The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  It is very seldom that any thieves is sent up the country, as most of the gentlemen resides in Suydney, and would sooner take for his servant a man that he knows has been a regular thief at home, than one of them barn dore gentlemen; why is it, he knows he can depend on them, for they won’t see no tricks play’d with his master’s property, nor play none himself; you never hear of a thief getting into any trouble.34

  The servant problem was “as common a topic of conversation with the ladies … as the weather,” remarked the Catholic prelate William Ullathorne in 1838. “Whenever persons meet it is a constant topic.” There were more than enough domestic horror-stories of drink, impropriety and clumsiness—particularly drink—to go round.35

  The mistress of the house had to lock everything up—the “tantalus” (security-frame for the decanters), the cellar, the pantry, the dressing-table, the desks, the sewing-kit. Sometimes she had to put up with insults from her servants unknown in England, for convict women in domestic service were “very much in the habit” of raking their mistresses with curses and oaths of such obscenity that a proper lady could not repeat them to her husband, much less in evidence to a magistrate in court; so the foul tongue could not be punished.36

  Given the choice, colonists would have preferred free servants. Sir John Franklin, when he was lieutenant-governor in Van Diemen’s Land, proposed in 1837 that all assigned persons—including domestic help—should wear a distinguishing badge or patch on their clothes; the governor, Sir George Gipps, held back on applying this idea in New South Wales because he feared repercussions from rich colonists who did not want the splendor of their flunkies’ uniforms dimmed by this mark of infamy.37

  A few settlers in Van Diemen’s Land managed to keep a domestic staff of free people, but they were scarce and apt to leave without warning; there was, in any case, little difference of quality between convict and free male servants. However, up to the mid-1830s, most efforts to bring in respectable women as nurses or governesses failed utterly. For women convicts seemed particularly uncontrollable. (Respectable settlers supposed that their own mercies ensured this.) Parents were plagued by the fear that the running of their households was in the hands of vengeful and immoral women.38 Convict nannies and nurses would corrupt those innocent bearers of the Australian future, its children. The everyday peculiarities of growing up in a penal colony were striking enough, and domestic scenes like those set down by Marcus Clarke in His Natural Life must have been enacted many times:

  “You’re an impertinent man, sir,” cries Dora, her bright eyes flashing. “How dare you laugh at me? If I was papa, I’d give you half an hour at the triangles. Oh, you impertinent man!” And, crimson with rage, the spoilt little beauty ran out of the room.

  Vickers looked grave, but Frere was constrained to get up to laugh at his ease.

  “Good! Ton honour, that’s good! The little vixen!—half an hour at the triangles! Ha-ha! ha, ha, ha!”

  “She is a strange child,” says Vickers, “and talks strangely for her age … [H]er education has been neglected. Moreover, this gloomy place, and its associations—what can you expect from a child bred in a convict settlement?”

  In a society where violence against the person was all-pervasive and institutionalized, children were bound to acquire strange habits that mimicked those of their elders. They played flogging games and judgment games as freely as their descendants would play bushrangers. “I have observed children playing,” wrote one colonial observer in 1850,

  at the Botany Bay game of Courts of Petty Sessions, and noted the cruel sentences which were uniformly pronounced on those who were doomed to be “damned,” and the favour and partiality which was extended to others! Justice appeared never to be thought of:—the gratification of a licentious and an unlimited Power being all they sought.39

  Childhood became even more a theater of coercion in Australia than in England. On one level, children could threaten their parents’ convict servants in grotesque omnipotence: where else could a spiteful brat promise a nurse or a butler 25 lashes? On another, the habit extended into—and was reinforced by—adult society. As the Scottish penal reformer and future commandant of Norfolk Island, Alexander Maconochie, observed, “The total disuse … of moral motives in the domestic relations of life, and the habit of enforcing obedience by mere compulsion, give a harsh and peremptory bearing in all transactions.” Children learned contempt for others early. “Being very much in the hands of assigned servants,” Bishop Ullathorne testified, “they of course are aware of the condition of these servants; they look down on them with contempt. This creates an early habit in the minds of the children of looking down on those who are placed over them; it creates altogether … an insolence of feeling and of bearing towards their elders.”40

  The female convict’s alleged revenge was to teach the tots bad habits, from swearing to sexual precocity. “They do … much damage to the rising generation,” John Russell told the 1838 Select Committee on Transportation, “being generally most mischievous in attempting to seduce or contaminate the daughters of settlers.” The committee’s witnesses, anxious to depict the antipodes as Sodom and Gomorrah, told stories of how colonists’ girls had seen female convicts “in connexion” with their satyr-like lovers, and how the three daughters of one family had been so deranged by this penal primal scene that each went forth and got pregnant “by a connexion of her own, which was just the result of being left … to the tuition of a convict servant maid.”41

