The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  With a mixture of naïveté, zeal and creative drive, Macquarie set out to turn this hodgepodge into a Georgian city. His architectural education was necessarily slight, but he had seen the work of Nash, Soane and Wood, and believed their idiom was the correct one for the architecture of Empire. About the technicalities of building he knew nothing, but the taste of his time had rubbed off on him, as it was bound to do on any intelligent proconsul with firmly elitist values. Elizabeth Macquarie, his wife, had brought an album of building and town designs with her. It became the source-book for Macquarie’s plans of urban renewal.

  He started writing codes that specified the minimum floor area of houses and width of streets in Sydney. There would be no more hovels on Crown leases. These were the first such regulations in Australia. He laid out what is still the central grid of Sydney, and in five settlements along the Hawkesbury River he ordered that the core sites should be reserved for the court, the schoolhouse and the church, and that all houses must have their plans filed with the district constable.30

  When he turned from rulebooks to real buildings, Macquarie faced more obstacles. The British Government wanted him to cut costs. That meant no “extravagances,” no structures except of a strictly military or penal kind—and even they should be humble. It refused to send him an architect. But Macquarie had emergency powers, and felt he could define “emergencies” broadly enough to stifle long-range criticism with faits accomplis. So he tricked his way around the British Government’s ban on building. His first effort was probably designed with his wife. It was a new hospital, a handsome three-block affair with wide verandas (which came, not from English Regency architecture, but from Macquarie’s observations in India). It was by far the largest structure ever built in the colony. He financed it with rum, as the New South Wales Government, 150 years later, would part-finance its colossally expensive Opera House with lotteries. He gave its building contractors a trading monopoly on 45,000 gallons of spirits, from which the government drew a duty of 3 shillings a gallon; the £6,750 this generated was to be kicked back to the contractors as their fee, off the books. These arrangements did not work out, and bitter accusations of graft and cheating flew in all directions, but the “Rum Hospital,” as it was inevitably nicknamed, got finished. Two of its three blocks survive today: jerry-built in parts, due to the greed of the contractors, but the first presentable Georgian public building in Australia.

  It was followed by others. Lacking a free settler who was an architect, Macquarie found a convict of that profession: Francis Howard Greenway (1777–1837). The descendant of generations of West Country builders and stonemasons, Greenway was a trained architect—a pupil of Nash—but a poor businessman. Practicing in Bristol, he went bankrupt, forged a contract and received a death sentence which, as usual by then, was commuted to fourteen years’ transportation. When Macquarie found out about Greenway’s arrival in 1814, he grew cautiously interested. Given his modest talents and lack of savoir-faire in dealing with clients, Greenway might never have landed important commissions in England. But in Australia he was John Soane, he was Beau Nash—he might as well have been Gianlorenzo Bernini, for all the competition he had. Macquarie put him in charge of designing and building all government works, beginning in 1816.31

  Over the next six years, Greenway turned out for Macquarie a series of buildings, uneven in quality, the best of which utterly transformed the architectural standards of the fledgling colony. The main ones were two convict barracks, the Female Factory in Parramatta (1819) and—his secular masterpiece—the Hyde Park Barracks for men in Sydney (1819), together with several churches, notably St. Matthew’s in Windsor (1817–20) and St. James’ in Sydney (1820–24). The Female Factory kept at least some women off the Parramatta streets, although it was never large enough. The Hyde Park Barracks—which, like the General Hospital, Macquarie began without permission from London—he believed was an unqualified success. It was designed to house all convicts working for the government in Sydney. Because the 800 convicts placed in it could no longer plead that they needed the income from their “own-time” work to pay for the lodgings the government had formerly not provided, moving them in there was a ticklish business: The Hyde Park Barracks had to provide all kinds of inducements, from extra rations to weekends off, in return for Macquarie’s wholesale appropriation of the convicts’ time. The extra surveillance it afforded seemed to affect them for the better, or so Macquarie thought. In 1820 he told Bathurst that “not a tenth part of the former Night Robberies and Burglaries [are] being now committed, since the Convicts have been lodged in the New Barracks.” It held 800 felons, rather less than a third of the convict population of Sydney.32

