The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Such institutions were jam-packed, so all the lieutenant-governor could do to house the newly arriving women convicts was rent secure buildings in Hobart, or else detain the ship they came on and keep them on board “until you shall be able to effect more permanent arrangements.” The long-term plan, on which Franklin was to start at once, was to put up a women’s penitentiary for at least four hundred prisoners within twenty miles of Hobart, whose construction the Home Government would pay for. Here, every female prisoner would spend at least six months on arrival and then receive a probation pass. The penitentiary was not built.

  Stanley’s Probation System looked impressively machine-like and rational on paper, but it proved a cruel and wretched failure because it ignored both the economic facts of Van Diemen’s Land and the quality of its administrators. To succeed, it needed at least a prosperous economy and a strong cooperation between the Government House and the settlers. Neither existed in the last years of Franklin’s governorship. But Stanley, in his anxiety to have no one sully his plan, chose as Franklin’s successor a person so devoid of initiative that he hardly cast a shadow.

  Sir John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot (1783–1847) was a Warwickshire baronet of sixty, whom scarcely anyone in public life except Stanley had even heard of; and Stanley, his patron, was indiscreet enough to call him (though not in public) “a muddle-brained blockhead.” Until his appointment in August 1843, Eardley-Wilmot had not devoted a moment’s thought to the colonies in general or to Van Diemen’s Land in particular. His qualifications were three: His duties as a county magistrate had given him an amateurish, paternal interest in prison reform and juvenile offenders;7 having been to Oxford with Stanley, and having joined Stanley’s embryonic third party on quitting the Whigs, he had a place on the Old Boy network; and he was dull enough not to be disloyal. To back him up, Stanley appointed as comptroller-general of convicts a leftover from Arthur’s day, the harsh and choleric Captain Matthew Forster. Such was the team that Stanley relied on to run the penal system and to keep at bay the colonists of Van Diemen’s Land, irate at being denied both assigned labor and self-government.

  Under such conditions, the angel Gabriel himself would have been an unpopular lieutenant-governor. When the “battered old beau” (as one Hobart lady described Eardley-Wilmot on first glimpse) appeared with his three sons Augustus, Charles and Robert, all of whom promptly got public offices in Van Diemen’s Land, no one took to the new proconsul.

  He could not persuade the settlers that Whitehall knew or cared what it was doing to their economy. The trade depression that had begun in Van Diemen’s Land in 1841 was still worsening. One black day in 1843, Eardley-Wilmot learned that there was only £800 left in his treasury, and he had to borrow £20,000 from banks and the military chest to pay the wages of pass-holders in government service. Every year the government revenues of Van Diemen’s Land fell by £20,000, and Eardley-Wilmot had to keep borrowing “in the style of a man continuing to sign checks before his bank manager caught up with him.”8 Across the Bass Strait, in New South Wales and the Port Phillip region, vast, cheap and fertile acreage beckoned the settler. In Van Diemen’s Land, grazing land was expensive, and the best of it was already taken up; so the government’s revenue from the sale of Crown land dwindled to almost nothing.

  As with the public sector, so with the private. By 1844, it was cheaper to import cattle from the mainland than to buy locally raised animals. Sydney imported wheat from Valparaiso but charged a duty on grain coming from the “Tainted Isle,” Van Diemen’s Land. Men could not sell their farms, for there were no buyers; they could not hire labor, for they had no money. The farmers were even worse placed than the government to absorb the huge labor surplus that Stanley’s Probation System had created. At the low point of Eardley-Wilmot’s office the island had 16,000 unemployed prisoners and ex-convicts stranded in its collapsed economy—7,000 holders of probation passes, 5,000 ticket-of-leave men, and 4,000 of the conditionally pardoned.

