it is not the less true, that an appeal to their better feelings was the certain cause of insult and derision, which they would copiously inflict on their less depraved fellow Prisoner; and if he nevertheless persisted in publicly deprecating their horrid propensities, he would be struck, kicked and otherwise abused.65
There was no appeal to authority, because all the overseers on the mountain road gangs were convicts, and most of them, according to Cook, were homosexuals. “Woe unto that man who had the courage to pass a remark at all disrespectful of the despicable objects of their horrible ambition! He would be selected as a Lamb for the Slaughter!” If crossed, they could send a man to be summarily “lacerated at the Triangles” at the courthouse at Mount Wallawarang.
With his virtue stubbornly intact, Cook labored in the Mount Victoria gang for several months before losing his temper with an importunate homosexual, whom he thrashed “rather unmercifully.” For this, he was sentenced to a year in irons on the road at No. 2 Stockade, whose overseers were the worst of all—“without exception, the most overbearing and depraved Villains it were possible to find in the mountain district,” Cook wrote, his abstract figures of moral obloquy creaking under the strain:
The only regard they had to classification, was evidently that which to all natural beings, bespoke their own abominations,—or, in other words, the most execrable portion of their men found no difficulty in ingratiating themselves into favor, by the coarseness of their language, and the open demonstrations of Pleasure with which they give effect to their horrible propensities, in their Overseers’ hearing.66
At the stockade, convicts could sometimes bribe their way out of a flogging with money or tobacco, but the only other way was to “come out” as a homosexual and so mollify the overseers. A circle of sexual tyranny sustained itself because, according to Cook, the overseers on the iron gangs were chosen from the working hands on unshackled gangs, like those at Honeysuckle Flat and Mount Victoria. They were recommended by those gangs’ overseers, so that like chose like; an overseer’s sexual favorites could be rewarded with a ration of power on the iron gangs, enforcing “Starvation, Flogging and insupportable Labour” upon any resistant “straights.” Cook declared that in his time on the road gangs, he had only known two overseers who were not homosexual.67
Although Cook, like most Englishmen of his day, thought homosexuality disgusting in itself, his deeper objection to its role in the penal world was that it multiplied the injustices of power. It represented an abusive control over the will of others, often involving rape. If this carceral society of the 1830s was anything like prisons today, we must recognize that many of the sexual episodes Cook witnessed were not lovemaking but acts of sadistic humiliation, in which sexuality was merely the instrument of a deeper violence—the strong breaking the weak down into a punk, a molly, a gobbling queen. Nothing in Cook’s background prepared him for such transactions, and so he went down through the circles of the System—from the road gangs to Port Macquarie, from Port Macquarie to Norfolk Island—in amazement and outrage. He described, in language that can scarcely bear to encompass its subject, how sexual contact in prison tends to be metabolized into relationships of power.
Cook thought that the System nurtured sodomy—that it flourished in Australia as nowhere else. He believed that there was little homosexuality in English jails and hulks, but that inversion, in the sexual sense as well as the geographical, ruled the antipodes; and that cruelty was the seed of “the practice which was engendered at the Penal Settlements of Old where they were tortured by Tyrants in a manner that tended to brutalize all Nature.” If “nature”—which, for Cook, included the idea of “natural law” or justice—is perverted by tyranny, then other realms, including the sexual, will be warped as we’ll. Reflecting on this years later, in the relative peace and security of Alexander Maconochie’s administration on Norfolk Island, Cook speculated that the System meant to encourage sodomy, using the perpetual threat of rape or humiliation as one of the automatic punishments for the unwitting convict. In this he was wrong, but one can understand why he thought it. Until Maconochie took over Norfolk Island in 1840, not one commandant in the System had shown the least concern for the rehabilitation of his prisoners. They acted purely as agents of repression, as guardians of the pit. And if the men in the pit had ways of degrading one another, why trouble to stop them? So Cook, writing in the early 1840s, makes his climactic outcry against the “Old System” of the 1830s:
No prospect being afforded them of a woman’s Love,—without hope of Heaven or fear of Hell; their already darkened reason became more clouded. Their lax morals gave way and they indulged with apparent delight in every filthy and unnatural propensity. None but a mind capable of powerful reasoning, into which early moral habits had been instilled, or a heart filled with early affection could prevent a being falling into the lowest depths of infamy, never more to rise to the rank of man.… [I]t would be better to introduce the Dracon Laws than revert to the Old System.68
