The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  They strung up Cunningham, who had been badly wounded in the melee, from the stair of the Government Store in Parramatta—no need for trial. For the next few days, under martial law, the redcoats scoured the bush and farms, bringing all the croppies in. On March 8, King convened a court-martial to try the ringleaders: John Brannon, John Burke, George Harrington, Charles Hill, Timothy Hogan, Samuel Humes, William Johnston, Bryan McCormack, John Neale and John Place. There were no courtroom heroics and the trial was brief. Seven of the ten pleaded that they had been “forced” to join the rebellion. Only William Johnston admitted all charges and threw himself on the mercy of the court. Most of them were sentenced to hang in chains, as a special mark of infamy; the only ones not hanged were Burke and McCormack. The executions were carried out at Parramatta (Hill, Humes and Place), Castle Hill (Johnston, Neale and Harrington) and Sydney (Brannon and Hogan). In this way, the greatest example could be wrung from the hangings; everyone, in all three settlements, had a chance to see what the deluded Irish slogan of “death or liberty” really meant. For months to come, the rotting bodies would dangle in their rough iron frames: “Butcher’d by Scores in New Wales / Dead Men—by me—shall tell sad tales,” wrote John Grant, the first exile to write verse in Australia, and explained how on his trips around Parramatta

  the Path … rises suddenly to an Eminence, from where—Alas! how often!—as I glanced down at the little valley before me, through which I had to pass—the sight and smell of a man called Johnston (hanged there in chains from a high Tree for his part in the Rebellion last March)—would often halt my steps, hold my Gaze, and in fact bring the tears flowing from my Eyes!… [T]he excellent character of that man, added not a little to the Shock.—Several spectacles of this kind were exhibited, until the arrival of Mrs. Kent from India in the Buffalo with her Husband, when … she obtained, by her entreaties, an order from Governor King for the burial of all these Martyrs who were hanging in the Sacred Cause of Liberty.63

  Other United Irishmen were flogged nearly to death and sent to the mouth of the Hunter River, north of Sydney, to hew coal in a recently discovered seam, on a diet scarcely above starvation. As for the “less culpable” Irish, King had them worked in widely separated chain gangs on the rim of the little colony, where they were driven mercilessly “with no other intermission than the time allowed for their meals and the Sabbath.”64

  So ended the only concerted uprising of convicts ever to take place on the Australian mainland. With it, the prospects of a Jacobin rebellion were extinguished. The System had learned some valuable lessons from it—for instance, the basic strategy that political agitators should never be left long in one place or with the same company. “Altho’ there are some violent perturbators in this Colony,” King remarked a year later, “however, by their being occasionally removed from one Settlement to another, there is no present cause for apprehension.” The croppies would murmur and grumble and distill poteen from maize, but they would never rise again.65

  The English kept sending Irish political prisoners to New South Wales. From 1815 to 1840, the Irish countryside was in a state of more-or-less continuous civil war. At least 1,200 land-and-tithe protestors—probably many more, since not all political offenders were described as such in the ships’ indents after 1816—were shipped to New South Wales. They called themselves Caravats and Carders, Whiteboys, Rightboys, Hearts of Steel and Ribbon Men. The most dangerous, from the English point of view, were the Whiteboys, who pretended to be a trade-union association for the protection of Irish peasants, but were in fact enforcers and assassins, the ancestors of today’s Provisional IRA, who took on the dirty work of crushing knees, gouging eyes and burning houses that more squeamish Republicans would not touch. In the early 1830s, the Whiteboys were thought to have killed, maimed and otherwise discouraged two-thirds of the English informers in Ireland.

  But neither they nor any other Irish rebels transported after the 1804 rising at Castle Hill would pose much of a threat to the System, simply because they were dispersed in an expanding colony. Settlers pushed westward from Parramatta across the Blue Mountains and into the fertile Bathurst plains beyond. They went southwest to Berrima and Bowral, and eventually down to the wide sheep plains of the high Monaro. They colonized the Hunter River Valley, inland from Newcastle. All this new property was worked by convict servants, assigned men and women. Scattered in threes and fours through the immense bush, living in outback isolation, political prisoners had no social resonance: They were neutralized by geography as much as by law.

