Australians: Origins to Eureka: 1

by Thomas Keneally

  there were a great many men—as usual, from Emu Plains—brought up to answer various charges of insolence to overseers and the majority had already been tried and sentenced to receive various amounts of corporal punishment, from seventy-five to one hundred lashes being the general proportion of the sentences . . . One man came out of the presence of the awful conclave of magistrates wearing a countenance radiant with smiles. He declared, ‘Oh, I’ve nobbed it. I’ve got life to Newcastle.’

  Though Newcastle itself was a terrible place, the man delighted in the fact that he was getting away from Emu Plains.

  It is very likely that Tucker worked in a road party in 1830-31. There is an intimacy to his knowledge of life on a chain gang in the novel. ‘The overseer would next say to him, “Why the devil don’t you bolt [run away]? I’ll give you some grub to get rid of you”; and the poor fellow, willing to earn a few days rest from labour by a sound flogging, would at last agree to abscond.’ Three days had to elapse before the reward became available, and then the overseer would meet the absconder in the agreed place and ‘bring his prisoner before the magistrates, magnifying his exertions, of course, in making this capture’.

  Occasionally, contact with Currency girls, in this case the female children of Irish convicts, refreshed Rashleigh, and perhaps Tucker himself.

  There was no affected squirmishness or reserve among these unsophisticated children of nature . . . Their clothing was certainly simple enough, each and all wearing only a kind of pinafore or smock frock reaching from the neck to the ankle and made of very coarse osnaburg, but kept as clean and whole as the nature of their employment allowed. Besides this single garment, each youngster was equipped with a coarse straw hat, but of shoes they had none among them, for probably like nearly all Australian children, they looked on them as useless encumbrances.

  They slept on bags filled with corn husks, lacked sheets, and were afflicted, as the Irish said, by ‘flaas’. They smoked clay pipes, dudeens, as convict women also did. The idea of taking one of these half-wild, possum-hunting, goanna-clubbing girls to wife was not unattractive to Ralph Rashleigh.

  By 1833 Tucker had found congenial employment as a government messenger in the Colonial Architect’s office in Sydney. In 1837 he was made an overseer himself, in charge of a work gang in the Domain in Sydney. An educated eccentric convict, by being who he was he attracted the attention of meaner men in positions of authority. The severe terms of his ticket-of-leave prohibited drunkenness, but many ticket-of-leavers were habitually guilty of it. However, in September 1839, Tucker lost his ticket temporarily and spent a fortnight at the treadmill at Parramatta for drunkenness. But he received it back again for his part in fighting a fire at the Royal Hotel.

  Tucker’s ticket-of-leave was—as some but not all were—made out for Maitland in the Hunter Valley. While there he used to creep into Newcastle to meet his friend Alexander Burnett, an educated convict overseer who had taken part in all the Surveyor-General, Major Mitchell’s, explorations. From his experience in the Maitland district, Tucker was able to get material for a later play, a comedy entitled Jemmy Green in Australia. In 1842, however, he became involved in a not unusual scam, one not utterly removed from fictional creativity. He forged letters purporting to tell two ticket-of-leave holders that their wives in England had died, letters for which he was possibly paid and which would enable the men to remarry.

  For his punishment, he was re-sentenced and sent as a class of trusty named a ‘special’ to Port Macquarie. Port Macquarie, then in its decline as a convict settlement, provided a pleasant interlude in his life. Physically, it was beautiful and temperate, a place of lagoons and floodplains cupped between the Pacific and the mountains of the hinterland. He worked as storekeeper to the superintendent, Police Magistrate Partridge, who encouraged his writing. Old lags at Port Macquarie would later tell what an amusing fellow Jimmy Tucker was. Jemmy Green in Australia had its premiere performance there in the barn-theatre named Old Tumbledown. Amongst others of his plays performed there, but now lost, the old lags remembered Makin’ Money, a satire of the Rum Corps era, and Who Built That Cosy Cottage?

  When Port Macquarie penal settlement was broken up in 1847, Tucker, by then middle-aged, was granted another ticket-of-leave and stayed on in that port as a clerk and storeman for general merchants. He lodged at the house of Tom and Sarah Widderson, both ex-convicts and teamsters who used to take stores by bullock wagon from the coast to the New England plateau beyond.

