7

Bolters and Bushrangers

i

MOST PRISONERS of the System acquiesced in their fate. They waited out their time, knowing that longer and worse constraint—the triangle, the iron gang, Norfolk Island—would be the price of rebellion. But in any carceral society, there is always a spark of genius for escape. The worse the odds, the more hope escape gives others.

In Australia it was easy to escape. The hard thing was to survive. The odds against surviving were high, but hundreds of convicts made their bets. Some confronted Australia’s external wall, the sea: They stowed away, or hijacked ships, or built their own rafts, or stole a longboat. Others took to the land, even less charted than the sea. At first these runaways were called “banditti” (evoking ragged, romantic figures among dark caverns); more colloquially, “bolters.” In time, the skulking escapee became that primal figure of popular Australian culture, the bushranger—enemy of flogger, trap and magistrate, the poor man’s violent friend, the emblem of freedom in a chained society.

At first, from the 1790s to early 1800s, most of the runaways went inland. After a brief exhilaration they either died or wandered, broken, back to the settlement, “so squalid and lean,” David Collins remarked, “the very crows would have declined their carcasses.” There were reports that fifty skeletons, picked white by dingoes and birds, could be seen on a day’s march to Botany Bay.

The most persistent absconders were the Irish, who in their ignorance had constructed a Paradise myth to alleviate their antipodean Purgatory. They kept sneaking out of the settlement in the belief, as one of them put it to Watkin Tench,

that at a considerable distance to the northward existed a large river, which separated this country from the back part of China; and that when it should be crossed (which was practicable) they would find themselves among a copper-coloured people, who would receive and treat them kindly.¹

The fantasy of escape to China was one of the obsessive images of early transportation. Yellow girls and tea, opium and silk, queer-looking blue bridges and willows just like the ones on plates; and surcease from the hoe, the iron, the roasting sunlight and the dumb ache of hunger. For this, not a few of the “deluded Irish” died of fatigue, thirst or the spears of blacks. Their crow-pecked remains, with a rag of government slops and a rusty basil still around them, would be found in the bush between Parramatta and Pittwater.

The first large group of “Chinese travellers,” as they came to be derisively known, took off from Rose Hill in November 1791—twenty men and one woman, Irish convicts off the Queen. They separated, blundered about in the bush for days, and in their starving bewilderment were easily recaptured (although three of them were so sure they had nearly reached China that they soon ran away again, and died). In time, the China myth was joined by another fancy, reported by Collins with his usual disapproval of the croppies who held it: “In addition to their natural vicious propensities, they conceived an opinion that there was a colony of white people, which had been discovered in this country, situated to the SW of the settlement, from which it was distant between three and four hundred miles.” This other Shangri-la, where no work ever needed to be done, sustained some hope for a time.²

In 1798 the Irish were still running away to China, as many as sixty people at a time. Since none of them had a compass (and few possessed any idea of how to use it even if they had had one), they went out armed with a magical facsimile consisting of a circle crudely sketched on paper or bark with the cardinal points but no needle.

In 1803, King reported that fifteen “infatuated” Irish had made a run to China from Castle Hill; they were out for four days “committing every possible enormity except Murder” (one blew half a constable’s face away with a musket, but he lived). The court sentenced them all to death, but King only hanged two. He then fixed the punishment for bolting at five hundred lashes, plus double chains for the remainder of the sentence. He expressed the hope that “the Convicts at Large will be assured that their ridiculous plans of leaving public labor to go into the Mountains, to China, &c., can only end in their immediate detection and punishment.”³

As the settlement slowly moved outward and tracks were made through the raw bush, even the blindest optimist could see that the convict skeletons that kept turning up must mean something. The will to walk to Peking guttered out as it became clear that the logical escape route from this continental prison was not the land but the sea.

The sea route produced one epic escape in the early 1790s whose notoriety blossomed in London, reached back to Botany Bay and gave heart to would-be absconders for years to come. It was led by a woman, Mary Bryant (b. 1765)—“the Girl from Botany Bay,” as the English press later dubbed her—who, with her two small children, her husband William Bryant, and seven other convicts, managed to sail a stolen boat all the way north from Sydney to Timor, a distance of 3,250 miles in just under ten weeks. As a nautical achievement, this compared with William Bligh’s six-week voyage in a longboat from Tahiti to Timor with the “loyalists” of the Bounty in 1789. No one since James Cook in the Endeavour, twenty-one years before, had sailed all the way up the eastern coast of Australia, through the treacherous Barrier Reef, and lived to tell about it.⁴

Mary Bryant, née Broad, was a sailor’s daughter from the little port of Fowey, in Cornwall. She had been transported for seven years for stealing a cloak. She went with the First Fleet, on the transport Charlotte. Before the fleet reached Cape Town, Mary Bryant gave birth to a girl and named her Charlotte, after the ship. Soon after the fleet reached Port Jackson, Mary Broad married one of the male convicts, who fathered her second child, Emanuel, born in April 1790. He, too, was Cornish and had come out on Charlotte. He was a thirty-one-year-old fisherman named William Bryant. Like many another Cornishman who kept a boat on that wild and indented coast, Bryant was a smuggler as well as a sailor, and in 1784 he had been convicted of resisting arrest at the hands of excise officers. He had already spent three years in the hulks when the First Fleet sailed, and his full seven-year sentence still loomed before him.

A fisherman was just what the half-starved colony needed. Governor Phillip put Bryant in charge of the boats that hauled the fishing nets every day in the harbor. But the black-market opportunities were too good for a Cornish smuggler to resist. He was caught selling some of his fish on the sly, instead of delivering them all to the Government Store; for this, he got one hundred lashes. If he had not set his heart on it before, Bryant was now determined to escape. At worst, he would rather drown quickly at sea than starve inch by inch on land. He had access to the boats but had no weapons, tools, navigational instruments, charts or food.

In October 1790 an East Indies trader, the Waaksamheyd, lumbered into Port Jackson heavily freighted with stores from Djakarta. Her Dutch captain, Detmer Smit, felt no obligations to the English convict system. He listened to William Bryant and was persuaded to part with a compass, a quadrant, muskets, food and even a chart of the waters between Sydney and Timor. Bryant hid this precious stuff in rolls of bark under the floorboards of his hut and began assembling a crew. He picked his time carefully. In March 1791 the Supply was dispatched to Norfolk Island. At the end of the month, Waaksamheyd, having sold the last of her cargo and finished her repairs, also set sail. Now there were no ships left in Port Jackson—nothing that could overtake an escaping boat. On the night of March 28, in the dark of the moon, the Bryants, their two children and seven other convicts scrambled into the governor’s own six-oar cutter. In nervous silence, holding their breaths every time the oar-blades kissed the dark water, they rowed out into the harbor, past the little island of Pinchgut, heading east to the gate of the Pacific. The lookout on South Head did not see the cutter as it crept by in the night. They turned north toward New Guinea.

Their escape caused consternation next morning. The officers could hardly believe that although most of the men who had escaped had “connections” with female convicts in the settlement, not one woman had breathed a word about the long-laid escape plan. “They were too faithful to those they lived with to reveal it,” observed David Collins. One of the men, a spare-time cabinetmaker named James Cox who had been transported for life on the First Fleet for stealing 12 yards of lace and a pair of stockings, left a note on his workbench for his lover Sarah Young. It was a plain, fond letter, “conjuring her to give over the pursuit of the vices which, he told her, prevailed in the settlement, leaving to her what little property he did not take with him, and assigning as a reason for his flight the severity of his situation, being transported for life, without the prospect of any mitigation, or hope of ever quitting the country.”⁵

By no means all the guards were unsympathetic to the escape. “They got Clear off,” wrote a marine private, John Easty, in his diary,

but its a very Desperate attempt, to go in an open boat for a run of about 16 or 17 hundred Leags and in pertucalar for a Woman and 2 small Children the eldest not above 3 years of age—but the thoughts of Liberty from such a place as this is Enoufh to induce any Convicts to try all Skeemes to obtain it, as they are the same as Slaves all the time they are in this Country.⁶

At first the going was easy. At their landings they found edible palms whose hearts they chopped out, “a Varse Quantity of Fish which [was] of a great Refreshment to us,” and natives either friendly or timid. But then the rain poured and the seas rose; for five continuous weeks, they were soaked to the skin and rarely able to light a cooking fire. On the long stretch of surf-bound coast between Port Macquarie and Brisbane they were driven out to sea by an adverse wind, and “making no harbour or Creek for nere three weeks we were much distress’d for water and food.” There was a brief respite for them in “White Bay being in Latt^d 27°” probably Moreton Bay. But on leaving it, they were blown out to sea again, helpless before

a heavy Gale of Wind and Current, expecting every Moment to go to the Bottom; next morn^g saw no Land, the sea running Mountains high . . . thinking every Moment to be the last, the sea Coming in so heavy upon us every now and then that two Hands was obliged to keep Bailing out and it rained very hard all that night . . . [We] cou’d make no Land [the next] Day—I will leave you to Consider what distress we must be in, the Woman and the two little Babies was in a bad condition, everything being so Wet that we Cou’d by no means light a Fire, we had nothing to Eat except a little raw rice.⁷

After several days of this ordeal they were blown ashore, half-dead, on one of the desert islands of the Barrier Reef. On its circling coral they found turtles, one of which furnished “a Noble Meal this Night.” They butchered a dozen and made jerky of their meat. Thus victualled, they made the coast again and kept creeping north, stopping for water wherever they could get ashore, caulking the cutter—whose seams were loosened by the incessant pounding of the ocean—with soap and turtle-fat, fighting skirmishes with hostile blacks. Food was short all the way, but they were all still alive when they turned the point of Cape York Peninsula, the northernmost tip of Australia, and found themselves in the Arafura Sea with a clear run—pursued, part of the way, by stout cannibals in mat-sailed canoes—of five hundred miles of open water to Arnhem Land, and another five hundred to Timor. They reached Koepang in Timor on June 5 and passed themselves off to the local Dutch governor as survivors of a shipwreck on the Australian coast. In new clothes, with full bellies, they settled down to wait for a ship back to England. But after a couple of months, by Martin’s account, Bryant for some unexplained reason told the truth to the Dutch governor. Perhaps he got drunk:

W^m Bryant had words with his wife, went and informed against himself Wife and children and all of us, [upon] which we was immediately taken Prisoners and was put into the Castle we was strictly examined.

The governor now put them in detention. In mid-September, some more shipwrecked Englishmen appeared from the sea at Koepang: Captain Edward Edwards, who had been chasing the Bounty mutineers in the frigate Pandora. He had captured some of them at Tahiti but lost his ship on a reef south of New Guinea; in the pinnace, longboat and two yawls, he and 120 survivors had escaped the wreck and made their way across the Arafura Sea to Timor. Now Edwards took the Bryants and their comrades prisoner; they were clapped in irons, put on board the Rembang, a Dutch East Indiaman, and shipped to Batavia. In that mephitic port, both William Bryant and his little son Emanuel died of fever just before Christmas 1791.

