The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  An equation between convictry and slavery was the invariable trope used to attack the System. Some key figures in the convict administration also used it—such as George Arthur, the Tory lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land from 1824 to 1836—but it was most commonly heard from Abolitionists, in a lengthy succession that began with Jeremy Bentham and William Wilberforce and continued to William Molesworth and Lord Russell in the late 1830s. It lasted, therefore, for fifty years and remained (at least as a figure of speech) largely unquestioned in English liberal circles. But was it correct? Were convicts, in fact, slaves? And could the matter of their rights—or lack of them—rightly be brought under the great moral umbrella of the English Abolitionist movement, which had at such vast cost and effort extirpated black slavery from the British Empire and, by the 1830s, was busy trying to suppress the tenacious institution of slavery among the Africans and Arabs themselves? English liberal reformers were sure it could. Today, one is less sure.1

  In theory, the social contract of slavery is simple, rigid and one-sided. It is pure power in action, rampant will. The master owns the slave: his work, his time, his person. Slaves are bought and sold; they are property. Their rights begin and end with their status as chattels. They do not have the right to negotiate, to set the tempo or length of their work, to organize collectively or to protest. Incentives are unknown in the theoretical world of slavery (though not, as the experience of slave societies always shows, in its real world). Slavery is permanent and it perpetuates itself from generation to generation; slave parents beget slave children. When slaves are freed, it is an indulgence—or a revolution.

  None of these conditions applied to the convicts Britain exiled to Australia. Each served a fixed term of punishment and then became free. None was a chattel, the property of a master. All of them, within limits, had the right to sell some portion of their labor on the free market. Harsh and rigorous as their social world often was, it was enlaced by concepts of right and law, not of simple ownership. They could appear as witnesses in court, bring suits in civil law, and write petitions to the governor, which were given full and usually prompt consideration. Their masters did not have the right to flog them; such punishments could only be inflicted by the sentence of a magistrate, or, in later years, two magistrates. A convict could bring a master to court for ill-treatment. Often, when they had served their terms, convicts were given land and assigned convicts to work it. Their children were born free. They could not vote; but neither could anyone else in New South Wales until after 1840. If this was slavery, as its critics insisted, it was not of a kind recognizable in Barbados or Atlanta, let alone in ancient Athens, Rome or Luxor.

  It had its own name: the assignment system. Most convicts were “assigned”—lent out, as laborers, by the government—to private settlers. A few, perhaps one in ten, were kept by the government to labor on public works, digging ditches and tunnels, building jails, courthouses, stores and breakwaters, making roads through the bush. Thus the “government man”—a favorite euphemism in a society where the word “convict” was rarely used—could serve the Crown directly and pay back his debt to English society. Government labor was thought the worse punishment. But assignment was the staff of colonial life for the first fifty years of European settlement. It shaped the colony and molded its social institutions; and it was one—if not quite the—main reason why emigrants went there at all.

  Penal Australia was too distant, weird and tainted to attract many free immigrants from the working class. However, its government hoped to bring in “opulent” settlers, men of capital who would spend it in the colony, with offers of free land and free labor. In its unexplored vastness, the colony was glutted with land, and the government gave it away. Prime grazing country less than a hundred miles from Sydney could still be had for 2 shillings an acre in the 1830s.

  Because it was far scarcer, skilled free labor was much more valuable than land. It could name its own price. When the green and hopeful colonist brought his free servant to Australia with him, the servant often deserted:

  My own man, who had served me for eight years in England … never reached my new abode. About a month after our arrival I missed him one morning. Before night I received a letter, by which he informed me that he had taken a grant of land near Hunter’s River, and that he “hoped we parted friends.” He is now one of the most consequential persons in the Colony, has grown enormously fat, feeds upon greasy dainties, drinks oceans of bottled porter and port wine, damns the Governor, and swears by all his gods, Jupiter, Jingo and Old Harry, that this colony must soon be independent.2

  Cheap land and free grants meant that anyone with hard hands and a strong back could become his own boss. They also meant that the only stable source of labor, whatever its defects, came from the assignment system. Thus, assignment was as important to colonial Australia as black slavery was to the antebellum South, and both had practical disadvantages in common.

