The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  We cannot know how many assigned men were unjustly denied their tickets-of-leave. Presumably the settlers minimized the number and the convicts exaggerated it. What is not in doubt is the gulf that separated the settler’s from the convict’s view of the ticket-of-leave—one calling it (as the government declared it to be) an “indulgence,” the other always claiming it as a right. Thomas Cook, for instance, wrote of servitude “entitling” the convict at White Rock to his ticket. The extreme opposite view on this was held by Chief Justice Francis Forbes, who thought no convict had a right to a ticket while on assigned service to a private settler. Luckily for the convicts, Forbes could not persuade the government of this.

  Their belief in a right to a ticket did not mean the prisoners were deluded. Rights emerge by bargaining between the powerful and the relatively powerless; they are not simply “granted,” for if they were, there would be none. Rights are solidified claims, sanctioned by usage and expectation. When convicts spoke of wider rights than their simple, mechanical entitlement to food and shelter, they were speaking from their inherited expectations as laborers—that masters should behave with fairness and circumspection, and that the law should offer some formal protection to their own interests. In short, they expected the moral and legal economy of the traditional English labor market to apply in the continental prison that was Australia. And that economy did not exclude the common English practice by which free workers, adults as well as apprentices, were bonded to their masters and suffered severe penalties, ranging from fines to ostracism, if they broke away. In this respect, at least, assignment was not as totally foreign to English labor relations as one might assume.

  Some were cruelly disappointed. “The extent to which tyranny was formerly carried on with regard to assigned servants throughout the Colony,” wrote one ex-convict, Charles Cozens, “is almost incredible.” But sometimes the accounts of the same convict establishment, seen through different eyes, contradict one another like black and white. The Abolitionist J. D. Lang, who was certainly no friend of the assignment system, praised the way Governor Darling’s private secretary, Colonel Henry Dumaresq (1792–1838) ran St. Heliers, his 13,000-acre estate near Muswellbrook in New South Wales: “one of the best regulated estates in the colony … rewards, not punishments … the men are sober, industrious and contented.” To a visiting Quaker named James Backhouse, St. Heliers also seemed a model of convict management, and the future explorer Edward J. Eyre, a man of unquestionable decency and candor, thought it “the best-ordered, best-managed station on the Hunter.” Yet in 1850, one of Lang’s co-Abolitionists, John Goodwin, protested that his praises were only true of “the time of the late Mr. Whiteman’s superintendence” of St. Heliers (after 1830) and that the previous superintendent, Mr. Scott, had been “a demon incarnate”:

  He was in the habit of putting handcuffs, and leg-irons on them, and throwing them into a dungeon on that estate, where they remained generally for three days without either meat or drink.… [H]e did not trouble to take his men to court; but sentenced them for the most trivial offence, and just as his caprice dictated, to carry logs of wood on their shoulders, on his own verandah, and under his eye, for two to twelve hours; these logs weighed from 50 to 100 lbs. He never went out without a brace of loaded pistols and a belt-full of handcuffs.… Captain Dumaresque [sic], “that nice gentleman,” has to my own knowledge drawn as much blood from the flogged backs of his assigned men, as would make him to swim in human gore.64

  James Brine, one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs transported to Australia for trade-union activity in 1834, was assigned to a magistrate named Robert Scott at Glindon on the Hunter River. Scott set Brine to digging postholes, even though his bare feet were so cut and sore that he could not put them to the spade. Eventually Brine “got a piece of an iron hoop and wrapped it round my foot to tread upon,” but for six months (the regulation period between issues) Scott would give him no shoes, clothes or bedding. Stricken by a severe cold after spending seventeen days up to his chest in a creek, washing sheep, Brine begged for a blanket and got a homily instead.

  “No,” said he, “I will give you nothing until you are due for it. What would your masters in England have had to cover them if you had not been sent here? I understand it was your intention to have murdered, burnt and destroyed every thing before you, and you are sent over here to be severely punished, and no mercy shall be shown you. If you ask me for any thing before the six months is expired, I will flog you as often as I like.… You d—d convict!—don’t you know that not even the hair on your head is your own?”65

  E. J. Eyre, who found it “a most revolting sight to see the scarred and bleeding backs of human beings—convicts tho’ they were,” was impressed by the docility with which accused servants would trek unguarded to the split-slab outback courthouse. It was “singular,” he wrote,

  that men said to be the most worthless of their kind and the most reckless ruffians should thus quietly march a distance of 5, 10, 20 or even 60 miles, knowing that at the end of their journey there was a moral certainty of being severely flogged; yet the instances of their absconding or failing to appear at Court were comparatively rare. Some of the men would almost willingly undergo punishment for the sake of a few days’ wandering about in idleness and gossiping with the various persons they passed on the road.66

  Some masters began as liberals and ended as martinets. One such man was “the Laird of Shoalhaven,” a Scottish settler from Fife named Alexander Berry, who traversed almost the whole period of transportation, having arrived in Sydney in 1808 and died, aged 102 and worth 40,000 acres, in 1873. At first he was against flogging:

