The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  are carried to a country whose climate is delightful, producing in abundance all the necessaries and most of the luxuries of life;—that they have a certainty of maintenance … are better fed, clothed and lodged, than (by honest means) they ever were before; [can get] all the luxuries they are most addicted to … are permitted, even before the expiration of their term, to become settlers on a fertile farm … [I]t certainly does not look like a very terrific punishment.80

  When Thomas Potter Macqueen, an English magistrate who was the absentee landlord of 10,000 acres in Australia granted him in 1823 by Governor Brisbane, echoed this by remarking that assigned convicts in New South Wales were better off than farmworkers in Bedfordshire, a pseudonymous Australian settler fiercely disputed it:

  The work in this new country is of the most laborious description:—cutting down trees, the wood of which is of such hardness that English-made tools break like glass before the strokes of the woodman; making these trees into fires, and attending them, with the thermometer usually ranging in the middle of the day from 80 to 100 deg. for eight months in the year; grubbing up the stumps by the roots, the difficulty of which would appall an English woodman; splitting his hard wood into posts and rails, and erecting them into fences.… In what, then, does the superior condition of the convict consist? Is it in a slavery more profound than that of the West African negro?81

  Farm work in Australia was always hard; and probably the toughest of all jobs, in terms of the psychic tolls it could exact on a man, was a shepherd’s. As merino cross-breeds became the basis of Australian prosperity, more and more assigned men were sent to a lonely life in the bush, tending sheep. They lived on the perimeter of remote properties; and even places near Bathurst or in the Hunter River Valley were still virgin bush in the 1830s, not much tamer than the “real” outback, 300 miles inland. A shepherd stood a high chance of being the first white person to bear the revenge of Aborigines who had been evicted from their hunting-grounds by the outward push of white settlement. When blacks could not mount a frontal attack on a station homestead, they could easily pick off a lone shepherd with their silent spears, especially since assigned men are not armed. Even if local Aborigines had no special grievance against the farmer, they loved mutton anyway and would kill to get it. The assigned shepherd therefore lived in constant fear of death.

  His flock could be as few as 200 or as many as 3,000 sheep. The work sounds simple: All he had to do was drive the sheep out in search of pasture each day, keep an eye on strays, and bring them back at night. But he was rarely mounted and often had no dogs. Moreover, pasturage was not as common in New South Wales before 1850 as it is today. Millions of rolling acres were covered in box, a middle-sized eucalypt of no commercial value, whose thirsty roots pulled every drop of surface moisture out of the soil and prevented the growth of grass. The solution, which later farmers resorted to with excessive zeal, was ringbarking. This killed the box without using up extra labor in felling it and grubbing out the stumps. Grass then sprouted in abundance on these spectral landscapes of gesticulating, claw-white dead trees. But in the convict era, ringbarking was not much used, and the shepherd had to cover much more ground to find enough grass for his sheep. If he got lost, or if he lost some of the flock, he would have to stay out for days until he rounded them up again and struggled back to the out-station, although his master would only give him a day’s rations when he set out, to discourage him from abandoning the flock and bolting.

  The loneliness of a shepherd’s life was increased by the medical need to keep flocks (and hence their keepers) away from one another. Besides dingoes, the terror of a pastoralist was a highly infectious ovine disease called the Scab which, as Eyre found from bitter experience, ruined the wool, checked breeding and was practically incurable:

  A single act of neglect or inattention on the shepherd’s part might in a moment blast the prospects of his employer—and what more natural than that such acts should occur—the shepherd anxious to have a gossip would drive his flock as near to the boundaries of his run as possible—the shepherd of the infected flock would do the same, and while the two men were talking the two flocks would intermingle and the dreaded mischief be done.82

  It was not unknown for a resentful convict to avenge himself on his master by deliberately infecting his stock.

  In mallee scrub, patches of which could extend for miles—there was one district shared between northern Victoria and southern New South Wales that still covered 10,000 square miles in the 1880s—sheep were bound to get lost. The tough bushes of Eucalyptus dumosa were too high for a man to see across, even from horseback. In such a labyrinth, with dingoes howling in the middle distance—mallee was known as “dingo scrub” because it sheltered the wild dog that shepherds most feared—the assigned man was likely to go “cranky,” as colonial slang termed the harmlessly mad. As stations got larger, all the grass near the homestead was needed for stock-horses and working bullocks. The shepherd had to mind the flocks on runs three, five or ten miles out; instead of coming back to the homestead each night, he would have to sleep out in the bush.

