The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Not until 1828, with a change of government in London, did Stirling make much headway. Family influence played a major part. Both the new head of the Colonial Office, Sir George Murray, and his assistant, Horace Twiss, were friends of Stirling’s father-in-law. Stirling proposed to them that a syndicate of private capitalists should raise the money to establish settlers at Swan River. The government liked the sound of this—a Crown colony developed by private funds, as Pennsylvania had been by William Penn and Georgia by Colonel Oglethorpe.

  Enter, at this point, a young English landowner, the second son of a cotton-manufacturer, something of a wastrel but marked with gentility and imbued with the desire to cut a great figure on the colonial stage: Thomas Peel (1793–1865). An hour’s conversation with Captain Stirling had convinced him that the Swan River held his future, and he appeared before the government with a hastily convened syndicate of investors, who offered to transfer ten thousand settlers with all their stock and gear to Western Australia in return for a Crown grant of four million acres. The government counter-offered one million. At this dampening stinginess the syndicate evaporated, and Peel, who had much less money than Stirling thought, had to find a new backer. He did, but not one he wanted to acknowledge publicly: an ex-convict named Solomon Levey (1794—1833) who, transported in 1814 for stealing a chest of tea, had risen in Sydney as a merchant, banker, landowner and, eventually, philanthropist. The firm of Cooper and Levey, founded in 1826, was one of the biggest trading concerns in the South Pacific. Levey was an astute, generous man, but not—as it turned out—quite astute enough. He had always craved the respectability, the sense of access that had been twice denied him as an ex-convict and as a Jew. The chance to underwrite an ambitious imperial scheme with an aristocratic goy, a relative of the great Sir Robert Peel, dazzled him. Thomas Peel, for his part, insisted on keeping Levey’s partnership secret, so that the Swan River scheme would not be tainted by Jewishness and felonry. The company they formed was called Thomas Peel & Co.27

  The Colonial Office agreed to give this company 250,000 acres on the Swan, and 250,000 more after it landed 400 settlers, who would receive grants of 200 and 100 acres each. These settlers had to arrive by November 1, 1829. After twenty-one years—by mid-century—Thomas Peel & Co. was to get another 500,000 acres. Captain James Stirling, master of many ships and darling of the Colonial Office, would be lieutenant-governor of the new colony, with 100,000 acres of his choice. Peel would go with him to manage the company’s affairs.

  In May 1829, the frigate Challenger sailed into the Swan River estuary, and its master, Captain Charles Fremantle, took formal possession of one million square miles of territory,* naming it Western Australia—the first time the word Australia had been officially used. (Curiously enough, he was told to ask the Aborigines if they consented to this; but neither Fremantle nor anyone else on board spoke their language, and one could hardly convey so heroic a territorial concept to savages by pointing and waving.) Meanwhile, in England, the first Swan River colonists, all free men and women with promises of Arcadia dancing in their heads, were signed up, assembled and embarked on the Parmelia. No one had tried to survey the area or to map any part of its coastline, a fact that became embarrassingly evident at the end of the long voyage when Captain Stirling, catching sight of the mouth of the Swan River and the Challenger at anchor, became so anxious to make port that he steered a shortcut between an island and the shore and ran his ship, with all its colonists, onto the rocks. No one was drowned, and a few days later the young lieutenant-governor kedged Parmelia off. The Swan River pioneers had their first taste of Australian life, huddled disconsolately under canvas in the pouring rain surrounded by the emblems of the civilization they were to plant in the wild: cases of flour, trunks full of nankeen and velvet, Georgian furniture, rusting shovels, an upright piano cocked listing in the sand. They slapped at mosquitoes and scratched at sand-fleas while gazing on the barren coast, the prostrate creeping plants and the steaming rocks; their hearts sank. Not being convicts, the ladies could not curse.

