The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  There were many more than that. The rapparees and bolters who formed their bloody, troglodytic island colonies kidnapped hundreds of black women from their tribes not only because they needed sex, but because many coastal Aborigines were expert seal-hunters.13

  Convicts could easily escape from Van Diemen’s Land on sealing vessels. By 1820 Hobart had become the main port and market for all whaling and sealing in the southern ocean. It was hard to monitor the passage of crews between ship and shore; and any convict could bluff his way past the wharf guards with a forged ticket-of-leave. Hundreds of men went through this loophole into the sealing trade. It was an excellent arrangement for the masters of the “fisheries.” Once aboard, the convict could not return to land without risking the gallows; he was shanghaied into another sort of captivity, masquerading as freedom. By the 1830s the southern bays and refuges, from the Bay of Islands in New Zealand to the Recherche Archipelago on the west coast of Australia, were littered with criminal flotsam left by the dying pursuit of seals and whales.

  The first colonist to make money on the “fisheries” was a free Scottish merchant, Robert Campbell—“just and humane and a gentleman,” in Governor Bligh’s view, and no ally of Macarthur’s. To preserve its monopoly, the East India Company had arranged that no Australian-based trader could export whale or seal products direct to London. (Other “Southern whalers,” who were not actually based in Australia, were exempt from this ruling.) Campbell was determined to break this unfair restraint on trade, which in effect denied that New South Wales had any functions but penal ones. In 1805 he sailed to England with his family in his ship Lady Barlow. In her hold were 260 tons of oil rendered down from sea-elephant blubber and 13,700 sealskins. A few months behind her sailed the Honduras Packet, laden with 34,000 skins. The East India Company reacted predictably by seizing Campbell’s ship and cargo. The ensuing fracas, which Campbell handily won, led at last to free exports from Australia to England, bypassing the East India Company. Campbell returned to New South Wales a trader-hero, “father of the mercantile community.”14

  Free colonial trade destroyed the chance that there would ever be another rum monopoly. Some Emancipists could plough their profits from whaling and sealing back into property. They became—on the balance-sheet, at least—the equal of an Exclusive.

  In the early 1800s most sealing and whaling in Australian waters was run by three men: Henry Kable, Simeon Lord and James Underwood. All three were ex-convicts. Kable (1763–1846) was a burglar who came out on the First Fleet under a death sentence that had been commuted to fourteen years’ transportation. He became an overseer, then a rum trader, selling liquor to convicts the officers were too haughty to deal with directly.

  Some time before 1800, Kable met up with James Underwood (1776–1844), another convict who possessed the inestimably useful skill of knowing how to build boats. Ships of any kind were in short supply in the colony, even then. Kable and Underwood built a sloop, Diana, and fitted her out for sealing in Bass Strait. Before long they had sixty men working for them and were skinning 30,000 seals a year; Underwood’s shipyard, at the head of Sydney Cove, was turning out vessels up to 200 tons in burthen.

  In 1805 they took on a a third partner, Simeon Lord (1771–1840), who had been transported in 1790 for stealing several hundred yards of calico and muslin. His offense was a juvenile one and he never repeated it. A ruthless stone-squeezer of a Yorkshireman, Lord too had come up through the rum trade. Doubtless the officers felt that by using such shady men as distributors, they were saved from demeaning contact with convicts and Emancipists. In fact, they were creating just the social anomaly they feared. Lord was an entrepreneurial genius and fast as a dingo. By 1798 he had his own warehouse, and by 1799 his first ship. He cultivated Robert Campbell, who gave him useful introductions to important people in the sealskin market in London. Lord “traded up” from rum to iron and timber, and then to manufacture. In workshops staffed by assigned convicts, he made the consumer goods that were still in such erratic supply, and so costly, in Sydney: candles, soap, glasses, stockings, cloth, harness, boots and leather hats. Between 1806 and 1809 Lord, Kable and Underwood sold over 127,000 sealskins in London, more in China and Calcutta. Sealing led naturally to Pacific trade in sandalwood and other commodities.

