The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Hand in Hand

  On Earth, in Hell,

  Sick or Well,

  On Sea, On Land,

  On the Square, Ever.

  Stiff or in Breath,

  Lag or Free,

  You and Me,

  In Life, in Death,

  On the Cross, never.35

  Such are the embellishments of fiction, but there is no doubt that the Ring had existed on Norfolk Island since the late 1830s and that it was very much feared. It gave the hardened and depraved, Stuart wrote,

  an absolute power, which is exerted in the most tyrannical manner over the majority, many of whom, I firmly believe, desire to conduct themselves becomingly, but have not sufficient courage to enable them to defy the threats, rendered more alarming by the almost hourly exhibition of them being carried into effect, or to resist the determined, vicious confederacy by which they are oppressed. There are no means of protecting a man who may have brought himself odium on account of good conduct, or … having given evidence against any member of the so-called “Ring.” A more miserable position than that of such a man cannot be conceived.36

  There was more, in the same vein. When Stuart finished his report to Champ, and Champ “with the deepest regret” laid it before Eardley-Wilmot, and Eardley-Wilmot called a special meeting of the Executive Council on July 1, 1846, to consider what to do about it, that was the end of Major Childs. The council voted unanimously to get rid of him at once. Against Eardley-Wilmot’s protests, they agreed to relieve Major Childs without notice, lest “matters might be brought to a crisis, and the island be subjected to all the horrors of an open mutiny.”37

  And in fact, as they sat in council on July 1, a mutiny did break out on Norfolk Island. It was a food not. The prisoners never had enough food, and what they got gave them dysentery. The wretched victuals on Norfolk Island were a permanent and galling proof of Britain’s contempt for them. In July 1846, it only took a pinprick to release an explosion of hatred.38

  July 1 was the date of the half-yearly survey of all stores and equipment. William Forster, the superintendent, was in charge of the inventory, and on June 30 he went into the lumber-yard and its cookhouse to look for kitchen gear and cookpots. He did not want to make trouble with a close search, but he thought many dishes and mess-kits were missing (the inmates cut up large vessels and tinkered them into small ones, for sale to guards or other prisoners) and decided to come back after the eight hundred convicts were locked in barracks. That evening he found “a great number” of pots, pans and knives hidden around the lumber-yard, along with hoards of maize-meal that members of the Ring had skimmed for themselves from the regular rations. Foster had it all carried to the convict barracks store and locked away for the night, for inventory.

  Next morning the prisoners turned out for their breakfast and found that “their” kettles and pans, along with their private hoards of flour, were gone. Their loss maddened the elite of the ring and they surrounded the muster officer, Patrick Hiney, shouting confused threats. Then, noticing the open gate of the lumber-yard, a mob of men ran outside, made for the barracks store, broke the locks and returned in triumph with their maize-flour and cooking gear. They settled down to boil water and make porridge. None of the guards interfered. But half an hour later, as constables and overseers gathered outside the gates to march the prisoners off to the day’s labor, there was a shout from inside the lumber-yard: “Come on, we will kill the——.”* For the second time that morning, a mob of fifty or sixty men came boiling from the gates, led now by one of the hardest cases in the Ring, a twenty-six-year-old twice-convicted bushranger from Van Diemen’s Land named William “Jackey-Jackey” Westwood. They grabbed whatever weapons lay to hand—axes, shovels, slabs of wood for clubs—swinging furiously at their guards as they rushed at the constables’ cottages and then toward the house of the hated stipendiary magistrate, Samuel Barrow. They left four corpses behind them, men who had barely been able to react before their skulls were caved in by the mutineers. But they had no plan, and as they charged gasping and cursing toward Barrow’s cottage they saw a line of soldiers bearing down on them, muskets levelled and bayonets fixed. The mutineers faltered, turned, and ran back to their only haven, their “Alsatia” (as Stuart’s report had termed it), the lumber-yard. The bloody episode had lasted only minutes, but the reprisals were thorough. Barrow arrested more than fifty prisoners, and they crammed the filthy old jailhouse (which had not been enlarged or improved since Morisset’s time) to bursting. Most of them were summarily sentenced to a year’s hard labor in chains, and the presumed ringleaders were loaded with iron and reeved by their fetters to a long chain cable to await the arrival of a judge who could hold the necessary trial. Before the mutiny there were nine men in the lockup on other capital charges, and Childs had already sent for a criminal court justice. He arrived on the Lady Franklin a few weeks later, not knowing the mutiny had happened and unprepared for the sight of several dozen capital defendants. His name was Francis Burgess, and on board with him was the newly appointed commandant of Norfolk Island, John Price.

