by David Malouf
Phillip, who was an astute man, saw from the beginning that the various conditions of his charter were in conflict with one another. ‘Convicts,’ he insisted, ‘must not lay the foundations of an empire.’ For that reason they should remain ‘forever separated from the garrison and other settlers that may come’.
In fact few settlers came – twenty-three in the first twelve years – and though the penal settlement and the Colony might exist in Phillip’s mind as separate intentions and in different places, they could hardly do so in effect. No separation was possible between convict and free. The marines and sailors of the First Fleet took women from among the convicts, and male and female convicts could not be kept apart; and any child of such unions was free. Then, in the starvation years of the early Colony it was impossible to preserve distinctions between the convicts and the garrison, let alone keep them physically separate. They shared the same rations and even the same punishments (flogging or hanging); even, at last, the same rags of clothes. In November 1789, with the Colony less than two years old, Phillip abandoned his original policy and took what was to be a decisive step: he provided a convict whose term had expired, James Ruse, with the means to set up an experimental farm, with the promise, if he succeeded, of fifty acres of Crown land. At a single stroke Phillip had created a new class: the Emancipists.
In this act the System both succeeded and failed: succeeded in its attempt to rehabilitate, failed, as would be proved, in its power to terrify and deter. A new currency was created.
In England it had been property, in the form of land, that gave a man the right to vote and established him as a full member of society; its value was mystical. Australia had millions of acres of land – it was the only commodity here that was not in short supply. Is it any wonder, then, that men who had been cast out of society for having no property, or for being caught in the attempt to acquire it, should have found in Australia a new life in opportunity that no other place could have given them? It was the land itself that broke the old forms of distinction and turned the purgatorial venture from despair to optimism. The principle of ‘equality’ in Australia is based on the capacity of each man (and woman, recently) to acquire a house-with-land. It is a simple but powerful thing: sixteen perches in the suburbs or a thousand acres in the Gulf Country. To be a property owner is to be your own man. The deep irony that all this land, so easily occupied and doled out in such large portions to officers and ex-convicts, was in fact stolen has only gradually been perceived. No treaty has ever been signed with the natives of Australia. When Cook claimed the land, in 1770, as terra nullius, he not only dispossessed the original possessors; he deprived them of their legal existence.
Hughes is excellent on the emergence of the Emancipists and their rivalry with the free settlers, noting how early a snobbery that seems typically Australian entered this society, where distinction was based on something other than ‘the exaggerated rituals of class superiority’, and men who in England would have had no prospects of advancement could now mark themselves off from convicts and ex-convicts both. ‘Convicts,’ he writes, ‘ate salted meat – which signified lack of property, for only the landed could enjoy fresh beef or lamb – and fresh fish. The ceremonial food of the free therefore must be fresh meat and salt fish.’ This on a coast with some of the finest seafood in the world.
He is also good on that other development of the System, one that began, quite simply, as a way of getting the convicts ‘off the Store’ – that is, of getting them fed, clothed and sheltered by private persons, who would in return use their labour. This was the system called Assignment. Women, who were useless for such government work as road-building, were regularly assigned as servants (and bed-fellows) to those who would take them, or married off – sold would be more accurate – to Emancipists and settlers. The men were assigned as shepherds or labourers to big land-owners or as domestics. The statistics speak for themselves. As Hughes gives them: ‘In 1790 there were 38 such “assigned” convicts in New South Wales. By 1800 there were 356, and by December 1825 there were 10,800.’ Eventually such assigned convicts might be ‘on their own hands’ – that is, still legally bound, but free on ‘ticket-of-leave’ to work for themselves.
Once again Hughes has a sharp eye for the social ironies this produced. Servants in Sydney were hard to come by. ‘There was a demand,’ he writes, ‘for city convicts, preferably refined and literate forgers, who might know from which side to pass the roast; or, if not forgers, at least thieves, who would protect their masters’ property.’
What all this meant was that rehabilitation was working better than anyone in London had intended; in fact, too well. Alexander Dalrymple, before the First Fleet was at sea, had predicted the result:
… although it might be going too far to suppose This will incite men to become Convicts … yet surely it cannot deter men, inclined to commit Theft and Robbery, to know that in the case they are detected and convicted, all that will happen to them is, That they will be sent, at the Public Expense, to a good Country and temperate Climate, where they will be their own Masters …
By 1825 the news had drifted back to the Old Bailey and to Newgate that ‘a great number of the persons who keep carriages in Sydney were once convicts … now they, in the course of a very few years, have raised themselves from the situation of convicts into that of the most important persons, in point of wealth, perhaps, in the Colony’.
Conditions in England were so bad in the early decades of the century that it was difficult to sustain the fiction of a more hellish Elsewhere. As a report of 1831–32 puts it: ‘If a criminal can conquer the sense of shame, which such degradation is calculated to excite, he is in a better situation than a large portion of the working classes, who have nothing but their daily labour to depend on for a sustenance.’ In looking at the plight of convicts, their diet, the hours they worked, we have to remember the conditions under which women and children laboured in the mines and factories in England and the privations endured by those who were ‘on the parish’. Transportation was no longer a deterrent.
