The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  The System, Maconochie thought, debased free and bond alike, producing “the fretfulness of temper … which so peculiarly characterises the intercourse of society in our penal colonies.”

  Much of his report consisted of social impressions and moral lucubrations, but it had a hard core of fact. There, he was helped by several others. The Quaker missionaries James Backhouse and George Washington Walker, who had travelled throughout Van Diemen’s Land between 1832 and 1834 and reported on the chain gangs for Arthur, opened their files to him. He was advised by the Scottish surveyor Alexander Cheyne (1785–1858), who had been Arthur’s director-general of roads and bridges since 1835 and whom Franklin, in 1838, put in charge of the newly formed Department of Public Works. One sees the hand of Cheyne in Maconochie’s criticism of convict labor on government works, which entailed so much waste and graft that “1s. 9d. is lost out of every 3s. worth of labour.” Maconochie found little to commend in Arthur’s graded assignment system. It did not reform convicts; it bred social malaise and blunted the moral sense. “It destroys both soul and body—both master and man—both colonial character and, I may almost say, national reputation.”8 The convicts, he movingly argued,

  have their claims on us also, claims only the more sacred because they are helpless in our hands.… [W]e condemn them for our own advantage. We have no right to cast them away altogether. Even their physical suffering should be in moderation, and the moral pain we must and ought to inflict with it should be carefully framed so as if possible to reform, and not necessarily to pervert them. The iron should enter both soul and body, but not so as utterly to sear and harden them.9

  Manconochie gave his report to Franklin, who asked him to tone down some of the sharper criticisms, and he did so. Then Franklin sent the edited version to the main officials of the colony. Cheyne supported it, the others vehemently disagreed, and Franklin sent their minutes, one of his own, and Maconochie’s rebuttal along with the report itself to Lord Glenelg. For fear that this mass of paper, now running to several hundred pages, should “perish in the Colonial office from [its] own intrinsic gravity,” Maconochie wrote a separate summary of his case, and sent it to Lord Grey, as he had promised to do, but with a covering note asking him, if he thought fit, to show it to Lord John Russell. Russell was the home secretary, in charge of the British penal system. Franklin did not read this abstract from Maconochie, but he thought he knew what was in it. He hesitated to pass it on but gave in to Maconochie’s pleas. He wrote a covering note to Grey urging him not to send any material to the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline before it was thoroughly vetted by the Colonial Office, lest it “give pain to many respectable inhabitants here.”

  Thus two reports on Van Diemen’s Land—the long revised one Franklin had read, and the more pungent précis he had not—reached London by the same ship in February 1838. Grey read the précis and, on March 5, 1838, passed it on to Lord Russell. If any moment can be said to mark the peak and incipient decline of transportation to Australia, this innocuous act marked it.

  For what Maconochie did not know—and could not have known, due to the long delays in official communication between England and Australia—was that Russell, an ardent critic of transportation, had already been appointed a member of a Parliamentary Select Committee, under the chairmanship of the even more dogmatically anti-transportationist Sir William Molesworth, to inquire into the workings of the System. The Molesworth Committee had been convened in April 1837, when the dispatches were on the water. At that point, its members knew no more about Maconochie’s criticisms than Maconochie knew about the committee.

  Russell wanted ammunition. He sent Maconochie’s précis straight to the government printer, for publication. Thus a private memo entered the public, official record. To back it up, Russell had the whole text and minutes of the longer report, as approved by Franklin, published a month later.

  Both documents caused a sensation in the English press. But it was nothing compared to the hullaballoo the English papers touched off in Van Diemen’s Land six months later, in September 1838, when they reached Hobart.

  All of a sudden, the good citizens of Van Diemen’s Land found themselves vilified in official parliamentary print as callous slave-owners, rulers of a petty kingdom raised on the exploited bodies of convicts. This was enough to bury—for a time—all differences between the Arthur Faction and the anti-Arthurians. Everyone who had ever had a convict assigned to him could now hate Maconochie, who (so the Hobart version went) had gone behind Franklin’s back and smuggled his foul canards to England under the guise of official correspondence. Montagu and his friends lost no time persuading Franklin that Maconochie had betrayed him.

