The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  The first party of convicts—fifty-seven of them, picked for their skill as artisans—landed in June 1825 and began setting up new quarters out of stone and plank scavenged from the abandoned Kingston settlement. Over the next five years, the population grew and an unremarkable succession of military officers ran the island.* The authorities did not fix on a long-term commandant until 1829. The man they chose was a lieutenant-colonel of the 80th Regiment, James Thomas Morisset (1780–1852).

  Morisset had proven tastes and abilities for the work. At the age of forty-nine he was an old soldier; in fact, the army had been his entire life, from the age of eighteen, when he joined the 80th and began a steady rise through the ranks of service in India and Egypt. He was a career officer with no family money to buy him a commission. In the Napoleonic Wars, he fought as a captain in Spain and was gravely wounded at the battle of La Albuera. In 1817 he was posted with his regiment to New South Wales, where he took over command of the Newcastle penal settlement from Captain James Wallis. Through what Hall would later call “the timidity and suspicion of his natural temper, and his proneness to severity,” Morisset soon became a terror to the convicts, infamous for the harshness of his punishments. As commandant he was also magistrate, and in order to spare settlers up the Hunter River the bother of coming to Newcastle in order to bring charges against their assigned servants, he would make excursions upstream in a boat with two flagellators and a portable set of triangles so that he could hand out summary lashings on their farms.

  No portrait of Morisset survives, and his appearance would have taxed the meager resources of any colonial artist. He was slender, elegantly dressed (by Buckmaster, one of the more fashionable London military tailors) and fond of gold embroidery; even his forage cap was covered with it. But the look of the military dandy was brusquely contradicted by his face. At La Albuera, a 32-inch mine-shell had exploded near him and left him with the mask of an ogre. His mouth ran diagonally upward and made peculiar whistling noises when he spoke. One eye was normal, but the other protruded like a staring pebble and seemed never to move. The cheekbone and jaw on one side had been smashed to fragments and, without cosmetic surgery, had re-knit to form a swollen mass like “a large yellow over-ripe melon”; he would defiantly thrust this cheek forward in conversation, as though daring his interlocutor to look away.69 For Morisset was not without bravado, and he was determined to convert his wound into a badge of bitter honor in the eyes of his equals and superiors.

  For his inferiors, the convicts, more dangerous sublimations lay within the dapper frame and the twisted gourd of shiny tissue. He “knew” them; and when he returned to London on leave after eight years in Australia—the last two as commandant at Bathurst, beyond the Blue Mountains—he could not get the convicts out of his mind, for their management had become an obsession. He went every day to Bow Street; he haunted the police offices; he learned to talk underworld cant. “I am the man to keep these scoundrels in order,” he boasted later. “I assure you, Sir, if the Duke of Wellington searched through the Army of Great Britain he could not equal me; I understand all their priggings.”70 And while in London, he waited on Lord Bathurst and begged for Norfolk Island.

  Bathurst knew talent when he saw it. He was worried about the rabble’s changing attitude to transportation. Too many letters had come back from Emancipists and from assigned convicts who had found easy masters, praising the conditions of life in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, where wages were high and a man could make a new life for himself with his two hands. Bathurst did not want Australia to lose its reputation. Morisset seemed just the man to help Darling put a dose of iron back in the convict soul. The increase of terror (a word Bathurst used often in dispatches to Darling) must begin from the bottom of the System, which meant Norfolk Island. So Morisset went back to Australia as a lieutenant-colonel in 1827. There was some delay in getting him to Norfolk Island. He had married a young woman named Emily Vaux in 1826, but Darling wanted no women in Norfolk Island, because their presence would confuse the schematic purity of discipline in that Mount Athos of English misery. “I laid it down as a rule,” Darling explained, “that women should not be sent to the Settlement, and the few free women … belonging to the troops and the people there, were accordingly withdrawn.”71 He was reluctant to have only one woman, the commandant’s wife, in residence there. Yet it seemed unfair to separate Morisset from the meek young bride whom—with some difficulty, one may surmise, considering his looks—he had wooed and won and then brought so far to Australia. In February 1829, the Morissets sailed for Norfolk Island with their two children. These infants were to see strange sights.