So, to the extent that the penal colony succeeded in reforming criminals and restoring them to society, it would fail in its darker purpose as a model of Terror. It might even call into doubt the whole philosophy on which the System is based. Perhaps there was no ‘criminal class’. All it might need to turn hardened criminals into solid and conformist citizens was a change in conditions, a little hope, and property. It was not a message the authorities were eager to receive. The Bigge Report of 1820 stated unequivocally, as Hughes puts it, ‘that Australia must be “rendered an object of real Terror”, and that this must outweigh all questions of the economic or social growth of Australia as a colony’. Once again the two intentions were in conflict.
Hughes devotes a great deal of The Fatal Shore to this business of Terror. The problem was that it was difficult to sustain. As Phillip had seen, a penal colony and a free one could not exist in the same place. As soon as Sydney developed pretentions to being a centre of civilisation, Terror was driven out: first to Newcastle, then to Port Macquarie, then to Moreton Bay. These secondary settlements were places where second offenders were transported, partly to punish, partly to isolate, most of all to satisfy the need for an exemplary deterrent. Not one of them survived the arrival of free settlers within their bounds. The pattern kept repeating itself; free settlers objected to living in a police state and in sight of the ‘necessary’ horrors. One after another, Newcastle, Port Macquarie, Moreton Bay (Brisbane) were declared too good for their vile purpose and Terror was pushed out. By the 1840s it had been driven, in all senses, to the limits: to Norfolk Island and to the end of an isthmus in Van Diemen’s Land, the notorious Port Arthur.
That it lasted at all, right up to the end in fact, tells us a good deal about the dialectical terms in which decent society defined itself in the nineteenth century. When Alexander Maconochie went to Norfolk Island in 1840, and proved, even to the Governor’s satisfaction, that the most �
�depraved’ convict could be softened by decent treatment, he was universally vilified.
Maconochie spent only seven years in the Colony; he is a minor figure on the Australian scene, though a major one in the history of penology. But he emerges as the most fully drawn and certainly the most admirable and interesting character in The Fatal Shore, which says something for the man himself, but something also of Hughes’ emphasis in the book. His account of Maconochie’s three years at Norfolk Island makes extraordinary reading.
Maconochie’s own words about what he did are modest. It is difficult to see how they could have caused so much scandal:
Every man’s sentence was to imprisonment and hard labour; the island was his prison; and each was required to do his full daily Government task before bestowing time on either his garden or education. What I really did spare was the unnecessary humiliation.
‘Education’ and ‘garden’ must have been hard for some people to swallow, but the real catch was in that last phrase. Maconochie’s crime was to treat these ‘outcasts’ as men rather than as irrelevant criminals.
His success was spectacular, as in the case of ‘Anderson’:
An orphan, Anderson had passed from the workhouse into the navy at the age of nine. On active service, he was wounded in the head and suffered irreversible brain damage; after a drink or two, especially when under stress, he turned violent and hostile. During such a bout on shore leave, Anderson smashed some shop windows and was arrested for burglary. Tried and convicted, he was sentenced to seven years in Australia; he was then eighteen. Anderson was so crazed with resentment when he landed in Sydney that the penal authorities isolated him on Goat Island, a rock in Sydney Harbour. Over the next few years he escaped and swam for shore three times, and received a total of some 1500 lashes for such ‘offenses’ as ‘looking round from his work, or at a steamer in the river, etc’. He spent two years tethered to a chain on the rock, naked and sun-blackened … Prisoners were forbidden to speak to him, on pain of flogging. The welts and gouges torn in his back by the cat never healed and were infested with maggots. He stank of putrefaction and Sydney colonists found it amusing to row up to his rock, pitch crusts and offal at him, and watch him eat. Eventually Governor Bourke, ashamed by the light this public spectacle cast on the people of Sydney, had Anderson removed to the lime-kilns of Port Macquarie. He escaped again and joined a black tribe; was recaptured and savagely flogged; and killed an overseer, hoping to be hanged. The authorities sent him to Norfolk Island instead, and he was still there – a man of twenty-four, looking twenty years older, relentlessly persecuted by the Old Hands – when Maconochie took command.
Maconochie’s therapy for Anderson was simple: ‘he gave the poor, crazed man some responsibilities by putting him in charge of some half-wild bullocks … He hoped, rather fancifully, that ‘bovine’ characteristics would rub off on Anderson, making him more tractable. But the man did tame the bullocks, and found himself – for the first time since leaving England – congratulated and spoken kindly to … Anderson could never be fully rehabilitated – his earlier brain damage was too severe for that – but when Governor Gipps visited Norfolk Island in 1843, he recorded his amazement on seeing the former wild beast of Goat Island bustling about in a sailor’s uniform, open and frank in demeanor, returned to his human condition. (p. 511)
Faced with an open scandal in the Colony, the authorities withdrew Maconochie. He was replaced by Major Joseph Childs, with orders to make the island a place of real Terror again. By 1846 Norfolk Island had been raised to its peak of ‘exemplary’ horror under one of the few genuine monsters of Australian legend, John Giles Price, and decency, in Sydney and London, was preserved.
