So anxious were they to claim his death as their own revenge that they invented a different version: The hated commandant had been seized by his own convict servants in the bush, flogged nearly to death, finished off with a stone and buried facing downward, “looking down to Hell, for that’s where he’s going.” Then came the ghost stories. On the day Logan died, it was said, he appeared immobile and silent on his ghastly horse on the far bank of the Brisbane River; but when the ferryman rowed over to collect him, no one was there. Thus, Patrick Logan began to pass into popular legend at the moment of his death; the ballads came soon after. There was no libel trial for Edward Hall, this time. In fact Governor Darling, perhaps hoping to reduce the hail of innuendo and invective from the colonial press that beat around his head, took a deep breath and made the sole placatory gesture of his governorship: He freed Hall in November 1830, soon after the news of Logan’s killing reached Sydney.
But Hall was not grateful; nor did the Sydney democrats think this gesture outweighed Darling’s record of cruelty to convicts and favoritism to colonial Tories. Darling might have remained in office despite his colonial enemies—for Australians had not put him there, and they could not remove him—but England itself was moving away from the Tory extremism that Darling, an army man serving this arch-reactionary government of Wellington, embodied.
By 1830, the movement for parliamentary reform had percolated from working men to the very middle classes who, in 1819, had reacted indifferently or timidly to the Peterloo Massacre and who distrusted the idea of “reform.” And as the English middle classes became more aware of the appalling inequities built into the power structure—symbolized by the postwar sufferings of the countryside and the scandal of the “Rotten Boroughs”—so the social base of the reform movement broadened, and the Whigs, led by Lord Charles Grey, could move against the Tories’ monopoly of power. There was, moreover, the example of the French Revolution of 1830, which persuaded some liberal Whigs that populist moves, led by bourgeois interests, did not—as the Tories had warned since 1789—lead to Jacobinism and tumbrils. Lafayette and Louis-Philippe were plainly not the same as Marat and Robespierre. In November 1830, Wellington’s government fell and the new king, William IV, instructed Lord Grey to form a government. Under Grey, the Reform Bill passed, though only by one vote.
Grey was not liberal: “There is no one more decided against annual parliaments, universal suffrage, and the ballot than I am,” he told the House. “My object is not to favour, but to put an end to such hopes and projects.”59 But his son, Henry George Grey, known as Viscount Howick, did not share all the father’s views. In particular he had been fired by Wilberforce’s campaign against slavery, and he was not unaware of the comparisons drawn between slavery and convict transportation. Nepotism put Howick in his father’s ministry in 1830 as under-secretary for the colonies, under Viscount Goderich. In Howick, the stream of complaints from Australia about Governor Darling found a sympathetic ear. The world had moved somewhat, and even at the limits of Empire there was less room for a a dull, gold-braided martinet who believed more in the lash than the ballot-box. Howick particularly disliked Darling’s attempts to muzzle public speech in New South Wales; and when the governor’s six-year term ran out in 1831, there was no move to renew it. So Darling left Australia.
His departure was marked by wild jubilations from the Emancipists. Hall’s Monitor announced that an “illumination” would rise over its editorial office the night Darling sailed, bearing the incandescent phrase “He’s off.” “THANK GOD—We have shaken off the incubus at last!” Wentworth exclaimed in the Australian, and held open house for every Emancipist in the colony on the grounds of his estate at Vaucluse, overlooking Sydney Harbor, whose perimeter had been surrounded by a shallow trench filled with Irish earth to keep the Australian snakes out. Some four thousand people converged on Vaucluse House by gig, horse, donkey and Shank’s pony, and hoed into a feast more Brobdingnagian than Lucullan, involving a whole roast ox, twelve sheep, thousands of loaves of bread and incalculable quantities of ale and spirits. The pro-Darling newspaper, the Sydney Gazette, asked its readers to imagine
the roaring, bawling, screeching, blaspheming, thumping, bumping, kicking, licking, tricking, cheating, beating, stealing, reeling, breaking of heads, bleeding of noses, blackening of eyes, picking of pockets, and what not … the orgies of the lowest rabble of Botany Bay, congregated in the open air, shrouded by the curtain of night, released from the eyes of the police, and helewated by the fumes of Cooper’s gin … [T]hese contemptible proceedings have excited universal disgust and abhorrence among decent people.60
But that night the Emancipists and Currency voted obstreperously with their bellies; there were few tears when Darling sailed, and no new appointments for him when he reached England.
