8
i
OF THE PEOPLE transported to the antipodes between 1788 and 1852, about twenty-four thousand were women: one person in seven. Many Australians still think their Founding Mothers were whores. Undoubtedly some were prostitutes in the real sense of the word—that is, they survived by selling their sexual services, casually or regularly, without sentimental attachments. A commonly quoted figure, though a somewhat impressionistic one, is one woman in five.1 When a woman at her trial described herself as a prostitute—“on the town” was the usual phrase—one can assume that she was telling the truth. In the mouths of Authority, the word “prostitute” was less a job description than a general term of abuse.
What is quite certain, however, is that no women were actually transported for whoring, because it was never a transportable offense. The vast majority of female convicts, more than 80 percent, were sent out for theft, usually of a fairly petty sort. Crimes of violence figured low among them, as one might expect—about 1 percent.2 Sentences of more than seven years were exceedingly rare. None of this, given the severity of the English laws, suggests at the outset a very high degree of moral profligacy.
And yet there was rarely a comment on colonial society, scarcely a passage of evidence to the various Select Committees on Transportation, hardly a tract or a diary or a letter home, that missed the chance to describe the degeneracy, incorrigibility and worthlessness of women convicts in Australia. Military officers believed this, and so did doctors, judges, parsons, governors and, of course, their respectable wives. Convict men might in the end redeem themselves through work and penance, but women almost never. It was as though women convicts had passed the ordinary bounds of class and become a fiction, not far from pornography: crude raucous Eve, sucking rum and mothering bastards in the exterior darkness, inviting contempt rather than pity from her social superiors, rape rather than help from men.
Australian historians once swallowed this stereotype whole. “Even if these contemporaries exaggerated,” wrote A. G. L. Shaw, “the picture [that women convicts] presented is a singularly unattractive one!”3 Some later feminist historians, led by Anne Summers and Miriam Dixson, have striven to retain the picture while dismantling the biases, arguing that many or even most convict women became whores but that their fate was foisted on them by a tyrannous male power structure. The most influential statement of the case was made by Anne Summers:
It was deemed necessary by both the local and the British authorities to have a supply of whores to keep the men, both convict and free, quiescent. The Whore stereotype was devised as a calculated sexist means of social control and then . . . characterised as being the fault of the women who were damned by it.4
The classic double-bind, in short. The problem is the quality of the contemporary opinions on which the Whore stereotype, accepted by Reverend Samuel Marsden and feminist historians alike (though for very different motives), was based.
The British Government did not send women to Australia to keep men “quiescent” in any political sense; the lash could do that. But the presence of women, considered as carrot rather than stick, did have its uses in social control. Eve the Whore would keep Adam the Rogue from turning homosexual, an important consideration: William Pitt would underwrite a colony of thieves, but not one of perverts. The government did not, of course, announce in so many words that female convicts were sent to Australia as breeding-stock and sexual conveniences. Indeed, the original plan of settlement drawn up by Lord Sydney in 1786 spoke of enslaving women for this purpose
from the Friendly Islands, New Caledonia, Etc., which are contiguous thereto, and from whence any number may be procured without difficulty; and without a sufficient proportion of that sex it is well-known that it would be impossible to preserve the settlement from gross irregularities and disorders.5
Arthur Phillip rejected this idea, of course, for kidnapped Tahitian women would only “pine away in misery.” He asked for more women convicts to be sent out, not for their labor but because he wanted the felons to marry one another and so raise a native-born yeomanry—the genetic equivalent of his hope for an economic base of agriculture run by small-farming Emancipists. He offered rewards of land or free time (an extra day a week for raising their own crops for sale or barter) to convicts who married. Some of these hastily legitimized unions proved bigamous, since a number of the newlyweds were, in fact, already married but had left their husbands or wives behind them in England. From a “respectable” viewpoint, this policy seemed a farce, and the matrimonial rush only a scramble for gubernatorial favors.6
The Scottish forger Thomas Watling, himself a convict, sniffed that “little I think could reasonably have been expected from the coupling of whore and rogue together.” “Prostitution” and “concubinage” flourished in early colonial Sydney, as marriage did not. On this, the respectable convict, the respectable officer and the respectable cleric all agreed, because their terms of judgment were exactly the same. “There is scarcely a man without his mistress,” Watling complained, adding with sublime ignorance of the sexual habits of English working people that “the high class first exhibit it; the low, to do them justice, faithfully copy it.” The officers, being officers, got first pick of the women; and a female convict soon learned that her best chance of survival in New South Wales was to give herself over to the “protection” of some dominant male. In a tone of resentful irony, Watling advised “ladies of easy virtue” to get transported if they possibly could:
They may rest assured, that they will meet with every indulgence from the humane officers and sailors in the passage; and after running the gauntlet there, will, notwithstanding, be certain of coming upon immediate keeping at their arrival. . . . Be she ever so despicable in person or manners, here she may depend that she will dress and live better and easier than ever she did in the prior part of her prostitution.7
Watling’s prejudices were genteel. He believed he was writing as a “respectable” person (forgers always did) and his opinion of women convicts exactly reflected the attitudes of the middle class from which he had fallen. Respectable people in London—let alone in the chilly latitudes of John Knox, north of the Scottish border—saw little moral difference between prostitution and cohabitation. Patrick Colquhoun, as we have seen, included the female half of all unmarried couples in his attempts to guess the number of “prostitutes” in the “criminal class” of London. Before long the word “prostitute” came to be used of anyone promiscuous, paid or not. Eventually the distinction was so worn down by the weight of moral disapproval bearing upon the lower classes from the middle classes that Henry Mayhew, that indefatigable reporter, could claim that “prostitution . . . does not consist solely in promiscuous intercourse, for she who confines her favors to one may still be a prostitute,” even if her motives were “voluptuous” and not mercenary. In short, the moral vocabulary of the English middle classes enabled the free in Australia to speak of “prostitution” among convicts when they meant any extramarital relationship. And as neither the penal system nor pioneer life favored marriage (official policy always encouraged it, but such encouragement was more than offset by the general poverty of small settlers and the uncertain, bush-wandering nature of an Emancipist worker’s life), the respectable saw “prostitution” everywhere, even in sturdy matches that had lasted years out of wedlock and produced broods of children.8 As the historian Michael Sturma points out, the idea that convicts shared the same ideas about sexual behavior as their superiors is very dubious:
Working-class mores [in England] differed markedly from those of the upper and middle classes. . . . [A]mong the British working-class, cohabitation was prevalent. It is highly unlikely that working-class men, and in particular male convicts, considered the women convicts to be in some way sexually immoral. . . . The stereotype of women convicts as prostitutes emerged from . . . an ignorance of working-class habits.9
One notorious result of such thinking was the “Female Register” drawn up by the Reverend Samuel Marsden in 1806, an inspired piece of creative bigotry in which every woman in the colony, except for a few widows, was classified as either “married” or “concubine.” By Marsden’s count, there were 395 of the former and 1,035 of the latter. The only kind of marriage he recognized was one performed by a Church of England clergyman—ideally, himself. It followed that all Catholic and Jewish women who married within the form of their religion were automatically listed as “concubines,” as were all common-law wives whose relationship with their men, however durable, went unsanctified by Anglican rite. One such woman, Mary Marshall, had lived with her “husband” Robert Sidaway for eighteen years but was listed as a “concubine.” Sarah Bellamy had lived for sixteen years with the colony’s master-builder, James Bloodworth or Bloodsworth, the bricklayer who was transported on the First Fleet and supervised the erection of Sydney’s first permanent buildings, and had borne him seven children. No relationship could have been more respectable, devoted or tenacious than theirs. It ended in 1804 with Bloodworth’s death from pneumonia. In gratitude for his services to the infant colony, Governor King buried him with military honors. Nevertheless, Sarah Bellamy went down on Marsden’s list as “concubine,” along with a twelve-year-old girl and a sixty-four-year-old widow. Yet when it reached London, this absurdly pharisaical document was read and apparently believed by Lord Castlereagh and William Wilberforce, and it became an authoritative text on colonial morality. As the historian Portia Robinson comments:
That few women were legally married did not necessarily imply that the conduct of the remainder made New South Wales “a sink of infamy.” It simply meant that the standards of morality and the definitions of marriage familiar to the women concerned did not agree with those imposed on society by Samuel Marsden. Contemporaries accepted his conclusions as to the nature of the women of Botany Bay and modern historians have continued to perpetuate this view.10
Marsden was not alone in his prejudices; and as people are named, so they will be treated. While one may doubt that the British Government set out to create special forms of humiliation and degradation for women in Australia, there is no doubt that the whore-stereotype, accepted by the upper layers of a rigid little colonial society, wielded immense power. Indeed, it would remain, though gradually fading, as part of the design of Australian sexual politics for a century after transportation was abolished. The attitudes behind the stereotype can be seen clearly in the private journal of Ralph Clark (?-1794), marine officer on the Friendship in the First Fleet.
