43. Maconochie to Gipps, June 2, 1842, encl. 1 in Gipps to Stanley, Aug. 15, 1843, Con. Disc. 4, 1846, p. 54 and passim.
44. Alexander Maconochie, The Mark System of Prison Discipline.
45. On the convict graves in the Norfolk Island cemetery, see R. Nixon Dalkin, Colonial Era Cemetery of Norfolk Island.
46. James Lawrence, “Memoir,” Ms. It seems to have been Maconochie’s policy to encourage literate convicts to write down their experiences, both to exorcise their horrors and to supply an unofficial record of the underside of the Old System. The historian can only be grateful to him, since, if Maconochie had not given men like Thomas Cook, James Lawrence, James Porter and Laurence Frayne the means and time to describe the hells they had passed through, their reality would now be lost in administrative euphemisms, omissions and lies.
In general, convicts’ experiences were not considered worth wasting time on, and it is remarkable not only that the occasional manuscript like Cook’s should have survived complete, but that the others survived in any form, however physically damaged or edited. Most, one may assume, were thrown out by archivists or embarrassed descendants. Thus the memoir of a Liverpool convict named Jones (b. 1813), probably written under Maconochie’s aegis, ends after a few pages before his transport ship has left the White cliffs of Dover behind; on the last page is the notation, in a later hand, “Jones—Thief—up to his transportation for the Colonies—nothing interesting. Excerpt 1867.” One could wish to see those missing pages. See memoir of Jones, item 10 at MSQ 168, Dixson Library, Sydney.
47. The story of “Bony” Anderson, the convict chained to the rock of Goat Island in Sydney Harbor, appears first in the English journal Meliora, vol. 4, no. 13 (April 1861), pp. 12–14. Barry (Maconochie, p. 121) raises the possibility that it was taken from an unpublished, and now lost, manuscript by Maconochie himself. For a full account of Anderson and Maconochie see Barry, Maconochie, pp. 121–24.
48. J. W. Smith to Gipps, encl. 1 in Gipps to Stanley, Aug. 15, 1842, Con. Disc. 4, 1846, p. 58ff.
49. Gipps to Stanley, Oct. 13, 1841, HRA xxI:542.
50. Gipps to Stanley, Aug. 15, 1842, Con. Disc. 4, 1846, p. 66.
51. Gipps to Stanley, Apr. 1, 1843, HRA xxii:617. Barry, Maconochie, p. 140.
52. Gipps to Stanley, Apr. 1, 1843, Con. Disc. 4, 1846, p. 138.
53. Ibid., p.142.
54. Ibid., p. 143.
55. Ibid., pp. 143–44.
56. Ibid., pp. 146–47.
57. Ibid., p. 147.
58. Alexander Maconochie, On Reformatory Prison Discipline, p. 26.
59. Gipps to Stanley, Apr. 1, 1843, Con. Disc 4, 1846, p. 148.
60. Ibid., p. 149.
61. In 1840 it had cost £10. 18s. 4d. to keep a convict on Norfolk Island; in 1843, £13 3s. 11d., a rise of 21 percent. But in 1838, due to bumper harvests; the year’s cost of a convict was £4 14s. 2d; whereas in 1839, the year before Maconochie arrived, the crops were dismal and because all food had to be imported the figure went to £17 19s. 10d—a rise of 380 percent.
62. Stanley to Gipps, Apr. 29, 1843, HRA xx:691.
63. For the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia, see Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, pp. 68–77.
64. Pentonville penitentiary seemed, from the moment of its opening in 1842, to be “a model for prison architecture and discipline not only in England but in most of Europe … the culmination of three generations of thinking” (Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain, p. 3). Its purpose was to crush the will of its 450 inmates by means of absolutely inflexible routine, complete isolation and unvarying task-work, with each convict identically engaged on a 12-hour day of cobbling or weaving. Whenever the prisoner stepped outside his cell for muster or exercise, he was required to don a woollen mask with eyeholes so that he could neither recognize nor be recognized by his fellow-prisoners. The Pentonville chapel, where prisoners were assembled every day, was designed with a separate box for each prisoner; wooden partitions and a door in each box assured that no convict could see the man to right or left of him, only the preacher in the “cackle tub” or pulpit. All the main features of Pentonville—the silent cells, the spyholes, the isolation, the masks and the chapel—would be faithfully copied after 1853 in the “Model Prison” built at Port Arthur in Tasmania. (See note 45 to Chapter 15, below.)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN A Special Scourge
1. Stanley’s dispatches to Franklin outlining the Probation System: Nov. 25, 1842, Correspondence re Convict Discipline, in PP 159, 1843, nos. 175 (p. 3) and 176 (p. 10).
2. Shaw CC, pp. 295–96.
3. Sir James Graham to the Committee of Visitors of Parkhurst Prison, Dec. 20, 1842, Correspondence re Convict Discipline, Appendix to Part I, pp. 1–2, PP 1843.