  While lodging with them, Tucker wrote two other novels, Fearless Frederick Fraser and The Life of Mary Nayler, about the lives of male and female convicts at Port Macquarie, neither of which have been found. When he left Port Macquarie surreptitiously in 1849, he left the manuscripts with the Widdersons, in whose care they disappeared or perished. The old lags at Port Macquarie would later say that Tucker cleared out in 1849 to look for gold, but he was found, arrested, convicted and sent to prison at Goulburn, south-west of Sydney. Early in 1850 he again received a ticket-of-leave, but was continuously under supervision by police spies and was ultimately brought to court on a charge of stealing a watch.

  The police were unable to prove their point and his ticket was renewed in 1853, this time for Moreton Bay. He was approaching old age, exhausted in his endeavours, and very conscious that the stain of being a convict would never allow him to be left in peace. His adventures in the Brisbane area are not known, but he next appeared as a patient in the Liverpool asylum, near Sydney, where he died from ‘decay of nature’ in 1866. His novel presciently exhorts us at the end, on behalf of its eponymous hero Ralph Rashleigh: ‘Reader, the corpse of the exile slumbers in peace on the banks of the Barwon far from his native land. Let us hope that his sufferings and untimely death, alas, have expiated the errors of his early years.’

  CHAPTER 14 *

  ARRIVING AT THE END OF THINGS

  A convict arriving in Sydney or Hobart in the early to mid 1830s encountered prosperous-looking communities where women and men of wealth and property dressed in the best fashion of two British seasons past. The town of Sydney to which the 220 Irish convicts of the Parmelia were introduced in March 1834 as they marched from the landing stage to the main depot, ran raffishly inland along gentle hills either side of Sydney Cove. The settlement retained the narrow streets of the original convict camp of the late 1780s. Most houses were cottages with little gardens in front, and such structures clung in random clusters to the sandstone ledges of the Rocks on the western side of the cove. But they took on a more ornate, orderly character in the streets—Pitt, Macquarie—towards the eastern side of town. The landed prisoners heard the cat-calls of old lags as they staggered on unsteady land-legs uptown past St Phillip’s Church on its hill, past the Colonial Treasury, the Barrack Square, and saw the town’s theatre on the left. The barracks and the offices of government were built of Sydney’s honey-coloured sandstone, the most splendid structures of this eccentric seaport.

  The town abounded with ‘canaries’, convicts in government employ, in sallow-coloured jackets and pants, and free dungaree men, poor settlers and occasional tradesmen, who wore cheap blue cotton imported from India. The lean, dishevelled children of convicts, cornstalks or Currency urchins, ran wild, grown healthy by the standards of Europe on colonial corn doughboys, salt beef, fresh mutton and vegetables. Convict women on ticket-of-leave stood in gardens or outside public houses smoking Brazil twist in dudeens, clay pipes barely two inches long. Laggers, or ticket-of-leave men, wore blue jackets or short woollen blue smocks, and the hats of both convict and free were unorthodox, some of plaited cabbage-tree fronds, some of kangaroo skin. Soldiers and police were much in evidence in front of Customs House, Commissariat Office, Treasury, the post office, and all other government offices. But side by side with this martial formality, male and female sexual services were full-throatedly offered in a manner polite visitors said was more scandalous than in the East End of London. ‘A Wapping or St Giles in the beauties of a Richmond,’ as
one Englishman described Sydney. The abnormal imbalance between male and female gave the flesh trade an added fever, as did dram-drinking—the downing of Bengal rum out of wine glasses.

  There was a huge gulf of urbanity and learning between the Parmelia men and their fellow Irishman Sir Richard Bourke, whose Government House and stables the line of felons from Parmelia passed. Bourke was an improver, though never a radical. He was considered by the Exclusives, the free settlers who wanted to keep the convict class down, to be dangerously soft on serving convicts. He had reduced the power of magistrates in remote areas of the colony to inflict punishment on convict servants. Property owners were always reporting in their paper, the Sydney Herald, the organ of the respectable townspeople and the free, as proof of Bourke’s ‘soothing system for convicts’, the impudence and unruliness of their servants and labourers.