Darling’s departure, and his replacement by the comparatively liberal Richard Bourke, made convict life at Moreton Bay slightly better—but not much. Thanks to Logan’s slave-driving, the settlement now had better buildings and a regular supply of water (whose pipes were each laboriously hollowed from an ironbark log); accordingly, the disease rate slowed down, although trachoma would linger among convicts and then among poor-white settlers on the Brisbane River for half a century longer. Logan’s successor, Clunie, was a flogger but a less capricious one, and the convicts did not think him such a tyrant. Fewer of them tried to escape, but that was because they had given up hope: Relations between whites and blacks at Moreton Bay had degenerated so far that convicts now expected to be killed by the natives if they went bush. Allan Cunningham, who had been there in 1828–29, later reported that escaped convicts had been “taking liberties with”—raping—aboriginal women.61 This must have been the last straw. However, the territories of those offended tribes lay south of Moreton Bay.
Other convicts went north, in the hope of reaching China, and at least one of them not only survived but became famous for his escape (although he did not reach China). This was John Graham, a resourceful Irishman who had been transported in 1824 for stealing a few pounds of hemp from a linen-maker. Assigned at first to a master in Parramatta, he got to know the local Aborigines and learned from them some tricks of survival in the unfamiliar bush. Then, for a second offense, he was transported to Moreton Bay in 1827. After a few months of Logan’s brutalities he bolted north, managing to avoid the Aborigines and live, unaided, off the land. When at last he did blunder into contact with a tribe, he had the improbable luck to be greeted by one of its women as the white ghost of her dead warrior-husband. Thus he entered the tribe and lived with it from 1827 to 1833, before walking back to Moreton Bay and surrendering to the surprised Clunie. No convict, other than Buckley in Victoria, had ever acquired such intimate, detailed knowledge of aboriginal life and ritual, but it did not make Graham any more sympathetic to the blacks once he was back in white company. He denounced them as “frightful clans and hordes of cannibals and savages,” hoping to convince the authorities that he had suffered so much among them that his sentence should not be prolonged.62
Under Clunie, Moreton Bay took shape as a town, the embryo of the city of Brisbane. Its crude economy of forced labor had diversified, expanded by artisans from the “First Class” of convicts—minor offenders who had shown an unblemished record over their first years of imprisonment there. Tailors sewed gray-and-yellow uniforms out of the coarse, felt-like “magpie cloth” or “canary stuff”; and there were cobblers, tanners and candlemakers, smiths, coopers, joiners and wheelwrights—a thriving little economy that contained the seeds of surplus and trade, and whose labor was exploited in various ways by the overseers and officers. The convicts had more food now and placed an enormous value on small luxuries like tea and sugar. The tea was coarse green stuff full of twigs, known as “posts-and-rails”; the brown sticky sugar was nicknamed “coal tar,” but it would improve a sweet potato duff and give strength to the insipid mock-coffee the prisoners made from burnt corn kernels.
By the end of 1835, whe
n Captain Foster Fyans of the 4th (King’s Own) Regiment succeeded Clunie as commandant, the old starvation days under Logan were just a memory—though a bitterly preserved one in convict lore. But the rest of prison life went on much as before beneath the shadow of the triangles. Fyans took a sardonic pleasure in describing the rituals of the cat-o’-nine-tails to George Walker and James Backhouse, two Quaker missionaries on a tour of the Australian penal colonies:
“Friend,” said Friend Backhouse, “I wish thee much to explain the punishments. First, friend, the number of stripes in whipping?”