  Yet the story of English oppression and Irish resistance did not evaporate in Australia. On the contrary: It survived most tenaciously as one of the primary images of working-class culture, flourishing long after the System itself had receded from memory. The Irish stuck to one another. They were clannish and had long memories: “much hatred, little room.” They always felt they were being punished, not for their crimes, but for being Irish. In Australia, as in Ireland, each act of oppression contributed to a common fund of memory; fact might waver into legend, but the essential content did not change. By the 1880s, when the Protestant majority in Australia had all but sublimated the “hated stain” of convictry, the Irish still kept the memory of the System alive. Naturally, they also fostered the ennobling delusion that most Irish convicts had been sent to the Fatal Shore for political offenses, as though there had been no common thieves, muggers or rapists among the 30,000 men and 9,000 women who had been transported directly from Ireland. Of course, the numbers contradict the myth. Probably no more than 20 percent of the Irish transportees could have been called social or political rebels (except by those, if they still exist, who imagine that all crimes against property are political statements). And the hard core—those transported between 1793 and 1840 for political crimes (as distinct from actions related to riot, such as assault or destruction of property, which were usually treated as common felonies)—numbered less than 1,500.66 Nevertheless, the legacy of sectarianism in Australian politics, the sense of a community divided between English Protestant “haves” and Irish Catholic “have-nots,” began with them and influenced the patterns of power in Australian life for another 150 years.

  vi

  THIS DID NOT HAPPEN with English political dissidents. But between 1800 and 1850, at the most conservative estimate, about 1,800 people were transported to Australia from England for political “crimes.” Among them were representatives of nearly every protest movement known to the British Government, so that Australia received samples (if not big influxes) of most working-class movements. Frame-breaking Luddites were sent out in 1812–13, and food rioters from East Anglia in 1816. Fourteen members of the betrayed Pentridge Rising near Nottingham were exiled in 1817, and five dazed fanatics from the Cato Street Conspiracy—which had absurdly hoped to set off a general insurrection of English workers by assassinating Lord Sidmouth’s cabinet as its members sat down to dinner—came in 1820. Radical weavers from Scotland in 1820 and from Yorkshire in 1821, rioters from Bristol in 1831 and Wales in 1835; Swing rioters and machine-breakers in the early 1830s, the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834, more than 100 Chartists between 1839 and 1848—all went to Australia. So did “politicals” from other countries. From 1828 to 1838, the Supreme Court at the Cape transported each year 30 to 40 members of what it called “the excitable classes”—South African blacks* who, although they seem to have had no political ideas, were believed to have transgressed the racial supremacist laws of the Cape colony; there, transportation was another threat to keep the Hottentots and Bushmen in line.67

  In Canada in 1837 and 1838, there were two risings against the Tory legislature, the Anglican Church and their seeming unbreakable power over law and land: one by “Lower Canada” (Quebec) militants, the other in “Upper Canada” (Ontario) by English-speaking Canadians backed by some Americans from south of the border. Both these insurrections of tradesmen and farmers were put down by the British Army, and 153 Canadian patriotes were transported to Australia.68 />
  Of course, the number of Englishmen transported was only a minuscule fraction of those indicted for protest offenses. But the government, especially up to 1830, did not want to transport every English protestor; it wanted to demonstrate its weapons of repression while keeping intact, as far as possible, its reputation for “mercy,” which it could sustain by not pressing for extreme penalties in court.

