Australians

by Thomas Keneally

  By nightfall Graham was two-thirds of the way to Worwa and dined on a two-metre snake he had killed. On the track the next morning he met some people who told him that Eliza Fraser had been claimed by a man named Mothervane, who had identified her as the spirit of his wife’s sister. When Graham arrived at the site he was greeted by his kin and saw that Eliza was in a bark shelter guarded by his kinsman, Dapen. He began to talk, claiming that Eliza was his dead wife, Mamba. An argument developed about the validity of this claim but Mamba’s father supported Graham, especially after he began to tell stories of the journeys he had made with Mamba’s spirit. ‘All the coast blacks here stood on my side,’ wrote Graham later, ‘and said I always told the truth.’ Dapen then said, ‘Come uncle, I was watching my aunt; that the mountain blacks should not come near while you were talking.’

  He urged Graham to depart with Eliza immediately before the opposing inland Aboriginals could make trouble, especially since Mothervane was present and gave up his claim to Eliza with a bad grace. Much later it was surmised that Mothervane may have been the escaped convict Bracefield, who lived amongst the tribe to the north of the Noosa people. When she emerged from the shelter, Eliza’s appearance seemed strange to Graham: ‘On her head was a sou’wester, the smell of the paint kept the blacks from taking it. Around her loins were part of the legs and waistband of a pair of trousers, which covered part of her thighs, wound round with vines twenty fold as well for delicacy as the preservation of her marriage and earrings which she concealed under the vines.’

  Taking Dapen’s advice, Graham recounted, ‘I rose, reached out my hand, saying come with me. God has made me your deliverer. Fortitude was what I now called upon from Heaven to assist me in seeing a woman survive.’

  They left Worwa accompanied by four of his kinsmen, and took Eliza across the lake by canoe, where Otter had reached the arrow Graham had marked in the sand. Fourteen hours later they got to the ship. At Moreton Bay Graham was an instant hero. He was praised for having exhibited ‘noble conduct’. Foster Fyans wrote to Governor Bourke from Moreton Bay in 1836: ‘From the intelligence and firmness displayed by this man, I am certain should His Excellency at any future period think a survey of the North Coast advisable, Graham would be a most useful man in the undertaking.’

  From the time Eliza arrived in Moreton Bay, or certainly from the time she arrived in Sydney, her story began to change in a way that was prejudicial to the natives she had been amongst. There was no questioning she had had a horrifying experience, tormented by loss of a child and a husband, perhaps tormented too by jealous Aboriginal women. But soon she was accusing the Waka-kabic speakers of being cannibals, and perhaps she felt that thrilling word was necessary to insert into her story when later in Britain she became the central actor in her own tale in theatres and at fairs. In Sydney, she depicted Graham as having rescued her from a totally malign mass of natives rather than from his not unsympathetic kinsmen. By the summer of 1837, when Eliza was in Liverpool, Graham had become one who himself had been captive amongst the savages, and had arrived just as she was about to be ravished by an aged native. Her story appeared in America and throughout the British Isles in chapbooks in which Graham was helped by Huon Mundy who lifted her round the middle ‘with his gigantic arms’ and ran to the beach where Graham was waiting with a canoe. And on it went.

  Some form of pardon did come to Graham and thereafter he vanished from the record, into the anonymous mass of old lags. Over time, too, Bracefield’s name became unreliably but indelibly associated with the rescue.

  The idea of white women lost to heathens and their lusts, and then rescued, was such a fertile seed in the Victorian imagination that few could resist enhancing the reality, even Eliza herself.

  CHAPTER 21

  MOLESWORTH’S COMMITTEE

  Everyone—Major Mudie, James Macarthur, the Reverend Lang, every pastoralist who employed convict labour as well as every commentator who thought such employment immoral—wanted to bring their evidence to the Select Committee of Parliament on Transportation which met during the spring and summer of 1837 in a drafty committee room of St Stephen’s Hall, Westminster, where the British Parliament then still sat. And whoever it was, whether Mudie or Lang, apologist or opponent of the system, each wanted to give the committee his thoughts not just on the convict assignment system, but on the effect the system had on the whole society of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land.

  The committee chairman, Sir William Molesworth, was a wealthy and noble-hearted young man, twenty-seven years of age, who dressed superbly but was also a radical. He had in fact founded the London Review as a radical organ, and then acquired and edited the Westminster Review with the philospher of radicalism, John Stuart Mill. Though he disapproved of the state of debauchery to which the system of transportation and assignment had reduced New South Wales, he was not beyond debauchery himself. Yet as a radical he was mindful always of the poor and the slave. He had been disfigured in childhood by scrofula and this had resulted in teasing about his looks while he was at boarding school, an experience which gave him sympathy for other marked men and women.

  Another member of Molesworth’s committee, Lord Howick, was the young George Grey who entered parliament in 1829 and had a remarkable future as Earl Grey. Lord Howick disapproved of assignment but did not want to see the committee recommend the total abandonment of transportation which Molesworth himself obviously desired.