  Meanwhile, the flow of immigrants had dried up. In 1842, 2,446 emigrants had landed in Van Diemen’s Land; the next year there were 26, and in 1844 exactly one emigrant arrived. (In 1843–44, 3,618 people had emigrated from England to New South Wales.) In Launceston alone, 264 houses stood empty, abandoned by their owners, who had fled to the mainland to begin their lives again. In the first six months of 1845, 1,628 settlers left Van Diemen’s Land, a loss of some 5 percent of its free population.9

  There was also a great deal of alarm about fugitives from the probation gangs, who were said to be roaming the roads and valleys of Van Diemen’s Land unchecked, plundering at will, spreading misery and vice like a contagion everywhere. Some of them were tattooed like South Sea Island chiefs and would have stood out in “respectable” company. The description on a “wanted” poster of one such absconder, Charles Stagg, a twenty-three-year-old laborer from Norwich who ran from the Seven-Mile Creek probation station in March 1843, enumerates his tattoos, which included the initials of most of his family as well as his past sweethearts:

  Mary Stagg, Thomas Stagg, crucifix, 5 dots, shoe, crucifix, WS, man with stick, HK, dog, Gwynson, X Mary Robinson, Liberty, bracelet on right arm, Eliza Smith, O Sun and blue marks and rings all over right hand; man and woman, two men fighting, TS WS LS LHHS 1842, anchor, MSCS on left arm, blue dots and rings on fingers of left hand, H Stagg, William, crucifix, sun and moon on breast, ABCDEFGH on left leg, large scar on upper right arm.10

  It would seem, however, that the tales of marauding gangs were somewhat exaggerated, for the poster listed some 465 convicts at large, cumulative since 1831. Many of these must long since have died, escaped on sealing boats or made their way across the Bass Strait to the mainland.

  A further source of irritation was that Eardley-Wilmot had been ordered to go after free settlers for the arrears on their quit-rents. These small sums had mounted up, having remained unpaid for years on land granted in Arthur’s time or earlier; Stanley felt that collection of these taxes could offset the drop in Crown land sales. The settlers bridled at that, and even worse was the demand for taxes to carry the cost of both the judiciary and the police. The Van Diemen’s Land police force was huge in ratio to the free population. The costs of the police, the judiciary and the maintenance of paupers came to £52,437 a year, or nearly a pound a head for every man, woman and child, free and bond, in Van Diemen’s Land.11

  The colony was sliding into bankruptcy. Eardley-Wilmot bore all the blame for this and was even more execrated than Arthur. Yet the sad fact was that he sympathized with the plight of the settlers and took their side in his dispatches to Whitehall, much to Lord Stanley’s annoyance. He urged Stanley to drop the minimum price of Crown land below £1 an acre, as an inducement to new settlers; and he tried to get credit to use the mass paid labor of otherwise unemployable pass-holders on public works, to be underwritten by Britain but paid for, in time, by tolls and service charges. He also pressed the Treasury to pay the cost of the jail and police system; eventually, in early 1846, it agreed to pay two-thirds.

  This gesture came too late to appease the settlers. Between October and November 1845, Eardley-Wilmot faced a political crisis in his Legislative Council. The Legislative Council of Van Diemen’s Land was not an elected body, and, since Arthur’s day, it had usually been content to act as a rubber stamp. It consisted of the lieutenant-governor, six government officials and eight non-official members drawn from the ranks of free citizens, usually opulent ones. Six of the latter—the “Patriotic Six,” as their supporters called them—resigned over the police-funds issue and left the council without a quorum. They claimed they had been refused information on police budgets and convict administration, and that when they pressed for it Eardley-Wilmot and the official members had called them “factious” and “disloyal.” Although Eardley-Wilmot managed to replace the six, he could not keep a lid on the demands for representative government and the end of transportation, which by now had fused into the single obsessive issue of political life in
Van Diemen’s Land.

  But Whitehall would not listen. All Eardley-Wilmot could show after two years of pleas was a lengthy rebuke from Stanley, complaining that he had not filed proper reports on the working of the Probation System. By then, Van Diemen’s Land boasted sixteen probation stations: four (mainly for logging and coal-mining) on Tasman’s Peninsula, five for agriculture on the coast of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, one to build the female penitentiary at Oyster Bay, two on Maria Island, one on the east coast and three, whose gangers labored to build roads and bridges, in the interior of the island. There were eight hiring depots from which the free settlers could recruit pass-holders, but traffic through them was sluggish. All this presented a lot of ground for reports to cover. Eardley-Wilmot did not take to scrambling down the coal mines or through the forests of Tasman’s Peninsula to see how well the probation gangs were shedding their vices by splitting shingles and felling 150-foot eucalypts, and so he was often content to scrawl mere covering-notes on the detailed statistical reports of his comptroller-general of convicts, Forster. But Stanley’s complaints typified his imperial and solipsistic view of the antipodes. To him, Van Diemen’s Land was not a complex little society with severe economic problems; it was more abstract—a receptacle, a social void whose sole purpose was to swallow criminals. He did not want to hear that “his” convicts could not be fully employed in “his” colony. Realizing that the Probation System was about to fail, and that he might be blamed for it, Lord Stanley got ready to fling Sir Eardley-Wilmot to the Tasmanian Devils. He would make sure that the chaos in Van Diemen’s Land was seen not as his system’s fault but as the proconsul’s.12

  Stanley gave the draft of his strongly critical dispatch to the government printer, who published it for the House of Commons in February 1846. The first Eardley-Wilmot saw of it was in print. He was aghast at Stanley’s maneuver, which denied him the chance to have his letters of rebuttal printed along with the Colonial Office’s criticisms and pilloried him before government and press as incompetent, lazy and vague. Eardley-Wilmot dug in.

  The Colonial Office was getting set to dismiss him when, in 1845, Lord Stanley quit the Colonial Office for a larger political sphere. He was replaced by the thirty-six-year-old junior minister William Ewart Gladstone. Gladstone depended for his knowledge of Australian matters on the permanent under secretary to the Colonial Office, one of the preeminent civil servants of the nineteenth century (and the grandfather of Virginia Woolf), Sir James Stephen. Stephen felt Britain had been wrong in overloading Van Diemen’s Land with convicts, and he was very skeptical of Stanley’s Probation System. But he was also sure of Eardley-Wilmot’s incompetence and he took up the issue which, he knew, would turn the morally priggish Gladstone against the foundering lieutenant-governor.

  Ever since the Probation System had been installed, lobbyists had been harping on a subject peculiarly repugnant to the Victorian sense of public morality: that, thanks to those isolated bush gangs of toiling, degenerate men, Van Diemen’s Land was now a hotbed of sodomy. Letters and witnesses came across the oceans to Whitehall, testifying to the collapse of all moral values in the stained island. They made Van Diemen’s Land under Eardley-Wilmot sound infinitely worse than Capri under Tiberius.

  Francis Russell Nixon, Bishop of Van Diemen’s Land, carried the most weight among them. The epidemic of unnatural crime, he assured Lord Grey, “unless sternly arrested in its growth, must not only ensure the moral degradation of the colony, but draw down divine vengeance upon it.” Nixon believed that all the convicts, without exception, left the probation gangs worse than they entered them. He quoted letters to him from despairing gang chaplains. “I cannot depict the horrors committed here daily by miserable men, who know better, but who cannot escape from their wretched condition.” Parties of convicts slunk off together into the bush to gratify their lusts. In the “tench” or penitentiary (in fact, an ordinary prisoners’ barracks) in Hobart Town, where twelve hundred were kept, “The most disgusting crimes that ever stained the character of man are perpetrated … and without the least possible way of preventing it.” In the coal mines near Port Arthur, two men had raped a boy convict, “an offence hitherto, I believe, unheard-of in a Christian country.” They hanged for it, but the medical officer at the mines, Dr. Motherwell, found twenty men “labouring under disease from unnatural crimes.” The spread of rectal gonorrhea, Bishop Nixon warned, was “a special scourge” from God, “a mark of his increased wrath, for the yet greater abomination.”13

  Nor was the evil confined to men. The Female Factory at the Cascades in Hobart swarmed with lesbians. In August 1841, Franklin had set up a committee of inquiry to review the facilities for discipline of female prisoners in this dank, miserable and overcrowded building, along with its twin institution in Launceston. Its semi-confidential report appeared in February 1843, with its descriptions of women convicts in the “very act of exciting each other’s passions—on the Lord’s Day in the House of God—and at the very time divine service was performing.”14 By then the local press was printing stories about the “fiendish fondness” of Sapphic practices in the factories, and in November 1843 Eardley-Wilmot sent a secret dispatch of his own to London on this subject. He told Stanley that women in the Female Factories “have their Fancy-women, or lovers, to whom they are attached with quite as much ardour as they would be to the other sex, and practice onanism to the greatest extent.”15

  At least one convict, the Chartist exile John Frost (and he can hardly have been alone in his opinion), believed that the British Government maintained the probation gangs in all their turpitude in order to crush the spirit of class resistance. “The authorities of Van Diemen’s Land were indifferent to the commission of this great offence,” he told a shocked English audience some years after his release. “Smoking was deemed a greater offence than that of Gomorrah, and published with greater severity.”16

  Eardley-Wilmot, far away in Hobart Town, protested that although the vice denoted by asterisks in the Parliamentary Papers certainly existed in Van Diemen’s Land, one found it in the army and navy, too, and in all “large assemblies of the male sex.” In vain, he relayed to Stanley the opinions of the medical officers on the probation and hiring stations, as diligently collected by his comptroller-general. They showed only seventy cases of the sexual disease in a gang population of 10,000 men. Seven in one thousand, he agreed, were too many, but even so, the scare-stories had largely been made up by his critics to discredit the Probation System.17

  None of this appeased the local press, the clergy, the settlers or the Colonial Office. In July 1846, twenty-five Van Diemen’s Land clergymen (most of its Anglican establishment) signed a petition to Grey begging for the end of the Probation System, as an incubator of homosexuality.18 In London, embarrassing stories had been current in the press for some time. “Van Diemen’s Land is in a bad state,” wrote an anonymous pen in the London Naval and Military Gazette in October 1845. “Crimes the most horrible are of daily occurrence. All the females have left the bush and have taken refuge in the towns, and … are subject to every kind of insult. Sir Eardley-Wilmot sets a bad example himself. No people of any standing will now enter Government House except on business. No ladies can.” Satires and moral versicles made their clumping appearance:

  Shall fathers weep and mourn,

  To see a lovely son

  Debas’d, demoraliz’d, deform’d

  By Britain’s filth and scum?

  Shall mothers heave the sigh,

  To see a daughter fair

  Debauch’d and sunk in infamy

  By those imported here?

  Shall Tasman’s Isle so fam’d,

  So lovely and so fair,

  From other nations be estrang’d—

  The name of Sodom bear?

  Till Nature’s GOD, provok’d,

  Stretch forth His mighty arm;

  And in relentless fury, pour

  His righteous judgments down.19

  It was not exact
ly—the anonymous tongues now began to whisper—that the man in Government House condoned this frightful state of affairs; still less that he himself, despite the loneliness he must feel now and then in the antipodes without a wife, was touched by the hot breath of the Cities of the Plain. It was just that his behavior gave rise to idle rumors about quirks that, though doubtless innocent in themselves, clouded his office. He gave dinners in Lent, to the scandal of Bishop Nixon, who had already quarrelled With Eardley-Wilmot over the lieutenant-governor’s right to appoint religious instructors to the probation gangs. He had been seen putting his arm around girls’ shoulders on the sofa in Government House. He had flirted at a formal dinner party with Julia Sorell, the granddaughter of a leading settler and future grandmother of Aldous Huxley. Manifestly, there must be some ratio between this permissiveness at Government House and the unspeakable, furtive ecstasies of the probation gangs. Fish rot at the head.

  Gladstone’s reaction to all this was predictable. He flew into a moral rage, and at the end of April 1846 he wrote two letters of dismissal to Eardley-Wilmot. The first one was public, announcing that in view of the lieutenant-governor’s utter failure to safeguard the morals of the convicts under the Probation System, he was dismissed. The very absence of external signs of the vice of Sodom that Eardley-Wilmot had reported, Gladstone wrote with crushing illogic, showed how deep-rooted it was, how well sheltered from the light. Eardley-Wilmot was not being fired for mismanaging the transition from assignment to probation (anyone, Gladstone seemed to imply, could have failed at that) but for not displaying enough “assiduity,” “anxiety” and “prudence” in moral reform. Accordingly, Gladstone was transferring Charles La Trobe, the superintendent of Port Phillip, to Hobart to take over until a new lieutenant-governor was named.