  In 1803 Simeon Lord built himself a mansion in Sydney, the largest private house in the colony. It had three stories and a basement, and an elegant veranda carried on slender columns over the street; it was built of sandstone bound with imported mortar. “Lord’s palace” was to commerce what Macquarie’s estate was to landholding. His social betters passed it with distaste, unable to ignore this irrefutable monument to social permeability. “Mr. Lord (formerly a horse stealer) has built a house that he lives in that cost 20,000£,” sniffed a visiting naval surgeon in 1810, “but still these men are despised and any free settler would not deign to sit at their tables.… Most of these men have made their money by trading.”15

  “These men” were not all men. Mary Haydock (1777–1855), convicted and transported at the tender age of thirteen for horse-stealing in Lancashire, married a young free merchant and shipowner named Thomas Reibey in 1794, learned the business of shipping and sealing from him and aggressively expanded her holdings after 1811, when he died and left her with seven children. She owned warehouses and trading brigs as well as seven farms on the Hawkesbury River and numerous buildings in the growing center of Sydney. This alert and formidably tenacious woman was the exception that proved the rule: No other convict woman made a success, or even a passing stir, at business in the male-dominated society of penal Australia, and it is unlikely that Reibey herself, for all her drive and cunning, could have done it without the start her husband gave her.

  The most spectacular of the ex-convict merchants, and the most detested by the Exclusives, was Samuel Terry (1776–1838). Terry began as an illiterate Manchester laborer who was transported for seven years for stealing 400 pairs of stockings and became known to his contemporaries as “The Rothschild of Botany Bay.” Freed in 1807, he set up in Sydney as a pubkeeper and moneylender. Many nasty stories, some of them perhaps true (though none proven), were told of his exploitation of drunken Emancipists and ticket-of-leave men—how he would let them booze on credit for days and weeks and then seize their farms as payment. Whether by trickery, frugality or a judicious mixture of both, by 1820 he owned 19,000 acres, or 10 percent of the land possessed by all the eight hundred or so Emancipist landowners put together. He also held more mortgages on property than the Bank of New South Wales, in which he was a principal shareholder—about one-fifth of the total value of mortgages registered in the colony. Later in life, he turned to charity and politics, becoming an enthusiastic backer of Emancipists’ rights. His convict servants remembered him warmly as one who never had them flogged and never forgot the class bonds of his own past. When he died in 1838, Terry received the most lavish funeral ever held in Australia, complete with flags, full Masonic panoply and—to the disgust of his enemies—a procession through the crowded, silent streets of Sydney led by the military band of the 50th Regiment. “It is a piece of important news, certainly,” ran a letter to the London Times, “for the criminals of England, that military honours have given lustre to the obsequies of one of their most successful chums.”16

  But the Terrys, Reibeys and Lords are memorable precisely because they were exceptions. Very few ex-convicts made big fortunes after 1821, although many of their free descendants would. Most Emancipists survived as handymen, “mechanics,” butchers, bakers or small farmers. These “dungaree settlers,” so called for the coarse cloth they wore, clung to the land by their fingernails until they were shaken loose by drought or debt or drink. Their truck-gardens produced the fruit, vegetables and chickens that the exalted Merinos would not condescend to raise except for their own kitchens; they feared the space and melancholy of the bush, and stuck to the land around Sydney while other settlers, more adventurous and better endowed with slave labor, pushe
d outward. Often they drank their small acreage away and died paupers. And yet, as Peter Cunningham remarked, they served “like the American backwoodsmen”—a breed not yet mythologized in 1825—“the office of pioneers to prepare the way for a more healthy population”: their own children, the Currency.

  If the colony’s economy depended on ex-convicts, so did its professional and cultural communities. In Macquarie’s time, there was not one lawyer in Australia who had come there as a free man. No respectable lawyer would have contemplated going there to practice. But colonial life was bitterly litigious, and much of the suing and pleading therefore had to be done by fallen solicitors who had been struck off the rolls in England and Ireland.

