The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Rogers’s first charge was that Price’s transactions with the convicts on Norfolk Island were cynical. Price did not believe that reformation was possible; he assumed that good behavior was a sham and that everything any prisoner said about his own state of mind or moral progress was a lie. “Whenever a fellow is recommended to me by the religious instructor or the surgeon superintendent,” Price declared, “I always set that fellow down as the greatest hypocrite of the whole lot.” In 1846 the transport John Calvin landed its 199 prisoners on Norfolk Island to begin their trudge through the Probation System, and one convict was recommended by the surgeon superintendent as “an inoffensive man with very fine feelings.” “Oh, I’ll soon take them out of him!” Price replied.42

  On the other hand, he wanted the worst men he could draft as constables and overseers. “In selecting men for the police one day,” Rogers related,

  Mr. Price asked a man what he had been at home, the man replied he had been a farm servant; “well then,” was the remark, “you are not thief enough for me.” Another who professed to have been an “honest traveller” in England, i.e., a thief by profession, was made a police man.

  Price defended such appointments on the well-worn ground that one must set a thief to catch a thief, but the consistency with which he put “hard” men in minor offices and kept “soft” ones underfoot was perverse. No less so was his purge of the civil officers on Norfolk Island. Everyone who showed signs of opposing his autocratic rule was suspended or recalled to Hobart, until no one stood between Price and the prisoners. Rogers, before he had to leave in 1847, recorded the pervasive terror of informants Price fostered and the capriciousness with which prisoners could be punished. One prisoner was flogged for mislaying his shoelaces. A man named Peart got seven days in chains for saying “good morning” to the wrong person. Another was seen walking along waving a twig; a constable saw him and demanded to know what he was up to and where he was going. “Why, I might be after a parrot,” the prisoner replied, and was flogged. A cart-driver came before Price on the charge of “having a tamed bird” and got 36 lashes. A stockman named Higson was passing by a garden plot when the gardener asked him to “give this tree a push, I want to roll it down the hill to mend the garden fence where your bullocks come in.” Obligingly, the stockman did so and was seen by a constable, who charged him with “pushing a tree with his foot.” Price awarded him 36 lashes on the back and 36 on the buttocks, and within less than two weeks after that he was flogged twice more, once with 100 lashes for having tobacco and hiding in the bush. It had been the custom among the convicts to wash the back of a newly flogged man, to press down his mangled skin and dress it with cool banana leaves; Price had anyone seen with a banana leaf in his possession summarily punished.

  Punishments for less trivial offenses were in proportion; and Price’s orders were meticulously carried out by his chief constable, a ticket-of-leave man named Alfred Essex Baldock (1821–1848), whom Rogers called “of most unprincipled disposition … perfidious and unfeeling towards his fellow-prisoners … the servile creature of the commandant in everything.” Some men, after flogging, would be laced into a strait-jacket and tied down to an iron bedstead for a week or two, so that their backs mortified and stank. Others were “strapped down” without a flogging, but for as much as six weeks at a time, after which the victim “looked more like a pale distended corpse than a living being, and his voice … could scarcely be heard.” For striking Baldock, a convict named Lemon was bludgeoned unconscious by the constables, tube-gagged, and chained up with his arms, one broken, behind him around a lamp post. Cells were frequently whitewashed to cover the blood which, Rogers alleged, spattered the walls to a height of seven feet. In, one fetid punishment cell, known as the “Nunnery,” Price would keep a dozen men with a latrine-bucket in a space six by twelve feet when the outside temperature was 100°F.; “I had to step out into the yard at first;” Rogers confessed, “to save myself from fainting.” Men were sentenced to work “on the reef,” cutting coral in water up to their waists, in 36-pound leg-irons; they were condemned to fourteen days’ solitary for “having some ravelling from an old pair of trousers,” or “being at the privy when the bell rang.”

