was transferred to ward work in the Hobart hospital. In return for small and condescendingly given favors from the eminent of Hobart, he did watercolor portraits; some forty of these survive. A heartrending plea for a ticket-of-leave, written to the lieutenant-governor, Sir John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot, in April 1844, is preserved (Aw. 15, ML, Sydney). Wainewright calls Van Diemen’s Land “a moral sepulchre.” “Deign, your Excellency! to figure to yourself my actual condition during 7 years, without friends, good-name (the breath of Life) or Art—(the fuel to it with me). Tormented at once by Memory, & Ideas struggling for outward form & realization, barred up from increase of knowledge, & deprived of the exercise of profitable or even decorousspeech. Take pity, Your Excellency!” He reminds Eardley-Wilmot (who had probably not heard of any of them) that he, Wainewright, has been praised by “Flaxman, Coleridge, Chas. Lamb . . . & the God of his worship, Fuseli.” All to no avail; his ticket-of-leave was not granted until the end of 1846, less than a year before his death.

25.

For an example of these “pipes,” see Anon., “Alas; poor Botany Bay,” in Elliott and Mitchell, eds., Bards in the Wilderness, p. 8.

26.

J. M. Freeland, Architecture in Australia, p. 39. On Greenway, see ADB entry (vol. 1, pp. 470–72); M. H. Ellis, Francis Greenway: and Morton Herman, Early Australian Architects and their Work.

27.

Meredith, Notes and Sketches, pp. 50–51.

28.

Ibid., p. 39.

29.

Letters of G.T.W.B. Boyes, May 6, 1824, Royal Society of Tasmania, UTL, Hobart.

30.

Meredith, Notes and Sketches, pp. 49–50.

31.

Ibid., pp. 58–59, 75.

32.

Hirst, Convict Society, pp. 118–19.

33.

Gipps to Glenelg, Mar. 29, 1839. HRA xx:74.

34.

Mellish, A Convict’s Recollections, p. 52.

35.

Ullathorne to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 22. Domestic horror-stories: Meredith, Notes and Sketches, p. 128. Christmas was especially trying, she reported: “The prevailing vice of drunkenness among the lower orders is perhaps more resolutely practised at this season than any other. I have heard of a Christmas-day party being assembled, and awaiting the announcement of dinner as long as patience would endure; then ringing the bell, but without reply; and on the hostess proceeding to the kitchen, finding every servant either gone out or rendered incapable of moving, the intended feast being meanwhile burned to ashes. Nor is this by any means a rare occurrence.”

36.

John Russell to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 56.

37.

Gipps to Glenelg, Mar. 29, 1839, HRA xx:74.

38.

Russell to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, pp. 58–59.

39.

John Goodwin to J. D. Lang, 1850, Lang Papers, vol. 6, A2226, ML, Sydney.

40.

Maconochie to SC 1837–38 (ii), Report, p. xxxiii; Ullathome to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 23.

41.

Russell to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 56.

42.

Darling to Goderich, Oct. 2, 1837, HRA xiii: 673.

43.

J. F. Mortlock, Experiences of a Convict Transported for Twenty-one Years, p. 92.

44.

On John Grant, see ADB entry (vol. 1, pp. 469–70); W. S. Hill-Reid, John Grant’s Journey; Grant Papers (journal and letters), NLA, Canberra. Grant’s description of his efforts to extract a ticket-of-leave from Governor King is in a letter to his mother and sister, Jan. 1, 1805, Ms. 737/22, NLA, Canberra.

45.

Mortlock, Experiences of a Convict, pp. 84–85. The former MP was William Smith O’Brien(1803–1864), member for Ennis (1828–31) and Limerick (1835–49), one of the leaders of the Young Ireland movement who, with his compatriot John Mitchel and several others, was convicted of high treason in 1848 and transported for life to Van Diemen’s Land.

46.

Woomera [pseud.], The Life of an Ex-Convict, p. 13. On official harassment of Specials who professed atheism, see James Bushelle, “Memoir.” Bushelle, the son of an Irish merchant in Limerick, was transported for stealing diamonds. He served a term in the penal station at Port Macquarie, returned to Sydney, became choir-leader in St. Mary’s Cathedral and instructor to the military bands; he presented these signs of respectability to Governor Bourke, hoping for an early ticket-of-leave. Alas, “Governor Bourke would not grant [me] that indulgence; having referred to [my] character on the books, and found the charge of ATHEISM affixed to [my] name.” Instead, he went back to Port Macquarie for another year, bitterly lamenting the day he had succumbed to the French accomplice in crime who “in the polite and fascinating language of France and Italy . . . infused into my unsuspecting mind, that ffrench Philosophy best known in England as ffrench Principles, meaning those poisonous seeds disseminated by Voltaire and his school, founded upon Satire and Irony upon Religion and Government.”

47.

The first view was set forth by Russel Ward in The Australian Legend: “All we know about the convicts shows that egalitarian class solidarity was the one human trait which usually remained to all but the most brutalized.” It was attacked by Humphrey McQueen (A New Britannia, pp. 126–27) on the grounds that the convicts could not have felt class loyalty because they did not form a class: “For its first fifty years at least, Australia did not have a class structure, but only a deformed stratification. . . . The convicts lacked, through no fault of their own, any feeling of class-consciousness.” This late Marxist boilerplate ignores the primary social fact of colonial society, which was that convicts were treated, oppressed, and made to see themselves as a class separate from and inferior to all free settlers. They were usually called “a class” in official communications. That their behavior did not conform to Utopian stereotypes of class unity—that, like their social superiors, they competed for property and status—in no way altered their sense of separateness as a group, or their ability to stick together. In McQueen’s schematic view of history, even the convicts’ dislike of guard, trap, informer and beak was “essentially bourgeois in origin and content,” reflecting only the hegemony of false individualism. No doubt if they had loved their Gulag, such writers would laud them as pioneer Stalinists.

48.

Rev. John Morison, Australia As It Is, London, 1864, p. 223.

49.

Hunter to SC 1812, Appendix 1, Minutes, p. 23.

50.

Samuel Marsden, “A Few Observations on the Toleration of the Catholic Religion in N. South Wales.”

51.

Ward, Australian Legend, pp. 29–30.

52.

Mellish, Recollections, pp. 63–65.

53.

Alexander Harris, Settlers and Convicts, p. 326.

54.

Ibid., p. 126.

55.

Bligh to SC 1812, Appendix 1, Minutes, p. 46. Bigge NSW, p. 102. Bourke to Goderich, Apr. 30, 1832, HRA xvi:625.

56.

Sydney Smith, Edinburgh Review, July 1819.

57.

For a discussion of the complexities of origin in colonial society in the 1820s, and the inadequacy of the “children of the convicts” stereotype, see Portia Robinson, The Hatch and Brood of Time.

58.

“Crime descends”: Judge Alfred Stephen to James Macarthur, ca. 1857, cit. in Michael Sturma, Vice in a Vicious Society, p. 2. On the respectable reaction against convictism, see Sturma, p. 8: “Ultimately the community’s reaction to its convict origins proved of more lasting and profound significance than convictism itself.”

59.

Sir William W. Burton, “State of Society and State of Crime in New South Wales . . . ,” Colonial Magazine, vol. 1, p. 425.

60.

Burton, ibid., vol. 2, pp. 51–53. Burton’s general figures for crime, gathered from trials before other judges as well, show the same pattern. Translated into percentages of defendants in three sample years, they become:

61.

Bigge NSW, p. 105.

62.

Robinson, Hatch and Brood of Time, p. 12.

63.

“None but slaves do work”: Cunningham, New South Wales, vol. 2, pp. 48–49. Aversion to the sea and maritime labor: Robinson, Hatch and Brood of Time, p. 237ff. Bigge, it seems, was wrong in reporting (Bigge NSW, pp. 81–82) that “many of the native youths have evinced a strong disposition for a sea-faring life, and are excellent sailors. . . . [T]hat class of the population will afford abundant and excellent materials for the supply of any department in the commercial or naval service.”

64.

“Fair hair and blue eyes”: Cunningham, New South Wales, vol. 2, p. 53. Other references to Currency traits also are from Cunningham, passim.

65.

G.T.W.B. Boyes to Mary Boyes, Oct. 23 and 27, 1831, in Boyes Letters, UTL, Hobart.

66.

“Supercilious intolerance”: Harris, Settlers and Convicts, pp. 295–96. “Sterling madonnas”: Cunningham, New South Wales, vol. 2, p. 53.

67.

Harris, Settlers and Convicts, pp. 149–53.

68.

Bigge NSW, Appendix. CO 201:142, p. 336ff, cit. in Clark HA, vol. 2, p. 43. On Wentworth, see Clark HA, vol. 2, p. 41ff.

69.

William Charles Wentworth, “Where’er the sickening Muse,” in Wentworth Papers, Miscellanea, ML, Sydney.

70.

“I will not suffer”: W. C. Wentworth, May 1, 1820, in Wentworth Letters, ML, Sydney. The term “bunyip aristocracy”—still occasionally used in Australia to deride the pretentious—was invented by the young Irish politico Daniel Deniehy in 1853, in a speech against Wentworth’s self-serving proposal for a hereditary colonial noblesse. The relevant passage, as reported on Aug. 16, 1853 in the Sydney Morning Herald, runs: “Even the poor Irishman in the streets of Dublin would fling his jibe at the Botany Bay aristocrats. In fact, he [Deniehy] was puzzled how to classify them. . . . Perhaps it was only a specimen of the remarkable contrariety that existed at the Antipodes. Here they all knew the common water-mole was transformed into the duck-billed platypus, and in some distant emulation of this degeneration, he supposed they were to be favoured with a bunyip aristocracy. (Great laughter.)”

