Meanwhile, the prospects for the convicts themselves had grown considerably worse. Brisbane had begun to re-convert Australia into a place of dread for the lower classes of Britain. The process did not stop with him. Between 1825 and 1840, the separate colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land found their penal systems refined, expanded and rendered ever more efficient and excruciating. This work was begun by two military martinets: Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Darling, who governed New South Wales from 1825 to 1831, and Lieutenant-Colonel Sir George Arthur, who ran Van Diemen’s Land from 1824 to 1836. Vast differences—of character, ideals and methods—lay between these two men. But their styles of oppression and philosophies of reform shaped Australia during the last years of the Georges.
* In 1833, six convict runaways, most of them assigned to Mudie, went on a rampage at Castle Forbes. Led by a skilled and relatively privileged convict carpenter named John Poole, they robbed the house, shot at Mudie’s son-in-law, plundered another property in the district and flogged the master of a third farm. They were soon captured, and the case became a cause célèbre. Conservatives greeted the “Castle Forbes rebellion” as proof of the anarchy that had to follow Bourke’s liberal attitudes. The defense, marshalled by Emancipist and emigrant friends of Bourke, argued that the convicts had been driven to rebellion by flogging and starvation. Unhappily for the liberal argument, it developed that rations at Castle Forbes were good and discipline moderate (about half the sixty assigned servants there had never been flogged); the discontent arose more from the incompetence of Mudie’s son-in-law, John Larnach, who managed the estate during Mudie’s own prolonged absences. Despite the facts, the case tarred Mudie with a permanent reputation, which he greatly resented, as the Simon Legree of the Hunter River. See John Hirst, Convict Society and its Enemies, pp. 182–184. One may also note that champions of the Emancipists could get a very bad name for cruelty among their assigned men. Robert Wardell, barrister and first editor of Wentworth’s pro-Emancipist newspaper The Australian, was shot dead by one of his servants, John Jenkins, who declared on the scaffold that he had murdered Wardell for his tyranny.
11
To Plough Van Diemen’s Land
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IN CONVICT LORE, Van Diemen’s Land always had the worst reputation for severity. Its name induced a frisson that later became integral to Australian culture, and earlier ballads refer to it with a kind of passive dread lacking in the more defiant convict-songs of New South Wales. It was the very quintessence of punishment:
Come all you gallant poachers that ramble void of care,
While walking out one moonlit night with gun and dog and snare,
With hares and lofty pheasants in your pocket and your hand,
Not thinking of your last career upon Van Diemen’s Land.
It’s poor Tom Brown from Nottingham, Jack Williams and poor Joe,
They were three daring poachers, boys, the country well did know;
At night they were trepanned by the keepers hid in sand—
For fourteen years transported, boys, upon Van Diemen’s Land.
The very day we landed upon the fatal shore,
The planters they stood round us full twenty score or more;
They ranked us up like horses and sold us out of hand,
They roped us to the plough, brave boys, to plough Van Diemen’s Land.
The cottage that we lived in was built of sods and clay,
And rotten straw for bed, and we dare not say nay,
Our cots were fenced with fire, to slumber when we can,
To drive away wolves and tigers come by Van Diemen’s Land.
It’s oft-times when I slumber I have a pleasant dream:
With my pretty girl I’ve been roving down by a sparkling stream;
In England I’ve been roving with her at my command,
But I wake broken-hearted upon Van Diemen’s Land.
Come all you gallant poachers, give hearing to my song:
I give you all my good advice, I’ll not detain you long:
O lay aside your dogs and snares, to you I must speak plain,
For if you knew our miseries you’d never poach again.
The reputation of Van Diemen’s Land as the convicts’ hell was gradually acquired. At first the place seemed equally miserable for bond and free, in the way that any new Australian settlement did: coarse, dangerous, and plagued by shortages. Its reputation for severity began modestly with Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Davey (1758–1823), who ran Van Diemen’s Land from 1813 to 1816.
