The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  v

  THE VISITOR to Port Arthur in the 1830s and 1840s rarely failed to take a boat across Opossum Bay to a neck of land named Point Puer, where he could see, “climbing among the rocks and hiding or disappearing from our sight like land-crabs in the West Indies,” a colony of ragged pale-faced lads.67

  Point Puer was aptly named, puer being Latin for “boy.” It was a prison for children between nine and eighteen years of age who, caught in the inexorable mechanism of British law, had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land. “Little depraved felons” was Arthur’s word for them. By the mid-1830s; they were arriving in disconcerting numbers, as the gross influx of transported felons steadily grew. Thus, out of 1,434 convicts disembarked at Hobart between January and September 1834, 240 were juveniles. In all, more than 2,000 such boys were transported to Van Diemen’s Land and went to the reformatory at Point Puer.68

  The problem for Arthur and his three-man Board of Assignment was what to do with them. They were, to the last boy, either too young or too ignorant to have a trade or to be of the slightest use to a settler. These bewildered tykes, many of them hardened in theft and flashness, for whom no place could be found in the assignment system, were a dead weight on the government. Some were helpless, Arthur recognized, from “having been thrown upon the world totally destituted, others have become so from the tutelage of dissolute parents—and others have been agents of dexterous thieves about London—but all are objects of compassion.”69

  In 1833, sixty-eight such lads were vegetating in the Prisoners’ Barracks in Hobart, and Arthur’s “compassion” expressed itself by sending them all to the Tasman Peninsula. They arrived in January 1834, all of them drunk, for on the ship they had broken into a six-dozen crate of wine and shared it with the adult convicts on board. After a sharp lecture from Commandant Booth, they were put in a large, drafty temporary barracks rigidly segregated from the main settlement, so that the adult prisoners would have no chance to “contaminate” them. Point Puer was well isolated, with a shoreline consisting mainly of sixty-foot cliffs and the sea around it full of boiling rips and dangerous currents—“a wretched, bleak, barren spot without water, wood for fuel or an inch of soil that is not … utterly valueless.” It would improve along with its inmates, or so the System assumed.70

  The juvenile population at Port Arthur climbed rapidly. By the end of 1834, Booth had 161 boys under his eye; in 1836, 271; and in 1837, a special transport ship, the Frances Charlotte, was dispatched from England at the benevolent suggestion of Lord John Russell, with 139 boys and 10 adult overseers on board. By 1842, there were 716 lads on this dismal neck of land, and a jumble of barracks, workrooms and schoolrooms had grown up to shelter them.

  They were to be schooled, taught trades, instructed in the truths of Christianity, and punished. “Keep in mind that these boys have been very wicked,” wrote Arthur to Booth in 1834, in the ominous accents of Dickens’s Wackford Squeers; “the utmost care should be taken to enforce upon their minds the disgraceful condition in which they are placed, whilst every effort should be made to eradicate their corrupt habits.” He did not want to see too much time wasted in “instructing the boys in reading and writing.” They needed practical skills, which would make useful assigned servants of them. They would acquire these from a hard daily grind. Up at 5:00 a.m., fold hammocks, assembly, Bible reading and prayer; breakfast at 7:00, hygiene inspection, muster, and classes in practical trades like joinery or bootmaking from 8:00 to 12:00. At midday, ablutions and another inspection; at 12:30, dinner; from 1:30 to 5:00, more apprentice work; wash and inspection again, and supper at 5:30; muster for school at 6:15; then school lessons for an hour, followed by evening prayers and Scripture reading, and bed at 7:30. Later the time for schoolwork in the evening was increased to two hours; it made little difference, however, as most of the boys were by then too fatigued to learn anything much.

  The most successful part of this regime was the trade instruction, which was remarkably diverse. By 1837 it included baking, shoemaking, carpentry, tailoring, gardening, nail-making and blacksmithery. Enrollment in trade classes was limited, and most boys wanted to get into them. “As vacancies occur,” reported Booth, “the better disposed are selected to be placed at a trade, which is eagerly sought after.” They were anxious to get out of the laboring gangs, where every new arrival at Point Puer was introduced to “the use of the spade, the hoe and the grubbing-axe.” Boys in the laboring gangs did the donkey-work of Point Puer—the cleaning and scrubbing, the fetching and carrying—and they were worked hard; it may be no coincidence that, out of thirty-eight boys who died at Point Puer in the years 1834 to 1843, twenty-two were laborers. To be a sawyer or a joiner was far better. It also meant free skilled (or semi-skilled) labor for the Establishment, of the kind noted in the Port Arthur returns:

  Construction of wheel-barrows, four cells, five coffins, 390 hammer-handles, six barrack stools, 13 school desks, 4 garden gates, and one set of stocks, and a pillory.