71.

W. C. Wentworth, A Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales. . . , pp. 349–50.

72.

Sidney Smith, Edinburgh Review, July 1819.

73.

The text of the Emancipists’ petition to the Crown is given in HRA x:549–52.

74.

The winner was William Mackworth Praed, who knew little about Australasia but was soon to become the wittiest writer of vers de société in England. Against him, Wentworth’s clumping measures had little chance; but that second prize was the first cultural kudos earned by an Australian overseas.

75.

Brisbane to Bathurst, Oct. 28, 1824, in “Transcripts of Missing Despatches,” A1267, ML, Sydney.

1.

On Thomas Davey, see ADB entry; Robson, Hist. Tas., pp. 64–67 and 78–94; and J. W. Beattie, Glimpses of the Lives and Times of the Early Tasmanian Governors, pp. 23–25.

2.

William Sorell, Memorandum in HRA iii:4.

3.

In July 1817, shortly after assuming office in Van Diemen’s Land, Sorell was ordered to pay damages of £3,000—a colossal sum—to Lieutenant Kent for alienating the affections of his wife. When Mrs. Kent arrived in Hobart and settled into residence at Government House, the notoriously choleric Anthony Fenn Kemp, merchant, landowner, former New South Wales Corps Captain and conspirator in the “Rum Rebellion” plot against Governor Bligh, used this “evil example to the Rising Generation” as his main weapon in a campaign to unseat Sorell. Partly because the normally prudish Governor Macquarie distrusted Fenn Kemp for his role in the Rum Rebellion, these objurgations failed.

4.

Sorell to Cuthbertson, in standing orders, Dec. 8, 1821, CSO 1/133/3229, TSA, Hobart.

5.

John Barnes to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, pp. 45–46.

6.

James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, pp. 44–45.

7.

Pine logging statistics for the year 1827: T. J. Lemprière, The Penal Settlements of Van Diemen’s Land, p. 39.

8.

Barnes to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 37.

9.

Monotony relieved by hunting privileges: J. Butler to Arthur, Aug. 28, 1828, CSO 1/290/6944, TSA, Hobart. Taste of echidna: Lemprière, Penal Settlements, pp. 43–44.

10.

Vegetables against scurvy: Sorell to Cuthbertson, Dec. 10, 1823, CSO 1/134/3229. Rapid increase of scurvy: J. Spence (asst. surgeon at Macquarie Harbor) to James Scott, Colonial Surgeon, Feb. 8, 1823, CSO 1/134/3230.

11.

Lemprière, Penal Settlements, pp. 37–38.

12.

Barnes to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 37.

13.

Davies, “Memoir of Macquarie Harbour,” Ms. 8 in MSQ 168, Dixson Library, Sydney.

14.

For occupational disease among the convicts and guards at Macquarie Harbor, see Spence to Scott, CSO 1/134/3230.

15.

Davies, “Memoir,” pp. 2–3.

16.

Barnes to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 45.

17.

Ibid., p. 46.

18.

Ibid., p. 43.

19.

J. Butler (commandant at Macquarie Harbor) to Arthur, June 9, 1825, CSO 1/220/5313.

20.

Butler to Col. Sec. Burnett, Nov. 25, 1827, CSO 1/216/5236, p. 189.

21.

CSO 1/216/5188, Minute 312, Dec. 17, 1827, pp. 239, 243, 247.

22.

Lemprière, Penal Settlements, p. 31.

23.

Ibid., p. 32.

24.

Barnes to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 43.

25.

Robson, Hist. Tas., p. 137. On Arthur, see ADB entry; Anne McKay, “The Assignment System of Convict Labour in Van Diemen’s Land, 1824–1842” (M.A. thesis); and W. D. Forsyth, Governor Arthur’s Convict System.

26.

Arthur to Huskisson, cit. in P. R. Eldershaw, “The Colonial Secretary’s Office,” in “Guide to the Public Records of Tasmania,” Thrapp, vol. 15, no. 3, Jan. 1968, p. 57.

27.

Arthur to Bathurst, July 3, 1825.

28.

Backhouse, Narrative, p. 19.

29.

Arthur, Observations Upon Secondary Punishment, pp. 27–28.

30.

George Washington Walker to Margaret Bragg, May 24, 1834, Walker Papers, UTL, Hobart.

31.

McKay, “Assignment System,” p. 78.

32.

George Taylor to John Thompson, CSO 1/624/14148, collected as No. CXXVIII in Eustace Fitzsymonds, ed., A Looking-Glass for Tasmania.

33.

The first major landowner and capitalist of Van Diemen’s Land was Edward Lord; see E. R. Henry, “Edward Lord: the John Macarthur of Van Diemen’s Land.” On his unrelated namesake, the convict’s son David Lord (1785–1847), see ADB entry (vol. 2, p. 126).

34.

On the Rev. Carvosso at the scaffold, see Robson, Hist. Tas., p. 276.

35.

Arthur to Montagu, January 1831, CSO 1/224/5434, CSO 1/141/2493, cit. in McKay, “Assignment System,” pp. 124–25.

36.

Petition of Isaac Solomon to Arthur, CSO 1/430/9642. On Isaac “Ikey” Solomon, see ADB entry.

37.

John West, The History of Tasmania, part 3, sect. XVII, p. 138.

38.

Arthur, memo, Oct. 20, 1827, CSO 1/172/4150.

39.

“Slanderers and slaves”: West, Tasmania, part 3, sect. xvii, pp. 139–40.

40.

Arthur’s opinion of Baxter: ADB, vol. 1, p. 75.

41.

On John Burnett, see ADB entry and corr. file under Burnett, J., in TSA.

42.

On Roderic O’Connor and his relations with Arthur, see ADB, vol. 2, p. 296.

43.

On Goodwin, Bent, Melville, Murray and other pioneers, however flawed, of journalism in Van Diemen’s Land, see ADB entries and E. M. Miller, Pressmen and Governors.

44.

Melville to Arthur, Nov. 17, 1835, CSO 1/836/17722. In a covering note to Melville’s letter, the jailer, Thomas Capon, gives an interesting side-light on public opinion of Australian journalists. He had offered Melville a cell on the side of prison reserved for debtors, but “the Debtors had expressed their great repugnance to any person connected with the Press being put on their side of the Prison.”

45.

On Gellibrand, see ADB entry (vol. 1, p. 437), and Robson, Hist. Tas., pp. 289–92.

46.

Margaret Weidenhofer, Maria Island: A Tasmanian Eden, pp. 18–22.

47.

On the growth of the “demonic” reputation of Port Arthur, see Decie Denholm, “Port Arthur: the Men and the Myth.”

48.

Arthur’s Standing Instructions for Port Arthur are in CSO 1/639/14383.

49.

Lemprière, Penal Settlements, p. 61.

50.

John Russell to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 50.

51.

On early years at Port Arthur (administrations of Russell and Mahon, 1830–32) see Margaret Weidenhofer, Port Arthur: A Place of Misery, pp. 7–12.

52.

Russell to SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, pp. 51–2.

53.

Logan to Col. Sec., Dec. 31, 1832, CSO 1/633.1/14299.

54.

For number of sentences served at Port Arthur, see Decie Denholm, “Port Arthur,” p. 408.

55.

Charles O’Hara Booth, Journal, ed. Dora Heard, May 18, 1833.

56.

C. P. T. Laplace, “Considerations” p. 152, cit. and trans. in Booth, Journal, p. 28; Booth, Journal, Feb. 20, and Dec. 7, 1833.

57.

Lemprière, Penal Settlements, p. 94.

58.

John Frost, The Horrors of Convict Life, pp. 30–31.

59.

Backhouse and Walker to Arthur, CSO 1/807/17244, cit. in Weidenhofer, Port Arthur, p. 24.

60.

Frost, Horrors, p. 59.

61.

Punishment record of Robert Williamson is in TSA, Hobart.

62.

Absconder disguised as kangaroo: Lemprière, Penal Settlements, p. 69.

63.

Ibid., p. 95.

64.

Details of the semaphore system are in Dora Heard’s Introduction to Booth, Journal, pp. 24–25; W. E. Masters, The Semaphore Telegraph System of Van Diemen’s Land (Hobart, 1973); and Weidenhofer, Port Arthur, p. 25.

65.

Characteristics of Port Arthur coal: Lemprière, Penal Settlements, pp. 78–80.

66.

For the convict-propelled railway, see Godfrey Mundy, Our Antipodes, and William Denison, Varieties of Vice-Regal Life, both cit. in Weidenhofer, Port Arthur, pp. 37, 39.

67.

Ross, “Excursion to Port Arthur,” in Elliston’s Hobart Town Almanack (1837), p. 91.

68.

On Point Puer, I have relied on F. C. Hooper’s M.Ed. thesis, “Point Puer,” University of Melbourne, 1954 (subsequently revised and published as Prison Boys of Port Arthur, Melbourne, 1967). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from Hooper’s thesis, the standard and only full study of this curious pedagogical experiment.

69.

Arthur to Turnbull, Feb. 8, 1834, cit. in Hooper, “Point Puer,” p. 21.

70.

Champ to the Comptroller-General of Convicts, June 3, 1844, cit. in ibid., p. 3.

71.

On the religious instruction of inmates at Point Puer, see Hooper, pp. 72–79.

72.

Benjamin Horne, “The Report of B. J. Home to the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land,” cit. in ibid., pp. 43–44.

73.

Hooper, pp. 36–39.

74.

Punishment record of Thomas Willetts is in TSA, Hobart.

75.