Davey was a Devon man, a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Marines, who, a quarter-century before, had sailed to Botany Bay as an eager young first lieutenant on the First Fleet. By the end of 1792, he was back in England; but the colonial bug had bitten Davey, and by 1810, when he learned of the death in Hobart Town of his old marine comrade David Collins, he thought the antipodes might offer a way of advancement. Davey got Lord Harrowby, a liberal Tory cabinet member who came from the same Devon village as himself, to lobby for his appointment as lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land. It was confirmed, and he arrived in Sydney in 1812 with John Beaumont, the son of his patron, in tow as his secretary (but without his luggage, which had gone on another ship and been captured by an American privateer).
Administratively, Van Diemen’s Land was an appendage of New South Wales, not a separate colony; much depended on good relations between Davey and his governor, Lachlan Macquarie. The two men hated one another on sight. Davey thought Macquarie a Scottish prig; and Macquarie considered his new lieutenant-governor a wastrel and a drunk, who manifested “an extraordinary degree of frivolity and low buffoonery in his Manners.”
So he did. Davey marked his arrival in Hobart Town in February 1813 by lurching to the ship’s gangway, casting an owlish look at his new domain and emptying a bottle of port over his wife’s hat. He then took off his coat, remarking that the place was as hot as Hades, and marched uphill to Government House in his shirtsleeves. Nicknamed “Mad Tom” by the settlers, he would later make it his custom to broach a keg of rum outside Government House on royal birthdays and ladle it out to the passersby.1
In the past, Davey was said to have tampered with his regimental payroll. Macquarie was given explicit orders from London that Davey could not have a free hand with public money, and he set out with gusto to cramp his lieutenant-governor’s style. Davey was not even allowed to draw treasury bills, construct buildings or make contracts for shipping without Macquarie’s approval, which, given the distance between Hobart and Sydney, would take months to get. Consequently, Macquarie was furious when Davey, in his zeal to suppress bushranging—which seemed ready to take over Van Diemen’s Land by 1814—proclaimed martial law throughout the island without consulting him. Davey, for his part, was sure that Macquarie had encumbered him with regulations out of spite; that he did not understand the problems of Van Diemen’s Land (as his ill-worded offer of amnesty to bushrangers in May 1814, unintentionally giving them carte blanche to commit any crime short of murder until the end of the year, indeed suggested); that he was hamstringing the island’s economy by buying wheat from India instead of Van Diemen’s Land; and that he used the island as a dump for hundreds of Sydney convicts who were too turbulent, lazy or brutish to be useful in New South Wales.
There was truth in all these grievances, but Macquarie went on papering Downing Street with reports denouncing Davey until, in 1816, “Mad Tom” was relieved of his lieutenant-governorship and put out to pasture as a farmer, at which he failed. He left behind him, as much through Macquarie’s mistakes as his own, a sub-colony with a growing reputation for unmanageability and violence, where bushranging had become so flagrant as to border on a general convict uprising. However, the administrative chaos, the lack of records and the prevalence of embezzlement in Hobart were of Davey’s own making.