  Price defended his “severities,” without (of course) going into detail about them, on the ground the prisoners were wild beasts who would rise and take the island if they got an inch of slack. Rogers disagreed: Except for some twenty or thirty “villains,” the two thousand prisoners “were as manageable by the common methods of just and firm and rational government as the peasantry of Kent or Devon.”

  The commandant had his wife and children on the island, but his “constant companion,” according to Rogers, was Baldock, who went “riding with him to out-stations and shepherds’ huts in the bush, and attending him and advising him constantly.” Rogers seems to have thought that the two men were lovers, and that this explained Baldock’s invulnerability to reproof. In Van Diemen’s Land, former officers of Baldock’s probation gang assured Rogers that “he was so strongly suspected of being addicted to unnatural crime that he was ordered to be placed at nights in one of the sleeping cells.” There is no conclusive evidence of a liaison between Price and Baldock, although when the chief constable was drowned (to the unbounded joy of the prisoners) after his rowboat turned turtle on the Kingston reef, Price set up an unusually large and elaborate gravestone to him, much in contrast to the mass grave of Murderers’ Mound, with the grieving quatrain:

  ’Tis His Supreme prerogative

  O’er subject Kings to reign.

  ’Tis just that he should rule the world

  Who does the world sustain.

  The Reverend Rogers’s strictures on the “subject Kings” of Norfolk Island, however, were not acknowledged by Sir William Denison when his Correspondence was printed in 1849. Price was shielded by another friend, the dismally cynical opportunist (and future governor of Western Australia) Dr. J. S. Hampton, who wrote a whitewashing report on the prisoners’ condition and strenuously denied that anything odd was happening.

  Yet the suspicion that the commandant was out of control, that the island’s remoteness from Hobart had permitted some cancer of his soul to metastasize wildly, could not entirely be allayed. Price’s rule grew worse as his paranoia thickened, and in 1852 he received a dispatch from Denison’s desk querying the enormous inflictions of the lash he himself had reported. His Excellency, Price learned, “regrets very much that you should have considered such punishment necessary to so great an extent” and “trusts that you may … adopt … means of enforcing proper discipline without recourse to such frequent infliction of this mode of punishment.”43

  In reply, Price railed against the character of the convicts—“cullings,” “incorrigibles,” “desperadoes,” among whom “persuasion is useless, advice is thrown away.” He defended the “beneficial effect” of flogging. “Stringent the regulations are,” he wrote, “and stringent they must be, but they are not more so than those imposed on soldiers, indeed on boys at public schools in England.”44

  But in that month, March 1852, Bishop Willson was moved by rumor and report to make his third visit to Norfolk Island. He was appalled by what he saw there and penned a thirty-page report to Lieutenant-Governor Denison. It described mass floggings, blood-soaked earth, and an atmosphere of “gloom, sullen despondency, despair of leaving the Island.” He saw hideously overcrowded cells, men loaded with 36-pound balls on their chains, wizened pallid creatures staring at him “with their bodies placed in a frame of iron work.” He found the sole medical officer so much in cahoots with Price that he claimed a desperately sick prisoner had to be kept in an airless cell because ventilation would be “prejudicial” to him. Hampton, in turn, tried to discredit Bishop Willson’s report with obfuscations and quibbles. Price burst into tears and begged the Bishop to suppress his report. But Willson filed it, placing the blame squarely on Price and “the system which invests one man at this remote place with absolute, I might say irr
esponsible power of dealing with so large a mass of human beings.”

  Price had tendered his resignation once, at the end of 1850, citing the difficulty of bringing up his children well in “this Lazar house of crime.” He got a raise in salary instead. But by now, Denison feared he might become a serious embarrassment to the Crown. He felt that there was a connection between Price’s “illness”—whose nature was not specified in official correspondence—and the morbid ferocities of his rule. Denison had already cut the size of the convict population of Norfolk Island by half in 1847, in deference to Grey’s wish to abandon the island altogether; most of the probation prisoners had gone down to Van Diemen’s Land, leaving a hard core of about 450 “colonial” or twice-convicted offenders. But the military force on Norfolk Island had not been reduced, and very expensive it was, while civilian officers could not be found at any price, because of the rush to the newly discovered goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo.* In any case, Denison could read the larger political signs, all of which pointed to the abolition of transportation to Australia. It would be better to get rid of this remote penal outrider and concentrate all the management of convicts on Van Diemen’s Land. Denison therefore ordered his Convict Department to start drawing up plans for a maximum-security penitentiary at Port Arthur, modelled on the Separate System of Pentonville—which would receive the hard cases of Norfolk Island.45

  John Price was happy to leave; he had been there more than six years, he was sick of the eyes of prisoners, and he had a garden to cultivate in Van Diemen’s Land. No censure was passed. The new secretary of state for the colonies, the Duke of Newcastle, scanned Bishop Willson’s report and its accompanying drafts of exculpation from both Price and Hampton, and concluded that since Norfolk Island was about to be abandoned, one need investigate no further. Let the dead stay dead; let old wounds not be re-opened. John Price had done his duty according to his lights, with indefatigable prowess. He had been a good servant of the Crown, if a touch zealous. But excess of zeal in defense of penalty was no crime, the secretary of state reflected, closing the books on Norfolk Island.

  Price farmed for a while, but he could not keep away from prison management. Within a year, in January 1854, he accepted a job on the mainland as inspector-general of penal establishments in Victoria. One of his tasks was to run the five prison hulks moored in the port of Melbourne, at Hobson’s Bay off Williamstown. The regime on these vessels became a new byword for ferocity. The worst of Norfolk Island had come to the mainland: the tube-gagging and spread-eagling, the bludgeon-handle jammed in the mouth in tobacco searches, the rotten victuals, the loading with irons, the beatings, ringbolts and buckets of sea water. Before long, a warship had to take up station next to the hulks, its guns double-shotted so that, if the prisoners mutinied and the guards had to flee, it could sink the hulk and send its ironed men to the bottom.

  On March 26, 1857, Price paid an official visit to the quarry at Williamstown where gangs of hulk convicts were laboring. He had come, as his office demanded, to hear their grievances; and with his usual bravado, he walked straight into the midst of them, escorted only by a small party of guards. A hundred prisoners watched him marching up the tramway that bore the quarried stone from the cutting-face to the jetty. Quietly they surrounded Price, and their circle began to close. There was a hubbub of hoarse voices, a clatter of chains, a scraping of hobnails on stone. Rocks began to fly. The guards fled; Price turned and began to run down the tramway when a stone flung from the top of the quarry-face caught him between the shoulderblades and pitched him forward on his face. Then, nothing could be seen except a mass of struggling men, a frenetic scrum of arms and bodies in piebald cloth, and the irregular flailing of stone-hammers and crowbars.

  iv

  PRICE’S REIGN on Norfolk Island had been the last paroxysm of the System’s cruelty, a nightmare sweated out by a dying organism. Elsewhere, the transportation of convicts to Australia was winding down. But the process was slow, because Britain did not want it to end. In Whitehall and Downing Street, after 1846, there was still the hope that it might be kept alive. Her Majesty’s Government was not going to cave in before the colonial abolitionists just because the Probation System had failed. England still had to purge itself of convicts, the “excrementitious mass” Jeremy Bentham had written of a generation before; it needed space for thousands a year. Most judges, bishops and politicians agreed that transportation was still the way to get rid of them, given the surge in penal convictions. The Report of the 1847 Select Committee on Criminal Laws, Juvenile Offenders and Transportation was quite categorical on that: “The punishment of transportation cannot safely be abandoned.”46 So various projects were mooted, with a view of relieving the pressure on Van Diemen’s Land and sneaking the convicts onto the mainland through the back door. The first of these was promoted by Gladstone during his six-month term as secretary of state for the colonies, in early 1846.

  Gladstone proposed drawing a line across the map of New South Wales at 26°S., just above Brisbane. The land north of it would form a new and separate colony, North Australia. The “Gladstone Colony” would be a vast low-security jail, settled by convicts with conditional pardons and tickets-of-leave who would be moved up from Van Diemen’s Land. Prisoners from England would get conditional pardons as soon as they stepped ashore. In this way, Van Diemen’s Land would find room for more freshly transported felons from England.

  Naturally, this struck the island’s free settlers as a very poor solution. Van Diemen’s Land was saturated with convicts. By 1846, almost half its total population were criminals under sentence; out of 66,000 people, 30,300 were bond. If one reckoned in the number of former convicts among the free population (perhaps another 15,000), prospects for the Exclusive minority looked bad. They saw themselves as a small archipelago of decency in a rising sea of moral pollution; anything that let in new convict blood had to be opposed.

  The Gladstone Colony was even more unpopular in Sydney, since its plan did not include a convict-proof fence along the 26th parallel. What would stop a new seepage of outcasts into New South Wales? Yet it was tried. Early in 1847, settlers landed at its intended capital, Port Curtis, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. But it did not take root: Short of food, harassed by Aborigines, tropical rain, baking sun, bad water and whining clouds of insects, the colonists succumbed to despondency.

  Meanwhile Gladstone moved upward from the Colonial Office and his place was taken by Lord Grey, who—to the immense relief of its settlers, who heard the glad news in April 1847—ordered the evacuation of Port Curtis. If Gladstone’s scheme was meant to place convicts as pioneers in the wilderness, Grey explained to Parliament, it would have been better to put them in the wild parts of Van Diemen’s Land; but his predecessor’s “real object … was to send them through North Australia as it were through a sieve into New South Wales.” It was one thing for emancipated convicts to start a new life in neighboring colonies; “this cannot, with justice, be prevented.” But it was quite another, and most unfair, to dump them next to New South Wales and let them percolate south into a society that did not want them.47

  But Grey had some tricks of his own up his sleeve. Realizing that no more convicts could be sardined into Van Diemen’s Land, he announced in 1846 that transportation would be suspended for two years. In 1845, 2,870 prisoners of both sexes had landed there. The figure for 1846 was 1,126; for 1847, 1,269; and for 1848, 1,434. More than a thousand of the male convicts arriving in Van Diemen’s Land during 1847–48 had been relocated from Norfolk Island, so the cut in transportation from England was large.

  However, Grey in 1847 had told Lieutenant-Governor Denison that “it is not the intention” of Britain to resume transportation when the two years were up; and his under secretary, Sir James Stephen, told the Treasury a few days later that “Her Majesty’s Government have decided upon altogether abandoning the system of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land.”48 Denison, on reading Grey’s dispatch, assumed that it meant what it sa
id and that abolition was just around the corner; so, to their joy, did the free settlers of Van Diemen’s Land. Both were wrong. Grey, speaking for perfidious Albion, had a new system in mind, euphoniously called “assisted exile.”

  His idea was to combine penitentiaries at home with transportation abroad. Let the sinners first do time in Pentonville; once subdued by its awful mental rigor, let them have conditional pardons and be sent to Australia to complete their sentences. Even if Van Diemen’s Land (whose economy, by 1847, was showing distinct signs of revival) could not absorb them, then the labor-hungry pastoral settlers of New South Wales and Port Phillip certainly could. The sequence would be: first, “separate confinement” in England followed by a spell of “associated labor” in the naval dockyards; then “assisted exile” to the antipodes. Once there, the men would not be exposed to the evils of the Probation System; they would be dispersed to settlers across the country districts and the outback. They could also take their wives and families, if their moral qualities seemed adequate. Thus the colonists could not complain of being deluged, once more, in transportation. “The penal system known as transportation will not be renewed,” Grey told Denison in 1848. “The diffusion of men, instead of placing them in Penal and Probation Gangs, totally changes its character.”49 And since Grey had a politician’s sense of an acceptable name, the subjects of his penal experiment would not, under any circumstances, be called “convicts”; instead, they would be “exiles.”50