Between Cook’s objurgations one glimpses the workings of homosexual society among the prisoners. Clearly, there was a good deal of solidarity:
Several individuals were punished for the heinous offence, and although it may appear incredible it is nevertheless true that these wretches were generally viewed with feelings of sympathy and those who had brought such cases forward were looked upon with contempt, and very few would afterwards associate with them.69
Cook also hints at the strength of attachments between prison lovers on Norfolk Island, a fact confirmed by the disapproving testimony of Thomas Arnold, the deputy-assistant commissary on Norfolk Island, to the Molesworth Committee: “Actually, incredible as it may appear, feelings of jealousy are exhibited by those depraved wretches, if they see the boy or young man with whom they carry on this abominable intercourse speak to another person.” Eight years later an official report by Robert Pringle Stuart, a convict department magistrate in Norfolk, described how convicts called themselves “man and wife,” that there were probably 150 such couples, not counting more casual attachments, and that they could not bear to be separated: “The natural course of affection is quite distracted, and these parties manifest as much eager earnestness for the society of each other as members of the opposite sex.” Bishop Ullathorne, visiting Norfolk Island in 1835–36, heard at second hand (from a Protestant clergyman, who had been told it by a prisoner under sentence of death) that “two-thirds of the island were implicated” in homosexual activity. He thought the same proportion obtained at Moreton Bay and other penal stations.70
Certainly there was no decline in sexual coercion on Norfolk Island, except perhaps between 1839 and 1843, the time of Maconochie’s brief adminstration. By the mid-1840s it had grown even worse, largely because there was no effort to sort out the hardened criminals from the new arrivals. “Youths are seized upon, and become the victims of hoary and unnatural villains,” reported Thomas Naylor, chaplain on Norfolk Island from 1841 to 1845:
With these scoundrels the English farm labourer, the tempted and fallen mechanic, the suspected but innocent victims of perjury or mistake, are indiscriminately herded. With them are mixed Chinamen from Hong Kong, the aborigines of New Holland, West Indian Blacks, Greeks, Caffres, and Malays; soldiers for desertion; idiots, madmen, pig-stealers and pickpockets. In the open day the weak are bullied and robbed by the stronger. At night the sleeping-wards are very cess-pools of unheard-of vices. I cannot find sober words enough to express the enormity of this evil.… I watched the process of degradation. I saw very boys seized upon and lost; I saw decent and respectable men, nay gentlemen … thrown among the vilest ruffians, to be tormented by their bestialities.71
In no less heated terms, Robert Pringle Stuart reported to his superiors in Van Diemen’s Land in 1846 that Norfolk Island under the lax, vacillating sway of Major Childs had become a citadel of sodomy:
How can anything else be expected? Here are 800 men immured from 6 o’clock in the evening until sunrise �
� without lights, without visitation by the officers. Atrocities of the most shocking, odious character are there perpetrated, and that unnatural crime is indulged in to excess; the young have no chance of escaping from abuse, and even forcible violation is resorted to. To resist can hardly be expected, in a situation so utterly removed from, and lamentably destitute of, protection. A terrorism is sternly and resolutely maintained, to revenge not merely exposure but even complaint.72
Convict homosexuality seemed, from Stuart’s perspective, to be the quintessential form of convict evil. Other reformers and officials, staring timorously into the pit that England had created and whose very bottom was Norfolk Island, agreed. The danger seemed to be that this “contagion” would spread unchecked like an epidemic disease from the island to the mainland of Australia, so that, as Stuart put it, “in future years a moral stain of the deepest dye may be impressed, perhaps immovably, on its people, and thus become attached to the name of Englishmen.”73 This fear cannot have been felt by Stuart alone. The portions of his report that had to do with convict homosexuality were censored from its published form; but it is hardly possible that news and rumors of such doings on Norfolk Island and other penal stations, over the years, did not leak out into the colony and contribute to the atmosphere of nameless evil, of unutterable degradation, that surrounded the idea of convictry in the ears of its respectable citizens. This inevitably fostered more repressive attitudes toward all homosexuals in Australia. Their sexual preference was doubly damned: first, because it was a crime under law, and second, because it was mainly committed by those who were convicts already.