  Black slave labor was rarely as efficient as the paid work of the free. Its unproductiveness was rooted in the effect of slavery on men’s souls, for “bondage forced the Negro to give his labor grudgingly and badly, and his poor work habits retarded … the general level of productivity.”3 Most slaves were employed, not on Tara-like plantations, but in groups of one to ten on modest-sized farms.

  Slavery suits the production line, where each worker does a rigidly set task over and over again, with no variation. It also suits the rural ancestor of a production line, the latifundium with a huge labor force. But on a small farm the worker must turn his hand to many tasks, and here the drawbacks of slave labor—lack of skills, absence of initiative—bit deep. Slavery is inherently static. No slave ever came up with a new farm tool or a better way of using an old one.

  These drawbacks were just what a pioneer society did not need. But because the assignment system was more open and flexible than slavery, because it left some room for the initiative of the individual convict (if not in working for the master, then “on his own time”), it tended to be more innovative in its deployment of skills. Only in the outer penal settlements like Moreton Bay, Macquarie Harbor or Norfolk Island were the rigid, punitive inefficiencies of formal prison labor sustained, with men instead of animals dragging carts, and the hoe used instead of the plough. The economy of the mainland was more dynamic and, as John Hirst pointed out, “One of the colony’s claims to fame ought to be that it was a forced labor economy which developed a staple industry [wool] in which the forced laborers—the convict shepherds—worked alone.”4

  Still, the convicts had an irreducible unit of labor. They called it the “Government stroke.” Doing it kept you out of the hands of the flogger; you were seen to be working, but that was all. Colonial Australia progressed slowly because of its shortage of capital, its solitudes and distances, its small population, and because jails are inherently conservative. But its worst problem was a labor force with so few incentives to work.

  The mediocrity of convict labor drove free workers’ wages up. “Not the slightest dependence can be placed on convict labor as a permanent source of wealth.”5 But this was untrue. What was true was that being the master of assigned convicts did not give anyone the seigneurial confidence of the slave-owner, because the government could take them back. No farmer “had a property in” his convict servants. They were not part of his capital.

  Nor would any master see them as morally neutral creatures, like black slaves. Convicts, by definition, were criminals; they had to be watched closely and kept in rigorous submission. The farther away from the city the master was, the harsher his vigilance tended to become, unless he was an ex-convict himself and treated his assigned man “softly”—an indulgence that, colonial conservatives believed, only led to disorder.

  Yet the fact that convict labor produced less than the work of free men did not mean it was unproductive; indeed, fortunes were raised on it. Convicts did not represent capital, like slaves, but their work produced the same effect as the expenditure
of capital. “The operation of the penal system has altered the face of the country where it has been set down,” remarked the author of an emigrant’s handbook published in 1851, “just as manure may have altered the character of a field.” It could not produce extravagant surpluses, but it could and did offer the well-organized settler a solid prosperity. Nobody could visit Camden Park in the 1830s, the proud seat of the Macarthur family, with its 60,000 acres and its elegant Regency house by John Verge, without seeing what the System could do. And here was a “typical” large 800-acre farm in Van Diemen’s Land in the 1840s:

  The house is of stone, large, and commodious. The farm-buildings are ample in extent, and built of stone, with solid roofs. The implements are all of the best kind, and kept in perfect order. The livestock … consists of 30 cart-horses, 50 working bullocks, 100 pigs, 20 brood mares, 1,000 head of horned cattle, and 25,000 fine-wooled sheep. In this single establishment, by one master, 70 labourers have been employed at the same time. They were nearly all convicts. Nothing of the sort could have existed in this island if convicts had not been transmitted hither, and assigned, on their landing, to settlers authorized to make slaves of them.6

  This idyll was more common on the small, fertile island of Van Diemen’s Land than in the sprawling backblocks of New South Wales. Because it favored standardized work, and because men of influence could get the skilled servants (leaving the lumpen for the lumpen), assignment worked better for the large farmer than for the dirt-farming “dungaree settler.” But in either case, it held several compelling merits from the viewpoint of the government.

