The Fatal Shore
Page 36
No matter; I have bared my brow
Fair in Death’s face—before—and now.
At the other end of the scale, there was the Sydney shopkeeper who within a week or two of Bold Jack’s death produced a line of clay pipes in the form of his head, complete with the bullet-hole in the temple. They were snapped up as devotional effigies—ceramic ballads, as it were. If Donohoe had been a sadist, a rapist or a baby-killer like Mark Jeffries in Van Diemen’s Land, the outpouring of popular emotion that coalesced in the Donohoe ballads would not have occurred. But Australians admired flashness; most of them disliked Governor Darling and took great glee in seeing his authority ridiculed by this elusive bushranger. They—or, at any rate, the Emancipist and convict majority—felt that Donohoe posed no threat to them. He was a figure of fantasy, game as a spurred cock, a projection of that once-subjected, silent part of their own lives into vengeful freedom, thrown against the neutral gray screen of the bush. The legends of his freedom relieved Australians’ dissatisfaction with the conformity of their own lives, and this has been the root of the cult of dead bushrangers ever since. Moreover, he was Irish, and the ballads make a point of this to commemorate the hatred of Irish convict for English guard. “It never shall be said of me that Donohoe the brave / Could surrender to a policeman or become an Englishman’s slave.”
Thirty years ago, the Australian historian Russel Ward noted the differences between “Bold Jack Donohoe” and earlier ballads like “Van Diemen’s Land.” They bespeak a big shift of attitude. The earlier ones accept the System in the name of English values, while later ballads oppose it in the name of Irish values that become Australian.50
“Van Diemen’s Land” is a cautionary song directed to an English audience at home—“for if you knew my miseries,” one version of it enjoins, “you’d never poach again.” The call to repentance was a convention of the English ballads (without it, they could hardly have been printed and distributed in England). It stresses that convicts are the victims of a harsh fate that they cannot change for themselves. “May youth take warning e’er it is too late,” begins one lengthy excursus in cautionary doggerel, “A Solemn Advice to All Young Men,” attributed to a convict named James Kevel or Revel, returned from a fourteen-year sentence in 1823, but more likely written by some London ballad-monger, and continuing
Lest they should share my hard unhappy fate.
To see so many dying with hunger, pain and grief,
And buried like dogs because they prov’d a thief.
May all young men with speed their lives amend
And take my advice as one that is their friend,
For tho’ so slight of it you may make here,
Hard will be your lot if you are once sent there.
Such verses do not question either the order of the classes or the validity of English laws, whereas the Donohoe ballad explicitly does. Hence the ill-documented distinction, in the eyes of Australian authorities in convict days, between ordinary ballads and “treason songs,” which (tradition insists) could not legally be sung, although there seems to be no local law that explicitly banned them. The voice of rebellion, defiantly inveighing against floggers and tyrants, is plainly heard in other ballads that invoke the name of Donohoe, such as the last four verses of “Jim Jones”:
For night and day the irons clang, and like poor galley-slaves
We toil and toil, and when we die must fill dishonoured graves.
But bye-and-bye I’ll break my chains: into the bush I’ll go,
And join the brave bushrangers there—Jack Donohoo and Co—
And some dark night when everything is silent in the town,
I’ll kill the tyrants one and all, and shoot the floggers down,
I’ll give the Law a little shock: remember what I say—
They’ll yet regret they sent Jim Jones in chains to Botany Bay.
And so, as the only New South Wales bushranger thrown into such high relief in the convict era, Donohoe became a general, idealized image of bushranging itself and survived long after the System had passed away. He kept popping up with the same initials but different names: Jack Dowling, Jack Duggan, and—in the most famous of all bushranging ballads—Jim Doolan, the “Wild Colonial Boy”: still Irish, still “agin the system,” though it had shed its capital S sometime after the convict era ended. There used to be as many ways of singing “The Wild Colonial Boy” as there were pianos in Australian parlors. The most piercing one this writer has heard was not recorded: It was sung by a fat, seamed old Sydney prostitute, buoyed up by a few too many glasses of sweet port, in a pub on the Woollomooloo docks late one night in 1958—not in the rollicking front-room way of men, but as the off-key dirge of a mother grieving for her dead son:
’Tis of a wild Colonial boy, Jim Doolan was his name,
Of poor but honest parents he was born in Castlemaine,
He was his father’s only hope, his mother’s pride and joy,
And so dearly did his parents love the Wild Colonial Boy.