  Burgess fell ill a few days after the hearings started. He had to go back to Hobart on the Lady Franklin, and the court opened again in late September before a new judge, Fielding Browne. In the meantime Barrow and Price between then had developed the prosecution as a perfect opportunity to break the Ring. They indicted all the known Ring members they could, committing twenty-six men to trial; eventually, fourteen were tried on five counts of murder and abetting. Despite the protests of the chaplain, Thomas Rogers, none of them was allowed a defense lawyer; and when Rogers helped the prisoners draft a petition to the judge asking for counsel, the request was ignored. Several defendants were illiterate and could not read the depositions against them. The “jury” was only a tribunal of five military officers. Twelve witnesses were heard from the Crown but none for the defense, and as they gave their evidence the men in the dock hooted and cursed at them, trying as best they could to mock the processes of this kangaroo court. On October 5, twelve men out of fourteen were sentenced to death. No reprieves were given, although “Jacky-Jacky” Westwood wrote for the Reverend Rogers a last declaration exonerating four of the accused:

  I, William Westwood, wish to die in the communion of Christ’s Holy Church, seeking the mercy of God through Jesus, Christ Our Lord, amen. I acknowledge the justice of my sentence; but as a dying man I wish to say that I believe four men now going to suffer are innocent of the crime laid to their charge, namely Lawrence Cavenagh, Henry Whiting, William Pickthorne, and William Scrimshaw. I believe that I never spoke to Cavenagh on the morning of the riots; and those other three men had no part in the killing.… I die in charity with all men, and I ask your prayers for my soul.

  Rogers had persuaded Westwood and other condemned men to write out their last statements instead of declaiming them, as was the custom, from the scaffold; Price, Barrow and the guards feared that their speeches might spark another riot.

  On October 13, the men were hanged in two sets of six on the gallows that looked over Kingston beach and the Pacific beyond, before the assembled convicts, with all the military standing by with primed muskets to crush any restiveness.* No voices were raised but those of the condemned, who joined together in singing a hymn. Rogers had sat up all night with them, praying; he and the Roman Catholic chaplain, Father Bond, walked with the men to the scaffold, where their irons were struck off although their arms remained “severely pinioned.” The trapdoor crashed, the bodies fell, the ropes thrummed on the beams. The mutineers’ corpses were cut down, coffined, loaded unceremoniously into bullock-carts and dumped in an old sawpit outside the consecrated ground of the cemetery, by the sea’s edge. Rogers, cassock flying, trotted up too late for the burial; by the time he reached the edge of the mass grave, where the new commandant had stood grimly staring at the remains of the Ring, the gravediggers had done their work and the coffins were already under earth. As a token of infamy, the sawpit was unmarked, but the hump o
f earth over the bodies remained clearly visible decades later; it received the name of “Murderers’ Mound.”

  iii

  WITH THIS MASS execution, the career of the most notorious of all the commandants of Norfolk Island began.

