The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Such feelings of trust and recognition could readily run between men who had shared the same experience of servitude. Harris described how, in his wanderings in the Hawkesbury district, he met an Emancipist farmer and public-house keeper who, “like most of those who have risen from the ranks of the prison population by their own efforts” had “a sort of open sturdy manliness about his character which was very agreeable.”

  He had several convict-servants, who I could see were governed in quite a different manner from those I had met with in my Illawarra jobs under free settlers. The free settlers governed their men with capriciousness and by terror, and so could never trust them beyond their sight; whilst these settlers, who had once been prisoners themselves, seemed rather to obtain a willing obedience, founded on respect for their judgment and fairness; and consequently they could trust their men as well out of their sight as in.54

  Governor Bligh told the Select Committee in London in 1812 that “the convicts unite with one another, and get on very well.” Commissioner Bigge in 1822 pointed out that Emancipist settlers tended not to punish their assigned men out of “sympathy with that condition which was once their own.” Ten years later this had not changed; Governor Bourke in 1832 reported that most assigned men hoped to work for Emancipists, preferring “their coarse fare to being better fed and Cloathed with a More opulent Master and less liberty.” Such utterances (and there were many more) can only suggest that loyalties between convicts, throughout the life of the System, regularly went beyond personal friendship.55

  iv

  OF COURSE Australia was marked for glory, some wag said (and the saying would be repeated for generations), for its people had been chosen by the finest judges in England.

  And clearly, one of the things its people did best was breed. A rough census of New South Wales in 1807 showed a total population of 7,563 people. Of these, 1,430 were women, mostly convicts or Emancipists, and one woman in three was married. But the number of children was very high: 807 legitimate, 1,025 not. One person in four in the colony was a child; more than half the children were illegitimate; and most of them were the offspring of convicts.

  In 1828 the first official census revealed that there were at last more free people (20,870) than convicts under sentence (15,728) in New South Wales. Almost half the free population were ex-convicts who had done their time, received their pardons and stayed. Most of the rest were children born in Australia, whose parents were either ex-convicts or “came-free” settlers—soldiers, marines, officials large and small, settlers, emigrants of every kind. This first generation of Australians were born free but were raised in a police state. The term for these native-born “Currency lads” and “Currency lasses” came from monetary slang—“currency” meaning coin or notes that were only good in the colony, makeshift stuff, implying raffishness or worse, unlike the solid virtues of the “Sterling,” the free English immigrants. The Currency also called themselves “natives,” a word not applied to Aborigines, only to locally born whites.

  From England, the identity of these people looked simple: They were seen in a bald, one-dimensional way as “the children of the convicts,” heirs of a depraved gene pool, from whom little good could be expected. That many of them did not have convict parents; that many of those who did were not raised by stereotyped villains and whores; that crime may not run in the blood—none of this affected English opinion very much. Sin must beget sin, and the “thief-colony” was doomed to spin forever, at the outer rim of the world, in ever worsening moral darkness. This idea was epitomized in 1819 by one of the many experts who had never been there, the Reverend Sydney Smith, the clerical wit who founded the Edinburgh Review and, unfortunately, was sometimes consulted on colonial matters by Peel:

  There can be but one opinion. New South Wales is a sink of wickedness, in which the great majority of convicts of both sexes become infinitely more depraved than at the period of their arrival.… It is impossible that vice should not become more intense in such [a] society.56

  Almost everything that was said about the native-born in England, and by English visitors to Australia up to about 1835, tended to assume that they formed a homogeneous group, the “children of the convicts.” However, the native-born did not think of themselves that way—not because they felt up to denying the facts of the colony’s birth, but because their society was so much more intricate than England’s “instrumental” view of Australia as a convict dump, a society defined by criminality, would allow. In this real society, the children of the free were inextricably mingled in a web of social and economic relations with those of Emancipists. The poor were not all convict-born, the rich were not all free; menial workers as well as Macarthurs had come there free, and there were rough Midases as well as sober tradesmen and illiterate, broken helots among the transported. Some children of convicts grew up fighting for crusts, others had private tutors or went to ladies’ schools in Parramatta. Because the native-born were the sons and daughters of all conditions of people, bond and free, they were at every level of colonial Australian society by 1825 and could not be treated as a “class” on their own.57