The survivors were shipped back to the Cape. Three of the men died at sea. At the Cape, Mary Bryant, her daughter and the remaining four convicts—James Martin, William Allen, James Brown and Nathaniel Lucas—were put on board the Gorgon, the man-o’-war which was carrying the marine detachment (just replaced by the newly formed New South Wales Corps) back from Australia to London. “We was well known by all of the marine officers which was all Glad that we had not perished at sea,” Martin noted. That he did not exaggerate this is shown by the remarks of Captain Watkin Tench, of the Royal Marines, who had known the Bryants and Martin on the outward voyage of the First Fleet (“always distinguished for good behavior”) and now, seeing them on board the Gorgon, could not suppress his esteem for them. “I confess that I never looked at these people,” he wrote, “without pity and astonishment. They had miscarried in a heroic struggle for liberty; after having combated every hardship, and conquered every difficulty . . . I could not but reflect with admiration, at the strange combination of circumstances which had again brought us together, to baffle human foresight, and confound human speculation.”⁸

Mary Bryant’s sufferings were not over yet. On May 5, her three-year-old Charlotte died and was buried at sea. When she reached London and was committed to Newgate as an escaped felon, all she could look forward to was another transport ship, more irons and a second voyage to Botany Bay. But Mary Bryant soon acquired friends. Word got out about that indomitable curiosity, “the Girl from Botany Bay,” who had so far overcome the inherent weakness of her sex to make this epic voyage through cannibals, coral, fever-isles and mountainous seas, from the edge of the chart back to England and civilization. Surely a just government could not send this bereaved heroine and her companions back to the thief-colony? So thought James Boswell, for one; and this kind-hearted writer pressed Dundas, the home secretary, and Evan Nepean, the undersecretary of state, with letters urging clemency and pardon for her. In May 1793, Mary Bryant received an unconditional pardon. Boswell then settled an annuity of £.10 on her, and back she went to Cornwall. In November 1793 her four companions were pardoned, too; one of them promptly, if unexpectedly, enlisted in the New South Wales Corps and set sail again for Botany Bay.⁹

Boswell’s interest in Mary Bryant was such that his friends, used to his amatory divings among the lower classes, joked that Botany Bay had given him a new mistress. One of them, William Parsons, penned a “Heroic Epistle from Mary Broad in Cornwall to James Boswell, Esq., in London.” Mary languishes in her new, Cornish exile, pining for the Apollo of Auchinleck:

Was it for this I braved the ocean’s roar,

And plied those thousand leagues the lab’ring oar?

Oh, rather had I stayed, the willing prey

Of grief and famine in the direful bay!

Or perished, whelmed in the Atlantic tide!

Or, home returned, in air suspended died!

Instead, she dreams of being united with her Boswell in the ultimate transport of bliss, their liebestod on the scaffold at Tyburn—a new thrill for her, and even for him:

Great in our lives, and in our deaths as great,

Embracing and embraced, we’ll meet our fate:

A happy pair, whom in supreme delight

One love, one cord, one joy, one death unite!

Let crowds behold with tender sympathy

Love’s true sublime in our last agony!

First let our weight the trembling scaffold bear

Till we consummate the last bliss in air.¹⁰

But despite the elegantly turned prurience of his friends, there is nothing to suggest that Boswell’s interest in Mary Bryant—who faded from the newspapers and from history, on her return to Cornwall—was inspired by anything but compassion. His only souvenir of her (apart from some receipts for the annuity) was a packet of dried Australian “sweet tea” leaves, which she had held on to through thick and thin and given to him as a curiosity; they now repose in the archives of Yale University, very far from Botany Bay.

ii

AFTER THE BRYANTS made their escape from Sydney, security there had to be tightened. Collins, in April 1791, described the new arrangements: a sentinel at night on each wharf at Sydney Cove, and no boats allowed to leave the cove without direct spoken word from the officer of the guard, who also had to have a written list of all personnel, convict or free, allowed to use the fishing skiffs after sunset. Sydney Harbor was the gate to this little police-state and it had to be kept locked. In the beginning, with few ships coming and going, this was easy. But as traffic increased, the loophole widened. The Bryants’ escape gave absconders new heart. “The lenity and compassion expressed in England [for them],” Hunter grumbled, “I fear may have contributed to encourage similar attempts now. Had those people been sent back and tried in this country for taking away the boat . . . we should not have any schemes of that kind projected now.”¹¹

American whaling captains out of Nantucket and Sag Harbor, who cared not a spit for English penal policies, let convicts stow away when they needed new crewmen. Some English transports, turned back into trading vessels for the homeward voyage, also let convicts on board—no less than thirty absconders were flushed from the transport Hillsborough as she made ready to leave Sydney in 1799. Even the French captain Nicolas Baudin, while mapping the southern coast of Australia in 1802–3, found eight convict stowaways on board; he cast them ashore on King Island in the Bass Strait, without holding out much hope of their survival.¹²

There were natural sympathies between convicts and sailors, for some tyrannous captains treated tars little better than prisoners. Crewmen would sometimes stow prisoners away in crannies that were unknown even to their officers. Before a ship sailed from Sydney or Hobart, the constables would swarm through her, banging on casks and prodding bales and sacks with their bayonets. Watchers on shore would see white smoke pouring from the ship’s ports and ventilators, a sign that sulphur bombs had been ignited to smoke the stowaways out of their hiding places like rabbits from a warren. In 1814 a search of the trader Earl Spencer produced twenty-eight escapees, some concealed in barrels of flour and cheese and one wrapped up in a spare jib in the sail-locker. When the Harriet, a merchant ship out of Sydney, was found to have brought sixteen escaped convicts to the Cape even though she had been “diligently Searched” before sailing in December 1817, Governor Lachlan Macquarie complained to Lord Bathurst that

it is scarcely possible to find these Runaways, when the Sailors are in league with them and Connive at their Concealment on board, few ships leaving this Port without Carrying off some Convicts of both Sexes in the same way . . . [T]he Convicts, who have been the Shortest Time in the Colony, are always those who are the Most Anxious to make their Escape from it.¹³

In 1826 a memo to George Arthur, lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land, outlined some of the security problems in Hobart. The seal trade in Bass Strait was mainly carried on by runaways working for mainland businessmen, most of whom were Emancipists themselves. Arthur’s correspondent lamented

the facility with which a Prisoner gets conveyed away from the Colony in the boats and small Vessels employed in Sealing . . . They soon find Employment in the Straits, become sharers in Plunder, and finally get away to New Zealand, or some other more distant Country.¹⁴

Arthur clamped such strict port regulations on Hobart that not even a mouse, one would have thought, could get through them. Every ship in the Derwent River had to have a 24-hour officer watch, or else face severe and automatic fines. All vessels leaving were “searched and smoked”—fumigated with sulphur to drive stowaways out. For every convict found on board a vessel, each officer and seaman was fined a month’s wages, to be paid in full by the captain before the ship could sail. Informers were exempt from this, and any informer got half the total fine from the ship’s crew if a convict were found on board, the search-party receiving the other half. Since any seaman who informed in this way—and ended up with his shipmate’s wages—would face an unusually short and unpleasant life after his vessel cleared the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, Arthur’s regulations permitted the informer to “have his discharge from the ship should he require it,” unless he had actually brought the absconders on board himself.¹⁵

By 1820, Hobart was the main port for whaling and sealing, and Sydney the same for island trading in sandalwood, pearlshell, béche-de-mer and New Zealand spar timber, throughout the South Pacific. Each had to be both a jail and a port of call—an awkward contradiction. In stowing away, most convicts merely exchanged one kind of imprisonment for another. It was a fine arrangement for the ship’s masters because, once on board, the convict could not return to land—not, at any rate, to New South Wales or Van Diemen’s Land—without risking the gallows. He was shanghaied, and there was no romance in this cramped world of the fo’c’sle and the skinning-knife. Yet it was better than the chain gang. By the 1830s the southern bays and refuges, from the Bay of Islands in New Zealand (a veritable rookery of absconders) to the Recherche Archipelago on the west coast of Australia, were littered with grim little communities and patriarchal clans of convicts.

On other trading vessels, they ranged even farther afield. The sandalwood trade littered the central Pacific with escaped convicts. For a short time, between about 1812 and 1816, American ships had been kept out of the Pacific by the British-American War. This gave the Sydney traders, merchants like William Campbell and Simeon Lord, a near-monopoly on the cutting of sandalwood, the rare and sweetly aromatic timber for which there was an enormous market among the Chinese. It grew on mid-Pacific islands, most profusely in the Marquesas and the Tuamotus. Between 1811 and 1821, colonial trading vessels out of Sydney, such as Campbell’s diplomatically named Governor Macquarie, brought back perhaps a quarter of the total sandalwood harvest of the Marquesas. On the islands, the wood was not so much gathered as plundered. If a captain ran short of trading goods to exchange for sandalwood, he would steal them from one island to sell to another, as John Martin, master of the Queen Charlotte, stole canoes from Tahuata to sell in Nuku Hiva in 1815.

No law restrained these captains, and only their own violence—the lash, the battened hatch, the duck’s-foot pistol with its splayed barrels that could blast a fan of slugs down on a companionway and make a shambles of mutineers—could restrain their crews. They would find space on board for any escaping convict. But it was a one-way trip: Such absconders would be cast ashore three thousand miles from Sydney to fend for themselves as beachcombers. Sometimes a captain would be genuinely surprised by their presence on board. Thomas Hammond, master of the Pacific trader Endeavour, did not know he had five escaped convicts until they came blinking from their holes in the ‘tween-decks on the way to New Zealand. He wanted to put them ashore there, but the magistrate in the Bay of Islands refused to let them land unless Hammond left six months’ provisions for them, so he sailed on and dumped them on the beach of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas.¹⁶

It is not known how many escaped convicts ended up as beachcombers on the sandalwood islands. Hundreds of them must have been scattered in remote parts of the Pacific. “Strangers in their new societies and scandals to their old,” they contributed their own violence and opportunism, incubated and hardened by the System, to the ruin of the island cultures. By 1850 there was no part of the Pacific where the name of Botany Bay did not carry a sour infected reek—the breath of England, gone carious in double exile.

It was much harder for convicts to steal a boat for themselves than to stow away on someone else’s; but that did not prevent some from trying. Most attempts to escape from Australia on stolen or secretly built craft failed. The Bryants’ escape became legendary precisely because it was unique. More typical by far was the escape in September 1790 of a party of five life-sentence convicts off the Second Fleet. They stole a punt from Rose Hill, poled it down the Parramatta River to Sydney Harbor, stole a “very small and weak” skiff from the look-out station at South Head and set out for Tahiti with a week’s food, three iron pots, some bedding and no compass. Naturally, no trace of them was ever found. One desperate man tried to get away from Major Foveaux’s atrocious reign on Norfolk Island, around 1800, by stealing a door, cutting two leg-holes in it, and paddling out over the Kingston reef in the hope of somehow floating a thousand miles to the Australian mainland. In secret, men constructed skiffs out of green eucalyptus wood, which opened and sank; risked being skinned by the cat-o’-nine-tails to hide precious iron nails in their mouths, armpits, anuses; stole twine and needles to sew coracles out of kangaroo skin. Thomas Cook, author of The Exile’s Lamentations, spent weeks working by moonlight in relays with four accomplices, building a boat hidden in the bush of Norfolk Island:

Many sleepless hours did I experience in silent meditation on the schemes of Escape. All consideration of the long and perilous voyage of 1000 miles in a precarious Boat over the watery deep without either chart or compass was waived by the thought of my afflicted Parents, and the impossibility of my ever more seeing them in this world. . . . Blessed and sweet Liberty, that I had been doomed to forfeit in a place of unparallelled torture & sin, now appeared to me in all its grandeur. Those who I held dear now appeared in my dreams as transported by joy at my presence. But Alas! How visionary my calculations! A clue was gained to the boat by some means then to me unknown.¹⁷

The skiff, nearly finished, was found and destroyed. Such projects could not be kept secret, especially in the confines of Norfolk Island.