  Turning of 216 masons’ mallets, 20 hat-pins, 50 belaying-pins, 2 bedposts, and 243 ships’ blocks.

  Making 17 pairs of Wellingtons @ 11s. pr., 24 Bluchers @ 5s. a pr., 2 prs. ladies’ shoes @ 3s. a pr., 1788 boots, prisoners’, @ 4s. a pr.

  Point Puer boys made the nails, sewed the convicts’ “canary” uniforms of yellow and gray wool, painted the fences, forged the ax-heads and shaped the sledgehammer handles with their drawknives; the stonemasons among them laboriously cut the ashlar for the round security towers of Port Arthur, chiselled the moldings and ornamented keystones for the stone arches, hewed the angles of the pediments. The carpentry class made the elaborate pulpit and pews for the large neo-Gothic church, and in 1844 the thirty-four brickmakers turned out 155,000 bricks, some of which—bearing the thumb-marks left by those long-dead adolescents as they pushed the bricks from the sandstock molds—still lie scattered among the ruins of Point Puer.

  There is no question that Point Puer boys received a trades education as good as (and probably better than) any they could have hoped to get in England in the 1830s. But their intellectual schooling was rudimentary. In 1842, some boys who had been there two or three years had difficulty reading words of one syllable; their arithmetic was no better. The only readers the pupils had were Bibles, supplied by a Wesleyan mission, and there were a few spelling-books and primers, but never enough; for eight hundred pupils there was “one very small blackboard seldom used” and not even a map of the world. The state of religious instruction was not much better. At first, it had been in the hands of Methodists, who reported in 1836 that “considerable attention is given to the boys’ religious instruction and several have been brought under the saving influence of the Gospel”; Backhouse and Walker, the visiting Quakers, vehemently dissented, finding the boys’ morals in “a most degraded state.” The Wesleyans were replaced in 1837 by an eager young Anglican catechist, Peter Barrow, fresh from running an orphanage for black foundlings on the coast of Sierra Leone. He thought a chaplain could reclaim half or even two-thirds of the Point Puer boys. He failed. Five years later, a few of the boys could parrot bits of an Anglican catechism, but none could recite the Commandments in correct order or show much grasp of scriptural history. Even their hymn-singing had declined, to the point that “the screaming is almost intolerable to any person whose ears have not been rendered callous.”71

  The likelihood of producing good little Christians at such a place was slight. Like any borstal or boarding-school, Point Puer had not one but two social systems: an official one imposed by the commandant and the chaplain, and a tribal one invented by the boys. Benjamin Home, reporting on the place in 1842, mentioned “a sort of tyranny of public opinion amongst themselves which every boy in the place must submit to as a slave, almost at peril of his life … [T]he maxim of the whole fraternity was that everyone must tell as many lies [to overseers and other authorities] as may be necessary for himself and the community.”72

  The boy who ratted on his fellow prisoners wou
ld be persecuted and hazed half to death. The Point Puer boys had no reason to like their jailers; and although conditions there were at least no worse than an English orphanage or ragged-school, they were little better and its inmates loathed them. In particular, the boys hated the convict overseers as tyrants. If an overseer fell asleep on night dormitory watch, the lads would put out the lights and empty the communal chamber pot over his head. One especially unpopular overseer was so battered in such a nocturnal scuffle that he spent three months in the hospital. In 1843 one overseer, Hugh McGine, was murdered by a pair of fourteen-year-olds named Henry Sparks and George Campbell.73

  If a boy at Point Puer found a middle way between the strictures of Authority and the pressure of his peers and managed to learn a trade, he could come out with a better chance of making good than most assigned men; if not, the System would simply grind him down. So it was with Thomas Willetts, a stunted boy of sixteen from Warwick, transported in 1834 for filching some stockings and garden vegetables, who in the course of five years at Point Puer and Port Arthur racked up a total of 35 lashes from the full cat-o’-nine tails, 183 strokes of the cane on his butt and 19 sentences of solitary confinement.