  Franklin was not quite sure that he had. The opinions in the report were, after all, Maconochie’s own, and not presented as official. But in the end he had no choice. He dismissed Maconochie, although he allowed him (with his wife and six children) to stay on at Government House until they found other lodgings. Lady Franklin was sorry. Maconochie, she wrote to her sister, had “such a freedom from colonial suspicion and narrowness of views and personal spite and hostility … and so much less apparent self-interest that I could not but value his union with us and deplore his separation.”10

  The Maconochies were ostracized. “We see few and go nowhere,” Mrs. Maconochie wrote.

  Alexander is like a lion at bay, deafened by the barking and yelping of the curs about him, but in no other ways stirred from his steady honesty of purpose.… Alas, alas! I always looked forward to trials and difficulties, mystifications of every description, but no imagination could have realized the continued tissue of falsehood, suspicion and unworthy accusation continually poured forth.11

  All this only stiffened Maconochie’s fiber. He had at last found his mission in life: “The cause has got me complete,” he wrote to London. “I will go the whole hog on it.… I will neither acquiesce in the moral destruction of so many of my fellow beings nor in misrepresentation made of myself, without doing everything that may be necessary or possible to assist both.”12

  He felt the deck lifting under his feet. The Molesworth Committee had brought in its verdict of guilty on transportation; public opinion in England was changing. Despite his isolation in Hobart, Maconochie had found the allies he needed 14,000 miles away, at the head of the System, among English Whigs whose slanting of the evidence had made the findings of the Molesworth Committee a foregone conclusion.

  iii

  THE MOLESWORTH COMMITTEE was convened “to inquire into the System of Transportation, its Efficacy as a Punishment, its Influence on the Moral State of Society in the Penal Colonies, and how far it is susceptible of improvement.” It began its hearings in 1837 and laid its final report before the Commons in August 1838.13

  The Molesworth Committee claimed to be an objective tribunal. It was in fact a heavily biased show trial designed to present a catalog of antipodean horrors, conducted by Whigs against a system they were already planning to jettison. Its real movers were the home secretary, Lord John Russell, and the under secretary for the colonies, Lord Grey, in consultation with the Colonial Office. Grey, then thirty-six years old, was later to run the Colonial Office under Lord Russell; he never made any secret of his disdain for the assignment system. Australian affairs were not a large issue for either of these men or for the British Government; they came some distance behind those of Canada, Malta, Gibraltar and the colony at the Cape of Good Hope.14 But in 1836, Russell had already announced his intent to liberalize the criminal law, reduce the hanging statutes and abolish transportation as a punishment for simple larceny—which would have cut the number of transportees by half.15 He thought transportation archaic and, like other “progressive” Parliamentarians, favored punishment (at least for routine crimes) in model prisons and penitentiaries on English soil. Between them, Russell and Lord Glenelg had decided to abolish assignment and step up free emigration to Australia before the Molesworth Committee had heard a single witness.
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br />   So the Molesworth Committee was formed to dramatize the need for a decision which had already been taken. Russell chose a chairman of suitably flamboyant idealism, an eager young show-pony: the member for Cornwall, the twenty-six-year-old Sir William Molesworth. He was a “Philosophic Radical,” a follower of Bentham and Hobbes (whose collected works he would turn to editing in 1839), and a staunch Abolitionist.

  The committee heard twenty-three witnesses, most of whom, like the Scottish clergyman and politician John Dunmore Lang, an untiring promoter of free Protestant emigration to Australia, were already well-known foes of transportation. Others, like James Mudie, were so fiercely bigoted against convicts that their views on colonial morality were untrustworthy. Even Bishop Ullathorne had an ulterior motive in expounding on the horrors of atheism and sodomy Down Under, as he wanted to expand the power of the Catholic mission in Australia. James Macarthur, fourth son of fierce old John, who gave extensive evidence to the committee, thought the convict labor that had raised his family to immense wealth at Camden would no longer be needed if the Crown permitted the colony to get coolie labor from Asia and Crown-subsidized free emigrants from Britain.

