The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  This idea had been revolving in Grey’s mind for almost ten years. He first produced it during the sessions of the Molesworth Committee on transportation, where in 1837, as Viscount Howick, he suggested it to James Macarthur, the pastoral king of New South Wales. “Suppose,” he asked, “criminals were to be punished in England with a certain number of years’ imprisonment, and after that to be banished to New South Wales, [where they would] be placed under the surveillance of the police in the same manner of ticket-of-leave men, what do you think would be the effect?” “In a modified shape, the same as … transportation,” Macarthur replied.51 Before Grey received the seals of the Colonial Office, the experiment had already begun. In 1844, the transport vessel Royal George had landed twenty-one convicts at Port Phillip Bay, the first felons to arrive in the future state of Victoria since the abortive attempt at a convict settlement there back in 1803. They had all done terms in Pentonville, the new penitentiary in Britain.

  These “Pentonvillains,” as they were promptly nicknamed, were snapped up by labor-hungry settlers, who asked for more. Edward Curr, a rock-ribbed conservative who had become the manager of the ill-fated Van Diemen’s Land Company twenty years before and, after it failed, had taken up wide acres in the Port Phillip district, led the settlers’ case. Free labor was not to be had, so wages were high, and this attracted “whole shoals” of former convicts from Van Diemen’s Land and the “Middle District” of New South Wales. It would be better to have the Pentonville men, who might have been partly reformed by the penitentiary machine, than these frequently dubious characters. The grand question, Curr argued, was the need for cheap labor, and neither he nor his fellow squatters stood ready to be “ruined for virtue’s sake.”52

  Others disagreed. In the view of the Melbourne editor and alderman William Kerr, the “Exiles” threatened to depress not only the wages but the moral tone of the colony; and their introduction, “free of all manner of restraint,” would be a wanton injustice to all free citizens.53

  Thus the lines of class conflict over the arrival of Exiles were drawn. It was city versus country, worker versus squatter. The prospect that transportation to mainland Australia would begin again bypassed the old and by now demographically feeble division between Exclusive and Emancipist in the vast territory of New South Wales. Some Emancipist families were now very rich and wanted cheap convict labor; many a free emigrant rebelled at the idea of losing wages to a flood of Exiles. Even among the sons and daughters of “old” Exclusive families, who preened themselves on having been in the colony for fifty years or more, the convict presence was no longer pervasive, no longer a threat to order; out of a total population of 187,000 people in New South Wales in 1846, fewer than 11,000 were convicts still under sentence. Compared to the dark taint of Van Diemen’s Land, convictry (in the eyes of those who wanted more of it) was a mere tinge, rapidly fading. It was time to think about its advantages again.

  Thus, on the issue of Exiles, the squatters won—at first. In 1845–46, 517 “Pentonvillains” disembarked at Melbourne and found instant employment. Late in 1846, a committee set up by the New South Wales Legislative Council reported to Gladstone that the “vast solitude” of outback New South Wales seemed “to have been assigned by Providence to the British nation as the fittest scene for the reformation of her criminals.”54 The Legislative Council itself disagreed at first, but when Grey offered to send one free emigrant for every convict, and wives and families of the Exiles as well, it changed its mind. The stage was now set for the wholesale revival of transportation to the Australian mainland, even to Sydney, under the name of Grey’s Exile scheme. In 1847, 536 convicts arrived in Port Phillip; in 1848, 455.

  But then, hitches began to appear. The “vast solitudes” no longer seemed quite so empty, because England’s general economic depression of 1847 caused a surge of free emigration. From 1847 to 1849, some 30,000 emigrants sailed from England to take their chances in New South Wales. It was no longer so easy to find work for the Exiles who came to Port Phillip in 1847–48; the demand for convict labor had ebbed. Moreover, given the low state of the British economy, Grey did not feel he could ask the Treasury to pay for the plan of sending out a free settler for every Exile. So he dropped that part of his agreement with the Legislative Council of New South Wales. Instead, in August 1848, he secured an Order-in-Council declaring that convicts could once more be sent to New South Wales at the will and pleasure of Her Majesty’s Government, and he dispatched a transport loaded with 239 male prisoners, the Hashemy, direct to Sydney. She was the first convict ship to enter the immense gates of Sydney Harbor in a decade, and the splash of her anchor on June 11, 1849, at Circular Quay—where, like some stained cuckoo, she nested amid five ships loaded with more than 1,400 new-chum immigrants—was promptly taken as the sign of a complete breach of faith between Lord Grey and Queen Victoria’s loyal subjects in Australia.