  * They were, in order: Captain Turton, 1825–26; Captain Vance Young Donaldson, 57th Regt., 1826–27, Captain Thomas Wright, 39th Regt., 1827–28, Captain Robert Hunt, 57th Regt., 1828–29; Captain Wakefield, 39th Regt., 1829. Only Wright stayed longer than a year.

  The degradation of the fringe-dwelling Aborigines of Sydney, with their hand-me-down English rags and rum bottles, is recorded c. 1830 in the Augustus Earle’s lithograph Natives of New South Wales. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)

  An iron-gang of Government men seen outside the Sydney Barracks by Augustus Earle’s unsympathetic eye, during the governorship of Sir Ralph Darling, c. 1830. (National Library of Australia, Canberra)

  A road-gang in the bush near Sydney, c. 1838. The pinched and sallow look of the chained prisoners is probably nearer the truth than are the sturdy, brutalized Irish stereotypes of Earle’s lithography. (National Library of Australia, Canberra)

  Gang labor on the Great West Road across the Blue Mountains: Augustus Earle’s View from the Summit of Mount York, Towards Bathurst Plains, c. 1826. (National Library of Australia, Canberra)

  The road nears its completion, and “boundless regions open to our sight.” Charles Rodius, Convicts Building the Road to Bathhurst, 1833. (National Library of Australia, Canberra)

  “That place of tyranny”—Macquarie Harbor. The ruins of the stone jail on Sarah Island, photographed by J. W. Beattie in the 1860s. (National Library of Australia, Canberra)

  Sarah Island from the south, by the convict artist C. H. T. Costantini, c. 1830. The main wharf and boatyard are in the center; note the tall sawn-log security fences. (Allport Library and State Museum of Fine Arts, Hobart)

  Crews of convicts towing a raft of felled Huon pine logs to the sawpit at Sarah Island, Macquarie Harbor. Grummet Island is at right, with its crude punishment hut and, below, the dark opening in the rock used as a solitary cell. Sketch by T. J. Lemprière, c. 1830. (Allport Library and State Museum of Fine Arts, Hobart)

  A View of Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land, c. 1823, by George W. Evans. In the foreground, convicts are working, rather lackadaisically—note the two men at center chatting and smoking—under the supervision of an architect. This loose discipline was what Lieutenant-Governor Arthur dedicated himself to abolishing. Evans, the artist, was forced by Arthur from his post as surveyor in Van Diemen’s Land after allegations of bribery. [National Library of Australia, Canberra)

  The unbending proconsul of Van Diemen’s Land, Lieutenant-Governor Sir George Arthur (1784–1834). Anonymous miniature. [Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)

  Port Arthur in the 1860s. The four-story building with attics and stone quoins at right is part of the huge flour mill converted in 1857 to a penitentiary. The round castellated tower halfway up the hill to the left is the guardhouse. (National Library of Australia, Canberra)

  “Impartial justice, as impassive as that of fate”: Captain Charles O’Hara Booth (1800–1851), Commandant of Port Arthur from 1833 to 1840. Portrait by T. J. Lemprière. (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart)

  Sir John and Lady Franklin inspect the line of guard dogs at Eaglehawk Neck. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)

  “The Polar Knight,” Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Franklin (1766–1847). Anonymous miniature. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)


  Et in Arcadia Ego: instruments of Port Arthur discipline and bureaucracy, surrounded by native wildflowers. Tourist postcard by J. W. Beattie, c. 1870. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)

  Eaglehawk Neck, the only land-bridge to the Tasman Peninsula, photographed by J. W. Beattie in the 1870s. Guardhouses are in the foreground. (Launceston Museum and Art Gallery, Tasmania)

  “The adamantine gates of Hell itself”—Cape Raoul, at the entrance to Port Arthur, with its towering black basalt flutes. (Launceston Museum and Art Gallery, Tasmania)