When Lieutenant Clark sailed for Australia in 1787 he left behind his wife Betsy Alicia Trevan, a pretty Devon girl from a landed family, and their chubby firstborn son, Ralph Stuart Clark, aged not quite two. As the First Fleet rolled southward, Clark was tortured by remorse and nostalgia. Was a promotion worth this sundering? Betsy Alicia fills the journal as he pours forth his grief in ink, trying to conjure up the family he might not see again:
Dear good woman I did not know thy worth . . . Alicia, my friend, my dear wife, and beautiful little engaging son, Oh sweet boy, what would your father give for a kiss of your mother and you, oh I think I hear him cry Papa, Papa, as I am taking my hat to go out, dear sweet sound, music to my poor ears, the only happiness that I have is the kissing of my Betsy’s dear picture and my little boy’s hair that she sent. I would not part with them for a Captain’s commission.11
Clark devises a small ritual with the “dear picture,” a miniature under a hinged glass lid. Each morning, Monday to Saturday, he kisses the glass. On Sundays he raises the tiny oval pane to kiss “my dear Alicia’s picture out of the case,” the image symbolically laid bare, a little closer to flesh. This act is both a denuding and a prayer, as to the effigy of a female saint. Holiness and sexuality are intertwined through the knot of marriage. Sometimes his dreams of Alicia are sexual (“Dreamt last night of seeing my dear beloved Alicia in bed and I pulled her towards me”), but usually they reflect his guilt at leaving her and his fear of losing her. He cannot quite make sense of his dreams, but they seem ominous; he is unhappy
from dreaming that my Alicia took a dead louse from herself and gave it to me, oh unlucky dream, for I have often heard her say that dreaming of lice was a certain sign of sickness.12
Alicia is the fixed star of well-being in Clark’s emotional universe. Her name summons up what he left behind: security, fidelity, licit sexual delight, social continuity, maternal tenderness. The conventional form in which he phrased these feelings belies their intensity. He never meant to publish his journal; he was not a writer but a miserably homesick young marine trying to set down his deepest emotional engagements in a language of sensibility derived from the genteel culture of the day:
Read the remainder of the Tragedy of Douglas this day, oh it is a sweet play. . . . [W]hat are the emotions in the breast of Lady Randolph when she sees the features and shape of her lost and stained husband Douglas in that of young Norval, little does she know, fond mother, that it is her long lost son . . . but still I cannot think that she loved as my Betsy, my virtuous Alicia does.13
To say that Ralph Clark idealized his wife would understate his feelings: She monopolized his image of women. If another woman misbehaved, her violence or immorality became a slur on Alicia, suggesting to him on some less-than-conscious level that she too might fall from grace. Hence the vindictive contrast Clark drew between Alicia and the female convicts over whom he was placed in authority. He was being punished for their sins by losing his adored wife. “I could never have thought that there were so many abandoned wenches in England, they are ten thousand times worse than the men Convicts, and I am afraid we will have a great deal more trouble with them,” he wrote while they were still in the English Channel. In July, when four of Friendship’s sailors were found at it with four female convicts in the ‘tween-decks, the captain had the men flogged; but, Clark added, “if I had been the Commander I would have flogged the four whores also.”14 The Whore was typically foulmouthed:
Elizabeth Barber one of the Convict women abused the doctor in a most terrible manner and said that he wanted to f—–her and called him all the names she could think of. . . . She began to abuse Capt. Merideth in a much worse manner, and said she was no more a whore than his wife. . . . In all the course of my days I never heard such expressions come from the mouth of a human being. . . . She desired Merideth to come and kiss her Cunt for he was nothing but a lousy rascal as were we all. I wish to God she was out of the ship, I would rather have a hundred more men than have a single woman.15
The gulf between such “damned bitches of convict women” and distant Betsy, “surely an angel and not a woman,” is absolute, and his hatred of the debased lower orders for taking him away from his wife leads to fantasies and dreams of violence. “If they were to lose anything of mine that I gave them to wash I would cut them in pieces,” he writes of women doing laundry duty on board; and later he dreams that “I was going down to Tregadock to take leave of [the family] before I went to Botany, but was assaulted by a great mob, whom I was obliged to handle rather roughly with my sword.” Three years later, suffering the rigors of Norfolk Island duty after the wreck of the Sirius, he pens a brutally dismissive epitaph on the first person to die a natural death there, a convict woman named Ann Farmer: “She was better than half dead before they sent her from England, by all accounts she was a most wicked woman having been the occasion of more than twenty men and women coming to untimely ends, but she is now gone where she will be rewarded according to her merits.” Soon he was wishing death on other women convicts as well. “I wish the Almighty would be so kind to us as to take a few of them, for we could do much better without them at present.”16
Clark got away eventually and was briefly reunited with his Betsy Alicia in June 1792. After that, his diary ceases before he could see his ideal again. In December 1792, he returned to service in the war against France. Early in 1794 Betsy Alicia died in childbirth, and the child was stillborn. A few months later, Clark’s darling boy, Ralph, then a nine-year-old midshipman, died of yellow fever on board ship in the Caribbean, during a fight with a French ship. Clark was on board, too, and was killed in battle the same day. However, that was not quite the end of Clark’s line, for at the time of his death he had a three-year-old daughter, whom he scarcely knew. She had been born to a convict woman, Mary Branham, on Norfolk Island in July 1791. At Clark’s insistence, she had been christened Alicia. There is no reference to her mother in his journal.
ii
THE WOMEN in the First Fleet were picked haphazardly, ranging from old crones to mere children. There was more system on the next female transport, Lady Juliana, which brought young women of “marriageable” age, “the colony at that time being in great want of women.” A few of them were hardened professional criminals, like Mrs. Barnsley, a shoplifter who boasted that her family had been swindlers and highwaymen for a hundred years; her brother, a highwayman, often visited her on board before the fleet sailed, “as well-dressed and genteel in his appearance as any gentleman.” At the other end of the scale was a meek little creature who bore a curiously strong resemblance to the prime minister, William Pitt, and was thought by all on board to be his bastard daughter.
Some wept and stormed, some tried to escape, and others spent the weeks before sailing hidden in corners, pale with shock and shame, their eyes red with incessant weeping; a young Scottish girl died of a broken heart before the ship left the Thames. Most of them were so demoralized by their “ruin”—the cycle of poverty, pregnancy and survival by theft or prostitution that formed the plot of a thousand melodramas and ballads simply because it was one of the commonest things that could happen to a girl—that John Nicol, a Scottish steward on the Lady Juliana, thought they were actually glad to be on board. “When I inquired their reason,” he recalled,
they answered, “How much more preferable is our present situation to what it has been since we commenced our vicious habits? . . . Banishment is a blessing to us. Have we not been banished for a long time, and yet in our native land, the most dreadful of all situations? We dared not go to our relations, whom we had disgraced. Other people would shut their doors in our faces. We were as if a plague were upon us, hated and shunned.”17
Such sentiments, whatever their literary garnish, remind one how the morale of female convicts, never very strong, must have broken down on the way to Australia. London or Botany Bay: both poles of the world were, to many, equally alien and empty of hope. “Harmless unfortunate creatures,” Nicol called them, “the victims of the basest seduction . . . a troublesome cargo, yet not dangerous or very mischievous, as I may say more noise than danger.”
As soon as the Second Fleet was at sea, the seamen of Lady Juliana began to pair off with their cargo, thus starting the almost invariable pattern of later voyages. Doubtless some of the tars felt like pashas, lording it over a seaborne seraglio. Yet Nicol’s phrase is significant: “Every man on board took a wife from among the convicts, they nothing loath.” Offensive as such pairings were to later middle-class morality they were simply taken for granted among workers in villages, in ports and in London itself. Certainly Nicol did not regard his “wife,” Sarah Whitlam, transported to Australia for seven years for stealing a cloak, asa whore. He remembered her with respect and tenderness as
a girl of a modest reserved turn, as kind and true a creature as ever lived; I courted her for a week and upwards, and would have married her on the spot, had there been a clergyman on board. . . . I had fixed my fancy on her from the moment I knocked the rivet out of her irons upon the anvil, and as firmly resolved to bring her back to England, when her time was out, my lawful wife.18
He could not get her released, however, and he sailed back to England alone, leaving Sarah Whitlam and their son, born on shipboard, in Sydney.
One may doubt, however, that all sailors showed convict women as much respect as Nicol claimed he showed his Sarah. Lord Auckland, the chairman of the 1812 Select Committee on Transportation, visited a brig loaded with women convicts that lay in the Thames in the summer of 1812 (well after the committee’s work was done) to question its skipper “as to the means of preventing improper intercourse between the sailors and the women.” The captain told him that
every sailor was allowed to have one woman to cohabit with him during the voyage.—Had information of this practice been laid before the Committee . . . it would have been marked with the strongest reprobation as likely to lead some and confirm others of these unfortunate women in habits of prostitution and disorder.19
Clearly, such “unfortunates” were not being sent to Australia to drain England of some social purulence. Even if they all had been prostitutes, their banishment would have made no difference to English crime; but it would mean a great deal to an infant colony troubled by sexual starvation. The policy was reflected in the the age of transported women—“marriageable age,” as the 1812 Select Committee on Transportation was told:
“A lonely woman is a poor thing in a Country where there are so many villains,” wrote one of the officers of the female transport Britannia in 1798.21 When a ship bearing women anchored in Sydney Cove, its upper deck became a slave-market, as randy colonists came swarming over the bulwarks, grinning and ogling and chumming up to the captain with a bottle of rum, while the female convicts—washed for the occasion and dressed in the remnants of their English finery—were mustered before them, trying as hard as they could “to set themselves off to the best advantage.” Military officers got the first pick, then non-commissioned officers, then privates, and lastly such ex-convict settlers as seemed “respectable” enough to obtain the governor’s permission to keep a female servant. (Such permission was a very great favor before Macquarie’s day; and it was stingily given, as an unusual reward, by the governors after Phillip: Grose, Paterson, Hunter, King and Bligh.) According to one former convict, not all the women assigned to officers were made their mistresses (some men, after all, were married and had brought their wives). In fact, “there were several women who were rather taken by the officers as prostitutes than as servants”;22 most of the convict women in the colony cohabited with men and the fitful attempts to curb this did not really apply to officers. Thus, Bligh had forbidden women to be “taken off the store, without being married, unless it was as servant to an officer.” Bligh himself declared, bluntly enough, that “it was impossible to prevent prostitution” (but here he clearly means cohabitation), “and therefore there was no necessity for any regulations respecting it . . . [S]ettlers wanted female servants, and pitched upon particular women for whom they applied, who perhaps cohabited together; these things could never be prevented.”23
Some witnesses found this spectacle morally barbarous, “rendering the whole Colony little better than an extensive Brothel,”24 but the governors were slow to discourage it because it got the women—whose labor was not much use—“off the store,” so that they did not have to be fed and supported at government expense. It petered out during Macquarie’s administration, after some harsh injunctions from London.25
