The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Although the list of convict artists is fairly long—from Thomas Watling (b. 1762) in Sydney Cove to William Buelow Gould (1801–1853) in Hobart—it contains no men (and of course no women) of more than local interest, except for the celebrated “painter-poisoner” Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794–1847), an epigone of Henry Fuseli who had mixed in London literary circles with Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey and the young Dickens. His reputation for poisoning heiresses was a posthumous canard (invented in part by Dickens: so much for literary friendships); in fact, he was transported for forgery. But most convict painters were obscure limners who struggled as best they could in a society without opportunities, lived drunk and died disheartened.24

  Much of the same was true of writing, which, beyond the level of official dispatch, the legal opinion and the family letter, led a thin erratic life. Professional writers were of course unheard-of. There were convict balladeers, and no shortage of writers of “pipes” or anonymous pasquinades (the curious word came from their author’s habit of pushing them under doors, rolled in a cylinder) directed against Authority. Most of these were awkward expostulations, railing against well-known targets to whom they gave easily decodable names—“Parson Rapine,” for instance, for the sanctimonious Dr. Samuel Marsden.25

  The first Australian publisher was a former shoplifter, George Howe (1769–1821), whose bastard son would go on to start the first newspaper in Van Diemen’s Land.

  The first play produced in Australia was George Farquhar’s Restoration comedy The Recruiting Officer, performed by an all-convict cast in 1789. Its prologue, supposedly written by some nameless felon bard, was to become famous in and beyond Botany Bay:

  From distant climes o’er wide-spread seas we come,

  Though not with much eclat or beat of drum,

  True patriots all; for be it understood,

  We left our country for our country’s good;

  No private views disgrac’d our generous zeal,

  What urg’d our travels was our country’s weal,

  And none will doubt but that our emigration

  Has prov’d most useful to the British nation.

  Alas, later research has shown that this was not penned by a convict in Port Jackson, but by Henry Carter, a hack journalist in London, well after he heard the play had been performed; he also spread the tale that it had been spoken by the famed pickpocket George Barrington. (Nevertheless, even without its imperishable second couplet, the “Barrington prologue” deserves to be remembered as the first of a long series of gibes directed by the supercilious Pommy at cultural efforts in Australia.)

  The most important cultural figure to emerge from the ranks of the convicts was, however, the architect Francis Howard Greenway. He was a touchy, arrogant, painstaking and uncompromising man, and these qualities ensured both his successes and his failures. Without that stubborn egotism his talent could scarcely have survived the humiliations of convict life intact, but his outspokenness about the poor taste, graft, incompetence and bad workmanship that surrounded him made so many enemies that after Macquarie, his patron, returned to England, his career soon withered. To call Greenway an innocent victim distorts the record; much of his reputation for greed and extravagance was deserved. For example, after drawing his salary for six years as Macquarie’s architect, he had the cheek to present a further bill for £11,000, which he claimed as his commission fee (about 5 percent of construction cost) on government work for which he had already been paid. He lost his official post when Macquarie left and got no real jobs after 1828; ten years later, Australia’s finest Georgian architect died a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave.

  Three major Greenway buildings survive in their intended form: St. Matthew’s Church in Windsor, and the Hyde Park Barracks and St. James’s Church in Sydney, whose grave and spare pedimented façades face one another at the south end of Macquarie Street. Greenway had a genius for turning the relative poverty of colonial architectural resources—the lack of skilled carvers, for instance—to good account. He had to concentrate on proportion and material texture, rather than ornament: the simple-looking (but closely accounted) use of Palladian bays, with plain pilasters—brick on the Barracks, tawny sandstone on St. James’s—firmly stating the ratios of the walls. His Doric detailing, straightforward and masculine, suited the hard clarity of Australian light as well as the limitations of convict masonry skills. As in early American churches, the direct speech of Greenway’s idiom reinforced the content of the rituals: nothing Romish, every brick reflecting (as J. M. Freeland put it) “a vehemently evangelical society which saw all hope and cause for pride and pleasure in the unchallengeable rightness of the Protestant ascendancy.”26 The political engagement between Church and State was unambiguously put by the sole inscription in the cartouche on St. James’s pediment: not a motto or a Biblical text, just Lachlan Macquarie’s name, facing the same name in the same place on the Barracks a hundred yards away.