  John Giles Price (1808–1857) was the fourth son of a Cornish baronet, Sir Rose Price of Trengwainton. A family fortune had been raised on sugar and slaves in the Caribbean, but by John Price’s time it was all dissipated and he was only one of fourteen children begotten by this philoprogenitive minor aristocrat. Out he went to the colonies in 1836, a man in his late twenties armed with good letters of introduction but little capital. But in the pathologically snobbish society of Hobart Town, letters and a dash of noble blood counted for a lot. Lieutenant-Governor Arthur gave Price a generous land grant on the Huon River and more assigned servants than most new arrivals could expect. In 1838 Price married the niece of Arthur’s successor, Mary Franklin. His farm was successful and his skill at running assigned convicts was noted. He was appointed muster-master of the Convict Department, then assistant police magistrate. His wife bore him five children in rapid succession. Price’s colonial future was assured, despite a bout of illness after he moved to Hobart Town to take up his administrative duties. He was praised for his abilities as a classical scholar, athlete and oarsman; he was a skilled carpenter, turner, blacksmith, locksmith and tinker; he could even cook and sew; and, like some camp commandants in Europe a century later, he loved children. But it was his reputation for being tough and methodical that caused poor Eardley-Wilmot, in casting around for someone to redeem Norfolk Island from the miseries of Childs’s incompetence, to pick Price. Eardley-Wilmot got more than he bargained for.

  John Price has remained one of the durable ogres of the Australian imagination for more than a century now. This was largely because he was the original of the brutal island commandant Maurice Frere in the Great Australian Novel of the nineteenth century, Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life. Clarke could hardly have invented a more interesting villain than Frere, but he hardly needed to; the lineaments of the man Australians have loved to hate ever since were traced in the official correspondence of Norfolk Island, in the indignant letters of Price’s main opposition there, the Reverend Thomas Rogers, and in the various Parliamentary Papers that refer to him or contain his views on convict management. Clarke drew copiously on all of these, particularly on Rogers’s Correspondence Relating to the Dismissal of the Rev. T. Rogers from his Chaplaincy at Norfolk Island (1849), which remains a source of unremittingly pejorative information on Price. (In His Natural Life, Norfolk Island’s frail, morally tormented, alcoholic chaplain, the Reverend James North, who unsuccessfully opposes the demonic energies of Frere, is based on Rogers, and most of his reflections are taken verbatim from Rogers’s letters.) The habits of Frere the character were essentially those of Price the prototype, and so was the appearance: six feet tall (unusually tall for an Englishman in the mid-nineteenth century), with Herculean shoulders and a thick bull neck, his legs slightly bowed like those of a pit bull, “a round bullet head of the true Legree type,” a strong flushed face, sandy-red hair oiled in waves, and a cold gray stare through a monocle jammed in his eye. Price’s monocle looked incongruous and struck more than one prisoner as a sign of “flashness,” a puzzling intrusion of lower-class vulgarity into the world of Authority. This was confirmed by his dress. “He was dressed something after the style of a flash gentleman,” recalled a former Norfolk Island lag named Henry Beresford Garrett, who had remained so obsessed with Price that in the 1870s, years after both had left the island, he wrote a lengthy manuscript about him called The Demon:

  On his round bullet head a small straw hat was jauntily stuck, the broad blue ribbon of which reached down between his shoulders, a glass stuck in one eye, a black silk kerchief tied sailor fashion around his bullneck, no vest but a bobtail or oxoman coat, or something like a cross between this and a stableman’s jacket seemed to be bursting over his shoulders. A pair of rather tight pants completed his costume, except for a leather belt, six inches broad, buckled around the loins. In the belt two pepperbox revolvers were conspicuously stuck.

  … [A]ssured by the presence of the soldiers and the guard, he struck an attitude by placing his arms akimbo, and again spoke.

  “You know me, don’t you? I am come here to rule, and by God I’ll do so and tame or kill you. I know you are cowardly dogs, and I’ll make you worry and eat one another.”39

  Such were Price’s first words to his “lambs,” on his first visit to the Kingston barracks in 1846.

  When Clarke changed Price’s name to Frere in his novel, it was not a casual gesture. Frère, of course, means “brother,” and Price’s peculiar relationship to the convicts fascinated Clarke. Unlike all previous commandants, Price went to great lengths to deal with them as an insider. He learned their flash argot and always spoke to them in it, with none of the slips and malapropisms that betray a man using a foreign tongue. How had he learned it? Nobody knew, and many of the prisoners on Norfolk Island apparently believed that he had “done time” himself. He was rumored to have lived a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence in the dosshouses and kens of Hobart Town, mixing freely with hard cases who accepted him as one of them. There were also some missing years in England, from 1827 (when he matriculated at Brasenose College in Oxford, though without taking a degree) to 1836, when he sailed for Van Diemen’s Land. It may be—although the evidence for it, as we shall see, is ambiguous and circumstantial—that Price was homosexual and had picked up his fluent criminal slang when cruising for rough trade.

  Price was extremely proud of his reputation for special insight into the “criminal mind,” which he believed gave him special latitude. To confirm it, he would air weirdly contorted views on the irremediable and uniform evil of the prisoners under his charge. There was, for instance, no doubt that the brief mutiny of July 1, 1846, was a protest against semi-starvation. Price knew this perfectly well, for his first act after the mutineers were hanged was to increase the rations at the Kingston barracks. But at the end of 1846, Price cynically explained to William Champ, the comptroller-general in Van Diemen’s Land, that the outbreak was caused by sodomy. Without their confiscated kettles, the prisoners could not make culinary treats for “the objects of their lusts, and … this aroused their savage and ferocious passions to a pitch of madness.”40

  By turns fascinated and repelled by the spectacle of convict evil, Price set himself up as its authoritarian mirror and, as his biographer John Barry remarked, entered “a psychopathological love-hate relationship” with the prisoners of Norfolk Island. He had to dominate them by their own standards, to show that he was their master, even without the backing of the System. Hence his obsession with knowing the convicts: their slang, the way they thought, their desires. To speak their language was to demoralize them, to show that their world was open to him while his remained closed to them. To this end, he deployed the jocular, domineering, fake-egalitarian cruelty that is still one of the bad dreams of Australian life. Price was certainly bad and possibly mad, but no one could have called him stupid. No wonder Australians still remember him, though they have forgotten Morisset the blundering martinet and Maconochie the humane reformer.

  Price had no time for Maconochie’s “soothing system,” to which he attributed all the disorganization he inherited on Norfolk Island. He ruled by terror, informers and the lash, to which he added the public force of his own indomitable character; he was known to walk into the lumber-yard unescorted and, before five hundred hostile men, face down a convict who showed signs of rebellion. He once stared down a convict who snatched the pistol from his belt, taunting the man as a coward and a dog, until the prisoner handed back the weapon and fell beaten to his knees.

  The informer system had been usual on Norfolk Island long before Price arrived there; so, of course, had the lash. The question in assessing Price’s regime is how far he went in arbitrary cruelty and despotic abuse, beyond the degree of “res
ponsible” brutality that the government expected a Norfolk Island commandant to deploy.

  The main evidence came from two clergymen. The first was Thomas Rogers, who witnessed the first months of Price’s regime up to early 1847, when he was recalled to Van Diemen’s Land by Dr. J. S. Hampton, the new comptroller-general of convicts who favored Price and wanted to protect his position. Fired from the Convict Department, unable to move the authorities against Price and widely dismissed by officials from Denison down as a slandering crank, Rogers was nonetheless supported by some of his church superiors. In 1849 he published his Correspondence, which described what he had seen on Norfolk Island in prolix, indignant but convincing detail. Significantly, neither Price nor Denison made any effort to refute it, although Rogers was reprimanded for using official documents without permission.

  The second clerical witness to Price’s regime was Robert Willson (1794–1866), a priest from Nottinghamshire who had risen, by 1844, to become the first Roman Catholic Bishop in Tasmania. Willson visited Norfolk Island three times: in 1846 (when Childs was still commandant), in 1849 and in 1852. In 1849 he was struck by the success Price had had in cleaning up the chaos of Childs’s regime. Not until 1852 did his doubts about method really surface, in a long and appalling report he laid before Lieutenant-Governor Denison. Price, it seems, implored him not to send it. “I am sorry to see you carried away by the stories of these men; you know what a miserable lot they are; do not permit their stories to make any impression upon you.” Willson was outraged: “When I was last in England I told the Government to take away one third of the convicts on the island, and now I will recommend the Government to take the whole.” At this, Price burst into tears and begged Willson “not to ruin him.”41