4. Ibid.
5. Stanley to Franklin, Nov. 25, 1842, dispatch no. 176.
6. Robert Crooke, The Convict, pp. 39–40.
7. Eardley-Wilmot’s loyalty to the apprenticeship system for training young artisans—which was being harried into extinction by the free labor market of the late 1820s—would be upheld in the curriculum of craft-training at Point Puer in Port Arthur in the 1840s. He blamed the increase of juvenile crime on the breakdown of the master’s parental supervision of the young. “Formerly the apprentice was taken into the house of the master,” he declared in 1827; “he was considered one of the family.… [N]ow the master has ten or a dozen apprentices and perhaps never sees them.… [They] are allowed to go where they please … and the consequence is that they are all thieves.” Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pam, p. 182.
8. Robson, Hist. Tas., p. 418. For a general description of the depression of the Van Diemen’s Land economy, see pp. 413–19.
9. Robert Pitcairn to Lord Stanley, Feb. 4, 1846, Correspondence re Convict Discipline, PP 1843, p. 38.
10. “Half-Yearly Return of Runaway Convicts, Authorised by J. S. Hampton, Comptroller General at Hobart.” Poster, dated Jul. 1, 1850, cumulative since 1831, D356–18, ML, Sydney.
11. F. R. Nixon to Lord Grey, Feb. 15, 1847; printed in PP 1847, Memorials on Transportation, “A Communication upon the Subject of Transportation,” vol. 38, no. 741, p. 2.
12. Stanley to Eardley-Wilmot, draft dispatch dated Sept. 1845, encl. 1 in J. Stephen to S. W. Phillips, Sept. 8, 1845, Con. Disc. 3, 1846.
13. Nixon to Grey, Feb. 15, 1847, in PP 1847, vol. 38, no. 741, p. 3ff.
14. For the incidence of lesbianism in the Female Factories in Launceston and at the Cascades, see G. R. Lennox, “A Private and Confidential Despatch of Eardley-Wilmot.” The mention of lesbianism in chapel is at p. 342 of the 1841 Committee’s report at CSO 22/50, TSA. One reason for Eardley-Wilmot’s downfall as lieutenant-governor was that Gladstone believed he had done little or nothing to curb convict lesbianism in Van Diemen’s Land. Though plans for the separate women’s penitentiary Stanley had called for as part of his Probation System had been drawn up (by Major Joshua Jebb, along the lines of Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight) and sent from England, and though a budget of £35,000 had been approved for its construction, it was not, as noted above, actually built. Instead, as many newly arrived women convicts as possible were diverted from the Cascades Factory into a converted prison ship moored in the Derwent, HMS Anson, where (it was hoped) they would not be exposed to the factory’s corrupting influence. In all, about 3,500 convict women passed through probationary instruction on board the Anson between 1844 and 1849, under the authority of Edmund and Philippa Bowden, superintendent and matron. To save money, however, Eardley-Wilmot planned to reverse the roles of the Anson and the Cascades Factory; the factory would become the reform-school, the ship a punishment hulk. This earned him the enmity of Matron Bowden; she helped persuade Gladstone (already famous for his interest in “fallen women”) that her work as a rehabilitator was being undermined by the lieutenant-governor; and this, Lennox points out (p. 87), must have accelerated Eardley-Wilmot’s sacking in April 1846.
15. Wilmot’s confidential report to S
tanley, Nov. 2, 1843, cit. in Lennox, “Eardley-Wilmot,” p. 80.
16. John Frost, The Horrors of Convict Life, p. 40.
17. Eardley-Wilmot to Stanley, Mar. 17, 1846, Con. Disc, 1847, p. 46.
18. The petition of twenty-five clergymen in Van Diemen’s Land to Lord Grey was couched in somber tones, inspired by “a deep sense of the responsibility of living in a land where such awful sins are committed, and where the unhappy convicts are subjected to an association leading them into such shocking corruption.” Enclosure 1 (dated July 9, 1846) in Bishop Nixon to Lord Grey, May 3, 1847, Con. Disc. 1847, p. 44.
19. J. Syme, Nine Years in Van Diemen’s Land …, Dundee, 1848, pp. 200–201, cit. in Crowley, Doc. Hist., vol. 2, p. 122.
20. Gladstone to Eardley-Wilmot, Apr. 30, 1846, both private and public letters in CO 408/25.
21. C. J. La Trobe to Lord Grey, May 31, 1847, paper 941, in Con Disc. 1847.
22. Stanley to Gipps, HRA xxii:695–96.
23. Childs to Champ, July 11, 1846, encl. 2 in Wilmot to Gladstone, Sept. 3, 1846, Con Disc. 1847, p. 176.
24. John Mortlock, Experiences of a Convict, pp. 73, 71.
25. Ibid., p. 70.
26. Rev. Thomas Rogers, Correspondence, p. 144. Thomas Rogers (1806–1903), a graduate of Trinity College in Dublin, accepted from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel a post on Norfolk Island as religious instructor to convicts. He arrived in Hobart in July 1845 and by September was on Norfolk Island. His position was anomalous. Not having been appointed by Bishop Nixon in Tasmania, he had no ecclesiastical authority. He was not well-placed to argue with the island commandants, Childs and Price; but argue he did, passionately and with anguish, on behalf of the tormented prisoners. He tried (but failed) to report on Childs’s misdeeds and neglect to Eardley-Wilmot in Hobart; tried (and failed again) to get Denison’s ear on John Price. Naturally, this dissident friend of the convicts did not last long on Norfolk Island; he was recalled to Hobart in February 1847. In 1849 he published a book defending his stand against the System, Correspondence Relating to the Dismissal of the Rev. T. Rogers, from his Chaplaincy at Norfolk Island. Rogers’s manuscript Letter-Book for his sojourn on Norfolk Island, 1844–46, is in the ML, Sydney.
He was less generous to his family. Over four years in Australia Rogers only sent £75, a miserable pittance, to the wife and six children he had left behind. Sarah Rogers died destitute without seeing her errant husband again. Early in 1850, friends subscribed to raise the passage money to send their children to Australia. Unaware of this, Rogers had made arrangements to sail back to Ireland to fetch them. The two ships passed each other en route; Rogers was not reunited with his offspring until he returned to Australia in 1860.
One of his sons, John William Foster Rogers, worked up his father’s reminiscences and letters into a manuscript, which remained unpublished: “Man’s Inhumanity—Being a Chaplain’s Chronicle of Norfolk Island in the ’Forties” (typescript, with illustrations, C214, ML, Sydney). Rogers himself was the prototype of the tormented, alcoholic chaplain the Rev. James North in Clarke’s His Natural Life.
27. Diary of Elizabeth Robertson, Ms. 163 in Dixson Library, Sydney, cit. in Margaret Hazzard, Punishment Short of Death, p. 189.
28. Childs to Eardley-Wilmot, Oct. 1, 1845, encl. in Wilmot to Stanley, Dec. 19, 1845, Con. Disc. 2, 1846, p. 48.
29. Naylor to Grey, in GO 1/63, TSA, cit. in Eustace Fitzsymonds, ed., Norfolk Island 1846 …, pp. 15–16. (Naylor’s report to Stanley, edited for parliamentary publication, is printed as encl. 2 in Grey to Denison, Sept. 30, 1846, Con. Disc. 1847, pp. 67–76.)
30. Ibid.
31. Maconochie advises Naylor against publishing the report: Maconochie to B. Hawes, Sept. 22, 1846, encl. 1 in paper 11, Con. Disc. 1847, p. 67. “Too probable” to pass over: Grey to Denison, Sept. 30, 1846, paper 11 in Con. Disc. 1847, p. 66. Grey’s second thoughts: Grey to Denison, Nov. 7, 1846, paper 12 in Con. Disc. 1847, p. 76.
32. Hazzard, Punishment Short of Death, p. 196.
33. Robert Pringle Stuart’s Ms. of the report is at CON 1/5183 and GO 33/55, TSA. The censored version, with whole paragraphs missing and a copious scattering of asterisks, appeared in Con. Disc. 1847, pp. 84–101. The full text, as with Naylor, is published in Fitzsymonds, ed., Norfolk Island 1846.
34. Ibid.
35. Clarke’s account of the Ring in His Natural Life, based on Stuart’s report, is relatively unsensational, though fanciful in parts. Price Warung’s “Secret Society of the Ring,” in Convict Days, pulls out all the stops and sounds like an antipodean mixture of Maria Monk, Juliette, The Castle of Otranto and Melmoth the Wanderer, overglazed with Poe; the Ring’s nocturnal conclaves are lit with blazing light from the eyesockets of a skull, producing “a diabolic effect upon weakened nerves,” including the reader’s. As for the language, “Were you to clothe with literary form the mouthings of the creatures led by Hebert, as thy danced round Lais and Phryne enthroned as Goddesses of Reason on the desecrated church altars of Revolutionary Paris, you would scarcely parallel it in point of blasphemous horror” (pp. 159–60). On the rhymed “Convict Oath” (presumably written by Warung), see “The Liberation of the First Three” in Convict Days, pp. 68–69.
36. Stuart, in Fitzsymonds, ed., Norfolk Island 1846, p. 67.
37. Minutes of Executive Council Meeting, Hobart, July 1–2, 1846.
38. On the Norfolk Island mutiny of July 1, 1846, see Judge Fielding Browne’s Report in Con. Disc. 1847, pp. 35–40. Price’s report, with declarations and testimony from Alfred Baldock, George Bott, William Forster and others, encl. in Latrobe to Grey, Jan. 8, 1847, ibid., pp. 25–35.