There could have been no better breeding ground for the ferocious bigotry with which Australians of all classes, long after the abandonment of Norfolk Island and of the System itself, perceived the homosexual. And this in turn seemed like an act of cleansing—for homosexuality was one of the mute, stark, subliminal elements in the “convict stain” whose removal, from 1840 onward, so preoccupied Australian nationalists.
v
THE THIRD “minority” in penal Australia was not, in round figures, a minority at all, for until about 1845 there were probably more Aborigines scattered across the continent than whites clustered around its coastal settlements. But aboriginal groups were always small and scattered, whereas the white groups (except on the rim of pastoral settlement) tended to be larger and denser. On the shores of Sydney Harbor, whites outnumbered blacks from the moment the First Fleet arrived; no black could ever have seen so many people before. One is apt to think of Sydney and its outlying penal settlements, from Hobart and Launceston in the south to Moreton Bay in the north, as small and weak. So they were, but to the Aborigines they looked large, strange and imposing, and the malign gravitational field they emitted would destroy their culture.
The fate of the Australian blacks was intimately connected to the System. A frontier society based on slave labor, run by the threat of extreme violence and laced with rigid social divisions was not likely to treat the Aborigines compassionately or even fairly. Nor did it. There was a great gap between policy and practice. The Royal instructions to every governor of Australia, from Arthur Phillip in 1788 to Thomas Brisbane in 1822, always repeated the same themes. The Aborigines must not be molested. Anyone who “wantonly” killed them, or gave them “any unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations”, must be punished. The aim in racial relations was “amity and kindness.”74 The idea of converting them to Christianity would not be embodied in official policy until Brisbane’s successor as governor, Ralph Darling, came in 1825. Yet, even though white settlement began with no policy of racist persecution, the coming of the whites was an unmitigated disaster for everyone with a black skin.
The legal status of Aborigines—and of their “claims,” as white officials interestingly put it, to the territory they had occupied for some eighteen millennia before the arrival of the whites—seemed almost insoluble to the whites. Everywhere else in the historical experience of the British Empire, colonies had been planted where the “natives” and “Indians” understood and defended the idea of property. In Virginia as in Africa, in New Zealand as in the East Indies, British colonists encountered cultures of farming people who had houses, villages and plots of cultivated land. These proofs of prior ownership might be violated by the whites (and often were); but they could not be denied or ignored. Even Charles II’s instructions to the Council of Foreign Plantations on the conduct of the English colony in Virginia had recognized that as the new settlement would “border upon” the lands of the Indians, their territory had to be respected, for “peace is not to be expected without … justice to them.”75
But the Aborigines were hunter-gatherers who roamed over the land without marking out boundaries or making fixed settlements. They had no idea of farming or stock-raising. They saved nothing, lived entirely in the present and were, in the whites’ eyes, so ignorant of property as to be little more than intelligent animals “whose only superiority above the brute,” as one visiting naval surgeon put it, “consisted in their use of the spear, their extreme ferocity and their employing fire in the cookery of their food.” The whites were not the only ones to think so; when a Maori named Tipahee visited Sydney with his son around 1800 at the behest of Governor King, both warriors formed “the most contemptible opinion” of the Aborigines’ nakedness, weak technology, poor comforts and “trifling mode of warfare.”76
Macquarie hoped they could be brought from their “rambling Naked state” and made into farmers. In 1815 he tried to put sixteen aboriginal men on a small farm on Sydney Harbor, complete with huts and a boat. They lost the boat, ignored the huts and wandered off into the bush.77