Sometimes, though not often, a group of convicts would manage to pirate a full-size ship. In 1797 the Cumberland, a Sydney-built smack, the “largest and best boat in the colony,” according to Governor Hunter, was seized by an Irish convict crew on a routine trip delivering stores from Sydney to the Hawkesbury River; she went north and was never seen again, although Hunter sent a rowboat laden with armed men after her for sixty blistering miles.¹⁸

Late one Sunday night in May 1808, as the brig Harrington was riding quietly at anchor in Farm Cove in Sydney Harbor under the very windows of the Pacific trader William Campbell, her owner, a “body of desperadoes”—some fifty convicts—silently came alongside in boats and swarmed over her rail. Her chief officer awoke staring down the bore of a pistol held by the ringleader, Robert Stewart; other convicts stole forward and pinioned the crew. They cut the ship’s anchor-cables and used the rowboats to tow her down the harbor to the Heads, and by dawn they were well out to sea. Stewart put the officers and crew over the side, into the boats. It took them eight hours to row back to Sydney, and by then the Harrington was over the horizon. It was thought that she would never be seen again—she had just been fully provisioned for a voyage to Fiji—but three months later she ran on a reef in the South China Sea and was taken by a Manila-bound British frigate, the Phoenix. Robert Stewart and other ringleaders were shipped back to Sydney and hanged.¹⁹

Despite a widespread belief among the free that convicts who pirated boats wrought orgies of vengeance on their unhappy crews and passengers, the absconders usually showed pity and moderation. In 1826 the brig Wellington was seized by the sixty-six convicts it was taking to Norfolk Island. They killed nobody and, having carried the ship, solicitously treated the minor flesh wounds, cuts and bruises some of the guards had suffered. Having shaped their course for New Zealand, the convicts set up a “Council of Seven” to keep order on board and especially to punish any mutineers who tried to dishonor the escape by brutalizing their former guards. Such people were to be put back in irons and then dropped ashore in New Zealand, “instead of proceeding with us to our ultimate destination.” One of the convicts was actually found guilty of “attempting a revolt and mutiny” by urging his fellow prisoners to revenge and was sentenced to spend the rest of the run to New Zealand in irons day and night on deck. The new masters of the Wellington kept a log of these respectable proceedings, parts of which sound cozy, almost domestic:

This being Christmas Day, and the only deficiency we have at present found on the part of government, was in not supplying us with plums; issued an order, if any individual on board had any plums they must be given up for all hands; plums were procured, four geese killed, together with three sheep, spent a very comfortable day, moderately indulging ourselves with some gin and brandy.²⁰

The Wellington and its escapees were recaptured by a whaler in New Zealand, and this log told in their favor at their trial. When their merciful conduct was revealed—and confirmed by the ship’s guards and crew—there was a swell of public sympathy for them, and out of twenty-three men condemned to hang, only five were actually executed.

The prisoners who seized the brig Cyprus in 1828 were less fortunate, although their escapade became as celebrated in convict lore as the Bryants’. By the early 1830s they had become the subject of one of the “treason songs” or proscribed convict ballads. The men of Cyprus, reconvicted in Van Diemen’s Land for “little trifling offences,” were being taken from Hobart to the penal station of Macquarie Harbor, “that place of tyranny”:

Down Hobart Town streets we were gathered, on the Cyprus brig conveyed,

Our topsails they were hoisted, boys, our anchor it was weighed,

The wind it blew a nor’-nor’-west, and on we steered straightway,

Till we brought her to an anchorage in a place called Recherche Bay.

The facts do not match the song at all points. Far from being guilty of minor offenses, most of the thirty-one convicts going to Macquarie Harbor on the Cyprus had been convicted of capital crimes but had had their sentences commuted. The most intrepid of them was a former sailor, William Swallow. Swallow was a veritable Houdini. In 1810 he had hijacked a schooner in Port Jackson and been sent to Van Diemen’s Land as his secondary punishment. The ship that took him there, the Deveron, was disabled in a storm and Swallow, “remarking that his own life was of little moment,” volunteered to go aloft and cut away a slatting tangle of broken spars and rigging. It seems that the Deveron’s sailors were so grateful for his courage in saving the ship that, as soon as Swallow was landed in Hobart, they smuggled him back on board. Thus he escaped, and got all the way west across the ocean to Rio, where he was captured again by the British authorities. Once more he got free and stowed away on a London-bound boat. But he was finally recognized in London, arrested and shipped out again to Van Diemen’s Land. Such was the man who, “confined within a dismal hole” with his fellow convicts as the Cyprus rode at anchor near the southern tip of Van Diemen’s Land, decided to make a last bid

To take possession of that brig or else die every man:

The plan it being approv’d upon, we soon retired to rest,

And early next morning, boys, we put them to the test.

Up steps bold Jack Muldeamon, his comrades three more—

We soon disarmed the sentry and left him in his gore:

“Liberty, O liberty! It’s liberty we crave—

Surrender up your arms, my boys, or the sea shall be your grave!”

After a rush, a scuffle and some shooting, the convicts overpowered the guard and carried the ship. They put the officer-in-charge, Lieutenant Carew, over the side along with his wife, the soldiers and thirteen convicts who had not joined the mutiny. The Cyprus was heavily laden with stores for Macquarie Harbor, enough to sustain 400 men for six months, but the convicts gave the forty-five castaways a stingy ration—a live sheep, some salt beef, a bag of biscuits and 30 pounds of flour, with no weapons and no boat:

First we landed the soldiers, the captain and his crew,

We gave three cheers for Liberty, and soon bid them adieu:

William Swallow he was chosen our commander for to be—We gave three cheers for Liberty, and boldly put to sea.

Lay on your golden trumpets, boys, and sound their cheerful note!

The Cyprus brig’s on the ocean, boys, by Justice does she float!

After prolonged sufferings from exposure and starvation, living on a handful of raw mussels and a quarter-biscuit a day, the castaways eventually got back to Hobart. They might not have done so without a convict named Popjoy, who framed up a 12-foot coracle out of mimosa branches, covered it with hammock canvas (sewn by Mrs. Carew, who had a needle) and waterproofed it with soap and resin. Popjoy and Carew sailed this fragile shell twenty miles to Partridge Island, where they were saved by a passing ship.^*

In the meantime, the Cyprus and her pirates were well away. Swallow shaped his course for Tahiti, and then turned north for Japan, where he and his crew landed some time in 1829; seven of the convicts jumped ship there. Several months later, Swallow and three of his mates appeared in a skiff off the Chinese trading port of Whampoa. They had abandoned the Cyprus. Swallow presented himself to officials in Canton as Captain Waldron of the ship Edward, set on fire and sunk at sea by the Japanese. In this way, Swallow and his mates wangled a free passage home to England. Unfortunately, soon after they sailed, other survivors of the Cyprus turned up in Canton and Swallow’s story began to unravel. Eventually, Swallow and his mates were arrested in England, and were identified by Popjoy, who, by a bizarre stroke of colonial ill-luck, had returned to London after receiving a free pardon for helping save the castaways at Recherche Bay. But Popjoy insisted that Swallow had been forced by his fellow absconders to navigate the ship, and the court believed him. So, although Swallow’s companions were hanged, he was not. For the third time, he was forced to go on board a transport and make the long, lugubrious journey to Australia. It was his last. As soon as he arrived in Hobart, he was shipped to Macquarie Harbor—and this time there was no escape. William Swallow eventually died of tuberculosis in the penal colony of Port Arthur, to which he had been transferred when Macquarie Harbor was closed down in 1834. Unfortunately, he never wrote a memoir of his adventures.²¹

But one later absconder did: James Porter, a twenty-six-year-old Londoner who helped his convict companions, ex-sailors among them, to hijack the brig Frederick from the slipway where they had built her for the government at Macquarie Harbor in 1833, just as the settlement was being abandoned. This caused much embarrassment, not least because the vessel had been named after one of Lieutenant-Governor Arthur’s seven sons. They cast the guards and crew ashore (all survived) and with remarkable skill and courage sailed clear across the Pacific to the coast of Chile, where they abandoned her to sink and took to the longboat. Reaching Valdivia, they came before its Chilean governor, who assumed that they were pirates, not innocent shipwrecked sailors, and promised to shoot them. Porter saved their skins with a stirring speech (as recorded years later, by himself):

“Avast there! We as sailors shipwrecked and in distress expected when we made this port to have been treated in a Christian-like manner, not as though we were dogs! Is this the way you would have treated us in 1818 when the British Tars were fighting for your independence, and bleeding in your cause against the old Spaniards? If we were pirates do you suppose we should be so weak as to cringe to your tyranny? Never! I also wish you to understand that if we are shot England will know of it and will be revenged . . . [S]hould you put your threat into execution we will teach you Patriots how to die.”²²

Impressed by this magnificent bluff, the governor let them stay unmolested, and asked his superiors in Santiago to issue them with residence permits. Porter and his companions now settled down to a picaresque life among the ladies and knife-wielders of Chile. But the governor was replaced soon afterward, and his successor—suspicious that Porter and his shipmates were, in fact, escaped convicts—alerted a passing British frigate, HMS Blond. Thus they were taken again, first back to England, and then on a second transport ship to Van Diemen’s Land. On the weary voyage south, Porter was falsely denounced as a mutineer by two of his former shipmates, Charles Lyon and William Cheshire, who hoped to curry favor with the captain and escape hanging for piracy when, as seemed inevitable, they were recognized in Hobart. “Knowing my innocence I stood nearly petrified,” he recounted:

I was seized by the soldiers and seamen, lashed to a grating (and to that degree until the blood hoosed from the parts where the lashings went round different parts of my person) and a lump of a black-fellow flogged me across the lines and every other part of my body until my head sank on my breast. As for the quantity of lashes I cannot say, for I would not give them the satisfaction to scringe to it, until nature gave way through exhaustion.

Then he and his mate William Shires were chained below, bleeding and infected, hands manacled behind their backs, in a steaming rat’s-hole and were given no more than quarter-rations of water and food for three weeks, until they presented “the appearance of anatomies [i.e., skeletons] more than living beings.” “I craved for death,” Porter noted, but on recovering the use of his arms he wrote a pathetic verse on a scrounged leaf of paper:

How wretched is an Exile’s state of mind

When not one gleam of hope on earth remain,

Through grief worn down, with servile chains confined,

And not one friend to soothe his heartfelt pain.

Too true I know that man was made to mourn,

A heavy portion’s fallen to my lot

With anguish full my aching heart is torn

Far from my friends, by all the world forgot.

The feathered race with splendid plumage gay

Extent their throats with a discordant sound,

With Liberty they spring from spray to spray,

While I a wretched Exile gaze around.

Farewell my sister, Aged Aunts dear,

Ere long my glass of life will cease to run,

In silence drop a sympathetic tear

For your Unhappy, Exiled, Long-Lost Son.

O cease, my troubled aching Heart, to beat,

Since happiness so far from thee has fled!

Haste, haste unto your silent cold retreat

In clay-cold earth to mingle with the Dead.

But Porter was not to die; or not yet. He survived the voyage and landed in Hobart in March 1837, where he was instantly recognized as one of the pirates of the Frederick. He was tried and convicted of piracy, despite his ingenious argument in defense: As the vessel had not been formally commissioned by the government—“it was canvas, rope, boarding and trenails, put together shipwise—yet it was not a legal ship: the seizure might be theft, but not piracy.” Luckily for him, “the bloodthirsty Arthur” had left Van Diemen’s Land five months earlier, “and had not the colony been under the Government of the humane Sir John Franklin I should not now have been alive to have given this small Narrative.” So Porter and Shires did not hang. They ended up on Norfolk Island, where Porter was able to write his memoirs under the kindly eye of Captain Alexander Maconochie.

These were the last men to escape from Macquarie Harbor, but they were by no means the first. Ever since 1821, when Lieutenant-Governor Sorell had pitched this dreaded prison settlement on the isolated west coast of Van Diemen’s Land, convicts had been trying to get away from it, mostly on foot. In 1822 and 1823, one man in ten disappeared. In 1824, the rate rose to nearly one in seven. They went inland, trying to reach the settled and farmed districts to the east, and most of them died. In the long list of Macquarie Harbor absconders for the first six years of settlement, only eight carry a brief remark like “Reported to have reached the cultivated part of the island: this requires confirmation.” The rest is a gray official litany, punctuated by sparks of saturnine humor. Timothy Crawley, Richard Morris, John Newton, June 2, 1824: “Seized the soldiers’ boat, provicions, fire-arms &c., and supposed to have perished in their way across the interior. The boat was afterwards found moored to a Stump, and written upon her stern, with chalk, ‘to be Sold.’” But the usual requiem was “Supposed to have perished in the woods.”²³

Only one man escaped from Macquarie Harbor twice. His name was Alexander Pearce (1790–1824), a little, pockmarked, blue-eyed Irishman from County Monaghan who had been transported for seven years at the Armagh Assizes in 1819, for stealing six pairs of shoes.²⁴ He had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1820, and as an assigned servant he gave continuous trouble to his masters by running away, stealing and getting drunk. He soon learned enough bush skills to “stay out” for three months at a stretch with some other absconders. Flogging did not impress him. Eventually, in 1822, he was sent to Macquarie Harbor for forging a two-pound money order and absconding from service. On September 20, 1822, Pearce seized an open boat from Kelly’s Basin on Macquarie Harbor, where he had been working in a sawpit gang. Seven other convicts piled into the craft with him. Two of them had already tried to escape from Van Diemen’s Land by stealing a schooner moored in the Derwent estuary: Matthew Travers, an Irishman under life sentence of transportation, and Robert Greenhill, a sailor from Middlesex. For that failed escape, they had been sent to Macquarie Harbor. The others were an ex-soldier, William Dalton (perjury in Gibraltar, fourteen years); a highway robber, Thomas Bodenham; William Kennelly, alias Bill Cornelius, transported for seven years and re-sentenced to Macquarie Harbor for an escape attempt; John Mather, a young Scottish baker, working a seven-year sentence and then sent to Macquarie Harbor for forging a £15 money order; and a man called “Little Brown,” whose Christian name is unknown and who cannot, due to the commonness of his surname, be identified.

Flogged with the adrenaline of escape, the eight men rowed across the harbor, ran the boat ashore, smashed its bottom with a stolen axe, and set out on foot. At first they made good time through the dank maze of the shore forest, lugging their axes and their meager rations. They spent the night on the slopes of Mount Sorell, not daring to light a fire, and struck east the next morning toward the Derwent River, where they planned to steal a schooner, sail it downstream past Hobart and out into Storm Bay and so “proceed home,” 14,000 miles to England. The first leg of their route lay across the Darwin Plateau, keeping to the north of the Gordon River.²⁵

Before them, although they did not know it, lay some of the worst country in Australia. Even today, bushwalkers rarely venture into the mountains between Macquarie Harbor and the inland plains: fold after fold, scarp on scarp, with giant trees growing to a hundred feet from clefts in the steep rock where, clambering along rotted limbs or floundering through the entangling ferns and creepers, one cannot possibly move in a straight line. The convicts struggled along in a gray, dripping twilight from dawn to dusk, with one man beating the scrub in front “to make the road.” At night, like exhausted troglodytes, afraid of winds and shadows, they lit a fire in the cleft of a rock and huddled around it to sleep as best they could. Within a week, the weather turned to gales and sleet and their little store of tinder was soaked. Then they finished the last of their rations. Hungry, cold and failing, the band struggled for another two days through “a very rough country . . . in a very weak state for want of provisions.”

But now the fugitives were straggling. “Little Brown . . . was the worst walker of any; he always fell behind, and then kept cooing [sic] so that we said we would leave him behind if he could not keep up better.”²⁶ No man felt able to gather all the wood for a fire. In the feeble hysteria of exhaustion, they began to squabble about who should do it; in the end, each convict scraped together enough twigs for himself and eight little fires were lit. Kennelly made what might or might not have been meant as a joke. “I am so weak,” he said to Pearce and Greenhill, “that I could eat a piece of a man.”

They thought about that all night, and “in the morning,” Pearce’s narrative goes on,

there were four of us for a feast. Bob Greenhill was the first who introduced it, and said he had seen the like done before, and that it eat much like a little pork.

John Mather protested. It would be murder, he said; and useless, too, since they might not be able to choke the flesh down. Greenhill overrode him:

“I will warrant you,” said Greenhill, “I will well do it first myself and eat the first of it; but you must all lend a hand, so that you may all be equal in the crime.” We then consulted who should fall. Greenhill said, “Dalton; as he volunteered to be a flogger, we will kill him.”

In these flat declarative outlines, the scene might come from an Elizabethan revenge-tragedy: the conclave, the ritual to overcome the great taboo, the literary diction, the avenging choice of the flogger as victim. Indeed, it may be too pat; Dalton was never a flogger at Macquarie Harbor, and other “literary” touches in the narrative may come from the amanuensis to whom Pearce eventually dictated his story. But in any case, Dalton was killed. He fell sound asleep at about three in the morning, and Greenhill’s axe

struck him on the head, and he never spoke a word after . . . Matthew Travers with a knife also came and cut his throat, and bled him; we then dragged him to a distance, and cut off his clothes, and tore out his inside, and cut off his head; then Matthew Travers and Greenhill put his heart and liver on the fire and eat it before it was right warm; they asked the rest would they have any, but they would not have any that night.

But the next morning, hunger won. They had been without food for four days. Dalton’s flesh was carved and doled out into seven roughly equal portions, and the band got moving again.

Brown was walking slower and slower; he must have reflected as he limped along that he, the weakest, would be next. Kennelly, too, was afraid for his life. And so the two of them fell back, and silently disappeared in the forest mazes of the Engineer Range, hoping to get back to Macquarie Harbor. Realizing that their story “would hang us all,” the others tried to catch them but failed. On October 12, Brown and Kennelly were found half-dead from exposure on the shore of Macquarie Harbor, still with pieces of human flesh in their pockets. Brown died in the prison hospital on October 15, and Kennelly four days later.

Now five convicts were left. They reached the Franklin River, swollen with rain, and spent two days trying to cross it; Pearce, Greenhill and Mather went across first and dragged the other two over with the help of a long pole. Mather was crippled with dysentery and the others “were scarcely able to move, for we were so cold and wet.” But they struggled on across the Deception Range and then the Surveyor Range after that, and on October 15 they saw below them a fine open valley, probably the Loddon Plains. Here, in the long grass by a creek, thoughts of fresh food rose again. It was Bodenham’s turn to die. As he slept, Greenhill split his skull. Ten years later, the first official explorer to reach the Loddon Plains, a surveyor, would find human bones in this valley.²⁷

Four men were left, and they kept marching. By about October 22, they had apparently reached the first line of the Western Tiers and before them lay “a very fine country,” full of “many kangaroos and emus, and game of all kinds”; but they had no hunting weapons, and the frustration of starving while watching the mobs of shy gray marsupials bounding invulnerably past must have been overpowering. “We then said to ourselves,” Pearce declared, “that we would all die together before anything should happen.”

But Greenhill had no intention of dying together with anyone, and Mather was very apprehensive. He and Pearce “went to one side, and Mather said, Pearce, let us go on by ourselves; you see what kind of a cove Greenhill is; he would kill his father before he would fast one day.” But on that open button-grass moor, which may have been the King William Plains, they could not have lost Greenhill. Since he carried the only axe they had left, he could not be killed; and none of the famished men could hobble faster than the rest. Thus bound together, they went on; and around the last week in October (from here, the chronology of Pearce’s accounts grows hazier), they stopped by a little creek and lit a fire to boil the last of Bodenham, “which scarcely kept the Faculties in Motion.”²⁸

Mather could not eat his share. He had gathered some fern roots, which he boiled and wolfed down, but

he found it would not rest on his stomach (no wonder) for such a Mess It could not be expected would ever digest in any Mortal whatever, which occasioned him to vomit to ease his Stomach & while in the act of discharging it from his Chest, Greenhill still showing his spontaneous habit of bloodshed seized the Axe & crept behind him gave him a blow on the head.

It did not kill Mather. He jumped up and grappled with Greenhill, wresting the axe from him. Pearce and Travers managed, for a time, to calm the two men down. But Mather was doomed, and that night the four men made camp around a fire “in a very pensive and melancholy mood.” Greenhill and Travers, bosom friends, were determined to eat Mather next; Pearce, without telling Mather, was secretly on their side. He walked a little way from the fire and looked back: “I saw Travers and Greenhill collaring him.” The team was at work again, and Pearce made no effort to save poor John Mather, who now made ready to die a Christian death, very far from England.

They told him they would give him half an hour to pray for himself, which was agreed to; he then gave the Prayer-book to me, and laid down his head, and Greenhill took the axe and killed him. We then stopped two days in this place.

The three men kept heading east, but Travers was sinking. He had been bitten on the foot by a snake and could no longer walk. Terrified that his two companions would eat him, he begged them to leave him to die and go on with what remained of Mather, which might be rations enough to carry them to a settlement. Greenhill refused to abandon him. He and Pearce stayed with the delirious Travers for five days, tending him. Travers lapsed in and out of his fever, “in great agitation for fear that they would dispose of him. . . . [T]he unfortunate Man all this time had but little or no sleep.”²⁹

They half-dragged, half-carried Travers for several days more. But it was no use:

[Greenhill and Pearce] began to Comment on the impossibility of ever being able to keep Traviss up with them for their strength was so nearly exhausted it was impossible for them to think of making any Settlement unless they left him. . . . It would be folly for them to leave him, for his flesh would answer as well for Subsistence as the others.

Travers awoke and, through his haze of pain, heard them talking.

In the greatest agony [he] requested them in the most affecting manner not to delay themselves any longer, for it was morally impossible for him to attempt Travelling any more & therefore it would be useless for them to attempt to take him with them. . . . The Remonstrances of Traviss strengthened the designs of his companions.³⁰

They killed Travers with the axe. The victim “only stretched himself in his agony, and then expired.”

Now they were two. But for the kangaroos, the terrain through which Pearce and Greenhill were now walking was not unlike England: undulating fields of grass sprinkled with little copses, a mild and fruitful landscape ringed with hills, all golden in the early summer light.

Greenhill began to fret, and said he would never get to any port with his life. I kept up my spirits all along, and thought we must shortly come to some inhabited parts of the country, from the very great length we had travelled.

But there could be no doubt that one would sooner or later eat the other. Greenhill had the axe, and the two men walked at a fixed distance apart. When Pearce stopped, so did Greenhill. When one squatted, so did the other. There was no question of sleep. “I watched Greenhill for two nights, for I thought he eyed me more than usual.” One imagines them: a small fire of eucalyptus branches in the immense cave of the southern night, beneath the drift and icy prickle of unfamiliar stars; the secret bush noises beyond the outer ring of firelight—rustle of grass, flutter and croaking of nocturnal birds—all sharpened and magnified by fear, with the two men fixedly watching one another across the fire. One night Pearce became convinced of Greenhill’s “bad disposition as to me.” He waited, and near dawn his adversary fell asleep. “I run up, and took the axe from under his head, and struck him with it, and killed him. I then took part of his arm and thigh, and went on for several days.”

Pearce was now utterly alone. “I then took a piece of a leather belt,” he notes laconically, “and was going to hang myself; but I took another notion not to do it.” He walked on a little further and blundered into his first stroke of good luck since Macquarie Harbor: a deserted aboriginal campsite. The blacks had seen him coming and had fled, leaving pieces of game scattered around their still-lit cooking-fires.

Pearce settled down and gorged himself on the first non-human meat he had tasted in nearly seven weeks. It gave him strength to keep going for several days until, from a hilltop, he glimpsed the landmark that signalled his arrival in the farmed country of the Derwent Valley: Table Mountain, a hill just south of Lake Crescent. Below him lay the Ouse, a large tributary stream of the Derwent.

Two days later, following the river down, Pearce came on a flock of sheep. He managed to grab and dismember a lamb. As he was devouring its raw flesh, a convict shepherd emerged from the bush “and said he would shoot me if I did not stop immediately.”

The shepherd’s name was McGuire, and he soon realized that he knew the blood-boltered little goblin he had at gunpoint. Before his banishment to Macquarie Harbor, Pearce had worked on a sheep run nearby. McGuire “carried the remains of the lamb, and took me with him into his hut, and made meat ready for me, where I stopped for three days, and he gave me all attendance.” He would not turn a fellow Irishman in to the authorities, and for several weeks more Pearce hid in the huts of McGuire and other Irish convict shepherds. Then he fell in with a pair of bushrangers, Davis and Churton, who armed him; and they skulked about in the bush together for two more months. But his new companions had a £10 reward on their heads, and convict solidarity—never a dependable bond—could not hold up forever against that. On January 11, 1823, near the town of Jericho, the three of them were arrested by soldiers of the 48th Regiment acting on the word of informers and were brought down to Hobart in chains.

Churton and Davis were tried and hanged, an automatic punishment for bushrangers. While in jail, Pearce confessed the whole story of his escape—cannibalism and all—to the acting magistrate, the Reverend Robert Knopwood. It was transcribed and sealed, and not a word of it was believed. The authorities assumed—in the manner of the Cretan paradox—that since all convicts were liars, this one could only be covering for his “mates,” who must still be alive and at large. This grotesque tall story could only be the invention of a felon’s debased mind. There were no living witnesses to that nightmare trek from Macquarie Harbor to the Derwent, and no corpus delicti. And so Pearce was not executed; instead, they sent him back to Macquarie Harbor, where he arrived in February 1823.

He became, of course, a celebrity among the convicts. He was living proof that a man could get out of Macquarie Harbor, and only he kept the secret of how to do it. One newly arrived convict, a young laborer named Thomas Cox, kept begging to come along the next time. Finally, Pearce gave in to Cox’s whispered entreaties; but he would not try the eastern route again. Instead, he decided to try and go north to Port Dalrymple—once again, through totally unexplored territory, but perhaps not as bad as the Western Tiers. On November 16, 1823, the two men absconded.³¹

They did not get far. On November 21, a lookout on Sarah Island saw a plume of smoke rising from a distant beach. The fire was also seen by a convict transport, the Waterloo, as it made sail for Hell’s Gates. The ship lowered a boat, and the shore guard dispatched a launch. Before dark, the exhaused Pearce was back in the settlement where he told the commandant that he had killed Cox two days before and had been eating him since. By way of proof, he produced a piece of human flesh weighing about half a pound. Next morning he led a search-party to the bank of a stream, where Cox’s body lay “in a dreadfully mangled state,” according to one official report,

being cut right through the middle, the head off, the privates tom off, all the flesh off the calves of the legs, back of the thighs and loins, also off the thick part of the arms, which the inhuman wretch declared was the most delicious food.³²

Probably Pearce killed Cox in rage, not gluttony; his own account rings true, despite its apparent gratuitousness:

We travelled on several days without food, except the tops of trees and shrubs, until we came upon King’s River. I asked Cox if he could swim; he replied he could not; I remarked that had I been aware of it he should not have been my companion. . . . [T]he arrangement for crossing the river created words, and I killed Cox with the axe. . . . I swam the river with the intention of keeping the coast around [to] Port Dalrymple; my heart failed me, and I resolved to return.³³

The authorities did the only thing they could. Pearce was shipped straight down to Hobart on the Waterloo, tried and hanged. When he was dead, a local artist, Thomas Bock, drew his likeness. The court had ordered that, as its ultimate brand of infamy, Pearce should be “disjointed” after death—delivered to the anatomizing surgeons. This was done, and Mr. Crockett, the head doctor in the Hobart Colonial Hospital, made a souvenir of the cannibal’s head. He skinned it and scraped the flesh away, plucked out the eyes and the brain, and boiled the skull clean. Thirty years later, the relic was given to an American phrenologist, Dr. Samuel Morton, who was busy assembling his collection of skulls and shrunken heads, more than a thousand specimens, known as “The American Golgotha.” It went into a glass cabinet in the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, where it may still be seen, a yellowed label pasted across the blackened ivory bone, recording its small role in the taxonomy of an extinct scientific fad.

iii

IN EARLY New South Wales, up to 1825, the escaped convict was a bogey, a nuisance, an embarrassment to the seamless image of Authority—but rarely more. In Van Diemen’s Land, however, he became a social force.

We have seen in Chapter 5 how the Tasmanian bushrangers began as convict kangaroo hunters who stayed out in the bush and formed gangs. Until the mid-1820s, the government had little chance of catching them, as it had few soldiers and none were skilled bushmen. No squad of stumbling “lobsters” could take these bandits. In the wild lovely terrain of Van Diemen’s Land, riven by gorges and precipices, that was like trying to pluck quicksilver from a carpet with one’s fingers.

Besides, some settlers had a vested interest in protecting them. As the populace’s food supplies grew more secure and its dependence on kangaroo meat declined (although the need for the skins remained, as they were the main source of leather), the banditti took to sheep stealing. They would sell the mutton to free farmers for sugar, flour, tea and gunpowder, and vanish into the wild again. They stole from big farmers and sold to small “bent” ones, and with this began the Robin Hood reputation (wholly undeserved in nine cases out of ten) of the Australian bushranger. Sometimes assigned convicts would bring food to bushrangers in hiding, and by 1815 there was an efficient network of bandits’ spies in Van Diemen’s Land—one bushranger boasted from his mountain fastness that he had the Hobart newspapers in his hand within five hours after they came off the press. These exasperating alliances were forged from a shared hatred for the System.

Convicting the bushrangers was a worse headache than catching them. Sheep-stealing was a capital crime. Any convict charged with a second and potentially capital offense had to be tried in Sydney. But without witnesses there could be no case, and Sydney was so far north that the settler would have to abandon his farm for several months to go there at his own expense and testify against a sheep-duffer. Few could afford to. Edward Lord (1781–1859), the Welsh marine officer who in 1803 built the first private house in Hobart, was the most powerful man in the early settlement next to Collins—and next to nobody, its largest stock-owner, an arrogant land-grabbing troublemaker who burned all the Government House papers when Collins died in 1810 in order to cover his business tracks—and even he could not get legal redress against the bandits, who made off with five hundred head of his stock every year.³⁴

These cave-dwelling satyrs of the penal system resist all romanticization. They were hardly worth dignifying with the name of banditti. As John West put it, with some asperity:

The Italian robber tinged his adventure with romance; the Spanish bandit was often a soldier, and a partisan; but the wandering thieves of Tasmania were no less uncouth than violent—hateful for their debasement, as well as terrible for their cruelty.³⁵

They had long ratty hair, thick beards, roughly sewn garments and moccasins of kangaroo hide, a pistol stuck in a rope belt, a stolen musket, a polecat’s stench. When on raids, they blacked their faces with charcoal. Most of them would kill a man as soon as a kangaroo. Some joked about this. One of the earliest “gangs” in Van Diemen’s Land consisted of only three men: two Irishmen named Scanlan and Brown and an Englishman named Richard Lemon, who had gone on “the out and out” from Hobart and roamed the bush in the area of Oyster Bay. Lemon did not like Brown and Scanlan talking in Gaelic, of which he understood not a word. One morning when Brown was out hunting ‘roos, Lemon crept up on Scanlan at the campfire, put a pistol to the back of his head and pulled the trigger. He then strung up the corpse by the heels on a gum tree, as if he were hanging a “boomer” (big kangaroo) for skinning. “Now, Brown,” he laconically observed when his partner returned, “as there are only two of us, we shall understand one another better for the future.” The two of them ranged the bush for two more years, murdering four whites and an uncounted number of blacks, until some convict bounty-hunters took them prisoner. They shot Lemon dead and forced Brown, at gunpoint, to hack off his mate’s head and carry it back to Hobart in a bag. Their reward was an invitation to Government House (leaving their bag outside, presumably) and a free pardon.³⁶

By 1814 there were so many bushrangers at large, and the authorities in Hobart could do so little about them, that Lachlan Macquarie decided to save Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Davey’s face with a proclamation. It offered amnesty to any bushranger who turned himself in by December 1, 1814. But it was so ambiguously drafted that it offered six months’ grace to bushrangers to commit with impunity any crime they wanted, short of murder, before that date. Robbery, rapine and mayhem multiplied at once. When the deadline for amnesty came, few bushrangers had surrendered and the colonists were frantic. They were sure the convict population (then 1,900 souls) was ready to rise and join the bushrangers, consigning Van Diemen’s Land to anarchy. So the flustered Davey reacted like the soldier he was: He hoisted the red flag in Hobart and proclaimed martial law. He then imposed a strict curfew, revoked all tickets-of-leave, forbade the sale of kangaroo skins and ordered that all kangaroo-dogs should be shot on sight, thus hoping to destroy the bushrangers’ means of support. And as a court-martial could hang anyone without reference to the criminal court in Sydney, Davey strung up as many bandits as he could catch, gibbeting their corpses in chains on a little island off the Hobart docks until they stank too much even for the wheeling, scavenging birds.³⁷

But although these summary proceedings (which exasperated Macquarie when he found out about them) somewhat damped the progress of banditry in Van Diemen’s Land, there were bushrangers Davey’s troops could not catch. The most conspicuous one was a twenty-seven-year-old seaman from Yorkshire named Michael Howe. Twice a deserter—from the merchant marine and from the army—Howe had finally come to grief on a charge of highway robbery and been transported for seven years. He arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1812 and absconded almost at once. By 1814, he and a fellow convict named Whitehead had brought together a roving gang of twenty-eight bushrangers, terrorizing settlers in the region of New Norfolk, on the Derwent. Their favorite targets were landowners with a reputation for treating convicts badly. One of these, an especially hated “flogging magistrate” named Adolarius William Humphrey, who lived at Pittwater, some thirty miles from Hobart, lost hundreds of his Saxon merinos to them. Howe had struck when he was away; the bandits burnt Humphrey’s corn, terrified the servants and then trashed the house in a paroxysm of rage after finding two pairs of leg irons.³⁸

Howe left a wide and furious swath across Van Diemen’s Land. His comrade, Whitehead, was captured near Launceston. Howe became sole leader, recruiting new members to replace some who had cast themselves on the mercy of Davey’s amnesty, and continued to pillage across an area of some five hundred square miles, from Launceston in the north to homesteads not far from Hobart in the south. He always stressed, in his rambling chats with the “slaves” on the farms he plundered, that he was like Dick Turpin, robbing the rich and helping the poor. Many of them believed him, and so he acquired a network of informers among assigned convicts and small farmers and was able to hear about troop movements almost as soon as they began.