  First, it was cheap. It got convicts “off the stores” and, by shifting the cost of their food and keep to private citizens, it saved the British Government thousands of pounds a year.

  Second, it induced well-to-do free settlers to think of emigrating to Australia. Where else in the world could “settlers of responsibility and Capital” assure themselves a free supply of labor? The authorities in New South Wales and their friends in England were apt to emphasize that advantage. The first capitalist-farmer to emigrate was a friend of Joseph Banks named Gregory Blaxland, a prosperous landowner from Kent who had sold most of his English property to invest in Australia, arriving in 1805. The authorities, realizing that here (at last) was the first settler of unimpeachable respectability, showered him with favors. On instructions from Castlereagh, Governor King gave him 4,000 acres of land “in perpetuity … in a situation of his own Chusing” and forty convicts to work them with. All were fed and clothed by the Crown for the first eighteen months of their assignment to Blaxland, at a total cost of £1,300, which is more than £50,000 in today’s money.7 Clearly, both the Crown and the colonial government were very anxious to have solid settlers. But in those years, few came out.

  The assignment system had a third merit: social control. It dispersed convicts all over New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, instead of concentrating them in potentially rebellious groups and gangs. It could also control settlers through patronage. The government could punish a settler by denying him convicts, or reward another by assigning them. This damped the political dissensions of free settlers, just as the convicts could be kept in line by the threat of the lash and the promise of eventual freedom. It was a power wielded with special vigor in Van Diemen’s Land between 1824 and 1836, under Lieutenant-Governor Arthur—where, according to the wealthy settler George Meredith, a potential master’s access to convict labor depended “not upon [his] wants, but upon the construction the Governor may be pleased to put upon the political sentiments and conduct of the applicant.” Arthur’s favoritism was such that in 1832 half the skilled artisan convicts in Van Diemen’s Land were assigned to one-tenth of the settlers, mostly his own clique of officials.8 The price of irking a governor might be to lose one’s servants a week later, for “what the Settler is now allowed by the law to enjoy is a mere indulgence, a temporary, revocable loan of services.”9

  Convict assignment in Australia differed, in law, from its earlier form in America. Many respectable Americans railed at the influx of felons, which they thought polluted their society. “In what can Britain show a more Sovereign contempt for us,” wrote an irate Virginian in 1751, “than by emptying their Jails into our settlements; unless they would likewise empty their Jakes on our tables!” But the fact was that most farmers and merchants in Maryland or Virginia, when offered a chance of convict labor, grabbed it—and paid handsomely for it. The American colonist owned his indentured servants. He had paid for their transportation across the Atlantic, and he expected to be safeguarded against financial loss if they were set free by some “unforeseen exercise of the Royal Mercy.” Convicts were capital, like slaves, and had been freely traded as such since the early seventeenth century. “Our principall wealth consisteth in servants,” wrote the Virginia settler John Pory in 1619. Under the transportation acts of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, therefore, the Crown was bound to pay a convict’s owner should it remit his sentence. Such a release was unlikely but possible.10

  In any case, Virginia and Maryland were not penal colonies, but free ones that used felon slaves. In Australia, which had been settled as a jail, no free settler ever paid for a convict’s passage from England; and that, in the official view, disposed of the settler’s claim to a right of property in the convict’s labor. All such rights belonged to the government. Nevertheless, disputes over the “right” of settlers to sell or reassign their convicts kept raising colonial hackles for decades.11

  ii

  IN THE FIRST years of the colony, under Governor Phillip, convicts worked only for the government, which also had a monopoly on all the crops grown; these went into a communal store and were rationed out to the colonists. The first stage of the assignment system, which lasted until 1800, was a refinement of this. The government gave convict labor, clothed and victualled at government expense, to free settlers. But the crops they raised could only be bought by the government, at fixed prices. The government store became the sole market. In 1790 there were 38 such “assigned” convicts in New South Wales, working on private farms. By 1800 there were 356, and by December 1825 there were 10,800.

