The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  The prisoners were quartered on an island in the middle of the harbor, known as Sarah Island (now Settlement Island). Today the trees have reclaimed it, and the pink underfired bricks of its walls have all but dissolved back into their original clay; here and there one can make out the plan of a cell or a passage, and fragments of carved lintel repose like fragments of a botched, weak culture among the embrangling thickets. In the 1820s, however, the island was bare of forest, covered with buildings, fenced with sawn paling fences and protected against the northeast gales by tall lath windbreaks. It had sawpits and shipbuilding yards, a stone penitentiary, a bakehouse and a tannery, and trim, cold barracks. Of all the sites that could have been chosen for a settlement at Macquarie Harbor, this was the most windswept and barren; even the water and firewood had to come by boat from the mainland. But it was also the most secure.

  At 6 a.m., the convicts were herded into boats and ferried to the mainland to cut timber. The settlement had no draft animals, because horses and bullocks rarely survived the voyage from Hobart and, in any case, there was not enough grass there to feed them. So the ponderous trunks, some weighing twelve tons, had to be hauled down a crude corduroy slipway of logs, known as a “pine-road,” laid on the forest floor. At the tideline, the logs—sometimes a hundred at a time—were chained together in rafts and towed behind whaleboats across the harbor to the sawpits. When they got the raft back to Sarah Island, the worst part of the prisoners’ work began: grappling the logs ashore with handspikes, struggling for hours up to their waists in icy water.

  A small minority of luckier prisoners was chosen to build boats on the Sarah Island slips under the eye of Mr. Hoy, the master shipwright. Over the eleven years of its existence, the Macquarie Harbor settlement turned out a surprising number of vessels, all made from local timber. Hoy alone was responsible for the 200-ton bark William IV, four brigs of 130 tons each, three 50-ton cutters, five 25-ton schooners, twenty-two launches of 5 to 10 tons, and forty-six small craft of various types.

  The convict’s daily ration was 1 pound of meat, 1¼ pounds of bread, 4 ounces of oatmeal or hominy, and salt. The meat was brine-cured pork or beef, two or three years old; Surgeon Barnes noted that it often had to be destroyed “as being too bad for the convicts to consume,” and that in his own eighteen months at Macquarie Harbor he himself had eaten fresh meat no more than six times.8

  The officers would vary their diet by shooting kangaroos. The hunt “relieved the dreariness and monotony of a Station and Duty, which must otherwise in numerous instances have originated discontent and probably insubordination.” They also ate wombats, which they roasted like piglets (“a most delicious dish,” one visitor wrote) and the echidnas, or spiny anteaters, which with a stuffing of sage and onion were vaguely reminiscent—if one closed one’s eyes—of roast goose.9 Fish could not live in Macquarie Harbor; the peat washed down by the Gordon River poisoned them. The river had big eels in it, and a giant freshwater crayfish (Astacopsis gouldii, named after the convict artist William Buelow Gould, who was the first to draw and describe one), and mud crabs with fifteen-inch claws.

  The convicts, of course, never got fresh meat, let alone the other exotica of Macquarie Harbor; nor did they get greens. Sorell urged Cuthbertson to grow as many vegetables as possible “as the sure mode of preventing scurvy,” but the incessant rain defeated most efforts at gardening in the mean, gravelly soil of the settlement. Hence scurvy was endemic there. It abated somewhat toward the middle of 1822, when lime juice and potatoes arrived from Hobart, but by January 1823 “it was again increasing rapidly, and in short there were very few who had not more or less of the disease.”10

  By ferrying topsoil and humus across to Sarah Island, which had little good earth, convicts did manage to grow vegetables “of a quality and size which would not have disgraced the stalls of Covent Garden,” but these small crops were all reserved for the officers and the civil establishment. Phillip Island, about four miles down the harbor from the settlement, had better soil and potatoes were grown there—about forty tons a year, which were not issued to the prisoners either.11 They could have as much water as they wanted, Surgeon Barnes added with no conscious effort at irony; but “other sources of comfort or luxury could not be provided, as it was an insulated situation.”12

  Such was light punishment, routine at Macquarie Harbor. If a convict was balky or insolent, he would be deprived of meat and forced to perform the same work on a protein-free diet. That was the second grade of punishment, and the third was to be ironed with clumsy leg-fetters, weighing 12, 18 or up to 45 pounds, riveted round his ankles and linked by a chain. An ironed man was issued leather gaiters to keep the basils, or rings, from wearing through his flesh. Before long, however, the wet chafing of the iron and the stiff hide started ulcers and scraped their ankles down to the bone.

  By far the worst work was driving piles, under water and in chains, for the slipways. If that did not break a man down, he could be left overnight on tiny Grummet Island, half a mile off Sarah Island. According to a convict named Davies (his given name is lost) who spent several years at Macquarie Harbor, it was

  a perpendicular Rock Fifty Feet above the levil of the Sea about 40 yards long and 8 wide—a rude stairs in the cliffs is the only road to a truly Wretched Barracks Built with Boards and Shingles (the timber quite green) into which 79 men were often confined in so crowded a state as to be scarcely able to lay down on their sides—to lay on their backs was out of the Question.13

  To sleep on this rock, in Surgeon Barnes’s view, was “very severe indeed, although it was considered a minor punishment.” No convict could land on Grummet without being soaked, so he had to sleep either naked or in wet clothes, without fire or blankets.

  Half-starved, chilled to the bone, forced to labor twelve hours a day in winter and sixteen in summer, sleeping on a wet rock under the driving rainsqualls of the Southern Ocean, aching with rheumatism and stinking from dysentery, afflicted by saltwater boils and scurvy, some convicts nevertheless remained defiant.14 Hence flogging was a daily event, and Davies noted down the sentences handed out in his time by Cuthbertson, “the most Inhuman Tyrant the world ever produced I think, since the reign of Nero.… Oppression and Tyranny was his motto, he had neither Justice nor compassion for the naked starved & wretched, Humanity was a virtue he did not acknowledge.” Neglect of work got 25 lashes, insolence 25. Losing an item from one’s “slops”—the cotton duck government-issue work clothes—meant 50 lashes and three months in irons, even if the garment had been stolen by another prisoner. Tools, in that remote settlement, were irreplaceable, and so 50 lashes and three months’ irons were meted out to anyone who broke “a Saw, Axe, Spade, Oar or any other tool no matter how, as [Cuthbertson] did not admit Accidents, he would say it was Carelessness.” For robbing the stores, or attempting to escape, or striking an overseer, a convict got 100 lashes and six months in irons. Davies’s manuscript gives a vivid picture of the daily blood-ritual:

  The Cats and the way they were made and used were the most Dreadful things that can be thought of. They had 9 tails or rather thongs, each four feet long, just 3 times the thickness of the Hobart Town cats. Consequently it took 3 pair [of regulation cat-’o-nine-tails] to make one at this settlement.… [E]ach tail had on it seven Overhand Knots and was whipped, some with wire ends some with waxed ends. It was left to the decision of the Commandant which should be used.

  The place of punishment was a low point almost levil with the sea, and just above high water mark was a planked Gangway 100 yards long. By the side of it in the center stands the Triangles to which a man is tied with his side towards the platform on which the Commandant and the Doctor walked so that they could see the man’s face and back alternately.

  It was their costome to walk 100 yards between each lash; consequently those who received 100 lashes were tied up from one Hour to One Hour and a Quarter—and the moment it was over unless it were at the Meal Hours or at Nights he was immediately sent to work, his bac
k like Bullock’s Liver and most likely his shoes full of Blood, and not permitted to go to the Hospital until next morning when his back would be washed by the Doctor’s Mate and a little Hog’s Lard spread on with a piece of Tow, and so off to work … and it often happened that the same man would be flogged the following day for Neglect of Work.15

  On an average, over the five years 1822 to 1826, there were 245 prisoners at Macquarie Harbor. Of these, seven men in ten were flogged for various offenses, mainly “rebelliousness,” “insolence” or “refusal to work.” In that period the scourgers inflicted a total of 33,723 lashes—6,744 per year, meaning a little over 40 per man, each stroke meticulously noted in the commandant’s ledger.

  Convicts distrusted one another, because the system was astute enough to use convicts as guards. All the constables at Macquarie Harbor were convicts, pressed into service by the military commandant. So were the floggers, the chief constable and the chain-gang overseers. The result was “the most tyrannical system that can be imagined.” If a convict constable failed to report some insubordination, word of his cover-up would usually get back to the military command and he would be flogged. If he did report it, and the disobedient convict was flogged, the other prisoners would hate him all the more. The worst thing the military could do to a convict constable, therefore, was to strip him of his rank and throw him back unprotected, among the prisoners. To survive at all, the constables had to ride an ascending spiral of vigilance and brutality; and the taste of arbitrary power was an elixir to men who had lost every other source of self-esteem:

  There was a man of the name of Anderson at Macquarie Harbour, and that individual seemed to delight in seeing his fellow-convicts punished; and I believe scarcely a day passed over without four or five, and in some cases 16 or 17 individuals, being flogged on the report of that man.… Any man that he had a spite against, he would go before the commanding officer and swear that he had been idle; of course the man … would receive a flogging.16

  The officers at Macquarie Harbor tended to be mediocre and harassed men whose skills, in the Army’s view, deserved no better reward; nobody who could get a better post wanted this one, and so “it was a most difficult matter to select individuals from a regiment to fill such a post.”17 So they tended to run the settlement by the book, and endless abuses were possible within the formal chain of command. Yet the more capricious the convict-overseer system was, the better it “worked,” since it demoralized the convicts as a group and made them weaker.

  The jailers found other means to atomize the convicts, “to divide them as much as we could” and so frustrate their obsessive conspiracies to escape:

  It is only the keeping their minds and their bodies constantly exercised that will prevent the commission of crimes. We invariably found, if the convicts were allowed to be idle, that there was always some new plan, either an attempt to make an escape or a personal injury to the other convicts in agitation; it was not in apportioning their work so much as it was in distributing them in various gangs, so that a man who was in one gang today should not be in the same gang tomorrow.18

  There was reason to watch the refractory, because a convict would occasionally incite his mates to defiance and try to call a strike. In one twenty-man logging gang in 1825, Commandant James Butler reported to Arthur, an Irishman named William Pearse “stepped out and urged the others not to labour any more—that the Commandant would not flog but merely confine them, which they could well bear, tho’ they could not stand flogging—and called the Constables a damned set of villains.” Butler gave him 25 lashes.19

  Prisoners would go to extreme lengths to get away from Macquarie Harbor, even for a little while. For example, two men would arrange for one to gash the other with an ax or a hoe; the victim would then swear out a charge and other convicts would step forward as witnesses. Since there was no court at Macquarie Harbor, they would all have to be shipped back to Hobart for trial. In court, their testimony would become vague and contradictory, and in the fog of lies the case would have to be dismissed. Prisoners detained on capital charges, waiting for the ship back to Hobart, could not by law be flogged or otherwise punished for a lesser offense until they had been tried for the hanging crime; hence “they become turbulent and insolent, cut their irons and injure the Gaol walls, besides setting an extremely bad example in a Station like this.”20

  If a man was so fortunate as to be sent back to Hobart as a witness in a capital crime, he had a good chance of never returning to Macquarie Harbor. The strict omertà among convicts there virtually ensured that he would be beaten up or killed for ratting on a mate. In 1827 nine prisoners were charged with the murder of a particularly hated convict constable, George Rex. Down they went to Hobart, where the attorney-general’s case against them failed on a technicality. The five convict prosecution witnesses at once begged Lieutenant-Governor Arthur to be transferred to other settlements. “Our circumstances is at present very Critical and not safe, agoing to Macquarie Harbour again—there are such Characters there that would do us a great injury if not Terminate our Existence, as we was sent up to prosecute those men for Murder.” Three of them, “through the intercession of friends” who knew Arthur, were transferred to other penal stations; the other two went back to Macquarie Harbor, where they were indeed killed.21

  Other prisoners would simply murder an overseer or a prisoner so that they could be hanged in Hobart. T. J. Lemprière, who worked for a time as storekeeper in the commissariat at Macquarie Harbor, described how one such man, by the name of Trennam, had reasoned this out. Trennam stabbed a fellow prisoner on Grummet Island and was in jail awaiting transfer to Hobart and the gallows. Why, the chaplain asked, had he done it? Because he was “tired of his life,” Trennam answered, and hoped to hang. Then why did he not drown himself, instead of murdering a fellow creature?

  “Oh,” he replied, “the case is quite different. If I kill myself I shall immediately descend to the bottomless pit, but if I kill another I would be sent to Hobart Town and tried for my life; if found guilty, the parson would attend me, and then I would be sure of going to Heaven.” He was asked if he had any animosity towards his victim; he replied in the negative. Would he have killed any of the officers? Certainly, if they had given him the same chance. Would he have killed his interrogator, the Chaplain? “Yes, as soon as anyone else.”22

  Even starker mutations were seen in the moral void produced by Macquarie Harbor. A group of prisoners were being led in single file through the forest when, without provocation or warning, one of them crushed the skull of the prisoner in front of him with his ax. Later he explained that there was no tobacco to be had in the settlement; that he had been a smoker all his life and would rather die than go without it; so, in the torment of nicotine withdrawal, he had killed the man in order to be hanged himself. At least he could get a twist of nigger-head shag in Hobart before he died.23

  Such bizarre events became so common that the commandant, with the permission of the lieutenant-governor, ordered a public hanging at Macquarie Harbor. The gallows were raised, the felons were all mustered and the three condemned prisoners were marched forth; but, alas for the majesty of Law and the moral power of the spectacle,

  their execution produced a feeling, I should say, of the most disgusting description.… So buoyant were the feelings of the men who were about to be executed, and so little did they seem to care about it, that they absolutely kicked their shoes off among the crowd as they were about to be executed, in order, as the term expressed by them was, that they might “die game”; it seemed … more like a parting of friends who were going a distant journey on land, than of individuals who were about to separate from each other for ever; the expressions used on that occasion were “Good bye, Bob” and “Good bye, Jack,” and expressions of that kind, among those in the crowd, to those who were about to be executed.24

  Macquarie Harbor would remain a colonial benchmark for some time—the nadir of punishment, until it was shut down and then exceeded by N
orfolk Island. Sorell himself left Van Diemen’s Land in 1824. His reputation had been very much undermined by colonial gossips, particularly by a malevolent former officer in the Rum Corps named Anthony Fenn Kemp, who had risen to wealth as a grazier and trader in Van Diemen’s Land and out of sheer obsessive contentiousness had appointed himself Sorell’s bête noire. Perhaps it was Kemp’s snarling recitations of the lieutenant-governor’s sexual laxity, in letters to the English authorities, that did the trick; whatever the cause, Sorell was never to get another administrative post in the British Empire, and he died after twenty-four years of virtual idleness in 1848.

  His successor had already been chosen before Sorell left Hobart. He remains one of the most controversial figures in early Australian history: Sir George Arthur (1784–1854), the archetype of the pious colonial strongman, charged by the British Government with the task of rendering all transportation a perfect terror to the criminal classes of Great Britain. “The most powerful, skilful and ruthless figure in the colony,” L. L. Robson’s judgment on him runs, “hated with an intensity of which only the neurotic and grasping settlers of Van Diemen’s Land were capable.”25