It was the sense of helplessness, above all, that ground the women prisoners down. Reflecting on the regular shipboard slave market, “a Custom that reflects the highest Disgrace upon the British Government in that Colony,” one observer noted that all the women were not equally “depraved” on arrival; but they were driven down by “Jealousy Vexation & want.” “All have not run to the same Excesses of Iniquity; some occasionally are found better disposed, and perhaps their number would be much increased if they were not, on their first arrival, promiscuously thrown into such difficulties and temptations.”26
Since the liaisons were free of legal ties, a settler could simply throw a convict woman out when he was tired of her. This caused a troublesome floating population of whores and unattached “disorderly women” to accumulate around Sydney Cove, whose westerly arm, “The Rocks,” soon acquired a well-deserved name as the rowdiest and most dangerous thieves’ kitchen in the colony. As early as 1793, these women were offending all who met them, including a Spanish lieutenant who stopped in Sydney on an exploration vessel, the Atrevida: They made “continuous seductive advances” to his crewmen, slipped them Mickey Finns, robbed them blind, and were so “degraded by vice, or rather greed” that the notorious dock-women of Tenerife paled in memory beside them.27 In 1802 Michael Hayes, an Irishman from Wexford who had been transported as a political prisoner for his part in the abortive Irish uprising of 1798, wrote to his sister Mary pleading with her not to come out and join him. He warned her of
the distress that generally accompany [sic] unprotected Females coming to this distant part of the world. . . . Even were you with me your life would be a solitary one, [unless] you were to asociate with Prostitutes. In this country there is Eleven Hundred women I cannot count Twenty out of that number to be virtuous. The remainder support themselves through the means of Ludeness. . . . This way of life was sanctioned by the Governors, from the first Landing to this day.28
Hayes also mentioned the punishments, similar to the barbarous treatment of adulteresses in Puritan societies, visited on convict women who could not, due to their weaker constitutions and the relative mercy of the governor, be flogged as severely as men:
They are so accustomed to their lude way of life that the most severe punishments will not restrain them. I have been witness to some flogged at the Tryangle, more led through the Town [with] a rope round their waist held by the common Executioner, and a label on their necks denoting the crime. The mode of punishment mostly adopted now is mostly shaving their heads and Ducking, and afterwards [they are] sent up to Hard Labour with the men.29
Women who had money or evidence of property were usually given their ticket-of-leave on arrival—at least up to the early 1820s and the departure of Macquarie. So were married women joining their husbands in Sydney; if the husband was a convict, he too would generally get his ticket, “as affording greater facilities of support.” A female convict could also secure her ticket-of-leave on the dock if she had a special recommendation from the captain or surgeon of the transport ship—an arrangement that gave the ship’s officers a great deal of sexual leverage, although most refrained from using it.30
All the others—those pregnant or with children born on shipboard, the rejects from the “market,” the poor, the ugly, the mad, the old, the wizened—were sent to the Female Factory in Parramatta. They travelled by barge, along the long crinkling silver arm of Sydney Harbor, up the Parramatta River: a stately progress through that wild and exquisite landscape between banks lined with ancient eucalypts, where sudden green clouds of budgerigars whirled over the water and the white cockatoos flapped, shrieking like colonies of lost souls, from tree to tree. If the wind set fair, the trip took all day, but sometimes it used up the night as well; then they had to bed down at one of the ramshackle inns, mere huts with straw in back, along the river. The innkeepers—not jolly publicans, but hard-eyed ex-convicts who had got their little corner of the rum trade—plied them with liquor until they were stupefied and then robbed them of their small possessions. The barge constable did nothing to protect them.31
What greeted them the next day, as they floundered blearily into Parramatta, was a scene of disgusting squalor. The Female Factory was a loft above a jail, some sixty feet by twenty. This loft was filthy and its floor could not, in any case, be washed, since its boards had warped so much that water went straight through the cracks onto the heads of prisoners in the cells below. The roof leaked, the privies stank, and the kitchen was just a fireplace. Here, the women were expected to card and spin wool into yarn, and from the yarn weave the coarse “Parramatta cloth” from which convicts’ winter clothes were made. Those who had not managed to bring their bedding from the transport ship had to sleep on piles of scungy raw wool, full of ticks and dags; the government did not give mattresses or blankets to Parramatta women.32
The Factory had room for only a third of the women prisoners. The rest had to lodge on whatever terms they could get with the local settlers. The cost of “lodging and fire” was usually about four shillings a week, a sum which most women could only raise by “buttock-and-twang.” Their main clientele consisted of the male convicts, who had no money either and had either to steal it or work for it in their own time after they had done their “government task” for the day. Most preferred the former; and so, one irritated colonist pointed out, more than £1,560 was stolen every year in Parramatta to pay the “whores.” Macquarie reported that almost any night one could see up to three hundred convicts of both sexes roaming the town “at full liberty.”33 And the Reverend Samuel Marsden complained that
there is not a bushel of wheat or maize in the farmer’s barn, nor a sheep in his fold, nor a hog in his stye—nor even a potatoe, turnip or cabbage in his garden—but what he is likely to be robbed of every night . . . to supply the wants of these abandoned women, to whom the men can gain access at all times of the night.34
Meanwhile the superintendent of the Female Factory did nothing for his prisoners except give them their rations and reassure the government that all was quiet among the women. One of these incumbents, an oily Emancipist named Durie, went so far as to admit in 1811, after a testy memo from Macquarie, that he had let women sleep outside the Factory; but now he had abolished “this indulgence” and in future they will all sleep inside the Factory walls. Actually, it had no “walls,” except the ones that held up its roof, and convicts of both sexes came and went as they pleased.35
In 1819 Macquarie had his ex-convict architect Francis Greenway design a new Female Factory, a pretty three-story Georgian structure complete with clock, cupola and security wall. But the social conditions inside it were still imperfect. Thomas Reid, surgeon on the female transport Morley, visited his former charges there early in 1821 and found it hard to describe their “miserable state.” They gathered around him, weeping incoherently, and he learned that when they had arrived there the previous evening they had been surrounded by hordes of idle fellows, convicts . . . provided with bottles of spirits . . . for the purpose of forming a banquet according to custom, which they assured themselves of enjoying without interruption, as a prelude to excesses which decency forbids to mention.”36
In the new Factory, the women were sorted into three classes: “general,” “merit” and “crime.” The “crime” class of incorrigibles wore no badge, but their hair was cropped, as a mark of disgrace. The “merit” class was made up of those who had sustained six months’ good behavior. The “general” class was by far the largest, and it resembled a nursinghospital, being mainly composed of unlucky girls who had been sent back to the Factory when they got pregnant on assigned service. They were not compelled to reveal the father’s name, and when asked they usually said he was the Reverend Samuel Marsden.
The Female Factory was the colony’s main marriage-market, and settlers took themselves to Parramatta to find a “Factory lass” (the Australian equivalent of the mail-order bride). All it took was a written permit from Marsden, written notice to the matron and enough phlegm to endure the teasing and taunts of the women. “It requires the face of a Turk to come on such an open and acknowledged errand.” A bizarre scene: The women lined up in their coarse flannel dresses, some scowling and others hopefully primping; the “Coelebs” or bachelor, often an elderly and tongue-tied “stringybark” from the back country, hesitating his way along the rank; the matron reeling off the women’s characters and records. “After uttering the awkward ‘yes,’” recalled one witness to this colonial mating ritual in the 1820s,
the bride-elect flies around to her pals, bidding hasty adieus, and the bridegroom leads her out. “I’ll give you three months before you’re returned!” cries one, and “It’s a bargain you’ve got, old stringy-bark!” cries another. Hubbub and confusion mark the exit of the couple. . . . The clothes of the convict are returned to her, and dressed again like a free woman she hies with her suitor of an hour to the church. Government gives her a “ticket of leave” as a dower, and she steps into her husband’s carriage to go to his farm.37
These unions were not guaranteed to last. The “Factory lasses,” one ex-convict thought, only wanted to get back to Sydney and “dress themselves up and go to the flash houses, and at night to the dancing houses, then they are happy”:
I have known . . . very nice young women as you could wish to see, actually marry an old man, as ragged as possible, and perhaps he lives 20 or 30 miles up in the country, and no house within 5 or 6 miles of him, right up in the bush, where you can see nothing but the trees; but there is a policy in that, this man is a free man, and when they are married it makes her free, then after she has stop’d a day or two she will make some excuse which a woman is never at a loss for, to come down to Sydney; she will get what money she can of him (the Old Fool!) but she don’t return again.38
Punishments for the “crime” class at the Parramatta Factory—and at its no less disagreeable southern cousin, the Female Factory in Hobart, which was built in 1827 and was so overcrowded that it stank like the hold of a slave ship—were not as severe as for the men. By the 1820s, female convicts in New South Wales could no longer be seen hauling big baskets of earth for bridge construction; nor, as a rule, did “refractory” women have to wear spiked iron collars, or be whipped to the beat of a drum. However, a treadmill was put in the Parramatta Female Factory in 1823, and in 1837 another was installed in Hobart; women condemned to it suffered “a very horrible pain in the loins.”39 And there was punishment by humiliation, whose most hated form was shaving the woman’s head. This could produce rebellions, as the superintendent of the Hobart Factory found in 1827 when he told the assigned convict Ann Bruin that she was to be shorn for spending a night away from her master’s house:
She screamed most violently, and swore that no one should cut off her hair. . . . She then entered my Sitting Room screaming, swearing, and jumping about the Room as if bereft of her senses. She had a pair of Scissors in her hand and commenced cutting off her own hair. . . . Coming before the window of my Sitting Room [she] thrust her clenched fist through three panes of glass in succession. . . . With a Bucket [she] broke some more panes of glass and the Bottom Sash of the Window Frame.40
Naturally, this was seen as the action of a crazed termagant, not the protest of a woman whose physical rights were brutally transgressed. There were several riots and near-breakouts at both factories, including one in 1827 when the soldiers had to be brought in because the “Amazonian banditti” stood together, “declaring that, if one suffered, all should suffer.” In 1829 the women in the Hobart Factory tried to burn the whole place down with “Parcels of fire” thrown through their ventilation-hatches.41
iii
“WHORE” AND “PROSTITUTE,” then, were bandied about to serve the moral views of middle-class ideology; and neither the male nor the female convicts thought it disgraceful, or even wrong, to live together out of wedlock. However, female convicts in Australia were all to greater or lesser degrees oppressed as women—as members of an inferior sex. The sexism of English society was brought to Australia and then amplified by penal conditions. A convict woman needed unusual strength of character not to be crushed by its assumptions. Language itself confirmed her degradation, and some sense of this may be gleaned from the slang and cant words applied to women in Georgian times—a brusque, stinging argot of appropriation and dismissal.