  But Stirling was indefatigable. He named a port town, Fremantle, at the mouth of the Swan; and then led a party upstream, between embowered banks where the arch-symbols of antipodean inversion that had given the river its name, the black swans, dibbled their red bills in the water. Nine miles from the sea, he chose a spot for the main city, Perth. By December 1829, when Thomas Peel sailed in with ninety more colonists, two shantytowns marked the white man’s foothold on the coast. It was typical of Stirling that, as the age of Sail turned to that of Steam, he had separated the capital from the port by a stretch of river navigable only by rowboats.

  The fertility of the land proved, as so often it had done to Australian pioneers before, a mirage. Either the soil was barren, or it was so thick with trees that the work of clearing and stumping defeated all but the most iron-willed settlers. Not until 1835 did the Swan River colony grow enough wheat to feed itself. Stirling was constantly sending to the Cape for emergency supplies, but the British Government did not want to spend money underwriting what had been presented to it as a legitimate commercial speculation. Hence, the settlers lived on the edge of famine most of the time. Stirling won their gratitude, if little else, by sailing to England in 1832 to beg assistance; the Colonial Office sent Stirling back to Western Australia with a flea in his ear for leaving his post without permission.

  As lieutenant-governor, Stirling had to spend every grain of his charm and authority to keep the anxieties of his “genteel colonists” at bay, so that their morale would not cave in. He never let them forget their Englishness. They dined at the vice-regal tent in formal dress, decorations optional; he presided over balls, picnics and hunts. Not without difficulty, he got Anglican chaplains to make the immense voyage to Western Australia so that their rites and sermons could furnish the little colony with its necessary social glue and spiritual comfort.

  Yet such efforts were mainly cosmetic. Nothing could abolish the miseries of the land or the frictions of the harassed little community, promised Arcadia but given sand. One settler noted that the doctors were kept busy with “casualties and accidents, arising from grog drinking, and guns and gunpowder in the hands of persons not accustomed to their use till they came here.” Thomas Peel, their financial promoter, disintegrated almost as soon as he arrived. His chosen acreage south of Fremantle, poor land to begin with, was swept by a bushfire; in May 1830, the Rockingham, carrying settlers for his land, was wrecked on the same rocks that had nearly destroyed Parmelia. In a paroxysm of rage, he challenged her captain to a duel and got shot in the right hand. He seemed so choleric and crazy that no one would work for him. Supplies he promised never arrived. Promissory notes on Cooper & Levey, in which many workers had been paid, were dishonored by Daniel Cooper in Sydney (without, it should be mentioned, the knowledge of Solomon Levey in London). Settlers sued Peel for their wages; he countersued for their passage money. He sent no reports to Levey and did not set aside the 125,000 acres meant to recompense his unacknowledged partner for the £20,000 he had sunk in the Swan River scheme. In 1832, Levey had to ask the Colonial Office what on earth was happening at Swan River—and the Office was loath to tell him, for it had no record of Levey’s financial involvement. Peel had not revealed that his one solid backer was an Emancipist Jew.

  Levey died the next year, 1833, his spirits broken by this utter fiasco. Peel lived on in Western Australia for another thirty years, slipping into poverty, juggling his land-grants, selling a few acres here and there to keep going—not that there were many takers. In his old age, he could sometimes be glimpsed riding alone through his vast acreage of worthless bush, wearing a frayed pink coat like the hunting squire he had tried, and failed, to become.

  In 1832 the Swan River colony had slightly under 1,500 white colonists; five years later it had scarcely 500 more. By 1839, when Stirling left, it could support itself after a fashion, but all its wheat and flour still had to be imported from Hobart. Each year, it exported a token
few hundred bales of wool to England, nothing else. In December 1850, after two decades of settlement, Western Australia had only 5,886 colonists—two-thirds of whom, according to its governor, Charles Fitzgerald, in a report to Lord Grey, “would quit this colony tomorrow.” Sheep that had cost £4 to £5 a head were going begging at half a crown. The price of their wool had plummeted to 9d. or even 6d. a pound, leaving the grazier no margin at all. All was “depression, stagnation, and, I may say, despair.”28 One last possible fount of manpower remained to save them: convicts.