  Thinking and writing of them as “the children of the convicts” exposed them to condescension. The very word “convict” carried a crushing load of moral opprobrium. “Atrocious” crimes had put the parents in Australia, with predictable results for the native-born. Few of the observers of colonial life, from generally sympathetic ones like Peter Cunningham to prejudiced Tories like John Bigge—let alone choleric bigots like James Mudie—made allowance for the fact that many of their parents had been transported for small crimes. Such folk were not habitual criminals, still less limbs of that chimera the “criminal class,” but ordinary sinners without much opportunity, who had offended the law once and had been caught. But to their moralizing observers, simply to be in Australia against one’s will was a proof of wickedness.

  In particular, the moral prejudices invoked against convict women—the stereotypes of their boozing, promiscuity, rebelliousness and lack of talent for motherhood—distorted the picture of Emancipist family life, suggesting that the native-born were reared on rum and abandoned to fate. Some of the native-born shared this prejudice against their social “inferiors.” They were the smallest group: the sons and daughters of the Exclusives, the high officials and the wealthy free settlers, who believed they were a colonial aristocracy.

  The idea that, in the words of a colonial judge in the 1850s, “crime descends, as surely as physical properties and individual temperament,” was the very axis of the idea of a “criminal class”; it was also, of course, the key reason for all social discrimination by “respectable” Australians against their Others, the Emancipists. But it turned out not to be true. Despite all the jeremiads directed against their origins, despite the widespread perception of a permanent groundswell of crime for which they were supposed to be responsible, the first generations of the native-born turned out to be the most law-abiding, morally conservative people in the country. Among them, the truly durable legacy of the convict system was not “criminality” but the revulsion from it: the will to be as decent as possible, to sublimate and wipe out the convict stain, even at the cost—heavily paid for in later education—of historical amnesia.58

  This was to be confirmed by the crime statistics in New South Wales. In 1835 W. W. Burton, judge of the New South Wales Supreme Court, speaking at length on the prevalence of crime, declared that it was as though “the whole colony were continually in motion towards the several Courts of Justice.” But five years later, reflecting on his experiences on the colonial bench—and on the sensational revelations about Australian vice that had filled the ears of the Molesworth Committee—he protested that the Molesworth report “no more represents the true state of society in New South Wales than an enquiry into the horrible particulars of an ill-regulated gaol in England would represent the state of society in the county in which it is situated.”59

  For instead of growing up depraved
, the Currency showed the lowest crime rate of any group. Out of 827 men he had tried in the years 1833 to 1838, 450 (54 percent) were convicts under sentence, 241 (29 percent) were Emancipists, 50 (6 percent) were free emigrants, and only 30 (4 percent) were Australian-born. Moreover, none of the Currency had committed murder or grand larceny; arid he had never even heard of one being charged with rape. Of the 30 Currency defendants, 13 (nearly half) were up for horse-stealing or cattle-rustling—which, like poaching in England, ordinary Australians hardly thought were crimes at all.60

  Then how did the cankered stock of English criminality produce such fresh, green shoots in Australia? Observers like Bigge pondered this and came up with a theory. The children had a “natural aversion” to the spectacle of sin. They “neither inherit the vices nor the feelings of their parents,” he reported in 1822. They “felt contempt for the vices and depravity of the convicts even when manifested in the persons of their own parents” [emphasis added].61 The Currency lasses, Cunningham thought, were “anxious to get into respectable service … [to] escape from the tutelage of their often profligate parents.” So there must have been a general rupture between parents and children, a fissure that traversed whole generations—the young, en masse, rejecting the old, and exiling felonry from their lives as it had been exiled from Mother England. They were so hurt by the behavior of their parents that they resolved, no matter how difficult it was, to be as little like them as possible—to go straight. Thus the “viciousness and indolence” of the parents could be squared with the “honesty and industry” of their children.