A woman was a bat, a crack, a bunter, a case fro, cattle, a mort, a burick, or a convenient. If she had a regular man, she was his natural or peculiar. If married, she was an autem mott; if blonde, a bleached mott; if a very young prostitute, almost a child, a kinchin mott; if beautiful, a rum blowen, a ewe, a flash piece of mutton. If she had gonorrhea, she was a queer mort. This language was the lower millstone; the upper was the pompous moral phraseology of the Establishment, the good flogging Christians. Ground between the two, a woman would need unusual reserves of tenacity and self-esteem to resist the pressure of the stereotype. The pervasive belief in their whorishness and worthlessness must have struck deep into the souls of these women. The double-bind to which they were condemned was piercingly illustrated by the remark of one Scottish settler, Peter Murdoch (who had more than 6,000 acres in Van Diemen’s Land and had helped set up the penal station on Maria Island), to the 1838 Select Committee in London. “They are generally so bad,” he said, “that the settlers have no heart to treat them well.”42
The brutalization of women in the colony had gone on so long that it was virtually a social reflex by the end of the 1830s. The first full account of it was given by Robert Jones, Major Foveaux’s chief jailer on Norfolk Island in the early 1800s, who thought the lot of the women prisoners there “must surely have been greater than the male convicts. . . . Several have not recovered yet from their treatment at the hands of the Major.” Passages in Jones’s memoir show how absolute the chattel status of women was. “Ted Kimberley chief constable considered the convicts of Norfolk Island no better than heathens unfit to grace the earth. Women were in his estimation born for the convenience of men. He was a bright intelligent Irishman.”43 Jones’s sentiments are echoed in a fragmentary letter from a free settler on Norfolk Island, an ex-missionary turned trader named James Mitchell. “Surely no common mortal could demand treatment so brutal,” he wrote around 1815.
Heaven give their weary footsteps their aching hearts to a better place of rest for here there is none. During governorship of Major Foveaux convicts both male and female were held as slaves. Poor female convicts were treated shamefully. Governor King being mainly responsible.44
The rituals of courtship on Norfolk Island were, to put it mildly, brusque. We see the “bright intelligent” Kimberley pursuing a married convict woman named Mary Ginders with an axe, shouting that “if she did not come and live with him he would report her to the Major and have her placed in the cells.” Major Foveaux got the woman of his choice, Ann Sherwin, away from one of his subordinate officers by throwing him in jail on a trumped-up charge “so that,” claimed the Irish rebel leader Joseph Holt, a Norfolk prisoner at the time, “the poor fellow, seeing the danger he was in, thought it better to save his life, and lose his wife, than to lose both.”45 (At least their union lasted: Foveaux married Ann Sherwin in England in 1815.)
In such a moral environment, although male convicts had some rights (however attenuated), the women had none except the right to be fed; they had to fend for themselves against both guards and male prisoners. “England for white slaves, why were they sent here,” Jones scribbled in one of his outbursts of delayed guilt, while reflecting on the fate of three women sent to Norfolk Island for the “crime” of abortion,
for crimes that required pity more than punishment. Heaven forbid [sic] England if that is her way of populating her hellholes. What would our noble persons think of our virgin settlements and their white slaves. In every case the women treated as slaves, good stock to trade with and a convict having the good chance to possess one did not want much encouragement to do so.46
Thus the women were prisoners of prisoners. The price of a young, good-looking girl, fresh off the ship from Sydney, was “often as high as ten pounds.” The island’s bellman or beadle, Potter by name, had acquired the right to sell them. The same woman might be sold several times during her Norfolk Island sentence, with Potter “in most cases reselling them for a gallon or two of rum until they were in such a Condition as to be of little or no further use.” The sales would be held in an old store where the women had to strip naked and “race around the room” while Potter kept up a running commentary on their “respective values.”
The regular social pleasure of Norfolk Island under Foveaux, however, was the Thursday evening dance in the soldiers’ barracks where, Jones wrote,
all the women would join in the dances of the Mermaids, each one being naked with numbers painted on their backs so as to be recognized by their admirers who would clap their hands on seeing their favorite perform some grotesque action . . . with the assistance of a gallon or two of Rum. Such amusements were the talk of the soldiers for days before and after the performance.47
Such dances commonly took place in London brothels, where they were known in flash-talk as “ballum rancums.” In these scenes, with the drunken, lurching bodies of women numbered like sides of beef, we see the epitome of sexual politics in early Australia. Women had to adapt as best they could; the system of sexual exploitation provoked competition among them, and they would fight like cats to stay in with the guards. Mary Ginders, the chief constable’s woman, was “the leader of all the dances in the barrack Room and was well liked among the soldiers”; when Bridget Chandler, another convict woman, challenged her as favorite, Ginders broke her arm. James Mitchell, despite his moral disapproval of Norfolk Island promiscuity, gave up his missionary work and acquired a mistress, rather to Jones’s envy,
a beautiful young woman named Liza McCann who was as cunning as himself, who could drink more rum than most of the Hardened Soldiers, and took every opportunity to make herself disagreeable to the other females who would never dare venture within her store. Her greatest pride was to be clothed in silk and a bonnet with feathers.48
Women on the mainland or in Van Diemen’s Land were rarely flogged, but such punishment was common on Norfolk Island and, indeed, appears to have been Major Foveaux’s special treat. “To be remembered by all there,” Mitchell alleged, “was his love for watching women in their agony while receiving a punishment on the Triangle. . . . [I]t was usual for [him] to remit a part of the sentence on condition that they would expose their nakedness it being considered part of the punishment. And poor wretches were only too glad to save their flesh and pain.”49 With his pistol in one hand and cutlass in the other, Foveaux would muster the male convicts in a semicircle; the naked woman was compelled to walk past them before she was trussed up to the triangle and the “skinner” or “backscratcher” (Norfolk Island cant for the flogger) went to work. The usual sentences were 25 lashes, the “Botany Bay dozen,” but they could go as high as 250. The last Norfolk Island woman to be flogged on Foveaux’s orders, in 1804, received such a sentence, but the flogger was squeamish about it; he said he was sick and Kimberley had to take the cat-o’-nine-tails, “upon which,” as Jones described it, “[he] cried out that he did not flog women. This reply made the Major furious. He then asked one of the soldiers, Mick Kelly by name, to take the tails and go on with the punishment, which he immediately proceeded to perform in such a manner that not one mark was left on her back. This made the Major so wild that he ordered the woman to be placed in the dark cells for a fortnight.”50
This was the man whom Ellis Bent, Macquarie’s deputy judge-advocate, found “attentive and obliging.” Foveaux’s amusements may suggest how much of the true nature of the British regime in early Australia lies hidden under the smooth language of administration. Crimes die with their witnesses, and so, no doubt, did most of the crimes against women in the early colony. Yet there is no lack of evidence that women continued to be treated as a doubly colonized class throughout the life of the penal system. Almost four decades later, the fate of women excited the horror and contempt of Franćois-Maurice Lepailleur, one of the fifty-eight Canadian patriotes who had been transported for political rebellion against the English colonial authorities in “Lower Canada” (Quebec). Arriving in 1840, these Canadian exiles were confined on a penal farm in the forest at Longbottom, halfway between Sydney and Parramatta. All of them, and especially Lepailleur (who was able to keep a journal in secret), were disgusted by the way the local free men, Emancipists, guards and police treated their women. “A farce,” Lepailleur called the New South Wales police force. “Drunks and scum.”51 At night, the huts around the stockade would resound with the shrieks of women being thrashed. The forest warden at Longbottom, a man named Rose, tied his wife to a post and gave her 50 lashes with a government cat-o’-nine-tails; another settler, a Portuguese, stabbed his wife and hung her on a gum tree, with complete impunity. Not surprisingly, most of the women Lepailleur encountered in his Australian exile were alcoholic sluts, broken down by abuse, wife-beating and rum:
During the afternoon a drunken woman, just come from the factory at Parramatta, began to abuse the woman who lives in the small cabin in front of the gate. After she had sworn a lot, cursed and blasphemed, . . . [she] turned her back to us; lifted up all her clothes and showed us her bum, saying that she had a “Black Hole” there and slapping her belly like the wretch she was. Nothing more vile than that tribe; animals are more decent than they. I would say much more but it would dirty my little journal to go on. It is incredible to see so many drunken women in this country. The roads are full of women drunkards.52
Thus it would seem that some prisoners—especially those who, like Lepailleur, believed themselves to be the respectable victims of tyranny and hence a cut above the “real” criminals—had exactly the same contempt for convict women as the free witnesses who discoursed so unanimously on their evils to the Molesworth Committee in 1838. “More irreformable than the male convicts,” opined Bishop Ullathorne, declaring that “when a woman is bad, she is generally very bad.” “I do not believe that one woman in a thousand has the moral energy to resist the temptation [to promiscuity],” Peter Murdoch testified.
Religious authorities and social workers claimed that convict women, in and out of the Female Factory, responded eagerly to any gesture of compassion or attention. But such assertions were rarely unbiased. The Roman Catholic prelate William Ullathorne (1806–1889), who had been appointed vicar-apostolic for New South Wales in 1834, never missed an opportunity to assert the success (and hence the necessity) of Catholic missionary work among the convicts. He had brought out a large contingent of Catholic clergy to Australia in 1838, including the first nuns ever seen in the colony—five Irish Sisters of Charity. Ullathorne described how these devoted women would go and visit the prisoners of the Female Factory at Parramatta five evenings a week. About a third of the factory women, he said, were Catholics, and most of them were desperate to pour their hearts out to a friendly ear. “It was sometimes difficult to prevent these poor creatures from making complete confession to the nuns. They wanted to unburden their minds, and said they would as soon speak to a nun as to a priest. The reverence with which the Sisters were regarded by all these women was quite remarkable, and the influence they exercised told . . . throughout the Colony.”53 If one has difficulty swallowing this, it can only be because Ullathorne’s sentimental picture of women convicts begging to be shriven flies in the face of most other evidence about them; there is not much reason to suppose that they were any less tough or any more pathetic than their male equivalents—which is not, of course, to say that they were the degenerate creatures some authorities made them out to be. Clearly, it was in Ullathorne’s interest to increase the Catholic clergy in Australia, and his testimony on the moral iniquities of transportation must be seen in that light.