Corr. Military Operations 1831, Minutes of Evidence for Committee for Aboriginal Affairs, testimony of Edward White, pp. 53–54.

76.

James Carrott: Report of Committee for Aboriginal Affairs, Corr. Military Operations 1831, p. 36.

77.

Corr. Military Operations 1831, Minutes of Evidence, testimony of James Hobbs, pp. 49–50. A full account of European settlers’ and sealers’ aggression against the Tasmanian Aborigines is given in Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, Chapters 3–7.

78.

Figures from Robson, Hist. Tas., p. 260.

79.

Richard Stickney to his sister Sarah, June 21, 1834, Stickney Papers, UTL. The Vandemonians, Stickney thought, “are a facsimile of the Americans both in body and mind, tall, raw-boned and muscular, with a most exalted opinion of themselves. . . . They are mostly ignorant to the last degree.”

80.

Corr. Military Operations 1831, Report of Aborigines Committee (Mar. 19, 1830), p. 41.

81.

Ibid., Minutes, testimony of Gilbert Robertson, p. 48.

82.

Ibid., encl. 7, Arthur to Murray, Apr. 15, 1830, p. 16.

83.

Ibid., p. 48. For Arthur’s views on treatment of Aborigines by free settlers, see ibid., p. 16.

84.

Ibid., p. 47 (Sherwin, Espie), pp. 54–55 (O’Connor).

85.

Ibid, p. 4: Arthur to Goderich, Jan. 10, 1828. The dogs were not dingoes, but the descendants of kangaroo-dogs and sheep-dogs “originally purloined from the settlers,” which now formed enormous semi-wild packs.

86.

Ibid.

87.

Proclamation by Arthur, encl. 2 in Arthur to Huskisson, Apr. 17, 1828, Corr. Military Operations 1831, pp. 5–7.

88.

Arthur’s proclamation of martial law and his definition of restricted aboriginal territory in Van Diemen’s Land, issued Nov. 1, 1828: ibid., pp. 11–12. Arthur was careful to “strictly order, enjoin and command that the actual use of arms be in no case resorted to . . . that bloodshed be checked as much as possible; that any tribes which may surrender themselves up shall be treated with every degree of humanity; and that defenceless women and children be invariably spared.”

89.

Robson, Hist. Tas., pp. 214–15.

90.

John Burnett, Government Order 2, Feb. 25, 1830, Corr. Military Operations 1831, p. 35.

91.

Arthur to Murray, Nov. 20, 1830, ibid., p. 58.

92.

Murray to Arthur, Nov. 5, 1830, ibid., p. 56.

93.

Robson, Hist. Tas., p. 230.

94.

Fear of bloodbath: Anstey to Arthur, Aug. 22, 1830, CSO 1/316. “The most rancorous animosity”: Report of Aborigines Committee, in Corr. Military Operations 1831.

95.

Arthur, Memorandum, encl. 7, Corr. Military Operations 1831, p. 72.

96.

For an account of the Black Line and its effects on the big River and Oyster Bay tribes, see Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 110–12.

97.

On George Augustus Robinson, see ADB entry (vol. 2, pp. 385–87) and Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, Chapters 8–9.

98.

For the story of Trucanini, and a useful criticism of the myths that grew up around her (including the fiction that she was an Aboriginal “Queen”), see Vivienne Ellis, “Trucanini.”

However, the most pernicious—and seemingly, the most durable—myth is the one exposed by Lyndall Ryan, in The Aboriginal Tasmanians: the belief that Trucanini was “The Last Aborigine,” and that after her death the Tasmanian Aborigines became an extinct race. It has been repeated, with varying degrees of outrage and pathos, by historians, anthropologists and journalists for over a century, with the result that the surviving Tasmanian Aborigines—who now number about 2,500—have found themselves treated as ciphers or non-persons by conservative Tasmanian whites, and as embarrassments by liberal ones with a vested emotional interest in the tale of their “extinction.” Consequently, the Tasmanian State Government recognizes neither the ethnic identity of the surviving Tasmanian Aborigines, nor any of their claims to ancestral territory or sacred sites—as other Australian State Governments, in varying degrees, grudgingly do with mainland Aborigines. What happened, as Ryan shows in detail, was that a substantial number of Aborigines survived, interbreeding with the descendants of white sealers, on the islands in the Bass Strait, especially Cape Barren Island. In 1847 the Cape Barren islanders numbered thirteen families, comprising some fifty people. Their descendants, though as racially dilute as most American blacks or mainland Australian Aborigines, form the present black population of Tasmania. It should also be noted that Trucanini was not even the last full-blood Aborigine to die; that person was Suke, an old woman who had been taken by sealers from Cape Portland in Tasmania to Kangaroo Island off South Australia, and who lived until 1888.

1.

Shaw CC, p. 142.

2.

Peel to Smith, Mar. 24, 1826, cit. in Shaw CC, pp. 144–45.

3.

James Dowling, “Norfolk Island Journal,” Feb. 25, 1828, ML, Sydney.

4.

Alexander Harris, Settlers and Convicts, p. 11.

5.

Figures based on Gipps to Glenelg, Nov. 8, 1838, HRA xix:654.

6.

Harris, Settlers and Convicts, p. 12.

7.

John Barnes in SC 1837–38 (ii), Minutes, p. 37.

8.

Report of Ernest Augustus Slade, Appendix to SC 1837–38 (ii), paper 518, pp. 89–90.

9.

Bourke to Rice, Dec. 14, 1834, HRA xvii:604 and n.; Col. Sec. circular 33/38, NSWA, Sydney.

10.

Replies to Col. Sec. circular 33/38, Oct. 1–8, 1833, at NSWA 4/2189:1.

11.

Darling to Bathurst, Mar. 1, 1827, cit. in Shaw CC, p. 195.

12.

Darling to Huskisson, Mar. 28, 1828, HRA xiv:70.

13.

Darling to Huskisson, Mar. 28, 1828, ibid. There were 1,045 “colonially convicted” men at Port Macquarie, Moreton Bay and Norfolk Island put together. On the road gangs, Darling’s count ran to 500 men, supervised by 22 “trusty” convict overseers, split into gangs of a few dozen at work stations along the 150–mile Great Western Road, out of Parramatta; some 400 gangers on the Great Northern Road north from Windsor; 249 on the Great Southern Road, connecting Sydney to Stonequarry and Throsby Creek beyond; and 119 on the unfinished road to Newcastle.

14.

As Governor Bourke found six years later, when he tried using privately contracted roadwork “at a very high rate, notwithstanding that the bonus of an assignment of three convicts per mile has been given to the contractors.” Bourke to Stanley, Jan. 15, 1834, HRA xvii:317.

15.

Cook EL, p. 18.

16.

“The mere fact”: Bourke to Stanley, Jan. 15, 1834, HRA xvii:315. Two fat bullocks: Cook EL, p. 28.

17.

“They have no time”: Bourke to Stanley, Jan 15, 1834, HRA xvii:321. Iron-gangers running to work in double time: Cook EL, p. 58.

18.

Cook EL, pp. 58–60.

19.

Bigge NSW, p. 99.

20.

Ibid., p. 155.

21.

Lachlan Macquarie had proposed outward colonization by convict gangs before Bigge, in the wake of the disastrous Nepean floods of 1816–17, when settlers were actually returning assigned convicts whom they could no longer support on their ravaged farms to the government. In May 1818, having received five ships carrying 1,046 men within a single month, Macquarie sent 450 of the new arrivals down to Van Diemen’s Land and proposed, as a long-term buffer, that convicts working for the government should break ground to the south of Sydney, at Jervis Bay and Illawarra. (Macquarie to Bathurst, May 1818, HRA ix:795.)

22.

James Jervis, “The Rise of Newcastle.”

23.

William Sacheverell Coke, letter, 1827, in DRO, D1881.

24.

W. S. Coke, letter in DRO, D1881.

25.

On conditions in the Newcastle coal mine, see Bigge NSW, p. 115–16. A harrowing account of both coal-mine and lime-kiln labor at Newcastle is given in the early Australian novel Ralph Rashleigh, written about 1840 by “Giacomo di Rosenberg,” supposedly the pseudonym of the convict James Rosenberg Tucker (1808–1888?), an Essex clerk tranported for life in 1826 for writing a threatening letter.

26.

Jervis, “Newcastle,” p. 149.

27.

Bigge NSW, p. 117.

28.

Ibid., p. 116.

29.

Jervis, pp. 149–50.

30.

W. S. Coke, letter, Apr.–Aug. 1827, DRO D1881.

31.

James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, p. 405.

32.

Woomera [pseud.], The Life of an Ex-Convict, p. 6.

33.

James Bushelle, “Memoir,” Ms.

34.

Woomera, Life, p. 15.

35.

Bushelle, “Memoir.”

36.

Woomera, Life, p. 6.

37.

Cook EL, pp. 79–80.

38.

“The Brisbane River 100 Years Ago, by an Old Brisbaneite,” Brisbane Courier, Mar. 22, 1930, cit. in J. G. Steele, Brisbane Town in Convict Days, 1824–1842, p. 28.

39.

Brisbane to Bathurst, HRA xi:604.

40.

Miller to Balfour, CSO 1/371/8476.

41.

Ibid.

42.

Charles Bateson, Patrick Logan, Tyrant of Brisbane Town, p. 52.

43.

W[illiam] R[oss], The Fell Tyrant; or the Suffering Convict: in places a tendentious and biassed diatribe, although its bias, as from a former convict, is understandable. It is verifiably accurate on certain matters of routine and convict discipline, but apt to invent when it comes to names and cases. Thus Ross asserts, at one point that a prisoner named Geary “starved to death in his cell” when in fact he died of dropsy in hospital. Ross was a Special, serving time for embezzlement, and was Logan’s clerk at Moreton Bay. He did not have to labor and was apparently not flogged.