  It is silly to object to any man because he is a rogue, when they all come here for their crimes. All I care about is having able-bodied men—for the rest, no matter if they have been born and bred in Hell. With quiet, peaceable and humane measures, I will make the most refractory see that it is in their interest to behave well.… [T]o turn in men for flogging because they behave ill is utterly childish.67

  “Childish,” of course, because it showed a dependence on higher authority—the unwieldy power of the Bench—and so made the master lose face before his servants. But two years later, Berry was calling for irons and cat-o’-nine-tails: “We have been teasing ourselves to death,” he wrote to his partner Edward Wollstonecraft, “in endeavouring to render ungrateful and irreclaimable profligates more comfortable than they have ever been in their lives.”68

  But a contented convict plainly worked better than a hungry, rebellious one. To that end, as John Macarthur’s son James sensibly told the Select Committee on Transportation in 1837, it was best “where a man behaves well, to make him forget, if possible, that he is a convict.” One of the first treatises on Australian farming (1826) advised settlers that “the belly is far more vulnerable and sensitive than the back.” Use firmness and circumspection, the carrot not the stick; stay away from magistrates, because constant appeals to the formal powers of higher authority will diminish your own. Set up wages and a scale of rewards which will seem “a very great boon” and whose withdrawal will be “much more effectual … than the lash of the flogger.” On one hand, do not get familiar with the convicts or give them the idea that their work is indispensable; on the other, a master must never forget “that they are men who, however degraded, still have the same feelings and passions as himself.” The right stance is balanced paternalism, the instinctive attitude of the English squire when dealing with his laborers. For that was how the English workingman expected his employer to behave; the code of the country gentleman underwrote the modest, customary rights of his workers. Kindness, firmness and distance—with these, boasted a new settler with ten assigned men on the Yass Plains in 1835, “as Burns says, ‘I labour them completely,’ and have them in hand, bless your heart, as tame as ‘pet foxes.’ … I never had occasion to give a single lash.”69

  Most “government men” in bush service were, if not content with their fate, realistic about it. They
knew that rebelliousness, insolence or conspicuous foot-dragging would probably extend their sentences and delay their tickets-of-leave for years—and knew as well, from experience, how pervasive and efficient the “pass system” was in preventing long escapes. (Every convict, when off his master’s property for any time or for any reason, had to carry and show on demand a written pass that stated his name, where he had started from, where he was going and the precise number of days or even hours he was to be on the road.) So they behaved “admirably as a class,” Edward J. Eyre observed after he took up land near Queanbeyan on the Molonglo Plains near the present site of Canberra in 1834, and became “most excellent, careful, industrious, trustworthy servants.” Even the worst of them, though they might rob a passing visitor or a new assigned man, “would rarely plunder their own masters” and could be trusted anywhere:

  I have constantly known two convicts sent down to Sydney quite by themselves, a distance of 200 miles in a dray full of wool drawn by oxen, and having, after depositing their wool at the merchants’, to bring back a load of … clothing, flour, tea, sugar, tobacco and other groceries—luxuries for the master, and even wines, beer and spirits, and yet tho’ this journey involved an absence of five or six weeks during which the men were tempted constantly by the presence of so much property and the facility of appropriating it, the instances were very rare in which any plundering took place or loss ensued.70

  And trust built reform. The posting of sanctioned rural relationships on the far soil of Australia mattered greatly to convicts and always evoked their gratitude. Everything else was strange—the bouncing animals, the upside-down stars, the resentful blacks and the nine agonizing claws of the cat-o’-nine-tails—but this was blessedly familiar. Besides, the man assigned to a decent master in the country districts in the 1830s was, as Eyre pointed out, “in a better position than half the honest laborers of England. No wonder then that convicts behaved well, and from being useful members of the community gained both the respect of others and learned to respect themselves.”

  The feeling was sometimes reflected in convict songs, or folk songs about convictry. In one of the versions of “Van Diemen’s Land,” a ballad circulated in the late 1820s, the narrator is at first horrified to see

  … my fellow sufferers,

  I’m sure I can’t tell how,

  Some chained to a harrow

  And some unto a plough.

  No shoes nor stockings had they on,

  No hats had they to wear,

  Leather breeches and linen drawers,

  Their feet and heads were bare.

  They drove about in two and two

  Like horses in a team,

  The driver he stood over them

  With his malacca cane.

  Such was the fate of the “government man.” But then:

  As we marched into Hobart Town

  Without no more delay

  A gentleman farmer took me,

  His game-keeper for to be:

  I keep my occupation,

  My master loves me well,

  My joys are out of measure

  I’m sure no tongue could tell.