He was scarcely sixteen years of age when he left his father’s home,
And through Australia’s sunny clime bushranging he did roam.
He robbed the wealthy squatters, their stock he did destroy,
A terror to Australia was the Wild Colonial Boy.
In eighteen hundred and sixty-two he started his wild career,
With a heart that knew no danger, no foeman did he fear.
He bailed up the Beechworth Royal Mail Coach, and robbed Judge Macoboy,
Who trembled and gave up his gold to the Wild Colonial Boy.
He bade the Judge good morning, and told him to beware,
He’d never robbed a poor man, or one who acted square,
But a Judge who’d rob a mother of her only pride and joy,
That Judge was worse of an outlaw than the Wild Colonial Boy.
As Jim rode out one morning the mountain-side along,
A-listening to the kookaburra’s pleasant laughing song,
He spied three mounted troopers, Kelly, Davis and Fitzroy,
All riding forth to capture him, the Wild Colonial Boy.
“Surrender now, Jim Doolan, you see there’s three to one—
Surrender in the Queen’s name, you daring highwayman.”
Jim pulled his pistol from his belt and he waved the little toy,
“I’ll fight but not surrender,” cried the Wild Colonial Boy.
He fired at Trooper Kelly, and brought him to the ground,
But turning round to Davis he received his mortal wound.
All shattered through the jaw he lay, still firing at Fitzroy,
And that’s the way they captured him, the Wild Colonial Boy.
The second big difference between the Donohoe variant ballads and the earlier cautionary songs written for English consumption lies in what they imply about Australian nature and space. Until about 1830 the transportation ballads and broadsides present the bush as sterile and hostile, its fauna (except for the kangaroo, which no one could dislike) as eerie when not disgusting. The Fatal Shore is a desert full of snakes and cannibals, insufferably strange, the world upside down. “Our cots were fenced with fire, to slumber when we can, / To drive away wolves and tigers come by Van Diemen’s Land.” So goes the complaint in the ballad “Van Diemen’s Land,” faithfully mirroring the penal intentions of the colony, where nature was destined to punish. Space and the bush imprisoned it.
And so the absconder, by making the bush his new home, renamed it with the sign of freedom. On its blankness, he could inscribe what could not be read in spaces already colonized and subject to the laws and penal imagery of England. “As Donohoe made his escape, to the bush he went straightway.” The bush is the citadel of the nay-sayer, the rebel: hence the poignancy, to Irish-Australian ears, of the chorus of “Wild Colonial Boy”:
O come along, me hearties, and we’ll roam the mountains high—
Together we will plunder, together we will die.
; We’ll wander over valleys and we’ll gallop over plains,
And we’ll scorn to live in slavery, bound down by iron chains.
The bushranger is the first figure in the low undergrowth of Australian literature to be identified with the bush animals: “ ‘I’d rather roam these hills so wild like a dingo or kangaroo / Than work one hour for Government,’ cried bold Jack Donohoe.” And the identification of bushranger with national landscape would persist until the railroads put an end to bushranging itself, with the destruction of the Kelly gang and the capture of their leader Ned at Glenrowan in 1880. By taking to the bush, the convict left England and entered Australia. Popular sentiment would praise him for this transvaluation of the landscape (though at a safe distance, of course) for another hundred and fifty years.
* The rescue of the survivors of the Cyprus, and Popjoy’s construction of the coracle, was adapted by Marcus Clarke in His Natural Life.