Howe was a natural leader, endowed with immense vitality and a gift for organization. The gang was under quasi-naval discipline, and each member had to swear an oath of obedience on a prayer book. He had the gloomy charisma of the paranoid. He kept a kangaroo-skin diary in which he inscribed his bad dreams in blood. It also contained lists of the flowers he had known as a boy in Yorkshire, for Howe was passionately interested in botany and planned to adorn his mountain hideout with an instructive garden. He believed that Fate had singled him out as the convicts’ instrument of revenge on the hated System. He had the gall to style himself “Lieutenant-Governor of the Woods,” in contrast to the lieutenant-governor in Hobart. He was so sure of his safety that in 1816 he sent Davey a haughty letter, thinking the lieutenant-governor would negotiate a general pardon for him and his gang if they would “come in.” Howe thought Davey was stalling until informers betrayed him.

We have thought proper to write these Lines to you—As We have been Kept in the Dark so long—and We find it is only to Keep us Quiet until By some Means or other you think you Can Get us Betrayed. But We will Stand it no Longer. We are now Determined to have A full and satisfactory [answer?] Either for or against us, As we are determined to be Kept No longer In Ignorance, for we think ourselves Greatly Ingured By the Country at Large.

Howe ironized on Davey’s fear that his gang was growing into a guerrilla army: “I have not the least Doubt but you are Glad that those new Hands [are] joining us—We are Glad Also.” God was on the bushranger’s side, “and He who Preserved us from your Plotts in Publick will Likewise Preserve Us from them in secret.” So let Davey send word back within ten days: “Answer either for or Against us . . . clap on it the King’s Seal Seal—and Your Signature”; and let the redcoats not sneak along behind, for “We [are] As Much Inclined to take Life As you are in your Hearts; We could destroy All the partyes you can send out. . . . You Must not think to Catch Old Birds with Chaff.” This singular missive, only one of several Howe sent to Davey and his successor William Sorell, was written in blood and signed by ten other bushrangers.³⁹

Davey would not cooperate. “The Power of Pardoning Capital Offences,” he replied to Howe, “rests solely with the Governor in Chief, but no application for favor can avail those, who are in the daily Commission of the greatest outrages.” Thus the war of cops and robbers went on, with the robbers generally winning, through the end of Davey’s administration and the arrival of the next lieutenant-governor, Colonel William Sorell, in 1817.

In that year, Michael Howe’s luck began to run out. He had acquired a devoted aboriginal “wife,” Black Mary. (Such liaisons, which usually began with abduction and rape, were of course invaluable to all bushrangers, as they could learn a host of survival tricks from a friendly black.) One day, the couple was ambushed by soldiers. Howe ran, and Black Mary, who was many months pregnant, could not keep up with him. In an exchange of shots, one of Howe’s bullets struck her. The soldiers, anxious to cultivate Howe’s image as a monster, claimed afterward that he had shot her in cold blood to stop her from talking. Howe insisted it was an accident, and probably it was. But the jilted Black Mary, left painfully wounded on the ground by her lover, wanted revenge—and she sought it, after she had recovered from the bullet and given birth, by volunteering to track him down. Even with her superb skills to guide them, the soldiers could not catch up with him; but Howe felt the law was closing in on him and tried to negotiate with Sorell. The new lieutenant-governor of the town offered the “Lieutenant-Governor of the Woods” a conditional pardon for all of his crimes except murder and a strong recommendation for clemency on the murder charge itself, if he would turn his gang-mates in. Howe began to testify, naming a surprising number of “respectable” settlers as receivers of stolen stock and goods. One of these, to the potential embarrassment of the law-abiding, was Hobart’s resident man of God, the Reverend Robert Knopwood. Sorell began an investigation of Knopwood’s relations with the bushrangers; he may have been on to something, because one night all of the transcribed evidence mysteriously vanished.

The promised pardon never came. Howe got jittery at the delay, and in September 1817 he fled back into the bush. Without his gang, which in his absence had fallen apart into little pillaging groups, he had to go deep into the mountain valleys of the upper Shannon near the aptly named peaks of Barren Tier and Rat’s Castle, “a dreary solitude of cloudland,” as one chronicler put it, “the rocky home of hermit eagles.” From time to time he would waylay farmers—who were very remote and unprotected, for the Great Lake area was the extreme limit of settlement in Van Diemen’s Land—and extort food and ammunition from them, with horrible threats. In September 1818 he barely escaped from an ex-convict bounty hunter named John McGill, who had found him with the help of Muskitoo, an aboriginal blacktracker imported from Sydney. A month later, two white men named Worrall and Pugh cornered him at his hut on the Shannon. Worrall and Howe faced one another, with pistols levelled, at fifteen yards. “He stared at me with astonishment,” Worrall testified later, “and . . . I was a little astonished at him, for he was covered with patches of kangaroo skin and wore a black beard . . . [A] curious pair we looked. After a moment’s pause he cried out, ‘Black beard against grey beard for a million!’ and fired”—but missed. Worrall shot him down and Pugh battered his brains out with his gun-butt. They cut off the bushranger’s head and carried it back to Hobart Town, where Sorell put in on public view, spiked to a base.

If Howe’s short violent career had proven one thing, it was the embarrassing volatility of imposed social order on the colonial frontier. Neither Howe nor his gang could possibly have stayed at large for more than three years without the sympathy, and sometimes the active collaboration, of assigned servants, ex-convicts and even free settlers out for profit. An Australian type was being cast—the bushranger as popular hero. Although Howe was gone, his emulators lived on, mocking the law and causing great anxiety to the government. These desperadoes threatened—as Sir John Wylde, Macquarie’s deputy judge-advocate, warned after a judicial circuit of the island in 1821—to break down “the sense of Restraint and Coercion, which may be urged to keep the Prisoners of the Crown, so comparatively numerous here, in proper awe and subjugation.”⁴⁰

For by that year, 53 percent of the entire population of Van Diemen’s Land were convicts under sentence, and “a Spirit of Insurrection” was on the judge’s mind. Dozens of bushrangers were out around Hobart; fifteen or twenty had run away from their masters or from the government punishment gangs at Launceston and seven or eight had broken out of Hobart Jail itself. The amount of theft, cattle-rustling, sheep-stealing and general predacity “forbade,” Wylde urged in his creaking syntax, “as illusory almost, the Hope that a renewed extension of Mercy to them would influence an amelioration of Principle.” Translated, this meant, “Hang as many as you can.”⁴¹

They did. Macquarie, visiting Van Diemen’s Land with Wylde, conferred with Sorell and made sure that plenty of rope was used against the “depraved Wretches, . . . cruel and savage Depredators” then in custody awaiting trial. A circuit court convened in Launceston, and nine out of thirteen bushrangers swung. In Hobart, out of twenty-six awaiting their fate, ten were hanged. “Now that these dreadful examples have been made,” Macquarie wrote to London, “I am enabled to report that there is every reasonable prospect of the Bush-Ranging System being completely at an End, most probably for many Years to come.”⁴²

He was wrong. Bushranging continued with unabated vigor after 1821, still with the clandestine support of the convict population. The next “Dick Turpin” to win fame in Van Diemen’s Land was Matthew Brady (1799–1826), a Manchester boy sentenced by the Salford Assizes in 1820 to seven years’ exile on the Fatal Shore for stealing a basket with some bacon, butter and rice. Wild with resentment, he tried again and again to abscond and was pushed down from assignment to the chain gang and finally to the penal nadir: Macquarie Harbor. In the first four years of his transportation he took 350 lashes.⁴³

In June 1824, Brady and thirteen other convicts escaped from Macquarie Harbor in a whaleboat. Before the end of the month they reached the Derwent, came ashore, robbed a settler of his guns and provisions and began to range the bush. They quickly found themselves famous. Colonel George Arthur, the new lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land, papered the gum trees with proclamations calling “in the most earnest manner” on all settlers to join in the hunt for the Brady gang, and to order their Crown servants to pass on whatever information they heard. It was futile, for the convicts would rather join Brady than rat on him. Convict servants hid Brady and his men in barns, fed them and showed them where the master’s guns were kept. Arthur next appealed to baser motives by posting rewards: first £10 per head for each member of the growing Brady gang—which by now was rumored to be one hundred strong—then £25. If a convict gave information that led to the arrest of one of these bandits, he would get his ticket-of-leave. If he caught the bushranger himself, he got a conditional pardon. The only result was a notice pinned to the door of the Royal Oak Inn at Cross Marsh a week later:

It has caused Matthew Brady much concern that such a person known as Sir George Arthur is at large. Twenty gallons of rum will be given to any person that can deliver his person to me.

There was no question that the lad was flash. He was chivalrous, too, in his way. Brady would never harm a woman or let any of his gang do so. When his partner McCabe threatened to rape a settler’s wife, Brady shot him through the hand, flogged him mercilessly and threw him out of the gang; Arthur’s police caught McCabe ten days later, and hanged him. A psychopath named Mark Jeffries, a government executioner and flogger who had absconded and was known as “The Monster,” had captured a settler’s wife while he was on the run but was irked by the squalling of her newborn baby. He picked it up by the legs and smashed its head against a gum tree. Later he was caught and jailed for trial in Launceston. When Brady heard about this he had to be argued out of leading his gang in a frontal assault on the Launceston lockup, freeing all the prisoners, dragging Jeffries out and flogging him to death.

Knowing that his protection was other convicts, Brady took care not to harm assigned servants in the homesteads he robbed; but in case they “gave music” to the police later, he forced them to drink their masters’ whiskey until they were too fuddled to remember what his men had said, or which way they had gone. At least one luckless teetotaller died from this; and others, due to the vile quality of colonial spirits, became very sick.

The Brady gang fought like Tasmanian devils when cornered, with skill and coolness, shooting their way past many police ambushes. They had no compunction about revenging themselves on people who they believed were their oppressors—especially “flogging magistrates”—but they would also treat their captives fairly if such people had once been fair to them. Thus they made a prisoner of John Barnes, a colonial surgeon, while ransacking a magistrate’s house at Coal River:

One of them men who stopped me . . . had been punished a few days before by order of the magistrate, upon some trifling complaint of his master; the man was not in very good health . . . and I took him down before the whole of the flagellation had been inflicted, and requested that the magistrate would pardon him the rest; he recollected the circumstance with a little gratitude, or probably I might have been more severely handled.⁴⁴

They took his watch but gave him back his lancet-case, “telling me that that might be of service to them by and by.”

But Lieutenant-Governor Arthur was a tirelessly methodical man, and he wore Brady down. With a reorganized police force and more soldiers from the 40th Regiment under his command, he picked off the gang members in running skirmishes, one by one. He offered irresistible rewards—300 guineas or 300 acres of land free of quit-rent to the man who brought Brady in; or, for convicts, a full unconditional pardon and free passage to England. He sent rank-and-file field police convicts out wearing fetters, to infiltrate the remnants of Brady’s gang with a story of having escaped from the chain gang. Betrayed and outflanked, Brady was shot in the leg in a skirmish near Paterson’s Plains outside Launceston. He got away but was captured a few days later, limping and exhausted, by a settler named John Batman (the future founder of Melbourne).