  Irish convicts were still seen as both very dangerous—most of the mutineers on Norfolk Island recently had been Irish—but also as comically incompetent and unruly. The day after Parmelia arrived, the Sydney Herald had carried a characteristic tale characteristically told. ‘Eliza Burns, a native of Hibernia, favourites whiskey and potatoes, whispered to the bar, that . . . she did on Friday last, in Castlereagh-street, commit an assault with a pair of tongs of some value on the person of Mrs Griffiths. Mrs Griffiths . . . said that the defendant on Friday last, sans provocation, threw some water on her, and fetching a pair of tongs from her house, threatened to lay hold of that useful portion of the face, vulgarly termed a proboscis, or smeller.’ Mrs Griffith objected that she would ‘be deprived of the only pleasure, (except a drop of the cratur occasionally) which rendered life desirable, namely that of the taking of sundry quantities of snuff ’.

  Just the same, the comfort in all this for the Parmelia men marching to the barracks was that they would find plenty of their compatriots, bond and free, ashore, amongst the upwards of thirty thousand prisoners then in Sydney and the bush. Added to this number and still bearing the stigma of former imprisonment were the time-served and pardoned emancipists, who also numbered as many as thirty thousand.

  It would be wrong to omit the final buildings Parmelia’s felons passed that day. They were the School of Industry and the General Hospital, called familiarly the Rum Hospital. On one edge of the dusty green named Hyde Park lay St James’s Church and the courthouse, both splendidly designed by the convict architect from Bristol, Francis Greenway. Across from St James’s were the outbuildings and chief barracks of Sydney’s convict depot, Hyde Park Barracks.

  The superintendent of the Hyde Park Barracks at the time the Parmelia prisoners arrived was a young, recently retired military officer of the 40th Regiment, EA Slade. By the time the Parmelia men marched into Slade’s barracks, the superintendent was an enemy of any program of leniency, and so an enemy of Governor Bourke. Bourke would soon remove him from the magistracy for having abducted a young immigrant woman ashore and for living illicitly with her. Though thought a libertine in his personal life, he was an exacting official with convicts, taking pains to ensure that lashes at the barracks were properly given, and highly motivated to curtail sodomy. He would report three years later, in London before the Select Committee on Transportation, ‘When I had the lash inflicted, I never saw a case where I did not break the skin in four lashes.’ He was proud to declare that he had standardised the cats used for lashings throughout New South Wales.

  The disembarked Parmelia men are interesting because they contained amongst their number sixty-two men guilty of so-called Ribbon offences, acts of peasant grievance in a landscape where landlords and middling farmers were under economic pressure and the peasantry burdened by rents and fear of the loss of their small holdings on which their potato crops grew and their existence depended. The ‘Terry Alts corps’ (a name adopted by some peasant underground groups to honour a County Clare shoemaker falsely arrested for an attack on a landlord), and the Ribbonmen (so-called for an irregular practice of identifying each other by wearing ribbons), were secret societies of cottiers and small farmers, uncentralised but not unorganised, designed to protect, by direct action, small tenants from (amongst other things) unfair rents and the eviction of peasants and small farmers from their land.

  The Tory government of Great Britain had in 1829 been persuaded by the Irish Party, led by Daniel O’Connell, ‘the Liberator, the King of the Beggars’, to pass the Act of Emancipation, thereby granting political and religious rights to Catholics and lifting the oppressive net of acts called the penal laws. Now Catholics could hold office, become majors, magistrates, officers in the army, members of the judiciary and of Parliament. During the Emancipation struggle, which Hugh Larkin well remembered, a peasant could belong to the Catholic Association, the organisational structure behind Emancipation, by contributing one penny a month. Outside Clontuskert parish chapel after Mass on the first Sunday of the month, Hugh’s parents, like his wife Esther Tully’s, had in the 1820s donated their minimum penny—‘the Catholic tax’ it was named. After Emancipation, people were persuaded to keep up the payments towards the Liberator’s upkeep as a parliamentarian—the ‘Repeal tax’, aimed at bringing about the repeal of the union between Britain and Ireland by parliamentary means. When that happened, ordinary people believed, unjust rents would be swept away, tenants would have fixity of tenure, Irish spinning and weaving would be protected and encouraged, the narrow franchise would be expanded, the secret ballot would be introduced to prevent landlords terrorising their tenant voters, and Irish landlords would be taxed to support the poor.