  In 1846 some West Australians petitioned Whitehall “to make and declare their Colony a Penal Settlement Upon an Extensive Scale.”29 Grey was delighted. Here, at least, was one colony wise enough to realize that Britain’s long enterprise of social excretion could do good, manuring the antipodean sand. If Western Australia clamored for felons, Grey reasoned, the Anti-Transportation League would look weaker. At least it could not claim a complete moral monopoly among the white settlers of Australia.

  And so, just as transportation was drawing to a close in the east of Australia, it began in the west. The first convict ship to Western Australia, the Scindian, with 75 felons, 54 guards and the usual officials on board, appeared off Fremantle in June 1850. In January 1868, the thirty-seventh and last convict ship, the Hougoumont, disgorged 279 prisoners there—including a number of Irish Fenians, most prominent of whom was the writer and editor John Boyle O’Reilly, soon to make a spectacular escape on a ship chartered by fellow Irishmen in America. In those eighteen years, 9,668 convicts, all men and most of them able-bodied, were sent to Western Australia over the continuous protests of the other Australian colonies. They did not improve the moral tone of the raw West, but they saved its economy. As in the past, slave labor got the wheels turning.

  The monument of the System in Western Australia was a long, low, white building overlooking the sea at Fremantle—the convict barracks, known as the “Establishment.” It held the prisoners who had to work in chain gangs in and around Fremantle. Other groups of serving convicts, not in chains, were housed in depots at Perth and in the country districts, where they made roads, raised public buildings and in general improved the public face of Western Australia. After doing a specified part of his sentence, each prisoner became eligible for a conditional pardon—4 years for a 7-year sentence, 5 years and 3 months for a 10-year sentence, and so on.30 He could then do wage-labor for a free settler until his time was up. Before his ticket-of-leave, he could only work for the local government.

  The lash, by now only an execrated memory in the older Australian colonies, was part of the discipline here but not its basis. In 1858 the superintendent of convicts avowed that he wanted it reserved for “cases of brutal assault,” not even for escape attempts, for “when we consider the utter impossibility of effecting escape in the bush,—the colony being in reality what it is commonly described to be, a vast natural prison,—we ought in awarding punishment to reflect that the unfortunate culprit has already received the most impressive of all kinds of persuasion, viz., actual suffering from starvation.”31

  The colony was greedy; it wanted to get as many “government men” as it could, and extract as much profit from their labor as possible. In February 1858 the comptroller-general’s office in Fremantle asked the Colonial Office for a guaranteed one thousand prisoners a year, since “the prosperity of the Colony must mainly depend on the number of convicts sent here.” With less success, it asked the British Government to pay for “materials, powder, cartage, plant, &c” in road, dock and bridge building, as well as the prisoners’ transportation, food, clothing and tools. Western Australia was so poor, it added piteously, that paying for such things “is wholly out of the question.” Popular as government labor was in Western Australia (both the Anglican and the Catholic Bishops of Perth fruitlessly requested convict labor to erect their rival episcopal palaces), the whole idea of its continued influx was regarded with horror and dismay back East. The Stain was powerful stuff; this “moral sewage” could cross deserts, contaminate seas, seep its noxious way thousands of miles east and surface on the newly purged coast of Australia. Where did the Western Australian convicts go when their sentences ran out? To New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia—or so indignant citizens believed. The one issue on which all the participating members could agree at the first Australian Intercolonial Conference, held in Melbourne in 1863, was that transportation to Western Australia had to stop. A British Royal Commission on Penal Discipline chose this heated moment to urge that all male convicts sentenced to any length of sentence should be sent to Western Australia.32

  At this, the Victorian Anti-Transportation League, which had atrophied for want of a cause, sat up with a jerk and addressed a solemn plea to the people of Great Britain. “The happy homes of tens of thousands of families who were lately your neighbours,” it intoned, were about to be “desolated, by the presence of a convict curse … productive of abominations too horrible to be named.” If Western Australia could not survive without convicts, let its free settlers go elsewhere. But South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and New Zealand would no longer consent to indirectly serve as “the refuge for Britain’s outcasts, the hiding places for her sin and shame.” The fact that a convict had to have served his sentence before leaving Western Australia, and hence was no longer a convict but a free man, was immaterial.33 Nobody knew how many demons and villains really came east—a popular though certainly exaggerated figure was six men in ten—but there was no doubt that it would be easily done by ship. Certainly no one ever heard of an ex-prisoner doing it on foot. And if (as one of the Macarthurs suggested in a letter to the London Daily News) only six hundred felons a year got into the eastern states, that was six thousand in ten years, and each of them capable of corrupting at least a dozen innocent folk.34 The mere arithmetic was enough to freeze a man’s blood.