8
Bunters, Mollies and Sable Brethren
OF THE PEOPLE transported to the antipodes between 1788 and 1852, about twenty-four thousand were women: one person in seven. Many Australians still think their Founding Mothers were whores. Undoubtedly some were prostitutes in the real sense of the word—that is, they survived by selling their sexual services, casually or regularly, without sentimental attachments. A commonly quoted figure, though a somewhat impressionistic one, is one woman in five.1 When a woman at her trial described herself as a prostitute—“on the town” was the usual phrase—one can assume that she was telling the truth. In the mouths of Authority, the word “prostitute” was less a job description than a general term of abuse.
What is quite certain, however, is that no women were actually transported for whoring, because it was never a transportable offense. The vast majority of female convicts, more than 80 percent, were sent out for theft, usually of a fairly petty sort. Crimes of violence figured low among them, as one might expect—about 1 percent.2 Sentences of more than seven years were exceedingly rare. None of this, given the severity of the English laws, suggests at the outset a very high degree of moral profligacy.
And yet there was rarely a comment on colonial society, scarcely a passage of evidence to the various Select Committees on Transportation, hardly a tract or a diary or a letter home, that missed the chance to describe the degeneracy, incorrigibility and worthlessness of women convicts in Australia. Military officers believed this, and so did doctors, judges, parsons, governors and, of course, their respectable wives. Convict men might in the end redeem themselves through work and penance, but women almost never. It was as though women convicts had passed the ordinary bounds of class and become a fiction, not far from pornography: crude raucous Eve, sucking rum and mothering bastards in the exterior darkness, inviting contempt rather than pity from her social superiors, rape rather than help from men.
Australian historians once swallowed this stereotype whole. “Even if these contemporaries exaggerated,” wrote A. G. L. Shaw, “the picture [that women convicts] presented is a singularly unattractive one!”3 Some later feminist historians, led by Anne Summers and Miriam Dixson, have striven to retain the picture while dismantling the biases, arguing that many or even most convict women became whores but that their fate was foisted on them by a tyrannous male power structure. The most influential statement of the case was made by Anne Summers:
It was deemed necessary by both the local and the British authorities to have a supply of whores to keep the men, both convict and free, quiescent. The Whore stereotype was devised as a calculated sexist means of social control and then … characterised as being the fault of the women who were damned by it.4
The classic double-bind, in short. The problem is the quality of the contemporary opinions on which the Whore stereotype, accepted by Reverend Samuel Marsden and feminist historians alike (though for very different motives), was based.
The British Government did not send women to Australia to keep men “quiescent” in any political sense; the lash could do that. But the presence of women, considered as carrot rather than stick, did have its uses in social control. Eve the Whore would keep Adam the Rogue from turning homosexual, an important consideration: William Pitt would underwrite a colony of thieves, but not one of perverts. The government did not, of course, announce in so many words that female convicts were sent to Australia as breeding-stock and sexual conveniences. Indeed, the original plan of settlement drawn up by Lord Sydney in 1786 spoke of enslaving women for this purpose
from the Friendly Islands, New Caledonia, Etc., which are contiguous thereto, and from whence any number may be procured without difficulty; and without a sufficient proportion of that sex it is well-known that it would be impossible to preserve the settlement from gross irregularities and disorders.5
Arthur Phillip rejected this idea, of course, for kidnapped Tahitian women would only “pine away in misery.” He asked for more women convicts to be sent out, not for their labor but because he wanted the felons to marry one another and so raise a native-born yeomanry—the genetic equivalent of his hope for an economic base of agriculture run by small-farming Emancipists. He offered rewards of land or free time (an extra day a week for raising their own crops for sale or barter) to convicts who married. Some of these hastily legitimized unions proved bigamous, since a number of the newlyweds were, in fact, already married but had left their husbands or wives behind them in England. From a “respectable” viewpoint, this policy seemed a farce, and the matrimonial rush only a scramble for gubernatorial favors.6