  But there is little to support this idea. Australia was not only a country of opportunity for the Merinos and their friends—men like John Macarthur, in England a draper’s boy, a dynast in the antipodes; it was a frontier society that rewarded hard work at any level, to a degree undreamed-of by the English or Irish poor. The out-of-work blacksmith, reduced to petty theft by lack of opportunity, could soon become a flourishing tradesman in Sydney once his sentence was completed. Hope, effort and luck enabled thousands of Emancipists to make a second start in life, better than anything they had known in their British lives. The difference was biggest of all for unskilled workers, whose chances in England had been nil.

  To read what these people said about themselves, instead of what their superiors like Bigge and Cunningham said about them, is to get a different impression. Its main source is the “Memorials,” or petitions to the governor asking for land grants, which had, of course, to be accompanied by character references from magistrates and chaplains. By the first census, in 1828, one native-born man in three owned land, and the surviving Memorials (written by men on their own behalf, or by fathers seeking land grants for their sons) show a consistent pattern of family ties: Parents asked for land for their sons, sons petitioned for land grants close by their fathers’ farms, and this somewhat confutes the “assumption of parental abandonment and neglect” among the native-born.62 The language in which the memorials are couched always speaks of fathers as “tender,” “respectable,” “loving,” “honest”; of the sons as “deserving,” “sober,” “devoted.” Part of this, no doubt, is the standard language of scribes making formal addresses; one would not expect to find a petition asking the governor to give sixty acres to the “lazy, brutish, undeserving” son of a “drunken, dissolute, hard-hearted” ex-convict. Yet one may feel that the language reflected social facts as well as epistolary conventions.

  By 1828, about one adult Currency man in three owned land, but not all the native-born aspired to. The landless did not want to become agricultural laborers either, since that carried the stigma of working alongside assigned convicts. It was noticed that the Currency shunned farm labor “partly from a sense of pride: for, owing to the convicts being hitherto almost the sole agricultural laborers, they naturally look upon that vocation as degrading in the same manner as white men in slave colonies regard work of any kind, seeing that none but slaves do work.” By the same token, the Currency did not look to the sea for work. The harsh regime on board ship, the absolute authority of the captains and their way of keeping discipline with a rope’s end was too much like convict life for their taste.63

  The great area of opportunity was skilled labor and small trade. It took patience to succeed as a farmer. But a carpenter, joiner, bricklayer, wheelwright, cooper, cobbler or blacksmith—in short, any artisan skilled at one of the basic trades on which transport, construction and storage depended—had success at his fingertips in colonial Australia. There was little demand for luxury trades; the colony could support any number of house-carpenters but not many ivory-turners, perfumers or bookbinders. At the end of the 1820s, a good carpenter could make 7s. 6d. a day in Sydney, whereas his counterpart in London might manage to earn two-thirds that. This was the main reason why, despite the seasoning of “political” workers transported to Australia for their protests against trade and labor conditions in England, no radical ideas took root and no trade-union agitation of any note was heard from either the Emancipists or the Currency in New South Wales. Sweated free labor and the exploitation of child workers were equally unheard of there; it was the convicts who sweated and were exploited. Pay and conditions for skilled workers were so much better there than in England that, relatively speaking, they had no gripes.

  The native-born Australians did not look like their parents and grandparents, those dark and often stunted emanations of English slums and mills. As children, they were well if plainly fed, cradled in sunshine, and grew into tall and stringy cornstalks, “like the Americans,” the resident naval surgeon Dr. Peter Cunningham remarked in the 1820s, “generally remarkable for that Gothic peculiarity of fair hair and blue eyes.” They did not have the typically apple-red cheeks which, some etymologists think, were the origin of that mysterious and durable Australian slang term for an Englishman, “pommy.” Their complexion was sallow, and they lost their teeth early. They were punctiliously honest and sober, with “an open manly simplicity of character … little tainted with the vices so prominent among their parents.”64