  John Standfield, one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, described what this did in 1834 to his father, Thomas Standfield, who was in his fifties and had been assigned to a farmer named Nowlan near Maitland, some 150 miles from Sydney. Three weeks after being sent to this out-station, he was

  a dreadful spectacle, covered in sores from head to foot, and as weak and helpless as a child.… [H]e pointed to the place where he slept, called a “watch-box.” After my father had been out in the bush from sunrise to sunset, he had then to retire for repose to the watch-box, 6 feet by 18 inches, with a small bed and one blanket, where he could lie and gaze upon the starry heavens, and where the wind blew in at one end and out of the other, with nothing to ward off the pitiless storm—such were the comforts of the watch-box. Besides this he had to walk four miles for his rations, which journeys he was compelled to perform by night.83

  The Tolpuddle men (and a few other “politicals” in Australia) seem to have had especially harsh treatment from their masters. But even at the best of times, life in the outback could have a hallucinatory strangeness for men fresh from England. One visitor to the Maitland area in the 1830s noted that convict quarters in the bush were like a cross between a zoo and an Irish cabin, with

  a multitude of noisy parrots, intended for sale; pet kangaroos and opossums, and a variety of kangaroo dogs, greyhounds, and sheep-dogs; on the fire was a huge boiler filled with the flesh of a kangaroo, and close by were suspended the hind-quarters of another of these animals; in one corner was a large pan of milk; in another, a number of skins partially dried; while, a few feet from the ground, were the filthy bed-places or cribs of the people themselves.

  Inside it all was fug and cockatoo-shit, dried sweat and blowflies and the stink of hides. Outside, the landscape could be apocalyptic, vast; it was like standing on the edge of one world and looking into another:

  The extreme silence that prevails here almost exceeds what the imagination can conceive.… One would imagine that a residence in such a lone place would be liable to cause a change of some consequence in the minds and habits of any person; and it would be an interesting point to ascertain the effect on the convict stock-keepers, who, for weeks together, can have no opportunity of conversing with a white man, except their sole companion; for there are always two to a hut.

  And it did affect them. It promoted the pair-bonding, the feeling of reliance on one’s “mate,” that would lie forever at the heart of masculine social behavior in Australia. Because there were no white women in the bush, it meant—as some authorities grudgingly acknowledged, by the end of the 1830s—that “mateship” found its expression in homosexuality. Most important, in the eyes of some observers, was the fact that life in the bush reformed the socially useless criminal by teaching him skills and giving him time to reflect, with the bonus of exposure to “sublime” landscape. Here was Wordsworth applied to penology—the nineteenth-c
entury belief that Nature, as the unaltered fingerprint of its Creator, could serve as a moral text for the betterment of fallen man. The convict becomes a hermit, cleansing his soul in the desert:

  This monotonous and solitary life has the effect of giving a new direction to the ideas of the moral patient, superior to any other which the most profound metaphysician could have invented. Solitude and idleness in a cell either subdue and subvert the mind entirely, by causing madness and suicide, or they generate a hardihood and a caution which enable the criminal to pursue his career with greater chances of profit; while the combination of pastoral occupation with solitude, offers the fairest chance of success, by weaning and forcing him from his ancient habits.

  The future Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, while still at Oxford in 1794, had drawn much the same picture of the moral benefits of Australian wilderness on the repentant sinner in his Botany-Bay Eclogues:

  Welcome ye wild plains

  Unbroken by the plough, undelv’d by hand

  Of patient rustic; where for lowing herds

  And for the music of the bleating flocks,

  Alone is heard the kangaroo’s sad note

  Deepening in distance. Welcome ye rude climes,

  The realm of Nature! for as yet unknown

  The crimes and comforts of luxurious life,

  Nature benignly gives to all enough,

  Denies to all a superfluity …

  On these wild shores Repentance’ saviour hand

  Shall probe my secret soul, shall cleanse my wounds,

  And fit the faithful penitent for Heaven.