  Such projects demanded skilled labor from bricklayers, masons, tilers, blacksmiths, glaziers and joiners. These “mechanics,” the riffraff of the immense body of craft on which the architectural achievements of England had been raised, were always in short supply and rarely much good. The government picked them out as soon as they arrived. When a ship anchored, the superintendent of convicts made a roll of names and trades, skimming off the men whom the government wanted for public works. Since most arriving felons had already learned that a skilled man’s life was apt to be easier in private assignment than in government labor, this always produced a little ballet of lies on shipboard, with wheelwrights and coopers professing to be common ditch-diggers or hayseeds. From 1814 to 1820, the government took 1,587 (or 65 percent) of the 2,418 “mechanics” arriving in Australia, and 3,000 (or 32 percent) of the laborers—the peak year in its demand for the skilled being 1819, at the height of Macquarie’s building schemes, when it took 80 percent of the artisans. Naturally, this policy irked the free settlers who needed artisans themselves.33

  Besides skilled labor, there was an equally great need for unskilled. From 1814 to 1820, the government took over some 4,600 of the 7,200 convicts arriving in Australia, for it needed worker ants. In technological terms, Macquarie’s Australia was more backward than Cromwell’s England. There was as yet no steam power; draft animals were few; and there were no streams near Sydney reliable enough to turn watermills. So every hole was dug, every log sawn, every rock quarried and every ton of rubble moved by that least efficient of engines, the human body, toiling in gangs. Macquarie’s plans demanded roads.

  For by 1813 the colony was beginning to feel crowded. Along the Hawkesbury River and on the rich flats of Parramatta, every inch of land had been leased and granted. Settlers had pushed southwest to Stonequarry (modern Picton and Bowral) and the poor dry belt of the Bargo Brush. But the great barrier lay to the west—the line of mountains that could be seen, low on the horizon, from Sydney. The Blue Mountains, as they were named after their color, were an ever-present proof of the “impenetrability,” the “hostility,” of the continent to whose rim the colonists clung. Nobody had got across them—not in twenty-five years. Even the Aborigines said they were impassable. Some convicts who tried to cross them, thinking China lay beyond, died of hunger in their immense labyrinth of sandstone, where bellbirds chimed and long filaments of water fell, wreathing, from distant cliffs.

  Then in 1813 three prosperous settlers, Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and W. C. Wentworth, set out to look for a way over the divide. They took convict servants, dogs and horses; and after three weeks’ exhausting struggle they found themselves looking down on a golden vista which, like other explorers in America, they compared to Arcadia and the land of Canaan. From the summit of what is now Mount Blaxland they saw, rolling like the sea, “Enough grass to support the stock of this colony for thirty years.” There would never be a shortage of pasture again; but there had to be a permanent way to get to it. In 1815 Macquarie made a journey of inspection along their trail, bestowing names on its grander views: “The Prince Regent’s Glen,” “Black Heath,” “Pitt’s Amphitheatre.” To record the picturesque splendors of this gateway to Goshen, he even took an artist, John Lewin, with his party. Surveyors followed; and Macquarie, determined to have “a go
od practicable Cart Road made with the least practicable Delay” from Parramatta to the other side of the Blue Mountains, chose sixty convicts “who had been a Certain Time in the Colony and who were also considered well-behaved Men, and entitled … to some Indulgence.” He told them they would get conditional pardons for their “Arduous Labours” if they finished the road—126 miles of it—in six months. They did it and were set free. This meant cutting about 1,200 yards of road per day and building more than a dozen wooden bridges along the way from Emu Island to the Macquarie River—a feat that showed what prisoners could do if they had better incentives than the lash. There was only one major problem with this road: Parts of it, especially the descent of Mount York, were so steep that loaded bullock-carts had to go down with big logs hitched to them as brakes; and the ascent could only be made if the cart were dragged up in stages, by a chain run through iron ringbolts in the rock face harnessed to a second bullock team pulling downhill. The Western Road, as Macquarie pointed out to Bathurst (for whom its destination was diplomatically named), would have taken three years to finish by contracted free labor or the “Government stroke” of unmotivated prisoners, instead of six months.34

