The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  iii

  IN EARLY New South Wales, up to 1825, the escaped convict was a bogey, a nuisance, an embarrassment to the seamless image of Authority—but rarely more. In Van Diemen’s Land, however, he became a social force.

  We have seen in Chapter 5 how the Tasmanian bushrangers began as convict kangaroo hunters who stayed out in the bush and formed gangs. Until the mid-1820s, the government had little chance of catching them, as it had few soldiers and none were skilled bushmen. No squad of stumbling “lobsters” could take these bandits. In the wild lovely terrain of Van Diemen’s Land, riven by gorges and precipices, that was like trying to pluck quicksilver from a carpet with one’s fingers.

  Besides, some settlers had a vested interest in protecting them. As the populace’s food supplies grew more secure and its dependence on kangaroo meat declined (although the need for the skins remained, as they were the main source of leather), the banditti took to sheep stealing. They would sell the mutton to free farmers for sugar, flour, tea and gunpowder, and vanish into the wild again. They stole from big farmers and sold to small “bent” ones, and with this began the Robin Hood reputation (wholly undeserved in nine cases out of ten) of the Australian bushranger. Sometimes assigned convicts would bring food to bushrangers in hiding, and by 1815 there was an efficient network of bandits’ spies in Van Diemen’s Land—one bushranger boasted from his mountain fastness that he had the Hobart newspapers in his hand within five hours after they came off the press. These exasperating alliances were forged from a shared hatred for the System.

  Convicting the bushrangers was a worse headache than catching them. Sheep-stealing was a capital crime. Any convict charged with a second and potentially capital offense had to be tried in Sydney. But without witnesses there could be no case, and Sydney was so far north that the settler would have to abandon his farm for several months to go there at his own expense and testify against a sheep-duffer. Few could afford to. Edward Lord (1781–1859), the Welsh marine officer who in 1803 built the first private house in Hobart, was the most powerful man in the early settlement next to Collins—and next to nobody, its largest stock-owner, an arrogant land-grabbing troublemaker who burned all the Government House papers when Collins died in 1810 in order to cover his business tracks—and even he could not get legal redress against the bandits, who made off with five hundred head of his stock every year.34

  These cave-dwelling satyrs of the penal system resist all romanticization. They were hardly worth dignifying with the name of banditti. As John West put it, with some asperity:

  The Italian robber tinged his adventure with romance; the Spanish bandit was often a soldier, and a partisan; but the wandering thieves of Tasmania were no less uncouth than violent—hateful for their debasement, as well as terrible for their cruelty.35

  They had long ratty hair, thick beards, roughly sewn garments and moccasins of kangaroo hide, a pistol stuck in a rope belt, a stolen musket, a polecat’s stench. When on raids, they blacked their faces with charcoal. Most of them would kill a man as soon as a kangaroo. Some joked about this. One of the earliest “gangs” in Van Diemen’s Land consisted of only three men: two Irishmen named Scanlan and Brown and an Englishman named Richard Lemon, who had gone on “the out and out” from Hobart and roamed the bush in the area of Oyster Bay. Lemon did not like Brown and Scanlan talking in Gaelic, of which he understood not a word. One morning when Brown was out hunting ’roos, Lemon crept up on Scanlan at the campfire, put a pistol to the back of his head and pulled the trigger. He then strung up the corpse by the heels on a gum tree, as if he were hanging a “boomer” (big kangaroo) for skinning. “Now, Brown,” he laconically observed when his partner returned, “as there are only two of us, we shall understand one another better for the future.” The two of them ranged the bush for two more years, murdering four whites and an uncounted number of blacks, until some convict bounty-hunters took them prisoner. They shot Lemon dead and forced Brown, at gunpoint, to hack off his mate’s head and carry it back to Hobart in a bag. Their reward was an invitation to Government House (leaving their bag outside, presumably) and a free pardon.36