  The first Australian railway, convict-powered, designed and installed by Commandant Booth, carries visitors through the primeval forest of the Tasman Peninsula. (National Library of Australia, Canberra)

  Progaganda against the memory of the System. On the title page of “The Muster Master,” published thirty years after transportation to Tasmania stopped, a convict is flagellated while a low official exhorts him to “keep up.” At right, a magistrate remarks, “I’ll give the wretch 100 lashes and send him to be hanged.” The hangman, by the gallows on the hill, exclaims, “It’s complete butchery but I must do it, I suppose.” In fact, such combinations of corporal and capital punishment were proscribed. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)

  Benjamin Duterreau’s “National Picture,” The Conciliation, c. 1835. George Augustus Robinson is seen “bringing in” the surviving mainland Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land. Seated to his left, Trucanini points at the Conciliator and draws a hesitant tribesman toward him. Note the imagery of “reconciliation” naively expressed in the coexistence of a wallaby and some kangaroo-hounds. [Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart)

  The last pureblood Aborigines of the Tasmanian mainland, facing the end in European finery: from left to right, Trucanini, William Lanney and Bessie Clarke, photographed by J. W. Beattie in 1866. (National Library of Australia, Canberra)

  Arthur’s policy on race relations, c. 1828: a notice-board promising equal justice to blacks and whites alike, addressed to Aborigines. (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart)

  The rituals of the cat: a flogging at Moreton Bay, from William Ross’s pamphlet inveighing against Captain Logan’s regime, The Fell Tyrant; or, the Suffering Convict, 1836. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)

  The martinet of the mainland: Sir Ralph Darling (1775–1858), Governor of New South Wales from 1824 to 1831, oversaw the expansion of “secondary” penal colonies from Newcastle to Moreton Bay and the revival of Norfolk Island as “the ne plus ultra of convict degradation.” Portrait by John Linnell. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)

  “Fellow prisoners, be exhilarated/That all such monsters such a death may find”: Captain Patrick Logan, 57th Regiment, Commandant of Moreton Bay. Anonymous portrait. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)

  The remains of a “dumb cell” in the main prison at Kingston, Norfolk Island. Note the thickness of the walls, through which no sound could pass. Since this photograph was taken (c. 1870), the site has been levelled, and little trace of these structures survives. [Launceston Museum and Art Gallery, Tasmania)

  Gravestone of a mutineer hanged after the convict rising of 1834 against Commandant Morisset on Norfolk Island. (Author’s collection)

  “Murderer’s Mound,” the mass grave outside the consecrated ground of the Norfolk Island cemetery, where the convict mutineers of 1846 were buried. (Launceston Museum and Art Gallery, Tasmania)

  Captain Foster Fyans (1790–1870), Morisset’s second-in-command on Norfolk Island, who suppressed the 1834 mutiny. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)

  “One of the durable ogres of the Australian imagination”: John Giles Price (1808–1857), Commandant of Norfolk Island from 1846 to 1853. (Royal Society of Tasmania)

  Unknown artist’s sketch of the main settlement at Kingston, Norfolk Island, in 1838. The prisoners’ barracks and mess are at left; behind, at the foot of the hill, the Military Barracks; at right, Government House. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)

  Maconochie permits dignity to the dead: the convict-carved headstone of Samuel Jones, shot for his part in an attempted hijacking of the Governor Phillip off Norfolk Island, 1842. (Author’s collection)

  Products of the System: some of the remaining “old crawlers” or veteran convicts at Port Arthur, photographed in 1874. (Archives Office of Tasmania)

  13

  Norfolk Island

  i

  WHEN Lieutenant-Colonel Morisset left to take up his new duties, the Monitor in Sydney ran an editorial about his future on “Norfolk Island, late Gomorrah Island,” exhorting him to run it with mercy and restraint. To the powerless and passive convicts “he will be as a God,” and so

  let him therefore put himself in the place of Deity, and let his mind become imbued with magnanimity, considering that his power was given him, not for his own pleasure and benefit, but for the benefit of the wretches under his sovereign control (for such is a Commandant’s will at penal settlements).