  These political objectives were ones the Irish, free and bond, would bring to Australia to blend with the Chartism and other British democratic yearnings borne to Australia by a quotient of English political prisoners and progressive settlers. But despite Emancipation, the physical situation for millions of Irish remained appalling, and the voting system disenfranchised them. And regional juries, made up of landowners, abhorred turbulence amongst their peasantry and punished it harshly.

  The Galway Free Press reported, as a minor item in the tapestry of conflict between small tenants and large land-holders, that on 9 March 1832 a threatening notice had been pinned on the door of a Mr Simeon Seymour of Somerset House in East Galway, ‘stating that unless he complied with the Terry Alt rules and regulations, in raising wages and lowering the rent of lands, that he would meet an untimely fate’.

  The 1837 Report on the Poor of Ireland estimated that even with the little rented plots called ‘conacre’ there were two and a half million persons in Ireland who were in a state of semi-starvation every summer as, the seedlings planted, whole families waited for the new potato crop to appear at the end of the season. Conacre was generally a little plot of an eighth of an acre (0.05 of a hectare), although sometimes as extensive as two acres. It was rented for one season to grow potatoes, or sometimes, oats. Conacre (as well as paid labour, and perhaps an item of livestock such as a pig) was essential for the hungry transit from spring to autumn. These little plots were the only hope of the men who posted the threatening notice at Somerset House. Since they could seek from neither court nor landlord help in adjusting the balance of the world, they turned to secret companies of men of similar mind to themselves.

  To administer a Ribbon oath or to take one was an offence meriting seven years transportation; the posting of such a notice as the one quoted above— as with similar notices posted by peasant and political societies in England— could earn you fourteen years transportation. There were two steps left in the Ribbonman’s roster of options. The next one was to ‘assault habitation’. The last was to shoot the landlord dead.

  The young Hugh Larkin was driven—with others—by peasant rage and a fear that he, his wife Esther, and his two sons, if thrown off their quarter-acre (0.1 of a hectare) lot, would become spalpeens, ‘penny-scythes’, that is, summer day-labourers, or else outright beggars. At Mr Simeon Seymour’s Somerset House one evening in the spring or early summer of 1833, Larkin was a leading figure
of a Ribbon group who, bearing arms stolen or acquired, knocked a door down and uttered threats. This was Assaulting Habitation, and it had a statutory life sentence attached. Tracked down the next day and sent to the Galway Assizes, Larkin had other young Galway Ribbonmen for company in the county jail—one John Hessian, two brothers named Strahane. They were all sentenced at Assizes along with Larkin. The court in Galway was far from his native parish of Clontuskert, East Galway, and so we do not know if his no-doubt distraught young wife had the economic resources even to get to Galway city for the trial, which ended with a life sentence of transportation for Hugh.

  Larkin, Hessian and others were fortunate in being men accustomed to management of sheep. So—at the end of Parmelia’s voyage from Cork—Irish peasant discontent would be pressed into the service of Australian pastoral ambition. Their penal lives would be spent minding sheep in the great stupor of the Australian bush. Such men were often favoured over thieves when it came to employment in New South Wales.

  BEYOND THE LIMITS

  The original Nineteen Counties in eastern New South Wales, to which a twentieth north of Port Macquarie had been added, were designed to be the region where government operated and within which land could be alienated, acquired and sold legally. It was considered that this region, three times the size of Wales and containing five million desirable acres, was sufficient for the needs of the colonists. Two hundred and fifty miles (402 km) long at the coast, it ran inland to a depth of one hundred and fifty miles (241 km), where the Lachlan River provided its western boundary. As one commentator said, ‘The Nineteen Counties, to all intents and purposes, meant Australia, and the government decreed that they should be viewed as if the sea flowed all around, and not merely to the east.’ The borders of this region were named the Limits of Location.