Yet some were certainly grateful for a kindly ear. The prison reformer Caroline Anley visited the factory in 1834 and met two “young and extremely pretty” women who, while drunk and in a desperate outburst of temper, had attacked their tyrannous master—a Captain Charles Waldron of the 39th Regiment—and killed him. For once, popular sentiment intervened (and none of the other assigned convicts would give evidence against them), so that their death sentence was commuted to three years. Nevertheless they were regarded inside the factory as incorrigible demonesses, and Caroline Anley was the first prison visitor ever to ask for their side of the story. “If I had always been kindly treated,” one of them told Anley, through the first tears she had shed since her conviction, “I wouldn’t be as I am.”54
Life in the factory—whether in New South Wales or in Van Diemen’s Land—was a vegetative misery for all who led it. The minds of the women convicts rotted through lack of anything to do, although most of them preferred this stagnant leisure, punctuated by bouts of inefficient taskwork at the hand-loom, to being “treated like dogs and worked like horses” by some abusive master. The steadily growing population of freemen and colonial-born Australians objected to the Female Factories on more pragmatic grounds. By cloistering women in a colony short of females, it slowed down the birthrate. Their main mouthpiece, The Australian, editorialized at length on this in 1825, defending traditional “colonial marriage”—living together out of wedlock—as a great civilizer of the bush, a styptic against “dissoluteness and crime”:
How many parties are living to this day together by virtue of no other bond? How many . . . are there who, after conducting themselves in an exemplary manner in that state of “resemblance to marriage,” have been made honest women, and who, but for the forming of this species of obligation, would have been vagrants in the streets? How many by mutual industry have rendered miserable hovels comfortable homes? How many families have sprung up where nothing but a wilderness would have been seen? Had this order of things continued, even in this objectionable shape, many a vagabond, who had been lost to Society, might have been reclaimed; might have become a decent Settler. . . . But we live in an age, when it is fashionable to assume a demureness of manner, an extraordinary degree of godliness, and lay claim to an uncommon share of holy endowment.55
Here spoke the voice of rough-and-ready sense; but it was not one that penal officials, imprisoned by their own moral stereotypes of convict evil and female whoredom, were disposed to believe. The barrier of class thinking—of judging the social behavior of working-class convicts in terms of the desiderata of the English and colonial middle classes—was too strong for that; and ecclesiastical witnesses, from Quaker missionaries to Catholics like Ullathorne, were never slow to produce the bogey of convict sexual depravity when they needed to raise funds and muster support for their own evangelical programs in Australia. It was also, as many pages of the Molesworth Committee’s evidence record, an incomparably useful weapon for Abolitionists. To show the vileness of the System they had to emphasize its power to degrade. Hence the additional emphasis, in the English reformers’ decade of the 1830s, on something even less discussable: convict homosexuality.
iv
ONE WOULD naturally suppose that, in a remote colony whose proportion of men to women varied between 4 to 1 in the city and 20 to 1 in the bush, homosexuality would have flourished. So it did, especially on the chain gangs and in the outer penal settlements; but it did not leave much official evidence behind.
This was not only because sodomy was a capital crime. In the eyes of the law, sodomy deserved death; but in the eyes of social custom, especially the customs of English and Irish working people, it was more than ordinarily loathsome—“the crime whose name cannot be uttered,” the phrase that Oscar Wilde would later soften into “the Love that dare not speak its name.” Arthur Phillip, the first governor, was not by the ordinary standards of his time and calling a harsh man; indeed, he generally acted with humane decency. “I doubt if the fear of death ever prevented a man of no principle from committing a bad action,” he noted before the First Fleet sailed. But in his code there were two exceptions: murder and sodomy. “For either of these crimes I would wish to confine the criminal until an opportunity offered of delivering him to the natives of New Zealand, and let them eat him. The dread of this will operate much stronger than the fear of death.” Thus the sodomite, “violent against Nature,” would be erased from society, denied even the small social niche that burial affords. This draconic idea was not carried out, or even mentioned again—there were no spare ships to ferry the “madge culls,” “mollies” and “fluters,” as homosexuals were known in Georgian cant, across the Tasman Sea to enrich the Maori diet.56
Buggery, it has been said, is to prisons what money is to middle-class society. It was as utterly pervasive in the world of hulks and penal settlement as it is in modern penitentiaries. “The horrible crime of sodomy,” reported the convict George Lee from the Portland, a hulk in Langston Harbor, in 1803, “rages so shamefully throughout that the Surgeon and myself have been more than once threatened with assassination for straining to put a stop to it. . . . [It] is in no way discountenanced by those in command.” Jeremy Bentham claimed that prisoners entering the Woolwich hulks were raped as a matter of course: “An initiation of this sort stands in the place of garnish and is exacted with equal rigour. . . . [A]s the Mayor of Portsmouth, Sir John Carter . . . very sensibly observes, such things ever must be.”57
Not until 1796 was anyone in Australia charged with a homosexual offense. This pioneer was Francis Wilkinson, accused (but acquitted) of buggering a sixty-year-old settler named Joseph Pearce. The first forty years of the colony provide scattered mentions of homosexual acts, routinely listed in the magistrates’ bench-books and remarked on, in a general way, by lay and church authorities.58 Nothing in the reports of the Select Committees on convict establishments and transportation for 1798 or 1812 can be construed as a reference to homosexuality. But after 1830, the documents are full of references to it—for that was the decade in which the movement to abolish transportation, dormant since the protestations of Jeremy Bentham, began to gather steam. Abolitionists like Lord John Russell and Sir William Molesworth wanted to show that transportation to Australia depraved most of its victims and reformed none of them. Proponents of transportation—especially the wealthy Australian landowners, who stood to lose their assigned labor if convictry was abolished—did not want convict homosexuality discussed; but its opponents did. Mentioning the unmentionable would complete the picture of Australia sketched by William Ullathorne as a polity of fallen souls whose “otherness” was all the worse because they were white, not black. “The eye of God,” Ullathorne feelingly declared,
looks down upon a people such as, since the deluge, has not been. Where they marry in haste, without affection; where each one lives to his senses alone. A community without the feelings of community; whose men are very wicked, whose women are very shameless, and whose children are very irreverent. . . . The naked savage, who wanders through those endless forests, knew of nothing monstrous in crime, except cannibalism, until England schooled him in horrors through her prisoners. The removal of such a plague from the earth concerns the whole human race.59
When speaking of sodomy, Bishop Ullathorne’s eloquence became sublime and cloudy. He spoke to the Molesworth Committee of “crimes that, dare I describe them, would make your blood to freeze, and your hair to rise erect in horror upon the pale flesh.” But he, like all the Abolitionists, offered more impressions than figures. We do not know (and probably never will) how widespread homosexuality was in penal Australia.
An example of the difficulty occurs in the minutes of evidence of the 1832 Select Committee on Secondary Punishments. John Stephen, a former judge in New South Wales, related how in the first trial he had attended in Australia four or five Norfolk Island prisoners were sentenced to death. “They thanked the Judge for having ordered them to die: stating, that they lived in such a state of horrid misery, witnessing the most horrid crime known to human nature, committed in numberless cases from morning to night, that they preferred death.” In the course of another trial, Stephen testified, a witness had mentioned “50 or 60 cases [of sodomy] occurring in a day” on Norfolk Island, a sexual epidemic which “made men so perfectly miserable, that many preferred death to living in that penal settlement.” Since the total convict population of Norfolk Island at the time was about 600, this argues an impressive priapic energy on the prisoners’ part, perhaps caused by the sea air. Yet in the same report there is the testimony of the Crown botanist, Allan Cunningham, who spent four months on Norfolk Island in the same year, 1830. Were the convicts in a state “of the most horrible degradation”? “Not that I heard of,” said Cunningham, dismissing the idea of Norfolk Island as a sea-girt Sodom, which he thought had been cooked up by the “radical” press, particularly the “most scurrilous paper” in the colony, the Monitor, ever critical of Governor Darling. The crime of sodomy, he thought, “might have been committed once or twice in the course of ten years, but I do not believe it was common.”60
Once a decade or sixty times a day? Inflated though Stephen’s guess may have been, Cunningham’s was clearly absurd; but both were, in fact, produced by the same reflex. Because the act was unspeakable, it must not be inspected; easier to deny its existence, or else to believe any horror story about it. All that is known about Norfolk Island, however, suggests that Stephen’s guess was not far off the mark, especially by the mid-1840s under Major Childs, when the muddle of laxity and brutality there had reached its absolute nadir.
Obviously, most lovers were not caught; hence, statistics on sodomy from the penal period are of little use, as they were based only on court indictments. Homosexual acts in penal Australia were done in secret, and prisoners seldom swore out complaints against other prisoners for performing them. Consequently few “sodomists” were arraigned, let alone convicted. Over the period 1829–35, in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, only twenty-four men were tried for “unnatural offences.” Twelve were convicted and sentenced—four capitally, though only one (in 1834) was actually hanged. Five drew hard labor in irons on the chain gang, and three were re-transported to Norfolk Island or Moreton Bay.61
Why so few convictions? Ernest Augustus Slade, who had been superintendent of the convict barracks at Hyde Park in Sydney from 1833 to 1834 (his resignation was forced by sexual scandal, though over a woman), testified that “among [the lower] class of convicts sodomy is as common as any other crime.” It was an ineradicable part of jail culture. But only about one case in thirty could be proven. Molested youths lodged complaints but then prevaricated in court; and other evidence tended to be vague, since “shirtlifters” were rarely caught in the act of buggery. “If you had it proved,” Slade told the Molesworth Committee in 1838, “that men were found with their breeches down in secluded spots, and they stated that they had gone there to ease themselves, and upon examination it was found that they had not done so, what could have occurred?” But no jury would convict on such grounds. Out in the bush, the dreaded act became more obscure still, as there was nobody to watch the assigned convicts. Bishop Ullathorne believed that sodomy was less frequent among the shepherds, who tended to live alone, than among stockmen, “a much more dissolute set” who practiced “a great deal of that crime” and even taught it to the formerly innocent Aborigines. And if the Man from Snowy River’s convict forebear was not content with the brusque embraces of Jacky-Jacky, there were always sheep. “As a juryman,” one witness told the committee, “I have had opportunities of hearing many trials for unnatural offences, with animals particularly. . . . I think they are much more common than in any other country inhabited by the English.” “That is, among the convicts?” interjected one committee member. “Yes,” said the witness, dispelling the thought of the colonial gentry practicing abominations on their own merinos.62
The testimony given to the Molesworth Committee suggests a demimonde not quantified by the statistics of the time. Homosexuality was the norm in the Hyde Park barracks in Sydney, where new arrivals were decanted from the ships, old lags thrown together with young boys. As in all systems of confinement since prisons began, lads became “punks” (passive homosexuals) to get the protection of a dominant man; they went by girls’ names, Kitty, Nancy or Bet. Few of them had any homosexual experience before they got to Australia, according to Ullathorne—and his testimony was more than guesswork, since as a priest he had heard thousands of prison confessions and had to struggle with his conscience as he testified, generalizing so as not to violate the seal of the confessional. As one bewildered youth exclaimed to him, “Such things no one knows in Ireland.”63
The only account of penal homosexuality in Australia by a convict was set down by the Swing letter-writer from Shropshire, Thomas Cook, in his memoir of the System in the 1830s, The Exile’s Lamentations. His contact with it began when he was sent to labor in the road gangs in the Blue Mountains, cutting the Great Western Road through raw bush and sandstone at Honeysuckle Flat. “It was now,” he wrote, “that my miseries commenced,” although he would not press their “nauseous details” on the reader:
I was yet in the dark of the horrible propensity which the coarse and brutish language of my Gangmates in calamity, coupled with their assignations one towards the other, shortly told me the greater part of them had imbibed. So far advanced were these wretched men in depravity, that they appeared to have entirely lost the feelings of men, and to have imbibed those that would render them execrable to all mankind.64
For warmth, men bedded two or three together, a custom which “appeared to me altogether objectionable”; and before long. Cook was so broken down by labor and lack of sleep that a medical officer transferred him to another gang working closer to Sydney, at Mount Victoria. But at night, the same fumbling and rooting went on there; the only difference was that there the gangers “were less public in their demonstrations of brutal regard.” Naïvely, Cook tried to remonstrate with a ganger who took a fancy to him. “Extraordinary as it may appear,” he wrote indignantly,
it is not the less true, that an appeal to their better feelings was the certain cause of insult and derision, which they would copiously inflict on their less depraved fellow Prisoner; and if he nevertheless persisted in publicly deprecating their horrid propensities, he would be struck, kicked and otherwise abused.65
There was no appeal to authority, because all the overseers on the mountain road gangs were convicts, and most of them, according to Cook, were homosexuals. “Woe unto that man who had the courage to pass a remark at all disrespectful of the despicable objects of their horrible ambition! He would be selected as a Lamb for the Slaughter!” If crossed, they could send a man to be summarily “lacerated at the Triangles” at the courthouse at Mount Wallawarang.