  No wonder, then, that Specials—educated convicts—were much in demand as servants. Because such people were uncommon (less than half, probably no more than a third, of the prisoners arriving in Australia at any stage of its penal history could sign their names), they were of value to government, which by the mid-1820s needed a small army of clerks to keep track of convicts’ records. The bureaucracy of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land was almost wholly made up of forgers, none averse to palm oil. Governor Darling complained that “these people are guilty of all sorts of nefarious practices, altering and interpolating the Registers, and cannot be restrained by any fear of punishment or disgrace … [T]hey cannot resist a bribe.” But there were few free clerks, and so government demands meant that few Specials were assigned.42

  Nevertheless, private influence sometimes worked. Thus, several wealthy families boasted their convict tutors, who steered the children through mensa or tinkled away the eucalyptus-scented afternoon on a slightly warped Broadwood. The first grammar school in Sydney was started by a ruined Irish clergyman, Laurence Halloran (1765–1831), transported at the age of forty-six for forging a tenpenny frank. Certainly he was a better pedagogue than John Mortlock, a former officer in the British Army who had seen service in India and who was made headmaster of a small Hobart grammar school in the 1850s: “To impress myself with a sense of my dignity, and to lighten my spirits, I immediately belaboured several of the boys (particularly those whose parents had never been transported). This refreshed and consoled me.”43

  Because they had known respectability, most Specials found it very difficult to accept their fate. They looked down on the “decent” society of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. Some of them were utterly convinced of their own innocence and could not perceive themselves as criminals: How could the mere alteration of a document be compared to house-breaking or mugging? The shock of transportation caused a reflex of denial, leaving them with an aggrieved posture of superiority to convict trash. They tried to believe that transportation had not ruined the class position they had sinned to hold.

  One such man was a would-be poet, John Grant (1776–?), whose character typified the Special’s occasional sense of unreality. He was the unstable son of a landed English gentleman in Buckinghamshire, who, trying to better his lot, wooed a titled heiress but found his efforts frustrated by a lawyer in his family circle. In a fit of rage, he shot the solicitor with a pistol in the buttocks, in full daylight on a London street. His family connections saved his life; a pe
tition was sent to the daughters of George III and instead of hanging, he sailed. Grant arrived in Sydney in May 1804 and within months was asking Governor King for a ticket-of-leave. Rebuffed, he wrote again: “Why hesitate, Governor King, to do an act of justice? If you had presented to me the freedom of the Colony as soon as I landed, you would only have rescued a much-injur’d Gentleman from Highwaymen and Housebreakers.” King took no notice. “You must feel with me,” Grant lamented to his mother,

  the cruelty of keeping one thus upon the footing of the Highwaymen I came with in the eye of the Law.… But there is in this colony a disposition to humble those who come here, on the part of the Civil and Military.

  If one ponders the last sentence, it could be no surprise that Governor King thought Grant quite mad. This opinion was self-fulfilling. King banished him to Norfolk Island, where he could tell the cormorants about his innocence and his pretensions to gentility. Grant collapsed under the stress of three years’ isolation and ill-treatment on this remote settlement, and was invalided back to Sydney in 1808; Macquarie in his mercy pardoned him, and he returned to England in 1811.44

  Now and then a Special’s sense of superiority would be flavored with a touch of irony. “Our society now became somewhat improved. Though I did not hear of any naval or military officers, barristers or doctors of medicine,” wrote John Mortlock, who had been transported for the attempted murder of his uncle, a clergyman of Christ’s College in Cambridge,

  I could count two Protestant clergymen convicts, one of them a doctor of divinity, several solicitors, including one of them an ex-mayor, and many Chartists. What a sensation would be caused by the transportation of a bishop! The colony was also honoured by the advent of an ex-member of parliament, a gentleman at no time treated as an ordinary offender.45

  Giving themselves airs and graces, most Specials were disliked—and some detested—by laboring convicts for their flashness and arrogance. Officialdom could make life difficult for those suspected of freethinking. It was especially sweet to see these uppity nobs reconvicted and sent to a punishment gang on the Blue Mountain roads or at Port Macquarie. “Many of them were so flash that they used to look down on the other class of men, and try to play a game of ‘bluff,’ ” recalled the convict whose memoirs were published under the pseudonym of “Woomera”:

  Their hands were very soft … [T]hey schemed and wasted their time. In the middle of work I often heard them commence to talk about the fine wine they had drunk at some of the big inns in London—“The Angel at Islington,” “The Hole in the Wall,” or “The Elephant and Castle,” for instance, and some of them had never tasted wine in their lives. At night they began to “blow” about how they had done some of the honest merchants in England out of large and small sums of money. But it was a different tale now—they saw very little money in the road party.46

  Probably the rank-and-file convicts’ resentment of Specials helped consolidate the prejudice, long to be felt in Australia, against brain-workers as “bludgers” or social parasites. Be that as it may, the question of the Specials (who never formed more than a tiny minority of the convicts) bears directly on the much-vexed question of convict solidarity. Here, at least, was one group of convicts that received no trust from the majority and gave no loyalty to it—which only means that the existing class divisions of English society were preserved, as one might expect, among transported felons of all stations.