  Never had there been deeper unrest among the common people of England than between 1810 and 1845; hopelessness, poverty and resentment were endemic to postwar Britain, and they expressed themselves in a rising sense of class crisis that traced the graph of England’s economic malaise. The climax of this tension, between 1830 and 1845, saw more than 10 percent of the working population of England classified as paupers, thrown by the Poor Laws on the meager charity of the parish. Working people believed, with reason, that their government cared nothing for them; and manufacturers complained that official economic policy was strangling growth. Eric Hobsbawm pointed out that “in the post-Napoleonic decades the figures of the balance of payments show us the extraordinary spectacle of the only industrial economy in the world and the only serious exporter of manufactured goods unable to maintain an export surplus in its commodity trade.”69 But for this, men were losing the only jobs they could do. The bitterness of the silk-weaver thrown out of work by machinery came, not solely from his own poverty, but from the sense that a whole tradition of craftwork was being thrust into oblivion by inferior products. This despair was reinforced by the anomie of city life; the Machine, with its demand for new concentrations of labor in new places, was creating a society of people who no longer knew who they were or where they came from.

  Such dissatisfactions ran so deep that governments from Pitt’s to Sidmouth’s invented a demonology to explain them: “Our” common people would never feel this if left to their natural inclinations; hence, they have been wrought upon by foreign agents, the French; thus, all protest is tinged with treason. From the 1790s to the 1820s, the government found itself increasingly hampered by the apparatus of spies and agents it had set up to penetrate movements of working-class dissent. It was drowning in spurious information, distracted by the phantom of insurrection. This made it easier for it to ignore or misunderstand the clear import of demands for reform. It helps explain the often remarkable disproportion between the mild deeds of political protestors and the vindictiveness with which the social death of transportation was inflicted on them. It may also suggest why so many English political transportees, unlike their Irish counterparts, seem to have shed their “radical” attributes once they decided to stay on as Emancipists and enjoy the high wages that free skilled labor could command in Australia. They had been protesting against want, not foreign occupation; and in Australia, want could be relieved.

  The heyday of political transportation from England was the 1830s. The 1820s were by no means peaceful, although corn prices were lower, the hated Lord Castlereagh had been succeeded by the more moderate George Canning, and workers, especially industrial workers, seemed better off. This did not apply in the country, however. To William Cobbett—who had just returned from his American exile carrying the bones of Tom Paine in a box and had set out on the long journey on horseback through the shires that was to give him the material for Rural Rides—the once-sturdy countryfolk of England were “villeins” and “serfs.” He railed against Abolitionists like Wilberforce who, he claimed, cared more for the condition of African slaves in the colonies than for the fate of English workers at home. Most rural workers were below the poverty line at a shilling a day or less; some earned only three shillings a week. But the Tory politicians of the day saw the problem in terms of one hypnotic ideology: that of Malthus, who taught that it was futile to spend any money on poor relief, since it would only encourage the poor to breed and thus make the problem worse. If left to survive or starve, the poor would find their “natural” level. And since the out-of-work did not, by definition, generate wealth, their survival was not an issue for the government.

  Aggravated by a slump in the economy and a rise in staple prices toward the end of the 1820s, such was the background to the political unrest that after 1830 landed the largest single group of protestors in Australia. Most of them were tried and convicted in the southern counties, where farm wages were lowest; and their crime was complicity in what came to be known as “The Last Laborers’ Revolt.” The figurehead around whom they rallied was a fictional leader to whom custom gave the name of Captain Swing: a bogeyman to the propertied, in whose name threatening letters were tacked on gateposts and shoved under front doors in the dead of night. These were known as “Swing letters” and the disturbances they promised were “Swing riots.”

  Captain Swing stood for several issues. He expresed grievances against the loss of common land by the policy of enclosure. He protested against high wheat prices. The Corn Laws, framed to help English farmers by keeping cheap European wheat off the market, naturally worked against the poor in times of shortage; and by 1830 many farm laborers were deprived of their white bread. Efforts to feed them potatoes were indignantly rejected. The English worker believed his bread and cheese set him several cuts above the porridge-eating Scot or the root-grubbing Irish croppie. The loaf of wheat bread was, to him, a natural right, and the fact that landlords and gentry ignored such traditions did not make them unreal.70 The protestor’s weapon was fire: a match at the base of a hayrick.