  As the memory of the “famine years” receded and the economy of the colony grew and diversified, the government store gave up trying to hold its monopoly on farm produce. As it no longer controlled the market, it did not want to pay for the upkeep of assigned convicts either. Hence, by a General Order issued in October 1800, Governor King changed the system. In this second stage of assignment, the masters had to feed, clothe and shelter their servants. The government would advance them food and clothing out of its own stores, to be repaid at the year’s end; a full year’s rations for one convict cost about £13 13s.12

  This not only stimulated farming; it got convicts “off the stores,” so that they cost the government nothing. From 1800 to 1806, Governor King tried very hard to cut the routine costs of convict administration. Part of his strategy was to alter the rules of assignment again. After 1804, any settler who took a convict “off the stores” signed an indenture to keep him for at least twelve months.13 The master must maintain his man on exactly the same terms of work, food and clothing as the felons in government employ. If a settler could not support the convict and had to discharge him, he must pay the government a shilling for every day of the unexpired year, a fine that few smallholders could readily afford.

  In return, the convict worked the same hours as the government exacted: ten hours Monday to Friday, and six on Saturday, giving a fifty-six-hour week—not a brutal schedule, by any means. But every prisoner, whether he worked for the government or a settler, had to do his “task” of work. Labor by task rather than time followed the logic of having an unwilling convict work force. It had been excessively difficult to keep the hands at work all day; and the early settlement had no full-time guards except the military, who resented being used as jail overseers. Hence, very early, Phillip adopted the system of fixing an amount of produc
t rather than a span of time as the daily norm, and convicts would work at their own rates, although at first, Collins complained, “they preferred passing in idleness the hours that might have been so profitably spent.”14 Task-work had an association with skilled labor in England; it suggested a higher status than mere toil. In this way, labor negotiations were installed in the fledgling penal colony almost from its birth—not what one would expect in a jail, still less in a “slave society.” In 1800, Governor King fixed some typical task-rates: In one week, a male convict must fell an acre of forest timber, or split 500 five-foot palings, or thresh 18 bushels of wheat.

  In the “famine years,” convicts had been let off work at three in the afternoon so that they could raise their own produce. This dispensation became the custom, and it survived for both private and government workers after the shortages had passed. Convicts soon came to be paid wages for out-of-hours labor. They could sell this overtime anywhere, if the master did not want to pay for it. Some items in the 1808 code of labor prices were: 10s. for felling an acre of trees, £1 4s. per acre for “breaking up new ground,” 6d. a bushel for pulling and husking corn, and so forth. If a convict always worked the whole day for his master, not just the ten standard government hours, his surplus time entitled him to a shilling a day, or about £18 a year. He might also get occasional bonuses of rum. “Mechanics” or skilled craftsmen—blacksmiths, shoemakers, tailors—could get much more on their own time, sometimes £4 to £5 a week.15

  How well did the convict’s right to earn overtime, which was part of the essence of the assignment system for some twenty years after 1804, translate into spending power? Certainly, worse than one would suppose. Successive governors fixed the price of overtime convict labor, but the colony had no money supply. England had not sent money there, for one did not need cash circulating in a jail. Not until 1812 would the Crown dispatch a supply of silver coin to Australia; £10,000, which, as the Select Committee on Transportation had gloomily predicted, was sucked out of the colony by its unfavorable balance of trade. Not even Macquarie’s creation of the “Holey Dollar”—a mutilated Spanish coin of Charles III, whose center or “dump” was punched out and given a value of 1s. 3d., the “ring” being worth 5 shillings—could keep coinage in the colony.16