39. On Henry Beresford Garrett and “The Demon,” see Sir John Vincent Barry, The Life and Death of John Price, Appendix A. The facts of Garrett’s life are unclear. According to one version, he was a soldier transported for robbing the commissariat in Nottingham. He arrived on Norfolk Island around 1845, and toward the end of Price’s commandancy he was transferred to Van Diemen’s Land; he escaped in 1853 and fled to Victoria, finding anonymity within the vast horde of gold-seekers. In 1854 Garrett and three accomplices “stuck up” the Bank of Victoria at Ballarat, making off with £14,300 in cash and 250 oz. of gold. With his share of. the loot, Garrett returned to London but was recognized at once and re-transported to Melbourne for trial. Convicted of bank robbery, he went to the hulks in Port Phillip Bay, where he saw (and perhaps took part in) the murder of John Price in 1857. Released in 1861, he went to New Zealand, lived as a bushranger, and was sentenced in 1868 to 20 years in jail for shopbreaking. During the latter part of this sentence, before his death in 1885, Garrett wrote a number of manuscripts, including “The Demon,” his 25,000-word account of John Price—a document of obsession. It survives only as a transcript made after 1948; the original notebooks, which Garrett entrusted to a Methodist lay preacher named Hall, are lost. A photocopy of the transcript is in the Mitchell Library, Sydney.
40. Price to Champ, Dec. 7, 1846, encl. 1 in Latrobe to Grey, Jan. 8, 1847, letter 8 in Con. Disc. 1847, p. 26.
41. Barry, The Life and Death of John Price, p. 37. Willson’s damaging report to Denison on Norfolk Island (dated May 22, 1852) is printed in Con. Disc, 1853, pp. 88–95. In 1849, on his previous (second) visit, Willson had praised the improvement of rations, the “perfect unanimity” among the civil and military officers, and “the judicious conduct of Mr. Price, the Commandant” (Con. Disc. 1850, pp. 111–114).
42. Quotes from Rogers, unless otherwise specified, are from passages cited in Barry, The Life and Death of John Price, pp. 45–50, and from W. F. Rogers, “Man’s Inhumanity …,” typescript at C214, ML, Sydney.
43. W. Nairn to Price, Feb. 2, 1852, in Con. Disc. 1853, pp. 88–89.
44. Price to Nairn, Mar. 15, 1852, ibid., pp. 89–90.
45. The “Model Prison” at Port Arthur was begun in 1848 and finished in 1852, it remained in continuous use until Port Arthur closed down in 1877. It was, in every way, a scale model of
Pentonville, with a fraction of the capacity—48 separate cells, arranged in three wings; the fourth wing of the cross was the chapel, with its partitioned stalls so designed that convicts could not see or communicate with one another when at Divine Service. The cells, fittings, central inspection hall and schedules for work, exercise and cleaning were copied from Pentonville, as were the prisoners’ cloth masks, the felt slippers worn by guards to ensure silence, the silent numbering-machine that indicated to prisoners the order in which they must leave the chapel, and much else besides. It had four dumb-cells, black isolation chambers with walls three feet thick and no less than three internal doors; when these and the entrance door were closed, as any visitor to the restored Model Prison can now test for himself, the silence and darkness were such as to exclude all sensory stimulation. The records suggest that the Model Prison produced a high level of neurosis and mental breakdown in its inmates—as did Pentonville.
46. Report of SC on Criminal Laws, Juvenile Offenders and Transportation, PP 1847 (449), pp. 3–7.
47. Lord Grey in GB Parl. Debates, 3rd series, vol. 110, cols. 211–12, cit. in Crowley, Doc. Hist., vol. 2, p. 114.
48. Grey to Denison, Feb. 5, 1847. Stephen to the Treasury, Feb. 15, 1847, CO 280/196.
49. Grey to Denison, Apr. 27, 1848.
50. Grey to Fitzroy, Sept. 3, 1847, HRA xxv:735. In September 1847, Grey offered to send out one free emigrant, his fares paid by the government, for every “exile” transported to Australia. However, he retracted this offer the following year.
51. James Macarthur to SC 1837, p. 218.
52. Port Phillip Patriot and Melbourne Advertiser, Dec. 19, 1844.
53. Ibid., Dec. 26, 1844. On William Kerr (1812–1859), editor of the radically anti-pastoralist Argus and champion of workers’ rights in early Victoria, see entry in ADB and Garryowen [pseud. of E. Finn], The Chronicles of Early Melbourne (Melbourne, 1888), pp. 1–2.
54. V & P, NSW Legislative Council, Oct. 30, 1846.
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