  By 1814 there were so many bushrangers at large, and the authorities in Hobart could do so little about them, that Lachlan Macquarie decided to save Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Davey’s face with a proclamation. It offered amnesty to any bushranger who turned himself in by December 1, 1814. But it was so ambiguously drafted that it offered six months’ grace to bushrangers to commit with impunity any crime they wanted, short of murder, before that date. Robbery, rapine and mayhem multiplied at once. When the deadline for amnesty came, few bushrangers had surrendered and the colonists were frantic. They were sure the convict population (then 1,900 souls) was ready to rise and join the bushrangers, consigning Van Diemen’s Land to anarchy. So the flustered Davey reacted like the soldier he was: He hoisted the red flag in Hobart and proclaimed martial law. He then imposed a strict curfew, revoked all tickets-of-leave, forbade the sale of kangaroo skins and ordered that all kangaroo-dogs should be shot on sight, thus hoping to destroy the bushrangers’ means of support. And as a court-martial could hang anyone without reference to the criminal court in Sydney, Davey strung up as many bandits as he could catch, gibbeting their corpses in chains on a little island off the Hobart docks until they stank too much even for the wheeling, scavenging birds.37

  But although these summary proceedings (which exasperated Macquarie when he found out about them) somewhat damped the progress of banditry in Van Diemen’s Land, there were bushrangers Davey’s troops could not catch. The most conspicuous one was a twenty-seven-year-old seaman from Yorkshire named Michael Howe. Twice a deserter—from the merchant marine and from the army—Howe had finally come to grief on a charge of highway robbery and been transported for seven years. He arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1812. and absconded almost at once. By 1814, he and a fellow convict named Whitehead had brought together a roving gang of twenty-eight bushrangers, terrorizing settlers in the region of New Norfolk, on the Derwent. Their favorite targets were landowners with a reputation for treating convicts badly. One of these, an especially hated “flogging magistrate” named Adolarius William Humphrey, who lived at Pittwater, some thirty miles from Hobart, lost hundreds of his Saxon merinos to them. Howe had struck when he was away; the bandits burnt Humphrey’s corn, terrified the servants and then trashed the house in a paroxysm of rage after finding two pairs of leg irons.38

  Howe left a wide and furious swath across Van Diemen’s Land. His comrade, Whitehead, was captured near Launceston. Howe became sole leader, recruiting new members to replace some who had cast themselves on the mercy of Davey’s amnesty, and continued to pillage across an area of some five hundred square miles, from Launceston in the north to homesteads not far from Hobart in the south. He always stressed, in his rambling chats with the “slaves” on the farms he plundered, that he was like Dick Turpin, robbing the rich and helping the poor. Many of them believed him, and so he acquired a network of informers among assigned convicts and small farmers and was able to hear about troop movements almost as soon as they began.

  Howe was a natural leader, endowed with immense vitality and a gift for organization. The gang was under quasi-naval discipline, and each member had to swear an oath of obedience on a prayer book. He had the gloomy charisma of the paranoid. He kept a kangaroo-skin diary in which he inscribed his bad dreams in blood. It also contained lists of the flowers he had known as a boy in Yorkshire, for Howe was passionately interested in botany and planned to adorn his mountain hideout with an instructive garden. He believed that Fate had singled him out as the convicts’ instrument of revenge on the hated System. He had the gall to style himself “Lieutenant-Governor of the Woods,” in contrast to the lieutenant-governor in Hobart. He was so sure of his safety that in 1816 he sent Davey a haughty letter, thinking the lieutenant-governor would negotiate a general pardon for him and his gang if they would “come in.” Howe thought Davey was stalling until informers betrayed hi
m.

  We have thought proper to write these Lines to you—As We have been Kept in the Dark so long—and We find it is only to Keep us Quiet until By some Means or other you think you Can Get us Betrayed. But We will Stand it no Longer. We are now Determined to have A full and satisfactory [answer?] Either for or against us, As we are determined to be Kept No longer In Ignorance, for we think ourselves Greatly Ingured By the Country at Large.