  Assigned convicts and their relatives often expressed their gratitude to the good master. Thomas Holden, the Bolton weaver transported for political protest, is assigned to a decent master, writes home about his good luck, and in 1814 hears from his parents, “We are led to believe that the man you are liveing with is a gentleman, we beg to say to him we are very grateful that he hath so far condescended to take you into his service.” His wife, who with other wives of radical weavers has unsuccessfully petitioned the Prince Regent to be allowed to join their men in Australia—“Let your situation in Life be prosperity or adversity it Woud give me great satisfaction to share the Toil with you, but wether it will Ever be our lot to meet at NS Wales or not I cannot tell”—reinforces his gratitude:

  It gives us all the greatest pleasure to say [you have found] a friend … [W]e think it our Duty to say as he hath placed so much confidence in you we make not the least doubt but you will study to merit his Future Trust or Favors he may Chuse to bestow on you.71

  This, from the point of view of authority, was an ideal penal relationship. But it depended on a steady market, as John Bigge pointed out: Only constant production would keep felons too busy and tired for sin and achieve “that stimulus to exertions that supersedes the necessity of coercion.” And if there was not the proper class distance between master and man, all was apt to be lost. Bigge frostily noted that Emancipist settlers did not like to have a servant punished:

  This feeling is … attributable to a sympathy with that condition which was once their own, and is not corrected until they acquire property.72

  Many settlers who had been convicts did, in fact, spare the lash. Samuel Terry, the “Botany Bay Rothschild,” was said never to have had a man flogged; and Governor Bourke thought assigned men would rather work for a newly freed Emancipist: “A Convict … prefers their coarse fare to being better fed and Cloathed with a more opulent Master and less liberty.”73 Colonial conservatives were doggedly opposed to this. Their views were mirrored in Bigge’s report, which argued that convicts should be assigned preferentially to “opulent” rural settlers. Giving them to small Emancipists, the poor white trash of New South Wales, was “very pernicious.”74

  Convicts who found benevolent masters far preferred their assigned life to the miseries they had known in England. When they could write home, they stressed their comforts, reassured their families and begged them not to fret. “When this you see, remember me, and banish all trouble away from thee,” runs a little jingle in a letter from William Vincent, convict at Parramatta, to his family in Sussex in 1829. “Some people thought they had put me in [a] great deal [of] trouble, which they would, some of them, be glad to be as well as me; and I hope you are, mother, for I live at the Governor’s table, along with the other servants.” Two years later he is made an overseer, the much-coveted “bludger’s job,” and he jubilantly reports that “I have not worked one day since I have been in the country, so I am not hurt with work.” But Vincent was not an assigned man. An experienced farmer, he had been grabbed for government service as soon as he landed, “for there is but a few in the country knows much about cultivation.” He even urged his brothers to emigrate: “If I came free in this country, I could get 90£ a year to look after land.”75

  The sense of opportunity was a common theme. “Dear brother,” wrote the rural protestor Peter Withers in 1833,

  I hav got a very good place all the Bondeg i am under is to Answer My [Name] Every Sunday before I goes to church so you Mit not think that I am made a Slave of, for I am not, it is quite the Reverse of it. And i have got a good Master and Mistress 1 have got Plenty to eate and drink as good as ever a gentleman … so all the Punishement I have in this Country is the thoughts of leaving My frends My Wife and My Dear Dear Children … [T]ell Samuel never to get trannsported for i knows Very Well he will not Like to Lave his Mother 16 thousand miles behind him.76

  After this mild bit of child-scaring, the testimonials: “I think you would make your forting [fortune] in about 6 years, dear Brother,” Withers adds. “I should like to see you and your famly Com to this Country if you could get to com, for it Whould be Well for your Children after you are dead, for this is a very Plentiful Contrey, pervisions is very Cheap and Labour is dear, this is the Plesents [pleasantest] Country that ever I saw.” In the same way, Richard Dillingham, a ploughman from Flitwick in Bedfordshire who had been transported for life in 1831 for theft, is assigned to a colonial architect named David Lamb in Van Diemen’s Land and, after a few years, assures his parents that “I am now very comfortably situated … [A]s to my living I find it better than ever I expected thank God.… I am doing much better than many labouring men in England.”77

  One must read such praises in context: Vincent, Withers and Dillingham were all farm workers who had known the dreadful privations of the agricultural collapse w
hose nadir came in the 1830s, when England went closer to general agrarian revolt and “levelling” than it had been since the days of Wat Tyler. After such miseries, the cheap food and high wages in Australia must have seemed wonderful; in the words of such convicts, the idea of Australia as the paradise of a working man finds its first voice among workers. But the word about opportunities in Australia spread quite rapidly, and by 1830 the Privy Council archives contained many such petitions as this one, from Thomas Jones, a convict languishing on the York hulk:

  Having made Frequent applications to leave the country … having served four years and upwards … my friends having deserted me and my character lost, I dread to think of my situation when I obtain my liberty as no one will employ me; I have no resource left.… [H]ave the kindness to send me by the first ship that goes to New South Wales, I doubt not that I shall redeem that character that I have lost.78

  Eight years before, Bigge had warned in his report that the shortness of sentences—for most, a “mere” seven years—combined with the ticket-of-leave system and the high labor market to disturb the penal framework. A seven-year sentence was “too short” for convict laborers; it gave them premature thoughts of becoming settlers and made them less cautious, obedient and respectful. Thus by 1820, convicts were becoming uppity, or so Bigge thought, and “the prospect afforded by transportation to New South Wales is more one of emigration than of punishment.”79 This became a common criticism of the System in the 1830s. In 1833 the Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whately, a fervent abolitionist, wrote that Australian felons