44.

Logan to Col. Sec. Macleay, Apr. 6, 1827, cit. in Steele, Brisbane Town, p. 72.

45.

Darling’s orders to Logan: HRA xv:104–16. Summary power over free settlers: ibid., clause 35.

46.

Bateson, Patrick Logan, p. 96. Douglas Gordon, “Sickness and Death at the Moreton Bay Convict Settlement,” p. 473.

47.

Ross, Fell Tyrant, p. 20.

48.

J. J. Knight, In the Early Days (1895), cit. in Steele, Brisbane Town, p. 181.

49.

Bateson, Patrick Logan, pp. 81–82. In 1827 Macleay wrote to Logan enclosing a copy of a report on Moreton Bay discipline by the acting attorney-general, William Moore, and instructed him to “state both whether the prisoners are actually worked constantly in irons, as supposed by Mr. Moore, and whether hard labour may not advantageously be imposed instead of the severe corporal punishments of which he takes notice.”

50.

Gordon, “Sickness and Death,” p. 474.

51.

Asst. Surgeon J. F. Murray to Anna Bunn, NSWA 4/1966. One of Spicer’s recorded efforts was to tell the kitchen overseer to replace the worn-out copper bottoms of the settlement cauldrons with wood. “Sir,” the mystified overseer replied, “the wood will catch fire, and the bottoms be immediately burned out, and the prisoners’ victuals will fall into the fire.” “Then, sir,” Spicer is said to have told him, “let the carpenters make fresh bottoms every day, for there is plenty of wood in the settlement.” (Ross, Fell Tyrant, pp. 24–25.)

52.

Bateson, Patrick Logan, p. 100.

53.

Thus at Glendon in the Hunter River Valley an Aborigine was shot while in custody of the mounted police, “a very singularly formed man” nicknamed Black Cato, whom “it took four men to hold.” His body “was hung up by the Men on the Farm as a terror to the other Blacks,” just as one would nail a dead dingo to a tree. Enclosure 3 in Darling to Bathurst, Oct. 6, 1826, HRA xii:625–26.

54.

“Singularly prone to espionage”: E. S. Hall, Monitor, Oct. 17, 1829. “Prostituting his authority”: E. S. Hall to Murray, May 1830, Enclosure 1 in Darling to Murray, HRA xv:628ff.

55.

Darling to Bathurst, Apr. 18, 1827, HRA xiii:262–63.

56.

Affidavit of Surgeon Henry Cowper, NSWA 4/2081.

57.

Affidavit of Rev. Vincent, Executive Council Minutes, NSWA 4/1516.

58.

Steele, Brisbane Town, p. 150.

59.

Lord Charles Grey, November 1830, cit. in E. P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 202.

60.

Sydney Gazette, Oct. 22, 1831.

61.

Allan Cunningham to SC 1832, Minutes, p. 40.

62.

John Graham, petition in NSWA 4/2325:4. Graham helped rescue one of the minor celebrities of colonial Australian history, Mrs. Eliza Frazer, from a tribe of Aborigines near Lake Cootharaba, north of Moreton Bay. She was among the survivors of the Stirling Castle, wrecked on Eliza Reef, some 150 miles northeast of Gladstone, in May 1836. Its castaways (including its master, Captain Fraser) had reached Macleay’s Island (since renamed Fraser Island) in a longboat and a pinnace before they were seized by local tribesmen. Captain Fraser and others were killed. In August a search party from Moreton Bay, led by Lieutenant Otter and guided by Graham, located the naked and by now partly deranged widow, “dreadfully debilitated and crippled from the sufferings she had undergone” at the hands of the natives. The ordeal of Mrs. Fraser became the subject of a number of books and accounts, from John Curtis’s Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle, 1838, to Patrick White’s novel A Fringe of Leaves. It was also the basis of two well-known series of paintings (1947, 1957) by the Australian artist Sidney Nolan. The best account of the wreck of the Stirling Castle and its aftermath is Michael Alexander, Mrs. Fraser on the Fatal Shore (London, 1971).

63.

Foster Fyans, “Memoirs,” Ms., pp. 314–15 (p. 146 in the recently published edition, Memoirs, 1790–1870, ed. P. L. Brown). See Chapter 13, note 20, below, for a brief account of Fyans.

64.

Constance Petrie, Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences (1904), cit. in Steele, Brisbane Town, p. 247. Treadwheels had been in use in English prisons since 1818; the idea had been given to the poor by the engineer and builder Samuel Cubitt, who gave the rich (among other things) the luxurious and solid architecture of Belgravia. It was a parody of labor: utterly useless work which produced nothing, merely “grinding air” as prisoners put it. Never had the alienation of producer from product been so complete—and the authorities did not need a Marx or an Engels to tell them what a torment of anomie this could inflict on the “workers.” Sydney Smith hailed the treadwheel as a wonderful and salutary invention, and one judge called it “the most tiresome, distressing, exemplary punishment that has ever been contrived by human ingenuity.” See Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850, pp. 177–78.

65.

Bathurst to Brisbane, HRA xi:322. “Very severe sentence”: Hunter to SC 1812, Appendix 1, Minutes, p. 21.

66.

Brisbane to Horton, HRA xi:552–54; to Bathurst, HRA xi:604; to Bathurst, HRA xi:553.

67.

Bathurst to Darling, HRA xiii:36.

68.

Darling to Undersecretary Hay, Feb. 11, 1827, HRA xii:105.

69.

Fyans, “Memoirs,” pp. 213–14 (published edition, p. 92).

70.

Ibid.

71.

Darling to Hay, HRA xii:105.

1.

Monitor, Feb. 10, 1829.

2.

Morisset praised by Macquarie: Lachlan Macquarie, Journal, Nov. 17, 1821, p. 50, A785, ML. Morisset as opponent of hanging: Sydney Gazette, Nov. 20, 1827.

3.

Brisbane Papers, Box 4, Ms. 4036, NLA, Canberra.

4.

“Memoir of Norfolk Island,” Frayne’s undated Ms., catalogued in the ML as “Anonymous Convict Narrative,” is at p. 427 of miscellaneous papers bound in the back of NSW Col. Sec. Papers, vol. 1, Ms. 681. It was clearly written some time after the events described, a memoir (not a diary) probably composed during the Norfolk Island administration of Captain Maconochie (1840–44), who is known to have encouraged other convicts including Frayne’s friend Thomas Cook to set down their recollections of the Old System—thus supplying the only first-hand accounts of the Norfolk Island regime from the convicts’ viewpoint. The transcription is mine.

5.

W. S. Coke, Apr. 1826 from Rio, letter 20, D1881, DRO.

6.

LF, p. 1.

7.

Cook EL, p. 100.

8.

James Lawrence, “Memoir,” Ms.

9.

LF, p. 3.

10.

Ibid., pp. 20–21.

11.

Ibid., p. 15.

12.

Ibid., p. 16.

13.

Ibid., pp. 35–37.

14.

Ibid., pp. 38–39.

15.

Ibid., p. 40.

16.

Ibid., p. 51.

17.

John Holyard to Rev. J. Reddell, Feb. 4, 1834, in Reddell Papers, A423, p. 91, ML.

18.

LF, p. 19.

19.

William Ullathorne, Catholic Mission, p. 41.

20.

Foster Fyans (1790–1870), an Irish Anglican from Dublin, was a seasoned career officer by the time he came to Norfolk Island. He had enlisted in the 67th Regiment in 1810 and served at Cadiz and in the Peninsular War for seven years. As soon as he returned to England he re-embarked, with the 1st Battalion, for India; of its thousand men only 130 survived the ravages of cholera and fighting. He bought his captaincy, and 1827 found him in England again; but like many another “Empire hand,” he could not summon up the will to live there. He transferred to the 20th Regiment and in 1833 moved from Mauritius to Sydney, where he joined the 4th (King’s Own) Regiment and was sent to Norfolk Island as captain of the guard under Morisset. After his repression of the prisoners’ revolt there, he was posted (as commandant) to Moreton Bay.

When the 4th K.O. sailed for India in 1837, Fyans sold his commission and remained in Australia, settling in the Port Phillip district as the police magistrate of Geelong. In 1840 he was made commissioner of crown lands for Portland Bay, riding six thousand miles a year on his tours of inspection of licensed runs. He built up his own cattle-run and married in 1843. Fyans retired from government service ten years later. Up to then his hobby had been carpentry and wood-turning; it was said to be his eccentric fancy to hide jewels, purchased or looted in India, in secret compartments in the furniture he made, and a desk constructed by Fyans and sold at a country auction in the 1940s for £7 did in fact yield diamonds worth £4,000. But on retirement he turned to write his memoirs, whose 500-page manuscript reposes in the Latrobe Library, Melbourne. Rambling, unselfconscious and full of salty humor, it is a prime source on penal Australia. All quotations have been checked against these edited memoirs (1986, ed. P. L. Brown) but were taken from a typescript copy generously furnished by the Army Museums Ogilby Trust, Connaught Barracks, Aldershot. On Fyans, see also entry in ADB (vol. 1, pp. 422–24); S. Sayers, “Captain Foster Fyans of Portland Bay District,” Victorian Historical Magazine, vol. 40, nos. 1–2, pp. 45–66.

21.

Jewish prisoners on Norfolk Island were few. In 1841, when the convict population stood at 1,400, only 12 Jews were counted. One may tentatively guess that the man in question was Israel Levey, sentenced to 7 years on Norfolk Island in 1829 and appointed a convict overseer there in September 1832, which would place the suicide pact earlier in that year. Levey played a major role as an informer and witness after the convict mutiny of 1834, and was highly commended by Fyans to the Colonial Secretary for his “zeal.” This was the kind of man whom other convicts would say was “not to be trusted.”

