The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Working people in Australia saw their convict past differently. Growing up free and reaching for social trust, children born in the colony—the Currency, to use the common colonial term, many of whom had convict ancestry—might be obsessed with respectability. But memories lived on as social myths, particularly among the Irish, who never forgot what treatment their convict forbears received on the Fatal Shore. As we shall see, the System inadvertently produced Australia’s first folk-heroes, the bushrangers, most of them escaped prisoners. The basic class division of early colonial Australia—guards versus prisoners—lived on as a metaphor of future disputes there. It was something to think about at the Trades Union meeting, and on the picket lines. It provided a scheme of historical oppression. The Good Squire, the Benevolent Landowner, the Paternal Peer, all those figures of property who rise to modify the simple picture of early nineteenth-century labor relations in England—and who did in fact exist—were not features of the mythic Australian landscape. Instead, there were the harsh overseer, the treacherous “special,” the flinty officer, the brute with the whip; and under them, the suffering convict.

  From these twin pressures to forget and to mythologize arose the popular Australian stereotype of convict identity. It says that convicts were innocent victims of unjust laws, torn from their families and flung into exile on the world’s periphery for offenses that would hardly earn a fine today. They poached rabbits or stole bread to feed their starving offspring—and they had to, because their rulers had so brutally mismanaged England that they could no longer survive as honest yeomen in a collapsing rural economy. Crushed between economic forces they could not understand and laws they had not written, they were the people Thomas Gray apostrophized in “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1750) and Oliver Goldsmith in “The Deserted Village” (1770).

  The stereotype insists that the human fodder of transportation sprang from the root of British decency, the yeoman in the rural village. This would be given allegorical form by William Blake, whose vision of industrial desolation mingled with accounts he had heard of the Pacific thief-colony, the “Horrible rock far in the south,” where “my sons, exiled from my breast, pass to & fro before me,” and

  The Corn is turn’d to thistles & the apples into poison,

  The birds of song to murderous crows …1

  The commonest tag in Australian ideas about the convicts’ class identity came from Gray’s “Elegy,” where, musing on the decent obscurity of the village dead, the poet evoked a yeoman resisting the power of the enclosing landowner: “Some village-Hampden that with dauntless breast/The little tyrant of his fields withstood.” Hence, wrote J. L. and B. Hammond in 1913 in their influential study The Village Laborer, 1760–1832, “the village Hampdens of that generation sleep by the shores of Botany Bay.” From there it was only a step to the full form of the myth, stated more than sixty years ago in the rhetorical question of an Australian historian, Arnold Wood: “Is it not clearly a fact that the atrocious criminals remained in England, while their victims, innocent and manly, founded the Australian democracy?”2

  It was no fact, but a stout and consoling fiction. The innocence of convicts as a class (if not their manliness) was first exposed to criticism by Manning Clark in the 1950s and finally demolished with statistical analysis by L. L. Robson in 1965.3 Basing his work on a “random” sampling of one name in twenty in the Home Office Papers in the London Public Record Office, which list the names, ages, places of trial and crimes of about 150,000 of the transportees, Robson was able to show that, far from being first offenders, one-half to two-thirds of the convicts carried previous convictions. Eight in ten were thieves, and only a minuscule fraction could be classed as political offenders. Most were city-dwellers, not villagers or peasants. Nearly all were propertyless laborers rather than smallholders. Three-quarters were single, and their average age was about 26. The idea of the convict that one might extract from the earliest transportation indents—an old woman who stole cheese, a mere child, a harmless wigmaker’s ’prentice or a sensitive Scottish painter like Thomas Watling—is very far from the whole truth about the majority of convicts who came later.