The Scottish forger Thomas Watling, himself a convict, sniffed that “little I think could reasonably have been expected from the coupling of whore and rogue together.” “Prostitution” and “concubinage” flourished in early colonial Sydney, as marriage did not. On this, the respectable convict, the respectable officer and the respectable cleric all agreed, because their terms of judgment were exactly the same. “There is scarcely a man without his mistress,” Watling complained, adding with sublime ignorance of the sexual habits of English working people that “the high class first exhibit it; the low, to do them justice, faithfully copy it.” The officers, being officers, got first pick of the women; and a female convict soon learned that her best chance of survival in New South Wales was to give herself over to the “protection” of some dominant male. In a tone of resentful irony, Watling advised “ladies of easy virtue” to get transported if they possibly could:
They may rest assured, that they will meet with every indulgence from the humane officers and sailors in the passage; and after running the gauntlet there, will, notwithstanding, be certain of coming upon immediate keeping at their arrival.… Be she ever so despicable in person or manners, here she may depend that she will dress and live better and easier than ever she did in the prior part of her prostitution.7
Watling’s prejudices were genteel. He believed he was writing as a “respectable” person (forgers always did) and his opinion of women convicts exactly reflected the attitudes of the middle class from which he had fallen. Respectable people in London—let alone in the chilly latitudes of John Knox, north of the Scottish border—saw little moral difference between prostitution and cohabitation. Patrick Colquhoun, as we have seen, included the female half of all unmarried couples in his attempts to guess the number of “prostitutes” in the “criminal class” of London. Before long the word “prostitute” came to be used of anyone promiscuous, paid or not. Eventually the distinction was so worn down by the weight of moral disapproval bearing upon the lower classes from the middle classes that Henry Mayhew, that indefatigable reporter, could claim that “prostitution … does not consist solely in promiscuous intercourse, for she who confines her favors to one may still be a prostitute,” even if her motives were “voluptuous” and not mercenary. In short, the moral vocabulary of the English middle classes enabled the free in Australia to speak of “prostitution” among convicts when they meant any extramarital relationship. And as neither the penal system nor pioneer life
favored marriage (official policy always encouraged it, but such encouragement was more than offset by the general poverty of small settlers and the uncertain, bush-wandering nature of an Emancipist worker’s life), the respectable saw “prostitution” everywhere, even in sturdy matches that had lasted years out of wedlock and produced broods of children.8 As the historian Michael Sturma points out, the idea that convicts shared the same ideas about sexual behavior as their superiors is very dubious:
Working-class mores [in England) differed markedly from those of the upper and middle classes.… [A]mong the British working-class, cohabitation was prevalent. It is highly unlikely that working-class men, and in particular male convicts, considered the women convicts to be in some way sexually immoral.… The stereotype of women convicts as prostitutes emerged from … an ignorance of working-class habits.9
One notorious result of such thinking was the “Female Register” drawn up by the Reverend Samuel Marsden in 1806, an inspired piece of creative bigotry in which every woman in the colony, except for a few widows, was classified as either “married” or “concubine.” By Marsden’s count, there were 395 of the former and 1,035 of the latter. The only kind of marriage he recognized was one performed by a Church of England clergyman—ideally, himself. It followed that all Catholic and Jewish women who married within the form of their religion were automatically listed as “concubines,” as were all common-law wives whose relationship with their men, however durable, went unsanctified by Anglican rite. One such woman, Mary Marshall, had lived with her “husband” Robert Sidaway for eighteen years but was listed as a “concubine.” Sarah Bellamy had lived for sixteen years with the colony’s master-builder, James Bloodworth or Bloodsworth, the bricklayer who was transported on the First Fleet and supervised the erection of Sydney’s first permanent buildings, and had borne him seven children. No relationship could have been more respectable, devoted or tenacious than theirs. It ended in 1804 with Bloodworth’s death from pneumonia. In gratitude for his services to the infant colony, Governor King buried him with military honors. Nevertheless, Sarah Bellamy went down on Marsden’s list as “concubine,” along with a twelve-year-old girl and a sixty-four-year-old widow. Yet when it reached London, this absurdly pharisaical document was read and apparently believed by Lord Castlereagh and William Wilber-force, and it became an authoritative text on colonial morality. As the historian Portia Robinson comments: