The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Maconochie’s humanity also showed in his treatment of men so broken by cruelty and neurosis that they were thought beyond help. Perhaps the most striking case was that of Charles Anderson, a mentally impaired convict who had undergone years of misery in Sydney as the butt of every colonial sadist.47 An orphan, Anderson had passed from the workhouse into the navy at the age of nine. On active service, he was wounded in the head and suffered irreversible brain damage; after a drink or two, especially when under stress, he turned violent and hostile. During such a bout on shore leave, Anderson smashed some shop windows and was arrested for burglary. Tried and convicted, he was sentenced to seven years in Australia; he was then eighteen. Anderson was so crazed with resentment when he landed in Sydney that the penal authorities isolated him on Goat Island, a rock in Sydney Harbor. Over the next few years he escaped and swam for shore three times, and received a total of some 1,500 lashes for such “offenses” as “looking round from his work, or at a steamer in the river, etc.” He spent two years tethered to a chain on the rock, naked and sun-blackened. His only shelter was a coffin-shaped cavity hewn out of the sandstone; at night he would lie down in it and the warders would bolt a wooden lid, pierced with air holes, over him till morning. His food was put on the rock and pushed at him with a pole, like a wild beast’s rations. Prisoners were forbidden to speak to him, on pain of flogging. The welts and gouges torn in his back by the cat never healed and were infested with maggots. He stank of putrefaction and Sydney colonists found it amusing to row up to his rock, pitch crusts and offal at him, and watch him eat. Eventually Governor Bourke, ashamed by the light this public spectacle cast on the people of Sydney, had Anderson removed to the lime-kilns of Port Macquarie. He escaped again and joined a black tribe; was recaptured and savagely flogged; and killed an overseer, hoping to be hanged. The authorities sent him to Norfolk Island instead, and he was still there—a man of twenty-four, looking twenty years older, relentlessly persecuted by the Old Hands—when Maconochie took command.

  His therapy for Anderson was simple: he gave the poor, crazed man some responsibilities by putting him in charge of some half-wild bullocks, and freed him from the taunts of the Old Hands by letting him stay with them out of range of the barracks every day. He hoped, rather fancifully, that “bovine” characteristics would rub off on Anderson, making him more tractable. But the man did tame the bullocks, and found himself—for the first time since leaving England—congratulated and spoken kindly to. Then Maconochie moved him up to a new job, managing the signal station on top of Mount Pitt, which he did “with scrupulous care.” Anderson could never be fully rehabilitated—his earlier brain damage was too severe for that—but when Governor Gipps visited Norfolk Island in 1843, he recorded his amazement on seeing the former wild beast of Goat Island bustling about in a sailor’s uniform, open and frank in demeanor, returned to his human condition. This was the most striking success, but not the only one, of Maconochie’s occupational therapy, an idea unheard-of in the English penal system until then.

  A man of such radical views was bound to make enemies wherever he went, and his system was sure to be attacked.* The first complaint from a minor official on Norfolk Island was, of all things, that he had become a tyrant, applying his system in the teeth of regulations. In August 1842, Governor Gipps forwarded to London a letter from a “demi-official,” Maconochie’s commissariat officer, J. W. Smith. It claimed that

  Captain Maconochie fancies himself supreme.… He has contended for absolute Power … [A] most radical Change is wanted here immediately. The Place bears no more Resemblance to what a Penal settlement should be than a Playhouse does to a Church. The Public works are neglected for want of mere Labour; the Roads which were made with so much Pains [sic] are falling into Decay;… the Crops are wholly insufficient to supply the Establishment. Idleness and Insubordination prevail to a shameful extent.48

  Both the shortage of food and decline of labor came from events beyond Maconochie’s control. In 1841 blight struck the staple crops on Norfolk Island. They failed, and hunger lowered the prisoners’ resistance to disease. Dysentery swept the island, and killed off a number of the “New Hands” from England. Smith mentioned none of this.

  There were also rumors, impossible to quash from Norfolk Island, of escapes and near-rebellions facilitated by the lenient new system. All were untrue, but they became arguments against Maconochie. Once in 1842, a group of twelve convicts (all twice-convicted Old Hands) seized the brig Governor Phillip at sea off Norfolk Island and held her for half an hour before the military guard rallied, killing five of them and capturing the rest. But since this piracy happened several miles offshore, it could only be blamed—as Gipps was prompt to recognize—on the negligence of the vessel’s captain and guards, not on Maconochie’s Mark System.