  The men were very “clannish”; mateship and class solidarity were absolutely fundamental to their values. They were great street-fighters. One in, all in: “If a soldier quarrels with one, the whole hive sally to his aid; and often they have turned out at Christmas-time, and beat the redcoats fairly into their barracks.” The Currency lasses tended to be gauche, pretty, credulous, sexually precocious (virginity had no special value for the “lower classes” on the marriage-market of penal Australia) but astute in improving their lot through matrimony. They married early, “and do not seem to relish the system of concubinage so popular among their Sterling brethren here.” They spent a lot of time at the beach and swam “like dab-chicks.” They were, in short, very like their seventh-generation descendants.

  The Currency were also warmly patriotic. “You cannot imagine,” wrote George Thomas Boyes, the sensitive and irritable colonial diarist, from Van Diemen’s Land to his wife Mary in far-off England in October 1831,

  such a beautiful Race as the rising generation in this Colony.… As they grow up they think nothing of England and can’t bear the idea of going there. It is extraordinary the passionate love they have for the country of their birth.… There is a degree of Liberty here which you can hardly imagine at your side of the Equator. The whole country round, Mountains and Valleys, Rock Glens, Rivers and Woods, seem to be their own domain; they shoot, ride, fish, go bivouacing in the woods—hunt Opossum and Kangaroos, catch and train parrots.… They are in short as free as the Birds of the Air and the Natives of the Forests. They are also connoisseurs in horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and wool … and this they all understand before they can speak that two and two make four.65

  This would become a common theme of visitors: In the midst of all the constraints of a penal colony, the native-born had developed for themselves a sense of physical liberty and kinship with the landscape—like Australians in the 1950s, accepting all manner of censorship
, Grundyism and excess police power, but feeling like the freest people on earth because they could go surfing at lunch-time.

  Surgeon Peter Cunningham was startled to find that most of them thought Australia’s “very miserable-looking” gum trees more beautiful than any oak or elm. (It was contagious, for after a time, he wrote, “I myself, so powerful is habit, began to look upon them pleasurably.”) The Currency lad who visited England could hardly wait to get back and tell his friends what a dull time he had, how thin the beer was and how slow the horses. Most of them did not want to visit England at all, because it was so full of thieves.

  They also had by the 1820s a peculiar accent, lacking both the euphony of standard English and the glottal patter of Cockney: twangy, sharp, high in the nose, and as utterly unmistakable as the scent of burning eucalyptus.

  They shared certain grievances with the Emancipist stock from which so many of them had sprung. The prime one was the general attitude of the colonial Exclusives to labor. Convictry had induced the Exclusives to think of all labor as with “supercilious intolerance.” Masters used “to tell [convicts] they have no rights, and to taunt and mock them if they talk about seeking redress for any ill treatment.… The habit and the feeling have become rooted in their very nature; and they would wish to treat free people in the same way.” Women behaved similarly: “It is most laughable to see the capers some of our drunken old Sterling madonnas will occasionally cut over their Currency adversaries in a quarrel. It is then, ‘You saucy baggage, how dare you set up your Currency crest at me? I am Sterling, and that I’ll let you know!’ ”66

  By far the most galling manifestation of this—the point at which the colony’s penal, police-state nature rubbed incessantly against the free-born—were the restrictions of movement and the farm-constable system. Many Currency lads were wanderers, constantly “on the wallaby track.” They would roll their swag and go from one end of New South Wales to the other, picking their work. Most of them carried no identification and, being free, were not required to. Nor did they want to: The convict’s pass or ticket, much folded and tattered, was as plain an image of servitude as a scarred back. But fear of escaped convicts had led, by the 1830s, to an oppressive patchwork of regulations, chief among which was the Bushranging Act. Under it, anyone could be arrested on suspicion of being an absconder; and the primitive communications in the outback (and records in the towns) made it hard to prove one’s identity. Since police were thinly scattered, most of the arrests were made by “farm constables,” “trusty” convicts still under sentence, who knew their sentences would be shortened if they could bring a bolter in.