Hughes writes with great power and compassion of all this; he is at his most colourful when he is dealing with physical suffering under the lash and with daily humiliations. The horror was real, and we would do an injustice to the men and women who suffered if we were to turn away from its savage cruelties. That the number of lashes administered should be so minutely recorded is itself appalling: 33,727 at Macquarie Harbour between 1822 and 1826, 304,327 in New South Wales in 1836. But we need to remember two things here. One is that floggings of this sort were common amongst free men too, in the contemporary army and navy; it was an age when forms of physical brutality that seem unimaginable to us were entirely acceptable. The other, as commentators have been quick to point out, is that the majority of convicts were never flogged at all. Still, the individual lashes, and Hughes’ descriptions of them, are important; they bring us some way toward experiencing these statistics as real men and women felt them. The horror puts us in the scene, and as something more than distant spectators. It is part of Hughes’ stance, which is not that of the historian, for all the scholarly apparatus he employs. He respects the facts, but also allows himself, as a professional historian might not, to sketch a view, evoke a character, make us see and hear and feel as well as ponder meanings. He works, that is, like a writer, putting us inside what he writes as a dramatist might. He understands that the story in history, if we are to experience the thing fully, is as important as the mere recounting of events.
As for the men and women who lived this story: we know the administrators and the important movers in this colonial world from their decisions and the reports and letters they wrote. Few of them were men of intellect or vision, Australia was not a top imperial posting as India was. It had none of the glamour of the great sub-continent. The wars fought by the Aborigines – guerrilla skirmishes followed by massacres – offered no scope to generals and did not demand the presence, as on the North-West Frontier, of crack regiments. The makers of the Colony (like the fathers of Federation when it came in 1901) were at best decent and dull, but along with their other privileges had the power of the word. The view we get, as always in ‘history’, is theirs. The huge majority of those who endured the System were either illiterate or left no personal record.
We get only the briefest glimpse, in a poorly spelled letter here and there, of the grief a man suffered at being separated from a wife or from his parents, or a woman’s plea (the emotion already distorted by its formal expression) that she be allowed to join her husband at the Bay.
These working-class people came from a different culture from their educated masters; they could have seen themselves and all that happened around them in a different light. For the most part, they are mute. They suffered as objects and they appear as objects in the records, even when they are objects of sympathy.
Convict women, for example, are very often presented as ‘prostitutes’, persons naturally depraved. What this means, for the most part, is that since they were intended to be used as prostitutes, either officially or unofficially, it was easier for the men concerned if they were defined that way. A reply to Governor Macquarie’s request of 1812 that ‘as many male convicts as possible be sent hither, the prosperity of the country depending on their numbers; whilst on the contrary female convicts are as great a drawback as the others are beneficial’ offers an insight into the confusions of the Official View.
To this observation Your Committee feel they cannot accede: they are aware that the women sent out are of the most abandoned description, and that in many instances they are likely to whet and to encourage the vices of the men, whilst but a small proportion will make any step towards reformation; but yet, with all their vices, such women as these were the mothers of a great part of the inhabitants now existing in the Colony … Let it be remembered too, how much misery and vice are likely to prevail in a society in which women bear no proportion to the men; in the Colony at present the number of men compared to that of women is 2 to 1; to this, in great measure, the prevalence of prostitution is to be attributed; but increase that proportion and the temptation to abandoned vices will be increased …
Manning Clark, Select Documents in
Australian History, p. 117
Convict women were caught between that view and the opinion of the Reverend Samuel Marsden t
hat all women who were cohabiting outside wedlock, however sustained the relationship, were prostitutes. Only rarely, and then indirectly, do we hear from one of the women herself, as in this deposition to a Committee from a settler, W. R. H. Brown in 1819:
These women informed me, as well as others of their shipmates, that they were subjected to every insult from the master of the ship and sailors; that the master stript several of them and publickly whipped them; that one young woman, from ill treatment, threw herself into the sea and perished; that the master beat one of the women that lived with me with a rope with his own hands till she was much bruised in her arms, breasts and other parts of her body. I am certain, from her general good conduct since she arrived, to the present day, she could not have merited any cruelty from him … In addition to the insults they were subject to on board, the youngest and handsomest of the women were selected from the other convicts and sent on board, by order of the master, the King’s ships who were at that time in the fleet, for the vilest purpose; both my servants were in the number.
Manning Clark, Select Documents in
Australian History, p. 114
Writing the truth of what happened in history is a matter of taking the records and then listening hard between the lines, not only for the cries of individual agony and protest, but for the buzz of ordinary conversation and comfort, and humour, and hope. It demands the highest imagination.
The nineteenth century in Australia produced no literature of the convict experience from a man or woman who had actually known it. We have no House of the Dead.