  Howe ironized on Davey’s fear that his gang was growing into a guerrilla army: “I have not the least Doubt but you are Glad that those new Hands [are] joining us—We are Glad Also.” God was on the bushranger’s side, “and He who Preserved us from your Plotts in Publick will Likewise Preserve Us from them in secret.” So let Davey send word back within ten days: “Answer either for or Against us … clap on it the King’s Seal—and Your Signature”; and let the redcoats not sneak along behind, for “We [are] As Much Inclined to take Life As you are in your Hearts; We could destroy All the partyes you can send out.… You Must not think to Catch Old Birds with Chaff.” This singular missive, only one of several Howe sent to Davey and his successor William Sorell, was written in blood and signed by ten other bushrangers.39

  Davey would not cooperate. “The Power of Pardoning Capital Offences,” he replied to Howe, “rests solely with the Governor in Chief, but no application for favor can avail those, who are in the daily Commission of the greatest outrages.” Thus the war of cops and robbers went on, with the robbers generally winning, through the end of Davey’s administration and the arrival of the next lieutenant-governor, Colonel William Sorell, in 1817.

  In that year, Michael Howe’s luck began to run out. He had acquired a devoted aboriginal “wife,” Black Mary. (Such liaisons, which usually began with abduction and rape, were of course invaluable to all bushrangers, as they could learn a host of survival tricks from a friendly black.) One day, the couple was ambushed by soldiers. Howe ran, and Black Mary, who was many months pregnant, could not keep up with him. In an exchange of shots, one of Howe’s bullets struck her. The soldiers, anxious to cultivate Howe’s image as a monster, claimed afterward that he had shot her in cold blood to stop her from talking. Howe insisted it was an accident, and probably it was. But the jilted Black Mary, left painfully wounded on the ground by her lover, wanted revenge—and she sought it, after she had recovered from the bullet and given birth, by volunteering to track him down. Even with her superb skills to guide them, the soldiers could not catch up with him; but Howe felt the law was closing in on him and tried to negotiate with Sorell. The new lieutenant-governor of the town offered the “Lieutenant-Governor of the Woods” a conditional pardon for all of his crimes except murder and a strong recommendation for clemency on the murder charge itself, if he would turn his gang-mates in. Howe began to testify, naming a surprising number of “respectable” settlers as receivers of stolen stock and goods. One of these, to the potential embarrassment of the law-abiding, was Hobart’s resident man of God, the Reverend Robert Knopwood. Sorell began an investigation of Knopwood’s relations with the bushrangers; he may have been on to something, because one night all of the transcribed evidence mysteriously vanished.

  The promised pardon never came. Howe got jittery at the delay, and in September 1817 he fled back into the bush. Without his gang, which in his absence had fallen apart into little pillaging groups, he had to go deep into the mountain valleys of the upper Shannon near the aptly named peaks of Barren Tier and Rat’s Castle, “a dreary solitude of cloudland,” as one chronicler put it, “the rocky home of hermit eagles.” From time to time he would waylay farmers—who were very remote and unprotected, for the Great Lake area was the extreme limit of settlement in Van Diemen’s Land—and extort food and ammunition from them, with horrible threats. In September 1818 he barely escaped from an ex-convict bounty hunter named John McGill, who had found him with the help of Muskitoo, an aboriginal blacktracker imported from Sydney. A month later, two white men named Worrall and Pugh cornered him at his hut on the Shannon. Worrall and Howe faced one another, with pistols levelled, at fifteen yards. “He stared at me with astonishment,” Worrall testified later, “and … I was a little astonished at him, for he was covered with patches of kangaroo skin and wore a black beard … [A] curious pair we looked. After a moment’s pause he cried out, ‘Black beard against grey beard for a million!’ and fired”—but missed. Worrall shot him down and Pugh battered his brains out with his gun-butt. They cut off the bushranger’s head and carried it back to Hobart Town, where Sorell put in on public view, spiked to a base.