  Architecture is a social art par excellence. A citizen sees his city’s buildings every day, whether he wants to or not; their speech is quiet but pervasive. Greenway’s public buildings publicly epitomized one of the “distasteful” facts of penal Australia—that free birth did not confer a monopoly of talent. For all the Exclusives’ obsession with status, and despite the armored barriers of class raised against the Emancipists, the free still had to employ an ex-convict to form and condense their desire for urban elegance and ceremonial space. To worship God in a house built by a forger, while across the way more criminals were confined in another house of equal elegance—this was a piquant contradiction, not to be dwelt on. It summed up the peculiar insecurity of the signals respectable people in Sydney devised to distinguish themselves from their Others.

  In their desire for signs of status, the colonial Australians developed some unlikely fixations, refuting entirely the idea that remote societies are robustly free of snobbery. Of course, the reverse is true: It is the provinces that fix on style and “correctness,” since their fate is to reflect distant prototypes. Hence the attention the early Australian gentry paid to form, and their contempt for the pretensions of new Emancipist money. Louisa Anne Meredith, the recording angel of the antipodean drawing-room, took one of her finest flights on the subject of risen convicts:

  Wealth, all-powerful though it be,—and many of these emancipists are the richest men in the colony,—cannot wholly overcome the prejudice against them, though policy, in some instances, greatly modifies it. Their want of education is an effectual barrier to many, and these so wrap themselves in the love of wealth, and the palpable, though misplaced, importance it gives, that their descendants will probably improve but little on the parental model. You may often see a man of immense property, whose wife and daughters dress in the extreme of fashion and finery, rolling home in his gay carriage from his daily avocations, with face, hands and apparel as dirty and slovenly as any common mechanic. And the son of a similar character has been seen, with a dozen costly rings on his coarse fingers, and chains, and shirt-pins, glistening with gems, buying yet more expensive jewelry, yet without sock or stockings to his feet; the shoes, to which his spurs were attached, leaving a debatable ground between them and his trowsers! Spurs and shoes are, I imagine, a fashion peculiar to this stamp of exquisites, but among them very popular.27

  But how to distinguish oneself from the spur-and-shoe men? Much ingenuity was expended on the problem. Beyond drink, social climbing and fornication, the amusements of the upper crust of New South Wales were not the same as they are today, and generally not of a distinctively “Australian” kind. Superior people did not, for instance, swim in the sea or even go to the beach; sea-bathing bore the taint of the imprisoned, because when Sydney convicts washed they usually had to do it in the salt water. To get a tan, for a woman, was to plummet from gentility to coarseness; sunburned skin suggested convict labor and carried overtones of the despicable black savage. “Few ladies venture to risk their complexions to the exposure of an equestri
an costume, and accordingly few appear on horseback.”28

  The desire not to resemble convicts even affected diet. Mrs. Meredith was puzzled by her hosts’ refusal ever to serve fresh fish at lunch or dinner, despite the superb quality and variety of Sydney seafood. Instead, she was given smoked salmon or dried cod brought from England. This aimed to invert the convict diet. Convicts traditionally ate salted meat—which signified lack of property, for only the landed could enjoy fresh beef or lamb—and fresh fish. The ceremonial food of the free must therefore be fresh meat and salt fish.

  One could live grandly in early Sydney, given the money and the adminstrative power. The extreme example was Captain John Piper (1773–1851), a very unthrifty Scottish Lucullus who had come out with the New South Wales Corps and obtained the plum job of chief naval officer in Sydney, giving him the right to take a percentage of all excise on spirits and customs dues exacted on imported goods. This was worth more than £4,000 a year to him, and with it he built Henrietta Villa—otherwise known as the Naval Pavilion—on a 190-acre harborside promontory granted to him by Macquarie and known today as Point Piper. “He lives in a beautiful house,” reported George Thomas Boyes, Governor Brisbane’s deputy-assistant commissary-general in Sydney,

  but it stands alone for there is nothing like it in the Colony. He has laid out immense sums and no expense had been spared to ornament this fairy Palace.… He does the thing properly, for he sends carriages and four and boats for those who like the water, and returns his guests to their homes in the same manner. He keeps a band of music and they have quadrilles every evening under the spacious verandahs. At the table there is a vast profusion of every luxury the four quarters of the globe can supply, for you must know that this fifth or pick-pocket quarter contributes nothing of itself.… There is no honour in dining with Piper for he invites everybody who comes here.29