It fell to the next lieutenant-governor, William Sorell (1775–1848), to repair the damage. He summed up the state of the island in a
pessimistic memo in which he declared that it held “a larger portion, than perhaps ever fell to the same number in any Country, of the most depraved and unprincipled people in the Universe,” and was dragged down by
its long disordered state from a Banditti which has subsisted for years, with connexions ramified throughout the Country; the retransportation of the worst Convicts from Sydney; the great influx of Convicts to a Colony of such limited institutions, and their diffusion all over the Island; the difficulty attending the punishment of serious Offences, and … the want of a court of Criminal Judicature; and the Insufficiency of the Lower Police, in which (from the difficulty of obtaining with the present rate of payment the service of respectable people) Convicts are unavoidably too largely employed.2
Sorell was a far better man than Davey, with no weakness for the bottle. He too was a soldier, and had served with the 31st Regiment since 1790. In 1807, he was made deputy adjutant-general of the British forces at the Cape of Good Hope, which gave him some previous administrative experience. Skillful, tactful and patient, but with a steel backbone, he seemed an ideal choice to run a fractious place like Van Diemen’s Land, with its bloody-minded population and long delays in orders. His only flaw, which Macquarie reluctantly overlooked, was a taste for fornication; he had abandoned his wife and seven children and had taken up while at the Cape with a Mrs. Kent, the wife of a brother officer, who bore him several more offspring and, to the scandal of many, was installed in Government House as the lieutenant-governor’s lady.3
Sorell broke Michael Howe’s gang and hanged most of its members, thus stemming the tide of banditry that seemed set to sluice all law-abiding people off the island. With troops and police, he made the rich farmland of the upper Derwent and the Clyde at least partially safe for settlers. He systematized land grants and cleaned up the Augean stables of government bookkeeping Davey had left. He tried, but failed, to regulate the chaotic slippages of debased currency. He built convict barracks and laid the foundations of the “system of perpetual reference and control” over convicts that would become the bureaucratic masterpiece of his successor, George Arthur. Under his rule, the free population of Van Diemen’s Land (including Emancipists) rose from 2,546 in 1817 to 6,525 in 1824; the total population, from 3,114 to 12,464. This meant an enormous proportional increase in the convict population. At the start of Sorell’s regime, convicts made up not quite 18 percent of the white populace of Van Diemen’s Land; by 1822, the figure was 58 percent. New means of terror had to be devised to keep them docile, and Sorell came up with an effective one. In 1821 he founded a small penal settlement at Macquarie Harbor, as a “Place of Ultra Banishment and Punishment” for convicts who had committed second crimes in the colony and appeared to be turning into bushrangers. For ten years, this would be the worst spot in the English-speaking world.
ii
MACQUARIE HARBOR lies at latitude 42° 14’ S., longitude 145° 10’ E., on the west coast of Tasmania. As you approach it, sea and land curve away to port in a dazzle of white light, diffused through the haze of the incessantly beating ocean. All is sandbank and shallow; the beach that stretches to the northern horizon is dotted with wreckage, the impartial boneyard of ships and whales. No one has ever lived there or ever will. To starboard, there is a sharp jumble of rocks.
To enter the harbor, you must steer between this headland and another rock, Entrance Island, that marks the southern tip of the sandbars. There is no more than fifty yards between them, and at full tidal flow, the neck of water has a glossy, swollen look, ominous to seamen. Macquarie Harbor is one of the few large bodies of tidal water in the world (covering some 150 square miles), with a bottleneck entrance that faces west. Moreover, it looks directly into the Roaring Forties; the prevailing winds are northwesterly, and the waves of the Southern Ocean have the entire circumference of the world in which to build their energy before they crash on this pitiless coast. And so, when tide sets against wind and millions of tons of water a minute come boiling through the entrance, frightful seas rise. Worse, there is a sandbar dead across the entrance, with only eleven feet of water over it at spring tide. For these and other reasons, the place is called Hell’s Gates. It was the first thing that Irish and English convicts saw when their transport ship sailed in, a hundred and sixty years ago.