  It was also the first public work in Australia to be praised in verse. For Macquarie had appointed a convict poet-laureate: Michael Massey Robinson (1744–1826), a graduate of Oxford and former lawyer who had tried to blackmail a London ironmonger by threatening to publish a scurrilous verse about him, and was transported for life. It was his task, each year, to recite a birthday ode at Government House in Sydney. These first frail pipings of the formal Australian muse included a paean to the Western Road across “yon Blue Mountains, with tremendous brow,”

  Behold, where Industry’s encourag’d hand

  Hath chang’d the lurid Aspect of the Land;

  With Verdure cloathed the solitary Hills,

  And pour’d fresh Currents from the limpid Rills;

  Has shed o’er darken’d Glades a social Light,

  And BOUNDLESS REGIONS OPEN TO OUR SIGHT!35

  One can almost see Marquarie, stiff in his gold braid, nodding with approval to the march of his assigned iambics. For his vanity matched his energy. He loved, as the colony expanded, to name new places after himself, a harmless habit much satirized after (not before) he left the colony. “ ’Twas said of Greece two thousand years ago,” wrote another Scot, the Presbyterian minister John Dunmore Lang, who had arrived in Sydney in 1823, the year after Macquarie sailed,

  That every stone 1’ the land had got a name,

  Of New South Wales too, men will say that too,

  But every stone there seems to get the same.

  “Macquarie” for a name is all the go;

  The old Scotch Governor was fond of fame,

  Macquarie Street, Place, Port, Fort, Town, Lake, River;

  “Lachlan Macquarie, Esquire, Governor,” for ever!36

  Nevertheless, Macquarie’s commitment to public works rather than private assignment paid its dividends by giving the colony a civic armature. Its critics in London and New South Wales harped on how much it cost the Crown to have so many convicts working for the government, for during Macquarie’s term of office, 1810–1821, the colony cost England about £3 million, which seemed a great deal for a place that sent no goods back to England and functioned in a merely negative way, as a social oubliette. But in 1810 it took £100 a year to transport a man and maintain him “on the stores,” whereas by the time Macquarie’s public-works policy was fully under way—between 1816 and 1821—the cost was down to less than £30 a year.37

  The gross cost of the transportation system had certainly risen: £579,000 for 1810–12, £717,000 for 1816–18, £1,125,000 for 1819–21. This worried the British Government and disposed Lord Bathurst to listen to critics who believed that convicts should work only, or mainly, for private enterprise—and especially for free emigrant settlers, whose numbers had increased from about four hundred in 1810 to nearly two thousand men, women and children by 1820.38

  Such was the pressure that in 1819 Bathurst sent a commissioner of inquiry, John Thomas Bigge, to look into Macquarie’s administration. Bigge, a diligent, intensely snobbish Tory lawyer who thought convicts were scum and unhesitatingly sided with the emigrants against the small farmers and Emancipists, fell out with Macquarie and in with the Macarthurs, and his eventual report was a litany of extravagance—a political disaster for Macquarie.

  And yet Macquarie’s policies were, if anything, frugal. What had driven the gross cost up was numbers—the flood of convicts that came after 1815 with the end of the Napoleonic Wars. England now had more crime and more ships to bear it away; and Macquarie, who had begged for more convicts, had not bargained for so many. The white population of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land almost doubled between 1812 and 1817, going from 12,471 to 20,379. Most of these were convicts; in 1818 there were so few free settlers—and the ones along the Hawkesbury River had been so battered by a disastrous flood in 1817—that hardly one convict in eight could be assigned. “In the meantime I have no alternative but to employ large Gangs of them on the Government Public Works,” Macquarie protested.39

  By 1821, his last year in office, Macquarie had a total of 4,001 convicts working for the government—more than twice the number (1,853) that, would be doing government labor under his successor, Sir Thomas Brisbane, in 1825.40 And he had cut down the treasury bill expenditure for each convict per year from £60 in 1810 to less than £15.