22.

Fyans, “Reminiscences,” pp. 233–35.

23.

Bourke to Stanley, Nov. 30, 1833, HRA xvii:276–77.

24.

LF, p. 65.

25.

Morisset to Undersecretary R. W. Hay, Morisset Letters, Ms. AM34, ML, Sydney.

26.

On Knatchbull, see ADB entry (vol. 2, p. 66); the colonial secretary’s correspondence on Norfolk Island for 1833–35, NSWA 4/2244:2; Executive Council Minutes for 1834, NSWA 4/1441 and 1443; Colin Roderick, John Knatchbull, from Quarterdeck to Gallows; and Anon., A Memoir of Knatchbull, the Murderer of Mrs. Jamieson, Comprising an Account of his English and Colonial History (Sydney, 1844).

27.

Knatchbull, deposition in NI Mutiny Papers, 1834, NSWA 2/8291.

28.

John Jackson, deposition in NI Mutiny Papers, NSWA 2/8291.

29.

James Pearson in NI Mutiny Papers, NSWA 2/8291, p. 223.

30.

Narrative reconstructed from depositions of James Pearson, Elijah Sallis, William Phipps, James Oppenshaw, Charles Russell and William Parham in NI Mutiny Papers.

31.

Deposition of James Fitzgerald, ibid.

32.

Fyans to Col. Sec. McLeay, Feb. 16, 1834, NI Mutiny Papers, NSWA 4/1441.

33.

Cook EL, pp. 128–29.

34.

All the mutiny figures in Fyans’s “Reminiscences” are exaggerated. He gave 500 (not 120) for the first attack on the jail gang guard; and 300 for the strength of the mutineers at Longridge, whereas his report to McLeay written within a month of the mutiny put it between 60 and 80. He was writing his memoir many years later, in retirement: Heroic exploits grow with age.

35.

Cook EL, pp. 134–35.

36.

Cook EL, pp. 130–31. This form of torture was also referred to by Rev. T. Sharpe, who was chaplain on Norfolk Island from 1837 to 1841, hence not a witness to the mutiny: Sharpe Papers, 27 ff., A1502, ML, Sydney.

37.

Fyans to Col. Sec. McLeay, Feb. 20, 1834, NI Mutiny Papers, NSWA 4/1441. “Fatal Ball”: Cook EL, p. 133.

38.

Chambers to Col. Sec. McLeay, Aug. 20, 1834, NSWA 4/2245.

39.

Sir William W. Burton, The State of Religion and Education in New South Wales, pp. 152–54.

40.

Chambers to McLeay, Aug. 30, 1834, CSO 34/6236, NSWA 4/2245.

41.

Burton, Religion and Education, p. 154.

42.

Ullathorne, Catholic Mission, passim and esp. pp. 40–45.

43.

Ibid., p. 37.

44.

On the last years of Morisset, see Petition of Emily Morisset to Sir Charles Fitzroy, Governor of NSW, Sept. 13, 1852, Ms. at Am. 34, Morisset Papers, ML.

45.

Joseph Anderson, Recollections of a Peninsula Veteran (London, 1913).

46.

Cook EL, p. 137.

47.

T. Sharpe, “Letter Book,” Ms. A1502 in ML, also cit. in Phillip Cox and Wesley Stacey, Building Norfolk Island, p. 24.

48.

James Backhouse, A Visit to the Australian Colonies, p. 257. It was difficult to persuade the skeptical authorities on Norfolk Island of the genuineness of one’s injuries. In January 1834 (NSWA) the convict John Boyd petitioned for release from his chains and his life sentence: “Being totally deprived of sight . . . I most humbly intreat you to look on me with an eye of Mercy . . . the remainder of my life, shall be spent in sorrow for violating the Laws of the Land . . .” This heartrending plea did not impress Fyans, who minuted on the back: “From all I can learn of this person, he has malingered with his eyes—and has anything but a good Character.”

49.

LF, pp. 25–26.

50.

Ibid., p. 26.

51.

Ullathorne, Catholic Mission, p. 40.

52.

Ibid.

53.

Prisoner of “great recklessness”: Backhouse, Australian Colonies, p. 266. “Their passions”: Ullathorne, Catholic Mission, p. 41.

54.

Sydney Smith, cit. in Sheldon Glueck, Foreword to Sir John Vincent Barry, Alexander Maconochie of Norfolk Island, p. viii.

1.

John West, The History of Tasmania, part 4, sect. 1, pp. 146–47.

2.

Lady Franklin to Mrs. Simpkinson, Dec. 10, 1841, in George Mackaness, Some Private Correspondence of Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin, vol. 2, p. 36.

3.

T. J. Lemprière, Diary at Port Arthur, Mar. 26, 1837, p. 24.

4.

Montagu to Arthur, Dec. 9, 1837, cit. in Shaw CC, p. 269.

5.

Diary of G.W.T.B. Boyes, June 11, 1846, cit. in Sir John V. Barry, Alexander Maconochie of Norfolk Island, p. 30.

6.

Maconochie to Admiral Sir George Back, cit. in Barry, Maconochie, p. 28.

7.

Alexander Maconochie, Report on the State of Prison Discipline in Van Diemen’s Land.

8.

Maconochie to Back, Mar. 14, 1839 [?], cit. in Barry, Maconochie, p. 52.

9.

Maconochie, Report.

10.

Jane Franklin to Mrs. Simpkinson, Dec. 26, 1839, cit. in Barry, Maconochie, p. 58.

11.

Mrs. Maconochie to Back, Mar. 11, 1839, cit. in Barry, ibid.

12.

Maconochie to Washington, May 29, 1839.

13.

On Apr. 8, 1837, the “philosophic Radical” William Molesworth, Member for East Cornwall, rose in the Commons to propose a select committee of inquiry into transportation. Fifteen members were appointed, representing a fair cross-section of political views from Tories to Radicals, with Molesworth as chairman. The committee held, in all, thirty-eight meetings between its first session on Apr. 10, 1837 and its last on Aug. 3, 1838. It examined twenty-three witnesses; the most extensive testimony was given by Sir Francis Forbes, James Mudie, James Macarthur, J. D. Lang, Colonel George Arthur and the Rev. William Ullathorne. The voluminous Report of the Molesworth Committee, with minutes of testimony and appendices was published in two parts: PP vol. xix, no. 518, 1837, pp. 5–317, cited as SC 1837–38 (i), and PP vol. 22, 1837–38, pp. 1–139, cited as SC 1837–38 (ii).

14.

Correspondence between Russell and the Commissioners for the Reform of the Criminal Law, The Times (London), Apr. 1, 1837, cit. in John Ritchie, “Towards Ending an Unclean Thing,” p. 158.

15.

Ritchie, “Towards Ending,” pp. 159–60.

16.

Extract from Molesworth’s notes on Report of SC 1837–38 (ii), cit. in Sir William W. Burton, “State of Society and State of Crime in New South Wales,” Colonial Magazine, vol. 1.

17.

William Ullathorne, Autobiography, pp. 138–39.

18.

See SC 1837–38 (ii), Report, p. viii, and Appendix, p. 77.

19.

Ibid., p. xxi.

20.

Ibid., pp. xxiv–vi.

21.

NSW V & P, July 17, 1838.

22.

On the changing perception of colonial crime in the wake of the Molesworth Report and the attitudes of “respectables,” see Michael Sturma, Vice in a Vicious Society, pp. 27–30.

23.

Gipps to Glenelg, Mar. 29, 1839, HRA xx:75.

24.

SC 1837–38 (ii), Report, p. xliv.

25.

Maconochie, encl. 7 in Gipps to Russell, Feb. 25, 1840, HRA xx:544.

26.

Maconochie, encl. 2 in Gipps to Russell, HRA xx:532–33.

27.

Maconochie, encl. 3 in Gipps to Russell, HRA xx:533–34.

28.

Alexander Maconochie, Norfolk Island, p. 8. West, Tasmania, vol. 2, p. 283.

29.

Cook EL, pp. 192–93.

30.

Ibid.

31.

James Lawrence, “Memoir,” Ms.

32.

Gipps to Russell, June 27, 1840, HRA xx:689.

33.

Russell to Gipps, Sept. 10, 1840, Con. Disc. 4, 1846, p. 29.

34.

Russell to Gipps, Nov. 12, 1840 (in response to Gipps-Russell, June 27, 1840), Con. Disc. 4, 1846, pp. 29–30.

35.

Maconochie to Gipps, encl. 4 in Gipps to Russell, Feb. 25, 1840, HRA xx:535.

36.

E. Deas Thomson (Col. Sec. Off., Sydney) to Maconochie, Aug. 20, 1841, Con. Disc. 4, 1846, p. 29.

37.

Gipps to Russell, Aug. 27, 1841, Con. Disc, 4, 1846, p. 27.

38.

Maconochie to Gipps, re Mark & Ticket System, June 2, 1842.

39.

Encl. 1 in Gipps to Stanley, Aug. 15, 1842, Con. Disc. 4, 1846, p. 59.

40.

Gipps to Stanley, Aug. 15, 1842. HRA xxii:209.

41.

Maconochie to Gipps, Dec. 31, 1841, encl. 1 in Gipps to Stanley, Con. Disc. 4, 1846, p. 38.

42.

Thomson to Maconochie, Jul. 29, 1842, Con. Disc. 4, 1846, p. 55.

43.