  It provoked the biggest show of mass public indignation in the colony’s short history. In driving rain, crowds assembled at the Quay—five thousand by the Abolitionists’ count, seven or eight hundred according to the police. The governor, Sir Charles Fitzroy, watched them pouring down George and Macquarie Streets; the shopkeepers along the quay prudently locked up their shutters as soldiers with fixed bayonets took up their stations outside Government House and the perimeter of the Quay, by now a squelching bog, was ringed with police. But there was no violence. Speaker after speaker clambered on top of the improvised dais (an omnibus) harangued the crowd and was rewarded with thunderous cheers. Robert Campbell, nephew of the great colonial merchant whose brick warehouses and wharf stood nearby, a man who had been campaigning against transportation for twenty full years, declaimed that “they would be content to subdue the land and replenish it without the introduction of British crime and its attendant British misery.” John Lamb, a retired naval commander and now a leading businessman with a seat on the Legislative Council of New South Wales, moved the first of the anti-transportation resolutions, drafted by a rising Australian politician named Henry Parkes—a “deliberate and solemn protest” against transportation:

  FIRSTLY—Because it is in violation of the will of the majority of the colonists, as is clearly evinced by their expressed opinions on this question at all times.

  SECONDLY—Because numbers among us have emigrated on the faith of the British Government, that transportation to this colony had ceased for ever.

  THIRDLY—Because it is incompatible with our existence as a free colony, desiring self-government, to be the receptacle of another country’s felons.

  FOURTHLY—Because it is in the highest degree unjust, to sacrifice the great social and political interests of the colony at large to the pecuniary profit of a fraction of its inhabitants.

  FIFTHLY—Because … we greatly fear that the perpetration of so stupendous an act of injustice … will go far in alienating the affections of the people of this colony from the mother country.

  An English emigrant barrister, Robert Lowe, the future Viscount Sherbrooke, a half-blind albino with a stentorian voice and a feel for the main vein of popular sentiment, scrambled onto the bus roof to declaim that “the stately presence of their city, the beautiful waters of their harbour, were this day again polluted with the presence of that floating hell—a convict ship.” He denounced “this attempt to impose the worst and most degrading slavery on the colony” as the outcome of “that oppressive tyranny which had confiscated the lands of the colony—for the benefit of a class,” the squatters. This meeting, he shouted into the brief lulls between the cheers of the crowd, was the prelude to an Australian republic, as the Boston Tea Party had been to the American. “In all times, and in all nations, so will injustice and tyranny ripen into rebellion, and rebellion into independence.”55

  The meeting wound to its end, by which time (some of the more perceptive listeners noted) not a single Emancipist or descendant of a convict had spoken; and the anti-transportation orators went to Government House and asked to pre
sent their petition to Governor Fitzroy. He agreed to see them the next day. Fitzroy told Lowe that he would pass their protest on to Her Majesty, but the convicts from the Hashemy would stay; on that, there could be no negotiation. So another monster rally was called at Circular Quay for June 18, to ask for the dismissal of Lord Grey. Lowe moved for dismissal, and Henry Parkes rose to speak against Grey, “a nobleman who never bestowed a thought upon New South Wales in his life, till some political chance or accident gave him his ministerial position.” But because there had been a buzz of speculation about a Yankee-style revolt in Australia, he added that he did not see what good would come from such comparisons. Free Australians “were not at a state of advancement to be benefited by separation from the mother country, even if we had cause to desire separation.… We possessed little of the stern and sturdy spirit of the old American colonists.” So much, in Parkes’s view, for the legendary independence of Australians. He was righter than even he could have supposed, for a century and a quarter later Australia would continue to cling to the British Commonwealth.

  Fitzroy wrote to Lord Grey, assuring him that the anti-transportation lobby in Sydney was merely a faction, whose sole audience was the mob. Their notion that the secretary of state for the colonies had committed a breach of faith with the colonists was quite unjust, Fitzroy thought.56 And indeed, the political crisis over the Hashemy did die out quite soon. When yet another convict ship, the Randolph, arrived in Port Phillip with 295 convicts, the citizens of Melbourne persuaded La Trobe to bar it from anchoring—but her captain merely sailed north and unloaded his bedraggled cargo in Sydney, without provoking a single meeting or speech. After that, two more vessels, the Havering and the Adelaide, disembarked a total of 593 Exiles at Sydney Cove. They were the last, and they caused no incident.