  The respectable classes loved horse-breeding and horse-racing; Australia’s equine fixation was fully formed by 1820. They held lavish balls, which some pastoral families would ride 200 miles to attend—these being the main displays of the colonial marriage-market. The dancing was segregated, with Emancipists at one end of the room and Exclusives at the other, sometimes with different orchestras. Some gentlemen did what English gentry were known to do—they rode to hounds. But there were no foxes in Australia, and so the “Cumberland Hunt,” as it called itself, donned pink coats amid the old scribbly gray of the bush and went baying, belling and tallyhoing after dingoes. Rarely can Oscar Wilde’s definition of hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable” have applied so forcibly within the British Empire.

  The aim was to be as English as possible, and to speak of England as “home.” But the settlers could not follow the change of English fashion; their conservatism was underscored by the great antipodean time lag. Ships would bring out-of-date magazines and newspapers, ancient Court news, obsolescent ladies’ clothes and overpriced luxury goods. There was a faded pleasure in gossiping about the Prince of Wales’s debts when, for all one knew, they might have been paid before one heard of them; or about the unwonted pregnancy of a county heiress if the baby had presumably already been born. The poverty of conversation could drive an intelligent visitor to despair. Louisa Meredith lamented that none of the colonial elite seemed to have read anything:

  An apathetic indifference seems the besetting fault; an utter absence of interest or enquiry beyond the merest gossip,—the cut of a new sleeve, or the guests at a late party. “Do you play?” and “Do you draw” are invariable queries to a new lady-arrival. “Do you dance?” is thought superfluous, for everybody dances; but not a question is heard relative to English literature or art; far less a remark on any political event, of however important a nature:—not a syllable that betrays thought.30

  And so the image of England slowly dimmed to a nostalgic wraith, a film of imperfect memory. What filled up the horizon, as in small isolated communities it always does, was local news. And the convicts were the necessary low-water mark to which all social heights were compared. The gentry needed them for self-definition, not just for labor.

  iii

  ONE SAW GANGS of convicts everywhere. All around Sydney, on the Blue Mountain roads, or south toward Bowral, Goulburn and the Monaro plains, the visitor heard the colonial carillon of ringing leg-irons partly muffled by leather and coarse wool—the sound of chained men hewing the sandstone, dragging their fetter as though wading in air. Free settlers tended to conventionalize the sight, to turn these sweating, shuffling, unknowable Others into voids, mere yellow uniforms, man-shaped holes in the social landscape. One half-averted one’s eyes: There, but for the grace of God, go I.

  In most sketches and paintings of these landscapes, even those by convict artists, the convicts do not appear. When they do, as in the former purse-stealer Charles Rodius’s sketch of Convicts Building the Road to Bathurst, 1833, they are reduced to inconspicuous staffage figures against the notch of Western plain that opens promisingly to view. Much less common are sketches like Augustus Earle’s somewhat earlier View from the Summit of Mount York, Looking towards Bathurst Plains (ca. 1826–27), where the road gang moves into close-up and there is as much interest in its work and garb as in the immense landscape behind: a man in punishment irons carrying water, three felons hewing sandstone, an imperious—though in Earle’s drawing, rather limp—gesture from the military guard. The laboring convict, unlike the Neapolitan fisherman or the Provençal peasant, never became a picturesque feature in the landscape whose social use he typified. He was a pictorial embarrassment, since his known propensity for evil prevented any kind of idealization. He was not so much “brutalized” (in the modern sense: deformed by ill-treatment) as he was “a brute,” whose criminal nature was written on his very skin. He was a kind of abstraction to the traveller. “The villainous countenances of the greater number, the clank of their chains, and the thought of how awful an amount of crime had led to this disgraceful punishment, made me positively dread passing or meeting a band of the miserable wretches,” wrote Louisa Meredith of her journey across the Blue Mountains.31