They put Matthew Brady in Launceston Jail and a few days later loaded him with chains and brought him down to Hobart—accompanied, to his disgust, by the man he most despised in the world, the infant-killer Mark Jeffries. Before his trial and hanging, Brady was feted as a popular hero. Dozens of petitions for clemency arrived at Government House. Women shed tears for the “likely lad,” the “poor colonial boy,” who had shown such consideration to their sex. His cell was filled every day with visitors bringing baskets of flowers, fan letters, fruit and fresh-baked cakes. If his fate had been decided by vote, he would have gone free. But the judge was determined to make a solemn and awful example of him. On May 4, 1826, Brady received his last Communion and mounted the scaffold above a sea of colonial faces, contorted in grief or cheering him over the drop; only his enemies were silent. The government could not expunge his name from popular memory: A 4,000-foot peak in the Western Tiers, which frowns directly down on Arthur’s Lake below, is still known as Brady’s Lookout, and there is a Brady’s Lake out past Tungatinah power station on the Lyell Highway—whereas Mike Howe is remembered in less noble geographical detail, a gully near Lawrenny and a marsh east of Table Mountain.

Matthew Brady was by no means the last Tasmanian bushranger, or even the last to acquire a popular aura (that man was Martin Cash, an Irish picaro who absconded no less than four times from Port Arthur in the early 1840s and lived to a ripe age as a farmer near Glenorchy). But he was the last politically significant bandit, the last menacing avatar of a convict counterculture in Van Diemen’s Land that soon withered under the patient, systematic totalitarianism of Sir George Arthur. After Brady’s death, no roaming bushranger would be able to impede, or even threaten, the progress of Tasmanian settlement. Nor would any of them threaten a jacquerie, the convicts’ revolt that had figured in the nightmares of Australian settlers and governors since the Irish rose at Toongabbie in 1804. Van Diemen’s Land was a small island, soon filled up, and the pattern of ownership and intensive grazing that dominated it by the mid-1830s disposed of the bushrangers’ environment. They could no longer strike from virgin wilderness to prosperous farm or town in a day’s walk, or even a day’s ride. They were left without cover, like foxes in a bare field; whereas 700 miles north on the mainland, in the wide expanses of New South Wales that lay back from the coast, the bandits continued to pillage and present their threats to the law, reminding convicts and awakening the fears of their masters that chains were made to be broken.

iv

IT WAS ON the mainland, after 1825, that the popular myth of the Australian bushranger took its final form in story and folksong. Repressed in Van Diemen’s Land by Lieutenant-Governor Arthur—significantly, there seem to be no bushranger ballads of Tasmanian origin—it sprang up like an irritant weed in New South Wales. Bushranging became a social problem there later than in Van Diemen’s Land, because Sydney and Parramatta had never had to rely on convict kangaroo-hunters for their early survival. Not until the colony broke out of the narrow coastal plains and expanded over the mountains to Bathurst (giving plenty of scope for outlaws to hide in the gorges and caves of the Blue Mountains, now within striking distance of new trunk roads and farms) did bushranging start to flourish. And the supply of new bushrangers was guaranteed by Governor Ralph Darling’s crackdown in convict discipline. Most of them came from the dreaded iron gangs working on the “Great West Road” across the Blue Mountains and on the “Great North Road,” surveyed in 1825 and completed in 1831, which ran through 170 miles of rough sterile gorges and linked Sydney to the burgeoning farm districts of Maitland and the Hunter River Valley. The local names for spots along this road were eloquent: “Hungry Flat,” “Dennis’s Dog-Kennel,” “No-Grass Valley,” “Devil’s Backbone.” As the iron gangs of Darling’s administration wore their way through the mountain sandstone, cutting the roads foot by anguished foot, there was no shortage of men who would rather take to the bush at any risk than spend another day “condemned to live in slavery, and wear the convict chain.”

For ten years the roads and semi-settled districts of New South Wales, west to Parramatta and Bathurst, north to the Hunter River, were pestered by bushranging convicts who struck singly or in small gangs. There was nothing romantic about them. A few were pathetic harmless men who ran away from chain gang or master because, like a Bathurst absconder named Charles Jubey, they were “so harassed and torn about” by cruel discipline that they became “weary of life.” Many were mere thugs: muggers, chicken-stealers and occasional rapists. Small farmers were their victims, not the “rich,” and their crimes were brutal when not petty. Some tended, not without reason, to be paranoically suspicious: Daniel “Mad Dog” Morgan (ca. 1830–1865), one of the second wave of bushrangers who terrorized Victoria and New South Wales after the convict period, was so afraid of poison that he would accept no food from the settlers he robbed except hard-boiled eggs.

When caught, the mainland bushrangers did not comport themselves like Robin Hood either. Their speeches from the dock or at the gallows’ foot were apt to be primitive. In 1834, Dr. Robert Wardell, barrister and former editor of the colony’s chief newspaper, The Australian, was riding the river boundary of his 2,500-acre estate at Petersham, near Sydney. Outside a humpy, he surprised three escaped convicts, whose leader, an iron gang absconder named John Jenkins, took aim with a stolen rifle and shot him dead. Jenkins and his adult accomplice, a runaway assigned servant named Thomas Tattersdale, were tried on the evidence of the third prisoner, a terrified boy called Emanuel Brace. At the verdict of guilty, the judge uttered his ritual question: Did either have anything to say before sentence of death was passed? Jenkins did:

Throwing himself into a threatening and unbecoming attitude, [he] remarked, that he had not had a fair trial, a bloody old woman had been palmed upon him for Counsel; he did not care a bugger for dying, or a damn for anyone in court; and that he would as soon shoot every bloody bugger in court . .   [He made] a violent attack on Tattersdale, and struck him two tremendous blows in the face, which knocked him down in the dock . . . The Judge sat in mute astonishment. . . . [I]t took a dozen constables to secure and handcuff him.⁴⁵

Not until 1839 would the traveller be able to speak with confidence of “bushrangers, a sub-genus in the order banditti, which, happily, can no longer exist, except in places inaccessible to the mounted police.”⁴⁶ These mounted police, whose sole task was tracking and capturing bushrangers, began in 1825 as a small force of dragoons (whence, “goons”) under Governor Brisbane, drawn from infantry regiments in Sydney—2 officers and 13 troopers, operating mainly around Parramatta. Darling increased it until by 1839 it had swollen to 9 officers, a sergeant-major, 156 non-commissioned officers and enlisted men, with 136 horses—not a large net to throw over so large a territory, but often an effective one. The “horse-police” or “traps” (mounted police) like Sir George Arthur’s constabulary in Van Diemen’s Land, were disliked only a little less than the bushrangers themselves. They were apt to use violence when dealing with small Emancipist settlers whom they routinely suspected of harboring bushrangers out of criminal sympathy. Free workers hated them, because of the “pass system” enforced under Darling’s emergency Bushranging Act of 1830 (11 Geo. IV, c. 10), whereby any man in the colony who could not produce his ticket-of-leave and travel pass on demand could be clapped in jail until he could prove he was not an escaped convict. Despite its unpopularity, the Bushranging Act was renewed under Governor Bourke in 1832, and again in 1834. Although Bourke’s gubernatorial instincts were more liberal than Darling’s, he persuaded himself that it was worth offending the spirit of British law with such an act: “I believe . . . it would occasion very great dissatisfaction among the free People of the Colony to deprive them of the protection which this law affords,” he told London in 1832.⁴⁷

Furthermore, because Governor Darling had followed Sir George Arthur’s lead in setting up government rewards for information against bushrangers, the colony was a morass of denunciation and spying. In this way the lower classes came to feel victimized by the bushranger laws, and this created a wave of sympathy toward the bushrangers themselves.

Much as the “free objects” (as convicts and ex-convicts sardonically called emigrant settlers in Australia) might detest the bushrangers, it was not easy to stamp out every vestige of fellow-feeling between men who had undergone the government lash. Alexander Harris, while working in the 1820s as a cedar-cutter on the coastal slopes of the Illawarra, noted that bushrangers would freely join the loggers’ jamborees around the rum keg on deserted beaches and he compared the sight of their boisterous revelry to “a pirate’s isle.” No one would denounce them to Darling’s dragoons (who seldom dared to penetrate those deep coastal forests), partly from fear of reprisals but mainly “because, having mostly been prisoners themselves, it was a point of honour among the sawyers to help them as much as they could.”⁴⁸

By the late 1820s, such sympathies had already crystallized into folk ballads—none of whose texts, unfortunately, survive. To be the hero of a song offered a snatch of immortality to the convict, as the surgeon Peter Cunningham speculated in Two Years in New South Wales (1827):

The vanity of being talked of, I verily believe, leads many foolish fellows to join in this kind of life—songs being made about their exploits by their sympathising brethren. . . . It is the boast of many of them, that their names will live in the remembrance of the colony long after their exit from among us to some penal settlement, either in this world or the next; Riley, the captain of the Hunter’s River banditti, vaunting that he should be long spoken of (whatever his fate may be) in fear by his enemies, and in admiration by his friends!

The year Cunningham published this, the prototype of Australian convict-ballad heroes began his desperate colonial career. His ballad, the first surviving one about a bushranger, opens in fine style:

Come all you gallant bushrangers who gallop on the plain,

Who scorn to live in slavery and wear the convict chain, Attention pay to what I say, and value it if you do—

I shall relate the matchless fate of bold Jack Donohoe!

“Bold Jack” was a short, freckled, blond-haired, blue-eyed Irishman named John Donohoe (1806–1830), sentenced to life transportation in Dublin in 1823. On arrival in 1825, Donohoe had been assigned in the usual way (to John Pagan, a settler of Parramatta). He had misbehaved and spent time in a road gang; then he returned to assigned service under a Parramatta surgeon, Major West. The ballad, with a reasonable minimum of exaggeration, takes up the story:

He’d scarcely served twelve months in chains upon the Australian shore,

When he took to the highway as he had done before:

He went with Jacky Underwood, and Webber and Walmsley too,

These were the true companions of bold Jack Donohoe.

Bold Donohoe was taken for a notorious crime,

And sentenced to be hanged upon the gallows-tree so high—

But when they brought him to Sydney Gaol he left them in the stew,

For when they came to call the roll, they missed Jack Donohoe.

The “notorious crime” was committed in December 1827: Donohoe “went out” with two Irish confederates named Kilroy and Smith, holding up the bullock-drays that plied between farm and market on the Windsor Road—a kind of highway robbery which, because of the lumbering slowness of its target, did not demand a horse. The three men were soon caught, and in March 1828 they were sentenced to hang. Kilroy and Smith duly swung, but Donohoe made a break for freedom between the court and the condemned cell and fled. Before long he had assembled a small gang of other Irish and English absconders. They stole horses from settlers and, for the next eighteen months, to the discomfiture and occasional terror of the law-abiding, ranged across a wide swath of territory beyond the Blue Mountains, from Bathurst south to Yass and the Illawarra, close to Sydney and Parramatta, and north almost to the Hunter River. Hardly a week passed without a stickup, and in the bush where goods of any kind were hard to come by, Donohoe easily got rid of the swag. After his death, police searches (directed by a gang member named Walmsley, who turned informer to save his neck) showed that no less than thirty small settlers had received stolen goods from him.