  Nor did their passengers perceptibly degrade the tone of the colony. They were quite like ordinary people. “Dear Wife you can come out to me as soon as it pleases you,” one of them wrote after he was settled with a master upcountry.

  I will provide for you a comfortable Situation and Home as good a one as ever lies in my power.… When you come ask for me as an emigrant, and never use the word Convict or the ship Hashemy on your voyage, never let it be once named among you, let no one know your business but your own selves.… Dear Wife this is a fine Country and a beautiful climate it is like a perpetual Sumer, and I think it will prove congenial for your health, No wild beast or anything of the sort are here, fine beautiful birds and every thing seems to smile with pleasure.… [T]his is just the country where we can end our days in peace and contentment when we meet.57

  This encomium from a satisfied Englishman was printed in the most popular English magazine of the time, Household Words, whose editor was none other than Charles Dickens. To say that Dickens “edited” it is to understate the degree to which his views permeated the publication. On Australia, which he never visited, he had a most explicit line; and it had been given him by a journalist who had never been there either, although he pretended he had: Samuel Solomon (1813–1883), who wrote extensively on railways and agriculture under the pen name of Samuel Sidney. Sidney was quite well-informed about Australia (his brother had settled there and come back in 1847), and his many readers knew so little about it that for ten years they accepted him as an expert—indeed, as the popular authority—on matters Australian. He published a magazine, Sidney’s Emigrant’s Journal (1849–50), as well as a number of books, beginning with A Voice from the Far Interior of Australia (1847), and ending with The Three Colonies of Australia (1852), subtitled “How to Settle and Succeed in Australia,” which—coinciding as it did with the discovery of gold—was a roaring popular success. Sidney was an engaging mélange of social idealist and literary con man, like many another influential journalist. His heart yearned for the vision that the Industrial Revolution was banishing from England; pastoral Arcadia inhabited by sturdy forty-acre yeomen. He believed this paradise of the common man could be revived in Australia, by emigration. “There are thousands in this country pining in indigence, who if removed to a suitable colony would be able to attain decent independence.”58

  For this picture of Australia, Sidney drew heavily on Alexander Harris’s Settlers and Convicts (1847), the first book on the life of free workers there—anti-System, anti-squatter, squarely on the side of self-help, extolling the comradeship of hard labor among farmers and cedar-getters in the bush. The yeomen of England had fallen into the decay foreseen by Cobbett; they were the fretful prey of agitators, Chartists, ideologues of every kind. On the vast democratic grasslands of Australia Felix they would find their natural station.

  Such arguments were endorsed by reformers better-known today than Sidney: by Harriet Martineau, and the brave Roman Catholic philanthropist Caroline Chisholm, “the emigrant’s friend,” who had labored immensely from 1840 to 1846 in New South Wales, meeting every migrant ship, finding jobs for their bewildered women passengers, setting up shelters and employment agencies throughout the interior for newly arrived immigrants, and tirelessly escorting groups of “new chums” into the bush on her white horse, Captain.59 On her return to London, Mrs. Chisholm won the ear of Lord Grey and Sir James Stephen, the permanent under secretary at the Colonial Office. In 1849 she formed a Family Colonization Loan Society, underwritten through Coutts Bank at the behest of the philanthropic Baroness Burdett-Coutts, with a board of London merchants; it lent migrants their passage money, found them work in Australia, and collected the loans in small installments at no interest. She had interviewed hundreds of immigrants in Australia and their words became the first-hand stuff of her pamphlets. Chisholm was fervently committed to yeoman emigration and small farming. She had a natural ally in Samuel Sidney. Both found a mutual one in Dickens, who spread their opinions in every issue of Household Words and enthusiastically incorporated them into his novels. It was exactly along the lines of emigration proposed by Chisholm and Sidney that the feckless and debt-ridden Wilkins Micawber, at the happy end of David Copperfield (1849–50), took his chances in Australia along with Mr. Peggotty, Em’ly and Gummidge, finding a happy haven at Port Middlebay, Dickens’s name for Melbourne. Micawber is redeemed by the work of his hands. “I’ve seen that theer bald head of his, a-perspiring in the sun, Mas’r Davy, till I a’most thowt it would have melted away,” says Peggotty, the Yarmouth fisherman who knows what work is. “And now he’s a Magistrate.”60