With his virtue stubbornly intact, Cook labored in the Mount Victoria gang for several months before losing his temper with an importunate homosexual, whom he thrashed “rather unmercifully.” For this, he was sentenced to a year in irons on the road at No. 2 Stockade, whose overseers were the worst of all—“without exception, the most overbearing and depraved Villains it were possible to find in the mountain district,” Cook wrote, his abstract figures of moral obloquy creaking under the strain:
The only regard they had to classification, was evidently that which to all natural beings, bespoke their own abominations,—or, in other words, the most execrable portion of their men found no difficulty in ingratiating themselves into favor, by the coarseness of their language, and the open demonstrations of Pleasure with which they give effect to their horrible propensities, in their Overseers’ hearing.66
At the stockade, convicts could sometimes bribe their way out of a flogging with money or tobacco, but the only other way was to “come out” as a homosexual and so mollify the overseers. A circle of sexual tyranny sustained itself because, according to Cook, the overseers on the iron gangs were chosen from the working hands on unshackled gangs, like those at Honeysuckle Flat and Mount Victoria. They were recommended by those gangs’ overseers, so that like chose like; an overseer’s sexual favorites could be rewarded with a ration of power on the iron gangs, enforcing “Starvation, Flogging and insupportable Labour” upon any resistant “straights.” Cook declared that in his time on the road gangs, he had only known two overseers who were not homosexual.67
Although Cook, like most Englishmen of his day, thought homosexuality disgusting in itself, his deeper objection to its role in the penal world was that it multiplied the injustices of power. It represented an abusive control over the will of others, often involving rape. If this carceral society of the 1830s was anything like prisons today, we must recognize that many of the sexual episodes Cook witnessed were not lovemaking but acts of sadistic humiliation, in which sexuality was merely the instrument of a deeper violence—the strong breaking the weak down into a punk, a molly, a gobbling queen. Nothing in Cook’s background prepared him for such transactions, and so he went down through the circles of the System—from the road gangs to Port Macquarie, from Port Macquarie to Norfolk Island—in amazement and outrage. He described, in language that can scarcely bear to encompass its subject, how sexual contact in prison tends to be metabolized into relationships of power.
Cook thought that the System nurtured sodomy—that it flourished in Australia as nowhere else. He believed that there was little homosexuality in English jails and hulks, but that inversion, in the sexual sense as well as the geographical, ruled the antipodes; and that cruelty was the seed of “the practice which was engendered at the Penal Settlements of Old where they were tortured by Tyrants in a manner that tended to brutalize all Nature.” If “nature”—which, for Cook, included the idea of “natural law” or justice—is perverted by tyranny, then other realms, including the sexual, will be warped as well. Reflecting on this years later, in the relative peace and security of Alexander Maconochie’s administration on Norfolk Island, Cook speculated that the System meant to encourage sodomy, using the perpetual threat of rape or humiliation as one of the automatic punishments for the unwitting convict. In this he was wrong, but one can understand why he thought it. Until Maconochie took over Norfolk Island in 1840, not one commandant in the System had shown the least concern for the rehabilitation of his prisoners. They acted purely as agents of repression, as guardians of the pit. And if the men in the pit had ways of degrading one another, why trouble to stop them? So Cook, writing in the early 1840s, makes his climactic outcry against the “Old System” of the 1830s:
No prospect being afforded them of a woman’s Love,—without hope of Heaven or fear of Hell; their already darkened reason became more clouded. Their lax morals gave way and they indulged with apparent delight in every filthy and unnatural propensity. None but a mind capable of powerful reasoning, into which early moral habits had been instilled, or a heart filled with early affection could prevent a being falling into the lowest depths of infamy, never more to rise to the rank of man. . . . [I]t would be better to introduce the Dracon Laws than revert to the Old System.68
Between Cook’s objurgations one glimpses the workings of homosexual society among the prisoners. Clearly, there was a good deal of solidarity:
Several individuals were punished for the heinous offence, and although it may appear incredible it is nevertheless true that these wretches were generally viewed with feelings of sympathy and those who had brought such cases forward were looked upon with contempt, and very few would afterwards associate with them.69
Cook also hints at the strength of attachments between prison lovers on Norfolk Island, a fact confirmed by the disapproving testimony of Thomas Arnold, the deputy-assistant commissary on Norfolk Island, to the Molesworth Committee: “Actually, incredible as it may appear, feelings of jealousy are exhibited by those depraved wretches, if they see the boy or young man with whom they carry on this abominable intercourse speak to another person.” Eight years later an official report by Robert Pringle Stuart, a convict department magistrate in Norfolk, described how convicts called themselves “man and wife,” that there were probably 150 such couples, not counting more casual attachments, and that they could not bear to be separated: “The natural course of affection is quite distracted, and these parties manifest as much eager earnestness for the society of each other as members of the opposite sex.” Bishop Ullathorne, visiting Norfolk Island in 1835–36, heard at second hand (from a Protestant clergyman, who had been told it by a prisoner under sentence of death) that “two-thirds of the island were implicated” in homosexual activity. He thought the same proportion obtained at Moreton Bay and other penal stations.70
Certainly there was no decline in sexual coercion on Norfolk Island, except perhaps between 1839 and 1843, the time of Maconochie’s brief adminstration. By the mid-1840s it had grown even worse, largely because there was no effort to sort out the hardened criminals from the new arrivals. “Youths are seized upon, and become the victims of hoary and unnatural villains,” reported Thomas Naylor, chaplain on Norfolk Island from 1841 to 1845:
With these scoundrels the English farm labourer, the tempted and fallen mechanic, the suspected but innocent victims of perjury or mistake, are indiscriminately herded. With them are mixed Chinamen from Hong Kong, the aborigines of New Holland, West Indian Blacks, Greeks, Caffres, and Malays; soldiers for desertion; idiots, madmen, pig-stealers and pickpockets. In the open day the weak are bullied and robbed by the stronger. At night the sleeping-wards are very cess-pools of unheard-of vices. I cannot find sober words enough to express the enormity of this evil. . . . I watched the process of degradation. I saw very boys seized upon and lost; I saw decent and respectable men, nay gentlemen . . . thrown among the vilest ruffians, to be tormented by their bestialities.71
In no less heated terms, Robert Pringle Stuart reported to his superiors in Van Diemen’s Land in 1846 that Norfolk Island under the lax, vacillating sway of Major Childs had become a citadel of sodomy:
How can anything else be expected? Here are 800 men immured from 6 o’clock in the evening until sunrise . . . without lights, without visitation by the officers. Atrocities of the most shocking, odious character are there perpetrated, and that unnatural crime is indulged in to excess; the young have no chance of escaping from abuse, and even forcible violation is resorted to. To resist can hardly be expected, in a situation so utterly removed from, and lamentably destitute of, protection. A terrorism is sternly and resolutely maintained, to revenge not merely exposure but even complaint.72
Convict homosexuality seemed, from Stuart’s perspective, to be the quintessential form of convict evil. Other reformers and officials, staring timorously into the pit that England had created and whose very bottom was Norfolk Island, agreed. The danger seemed to be that this “contagion” would spread unchecked like an epidemic disease from the island to the mainland of Australia, so that, as Stuart put it, “in future years a moral stain of the deepest dye may be impressed, perhaps immovably, on its people, and thus become attached to the name of Englishmen.”73 This fear cannot have been felt by Stuart alone. The portions of his report that had to do with convict homosexuality were censored from its published form; but it is hardly possible that news and rumors of such doings on Norfolk Island and other penal stations, over the years, did not leak out into the colony and contribute to the atmosphere of nameless evil, of unutterable degradation, that surrounded the idea of convictry in the ears of its respectable citizens. This inevitably fostered more repressive attitudes toward all homosexuals in Australia. Their sexual preference was doubly damned: first, because it was a crime under law, and second, because it was mainly committed by those who were convicts already.
There could have been no better breeding ground for the ferocious bigotry with which Australians of all classes, long after the abandonment of Norfolk Island and of the System itself, perceived the homosexual. And this in turn seemed like an act of cleansing—for homosexuality was one of the mute, stark, subliminal elements in the “convict stain” whose removal, from 1840 onward, so preoccupied Australian nationalists.
v
THE THIRD “minority” in penal Australia was not, in round figures, a minority at all, for until about 1845 there were probably more Aborigines scattered across the continent than whites clustered around its coastal settlements. But aboriginal groups were always small and scattered, whereas the white groups (except on the rim of pastoral settlement) tended to be larger and denser. On the shores of Sydney Harbor, whites outnumbered blacks from the moment the First Fleet arrived; no black could ever have seen so many people before. One is apt to think of Sydney and its outlying penal settlements, from Hobart and Launceston in the south to Moreton Bay in the north, as small and weak. So they were, but to the Aborigines they looked large, strange and imposing, and the malign gravitational field they emitted would destroy their culture.