  The otherness of the convict was further reinforced by his language, for his argot declared that he came from another society, an Alsatia of the mind. The linguistic class barriers in penal Australia were absolute—the very opposite of today, when all classes share the robust vernacular of Australian slang. English criminal cant, an entire sub-language, immediately branded its users and the aspiring Emancipist had to unlearn it or stay where he was. Purely colonial terms like scrubbing brushes (bad bread full of chaff), smiggins (prison soup thickened with barley), canary (a sentence of 100 lashes) or sandstone (a weak man, who crumbled under flogging), classified the speaker as plainly as the broad-arrow stamped on all prisoners’ clothes. The fantastic richness of Australian slang, its power of invective and its curious metaphorical twists, are ultimately traceable to convict days, although the full blossoming of Australian language belongs to the later nineteenth century. Among themselves, old lags used the cant of transportation: They had “been married together” (gone fettered in a chain), “piked across the herring pond,” or been “on my travels,” or “marinated,” or “napped fourteen penn’orth” (drawn a sentence of fourteen years’ exile). Because such a sentence was a blow that knocked the wind out of the victim, the transported felon called himself a “bellowser.” But there was also a great need for euphemism, because class was such a sensitive issue. In the ears of Emancipists and their descendants, “convict” was a fighting word. In the 1820s, the polite form was government man or legitimate, and these were later displaced by exile or even empire-builder. Such usage was part of what amounted to a social agreement to soften the rub of convict status. One did not throw his bondage in a man’s face. Until 1840 and the end of transportation, few (if any) emigrants to New South Wales would have thought of calling themselves “Australian”—a British colonel in Bombay would have as soon called himself “Indian.” One was British, and it deme
aned one’s own standing within the conventions of British society to think that New South Wales was radically different from a “normal” civil community. Of course it was not normal, but to make it seem so the convicts had to be treated, in law and language, as belonging to such a community, lest the free emigrant colonists come to regard themselves as parasites on a jail. To its settlers, New South Wales was not a jail but a free community with rather a large preponderance of prisoners in it. This seemingly casuistical point had important social consequences. One sees them, for instance, in the policy that prevented governors sending prisoners, at will and without trial, from assignment to the secondary settlements. A man had to stand trial and be convicted again before losing his rights as a member of the civil community and going to Norfolk Island. If New South Wales had been thought as much a jail as Norfolk Island, no trial would have been needed—it would have been a technical matter, like moving a prisoner from one cell to another. Convicts arrested and held on suspicion in New South Wales could apply for habeas corpus, and in granting it a Supreme Court judge named John Stephen remarked that “the rights of prisoners were as sacred in the eye of the law as those of free men.” This was no idle figure of speech. In the same spirit of civil conciliation, judges in New South Wales (especially those of the Supreme Court) could be extraordinarily careful of convicts’ and former convicts’ rights—so much so that one judge in 1838 ruled it improper for the attorney-general to ask a witness, “What were you sent for?” This, said the judge, invited the witness to degrade himself in court. Thereafter, even if witnesses were known to be ex-convicts, they could not be questioned about their past and their convict origin could not be mentioned.32

  Outside the courts, in the private sphere, a particularly sensitive area of contact between bond and free lay in the use of convicts as maids, nannies, stewards and even teachers. The very idea of assigning convicts as personal servants “for the purposes of Luxury” gave later governors qualms33; but, since no butler or groom in London was likely to emigrate to raw Sydney to ply his skills, there was no socially acceptable alternative. For domestic service, preferences were altered. The farmer on his station might crave the labor of a horse-thief or a rick-burner. But in Sydney, the idea of some “barn door gentleman,” an untutored hayseed, big-booting nervously about the drawing-room and breaking the china, filled matrons with horror. Thus, there was a demand for city convicts, preferably refined and literate forgers, who might know from which side to pass the roast; or, if not forgers, at least thieves, who could protect their masters’ property: