The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Russell’s pleas to Hobart went unanswered, because Arthur was obsessed with the field strategy of his military campaign to round up the remaining black tribes of Van Diemen’s Land. And when the first group of convicts from Macquarie Harbor was moved to Port Arthur, Russell soon saw their influence on the prisoners fresh from England: “They exercised a complete tyranny over them, and shortly rendered them as hardened, as reckless, and as hypocritical as they were themselves.” With Arthur’s attention distracted, the colonial government ruined morale by not keeping its word to the better prisoners:

  Promises were sometimes held out through the commandant to well-conducted men, that their sentences should be shortly remitted in case of good conduct; that very good conduct rendered the men more useful in the settlement, and then the government detained them much longer.… The men, finding good conduct useless, reverted to bad practices, being rendered desperate.52

  Little by little, a settlement rose at Port Arthur. At the end of 1832, Lieutenant-Colonel Logan of the 63rd Regiment made a tour of inspection of Tasman’s Peninsula and reported that, once it had a fast patrol boat that could cruise the shore looking for absconders, the place would be ready to take over from Macquarie Harbor.53 Two months later, in February 1833, the man who was to give Port Arthur its true penal shape disembarked at Hobart with a detachment of the 21st Fusiliers. This was Charles O’Hara Booth, destined to fulfill Arthur’s hopes by taking “the vengeance of the Law to the utmost limits of human endurance” on Tasman’s Peninsula. He would remain commandant at Port Arthur for eleven years. In 1833, when he took command, there were 475 prisoners on the Tasman Peninsula; by 1835 there were nearly 950; and the total number of convicts received by Port Arthur up to 1844, the last year of Booth’s command, was 6,002. About 6,000 more had gone there by 1853, the year transportation to Van Diemen’s Land ceased. All told, about 12,700 sentences were served at Port Arthur during its half-century of active life—about one in six of the 73,500 convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land. (Some prisoners, however, went there more than once.) The place was therefore of great importance in the penal scheme and played a much bigger part in the punishment of habitual criminals, or recidivists, than Macquarie Harbor or even Norfolk Island.54

  Charles O’Hara Booth was a tough, vigilant man, whose taste for iron discipline was mingled with a liking for puns, Frenchifications and music-hall jollities. He had a strong sense of his job as role. In his journal, he called the Port Arthur convicts his “lions”; their tamer needed a certain histrionic poise. “Put on my annihilating countenance,” he wrote one evening when he had to face down 375 insubordinate prisoners on his own. “Raised my Stentorian voice and made them quake.”55

  He was innately conservative and had no illusions about his ability to reform the Port Arthur convicts. He was there to discipline them and make them work, but any moral change seemed an unlikely bonus. He made his opinions clear to a French visitor, Captain Laplace, in 1839. How, Laplace inquired as they paced the night rounds of the settlement with Booth, had he achieved such quiescence with such minimal means—a dozen or so guards to supervise several hundred men, a low-security jail building? “By severe punishments, he replied, by impartial justice, as impassive as that of fate; by untiring vigilance; by demanding absolute silence from the prisoners.” Booth added that he saw to it that convicts were never insulted or sworn at, and that he rarely had them flogged because the lash “often exasperates them and drives them to crime instead of reforming them”; he preferred solitary confinement, which, “much dreaded … subdues them through boredom.” They came out of solitary “better than they went in,” but only for a little while; “the banter, the bad examples of their companions, a fatal pride, soon make them forget their good resolutions, and they become just as dangerous as before.” When depressed, as he sometimes was by illness, he would feel doubts. “Sick at Heart from the number of Boys obliged to punish,” he noted in his journal in 1838, after a particularly taxing day among the refractory juveniles of Point Puer. “Would that we had persons to work the system—with firmness but temper and Patience to witness the results of perseverance—find myself breaking constitutionally rapidly—this is a trying situation … but great good may be effected by firmness tempered with kindness and unremitting perseverance.” This was the only opinion on the aims, as distinct from the means, of prison policy that Booth committed to his diaries in Port Arthur. His journals were full of notes on hunting, which he loved; sixteen brace of quail bagged one day, nine kangaroos another, duck on the lagoon; the making of a purse from a kangaroo’s scrotum, or “pebble case” as he archly called it, “it being a very fine specimen from a ‘Fighting Buck.’ ” But of reflection on his job and the moral values it entailed, there is hardly a trace. Booth was not a reflective man.56

  He had a name for justice, and even humanity, among his subordinates at Port Arthur. “We know he detests the use of [the lash],” Lemprière wrote, “and it is with regret, when he is compelled by the necessity of inflicting strict discipline, that he causes corporal punishment to be inflicted.”57 But when he used it he laid it on, handing out sentences of up to 100 lashes. Convicts regarded the Port Arthur cat-o’-nine-tails as unusually cruel—although the same had been said about the tools of flagellation at Macquarie Harbor. One of Port Arthur’s political prisoners, the Chartist John Frost (he had been sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered for leading an ill-armed band of insurrectionary miners from the Monmouth Hills against the English town of Newport after the mass arrests of Chartist leaders in 1839, but this was commuted to life transportation) claimed that “twenty-five lashes at Port Arthur … produced more suffering than 300 would have produced as they are inflicted in the Army.” In Van Diemen’s Land in the 1840s, “politicals” were relatively privileged, and Frost was never flogged. But his description of the hateful ritual, with “the flogger using every means in his power to break the spirit of those who suffered, and the sufferers determined to sustain the punishment unflinchingly,” was vivid enough:

  The knout was made of the hardest whipcord, of an unusual size. The cord was put into salt water till it was saturated; it was then put into the sun to dry; by this process it became like wire, the eighty-one knots cutting the flesh as if a saw had been used.

  Charles O’Hara Booth, Frost claimed, “would often witness this punishment with as much indifference as if he were looking at some philosophical experiment.”58

  He would also muster the convicts to witness floggings, a practice that the Quaker missionaries Backhouse and Walker felt “has an exasperating effect upon bystanders” and risked provoking a general mutiny, “in spite of the military Guards; the Prisoners present at these times being between six and seven hundred and the Guard but forty in number.”59

  Booth had solitary cells built, and special punishment cells, 7 feet by 4 feet and pitch dark, where “the occupant is not even allowed a knife to eat his food.… They throw in to him in the dark, as they would to a dog, a little food, and there is nothing but an old rug for him to lie upon. If he is wet he is obliged to remain in his wet clothes until the following morning.” Nights are cold on the Tasman Peninsula. For less “atrocious” offenders there were boxes like dog-kennels where the prisoner was chained, breaking stones from a pile in front of him; and if the irons were not heavy enough to suit his sins, he would go with “the log on his toes,” with a heavy balk of timber attached to his ankle-irons that he dragged as he walked.60

  To scrutinize into the punishment records of Port Arthur men is to look into a microcosm of harsh, bureaucratic tedium. Its horror comes not from unrestrained cruelty (as the Gothic legends and popular horror stories of the place insisted) but rather from its opposite, the mechanical apportioning of strictly metered punishments designed to wear each prisoner down into bovine acceptance—Arthur’s criterion of moral reform. It is like looking into the memory of some dull god interminably counting fallen sparrows on his fingers. Here, as a sample, is three years from the p
unishment record of a Scottish horse-thief named Robert Williamson, born in 1812, who was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation at Inverness in 1832, arrived in Van Diemen’s Land on the John Barry in 1834 and later that year was sentenced to seven years in Port Arthur for the extreme unwisdom of stealing a pea-jacket and other nautical gear from Arthur’s former attorney-general, now a judge of the Supreme Court and passionate amateur yachtsman, Algernon Sidney Montagu:

  1835

  JAN. 3RD: Having a file in his possession: 6 weeks in Chain Gang.

  FEB. 21ST: Neglect of Duty while at work: 6 weeks in Chain Gang.

  MARCH 28TH: Breaking gaol and absenting himself without leave from the Public Works at Port Arthur … and remaining absent until apprehended this day at Sympathy Point [sic] by a party of Constables and Military: 75 lashes.

  MARCH 28TH: Same date—having a variety of Government tools in his possession for the purpose of aiding him in his Escape from the Penitentiary … the Settlement Workshop having been broken into: 10 days Solitary Confinement in a Cell at the Coal Mine.

  SEPT. 4TH: Absenting himself from his Gang: 10 days Solitary Confinet.

  Nov. 6: Absent from his Gang for several hours: 10 Days ditto.

  DEC. 3RD: Endeavouring to excite prisoners to Abscond: 6 months in Irons.

  DEC. 19: Tampering with his Leg-Iron: 36 lashes.

  1836

  AUG. 13: Fishing contrary to orders: 3 weeks in Irons.

  SEPT. 6: Having a quantity of Vegetables in his Possession: 1 month on chain gang.

  SEPT. 20: Idleness: 3 Days Solitary Confinet.

  OCT. 10: Idleness: To lodge in a Cell 10 nights.

  OCT. 20: Fighting at Work: 48 hrs. solitary Confinet.

  DEC. 28: Absenting himself from his Gang without leave: 14 days No. 1 Chaingang.

  DEC. 29: Having a Knife improperly in his possession: 3 Days Solitary Confinet.

  1837

  JULY 15: Having a Towel improperly in his possession: 14 Days No. 2 Chaingang.

  SEPT. 18: Making use of a most Grossly Indecent Expression and subsequent malicious Conduct towards a fellow prisoner: 10 Days Solitary Confinet.

  OCT. 4: Absenting himself when going to the Hospital: 1 month in No. 2 Chaingang.

  Nov. 28: Having a Crayfish in his possession and endeavouring to convey it into the Gaol: 1 month No. 2 Chaingang.61

  Charles O’Hara Booth was an active commandant, roaming on foot and horseback through the bush of the Tasman Peninsula to drive his favorite projects along: a coal mine; a semaphore system that could communicate with Hobart; and the first Australian railway, powered not by steam but by convicts. But first he had to attend to the security system at Eaglehawk Neck, where Arthur had posted a permanent guard-station in 1831, after prisoners started escaping in numbers two years before Booth’s arrival. This wasp-waisted isthmus between the surf of Pirate’s Bay and the calm of Norfolk Bay, less than 100 yards wide, was the key to Port Arthur; it was and still is the only way a man could leave the Tasman Peninsula by land. Getting across it, therefore, became an obsessive focus of convict ingenuity. They walked, crept, ran, waded and even hopped. One prisoner, a former actor named William Hunt, “who in his younger days had belonged to a company of strolling mountebanks,” disguised himself as an enormous “boomer” or male kangaroo. He nearly got across to Forestier’s Peninsula before two picket-guards, thinking he really was a kangaroo, spotted him and gave chase, levelling their muskets. “Don’t shoot, I am only Billy Hunt,” the nervous marsupial squeaked, to their consternation.62

  Booth soon put a stop to such doings. His “prudent measures,” Lemprière acknowledged, “have … rendered every attempt futile, nor does it appear that any man effected the passage across.” Eaglehawk Neck was dotted with sandy hummocks, which gave cover to an escaping man creeping by; and the surf blotted out the sound of footsteps. In 1832, before Booth arrived, the ensign in charge of the guard there had the smart idea of putting a string of nine tethered guard dogs across the Neck. To this line he added a row of oil lamps, which shed their light on a white band of crushed cockle-shells; these primitive searchlights made it still more difficult for a bolter to pass at night without his shadow being spotted, even if he got past the dogs. Booth increased the guard to twenty-five men, built guardhouses and sentry-boxes, and doubled the number of dogs. “Whether Port Arthur is an ‘Earthly Hell’ or not,” Lemprière ponderously quipped, “it has at all events its Cerberus … [T]hese dogs form an impassable line.”63 When convicts started trying to wade out into the water to get past the line, Booth put more dogs on platforms out from the shore. There may have been some truth to the legend that the guards habitually dumped offal and blood off the beaches to draw sharks, since there was a slaughtering-station a few miles away on Forestier’s Peninsula. But perhaps they just told the convicts they did.

  To warn of escapes and crises in Port Arthur, and to receive messages from Hobart, Booth set up a chain of signal stations, the first long-range communication system in Australia. It was a “telegraph” without electricity, run by semaphores: tall poles set on hilltops and islands, each carrying three sets of double arms like railway signals. By a system of chains, each arm could be set at various angles, and each angle was allotted a numerical meaning. The number-groups translated into words, phrases and whole sentences through a codebook. Booth spent years of midnight oil on his signal book, which eventually contained thousands of number-groups referring to such matters as names, weather, runaway prisoners, supplies, tools, weapons, disease, food, places, measurements and distances. By 1844, the book listed 11,300 signals, which could be sent to Hobart through a relay of twenty-two stations perched on coastal headlands and islands around Storm Bay. In clear weather, it took less than half an hour to waggle a message to Hobart from Booth’s transmitter, a wooden pole as high as a ship’s mast, which dominated the settlement at Port Arthur. Local semaphores on the Tasman Peninsula could flash the news of a bolting convict from Port Arthur to Eaglehawk Neck in one minute flat.64

  Deep in the sandstone about fifteen miles from Eaglehawk Neck, on the western side of Norfolk Bay, there was a seam of coal. What more chastening form of extra punishment than to turn convicts into miners, condemned to hard labor, darkness, extreme confinement and hourly fear of cave-ins? So Arthur reasoned, and told Booth to sink shafts there, worked by the most refractory prisoners. Before long, the commandant had built a large stone barracks for 170 men, whose apricot-colored ruins, fretted by wind and weather and underpinned by cramped, half-collapsed isolation cells, still gaze picturesquely over Norfolk Bay. The mineshafts, behind, are long closed. Working in them was much dreaded. Only eleven miners could attack the seam at a time, and each had to hew 30 trolleys-full or 2½ tons of coal a day. The deeper of the shafts was 100 feet below sea level, and seepage was a constant problem. Lumps of Port Arthur coal kept alight “for an incredible length of time,” but “when at first lighted they crack and throw out small pieces in great quantities, to the detriment of carpets, furniture, ladies’ gowns, etc.” Nevertheless the fuel sold in Hobart for one-third the price of New South Wales coal and was in great demand.65

  Booth’s inventiveness shone forth, however, not from his mines but from his railway. It was a true curiosity, a small landmark in the history of transportation—in either sense of that word. It connected the dock at the head of Norfolk Bay, by Eaglehawk Neck, to the main settlement at Port Arthur some 4½ miles away. On it, supplies and people could be taken to the coal mines and the Neck without a long detour by sea around the peninsula. It was laid along a switchback route through the dense gum-and-fern forest; sawn hardwood rails about 6 inches by 3 inches were nailed to rough sleepers bedded in clay. Wooden bridges carried the line across the gullies. It had no engine; the power was supplied by convicts, propelling it at a trot, pushing against crossbars at front and rear. Its carriages were four-passenger carts, running on cast-iron mine-truck wheels. Such was the first passenger railway in Australia. It embarrassed some
visitors, but on the other hand it was better than walking, especially for the ladies. The trucks of Booth’s railway could rattle downhill at 30 mph, a terrifying velocity at a time when people seldom went faster than a trotting horse. Colonel Godfrey Mundy, a visitor to Port Arthur in 1851, described how the convicts pushed the cart up to the top of “a long descent,”

  when, gettting up their steam, down they rattled at tremendous speed—tremendous, at least, to lady-like nerves—the chains around their ankles chinking and clanking as they trotted along.… [T]he runners jumped upon the side of the trucks in rather unpleasant proximity with the passengers, and away we all went, bondsmen and freemen, jolting and swaying … a man sitting behind contrived, more or less, to lock a wheel with a wooden crowbar when the descent became so rapid as to call for remonstrance.

  In a more pensive mood, Lieutenant-Governor Sir William Denison rode a similar convict railway at Ralph Bay Neck while on an official tour of inspection of Tasman Peninsula in 1847: “I must say that my feelings at seeing myself seated, and pushed along by these miserable convicts, were not very pleasant. It was painful to see them in the condition of slaves, which, in fact, they are, waiting for me up to their knees in water.”66

  It must have given the children pause, too. For Port Arthur was not only a prison for the errant mature; it was also a school for young boys.