  The other issue behind the Swing riots was mechanization. The impact of steam-driven farm machinery on unskilled rural labor was disastrous. One threshing-machine, rented out and hauled from farm to farm, could put a hundred men out of seasonal work. The economist today sees this as the natural result of technology; the farmworker in 1830 saw it as a cruel denial of his natural right to work. Both are right, one in the historical perspective, the other in the immediate world of need. So, like the Luddities before them, the Swing rioters went for the machines, breaking the rollers, holing the boilers, jamming the gears with crowbars.

  Most Swing threats were inspired by rural grievances. Thus on January 20, 1831, an eighteen-year-old solicitor’s clerk named Thomas Cook, from Whitchurch in Shropshire, wrote a letter to a local cabinetmaker and auctioneer named William Churton:

  We men of determination, firm, resolute, and undeviating, are now without scruple and determined that your property shall not be of long duration, nor yet your existence—property which has been got through roguery.

  Roguery Churton has been your practice since first you were established in life, but no longer shall it be continued.

  Mark, therefore, the time is at hand when your blood shall atone for your rash and untoward acts. We shall waylay your body, and bring your family to total subversion, which you know you are well deserving.… PS, we give you this previous note in order that you may prepare for that awful and sad end.

  SIGNED: Men determined to right the oppressed. Agents to Swing. London.71

  Why make such threats to a provincial cabinetmaker? Because, although Churton was not a landowner, he had helped put out fires. During 1830–31 there were no less than sixteen acts of arson—rickburning and barnburning—in the vicinity of Whitchurch, which seems to have been a hotbed of rural political dissent. Churton was among the “respectables” who had called for more police protection and harsher punishment for incendiarists. So Thomas Cook was convicted at the Shrewsbury Assizes in March 1831 and sentenced to fourteen years in Australia, where in due course he would write his invaluable account of the System, The Exile’s Lamentations.

  Compared to Ireland thirty years before, the rioting of 1830–31 was mild; in any case, it was directed against property, not people. But it spread rapidly across the southern counties, where rural wages were about one-third the national average. Men marched, burned ricks and broke machines in Kent and Surrey, Shropshire and Lincolnshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Essex, Oxfordshire, Dorset and Norfolk. These “curiously indecisive and unbloodthirsty mobs”72 were
harshly met by Lord Grey’s new Whig government. It offered the enormous reward of £500 for the capture and conviction of arsonists and machine-breakers, and it sent army detachments and locally organized posses against them. Some counties raised their own squads of mounted yeomanry to ride down the protestors. Lord Melbourne enjoined all magistrates to maintain “a firm Resistance to all demands.”

  To frighten protestors, the Whig government now began an orgy of prosecution. Nearly 2,000 insurgents were tried in 34 counties. Of these, 252 were sentenced to death but, in the usual way of showing the Royal Mercy, only 19 of them were actually hanged and the rest had their sentences commuted to prison or transportation. In this roundup, 481 Swing followers were shipped out to Australia, for terms of seven or fourteen years.73

  Most of them were older than the normal run of transported felons—an average of twenty-nine years among those sent to Van Diemen’s Land, as against the convict average of just under twenty-six years. More than half of them were married men. Many of them had letters of commendation from former employers, and not a few were skilled craftsmen or “mechanics,” the most desirable kind of assigned servant in Australia. This puzzled the magistrates: What could a millwright, a carpenter or a blacksmith have to fear from the threshing-machines? But these skilled and settled people could read; they knew they had allies in Cobbett and Tom Paine, and they were often the first villagers to speak of rights and to raise discontent among their less skilled and literate neighbors. The case of one Hampshire radical, William Winkworth, a shoemaker who read Cobbett aloud to a circle of “bumpkins” on Saturday nights, should be multiplied by many hundreds to grasp its social import.74 Now their lives were shattered, their hopes gone, their families riven as the transport ships bore them away.