Maconochie to Gipps, June 2, 1842, encl. 1 in Gipps to Stanley, Aug. 15, 1843, Con. Disc. 4, 1846, p. 54 and passim.

44.

Alexander Maconochie, The Mark System of Prison Discipline.

45.

On the convict graves in the Norfolk Island cemetery, see R. Nixon Dalkin, Colonial Era Cemetery of Norfolk Island.

46.

James Lawrence, “Memoir,” Ms. It seems to have been Maconochie’s policy to encourage literate convicts to write down their experiences, both to exorcise their horrors and to supply an unofficial record of the underside of the Old System. The historian can only be grateful to him, since, if Maconochie had not given men like Thomas Cook, James Lawrence, James Porter and Laurence Frayne the means and time to describe the hells they had passed through, their reality would now be lost in administrative euphemisms, omissions and lies.

In general, convicts’ experiences were not considered worth wasting time on, and it is remarkable not only that the occasional manuscript like Cook’s should have survived complete, but that the others survived in any form, however physically damaged or edited. Most, one may assume, were thrown out by archivists or embarrassed descendants. Thus the memoir of a Liverpool convict named Jones (b. 1813), probably written under Maconochie’s aegis, ends after a few pages before his transport ship has left the White cliffs of Dover behind; on the last page is the notation, in a later hand, “Jones—Thief—up to his transportation for the Colonies—nothing interesting. Excerpt 1867.” One could wish to see those missing pages. See memoir of Jones, item 10 at MSQ 168, Dixson Library, Sydney.

47.

The story of “Bony” Anderson, the convict chained to the rock of Goat Island in Sydney Harbor, appears first in the English journal Meliora, vol. 4, no. 13 (April 1861), pp. 12–14. Barry (Maconochie, p. 121) raises the possibility that it was taken from an unpublished, and now lost, manuscript by Maconochie himself. For a full account of Anderson and Maconochie see Barry, Maconochie, pp. 121–24.

48.

J. W. Smith to Gipps, encl. 1 in Gipps to Stanley, Aug. 15, 1842, Con. Disc. 4, 1846, p. 58ff.

49.

Gipps to Stanley, Oct. 13, 1841, HRA xxi:542.

50.

Gipps to Stanley, Aug. 15, 1842, Con. Disc. 4, 1846, p. 66.

51.

Gipps to Stanley, Apr. 1, 1843, HRA xxii:617. Barry, Maconochie, p. 140.

52.

Gipps to Stanley, Apr. 1, 1843, Con. Disc. 4, 1846, p. 138.

53.

Ibid., p. 142.

54.

Ibid., p. 143.

55.

Ibid., pp. 143–44.

56.

Ibid., pp. 146–47.

57.

Ibid., p. 147.

58.

Alexander Maconochie, On Reformatory Prison Discipline, p. 26.

59.

Gipps to Stanley, Apr. 1, 1843, Con. Disc. 4, 1846, p. 148.

60.

Ibid., p. 149.

61.

In 1840 it had cost £10. 18s. 4d. to keep a convict on Norfolk Island; in 1843, £13 3s. 11d., a rise of 21 percent. But in 1838, due to bumper harvests; the year’s cost of a convict was £4 14s. 2d; whereas in 1839, the year before Maconochie arrived, the crops were dismal and because all food had to be imported the figure went to £17 19s. 10d—a rise of 380 percent.

62.

Stanley to Gipps, Apr. 29, 1843, HRA xx:691.

63.

For the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia, see Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, pp. 68–77.

64.

Pentonville penitentiary seemed, from the moment of its opening in 1842, to be “a model for prison architecture and discipline not only in England but in most of Europe . . . the culmination of three generations of thinking” (Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain, p. 3). Its purpose was to crush the will of its 450 inmates by means of absolutely inflexible routine, complete isolation and unvarying task-work, with each convict identically engaged on a 12-hour day of cobbling or weaving. Whenever the prisoner stepped outside his cell for muster or exercise, he was required to don a woollen mask with eyeholes so that he could neither recognize nor be recognized by his fellow-prisoners. The Pentonville chapel, where prisoners were assembled every day, was designed with a separate box for each prisoner; wooden partitions and a door in each box assured that no convict could see the man to right or left of him, only the preacher in the “cackle tub” or pulpit. All the main features of Pentonville—the silent cells, the spyholes, the isolation, the masks and the chapel—would be faithfully copied after 1853 in the “Model Prison” built at Port Arthur in Tasmania. (See note 45 to Chapter 15, below.)

1.

Stanley’s dispatches to Franklin outlining the Probation System: Nov. 25, 1842, Correspondence re Convict Discipline, in PP 159, 1843, nos. 175 (p. 3) and 176 (p. 10).

2.

Shaw CC, pp. 295–96.

3.

Sir James Graham to the Committee of Visitors of Parkhurst Prison, Dec. 20, 1842, Correspondence re Convict Discipline, Appendix to Part 1, pp. 1–2, PP 1843.

4.

Ibid.

5.

Stanley to Franklin, Nov. 25, 1842, dispatch no. 176.

6.

Robert Crooke, The Convict, pp. 39–40.

7.

Eardley-Wilmot’s loyalty to the apprenticeship system for training young artisans—which was being harried into extinction by the free labor market of the late 1820s—would be upheld in the curriculum of craft-training at Point Puer in Port Arthur in the 1840s. He blamed the increase of juvenile crime on the breakdown of the master’s parental supervision of the young. “Formerly the apprentice was taken into the house of the master,” he declared in 1827; “he was considered one of the family. . . . [N]ow the master has ten or a dozen apprentices and perhaps never sees them. . . . [They] are allowed to go where they please . . . and the consequence is that they are all thieves.” Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain, p. 182.

8.

Robson, Hist. Tas., p. 418. For a general description of the depression of the Van Diemen’s Land economy, see pp. 413–19.

9.

Robert Pitcairn to Lord Stanley, Feb. 4, 1846, Correspondence re Convict Discipline, PP 1843, p. 38.

10.

“Half-Yearly Return of Runaway Convicts, Authorised by J. S. Hampton, Comptroller General at Hobart.” Poster, dated Jul. 1, 1850, cumulative since 1831, D356–18, ML, Sydney.

11.

F. R. Nixon to Lord Grey, Feb. 15, 1847; printed in PP 1847, Memorials on Transportation, “A Communication upon the Subject of Transportation,” vol. 38, no. 741, p. 2.

12.

Stanley to Eardley-Wilmot, draft dispatch dated Sept. 1845, encl. 1 in J. Stephen to S. W. Phillips, Sept. 8, 1845, Con. Disc. 3, 1846.

13.

Nixon to Grey, Feb. 15, 1847, in PP 1847, vol. 38, no. 741, p. 3ff.

14.

For the incidence of lesbianism in the Female Factories in Launceston and at the Cascades, see G. R. Lennox, “A Private and Confidential Despatch of Eardley-Wilmot.” The mention of lesbianism in chapel is at p. 342 of the 1841 Committee’s report at CSO 22/50, TSA. One reason for Eardley-Wilmot’s downfall as lieutenant-governor was that Gladstone believed he had done little or nothing to curb convict lesbianism in Van Diemen’s Land. Though plans for the separate women’s penitentiary Stanley had called for as part of his Probation System had been drawn up (by Major Joshua Jebb, along the lines of Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight) and sent from England, and though a budget of £35,000 had been approved for its construction, it was not, as noted above, actually built. Instead, as many newly arrived women convicts as possible were diverted from the Cascades Factory into a converted prison ship moored in the Derwent, HMS Anson, where (it was hoped) they would not be exposed to the factory’s corrupting influence. In all, about 3,500 convict women passed through probationary instruction on board the Anson between 1844 and 1849, under the authority of Edmund and Philippa Bowden, superintendent and matron. To save money, however, Eardley-Wilmot planned to reverse the roles of the Anson and the Cascades Factory; the factory would become the reform-school, the ship a punishment hulk. This earned him the enmity of Matron Bowden; she helped persuade Gladstone (already famous for his interest in “fallen women”) that her work as a rehabilitator was being undermined by the lieutenant-governor; and this, Lennox points out (p. 87), must have accelerated Eardley-Wilmot’s sacking in April 1846.

15.

Wilmot’s confidential report to Stanley, Nov. 2, 1843, cit. in Lennox, “Eardley-Wilmot,” p. 80.

16.

John Frost, The Horrors of Convict Life, p. 40.

17.

Eardley-Wilmot to Stanley, Mar. 17, 1846, Con. Disc, 1847, p. 46.

18.

The petition of twenty-five clergymen in Van Diemen’s Land to Lord Grey was couched in somber tones, inspired by “a deep sense of the responsibility of living in a land where such awful sins are committed, and where the unhappy convicts are subjected to an association leading them into such shocking corruption.” Enclosure 1 (dated July 9, 1846) in Bishop Nixon to Lord Grey, May 3, 1847, Con. Disc. 1847, p. 44.

19.

J. Syme, Nine Years in Van Diemen’s Land . . ., Dundee, 1848, pp. 200–201, cit. in Crowley, Doc. Hist., vol. 2, p. 122.

20.

Gladstone to Eardley-Wilmot, Apr. 30, 1846, both private and public letters in CO 408/25.

21.

C. J. La Trobe to Lord Grey, May 31, 1847, paper 941, in Con. Disc. 1847.

22.

Stanley to Gipps, HRA xxii:695–96.

23.

Childs to Champ, July 11, 1846, encl. 2 in Wilmot to Gladstone, Sept. 3, 1846, Con. Disc. 1847, p. 176.

24.

John Mortlock, Experiences of a Convict, pp. 73, 71.

25.

Ibid., p. 70.

26.