  Let the biting scourge be inflicted seldom, and then in merciful quantities; and let no other part of an Englishman’s body be subjected to this ancient, though still brutal torture, but the back.1

  Morisset may or may not have read this advice; it hardly mattered, for he knew what his chief, Governor Darling, thought of the Monitor and its editor. People often suppose that penal systems recruit sadists. But cruelty is an appetite that grows with feeding, and few people receive an epiphany of their own sadism in the abstract; they must see their victims first. It is most unlikely that Morisset’s habits were known in advance and so ensured him the command of Norfolk Island. If anything, the authorities concluded from his conduct at Newcastle that he was conscientious, stern, but not unjust. Lachlan Macquarie, the Emancipists’ friend, had praised his work there (and even named a lagoon after him in 1821; 150 years later, more fittingly, a lunatic asylum would receive his name). The Sydney Gazette extolled him as an opponent of hanging.2 Both Bathurst in London and Darling in Sydney thought they had found in Morisset a tough, reliable line officer who would run the settlement with a heavy hand but by the book. But this description also fits the men who have run the Gulags of our own time.

  The essence of any sadistic relationship between a bad prison boss and his prisoners is that the latter should be (in the word so often used of Australian convicts) “objects.” The System’s distinction between “objects” (prisoners) and “subjects” (the free) was no mere grammatical quirk: It implied the convict’s expulsion from the domain of rights. “Felons on Norfolk Island have forfeited all claim to protection of the law,” wrote Governor Brisbane in 1825, meaning every word. “Port Macquarie for first grave offences; Moreton Bay for runaways from the former; and Norfolk Island as the ne plus ultra.”3 There was no point of exile beyond this island; its convicts were at their ultimate distance from reasoned legality and open transaction. The only refuge of their criminality was within their bodies, from whose inaccessible centers the meek silence craved by the System could be trumped by mute defiance. This was the silence of the “pebble,” the “stone man,” as prisoners of unusual endurance were called—a panting and glaring silence, that of a fox gone to earth. On Norfolk Island, that silence would be broken. On May 26, 1829, Morisset landed on Norfolk Island. A year and a half later, the only convict to leave a first-hand account of life under Morisset also arrived there. His name was Laurence Frayne.4

  Frayne was sent to Norfolk Island in his sixth year of transportation. He was an Irishman, convicted of theft in Dublin in October 1825. He arrived in Sydney on the transport Regalia with 129 other Irish convicts at the end of 1826; he may have been implicated en route to Rio in an abortive mutiny plot that failed because—as a young officer on board recounted it—“an Old Man whom we favoured a little came & confessed all the plot.… [The soldiers] would have been so enraged they would have murdered every convict on board.”5 In 1828 Frayne was reconvicted for �
��repeatedly absconding” and was sent to Moreton Bay. There, he still kept trying to escape and his behavior was so untameable that he was sent down to Sydney in January 1830, reconvicted by the Supreme Court, sentenced to death, had his sentence commuted and was put on the Phoenix hulk, awaiting transportation to Norfolk Island.

  The hulk, an unseaworthy old transport moored in Lavender Bay, had served as an antechamber to the far penal settlements since 1824. She was a stationary hellship, “that receptable of Filth and place of Cruelty and Starvation.”6 Prisoners on board were kept half-starved by the guards, who withheld their rations of flour and “salt horse” to sell on shore; the head warden was an alcoholic who later died in delirium tremens. Frayne tried to escape from the Phoenix, but he was caught slipping over the side and was given 50 lashes; then he cursed the overseer and received 150 more. Other convicts on the hulk fared just as ill. Thomas Cook, held there in May 1836 en route to Norfolk Island, was seized by the head keeper for sharing a pipe of tobacco with his nine cellmates. The ten men were stripped naked,

  and after manacling each of our hands behind our backs, he reefed the legs, which were heavily Ironed, to the upper part of the Iron Stanchions of the Cell … with the whole weight of our chains and bodies pressing on our Shoulder Blades for the night, in a state of perfect nudity. By the following morning, and for two days afterward, I could scarcely regain the use of my arms.7