  The facts pointed another way. Only about one ticket-of-leave holder in Western Australia in three was convicted of a second offense; less than one in twenty of these offenses was “serious,” and two convictions in five were for drunkenness or attempted escape. Escapes had become more frequent between 1862 and 1867, under the odious and corrupt governorship of J. S. Hampton, the former ally of John Price on Norfolk Island.35

  But this time the Abolitionists won. Her Majesty’s Government was no longer prepared to trade the convenience of draining six hundred felons a year into Western Australia for the grave risk of alienating all the eastern colonies, which had the population, the money, the resources, the trade—everything, in fact, that made a colony worth having. Early in 1865, Lord Palmerston’s cabinet announced that transportation would end within three years. And so it did: On January 10, 1868, the last convict ship to Australia landed its cargo of sixty Fenian political prisoners and more common assorted malefactors at Fremantle, eighty years to the month, if not quite the day, since Captain Arthur Phillip brought the First Fleet to its anchorage in Sydney Cove.

  The loss of convicts was an economic disaster for Western Australia. For two decades it had had the free labor of some fifteen hundred men, at a cost to England of £100,000 a year; and as a Fremantle editor put it, “we now awake from our normal state of apathetic indifference to find ourselves on the verge of ruin.” Virtually all it had to show for those twenty years were some mines that could no longer be worked, since free labor did not want to go down them; a network of roads around Perth that petered out in the bush; some handsome Victorian public buildings, a few bridges and dredged channels, and a half-empty jail barracks at Fremantle. The population of Western Australia in 1871 was 25,447, of whom about 9,000 were convicts or their descendants.

  The 1871 Census revealed that in population growth, the colonies that shed the System first (or, like South Australia, had never had it) had zoomed ahead of both Western Australia and Tasmania. In the twenty years since 1851, the white population of New South Wales had gone (in round figures) from 197,000 to 500,000; Victoria, fr
om 77,000 to 730,000, a tenfold increase set off by the gold rush and sustained by land development; South Australia, from 66,500 to 189,000. Queensland’s population had quadrupled since 1861, to 122,000 souls. But the last of the convict colonies, Tasmania and Western Australia, would be stuck for decades in their hangover from the malign indulgence of semi-slave labor.

  * Its eastern boundary was the meridian of 129°E.—not that this represented any “natural” boundary, but simply because it was the convenient fossil of the “Pope’s Line,” fixed in the fifteenth century by the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the world into Spanish and Portuguese hemispheres.

  17

  The End of the System

  THE LONG ANGUISH of the System was over. What had it achieved? It might be gratifying to claim that it had failed altogether; that this not-so-small, not-so-primitive ancestor of the Gulag deterred no one in Britain and reformed no one in Australia; that as a penal system it was quite unproductive, a botched act of sublimation.

  Certainly, there were things it did not do. If one accepts the “strategic outlier” argument—that the hidden agenda of convict colonization was to protect England’s Far Eastern trade with a refitting port on the coast of New South Wales—then it did fail. No big warships were rigged with the pine and flax that had so interested Captain Cook on Norfolk Island, and Australia’s contribution to the balance of military and trading power in Indian waters between 1788 and 1820 was nil. Perhaps the English colony on the eastern coast deterred the French from claiming the continent—or perhaps the French were not as interested in Australia as the English, fearful of Napoleon, assumed? The west and north coasts, facing the Indian Ocean and the Timor Sea, had strategic prospects, but the French did not try to claim them, even though England did not put a garrison into Western Australia until 1826.