  Much ink has been spilt by Australian historians arguing whether or not convicts in general not only sympathized with one another but also brought these sympathies, tempered by mutual suffering, to the point of “class solidarity.” Did they stick by one another as members of an oppressed class? Or were their loyalties so atomized by self-interest as to have no collective reach at all?47

  At moments of famine and stress, convicts could and did behave ruthlessly to one another. The weak went to the wall among the bond as well as among the free. The Reverend John Morison heard an ex-convict in Van Diemen’s Land utter the significant words, whose reductio ad horrorem was the cannibalism of Pearce: “What is the use of a friend, but to take the use of him?” “Very comforting doctrine, this,” he commented, “and the friendships of some people are more to be dreaded then their enemies.”48

  Convicts were seen to treat one another with special ruthlessness in the chain gangs and the outer penal settlements, such as Macquarie Harbor, Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay. The official strategy of breaking down their trust in one another by encouraging convict informers undoubtedly worked in these places. “Trusty” convicts, promoted to overseers, could be as brutal as the guards—and worse. Absolute punishment, such as existed on Norfolk Island under Lieutenant-Colonel James Morisset or at Moreton Bay under Captain Patrick Logan, degrades absolutely; as men are treated, so will they become. But only a tiny fraction of those transported to Australia spent any time in those penal stations. Most convicts lived under conditions that sustained and often increased their sense of mutual oppression; so that, from the earliest days of the settlement, whole groups of prisoners would stand mute rather than surrender one of their number to authority, whatever the promised bribes and rewards. When someone in the late 1790s burned down the only church in Sydney, Governor John Hunter offered the colossal incentive of a free pardon, a passage home and £50 to anyone, even a lifer, who informed on the culprit. “One would have thought that irresistible,” he recalled some years later. “But it brought no evidence; I never learned who it was; it was a designed thing.”49

  The church was Anglican and the arsonist was undoubtedly Irish. The Irish convicts had brought a “primitive” collectivism with them on the transport ships, a common will to stick together that had nothing to do with ideology (although it would greatly affect the tenor of socialist movements in Australia a hundred years later) but everything to do with kin and clan. They were seen, and despised, by English authorities in Australia as tribal people whose allegiances were not touched by the work-ethic of Protestant individualism. They were “depraved beyond conception … designing and treacherous,” ranted the Reverend Samuel Marsden from the depths of his bigotry; and their loyalty to one another could not be broken:

  they consider their Engagements to each other of whatever nature they be, as sacred; and when any are detected in the Commission of any Capital Crime … they will suffer death before they will give Information of any of their Accomplices: and when brought to the fatal Tree, will deny their Guilt with their last Breath.… Thus many of them live and die in the most hardened and impenitent State.50

  The Irish were the largest and most cohesive white minority in penal Australia, and their folkways were bound to make a deep mark on the ethos of all convicts and their descendants. The cohesion of the group is what resists pressure from outside it, and the clannish solidarity of Irishmen seems to have been experienced by many convicts who were not Irish as a way of resisting the overwhelming power of the organs of State discipline. Crime is by definition anti-social; criminals are lumpen individualists. But as Russel Ward pointed out, “When the criminal becomes a long-term convict, his scope for exercising individual cunning is very severely limited, while the forces impelling him towards social, collectivist behavior (within his own group) are correspondingly strengthened.”51 From this rude collectivism, set against the harsh environment of the country and the framework of inquisitorial law, emerged the basic traits of Australian mateship.

  There is no doubt about the ties of mutual recognition, sometimes amounting to a non-ideological sort of class loyalty, that could bind convicts together. Strong friendships were forged by repression, and they were so plentiful that one example must do for all. When the convict Mellish had served out his time in Macquarie’s New South Wales, he “left the bay” as servant to a married Emancipist couple, who had made their pile in New South Wales and were returning to England. He soon found there were six convict fugitives stowed away on board, two of them friends of his. “The reason I was unhappy was, I could not do by those
men as I could wish; I was oblig’d to go out a thieving every night for provishions for those men; to be shoor I brought some tools with me such as would unlock any of the harness casks where the meat was kepd.” He stole for them for a month, at great risk, before he was caught and subjected to six weeks of appalling privations, chained in the darkness of the hold. When the ship reached Cape Town, “my flesh was black and blue, and all around the wastebands of my trousers was scratch’d to pieces.… I have never so to say been right well since.” Yet there is not a breath of resentment in his memoir against the fellow convicts he had kept alive. “They were men that I had a very great respect for, and I do mean to say, that no man will leave behind him a friend in bondage, if they choose to chance the consequences of it.”52

  Visitors to Australia noted what Alexander Harris called the “mutual regard and trust engendered by two men working together in the otherwise solitary bush”—the typical situation of convict shepherds on far out-stations. “Men under these circumstances often stand by one another through thick and thin; in fact it is a universal feeling that a man ought to be able to trust his mate in anything.”53