The fate of the Australian blacks was intimately connected to the System. A frontier society based on slave labor, run by the threat of extreme violence and laced with rigid social divisions was not likely to treat the Aborigines compassionately or even fairly. Nor did it. There was a great gap between policy and practice. The Royal instructions to every governor of Australia, from Arthur Phillip in 1788 to Thomas Brisbane in 1822, always repeated the same themes. The Aborigines must not be molested. Anyone who “wantonly” killed them, or gave them “any unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations”, must be punished. The aim in racial relations was “amity and kindness.”74 The idea of converting them to Christianity would not be embodied in official policy until Brisbane’s successor as governor, Ralph Darling, came in 1825. Yet, even though white settlement began with no policy of racist persecution, the coming of the whites was an unmitigated disaster for everyone with a black skin.
The legal status of Aborigines—and of their “claims,” as white officials interestingly put it, to the territory they had occupied for some eighteen millennia before the arrival of the whites—seemed almost insoluble to the whites. Everywhere else in the historical experience of the British Empire, colonies had been planted where the “natives” and “Indians” understood and defended the idea of property. In Virginia as in Africa, in New Zealand as in the East Indies, British colonists encountered cultures of farming people who had houses, villages and plots of cultivated land. These proofs of prior ownership might be violated by the whites (and often were); but they could not be denied or ignored. Even Charles II’s instructions to the Council of Foreign Plantations on the conduct of the English colony in Virginia had recognized that as the new settlement would “border upon” the lands of the Indians, their territory had to be respected, for “peace is not to be expected without . . . justice to them.”75
But the Aborigines were hunter-gatherers who roamed over the land without marking out boundaries or making fixed settlements. They had no idea of farming or stock-raising. They saved nothing, lived entirely in the present and were, in the whites’ eyes, so ignorant of property as to be little more than intelligent animals “whose only superiority above the brute,” as one visiting naval surgeon put it, “consisted in their use of the spear, their extreme ferocity and their employing fire in the cookery of their food.” The whites were not the only ones to think so; when a Maori named Tipahee visited Sydney with his son around 1800 at the behest of Governor King, both warriors formed “the most contemptible opinion” of the Aborigines’ nakedness, weak technology, poor comforts and “trifling mode of warfare.”76
Macquarie hoped they could be brought from their “rambling Naked state” and made into farmers. In 1815 he tried to put sixteen aboriginal men on a small farm on Sydney Harbor, complete with huts and a boat. They lost the boat, ignored the huts and wandered off into the bush.77
From then on, it was assumed that “native labor” was useless. Hence, the rights normally assigned to colonized native workers within the Empire were not extended to Aborigines. The early colony was so overwhelmingly dependent on the slave labor of white convicts that the effort of training nomadic blacks even for the most menial work was notworthwhile. The convicts might be scum, but they had an economic value. The blacks clearly had none; therefore, they were less than scum. The decay of fringe-dwelling blacks on the edge of white urban culture—the remnants of the lora, Gammeraigal and Daruk—was inexorable and all-pervasive; to sympathetic onlookers it seemed a plague, and to racist ones a bestial joke. Stupefied with the cheapest grade of rum, racked with every new disease from tuberculosis to syphilis, begging and babbling in the flash-talk and gutter argot of the convicts, they were caricatures of misery. Even their traditions of authority had been parodied by the whites, who insisted on giving some elders patronizing identity cards in the form of crescent-shaped copper plates, with their rank as “chief” engraved on them in English. And yet, as the Russian explorer Captain Bellingshausen noted of some Sydney Aborigines in 1820,
The natives remember very well their former independence. Some expressed their claims to certain places, asserting that they belonged to their ancestors. . . . Despite all the compensation offered to them [!], a spark of vengeance still smoulders in their hearts.78
The tribes further out were better off, but only for a short time. They, too, were about to lose their land. Where did their title to it lie? Only in their own collective memory and oral traditions, to which the whites paid no attention. They seemed to drift across the territory in little ragged groups, never staying long in one place, appearing from the forest and vanishing back into it. They carried what they owned and killed the infants they could not carry. The complex and ancient ideas about territory that were embedded in aboriginal thought—ideas that had to do more with land as the “property” of mythic ancestors than with material ownership in the here and now—were completely unfamiliar to the whites and would have been opaque to them even without the barrier of language. The Aborigines had no visible political framework, and certainly they were not united as a people with common interests: There were perhaps five hundred languages and dialects spoken by the aboriginal tribes of early colonial Australia. Moreover, they lived in an almost continuous state of tribal warfare, aggravated by the kind of random contact made inevitable by nomadic life. One Australian historian cautiously ventured that the aboriginal death rate from these bloody encounters—rarely involving more than fifty men on each side—lay between I person in 270 and 1 in 150, a death rate “not exceeded in any nation of Europe during any of the last three centuries.”79 If these strange people showed so little solidarity among themselves, what common rights would their invaders assign them? In practice, almost none. The government simply declared all Australian land to be Crown land; and the idea that Aborigines might have some territorial rights by virtue of prior occupation was settled to the entire satisfaction of the whites by a New South Wales court decision in 1836, which declared that the Aborigines were too few and too ill-organized to be considered “free and independent tribes” who owned the land they lived on.80 Even the humanitarians could salve their consciences by reflecting that the Aborigines were, after all, nomads—and to a nomad, one tract of land is “as good as” another. This absurd misreading of nomadic life meant that Aborigines could be driven without compunction out of their ancestral territory and into new conflicts, not only with the whites, but with other tribes.
At the same time, the Aborigines were classified as British subjects; indeed, the early governors wanted to see them converted to Christianity and farming so that they could be absorbed, socially if not genetically, into the lower class of the colony—an idea loathed and resisted by every white, no matter what his class. The first policies about clashes between settlers and Aborigines were therefore most equivocal. In 1802, after nearly seven years of undeclared warfare against the Daruk tribe on the Hawkesbury River—guerrilla raids by blacks, punitive torture and killings by settlers—Governor King saw fit to remind the colonists that the killing of natives “will be punished with the utmost severity of the Law,” but that “the Settler is not to suffer his property to be invaded, or his existence endangered by them.” Thus, he would commute the hanging of five colonists who had killed two blacks on the Hawkesbury River two years before. In 1805, King’s judge-advocate opined that, since the Aborigines had no grasp of such basics of English law as evidence, guilt or oaths, they could neither be prosecuted nor sworn as witnesses, for either would be “a mockery of judicial proceedings.” And so the best course would be to “pursue and inflict such punishment as they may merit,” without the formalities of a trial. A settler would have had to be blind or a saint not to see the point, and from then on the miseries of dispossession began.81
They were brought to full spate over the next thirty years by the Australian wool industry and its insatiable appetite for land. They would go on far beyond the end of the penal system itself. Between 1800 and 1830, the settled stations pushed inexorably outward: south to Goulburn and the high Monaro plains, west across the Blue Mountains to the golden grasslands that stretched around Bathurst and Mudgee, and north to the valley of the Hunter River. At every contact with the Aborigines, the pattern would be much the same: a collision between a white culture of private property and a black one of “primitive communism” in which no resources, land least of all, were privately owned. Sometimes the blacks would move on. Usually they attacked, launching a small guerrilla war until enough of their warriors had been cut down by the settlers’ firearms to render the tribe helpless. If their resistance was strong enough, martial law could be declared against them: In 1824 the stockholders around Bathurst persuaded Governor Brisbane to send soldiers in to “pacify” the blacks in their area. Brisbane, who a few years before had been impressing missionaries with his liberal expressions of concern for the Aborigine (“If something is not done for these poor, distressed creatures, they will become extinct: the race of them will perish from absolute want!” he told a Wesleyan),82 dispatched his troopers and native police, and the death toll was not tallied.
Until lately, historians have not paid enough attention to the fierceness with which Australian aboriginal clans fought the European invaders for possession of their land. “The other side of the frontier”—to use the title Henry Reynolds gave to his study of this subject—showed a pattern of tenacious and often well-organized resistance, ranging from massed frontal attacks through guerrilla warfare to the carefully plotted tracking and revenge-murder of individual Europeans for known crimes against tribespeople. The Aborigines’ tactical superiority was generally, if reluctantly, admitted by whites. Aborigines stole guns and learned how to use them; they made devastating attacks on sheep and cattle, harassed miners, killed horses and burned homesteads, thus undercutting the economic basis of many areas of white settlement.83
This resistance did not always begin at once. Aborigines—at least in the early colonial years, before awareness of European rapacity became general among them—seemed to have no idea of dispossession. As Reynolds pointed out, “While conflict was ubiquitous in traditional societies, territorial conquest was virtually unknown. . . . If blacks often did not react to the initial invasion of their country it was because they were not aware it had taken place. They certainly did not believe that their land had suddenly ceased to belong to them and they to their land. The mere presence of Europeans, no matter how threatening, could not uproot certainties so deeply implanted in Aboriginal custom and consciousness.”84 Many tribes were convinced of the ignorance and weakness of the whites—at first. It was not the coming of the Europeans that provoked resistance, but their unrelenting seizure of all rights and uses of the land.
In some districts the Aborigines’ resistance lasted as long as ten years, but they were fated not to win. European technology was against them, and so was the breakdown of their hunting environment caused by the introduction of stock. Pasturage altered the environment and began to obliterate the old material bases of aboriginal life. Sheep and cattle drove out kangaroos and other game. Fences blocked ancient routes and runs. The forests were cut back. Familiar plants died out. And always, everywhere on the expanding limits of settlement, the Aborigine was seen as a mere native pest, like a dingo or kangaroo. He was a myall, a murky, a boong or (in a phrase that precisely expressed the whites’ belief in his inevitable passing) a dark cloud. He could be killed without hesitation—and, given the remoteness of the outer settlements and the thinness and inherent racism of the police force, without much chance of detection and punishment. “They may be destroyed by their fellows, and what is worse, may be shot wholesale by Europeans, and yet the arm of the law has no power to punish unless the evidence of a white person can be procured.”85 One observer heard “a large proprietor of sheep and cattle” maintain “that there was no more harm in shooting a native, than in shooting a dog”; and another
narrated, as a good thing, that he had been one of a party who had pursued the blacks, in consequence of cattle having been rushed by them, and he was sure they shot upwards of a hundred. . . . [H]e maintained that there was nothing wrong in it, that it was preposterous to suppose they had souls.86
The death toll of this long frontier war is a matter of informed guesswork rather than hard fact. Probably between 2,000 and 2,500 European settlers were killed, and upwards of 20,000 Aborigines.87
The emblematic massacre in New South Wales occurred in 1838 on the property of Henry Dangar, at a place called Myall Creek near the Gwydir River. It was meant as a reprisal for stock-theft and “cattle-rushing” or stampeding, which stockmen resented because it thinned the animals through panic and so reduced their salable weight.