As Donohoe made his escape, to the bush he went straightway,

The people they were all afraid to travel by night or day—

For every day in the newspapers they brought out something new,

Concerning that bold bushranger they called Jack Donohoe!

This verse commemorates what would become a frequent gripe of Australian authorities—that the press, in its lurid pennycatching, works against the government by making heroes out of criminals. With Ralph Darling as governor there was more point to this, for the Sydney papers took any chance they could get to make him look like a fool. In Van Diemen’s Land, the colonial press pointedly observed, Lieutenant-Governor Arthur took the field himself in pursuit of bushrangers and stamped them out; but in New South Wales, Governor Darling sat in Government House, while “with a mounted police and a police establishment, which if not effective is not for want of expense, and a strong garrison of armed soldiery, the bushranging gentry seem to carry on their pranks almost without molestation.” Donohoe and his mates even displayed a raffish elegance of dress and “a remarkably clean appearance,” their leader sporting “black hat, superfine blue cloth coat lined with silk surtout fashion, plaited shirt (good quality), laced boots.” Not only were they Pimpernels, the Australian sardonically implied, but they were not as bad as they were painted:

Donohoe, the notorious bushranger, whose name is a terror in some parts of the country, though we fancy he has more credit given to him for outrages than he is deserving of, is said to have been seen by a party well acquainted with his person, in Sydney, enjoying, not more than a couple of days ago . . . a ginger-beer bottle.⁴⁹

The price on Donohoe’s head rose from £20 to £100, and Darling sent more police and volunteers into the field to refute the myth—which had spread beyond “the ignorant and tainted portion of the population”—that the fierce little Dubliner had a charmed life. They caught up with him at Bringelly, near Campbelltown outside Sydney.

As he and his companions rode out one afternoon,

Not thinking that the pangs of death would overtake them soon,

To their surprise the Horse-Police rode smartly into view,

And in double-quick time they did advance to take Jack Donohoe.

“Oh Donohoe, oh Donohoe, throw down your carabine,

Or do you intend to fight us all? And will you not resign?”

“To surrender to such cowardly dogs is a thing I never would do—

Today I’ll fight with all my might!” cried bold Jack Donohoe.

“It never shall be said of me that Donohoe the brave

Could surrender to a policeman or become an Englishman’s slave—

I’d rather roam these hills so wild like a dingo or kangaroo

Than work one hour for Government,” cried bold Jack Donohoe.

The Sergeant and the Corporal they did their men divide,

Some fired at him from behind, and some from every side,

The Sergeant and the Corporal they both fired at him too,

And a rifle-bullet pierced the heart of bold Jack Donohoe.

Nine rounds he fired and nine men shot before the fatal ball

That pierced his heart and made him smart and caused him for to fall—

And as he closed his mournful eyes, he bade the world adieu,

Crying “Convicts all, pray for the soul of bold Jack Donohoe!”

The song embellishes, as ballads do. Donohoe did not kill nine “traps” with nine shots (or even six with six, as variants of the ballad have it) and his only recorded utterance at the moment of battle was a stream of oaths, inviting the effing buggers to come and get their bloody guts blown out, or something to that effect; he was not shot in the heart, but in the head, by a trooper named Muggleston—and so forth. Ballads are not history. Nevertheless, they do give us some sense of the penumbra of received opinion that surrounds historical events, even small ones like the killing of a flash, cursing little Mick by a squad of mounted police among the gum trees on one hot September afternoon in 1830. In death, Donohoe became more than the meager sum of his parts in life. At one end of the social scale, one finds Darling’s surveyor-general Thomas Mitchell (later Sir Thomas, distinguished Australian explorer and translator of Luis de Camoëns’s epic Os Lusiades from the Portuguese) visiting the Sydney morgue to view Donohoe’s corpse and drawing his portrait, beneath which he quoted a couplet from Byron:

No matter; I have bared my brow

Fair in Death’s face—before—and now.

At the other end of the scale, there was the Sydney shopkeeper who within a week or two of Bold Jack’s death produced a line of clay pipes in the form of his head, complete with the bullet-hole in the temple. They were snapped up as devotional effigies—ceramic ballads, as it were. If Donohoe had been a sadist, a rapist or a baby-killer like Mark Jeffries in Van Diemen’s Land, the outpouring of popular emotion that coalesced in the Donohoe ballads would not have occurred. But Australians admired flashness; most of them disliked Governor Darling and took great glee in seeing his authority ridiculed by this elusive bushranger. They—or, at any rate, the Emancipist and convict majority—felt that Donohoe posed no threat to them. He was a figure of fantasy, game as a spurred cock, a projection of that once-subjected, silent part of their own lives into vengeful freedom, thrown against the neutral gray screen of the bush. The legends of his freedom relieved Australians’ dissatisfaction with the conformity of their own lives, and this has been the root of the cult of dead bushrangers ever since. Moreover, he was Irish, and the ballads make a point of this to commemorate the hatred of Irish convict for English guard. “It never shall be said of me that Donohoe the brave / Could surrender to a policeman or become an Englishman’s slave.”

Thirty years ago, the Australian historian Russel Ward noted the differences between “Bold Jack Donohoe” and earlier ballads like “Van Diemen’s Land.” They bespeak a big shift of attitude. The earlier ones accept the System in the name of English values, while later ballads oppose it in the name of Irish values that become Australian.⁵⁰

“Van Diemen’s Land” is a cautionary song directed to an English audience at home—“for if you knew my miseries,” one version of it enjoins, “you’d never poach again.” The call to repentance was a convention of the English ballads (without it, they could hardly have been printed and distributed in England). It stresses that convicts are the victims of a harsh fate that they cannot change for themselves. “May youth take warning e’er it is too late,” begins one lengthy excursus in cautionary doggerel, “A Solemn Advice to All Young Men,” attributed to a convict named James Kevel or Revel, returned from a fourteen-year sentence in 1823, but more likely written by some London ballad-monger, and continuing

Lest they should share my hard unhappy fate.

To see so many dying with hunger, pain and grief,

And buried like dogs because they prov’d a thief.

May all young men with speed their lives amend

And take my advice as one that is their friend,

For tho’ so slight of it you may make here,

Hard will be your lot if you are once sent there.

Such verses do not question either the order of the classes or the validity of English laws, whereas the Donohoe ballad explicitly does. Hence the ill-documented distinction, in the eyes of Australian authorities in convict days, between ordinary ballads and “treason songs,” which (tradition insists) could not legally be sung, although there seems to be no local law that explicitly banned them. The voice of rebellion, defiantly inveighing against floggers and tyrants, is plainly heard in other ballads that invoke the name of Donohoe, such as the last four verses of “Jim Jones”:

For night and day the irons clang, and like poor galley-slaves

We toil and toil, and when we die must fill dishonoured graves.

But bye-and-bye I’ll break my chains: into the bush I’ll go,

And join the brave bushrangers there—Jack Donohoo and Co—

And some dark night when everything is silent in the town,

I’ll kill the tyrants one and all, and shoot the floggers down,

I’ll give the Law a little shock: remember what I say—

They’ll yet regret they sent Jim Jones in chains to Botany Bay.

And so, as the only New South Wales bushranger thrown into such high relief in the convict era, Donohoe became a general, idealized image of bushranging itself and survived long after the System had passed away. He kept popping up with the same initials but different names: Jack Dowling, Jack Duggan, and—in the most famous of all bushranging ballads—Jim Doolan, the “Wild Colonial Boy”: still Irish, still “agin the system,” though it had shed its capital S sometime after the convict era ended. There used to be as many ways of singing “The Wild Colonial Boy” as there were pianos in Australian parlors. The most piercing one this writer has heard was not recorded: It was sung by a fat, seamed old Sydney prostitute, buoyed up by a few too many glasses of sweet port, in a pub on the Woollomooloo docks late one night in 1958—not in the rollicking front-room way of men, but as the off-key dirge of a mother grieving for her dead son:

‘Tis of a wild Colonial boy, Jim Doolan was his name,

Of poor but honest parents he was born in Castlemaine,

He was his father’s only hope, his mother’s pride and joy,

And so dearly did his parents love the Wild Colonial Boy.

He was scarcely sixteen years of age when he left his father’s home,

And through Australia’s sunny clime bushranging he did roam.

He robbed the wealthy squatters, their stock he did destroy,

A terror to Australia was the Wild Colonial Boy.

In eighteen hundred and sixty-two he started his wild career,

With a heart that knew no danger, no foeman did he fear.

He bailed up the Beechworth Royal Mail Coach, and robbed Judge Macoboy,

Who trembled and gave up his gold to the Wild Colonial Boy.

He bade the Judge good morning, and told him to beware,

He’d never robbed a poor man, or one who acted square,

But a Judge who’d rob a mother of her only pride and joy,

That Judge was worse of an outlaw than the Wild Colonial Boy.

As Jim rode out one morning the mountain-side along,

A-listening to the kookaburra’s pleasant laughing song,

He spied three mounted troopers, Kelly, Davis and Fitzroy,

All riding forth to capture him, the Wild Colonial Boy.

“Surrender now, Jim Doolan, you see there’s three to one—

Surrender in the Queen’s name, you daring highwayman.”

Jim pulled his pistol from his belt and he waved the little toy,

“I’ll fight but not surrender,” cried the Wild Colonial Boy.

He fired at Trooper Kelly, and brought him to the ground,

But turning round to Davis he received his mortal wound.

All shattered through the jaw he lay, still firing at Fitzroy,

And that’s the way they captured him, the Wild Colonial Boy.

The second big difference between the Donohoe variant ballads and the earlier cautionary songs written for English consumption lies in what they imply about Australian nature and space. Until about 1830 the transportation ballads and broadsides present the bush as sterile and hostile, its fauna (except for the kangaroo, which no one could dislike) as eerie when not disgusting. The Fatal Shore is a desert full of snakes and cannibals, insufferably strange, the world upside down. “Our cots were fenced with fire, to slumber when we can, / To drive away wolves and tigers come by Van Diemen’s Land.” So goes the complaint in the ballad “Van Diemen’s Land,” faithfully mirroring the penal intentions of the colony, where nature was destined to punish. Space and the bush imprisoned it.

And so the absconder, by making the bush his new home, renamed it with the sign of freedom. On its blankness, he could inscribe what could not be read in spaces already colonized and subject to the laws and penal imagery of England. “As Donohoe made his escape, to the bush he went straightway.” The bush is the citadel of the nay-sayer, the rebel: hence the poignancy, to Irish-Australian ears, of the chorus of “Wild Colonial Boy”:

O come along, me hearties, and we’ll roam the mountains high—

Together we will plunder, together we will die.

We’ll wander over valleys and we’ll gallop over plains,

And we’ll scorn to live in slavery, bound down by iron chains.

The bushranger is the first figure in the low undergrowth of Australian literature to be identified with the bush animals: “ ‘I’d rather roam these hills so wild like a dingo or kangaroo / Than work one hour for Government,’ cried bold Jack Donohoe.” And the identification of bushranger with national landscape would persist until the railroads put an end to bushranging itself, with the destruction of the Kelly gang and the capture of their leader Ned at Glenrowan in 1880. By taking to the bush, the convict left England and entered Australia. Popular sentiment would praise him for this transvaluation of the landscape (though at a safe distance, of course) for another hundred and fifty years.