  The ferocity and scope of eighteenth-century capital statutes created, as we have seen, an extraordinary range of hanging crimes. The erratic mercy of the courts could, and did, transmute such sentences to exile in Australia. Hence, many early convicts, up to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, went on board the “Bay ships” for small, often ridiculously slight, offenses. But after 1815, the general tendency (to which, of course there were thousands of exceptions) was to reserve transportation for less trivial crimes. By 1818, the first stirrings of postwar legal reform were felt in England. A parliamentary committee urged that some kinds of theft (though by no means all) should be punished by transportation, not death, and that forgery should cease to be a capital offense. Sir Robert Peel’s attempts to reform and consolidate the criminal statutes in the 1820s did have a gradual effect on men in the dock. And as the number of hanging crimes shrunk, so the volume of “transportable” offenses grew.

  There was no third choice, for England had no penitentiary system, could not keep her felons at home and would not be forced to do so until the Prison Acts of 1835 and 1839. Consequently, each liberalization of the law helped to increase the flow of convicts to Australia. Only extreme Tories saw the period 1820 to 1840 as a time of “reckless” liberalization of the criminal law. But a sense of humanity did creep forward. By 1837, hanging was mainly restricted to cases of murder, while crime after crime—forgery, cattle-theft, housebreaking—was relegated to the less terrible and magical status of a “transportable” offense. Slowly, the English authorities acknowledged the mistakes and fantasies that had led their predecessors to fetishize the death penalty. But the real rise of transportation began, not with the law itself, but with its new enforcers: the “peelers,” the English police, established by Sir Robert Peel in 1827. A police force meant a huge rise, not in gross crime, but in successful arrests and convictions. Likewise, the abandonment of transportation was not caused by any fall in crime, but by three other factors: the growing moral and political opposition to the System among English reformers in the 1830s, the growth of an alternative English penitentiary system and the Australians’ own opposition to a continuous dumping of fresh criminals on what, after 50 years of settlement, they had come to view as their soil.

  A graph of transportation to Australia would run fairly flat (though uphill) from 1788 to 1816, then climb more steeply, shoot to a peak in the mid-1830s and then flatten again/After 1850, the English prison and penitentiary system could hold nearly all the criminals the courts could convict. Transportation to New South Wales finished in 1840; to Van Diemen’s Land, in 1853; and by 1868, when the last convict ship from England discharged its Irish prisoners on the other side of the continent, in Western Australia, transportation was part unpleasant memory and part unhealed wound.

  Thus we can roughly distinguish four phases of transportation. The first—“primitive” transportation, as it were—runs from 1787 to 1810. It began, as we have seen, as an attempt to clear the English hulks and jails and to post a British strategic presence in the Pacific. It involved relatively few convicts: in round figures, about 9,300 men and 2,500 women from England and Ireland (no more than 7 percent of the total number who would eventually be transported). They started coming out at a rate of about 1,000 people per year; but this fell by half when the Napoleonic Wars began in 1793 because convicts were needed for dockyard labor. Some were press-ganged into the Navy, or even dragged into the uniformed rabble of the British Army. England could not spare the ships to transport them “beyond the seas” to Australia.

  The second stage belongs to the two decades between 1811 and 1830. Around 1811, the transportation rate began to rise again. The accumulation in jails and hulks had cleared, but the government felt that, having set up its criminal waste-disposal system, it should keep using it. The sharp rise in this second phase came af
ter 1815, when the wars ended and England was struck by a succession of internal crises. Its population was increasing out of hand; between 1801 and 1841 it nearly doubled, from 10.1 to 18.1 million, and its fastest rate of growth in this period was in the decade 1811–20. Workers were pincered between falling wages and rising prices; the mechanization of hand trades created runaway unemployment; and the inexorable spread of enclosure was driving people from the country to the slum. Hence the crime wave which so troubled England’s rulers after the war, and which prepared Parliament to accept Peel’s novelty, a police force. Once the police existed, the supply of felons rose. So there was a great pressure driving the convicts onto the transports—and a corresponding suction at the other end of their journey, Australia, where the growth of the pastoral industry after 1815 created a ravenous demand for convict labor. From 1811 to 1820, some 15,400 male and 2,000 female convicts sailed out from England and Ireland. From 1821 to 1830, the corresponding round figures were 28,700 men and 4,100 women. So in this second phase, about 50,200 people—some 31 percent of the total number of transportees—went to Australia. By 1830, the System was mature and working at the full stretch of its efficiency.