  It was hard for Governor Gipps to formulate a policy for Norfolk Island and make it stick. Lord Russell had told him to stop sending twice-convicted criminals there from New South Wales and to keep the island solely as a prison for new offenders, fresh from England, subject to Maconochie’s system. All very well, but where was he to put the 250 or so recidivists who, each year, were condemned to second sentences and would normally have been sent to Norfolk Island? Russell had airily suggested putting them on Goat Island in Sydney Harbor. Gipps had to point out that Goat Island was less than a mile from Sydney Cove and now held the military magazine; putting twice-sentenced convicts on this (literal) powder-keg “excited much apprehension among the colonists.” Gipps devised a new holding-pen for them, on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbor north of Balmain, “surrounded by deep water and under the very eye of Authority.” It was solid rock, and could supply Sydney with building stones as the Sing Sing quarries did New York. Among the structures Gipps had the “hard cases” build there were twenty bottle-shaped wheat silos, hewn into the living sandstone.49

  But Cockatoo Island could not hold more than four-fifths of the recidivists. Where to put the rest? Russell had told Gipps to send no more second offenders to Norfolk, but the law (3 William IV, c.3) forbade him to send them anywhere else. Only an act of the New South Wales Legislative Council could change that. But the Legislative Council, Gipps well knew, would not allow any Old Hands back to contaminate New South Wales. It would only send them to Van Diemen’s Land—where Lieutenant-Governor Franklin did not want them either and would not permit them to land. And unless the twelve hundred Old Hands could be removed from Norfolk Island and put somewhere, there was little prospect that Maconochie’s new system would get its fair trial. But was it working at all? Or should it simply be abandoned? On this point, Gipps felt torn between the pressures of the colonists and his own sympathies for Maconochie.50

  Dutifully, Gipps kept the Colonial Office posted on all the main criticisms of Maconochie and his system. In 1840 Russell had empowered him to cancel Maconochie’s appointment “whenever the public good might … require such an exertion of authority.” By mid-1842, he felt fairly secure he ought to do so. He confessed the difficulty of getting at the truth, between the rancor of Maconochie’s critics and the commandant’s own lofty and long-winded certainties. Some good, Gipps agreed, had come out of the new system. There was less murder and violence among the prisoners, and Maconochie’s acts of leniency did awaken “the good feeling implanted in them by nature.” Punishment was rare, task work light, the New Hands “idle and listless,” the Old Hands “uneasy and scheming.” Maconochie had given out too many tickets-of-leave, so that the amount of work done for the government had fallen—convicts were always scurrying off to tend their vegetable-gardens. The validity of these tickets-of-leave was restricted to Norfolk Island, which raised another problem: If and when their holders were transferred to Van Diemen’s Land, they could not keep their tickets. Gipps doubted if the currencies of punishment could be exchanged between Van Diemen’s Land and Norfolk Island. So he advised the secretary of state for the colonies, Lord Stanley, that unless he received orders to the contrary by March 1843, he would mo
ve all the Norfolk Island New Hands down to Van Diemen’s Land and declare Maconochie’s experiment cancelled. “The best thing to do with Norfolk Island,” Gipps concluded, encompassing the end of the Mark System with a gloomy stroke of the nib, “will be to let it revert to what it was, prior to the year 1840.”51

  But Gipps was a fair-minded man, and the idea of erasing Maconochie’s project on the mere word of the man’s enemies gnawed at his conscience. Thus, just before the deadline of March 1843, he decided to visit Norfolk Island—without warning its commandant. He arrived there on the Hazard in the Pacific autumn of that year, and on landing he was agreeably surprised. Far from being an anarchic holiday-camp for criminal loafers, as the critics had suggested, the place semed perfectly in order, the convicts “respectful and quiet.” Digging deeper, he privately interrogated “every person having any charge or authority, however small” in the absence of Maconochie, taking notes and keeping the answers from the commandant. During his six-day visit, he “minutely inspected” every building of any significance on the island and spoke to many convicts.52

  All his findings pointed to one conclusion: Maconochie’s critics were mostly wrong, and the new system, though imperfect, was in some respects working better than the old. The elimination of disease, the main source of administrative troubles, lay outside the reach of any commandant; among the New Hands at the Longridge settlement, those sent directly from England to Norfolk Island as Maconochie’s guinea pigs in 1840, one in nine (11 percent) had died of dysentery in the past three years. Most of the survivors seemed listless, less healthy than the Old Hands, and (understandably) obsessed with the hope of being retransported to Van Diemen’s Land—anything would be better than death by the flux. “When I explained to them,” Gipps reported,

  that, owing to the Scarcity of Employment in Van Diemen’s Land, their Condition would probably not be improved by being removed from it, they replied “Perhaps not”, but that … they wished to get away from the Place where they had seen so many of their Comrades die; that they would rather go to New South Wales than to Van Diemen’s Land, but that they would go anywhere rather than remain on Norfolk Island.53

  That seemed to dispose of the charge of mollycoddling. However, Gipps could not “pronounce any decided Opinion” on the all-important question of whether the New Hands, after three years of Maconochean treatment, would be more likely to behave better when off Norfolk Island than “an equal number of men taken promiscuously from the Convict Population of New South Wales.” The convicts seemed to take a fairly opportunistic view of the Mark System; they thought accumulating marks would “be of little Avail to them” except by getting them, perhaps, off the island sooner. Most of the New Hands, 509 out of 593, had accumulated the 6,000 to 8,000 marks needed for a ticket-of-leave; many had racked up thousands of marks beyond that, theoretically redeemable on release at a penny a mark in cash, and Gipps doubted whether the government would ever foot this bill, running (in the case of one unusually virtuous convict, a millwright named Elliott) as high as £37 10s.

  Their morale was fair, no more. They had not suffered from “the chance of that Severity”

  which often brutalizes a Man in New South Wales, where a Convict’s life is one of extreme chances, yet they have become in Norfolk Island familiarized with one detestable Crime, before unknown to them, and addicted (especially of late) to one very demoralizing vice: the Vice is that of Gambling,—the Crime, the one most repugnant to Human Nature.54

  The New Hands, Gipps thought, gambled more than the Old (although this seems unlikely, it was “admitted by all persons on the Island”). He found sodomy to be widespread: Between 5 percent and 12 percent of the New Hands practiced it (this Maconochie denied); it was “said to prevail almost exclusively among the Prisoners of English birth.… [T]he Irish are (to their honour) generally acknowledged to be untainted with it.”

  Gipps’s objection was that the “Social System” had not really been tried. Maconochie’s “sanguine and hasty” enthusiasm about the prisoners’ reform, the governor crushingly remarked, had distracted him from “the sterner parts of his own System, which are nevertheless the Foundation of the Whole”:

  Nothing is more clearly laid down by Captain Maconochie than that Punishment should precede Probation,—that before Prisoners under his System should be distributed into social Parties on the principle of mutual responsibility, they should go through a Period of severe, though not vindictive, Punishment. But … he entered at once on the Second Part of his own System, overlooking altogether the first Stage of it; and this was the more remarkable, as it was no less contrary to the express Directions of Her Majesty’s Government, than contrary to his own System.55

  Gipps believed that Maconochie’s “marks” had become inflated currency through his goodwill. He had handed them out too lavishly. Some prisoners had worked “like tigers” to accumulate the number of marks that would make them free—“but when after they had acquired their full Number of Marks, and they found that they nevertheless were not removed from the Island, the Stimulus no longer existed, and Marks gradually came … to be considered valueless.” Disappointment and cynicism followed.56

  The “Experimental Prisoners,” then, had not done so well under the new system. But Gipps wrote with “almost unqualified Approbation” of its effects on the Old Hands: “These men had suffered, and suffered severely.… [T]heir minds had consequently been brought to a State in which the Manifestation of Kindness on the Part of their Ruler was likely to make the best Impression on them.” The changes had been “Great and merciful,” and had only good results. The Old Hands worked twice as hard as the new; they were cleaner, healthier, had better morale, and had responded to the religious training Maconochie offered: “I cannot speak but in commendation of them, and bear witness to the humanizing effect which [Chapel] seems to be producing.” Their morale, Gipps thought, was less due to the diminished use of irons and the lash than to many small mercies, “the importance of which can hardly be estimated by anyone who has not been on the Island.” They could rove about, fish and swim in the sea, sleep out of barracks sometimes, grow food in their own garden plots, and even carry knives.

  This “mildness,” Gipps felt, was justified by the fundamental misery of being on this distant island,

  so entirely cut off from Society, or even from a View or a Glimpse of Society, and more especially from the Society of Women. The yearning of their Hearts towards Society is indescribable; it constitutes their torment; it is a punishment greater than the Lash, or any other that Man can inflict on them.… In Assignment a Man is a Slave, but he is still a slave in Society.57

  Here, perhaps without altogether realizing it, Gipps answered his own objection to Maconochie’s way of running the island—that the prisoners were not given a taste of punishment first. Maconochie clarified this some years later:

  It may be said that I … overlooked, or even sacrificed, the great object—that of punishment … [but] I carried into effect the full letter and spirit of the law, and merely did not indulge in excesses beyond it. Every man’s sentence was to imprisonment and hard labour; the island was his prison; and each was required to do his full daily Government task before bestowing time on either his garden or education. What I really did spare was the unnecessary humiliation.58

  Gipps was against the Mark System being used “indiscriminately” among the Old Hands, because even if they won enough marks to expiate their second or “colonial” conviction in Norfolk Island and went back to the mainland, they would still have to serve out their first sentence in the usual way in New South Wales. He feared the social impact on New South Wales of 876 felons coming en masse from Norfolk Island. “I cannot contemplate the Possibility of their return without alarm; by the Colonists generally I am certain it would be viewed with Terror.”

  But the prison population was falling so fast that Gipps doubted whether Norfolk Island could keep supporting itself. No more twice-convicted men had been sent there from New
South Wales since 1840; because Old Hands were being transferred to Van Diemen’s Land, their number on Norfolk Island had dropped from 1,278 to 876 in three years; and the “Experimental Prisoners” would also be going to Van Diemen’s Land. Thus, if a large group of new prisoners did not go to Norfolk soon, Maconochie would not have the labor force “to maintain the cultivation of it, and to keep in repair the numerous buildings.”59

  So what would Her Majesty’s Government do with Norfolk Island? “The Decision … is of pressing Importance.” Clearly, if it remained a penal island, there should only be one system of management on it, not the two that Maconochie had been ordered to maintain. Maconochie still thought Norfolk Island “ill-adapted” to his system and, Gipps added, “I must admit, as I ever have done, that if his System is to be tried it … should be tried in a Locality which he approves.” Moreover, “I feel it right to say that I should regret to see the Experience wholly thrown away … [H]e fully admits that in the Distribution of Marks (the great Engine of his System) he has hitherto been too lavish.”60

  So Maconochie had received at least a guarded vindication from Gipps. The cost of running the island, Gipps saw, was not—as Maconochie’s fiercest critics had put about—the result of some inherent extravagance, but simply due to the failure or success of crops. Such variations were beyond the control of any commandant.61

  Gipps wrote his long report, and dispatched it to Lord Stanley on April Fool’s Day, 1843. Maconochie had every reason to hope that now, at last, the government would ignore his critics and give full backing to his system. What happened was the exact reverse. Powerful lobbying from the Arthur Faction throughout 1842 had convinced Downing Street that Franklin was a disaster and Maconochie worse. In any case, the Colonial Office had believed Gipps’s earlier criticism of Maconochie, and it was too late for the report to change Stanley’s decision: to recall Maconochie. The Colonial Office was under growing pressure from the Treasury to cut the expenses of the transportation system. Sir James Stephen, the under secretary for the colonies, felt no commitment to Maconochie’s theories of penal reform. It was all unimportant stuff, happening on the “remote, anomalous” dark side of the world. Maconochie had no defenders in the Colonial Office, and Lord Russell’s curiosity about his ideas had waned in the six years since his reports had helped the Molesworth Committee. He could be dropped to placate the Treasury, and he was. On April 29, 1843, before the ship carrying Gipps’s report had even crossed the equator, Stanley sent a dispatch ordering the end of the Mark System and the recall of Maconochie. It was carefully worded so as not to cast too black a shadow on his career. It gave Maconochie “the fullest credit” for his exertions and probity. “I gladly acknowledge,” Stanley wrote with icy unction, “that his efforts appear to have been rewarded by the decline of crimes of violence and outrage, and by the growth of humane and kindly feelings in the minds of the persons under his care.” It was the coup de grace.62