  THOMAS WILLETTS N° 1809

  tried 12 March 1833, arrd V.D.L. Augt 1834.

  Trade: None. Height: 4 ft. 11 in.

  Complex”: Dark Head: Small

  Hair: Brown Whiskers: None

  Visage: Small Forehead: M. Ht.

  Eyebrows: Brown Eyes: Grey

  Nose: Small Mouth: Med. Wide

  Chin: Small Remarks: Pockmarked, scar on Rt. Arm.

  Arrived in Van Diemen’s Land August 1834.

  Convict. 7 Years’ Transportation.

  Tried at Warwick, transported for stealing Stockings.

  Character—Very Bad.

  1834

  DECr 30TH: Assaulting fellow prisoner & attempt to deprive him of his bread: 24 lashes on the breech.

  1835

  SEPT. 9: Transferred to Port Arthur.

  SEPT. 28: Improper & riotous conduct in the Cells: 15 lashes on the breech.

  OCT. 21: Swearing, etc.: 7 days solitary confinement.

  Nov. 18: Having Tobacco: 5 days ditto

  1836

  FEB. 22: Having turnips, 5 days ditto

  Nov. 3: Insolent conduct to Overseer, 4 days ditto

  Nov. 7: Talking in cells, 3 days ditto

  DECr 26: Most improper conduct to the Asst Sub-Constable in the Execution of his Duty: 36 stripes.

  1837

  JAN 26: Fighting in the Schoolroom, 3 Days Solitary, Bread & Water.

  FEB. 18: Disorderly Conduct in School on Sunday, 5 Days ditto, ditto.

  MARCH 20: Having a pair of Fustian Trowsers in his possession and most Improper Conduct towards the Assist. Sub-Constable:

  36 Stripes on the Breech.

  SAME DATE: Most Contemptuous Conduct in laughing immediately on leaving the Office after Sentence for the preceding Offence:

  7 days’ solitary confinement on bread & water.

  MAY 29: Having a pair of Boots improperly: 4 Days Solity Conft.

  JUNE 26: Smoking in his hut contrary to orders:

  3 weeks in No. 2 Chain Gang.

  SEPT. 2ND: Gross Misconduct & Violence to Schoolmaster:

  36 Stripes on the breech.

  1838

  JAN 17: Insolence: 3 Days solitary Confinement, Bread & Water.

  MARCH 16: Gross insolence, 7 days ditto.

  APRIL 19: Improper Conduct towards a fellow Boy: 10 days ditto.

  JUNE 25: Talking in church during Divine Service, 48 hrs. soly conft on Bd & Wr.

  JULY 7: Striking a fellow prisoner: 36 Stripes on the breech.

  JULY 28: Talking in the Cells and Insolence when checked, 3 days solitary, Bd & Wr.

  AUGUST 3: Having his Face disgracefully disfigured, 48 hrs. soly confmt.

  AUGUST 16: Gross indecency on his going to the cells, 4 days ditto.

  OCTOBER 1ST: Absenting himself without leave from Public Works at Port Arthur and remaining absent until apprehended and brought back:

  7 days ditto.

  1839

  MARCH 5: Absconding: 35 lashes.

  MARCH 20: Absconding: 2 years hard labour in Chain Gang, Port Arthur—conduct to be reported to Lieutenant Governor.

  JULY 18: Disorderly Conduct: 24 hrs. solitary conft.

  OCTr 9: Having a Silk Stock in possession improperly: 1 month on No. 2 Chain Gang.

  DEC 5: Neglect of Duty and refusing to work: 1 month ditto.74

  On skins like his, the flaws of Arthur’s system were glaringly inscribed. But however wretched the life of the “incorrigible,” the “fractious” and the “refractory” could be made at Port Arthur, their sufferings were slight compared to the fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines under Arthur’s reign.