  The bassoon-like sound of the distant ’roo, one feels, must have made the journey worthwhile.

  Probably about one-fifth of the masters in Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales were genuinely interested in reforming their assigned servants, and two-fifths more “encouraged the convicts for their own interests.” The latter might treat their assigned servants like farm equipment, but at least they would teach them skills and keep them away from bad company. Out in the bush, there were no booze-shops, whores, or criminal cabals. There, convicts led “a healthy useful life of labor, well clothed and well fed, with the prospect of attaining their freedom,” Eyre wrote. “Transportation of convicts to a healthy country and the assignment of them to settlers … is … the true means of reforming the criminals themselves.”84

  Masters and government authorities generally believed that it was far harder for an assigned convict to “go straight” in a butcher’s shop or wearing servant’s livery in Sydney. The city was the condenser of vice; in the bush, there were more routines and less company, and the master’s life shared more of the hardships of the servant’s than in town. In Sydney or Hobart, the bon bourgeois’ need to demarcate his life from the felon’s led to exaggerated rituals of class superiority, which promoted the feeling that convicts could not be reformed at all. But the issue of class loomed large in penal Australia—a society traversed by confusingly rapid movements of individual status, where tides of men and women were constantly flowing from servitude into citizenhood and responsibility, from bitter poverty to new-found wealth. By the 1830s, Australia was as class-obsessed a society as any in the world.

  *It is not certain whether this canting, defiant ditty, quoted in Russel Ward, Australia Since the Coming of Man (Sydney, 1965), was written before or after 1830. It is not, however, an English music-hall song like the spurious jingle “Botany Bay,” ca. 1880. “Pinchgut Island,” or plain “Pinchgut,” was a bare knob of rock in Sydney Harbor, now occupied by Fort Denison, where recalcitrant convicts were sometimes chained in semi-starvation. The “Norfolk Dumpling” was 100 lashes, and the “Newgate hornpipe” the hanged man’s twitching in air.

  10

  Gentlemen of New South Wales

  i

  THE VISITOR from England, arriving in Sydney in the 1820s, saw a bright prospect from the deck of his ship: Across the glittering blue of the harbor, under the immense clarity of the southern sky, a neat-looking town of freestone or whitewashed cottages with shady verandas, their gardens marked off from one another and from the still-encircling bush with paling fences or clipped geranium hedges, their kitchen-yards “teeming with culinary delicacies.” And yet, as the naval surgeon Peter Cunningham noted in his memoir of New South Wales life, the sense of domestic familiarity dissipated as soon as he stepped ashore, among the English faces and not-quite-English accents, the caged cockatoos and rosellas shrieking among the overflowing fruit stalls, and the silent caged men:

  The government gangs of convicts … marching backwards and from their work in single military file, and the solitary ones straggling here and there, with their white woollen Parramatta frocks and trowsers, or gray and yellow jackets with duck overalls (the different styles of dress denoting the oldness or newness of their arrival), all daubed over with broad arrows, P.B.’s, C.B.’s, and various numerals in black, white and red; with perhaps the chain-gang straddling sulkily by in their jingling leg-chains,—tell a tale too plain to be misunderstood.1

  Inequality did not stop with the public gangs. In penal Australia, the question of class was all-pervasive and pathological. Distance had made it so. Tiny as it was (about 7,500 people in 1807; 10,500 in 1812; 24,000 in 1820; and 36,598 at the time of the first census in November 1828), the colony was gnawed by isolation and boredom, plagued by foolish vendettas and extreme class-consciousness. Class barriers were translated into personal affront in the blink of an eye. The atmosphere of New South Wales at the end of the transportation period was summed up in 1839 by “A Settler,” writing pseudonymously but with piercing insight in the Sydney Morning Herald:

  People come here to better their condition, many with limited means, their tempers a little soured with privations and disappointed expectations (for all expect too much); cut off from the ties of kindred, old friendships, and endearing associations, all struggling in the road of advancement, and no-one who reflects will be surprised that they jostle one another. Every man does not know his own position so well as at home. [Italics added.]2

  One speaks of “colonial gentry” as though there were gentlemen in early Australia; but there were not. Frontiers have a way of killing, maiming or simply dismissing gentlemen. In any case, most folk with settled estates have no reason to go to a raw, new country. They can invest in it later, without needing to break their bodies on it now. To succeed on the frontier, a man needed the kind of violent, grabbing drive that only failure or mediocrity in his former life could fuel.