  Some of their evidence remains useful to the historian, for most of the witnesses were telling the truth as they saw it; but the effect was still tendentious, because it was not the whole truth. The committee was out to portray Australia as a colony plagued by a rising crime rate and crippled by its dependence on criminal slavery. It wanted to set the stage for the policy of controlled emigration set forth by Molesworth’s intellectual mentor, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, whereby Crown lands in Australia would be sold to well-screened young emigrants at a “sufficient” or high price so that mere ex-convict laborers could not easily acquire land they could not use. “It is difficult,” Molesworth noted,

  to conceive how any man … merely having the common feelings of morality, with the ordinary dislike of crime, could be tempted, by any prospect of pecuniary gain, to emigrate, with his wife and family, to one of these colonies, after a picture has been presented to his mind of what would be his probable lot. To dwell in Sydney … would be much the same as inhabiting the lowest purlieus of St. Giles’s, where drunkenness and shameless profligacy are not more apparent than in the capital of Australia … [E]very kind and gentle feeling of human nature is constantly outraged by the perpetual spectacle of punishment and misery—by the frequent infliction of the lash—by the gangs of slaves in irons—by the horrid details of the penal settlements; till the heart of the immigrant is gradually deadened to the sufferings of others, and he becomes at last as cruel as the other gaolers of these vast prisons … [T]he whole system of transportation violates the feelings of the adult, barbarizes the habits, and demoralizes the principles of the rising generation; and the result is, to use the expression of a public newspaper, “Sodom and Gomorrah.”16

  Stirring stuff, and meant to be; but it ignored the facts that scores of thousands of emancipated convicts had gone on to build happy, productive and law-abiding lives for themselves and their children in Australia, that by no means all the “respectables” were opportunistic slave drivers, and that the place was not entirely a sink of atheism and inherited propensities to crime. Bishop Ullathorne summed up the committee’s bias—without perhaps realizing the implications of his story—when he described a private call he made on the young chairman at home in London. “I went to his house, and was amused to find him in a dandy silk dressing-gown, covered with flowers like a garden, and tied with a silk cord with flowing tassels. He had my pamphlet before him, and tried to coach me as to the best way of giving evidence.” [Italics added.]17

  The committee’s basic charge against the assignment system was its randomness as a “strange lottery,” ranging between “extremes of comfort [sic] and misery,” in which a swarm of unpredictable variants—the character, temper and security of the master, the kind of work, the site—had, as Governor Bourke put it, “an unmeasurable influence over [the convict’s] condition, both physical and mental, which no regulations whatever can anticipate.”18 What deterred crime, the committee argued, was not the fate of the convict in Australia but the perception of his fate among English criminals:

  Most persons in this country … are ignorant of the real amount of suffering inflicted on a transported felon, and underrate [its] severity.… On their arrival at the antipodes, they discover that they have been grievously deceived by the accounts transmitted to them, and that their condition is a far more painful one than they expected. For those convicts who write to their friends … are generally persons who have been fortunate in the lottery of punishment, and truly describe their lot in flattering terms; those … who really experience the evils of Transportation, and are haunted with “a continual sense of degradation,” are seldom inclined to narrate their sufferings except when they have powerful friends from whom they may expect assistance.19

  The main characteristics of transportation, the committee acerbically put it, were “inefficiency in deterring from crime, and remarkable efficiency … in still further corrupting those who undergo the punishment.” Efficiency for evil and futility for good “are inherent in the system,” which could never be improved. What of its economic benefits to the colony? The committee took a pessimistic view of these, too. Due to free convict labor, it noted, “a larger amount of wealth has been accumulated in a shorter space of time than perhaps in any other community of the same size in the world.” But it was an artificial prosperity, not likely to continue. “New South Wales is suffering excessively from a dearth of labourers. The flocks of sheep are double the size they ought to be; a vast number perish for want of care; the complaints of the colonists on this subject are loud arid universal.” Ten thousand laborers were needed in New South Wales but only three thousand convicts were likely to arrive there in 1838, barely enough to replace those lost to the labor force by death, illness or tickets-of-leave. Hence, there had to be another source of labor. The committee rejected Macarthur’s idea of importing Asian coolies; that smacked of American slavery.