  In the third stage, 1831 to 1840, the System peaked and began its decline. In those years, 43,500 male and 7,700 female convicts sailed for Australia—a total of 51,200 people, more than the previous two decades’ decantation on the Fatal Shore. The most active year was 1833, when 6,779 prisoners of both sexes were shipped to Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land. By then, transportation had been accepted by most respectable Englishmen as the best of all answers to crime; the idea of the penitentiary was still a Benthamite hypothesis in England, although it was being tested by the novelty-loving Americans across the Atlantic. Nevertheless, the English Prison Acts were passed in that decade, and they distantly signalled the end of transportation. By the late 1830s, a strong current of opinion, fed by anti-slavery sentiment, was running against Botany Bay. English liberals were hearing more about the System and were shocked by what they heard, especially when the sensational and tendentious Molesworth report was published in 1838. Meanwhile, native-born Australians had come to hate the stigma of convictry—and the competition from assigned convict labor. In 1840, all transportation to New South Wales ceased.

  This prepared the fourth and last stage of transportation. After 1840, convicts were of diminishing use as pioneers, and even their value as slave labor was falling. England kept sending them to Van Diemen’s Land; by 1847, only 3.2 percent of the population of New South Wales were convicts under sentence, as against 34.4 percent in Van Diemen’s Land.4 From 1841 to 1850, some 26,000 convicts were poured into Van Diemen’s Land, a number that soon jammed the System and led to its administrative breakdown. Transportation to Van Diemen’s Land was not abolished until 1853. In 1850 the embryo colony of Western Australia announced, with naively eager opportunism, that it would like some convicts too—there being little enough to attract free labor, in those pre-mineral days, to a place cut off from Sydney by 3,000 miles of desert and bush. In response, the System produced one last dribble: 9,700 felons, shipped there from Great Britain over a period of eight years, finishing with a group of Irish Fenians. By 1868, transportation was all over, except for the social and psychic results. These were considerable, for a young country does not serve as the pad on which England drew its sketches for the immense Gulags of the twentieth century without acquiring a few marks and scars.

  ii

  THERE WERE NO “fashions” in English crime. Poverty begets theft, monotonously and predictably. Year after year the same proportion held: about four-fifths of all transportation was for “offences against property.” Of the male convicts in L. L. Robson’s survey, 34 percent were transported for unspecified larcenies; 15 percent for burglary or housebreaking; 13 percent for stealing domestic or farm animals (as distinct from poaching wild game, which accounted for less than three people in a thousand); and 6 percent for “theft of wearing apparel”—a reminder of how ill-clothed the English poor were in the days before cheap, mass-produced clothing. Only a little more than 3 percent of the male convicts went down for “offences against the person,” which ranged from assault, rape, kidnapping and a few statistically negligible sodomy convictions to manslaughter and murder. A meager 4 percent were under sentence for “offences of a public nature,” which embraced an assortment of acts thought to undermine the rights or prestige of the Realm—mainly “coining and uttering” bad money (2 percent) followed by another 1.5 percent convicted of treason, conspiracy to riot or membership in trade unions or Irish secret societies like the Whiteboys and Ribbon Men. A few people were sent to Australia for bigamy, smuggling and perjury.5

  Seven men in ten were tried in England, mainly at assizes and quarter sessions in London and six chief counties: Lancashire, Yorkshire, Warwickshire, Surrey, Gloucestershire and Kent. These areas were home to four transportees in every ten. About one convict in five was tried in Ireland, most of them in Dublin.6