  The most parsimonious Scot could hardly have done better, but the British Government counted grosses, not averages, and did not like Macquarie’s reputed kindness to convicts. Before Bigge sailed, Bathurst told him unequivocally that Australia must be “rendered an Object of real Terror” and that this must outweigh all questions of the economic or social growth of Australia as a colony.41 Since Macquarie’s policy was based on his belief that the social growth of Australia really mattered, and it could not grow unless some quilting of liberality softened the iron framework of its repressive laws, this idea of Australia as a theater of horror acted out for a distant audience was not to his moral taste. In the end, he was seen as too extravagant because his own government sent him more convicts than the colony could absorb—and too lenient because he, alone among the early governors of New South Wales, really thought about the rights of these prisoners.

  iv

  THE QUESTION of rights under the assignment system was, in fact, more delicate than it looked. The convicts were not slaves under the law, but British citizens whose enforced task, in Australia, was to work their way back to freedom through expiation. Certain rights were guaranteed them—to food, to shelter, to protection from summary punishment by masters. Others accrued to them by custom, such as the right to sell what one made or did on one’s “own time.” From the Crown’s point of view, all convicts were legally dead under civil law from their arrival in Australia to their emancipation. They could neither sue nor be sued, nor could they testify in court as witnesses. In the colony, these restrictions were simply overlooked—they had to be, since no society composed mainly of present or former convicts, most of whom had businesses to run, debts to recover and wrongs to right, could function otherwise. But the rights to a convict’s work were vested in the government, which owned his labor until his sentence was served or remitted.

  This put the assigned servant in an odd relationship to his or her master. Government would only get between them to protect its own rights. The government strictly monitored a master’s treatment of his assigned servants because each master was its agent in the scheme of punishment. The assignment system was not just a way of using the labor of people whose crimes had already been expiated by transportation. Assigned labor was their punishment—hence, the government had the right to control its conditions and to step in when a master became too hard or too soft. The strictest emphasis on this was laid in Van Diemen’s Land under the rule of Sir George Arthur, but it was the ground rule of the System everywhere i
n Australia.

  The axiom that the settler, in accepting a convict servant, was acting on behalf of the government caused resentment. No settler, for instance, could take it on himself to punish a convict; for that, the felon had to be tried before a magistrate. When the settler was himself a magistrate he could not flog his own men; they had a right to their day in court. Likewise, if a convict felt ill-treated, he could complain to a magistrate. In this way, the government meant to protect its rights in its prisoners’ labor. But neither master nor servant was always willing to grasp that the rules were meant to safeguard the government’s interests before their own.

  Although the government took the skilled workers for its own projects and gave the dross of the labor force to settlers, it was a common practice under early governing officials such as Grose, Paterson and Hunter to give favored insiders a share of the first pick. Maurice Margarot thought “only the greatest ruffians” were assigned to the ordinary settlers, for “it is not in the interest of officers that settlers should get forward.”42

  A wealthy and established landowner could usually expect to get the convicts he needed. One finds Robert Townson (1763–1827), a scholarly friend of Joseph Banks who had published works on botany and mineralogy before taking up land grants in New South Wales, writing in 1822 to ask the government for “three men from the first ships” for his model estate, Varro Ville, near Minto. He made a request for “Shepherds, Gardeners, & Ploughmen—But English or Scotchmen, having already an undue proportion of Irish. The last three were Irish of no use—one was a runaway Soldier Lad—& another a Dublin Grocer’s errand boy.”43

  The law could also be bent. New settlers were meant to get servants first, so they could get started on the land. The liberal Whig governor Richard Bourke (1831–37) wanted to make sure that convicts were assigned in proportion to the amount of land a master held. Unfortunately, the law did not care whether their land was freehold or leasehold, cleared or raw bush; hence the loophole, not closed until after 1835. A large farmer could issue dummy leases of land to his own dependents and get up to eight assigned servants on each lease, “whilst persons who were more scrupulous as to the means they employed could get none.” He could also pad his application by claiming that acres of bush were actually worked land that needed assigned labor.44