  Hence, the only course was free emigration, underwritten by the sale of Crown land in Australia as proposed by Wakefield. That, too, demanded the end of the System, for “Transportation has a tendency to counteract the moral benefits of emigration, while … emigration tends to deprive Transportation of its terrors.” But with labor short, land cheap and wages high in New South Wales, it was too easy for free laborers to become small independent farmers—which they wanted to do for more than ordinary reasons, since “the employment of convicts as slaves has … a tendency to bring labour into disrepute.” So when transportation was abolished, the price of Crown land, then as low as 5 s. an acre, had to go up to at least £1, so that laborers would keep laboring.20

  It was not these reflections, however, that maddened the colonists, but the report’s strictures on their morals. Even before the full text reached Australia, word had leaked back of what some of the witnesses, especially Ullathorne, had said; it provoked much unease, and in May 1838 more than five hundred respectable citizens petitioned the Legislative Council of New South Wales to do something to counteract the talk about Sodom, Gomorrah and the rising crime rate. In July the council issued a lengthy resolution pointing out that “the character of this Colony … has unjustly suffered by the misrepresentations” of Molesworth, Russell and their parliamentary colleagues; that the free emigrants and the rising generation of native-born Australians “constitute a body of Colonists who, in the exercise of the social and moral relations of life … impress a character of respectability on the colony at large”; that many convicts were in fact reformed by assignment amid the “solitude and privations” of the outback; and that assignment generated the wealth that enabled settlers to buy Crown lands and so produce the government income to underwrite immigration, so that “the continuance of Immigration … must necessarily depend on the continuance of the Assignment of Convicts.”21

  The colonists feared, with reason, that b
y the time the Whigs had finished libelling their morals, nobody would want to come to Australia anyway and the colony would have neither convict nor free labor. To them, the report was a stunning parental rejection. They had posited their social self-esteem on a rigid class barrier between themselves and the convicts. Even the Currency had done this, burying their convict origins within a generation or two. Now, the report claimed that crime was increasing faster than population and referred to a “progressive demoralization both of the bond and of the free inhabitants”; clearly, in English eyes, there was little to choose between them. No wonder that the Exclusives—who had always insisted that the offspring of convicts bore a hereditary stain which had not touched their own lineage—reproached Mother England in bewildered denials and Oedipal tantrums and that they resolved to tighten the class line between convicts and “respectables” in New South Wales. Meanwhile, the Sydney press, which until 1838 had kept up a drumfire of scare stories about a growing crime wave in New South Wales, suddenly changed its tune; the very idea of a crime wave became, in local Tory eyes, a “monstrous caricature” sketched by English Whigs.22

  The report had placed the colonists in exactly the double bind that defines a colonial mentality. Many of them wanted to be more English than the English; they needed the approval of the implacable parent. Instead, Molesworth gave them pages of condescending Whiggery-and-priggery about their ineradicable stain.

  Once the fuss over the Molesworth Report had died down, however, the end of transportation and assignment in New South Wales came smoothly, without much political or economic strain. Even before the report hit the colony, the instructions from Downing Street were to wind down assignment and “coerce” convicts in government labor gangs instead. In October 1838, Bourke’s successor, Governor Sir George Gipps, who had taken over a few months before, proscribed the assignments of convicts “for domestic service, or for the purposes of Luxury and in Towns,” although they still did essential work on pastoral stations.23