The station-hands had no idea who the actual culprits were, but they found an inoffensive encampment of Aborigines some forty miles from the site and attacked them. A dozen armed stockmen, led by a white who had kept company with the little tribe for the previous three weeks, rounded up twenty-eight unarmed men, women and children, roped them together, drove them to a killing-ground nearby, and slaughtered them all with muskets and cutlasses. Then they chopped some up and mutilated others, and burned the corpses on a pyre. But as it happened, there was a white witness among the killers who turned informer against the other eleven. Although the jury in their first trial acquitted them all, a second trial produced verdicts of guilty for seven of them, who were hanged; four went free. The case was politically explosive. Probably it would never have come to court at all had Governor George Gipps not intervened directly. As no treaties with the Aborigines existed, Gipps concluded that they “had never been in possession of any Code of Laws intelligible to a Civilized People,” but he maintained that “in putting the Law into Force against the Aborigines, the utmost degree of Mercy and forebearance should be exercised.” Settlers had exterminated thousands of Aborigines before, but none had swung for it. So acute was the resentment of this sentimental interference with the code of the frontier that some graziers, led by a magistrate, even raised a defense fund for the murderers. Although the Myall Creek massacre caused a passing revulsion of public conscience, it did nothing to stop the majority of those who believed the Australian version of Manifest Destiny—that “it is in the order of nature that, as civilization advances, savage nations must be exterminated” and that the safety of explorers and settlers should not “be sacrificed out of deference to . . . political and humbugging maniacs who write and prate of matters of which they knew nothing whatever.”88
The best way to deal with the “sable brethren” was “by the discriminating application of firearms.” Ten days after Myall Creek (the news of which, however, had not yet leaked out), a correspondent in another Sydney paper, piqued by Gipps’s “softness” in not sending a punitive military force against the blacks in the Hunter Valley, urged that
if, by one decisive step, the Aborigines are shown their own weakness, and convinced that it is useless for them to contend with Europeans, they will submit and cease their outrages, and much bloodshed may be spared. . . . [U]nless prompt measures are adopted, these dusky “lords of the soil” will fairly drive the pale faces from their territories.89
The people who most craved this Final Solution were the convicts. It was not thought surprising that, of the twelve white murderers at Myall Creek, only one (the witness) was born in the colony and all the rest were either convicts or ex-convicts; or that, of the eleven, not one would inform on his fellows. Convicts’ hatred of Aborigines was a well-established tradition by then.
In Chapter 4, we saw how the first conflicts between black and white in the colony began with the convicts, who stole the Aborigines’ weapons to sell as souvenirs, transgressed their territory while trying to escape and hated the blacks not only for their freedom but for the conciliatory treatment the officers, acting on instructions, gave them. If a convict stole a chicken, he would be flogged; if a tribesman did the same, he would go scot-free. Such things rankled, particularly as the blacks soon came to be seen as a wild extension of the jail of infinite space: To escape into the bush was to risk almost certain death from either starvation or the blacks’ waddies and spears. Thus the conviction grew among the convicts that the Aborigines, if not exactly in league with their hated jailers, were on their side; and this was confirmed when, in the penal stations of Newcastle and Moreton Bay in the 1820s, the guards took to rewarding Aborigines who captured escaped prisoners, beat them bloody and dragged them in. By the 1830s, the systematic use of blacktrackers—Aborigines who, at the behest of the hunting police, used their superb skills at following a man through the bush—had confirmed the convicts’ picture of the Aborigine as a skilled, treacherous enemy. If not an enemy, he was merely subhuman—a spindly nomadic wretch, Nature’s dull orphan. “The natiffs of this Country they are Blacks,” a typical convict description goes, “and they go naked just as they came into the world, and they live on Ruts of trees and snails or aney other Creeping thing, Women and Children goes all naked alike.”90 Every underdog needs a dog below him so he can feel canine. That, in the convicts’ eyes, was all the Aborigines were good for. The cruelty of the authorities toward whites was stored up as blind resentment in the convict lumpenproletariat, and discharged—though not always as efficiently as at Myall Creek and other sites of massacre—upon the blacks.
For their part, the Aborigines seem to have despised the convicts, whom they saw laboring under conditions which their own pride would never have accepted, treated like the defeated members of some enemy tribe, as in a sense they were: driven, harried, kicked, flogged, scorned and occasionally killed. “No good—all same like croppy,” some tribesmen said when offered some left-over convict slops, “croppy” being the disdainful term for an Irish convict. In 1837 a missionary was surprised to find that Aborigines who had accepted a gift of winter dresses and cloaks painstakingly sewn from blankets had unpicked all the stitches and turned them back into blankets, because they thought them “Irish cloaks”—“our natives commonly attach some idea of inferiority to what is Irish and Ireland.”91
Without records from the blacks’ side, one can only guess what the structure of the System contributed to their opinion of whites; but their behavior showed that if they were to take sides, however briefly or opportunistically, it might as well be with the esteemed warriors—the men in red coats who dispensed the power, the tobacco, the blankets. The idea that the despised black might have had some “natural” sympathy with the oppressed convict is the flimsiest sentiment. Across the cultural chasm that separated them, no such alliances were possible and none were ever made, except for a few escaped convicts who successfully “went native” and adapted to tribal life.92
Convicts did not stop despising and fearing Aborigines after they had served out their sentences, received their pardons and become free men. On the contrary: Because “settled” land near the towns was always taken, the newly emancipated settler with little or no capital—and no government subsidies beyond a grant of raw bushland—was more likely to put up his slab hut on the very fringes of white occupation. This brought him and his family into contact with fresh tribal groups who would begin, all over again, the pattern of black resistance and “treachery,” answered by white retaliation and murder. In this way life on an expanding frontier ensured that convict attitudes toward Aborigines were carried and transmitted from generation to generation, from bond parents to free children. When one free farmer in the 1840s remonstrated with a hutkeeper—a former convict and soldier—for shooting an unarmed Aborigine, “he looked on me as a sort of dangerous lunatic for troubling myself about the lives of a few Blacks, which he evidently thought he had a perfect right to dispose of as he chose, so long as he did not get into trouble.” Let missionaries and city-dwellers prattle humanely about the blacks—they did not have to deal with them, or defend their huts and runs against them. They did not know how shiftless, feckless and dangerous they could be. In some parts of Australia, as any traveller can verify for himself, this attitude has never died.
With convicts, the hatred was greater because the fear was more pervasive. An emigrant free settler was likely to have good weapons. An Emancipist, newly pardoned by the governor, might be able to get hold of an old musket or a rusty horse-pistol. More likely he would set off with nothing but cutlass and axe. Even with a gun, a man was at a disadvantage against Aborigines with spears, especially in close bush; he could not load and fire fast enough, and in any case few convicts had the kind of military training or sporting experience that would have turned them into good shots. And when the fire-sticks were clattering on the roof of the hut, and its slab walls began to smolder, there was no colonial cavalry to come galloping over the hill. The cavalry was a long way off—in America, in fact. Thus the typical form of frontier skirmish was ambush and small, indiscriminate massacre, along the lines of the atrocity at Myall Creek. Whites laid for blacks and shot them in the back. Blacks crept into the hut and crushed the skulls of a settler and his woman with their waddies. “The normal condition of inland life was an armed, watchful, wary, nervous calm,” slow in tempo but punctuated by sunny explosions of horror that soon settled again on the indifferent skin of the land.93
Other factors helped worsen this long, bitter contact with men brutalized by the convict system. The remnants of aboriginal groups, their strength and numbers blasted away by the settlers’ guns, gave in to a marginal life as “station blacks” living on handouts and irregular work, like tracking stray cattle. Men who had sweated out years as assigned slave laborers were not averse to seeing blacks worse degraded. Ill from epidemic disease, blacks would sometimes “come in” to a settlement begging for medicine and be given sheep-drench, as befitted their animal status, and the crude veterinary medicines killed them. The one thing they could usually sell to Europeans was their women, and this led to debilitating outbreaks of venereal disease as well as further loosening of their vestigial tribal structure, through the birth of half-caste bastards. Missionaries often complained that the “lower-class whites”—former convicts and their descendants—deliberately undermined their efforts to educate and convert the fringe-dwelling Aborigines. Sewing-bees and Bible readings had no chance against rum and prostitution. And the politician who wanted to get and keep some popularity with the majority of white settlers had to deride government and missionary aid as the meddling of soft busybodies. Thus William Charles Wentworth, in bygone years the tribune of the ex-convicts but now widely known as “the lord of the lash and the triangle,” was reported as saying in a speech to the Australian Legislative Council in 1844:
He could not see if the whites in this colony were to go out into the land and possess it, that the Government had much to do with them. No doubt there would be battles between the settlers and the border tribes; but they might be settled without the aid of the Government. The civilized people had come in and the savage must go back. They must go on progressing until their dominancy was established, and therefore he could think that no measure was wise or merciful to the blacks which clothed them with a degree of seeming protection, which their position would not allow them to maintain. . . . It was not the policy of a wise Government to attempt the perpetuation of the aboriginal race of New South Wales. . . . They must give way before the arms, aye! even the diseases of civilized nations—they must give way before they attain the power of those nations.94
For the original Australians, then, the arrival of the convicts was a catastrophe. Perhaps they might have suffered less if New South Wales had been colonized by free emigrants who were, at least notionally, less brutal; who had a less obvious investment in kicking a subject class. The more opportunistic the settlers were, the more their sense of being poor white trash demanded relief, the more they spoke of civilization and racial superiority, reflecting that even their diseases facilitated Destiny’s plan for the blacks. It was a thin, embittered comfort; but it was one of very few the System offered its white subjects, at the end of their own deracination.