  The male society of early New South Wales could be roughly sorted into three kinds of people. There were opportunists struggling to be gentlemen; convicts and outcasts waiting to be opportunists; and the failures, who would never become anything. Social life thus displayed a crude, insecure face, which the cosmetic application of airs and graces could not altogether hide. The mixture of ambition and social pretension wearied many a visitor. The relentless deployment of tooth and claw against the tentative mobility of the lower orders would impress Charles Darwin himself with its unpleasant naïveté when he arrived in Sydney on the Beagle in 1836.

  The colonial elite after 1800 had arrived at an idea of gentility that was already becoming, if not obsolete, then certainly old-fashioned in England. It was feudal and rural. It belonged more to the 1720s than the 1820s. It parodied an ideal of privilege they had never had and, moreover, was distinguished by its absolute inability to relax. English gentility defined itself in relation to an aristocracy above and a peasantry and serving classes below. But its vision of the “good yeoman” did not apply very well in convict Australia, whose peasantry was, by definition, not good.

  The Exclusives had come from nowhere in a generation or two. They were determined to prevent other men, also from nowhere, from getting what they had. Hence their stubborn resistance to the gathering social demands of the Emancipists and their Australian-born children. It was a campaign fought with extreme punctilio. When Governor Lachlan Macquarie, who correctly b
elieved that some of the ablest men in the colony were Emancipists, invited four of them to dinner at Government House in 1810, the Exclusives were outraged. When he went further and appointed two of these men, the merchant Simeon Lord and the landowner Andrew Thompson, as trustees and commissioners of the new turnpike road that was to be built between Sydney and the Hawkesbury River, the third proposed trustee—the Reverend Samuel Marsden, senior chaplain of the colony and one of its biggest landowners, a merciless pharisee—was so piqued in his clerical dignity that he refused to serve. This in turn sent the governor into one of his military rages, and the feud between the two men poisoned relations between Church and State in New South Wales for the rest of Macquarie’s term.

  The Exclusives could define their sense of class against the despised Emancipists, but they were snobbish as only provincials could be. The tone was faithfully echoed as late as the 1840s by Louisa Anne Meredith, a clergyman’s wife who wrote a delectably acerbic account of her five years in Australia (1839–44):

  The distinctions in society here remind me of the “dock-yard people” described by Dickens.… Thus—Government officers don’t know merchants; merchants with “stores” don’t know other merchants who keep “shops”; and the shopkeepers have, I doubt not, a little code of their own, prescribing the proper distances to be obseved between drapers and haberdashers, butchers and pastrycooks.… [T]his pride of place is so very ridiculous and unbecoming in such a community, that were not its tendency so mischievous, it could only provoke a smile.3

  All colonial standards—of rank, etiquette, taste and the “interesting”—were English. Until well into the 1820s, the word “Australian” was a term of abuse, or at best of condescension; it carried an air of seediness on the rim of the Pacific. Sydney’s was a heliotropic society, and the sun it faced—distant, abstract but commanding—was the Royal family, seen through its viceroy the governor. He was an autocrat presiding over a police state with certain social trimmings. His power was all-encompassing, as befitted the man who ran a continent that was also a jail. It had been so since 1788, when Arthur Bowes Smyth, hearing Captain Phillip’s commission read at Sydney Cove, found it “a more unlimited one than was ever before granted to any governor under the British Crown,” while Ralph Clark noted that he “had never heard of any single person having so great a power invested in him.”4 All political decisions ran through his hands; who got land, where and how much; who got labor; who was pardoned, freed or sent to a penal station; what religions were celebrated, other than the established rites of the Church of England, and at what hours; who filled administrative positions; what could be said in the colony’s embryonic press—a thousand matters, loaded or trivial, down to the vexed question of which side of the road the chaotic, ever increasing traffic of Sydney should move on (Macquarie chose the left, as in Britain). Nowhere in the British Empire did a proconsul have wider social power than in penal Australia.