  Their status as lawyers was, to put it mildly, uncertain. But because Ellis Bent, Macquarie’s deputy judge-advocate, did not want to waste court time with the meandering, amateurish pleas of litigants acting as their own attorneys, he cautiously allowed three ex-convict lawyers to bring civil cases. Two of them built up quite flourishing practices, for a time. One was George Crossley (1749–1823), who, after twenty-four years’ blameless practice as a solicitor, had been transported for perjury.17 Governor King conditionally pardoned him in 1801, two years after he arrived; by 1803 he owned more than 400 acres on the Hawkesbury River and was handling cases for other settlers, despite a flurry of writs from newly acquired creditors. He advised Governor Bligh, who knew the law of the sea better than that of the land, on his legal dealings with the Rum Corps. Macarthur’s cabal, after their putsch against Bligh in 1808, had him arrested as a supporter of their “Tyrant” and sent to slave in the dreaded coal mines near Newcastle. Macquarie freed him to practice civil law again, but by 1821 he was crushed by debts and a last conviction, at the age of seventy-two, for perjury. He died two years later. His colleague, Edward Eagar (1787–1866), a Dublin attorney under life sentence for forgery, did slightly better: After getting his conditional pardon in 1813, he practiced law for two years. But then his and Crossley’s right to plead in court was struck down by the judge of the newly created Supreme Court of Civil Judicature, Jeffrey Bent.

  Bent proved to be an idle, haughty drone, whose conservatism even embarrassed some of the Exclusives. He and Macquarie detested one another on sight, and the friction between them rendered the new court unworkable. Bent thought of Emancipists as permanent helots, and refused point-blank to hear any cases brought by ex-convict lawyers.18 Naturally, this was a catastrophe for the likes of Eagar and Crossley. Macquarie protested, but in vain. In May 1815 it was ruled that no lawyer disbarred in England could plead in Australia. Macquarie then wrote to the colonial secretary, Lord Bathurst, threatening to resign if Jeffrey Bent and his ailing brother Ellis, the colony’s judge-advocate, were not both recalled. Bathurst, realizing that the whole relationship between the government and the bench was about to break down, gave in. Ellis Bent solved half of the problem by dying a few months later, and soon after that Jeffrey Bent left Australia. Nevertheless it would be some time before an Emancipist lawyer could plead with much chance of being taken seriously by an Australian court. This legal disability continued to be one of the most potent weapons in the Exclusives’ armory of social discrimination.

  Ex-convict doctors fared better than lawyers. One could hardly say that harried, shady writ-pushers like Eagar and Crossley, however badly they were victimized, founded Australian law; but William Redfern (1774–1833), another ex-convict, was certainly the father of Australian medicine.

  A spirited and deeply altruistic man, Redfern began his career as a naval surgeon and was tried in 1797 for supporting the mutiny of British sailors on the fleet at the Nore. He was accused as a leader of the rising, although his only role in it was to exhort the tars “to be more united among themselves.” The court sentenced him to hang, but he was reprieved, due to his youth and rashness, and spent four years in prison before being transported to New South Wales in 1801.19

  In a colony short of doctors, beset by grave problems of diet and sanitation, with a high accident rate and laws enforced by flogging, Redfern had plenty to do. He began as assistant surgeon on Norfolk Island, where he got a free pardon from Governor King in 1803. Returning to Sydney in 1808, he was made assistant surgeon to the colony and put in charge of the squalid and chaotic hospital on Dawes Point in Sydney. In 1816 he took effective charge of Macquarie’s new “Rum Hospital,” and by then his practice was the largest and most popular in the colony.

  For Redfern, much of the social prejudice against ex-convicts was suspended. He was clearly the best surgeon in the colony; moreover, his forte was obstetrics, which meant that every family, “good” or not, needed him. He delivered Governor Macquarie’s only son Lachlan in 1814, and he was also the family doctor to the Macarthurs in Camden. Respect for Redfern’s skills was one of the very few matters on which Macquarie and Macarthur wholeheartedly agreed. Yet despite the strength of his connections at Government House and Camden, Redfern was not content merely to be a “social” doctor. He never forgot that he, like other convicts, had come in chains to Australia. He spent as much time on the convicts’ dysenteries, broken bones, eye-sores, infected lash-cuts and bastard births as on the diseases of the rich. He was always accessible to them and ran an outpatient clinic for gang laborers at the back of the Rum Hospital. Above all, he fought to improve conditions on convict transports. Public health in Australia began with Redfern. Many convicts and Emancipists, therefore, considered him their savior; this gave the later political actions of this brusque, kindly and incorruptible man a real constituency.