  vi

  COLONEL ARTHUR’S last big problem was the Tasmanian blacks; and he was theirs. By 1824, the year he came to Van Diemen’s Land, a vicious, undeclared and seemingly unfinishable guerrilla war had been dragging on between whites and blacks for two decades. Its first shots were fired at Risdon Cove in 1804, a few months after the first landing. Years later, Edward White, a former convict, told a Committee for Aboriginal Affairs how it had been. On May 3, 1804, he was hoeing ground by the creek when a party of some three hundred Aborigines, men, women and children, came out of the bush, driving a mob of kangaroos before them. The blacks were strung out in a big crescent, between the ’roos and the water. They carried clubs but no spears, and White saw that they were not a war-party; all they meant to do was kill the cornered game, build their fires and have a corroborree. He remembered how “they looked at me with all their eyes … [they] did not threaten me; I was not afraid of them.” Nevertheless he ran off to tell the soldiers, who loaded their muskets and marched on the tribespeople. “The Natives did not attack the soldiers; they would not have molested them.” Nevertheless the soldiers trained a carronade on them point-blank and blasted them with grapeshot. Nobody counted how many of the unarmed blacks were slaughtered, but at the end of the massacre the colonial surgeon Jacob Mountgarrett, prompted by some anthropological whim, salted down a couple of casks of their bones and sent them to Sydney.75

  There may have been four thousand Aborigines in Van Diemen’s Land when the whites landed; by Arthur’s time there were considerably fewer, although it is hardly possible to guess how many. Perhaps ten blacks were killed for every white, perhaps twenty. At first the dirty little war sputtered its way around Hobart and the banks of the Derwent, as settlers in the starvation years competed against blacks for the kangaroos. Sometimes whites killed blacks for sport. In 1806 two early bushrangers, John Brown and Richard Lemon, “used to stick them, and fire at them as marks whilst alive.” Another escaped convict, James Carrott or Carrett, abducted an Aborigine’s wife near Oyster Bay, killed her husband when he came after them, cut off his head and forced her to wear it slung around her neck in a bag “as a plaything.”76 There were rumors that kangaroo-hunters would shoot blacks to feed their dogs. Two whites cut the cheek off an aboriginal boy and forced him to chew and swallow it. At Oatlands, north of Hobart, convict stock-keepers kept aboriginal women as sexual slaves, secured by bullock-chains to their huts. On the Bass Strait coast, marauding sealers would try to buy women from the tribes; the usual offer was four or five sealskins for a woman, but if the Aborigines would not sell, they would shoot the men and kidnap the women. When one of these women tried to run away from the sealers, they trussed her up, cut off her ears and some flesh from her thigh and made her eat it. All this and more, the convict pioneer James Hobbes remarked, with some understatement, “was known by the tribes, and operated on their minds.”77

  The pattern of violence between black and white in Van Diemen’s Land was fully established by 1815. It went on against a background of proclamations by the lieutenant-governor—Collins, Davey and Sorell all issued them—enjoining the settlers not to provoke or persecute the blacks and stressing that they h
ad the full protection of English law. Their utterances weighed nothing against the reality of invasion: The whites were on the blacks’ land, and grabbing as much of it as they could. No colonists were prepared to consider such two-legged animals as beings with prior rights.

  So the war of random encounter inexorably changed into one of extermination, as the settlements and the stock-pastures spread. The late 1820s began a roaring boom in sheep-farming and wool exports. Some stock-breeders got three lambings every two years. In 1827 there were 436,256 sheep in Van Diemen’s Land. By 1830 there were 682,128, an increase of more than 55 percent. By 1836 the ovine population had risen by another third, to 911,357–20 sheep for every white person in the colony. The export figures, in pounds sterling, tell their own story of growth:78

  YEAR GROSS EXPORTS WOOL EXPORTS

  1825 £ 44,498 £ 12,543

  1827 59,912 9,089

  1830 141,745 57,724

  1832 152,967 63,145

  1836 540,221 220,739

  This new prosperity affected the look, the self-esteem, the very fiber of Vandemonian life. “Trade flourishes exceedingly,” wrote Richard Stickney, a Quaker emigrant, to his sister Sarah in 1834; there are

  rows of shops in the first London style and elegant houses are springing up like magic. The Sperm Whale fishery is carried on successfully and to a great extent, whilst Wool is becoming a greatly increasing article of export. The peach tree is loaded with fruit without the aid of a gardener.… I don’t think England has a colony where everything appears so much like home as this. The scarcety of the Black Natives,… the excellent roads, the fashionable appearance of the well-dressed inhabitants, carriages without number and good horses. It really has not the dull look of a Colony at all but the bustle and activity of an English seaport. A stranger might easily fancy himself in England.79