My reply was, from twenty to a hundred or two hundred lashes, that was our limit:-when two long and hollow groans followed. “The first lash, Friend, the skin rises not unlike a white frost, Friend. The second lash, Friend, often reminds me of a snowstorm.… [T]he third lash, Friend, the back is lacerated dreadfully.” Half a dozen of groans. “The painful feelings then subside, Friend, for the blood comes freely.” Long groans and heavy moans, and the Friends said some prayers; when out the notebooks came.… I then proposed to flog a fellow that they might see the process, and be better able to judge. “No, Friend, we thank thee.”63
But by then the main form of punishment at Moreton Bay was not the lash, but the treadmill. In 1827, Logan had built a windmill there (it still stands, though converted into an observatory, and is one of the few remaining buildings of the convict period in Brisbane); and two years later a treadmill was added to it, so that convicts could grind corn when the wind did not blow—a practical machine that doubled as an instrument of mass punishment. The treadmill was like a waterwheel, but it was forty feet long, with wooden treads nine inches wide. As many as fifty convicts could be punished on it at once. The convicts’ names for it were expressive: the everlasting staircase or, because the stiff prison clothes scraped one’s groin raw after a few hours on it, the cockchafer. The prisoners went up a flight of steps and stood ready on the horizontal blade of the mill. They had a fixed handrail to hold. The overseer pulled out an iron bolt and the wheel began to turn: “You would hear the ‘click, click’ of their irons as they kept step with the wheel, and those with the heaviest irons seemed to have a great job to keep up. Some poor wretches only just managed to pull through until they got off.”64 The mill stood for progress—the rationalization of punishment. It was a more philosophical instrument than the cat.
From 1835 on, the exclusively penal nature of Brisbane Town and its outlying settlements began to fade. The lash could still be heard in the streets, and the centipedes of ironed men, their chains rusty with tropical dew, still shuffled from barracks to work, their heads bowed; but their numbers were declining, and when Fyans took over there were only about four hundred male convicts there. By 1840, the prisoners’ barracks and the Female Factory stood empty. All convicts still under sentence had been recalled to Sydney, and the assignment system had been discontinued. Now the free settlers of Brisbane had to manage without government-sponsored slave labor, for the place was no longer isolated. It even had a post office. And the broken, marginal Aborigines, stupefied with cane liquor, dozing like lumps of shadow in patches of shade, confirmed the total victory of white civilization. By 1840, squatters had found a stock route north to the rich plains of the Darling Downs, inland from Brisbane. So the pastoral economy of modern Queensland began with the emancipation of Brisbane, for “Nature has pointed out that spot,” the Australian editorialized in 1842, “as the site of the northern capital of Australia.” A week later, Governor Gipps formally declared that Moreton Bay was no longer a penal settlement. Settlers and visitors could come and go as they pleased. Military rule was over. So ended the last of the penal stations on the Australian mainland; and when the first Queensland Parliament was convened some years later, it met, by an irony that Logan might have appreciated, in the upper floor of the largest building in Brisbane—the old convict barracks, built to house a thousand men. But soon this unloved souvenir, like so many buildings that spoke of Australian darkness, was razed.