Rev. Thomas Rogers, Correspondence, p. 144. Thomas Rogers (1806–1903), a graduate of Trinity College in Dublin, accepted from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel a post on Norfolk Island as religious instructor to convicts. He arrived in Hobart in July 1845 and by September was on Norfolk Island. His position was anomalous. Not having been appointed by Bishop Nixon in Tasmania, he had no ecclesiastical authority. He was not well-placed to argue with the island commandants, Childs and Price; but argue he did, passionately and with anguish, on behalf of the tormented prisoners. He tried (but failed) to report on Childs’s misdeeds and neglect to Eardley-Wilmot in Hobart; tried (and failed again) to get Denison’s ear on John Price. Naturally, this dissident friend of the convicts did not last long on Norfolk Island; he was recalled to Hobart in February 1847. In 1849 he published a book defending his stand against the System, Correspondence Relating to the Dismissal of the Rev. T. Rogers, from his Chaplaincy at Norfolk Island. Rogers’s manuscript Letter-Book for his sojourn on Norfolk Island, 1844–46, is in the ML, Sydney.

He was less generous to his family. Over four years in Australia Rogers only sent £75, a miserable pittance, to the wife and six children he had left behind. Sarah Rogers died destitute without seeing her errant husband again. Early in 1850, friends subscribed to raise the passage money to send their children to Australia. Unaware of this, Rogers had made arrangements to sail back to Ireland to fetch them. The two ships passed each other en route; Rogers was not reunited with his offspring until he returned to Australia in 1860.

One of his sons, John William Foster Rogers, worked up his father’s reminiscences and letters into a manuscript, which remained unpublished: “Man’s Inhumanity—Being a Chaplain’s Chronicle of Norfolk Island in the ‘Forties” (typescript, with illustrations, C214, ML, Sydney). Rogers himself was the prototype of the tormented, alcoholic chaplain the Rev. James North in Clarke’s His Natural Life.

27.

Diary of Elizabeth Robertson, Ms. 163 in Dixson Library, Sydney, cit. in Margaret Hazzard, Punishment Short of Death, p. 189.

28.

Childs to Eardley-Wilmot, Oct. 1, 1845, encl. in Wilmot to Stanley, Dec. 19, 1845, Con. Disc. 2, 1846, p. 48.

29.

Naylor to Grey, in GO 1/63, TSA, cit. in Eustace Fitzsymonds, ed., Norfolk Island 1846 . . . , pp. 15–16. (Naylor’s report to Stanley, edited for parliamentary publication, is printed as end. 2 in Grey to Denison, Sept. 30, 1846, Con. Disc. 1847, pp. 67–76.)

30.

Ibid.

31.

Maconochie advises Naylor against publishing the report: Maconochie to B. Hawes, Sept. 22, 1846, encl. 1 in paper 11, Con. Disc. 1847, p. 67. “Too probable” to pass over: Grey to Denison, Sept. 30, 1846, paper 11 in Con. Disc. 1847, p. 66. Grey’s second thoughts: Grey to Denison, Nov. 7, 1846, paper 12 in Con. Disc. 1847, p. 76.

32.

Hazzard, Punishment Short of Death, p. 196.

33.

Robert Pringle Stuart’s Ms. of the report is at CON 1/5183 and GO 33/55, TSA. The censored version, with whole paragraphs missing and a copious scattering of asterisks, appeared in Con. Disc. 1847, pp. 84–101. The full text, as with Naylor, is published in Fitzsymonds, ed., Norfolk Island 1846.

34.

Ibid.

35.

Clarke’s account of the Ring in His Natural Life, based on Stuart’s report, is relatively unsensational, though fanciful in parts. Price Warung’s “Secret Society of the Ring,” in Convict Days, pulls out all the stops and sounds like an antipodean mixture of Maria Monk, Juliette, The Castle of Otranto and Melmoth the Wanderer, overglazed with Poe; the Ring’s nocturnal conclaves are lit with blazing light from the eyesockets of a skull, producing “a diabolic effect upon weakened nerves,” including the reader’s. As for the language, “Were you to clothe with literary form the mouthings of the creatures led by Hebert, as thy danced round Lais and Phryne enthroned as Goddesses of Reason on the desecrated church altars of Revolutionary Paris, you would scarcely parallel it in point of blasphemous horror” (pp. 159–60). On the rhymed “Convict Oath” (presumably written by Warung), see “The Liberation of the First Three” in Convict Days, pp. 68–69.

36.

Stuart, in Fitzsymonds, ed., Norfolk Island 1846, p. 67.

37.

Minutes of Executive Council Meeting, Hobart, July 1–2, 1846.

38.

On the Norfolk Island mutiny of July 1, 1846, see Judge Fielding Browne’s Report in Con. Disc. 1847, pp. 35–40. Price’s report, with declarations and testimony from Alfred Baldock, George Bott, William Forster and others, encl. in Latrobe to Grey, Jan. 8, 1847, ibid., pp. 25–35.

39.

On Henry Beresford Garrett and “The Demon,” see Sir John Vincent Barry, The Life and Death of John Price, Appendix A. The facts of Garrett’s life are unclear. According to one version, he was a soldier transported for robbing the commissariat in Nottingham. He arrived on Norfolk Island around 1845, and toward the end of Price’s commandancy he was transferred to Van Diemen’s Land; he escaped in 1853 and fled to Victoria, finding anonymity within the vast horde of gold-seekers. In 1854 Garrett and three accomplices “stuck up” the Bank of Victoria at Ballarat, making off with £14,300 in cash and 250 oz. of gold. With his share of the loot, Garrett returned to London but was recognized at once and re-transported to Melbourne for trial. Convicted of bank robbery, he went to the hulks in Port Phillip Bay, where he saw (and perhaps took part in) the murder of John Price in 1857. Released in 1861, he went to New Zealand, lived as a bushranger, and was sentenced in 1868 to 20 years in jail for shopbreaking. During the latter part of this sentence, before his death in 1885, Garrett wrote a number of manuscripts, including “The Demon,” his 25,000-word account of John Price—a document of obsession. It survives only as a transcript made after 1948; the original notebooks, which Garrett entrusted to a Methodist lay preacher named Hall, are lost. A photocopy of the transcript is in the Mitchell Library, Sydney.

40.

Price to Champ, Dec. 7, 1846, end. 1 in Latrobe to Grey, Jan. 8, 1847, letter 8 in Con. Disc. 1847, p. 26.

41.

Barry, The Life and Death of John Price, p. 37. Willson’s damaging report to Denison on Norfolk Island (dated May 22, 1852) is printed in Con. Disc, 1853, pp. 88–95. In 1849, on his previous (second) visit, Willson had praised the improvement of rations, the “perfect unanimity” among the civil and military officers, and “the judicious conduct of Mr. Price, the Commandant” (Con. Disc. 1850, pp. 111–114).

42.

Quotes from Rogers, unless otherwise specified, are from passages cited in Barry, The Life and Death of John Price, pp. 45–50, and from W. F. Rogers, “Man’s Inhumanity . . . ,” typescript at C214, ML, Sydney.

43.

W. Nairn to Price, Feb. 2, 1852, in Con. Disc. 1853, pp. 88–89.

44.

Price to Nairn, Mar. 15, 1852, ibid., pp. 89–90.

45.

The “Model Prison” at Port Arthur was begun in 1848 and finished in 1852; it remained in continuous use until Port Arthur closed down in 1877. It was, in every way, a scale model of Pentonville, with a fraction of the capacity—48 separate cells, arranged in three wings; the fourth wing of the cross was the chapel, with its partitioned stalls so designed that convicts could not see or communicate with one another when at Divine Service. The cells, fittings, central inspection hall and schedules for work, exercise and cleaning were copied from Pentonville, as were the prisoners’ cloth masks, the felt slippers worn by guards to ensure silence, the silent numbering-machine that indicated to prisoners the order in which they must leave the chapel, and much else besides. It had four dumb-cells, black isolation chambers with walls three feet thick and no less than three internal doors; when these and the entrance door were closed, as any visitor to the restored Model Prison can now test for himself, the silence and darkness were such as to exclude all sensory stimulation. The records suggest that the Model Prison produced a high level of neurosis and mental breakdown in its inmates—as did Pentonville.

46.

Report of SC on Criminal Laws, Juvenile Offenders and Transportation, PP 1847 (449), pp. 3–7.

47.

Lord Grey in GB Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol. 110, cols. 211–12, cit. in Crowley, Doc. Hist., vol. 2, p. 114.

48.

Grey to Denison, Feb. 5, 1847. Stephen to the Treasury, Feb. 15, 1847, CO 280/196.

49.

Grey to Denison, Apr. 27, 1848.

50.

Grey to Fitzroy, Sept. 3, 1847, HRA xxv:735. In September 1847, Grey offered to send out one free emigrant, his fares paid by the government, for every “exile” transported to Australia. However, he retracted this offer the following year.

51.

James Macarthur to SC 1837, p. 218.

52.

Port Phillip Patriot and Melbourne Advertiser, Dec. 19, 1844.

53.

Ibid., Dec. 26, 1844. On William Kerr (1812–1859), editor of the radically antipastoralist Argus and champion of workers’ rights in early Victoria, see entry in ADB and Garryowen [pseud. of E. Finn], The Chronicles of Early Melbourne (Melbourne, 1888), pp. 1–2.

54.

V & P, NSW Legislative Council, Oct. 30, 1846.

55.

Sydney Morning Herald, June 12–18, 1849.

56.

Fitzroy to Grey, June 30, 1849, CO 201/414, cit. in Clark HA, vol. 3, p. 420.

57.