  Dickens, Sidney and Chisholm: a formidable team of persuaders, backed by such sympathizers as Harriet Martineau and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who was himself to become a strikingly inept secretary of state for the colonies in 1858. They knew who deserved their sympathy—and who did not: the villains in the drama of colonial opportunity they were writing, the graziers of Australia, the selfish squatters, nostalgic for cheap slave labor and bitterly determined to preserve transportation. “Unlock the land!”—such was the cry, both in England and New South Wales, on behalf of the forty-acre yeomen. Were the big pastoralists deliberately sabotaging free immigration? In hindsight, it seems that they were not; they were desperate for labor much of the time, and paid for it when they could get it—but there was little doubt that the most reactionary would rather have had convicts. However, experience had also shown that, although Australian prospects could be seen by Englishmen (and sometimes, under the spell of Dickens’s prose, by Australians as well) through a rosy haze of Pickwickian stereotypes, small farmers in 1850 remained as vulnerable to drought, fire and flood as they had been along the Hawkesbury in the days of Governor Bligh. The land was not Arcadia; the bush could flare up and incinerate ten years of a forty-acre man’s work in a day; even in good times, it took three acres to sustain one sheep. But such realities were moved into the background by the largely urban polemicists who now urged the abolition of transportation not just as a moral good in itself but as a blow against land monopoly, a condition of successful emigration and a cure for England’s discontents.

  In Australia, the focus was different. Th
e image of the earnest yeoman frustrated by squatters’ greed was politically potent, sure enough, but the stereotype of convict evil was fixed beyond the power of any individual’s experience to alter it. Get rid of convictry, keep the imperial attachment—such was the local reformers’ tune. No bunyip Demosthenes preaching abolition would open his mouth against the pollutions of English crime without unfurling a long red-white-and-blue preamble assuring Her Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria, of his undying, wholehearted and grovelling fealty to the British Crown. The end of transportation was reached through a cumbersome accommodation between morally indignant colonials who could not make good on their threats and imperialists who felt weary of an obsolete penal system and yet could not cancel it at a stroke for fear of seeming malleable to Australian pressure. Anti-transportation views, by the late 1840s, were a commonplace of every pulpit sermon and most political meetings. Abolition was, as one British officer in New South Wales remarked, “the only movement at all resembling a popular émeute” in “the usually drowsy, well-fed and politically apathetic Sydney.”61 The same was true in Melbourne, and in Van Diemen’s Land, where in 1849 an Anti-Transportation League was formed under the leadership of the island’s leading publisher, Henry Dowling, Jr. (1810–1885), the landowner Richard Dry (1815–1869) and John West (1809–1873), a fervidly eloquent Congregationalist minister who, when not inveighing against the System from lecture halls and pulpits throughout the island, wrote the first and for many years the best history of Van Diemen’s Land.

  But for all the protests, the meetings and the airing of grievances at the enforced Stain, there was never any question of secession. Nobody, in or out of the League, wanted that. Meanwhile, Grey’s two-year moratorium on transportation to Van Diemen’s Land ran out in 1848, and the machinery of exile, obedient to his Lordship’s peevishly stubborn character, began once more to roll in the direction of Hobart and Launceston. Sir William Denison, the lieutenant-governor, could do no more than pooh-pooh the “moral pretensions” of the League and find what work could be found for Lord Grey’s Exiles. He also tried, with less success, to assure the free settlers that the new arrivals—having done their stint in Pentonville—were of better stuff than the old and that eight or ten convict ships a year did not mean a breach of faith by the Colonial Office. As the economy of Van Diemen’s Land struggled erratically out of its catastrophic slump, Denison grew optimistic about the number of convicts it could absorb in private employment: first 1,500 a year, then 2,000. The actual arrivals were 1,434 men and women in 1848, 1,847 in 1849 and a leap to 3,406 in 1850. “I have succeeded in getting back the assignment system in a modified form,” he boasted. Grey, however, did not wish to hear about assignment; and the Abolitionists did not want to have it, modified or no. The League’s work played a large part—larger than it is usually credited with—in killing transportation to Van Diemen’s Land. But what finished it off was Lord Grey’s retirement from the Colonial Office, and the discovery of gold in Australia.