  If Howe’s short violent career had proven one thing, it was the embarrassing volatility of imposed social order on the colonial frontier. Neither Howe nor his gang could possibly have stayed at large for more than three years without the sympathy, and sometimes the active collaboration, of assigned servants, ex-convicts and even free settlers out for profit. An Australian type was being cast—the bushranger as popular hero. Although Howe was gone, his emulators lived on, mocking the law and causing great anxiety to the government. These desperadoes threatened—as Sir John Wylde, Macquarie’s deputy judge-advocate, warned after a judicial circuit of the island in 1821—to break down “the sense of Restraint and Coercion, which may be urged to keep the Prisoners of the Crown, so comparatively numerous here, in proper awe and subjugation.”40

  For by that year, 53 percent of the entire population of Van Diemen’s Land were convicts under sentence, and “a Spirit of Insurrection” was on the judge’s mind. Dozens of bushrangers were out around Hobart; fifteen or twenty had run away from their masters or from the government punishment gangs at Launceston and seven or eight had broken out of Hobart Jail itself. The amount of theft, cattle-rustling, sheep-stealing and general predacity “forbade,” Wylde urged in his creaking syntax, “as illusory almost, the Hope that a renewed extension of Mercy to them would influence an amelioration of Principle.” Translated, this meant, “Hang as many as you can.”41

  They did. Macquarie, visiting Van Diemen’s Land with Wylde, conferred with Sorell and made sure that plenty of rope was used against the “depraved Wretches,… cruel and savage Depredators” then in custody awaiting trial. A circuit court convened in Launceston, and nine out of thirteen bushrangers swung. In Hobart, out of twenty-six awaiting their fate, ten were hanged. “Now that these dreadful examples have been made,” Macquarie wrote to London, “I am enabled to report that there is every reasonable prospect of the Bush-Ranging System being completely at an End, most probably for many Years to come.”42

  He was wrong. Bushranging continued with unabated vigor after 1821, still with the clandestine support of the convict population. The next “Dick Turpin” to win fame in Van Diemen’s Land was Matthew Brady (1799–1826), a Manchester boy sentenced by the Salford Assizes in 1820 to seven years’ exile on the Fatal Shore for stealing a basket with some bacon, butter and rice. Wild with resentment, he tried again and again to abscond and was pushed down from assignment to the chain gang and finally to the penal nadir: Macquarie Harbor. In the first four years of his transportation he took 350 lashes.43

  In June 1824, Brady and thirteen other convicts escaped from Macquarie Harbor in a whaleboat. Before the end of the month they reached the Derwent, came ashore, robbed a settler of his guns and provisions and began to range the bush. They quickly found themselves famous. Colonel George Arthur, the new lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land, papered the gum trees with proclamations calling “in the most earnest manner” on all settlers to join in the hunt for the Brady gang, and to order their Crown servants to pass on whatever information they heard. It was futile, for the convicts would rather join Brady than rat on him. Convict servants hid Brady and his men in barns, fed them and showed them where the master’s guns were kept. Arthur next appealed to baser motives by posting rewards: first £10 per head for each member of the growing Brady gang—which by now was rumored to be one hundred strong—then £25. If a convict gave information that led to the arrest of one of these
bandits, he would get his ticket-of-leave. If he caught the bushranger himself, he got a conditional pardon. The only result was a notice pinned to the door of the Royal Oak Inn at Cross Marsh a week later:

  It has caused Matthew Brady much concern that such a person known as Sir George Arthur is at large. Twenty gallons of rum will be given to any person that can deliver his person to me.

  There was no question that the lad was flash. He was chivalrous, too, in his way. Brady would never harm a woman or let any of his gang do so. When his partner McCabe threatened to rape a settler’s wife, Brady shot him through the hand, flogged him mercilessly and threw him out of the gang; Arthur’s police caught McCabe ten days later, and hanged him. A psychopath named Mark Jeffries, a government executioner and flogger who had absconded and was known as “The Monster,” had captured a settler’s wife while he was on the run but was irked by the squalling of her newborn baby. He picked it up by the legs and smashed its head against a gum tree. Later he was caught and jailed for trial in Launceston. When Brady heard about this he had to be argued out of leading his gang in a frontal assault on the Launceston lockup, freeing all the prisoners, dragging Jeffries out and flogging him to death.