iv
THE SPOT THAT now represented the quintessence of punishment was Norfolk Island. Governor Brisbane had turned his attention to it in 1824, the year Moreton Bay was settled. After reading the Bigge Report, Lord Bathurst had ordered him to prepare a place of ultimate terror for the incorrigibles of the System. As long as convicts were on the mainland, they could escape; and so Bathurst told Brisbane to re-occupy Norfolk Island, which had been abandoned ten years before at the merciful behest of Governor Macquarie. This speck of land, floating in the infinite waste of the Pacific a thousand miles east of Sydney and four hundred miles north of New Zealand, would once more serve as “a great Hulk or Penitentiary,” the nadir of England’s penal system. Its old form had been bad enough. As Governor Hunter declared in 1812, its prisoners “felt [it] was a very severe sentence; they would sooner have lost their lives.” Now it would get worse, and although no convict could escape from it, rumor and reputation would. In this way, the “Old Hell,” as convict argot termed it, would reduce mainland crime by sheer terror.65
Brisbane wrote to England, outlining his new kakotopia. On Norfolk Island, the genial stargazer promised, all pretense at reform would be dropped. Its sole purpose would be to provide “the ne plus ultra of convict degradation.” The island could not support many prisoners, and those it contained must be the absolute worst of those double-damned by the System. Hence, most of them would be men convicted of fresh hanging crimes in the colony, whose sentences had been commuted to life imprisonment. “The felon, who is sent there, is forever excluded from all hope of return,” and although mainland convicts in government service or on the assignment system had some legal rights, those on Norfolk Island “have forfeited all claim to the protection of the law.” To ensure their reduction to mere ciphers, Brisbane urged that
if it were not too repugnant to the Laws of England, I should consider it very fitting to have Norfolk Island completely under Martial Law, which would not only form part of the punishment in itself, but save the complicated machinery of Civil Courts, or sending people for trial [to Sydney].… My experience convinces me that there is nothing so effectual in dealing with convicts as Summary Proceedings.66
This, Bathurst would not grant; but in practice, the future commandants of Norfolk Island were invested with such sweeping powers short of arbitrary hanging that their rule was all but absolute.
The prisoners must be promised nothing and given only the dimmest sense of a goal toward which they could work. “No hopes of any mitigation of their sentences … should ever be held out to them,” and they could only get off the island after a minimum of 10 years, whose last 5 must show a perfect behavior-sheet.67 That record, of course, could be wiped out by the whim of an officer, the merest grudge-word of an informer. And even if the prisoner finished his Norfolk Island sentence and returned to the mainland, he must serve out the rest of his original sentence in full. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’intrate—Dante’s words on the adamantine gate of Hell became the obligatory text quoted by educated visitors to Norfolk Island (not that there were many of them) over the next fifteen years. The island would be a machine for extinguishing hope.
For this purpose it was ideal, for it concentrated and epitomized the sense of delusive beauty, beauty empty at the core and flaking into viciousness, uselessness and indifference, that had been part of English reactions to Australian landscape ever since the arrival of the First Fleet. From an approaching boat, Norfolk Island is an apparition, a rolling cap of green meadow and spiring trees, raised out of the Pacific on pipes and pillars of basalt as though offered to one infinite blueness by another. It was no harbor. Most of its coast is sheer cliff, black planes of rock laced with red oxides. There are only two landing-places. One is at Cascades Bay on the northeast side, where boats and crew have to be plucked from the water by a derrick. The other, chiefly used in convict days, is at Sydney Bay, where the ruins of the Kingston penal settlement stand. A reef blocks the whole approach to the shore; ships s
tood off and unloaded their freight of chained convicts into whalers, which had to be rowed over the reef through its boiling cross-rips—a terrifying ordeal for all but the stoutest tar.
They struggled ashore in Paradise. There was a little crescent beach of white sand where, still by an arm of the reef, the water lapped in aquamarine clarity. Green hills encircled the flat, swampy table where the first settlement had been pitched forty years before; their folds ran down to the sea, and in them ran cascades of bright water shaded by hibiscus and palms. Great ropes of jasmine, on stems thick as a man’s wrist, hung in swags from the branches of the Norfolk Island pines. There were groves of sugar cane, figs, guavas and lemons, the wild descendants of specimens brought by the First Fleet from Rio and the Cape in 1788. The Norfolk Island birds had forgotten man had ever been there; one could pick them out of the bushes, like fruit. Even today, a walk along the cliffs—where the green meadow runs to the very brink of the drop and the bushes are distorted by the eternal Pacific wind into humps and clawings that resemble Hokusai’s Great Wave copied by a topiarist—is a fine cure for human adhesiveness. One sees nothing but elements: air, water, rock and the patterns wrought by their immense friction. The mornings are by Turner; the evenings, by Caspar David Friedrich, calm and beneficent, the light sifting angelically down toward the solemn horizon. “My object,” wrote Governor Darling in 1827, “was to hold out that Settlement as a place of the extremest Punishment, short of Death.”68
The Fatal Shore Page 66