Sorell made no bones about the purpose of Macquarie Harbor. He commissioned its first commandant, Lieutenant John Cuthbertson of the 40th Regiment, with powers as magistrate and justice of the peace, so that he could hear and determine all charges against convicts and punish them with solitary confinement up to 14 days and floggings not in excess of 100 lashes. The place, he wrote, was for “the most disorderly and irreclaimable convicts,” and the system must be “strict and uniform.” “You will consider,” he wrote in his standing orders,
that the constant, active, unremitting employment of every individual in very hard labour is the grand and main design of your settlement. They must dread the very idea of being sent there.… You must find work and labour, even if it consists in opening cavities and filling them up again.… Prisoners upon trial declared that they would rather suffer death than be sent back to Macquarie Harbour. It is the feeling I am most anxious to be kept alive.4
To achieve this “grand and main design,” the Macquarie Harbor convicts would be loaded at Hobart into ships without bunks or hammocks; they had to sprawl as best they could on the stone ballast in the hold:
If they had a blanket it was all very well; but I think … out the 35 men they mustered 4 blankets. I recollect on one occasion … there was one prisoner who had neither jacket nor trowsers; the commanding officer gave him a bit of canvas, and I have frequently, when at Macquarie Harbour, seen men, 30 or 40 in that state, who have been on board the vessel for five or six weeks.5
Those weeks were spent at sea, beating north to Macquarie Harbor against the prevailing winds. Once off Hell’s Gates, stuck in a northwesterly, it could be days before a ship could get in. The Quaker missionary James Backhouse went there in 1832 and described the midwinter passage through the Gates. His ship had to wait close-reefed in a storm outside the sandbar while the semaphore on Entrance Island waggled its message, through relay signals, to the distant settlement. At last the harbor pilot appeared in a six-oared boat rowed by convicts, and when he came aboard
he commanded the women and children to go below … and advised me to go below too. I replied, that if we were lost I should like to see the last of it, for the sight was awfully grand.… The pilot went to the bows, and nothing was now to be heard through the roar of the wind and the waves, but his voice calling to the helmsman, the helmsman’s answer, and the voices of the men in the chains, counting off the fathoms.
As the vessel bore in toward the sandbar, albatrosses circled her; then the bar itself was seen, a pale blurred whaleback in the dark water.
The fathoms decreased, and the men counted off the feet, of which drew 7½, and there were but 7 in the hollow of the sea, until they called out 11 feet. At this moment a huge billow carried us forward on its raginghead into deep water. The pilot’s countenance relaxed; he looked like a man reprieved from the gallows, and coming aft, shook hands with each individual, congratulating them on a safe arrival in Macquarie Harbor.6
Past the entrance, past another rust-streaked rock named Bonnet Island, the harbor opens to view. It is so long that its far end is lost in the grayness. The water is tobacco-brown with a urinous froth, dyed by the peat and bark washed into it by Australia’s last wild river, the Gordon, which flows into the eastern end of the harbor. The sky is gray, the headlands gray, receding one behind the other like flat paper cut-outs. It is an utterly primordial landscape of unceasing interchange, shafts of pallid light reaching down from the low sky, scarves of mist streaming up from impenetrable valleys, water sifting forever down and fuming perpetually back. Macquarie Harbor is the wettest place in Australia, receiving 80 inches of rain a year.
The settlement was twenty miles back from the harbo
r entrance. One sailed to it past ironic names: Liberty Point, Liberty Bay, the Butt of Liberty. As their boat moved slowly to its anchorage—there was no hurry now, for prison time had superseded the time of the real world—the convicts must have begun to realize their final imprisonment in great space. Then coastal scrub, dreadful in its monotony, was so thick that a cat could hardly get ashore; the iron-laden rocks would tear the soles off your feet. Beyond them the hills rose, tier on tier of them, dominated by the 4,700-foot peak of Frenchman’s Cap—named, in irony, after the Phrygian headgear that had symbolized liberty, equality and brotherhood to the French a generation before. Below its smooth half-dome of basalt, veiled most of the year by clouds, the trees began.
The logging of these trees was the economic purpose of the settlement, and before the convicts arrived no man had ever touched them. The most prized kind was the Huon pine, Decydium cupressinum, which grew in great stands along the Gordon River. They attained a height of 70 feet and a circumference of 15 feet, and some of them had been saplings when Augustus Caesar was a child. Huon pine was the best ships’ timber on earth—springy, close-grained, easy to work, and so rot-proof that there are still Huon trunks felled by convicts in the 1820s and bearing their ax-marks lying intact along the shores of Macquarie Harbor today. In one year, 2,869 of these trunks were felled, sawn up and loaded for transport to Hobart.7 There were other valuable trees as well: light-wood (Acacia melanocylon), a lovely semi-hard timber that worked like walnut and had the grain and figure of Spanish mahogany, much prized by colonial shipwrights; celery-top pine (Podocarpus asplemfolius), good for masts and spars; and myrtle (Betula antarctica), whose wood resembled beech and was used by wheelwrights.
The Fatal Shore Page 54