Anon, letter in Household Words (London), Mar. 30, 1850, p. 24.

58.

Samuel Sidney, Emigrant’s Journal and Travel Magazine, cit. in Coral Lansbury, Arcadia in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Melbourne, 1970). Prof. Lansbury’s discussion of Sidney, a figure ignored by most Australian historians, is highly pertinent to an understanding of the image of Australia among English reformers at mid-century, and I have relied on it here.

59.

On Caroline Chisholm, see ADB entry; M. L. Kiddle, Caroline Chisholm (Melbourne, 1957); and Caroline Chisholm, The Emigrants’ Guide to Australia, (London, 1853).

60.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Chapter 63.

61.

Godfrey Charles Mundy, Our Antipodes, vol. 3, p. 125.

1.

Edward Hammond Hargraves, Australia and Its Gold Fields . . . . p. 116. On the “Sydney Ducks,” see Sherman Ricards and George Blackman, “The Sydney Ducks: A Demographic Analysis,” and Jay Monaghan, Australians and the Gold Rush. Sydney first heard of the California gold discoveries in December 1848. The first Australian gold-seekers arrived in San Francisco in April 1849. By May 1851 no less than 11,000 Australians had sailed to California, about 7,500 of them from Sydney. (In 1852 the population of San Francisco County was about 36,000, so the proportion of the Australian gold-seekers—and hence, of ex-convicts—was enormous. The origin of the term “Sydney Duck” (or “Derwent Duck,” for gold-seekers from Tasmania) is unclear. They were viewed with extreme suspicion by Americans, and the crimes of a few brought down prejudice upon the whole. Some Ducks were reported to have adapted a mode of robbery from aboriginal hunters, who would set fire to hollow trees and kill the animals as they scurried out. In San Francisco, the technique was to set fire to a building at night and wait for the occupants to run outside clutching—of course—their most valuable possessions. The California Vigilance Committees were especially hard on Australian emigrants. They were “obvious objects of persecution,” due to their strange accents and presumed criminal past, even though only one in eight from New South Wales and one in five from Van Diemen’s Land were Emancipists. Most of them (some 65 percent) migrated in family groups and had no criminal past or larcenous ambitions. The committees made ninety-one recorded arrests of Ducks. Of these, four were summarily hanged in front of mobs of as many as 15,000 people; fourteen were deported back to Australia, fourteen more summarily deported from California, fifteen handed over to other authorities, and the rest let off.

2.

Bathurst Free Press, May 17, 1851.

3.

Ibid., July 19, and Aug. 13, 1851. Clark HA, vol. 4, p. 9.

4.

The Times (London), Nov. 24, 1852.

5.

La Trobe to Lord Grey, Dec. 10, 1851, PP 1852, 34/1508, pp. 45–46.

6.

John Sherer, The Gold-Finder of Australia: How he Went, How he Fared, and How he Made His Fortune, pp. 195–96.

7.

Ibid., p. 198.

8.

Ibid., p. 10.

9.

William Rayment, Diary, Oct. 19, 1852, Ms. in Public Library of Victoria, cit. in John M. Ward, The Australian Legend, pp. 116–17.

10.

Address from William Nicholson, mayor of Melbourne, to the delegates from the Van Diemen’s Land Anti-Transportation League, February 1851, Ms. Aa 25/5, ML.

11.

Address from Mayor J. T. Smith, aldermen and citizens of Melbourne to Queen Victoria: Dispatches from Victoria #26, Feb. 16, 1852, A2341, ML.

12.

A. G. Dumas to Lord Grey, July 17, 1851, in Dumas Family Papers, vol. 1, pp. 19–34, A4453–1, ML.

13.

Leslie family letters, Jan. 20, 1850, pp. 37–40, A4094, ML.

14.

Robson, Hist. Tas., p. 502.

15.

Clark HA, vol. 4, pp. 28–29.

16.

For an account of the 1851 elections in Van Diemen’s Land and the curious alliance of Denison and the ex-convict lower classes against the Anti-Transportation League, see Michael Roe, “The Establishment of Local Self-Government in Hobart and Launceston.”

17.

Ibid., pp. 31–32.

18.

Ibid., p. 34.

19.

Shaw CC, pp. 348–49.

20.

Lord Grey, in G.B. Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, vol. 110, cols. 206–18.

21.

Fitzroy to Grey, June 19, 1851.

22.

Among these believers in the miraculous universality of convict labor was a Mr. Levinson, who appeared in Hobart with a prospectus for an irrigation canal to be dug across the continent from sea to sea, whose “stupendous nature . . . offers no obstacle to the science, ingenuity and perseverance of Englishmen of the 19th century.” Convicts, guarded by sappers and miners, would do the spadework on three-year terms, and be rewarded at the end with an allotment of land and a share of all minerals discovered on the way. The water for the canal, Levinson vaguely averred, would come from the “many rivers [which] would probably be discovered. . . . Thousands of men, who fail at the diggings and do not exactly like to go to agricultural labour, would take to this work, there being a chance of gold.” No investors were seduced. Hobart Town Daily Courier, Aug. 10, 1853.

23.

Pakington to Denison, Dec. 14, 1852, PP 1852–53, 82/1601, pp. 105–6.

24.

Colonial Times and Tasmanian (Hobart), Aug. 13, 1853.

25.

“The people of England”: Colonial Times and Tasmanian, Aug. 6, 1853. Church bells instead of cannon: Hobart Town Daily Courier, Aug. 11, 1853.

26.

Stirling to Darling, Dec. 14, 1826, encl. 2 in Darling to Bathurst Dec. 18, 1826, HRA xii:777–80. On Stirling and the Swan River colony, see ADB entry and Clark HA, vol. 3, pp. 11, 17–37.

27.

On Peel and Levey, see Hasluck, Thomas Peel of Swan River; ADB entries; and Clark HA, vol. 3, p. 18ff.

28.

Fitzgerald to Grey, Mar. 3, 1849, in Further Correspondence re Convict Discipline and Transportation, PP 1849, 43/1121, pp. 246–47.

29.

Perth Gazette, Jan. 2, 1847.

30.

Kennedy to Stanley, June 12, 1858, CO 18/104.

31.

Superintendent (Fremantle) to Comptroller-General (Henderson), Jan. 10, 1858, CO 18/104.

32.

“The prosperity of the colony”: Henderson to Stanley, Feb. 9, 1858. “Wholly out of the question”: Stanley to Gov. Kennedy, Apr. 16, 1858, CO 18/104. Convict labor to erect rival episcopal palaces: Kennedy to Labouchère, Mar. 13, 1858, CO 18/104.

33.

Statement and Appeals of the Anti-Transportation League of Victoria for the People of Great Britain, Melbourne, Oct. 23, and Dec. 22, 1853, Q041/Pa 10, ML, Sydney.

34.

A. Macarthur, letter in The Daily News (London), Mar. 7, 1864, Macarthur Papers, vol. 29, pp. 567–77, A2927, ML, Sydney.

35.

Shaw CC, p. 356.

1.

Cit. in Ernest de Blosseville, Histoire des Colonies Penales de L’Angleterre dans Australie. The verses translate thus: “Ah! Who does not know the consoling spectacle / Displayed by this vast receptacle of bandits, / This Botany Bay, the sewer of ALBION, / Where theft, rapine and treason / Go in hordes, and, while purging England / Fertilize the ground in their far exile? / There, kindly laws turn dangerous men / Into skilled colonists and happy citizens / Stir them to penitence, stimulate industry, / And give them freedom, customs and a homeland. / On all sides, I see drained marshes / Flowering deserts, and cleared forests. / Follow this example! Take these bandits / From their sterile prison, make their punishment useful.

2.

John Freeth, ed., The Political Songster (Birmingham, 1790).

3.

Edward Curr to Directors of VDL Co., letter 162, Jan. 12, 1831, VDL Co. Foreign Letter Book No. 3, cit. in Shaw CC, p. 220.

4.

Dickens to Normanby (unpublished), July 2, 1840, cit. in Sarah Bradford, “Forthcoming Sale of English Books and MSS,” Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 10, 1981.

5.

See Appendixes III, IV and V in Michael Sturma, Vice in a Vicious Society.

6.

Sturma, ibid., p. 77. For a general discussion, see his Chapter 4, “Measuring Morality,” pp. 64–85.

7.

Mary Gilmore, “Old Botany Bay.”

8.

John Mitchel, Jail Journal, p. 231.

9.

Ibid., p. 227.

10.

Ibid., p. 213.

11.

Ibid., p. 244.

12.

Ibid., p. 210.

13.

Ibid., p. 238.

14.

Henry Reynolds, “‘That Hated Stain’: The Aftermath of Transportation in Tasmania.” I have relied on Reynolds’s essay for the account of post-Transportation entropy in Tasmania that follows.

15.

Rev. John Morison, Australia As It Is, p. 214ff.

16.

Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, vol. 2, Chapter 2, pp. 28–29.

17.

Reynolds, “Hated Stain,” p. 31.

18.

My count, based on figures from Bateson, The Convict Ships, Appendix II, “Convict Ships to Van Diemen’s Land, 1812–1853.”

19.

See Miriam Dixson, “Greater Than Lenin”? Lang and Labour, 1916–1932.

20.

Alexander Cheyne to SC 1837–38, Report, pp. xxii–xxiii.

21.

Edward Willoughby, Australian Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil, pp. 78–79, 151.

22.

Anon., “The Day We Were Lagged,” The Bulletin, Jan. 20, 1888.

23.

Ibid.

24.

Ibid.

25.

Ibid.

26.

John Sherer, The Gold-Finder of Australia, p. 246.

27.

Marcus Clarke, His Natural Life, Chapter 22.