  Early colonial Sydney was not a cultivated town, and even its poor poet laureate Michael Massey Robinson was driven to metaphors of infancy and sunrise when he contemplated it. Cultural life among the better classes of Sydney society existed in a larval way, producing an occasional recitation or watercolor; but mostly it struck both visitors and residents as jejune and provincial. “A land without antiquities,” complained the well-named Judge Barron Field, who had come to Australia in 1816 to replace Jeffrey Bent. To Field, it was a place so raw as to be, except for a few oddities like the kangaroo, culturally invisible:

  … where Nature is prosaic,

  Unpicturesque, unmusical, and where

  Nature reflecting Art is not yet born;—

  We’ve nothing left us but anticipation,

  Better (I grant) than utter selfishness,

  Yet too o’erweening—too American;

  Where’s no past tense, the ign’rant present’s all.

  Sydney, he felt, was “a spireless city and profane.” The only evocative object in sight is a ship:

  … poetry to me

  Since piously I trust, in no long space,

  Her wings will bear me from this prose-dull land.20

  The only free professional artist to visit Australia before 1825 was John Lewin (1770–1819), a natural-history painter who, sensing that English interest in Australian exotica might make a journey worthwhile, arrived in 1800 to start work on two fine (and now exceedingly rare) illustrated books, Prodromus Entomology (1805), on Australian lepidopterous insects, and Birds of New Holland (1808).21 Lachlan Macquarie adopted this modest and uncomplaining young man as his quasi-official painter, taking him to do watercolors of the scenes on his gubernatorial “progress” across the Blue Mountains on the new convict road in 1815, and commissioning “transparencies” from him for the ballroom at Government House. He also gave Lewin a sinecure of £40, later £80, a year by appointing him coroner, which was as close to a direct subsidy of the infant arts as any governor could do.

  Educated convicts—known as Specials—took pride in their literacy and their distance from the brutish laboring mass of felons, and Lewin was a source of comfort to them; his presence suggested that they were not totally severed from culture. “I view, admire, and venerate the Man,” cried the convict John Grant, in an an exclamatory panegyric on this “tender Genius,”

  Lewin: rare, beauteous plant in Genius’ Vale!

  P
ainter! Engraver! Nature’s Wooer! Hail!

  Courage!22

  Lewin apart, all artists in the early colony were in the literal sense counterfeiters—or thieves, or fallen clerks, or obscurely disgraced pupil-teachers. Australia was not short of convict painters. One of them, Joseph Lycett (ca. 1774–?) came under Macquarie’s erratic patronage. A mere “limner” in England and a helpless alcoholic, Lycett in 1811 received fourteen years for forgery. In Sydney he was made a post-office clerk. There, he had access to the post office’s small printing press. Lycett scrounged some copper plates and a burin, and before long the colony was flooded with dud five-shilling notes. He was sent to the penal station at Newcastle. Very luckily for him, the commandant was Captain James Wallis, an amateur painter himself; and instead of hewing coal in darkness, Lycett was set to designing a church and painting a triptych, long since lost, for its altar.

  Wallis arranged a conditional pardon for Lycett in 1819, and then Macquarie—anxious, as always, to promote the beauties of Australia and attract free emigrant settlers—encouraged him to wander across the colony, sketching its landscapes. The watercolors became a volume of Views of Australia, published serially from 1824 on; these colored engravings were dedicated to the colonial secretary, Lord Bathurst, and presented an Arcadian image of Australia hardly distinguishable from the Cotswolds or a picturesque park.23 They proclaimed how the benign hand of the “Patriot-Chief,” Lachlan Macquarie, had transformed the harsh antipodes. “Behold,” the advertisement for the Views adjured its readers, “the gloomy grandeur of solitary woods and forests exchanged for the noise and bustle of thronged marts of commerce; while the dens of savage animals, and the hiding places of yet more savage men, have become transformed into peaceful villages.” There was something elegantly appropriate about setting a forger to such a task.