From then on, it was assumed that “native labor” was useless. Hence, the rights normally assigned to colonized native workers within the Empire were not extended to Aborigines. The early colony was so overwhelmingly dependent on the slave labor of white convicts that the effort of training nomadic blacks even for the most menial work was not worthwhile. The convicts might be scum, but they had an economic value. The blacks clearly had none; therefore, they were less than scum. The decay of fringe-dwelling blacks on the edge of white urban culture—the remnants of the Iora, Gammeraigal and Daruk—was inexorable and all-pervasive; to sympathetic onlookers it seemed a plague, and to racist ones a bestial joke. Stupefied with the cheapest grade of rum, racked with every new disease from tuberculosis to syphilis, begging and babbling in the flash-talk and gutter argot of the convicts, they were caricatures of misery. Even their traditions of authority had been parodied by the whites, who insisted on giving some elders patronizing identity cards in the form of crescent-shaped copper plates, with their rank as “chief” engraved on them in English. And yet, as the Russian explorer Captain Bellingshausen noted of some Sydney Aborigines in 1820,
The natives remember very well their former independence. Some expressed their claims to certain places, asserting that they belonged to their ancestors.… Despite all the compensation offered to them [!], a spark of vengeance still smoulders in their hearts.78
The tribes further out were better off, but only for a short time. They, too, were about to lose their land. Where did their title to it lie? Only in their own collective memory and oral traditions, to which the whites paid no attention. They seemed to drift across the territory in little ragged groups, never staying long in one place, appearing from the forest and vanishing back into it. They carried what they owned and killed the infants they could not carry. The complex and ancient ideas about territory that were embedded in aboriginal thought—ideas that had to do more with land as the “property” of mythic ancestors than with material ownership in the here and now—were completely unfamiliar to the whites and would have been opaque to them even without the barrier of language. The Aborigines had no visible political framework, and certainly they were not united as a people with common interests: There were perhaps five hundred languages and dialects spoken by the aboriginal tribes of ea
rly colonial Australia. Moreover, they lived in an almost continuous state of tribal warfare, aggravated by the kind of random contact made inevitable by nomadic life. One Australian historian cautiously ventured that the aboriginal death rate from these bloody encounters—rarely involving more than fifty men on each side—lay between 1 person in 270 and 1 in 150, a death rate “not exceeded in any nation of Europe during any of the last three centuries.”79 If these strange people showed so little solidarity among themselves, what common rights would their invaders assign them? In practice, almost none. The government simply declared all Australian land to be Crown land; and the idea that Aborigines might have some territorial rights by virtue of prior occupation was settled to the entire satisfaction of the whites by a New South Wales court decision in 1836, which declared that the Aborigines were too few and too ill-organized to be considered “free and independent tribes” who owned the land they lived on.80 Even the humanitarians could salve their consciences by reflecting that the Aborigines were, after all, nomads—and to a nomad, one tract of land is “as good as” another. This absurd misreading of nomadic life meant that Aborigines could be driven without compunction out of their ancestral territory and into new conflicts, not only with the whites, but with other tribes.
At the same time, the Aborigines were classified as British subjects; indeed, the early governors wanted to see them converted to Christianity and farming so that they could be absorbed, socially if not genetically, into the lower class of the colony—an idea loathed and resisted by every white, no matter what his class. The first policies about clashes between settlers and Aborigines were therefore most equivocal. In 1802, after nearly seven years of undeclared warfare against the Daruk tribe on the Hawkesbury River—guerrilla raids by blacks, punitive torture and killings by settlers—Governor King saw fit to remind the colonists that the killing of natives “will be punished with the utmost severity of the Law,” but that “the Settler is not to suffer his property to be invaded, or his existence endangered by them.” Thus, he would commute the hanging of five colonists who had killed two blacks on the Hawkesbury River two years before. In 1805, King’s judge-advocate opined that, since the Aborigines had no grasp of such basics of English law as evidence, guilt or oaths, they could neither be prosecuted nor sworn as witnesses, for either would be “a mockery of judicial proceedings.” And so the best course would be to “pursue and inflict such punishment as they may merit,” without the formalities of a trial. A settler would have had to be blind or a saint not to see the point, and from then on the miseries of dispossession began.81
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