  Men outnumbered women six to one. Over the whole transportation period, only 24,960 women were sent out, half to New South Wales and half to Van Diemen’s Land. Probably 60 percent of the male English convicts had previous convictions, and 35 percent are known to have been charged with as many as four earlier offenses before they “napped a winder” and “went to the Bay.” With women it was the same: A little more than two in ten had certainly never been convicted before, but the probable ratio of second-offenders or worse was about 60 percent.7

  Set against the popular Australian belief that the “typical” convict was an innocent creature who had sinned once and been savagely punished for it, these figures speak for themselves. They do not, of course, tell the whole story. The English criminal law was without a doubt as savagely repressive as it was inefficient. But a code’s badness does not necessarily acquit its victims—even though law reflects the interests and ideology of those who frame it.

  The System swelled in the 1830s because its administrative machinery had improved—that is, more criminals were caught and processed. This did not imply a catastrophic increase in crime, even though there was no end of talk about “crime waves.” Rather, because it was working so much better, it was able to gratify the social desires of respectable Britons much more readily. It answered a deep desire for sublimation and generalization. Few people want to take direct responsibility for hanging; understandably, they prefer abstractions—“course of justice,” “debt to society,” “exemplary punishment”—to the concrete fact of a terrified stranger choking and pissing at the end of a rope. Likewise, the idea that flogging reforms the criminal was an abstraction. The realities of the lash were only apparent where the cat-o’-nine-tails met the skin. Neither the man inside the skin nor the other wielding the cat was apt to think that an act of reformation was taking place. What happened was crude ritual, a magical act akin to the scourging-out of devils. All punishment seeks to reduce its objects to abstractions, so that they may be filled with a new content, invested with the values of good social conduct. But the main use of prison, from the viewpoint of the respectable, is simply to isolate and neutralize the criminal. Australia met this requirement perfectly. Since it was not a building but a continent, it could receive a whole class, with room to spare. And it was a class, not just an aggregation of individual criminals, that the English authorities thought they saw.

  For in the 1830s a new language of class had begun to take hold in England. The older Georgian vocabulary of social difference spoke of “order,” “degree” and “rank,” implying society stabilized by “vertical dependence,” its social strata linked by bonds of common interest and patronage. The new one, by contrast, was a language of division, not merely distinction. “Class” implied sharp demarcations and possible oppositions; the hierarchies of the old order may have seemed “natural” and conventional (at least to those on top), but relations of one class to another were adversary, contractual and based on the negotiation of opposed interests rather t
han a commonly recognized system of duties. The very idea of “class” implied a society, and a world, in change.

  We are used to thinking of the language of class as the language of the working class—perhaps, as Gertrude Himmelfarb suggested, “because social history has generally been written by labor historians and socialists.”8 But the language of class in the 1830s was mostly invented and used by a middle class trying to describe the social complications that surrounded it, and it did not resemble the scheme of a two-class society—proletariat versus bourgeoisie—that Engels would later invent. Instead of a working class, they spoke of working classes: an idea that reeks of atomization and false consciousness in Marxist nostrils, but which in the 1830s seemed to recognize the variety of interests among working people. Even Chartists and other radicals usually spoke of a singular “middle class” and plural “working classes” or “working people.”9 Meanwhile, the English middle classes had achieved a state of “class consciousness”—meaning an awareness of their identity, desires and hopes—long before the workers. In the 1830s, it was they, not the Left of the future, who owned the rights on the definitions of “class,” which they always took to be plural.

  One of these, the authorities felt, lay in crime. Criminals did not need to name themselves as a class—to show class-consciousness—before law-abiding citizens felt entitled to call them a “criminal class.” There was a crucial line between the “deserving” (frugal, hardworking, stoic) and the “undeserving” (lazy, improvident) poor, and crime certainly arose from the ranks of the “undeserving.” “I am anxious,” declared Henry Mayhew, “that the public should no longer confound the honest, independent working men with the vagrant beggars and pilferers of this country; and that they should see that the one class is as respectable and worthy, as the other is degraded and vicious.”10