  The Presbyterian minister JD Lang was available and anxious to give evidence since he was already in Britain recruiting Scots emigrants. In line with his capacity to damn both sides of a question, he disliked emancipists for their presumptions and exclusives for their sins. He told the gentlemen of the committee that transportation could work as a punishment, ‘but it has not been hitherto subjected to a fair trial in the colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land for lack of free population’. Society’s tone was created by the convicts, ‘instead of by a virtuous population’. As for assignment, he pleased the committee by declaring it ‘is unequal in its operation, and consequently unjust to the convict’. It depended for its severity on the character of the master. ‘If the master is of a mild disposition, the convict is treated with much indulgence; on the other hand, if he is of an austere and severe disposition, the convict experiences that severity.’ There was nothing that could be done to prevent this unevenness, in Lang’s opinion.

  Lang thought the number of assigned convict servants in Sydney and their ready access to ‘ardent spirits’ was the cause of dissipation and licentiousness which would lead inevitably to more crime. There were fewer temptations for convicts assigned as field labourers in the interior. Even so, all assignments should be discontinued, he argued. Would there not be a great want of labour? he was asked. Not if proper exertions were made to bring in free immigrants, said Lang.

  As for the convict road parties, ‘They have opportunities of escape, and they avail themselves of these very often to prey upon the settlers.’ Lang thought road parties should therefore be discontinued too, except maybe outside the Twenty Counties, the located districts. Within the settled districts there was a deficiency of superintendents, and, of course, too much ease in getting those ‘ardent spirits’. As for the chained gangs, they were under more vigilant superintendents, and found it harder to flit away. A great number were also employed on the streets of Sydney, repairing the roads. As for the government’s employment of convict mechanics, he did not like the special preferences they had been receiving, though there were fewer of them now than previously. Before 1830, almost all the mechanics in the colony either were convicts or had been convicts. They had been permitted to work ‘over-hours’ on their own account. Sir Richard Bourke had received a petition from the free mechanics of Sydney either in 1832 or 1833 requesting the government distribute the convict mechanics all over the territory, or not to employ them at the public works, as it interfered with the profits of the free mechanics’ labour. He had complied. This had been the
sensible way to proceed, in Lang’s view.

  By the questions it asked, the committee, so certain that convict transporta-tion was morally indefensible, obviously knew very little about the details of the system. When a convict woman is married either to a ticket-of-leave man, or to a free man, she becomes free? they asked. Lang told them that she was free as long as she conducted herself with propriety. But if she got drunk—as was frequently the case—she was liable to be sent to the Female Factory or to have her ticket-of-leave cancelled.

  Then came the significant question: ‘You said that the assignment of women tended to demoralise them; is not the sending them out there to become the wives of the emancipists and ticket-of-leave men tantamount to rearing up a criminal population for that colony?’

  Lang said he did not think so. Marriage had a reformatory impact on many. But then the question was, ‘Do you think that is good as a punishment; is it a good description of punishment, merely to send a woman out to be married?’

  Certainly not, said Lang. But the disproportion that existed between the sexes was a great source of crime and depravity, and should be addressed.

  ‘There is an action and reaction in the colony perpetually going on between the classes of society originally depraved and those which have, ostensibly at least, a better character,’ he continued. The impact of the assignment of educated convicts, for example, to become editors of newspapers was ‘the very worst possible . . . The only paper in the colony that was published three times a week was under the management of individuals of that class [O’Shaughnessy and Watt] so lately as the year 1835. The influence of these individuals on the press was virtually directed to the abolition of the moral distinctions that the law of God has established in society, to persuade the community that the free immigrant portion of the population was really no better in point of character than the class from which they had emanated, the convicts . . . they were perpetually endeavouring to persuade the community that their situation was the result of misfortune and not of misconduct.’ They also sought ‘to impress on the community that the mere fulfilment of the man’s term of transportation restored him, to all intents and purposes, to the same condition in society as the man who never had been a convict.’

  A committee member, Mr Bulwer, rather aggressively asked Lang did he consider the people who attended meetings in support of the legal rights of former convicts, men such as Sir John Jamison, WC Wentworth, Henry O’Brien, Doctor William Bland, Thomas Wills, Edward Cox, Henry Cox, George Druitt and others to be suspect characters. Lang moderated his tone a little, going so far as to say that though they were respectable they were too heavily influenced by wealthy emancipists who made their money by running public houses, and money lending. Lang was also not impressed that many schoolteachers and tutors in private families were convicts or ex-convicts. ‘There is at this moment the son of an English clergyman in New South Wales who was educated by a person of this class, and who is now a convict [himself] under sentence of transportation for life in Van Diemen’s Land.’ John Dunmore Lang certainly believed that the amount of immorality amongst the Australian mass, free and convict, was higher than in England. The number of couples living in ‘concubinage’ particularly concerned him.

  In truth, the Reverend Lang was in favour of the abolition of transportation as it then operated in New South Wales. A border should be drawn near Port Macquarie and the whole land north of that should be used for a new experimentation in transportation. The Highlanders of Scotland should be the settlers introduced into a new system, under which convict labour would prepare the settlements for immigrants. The funds derived from the sale of Crown land should be employed exclusively for that purpose. Free immigration was the only means ‘by which we can get rid of the evils which that system [convict transportation] has entailed upon the colony hitherto’. Bringing in a numerous population of Scots free settlers ‘would give a high value to land, and then, that population would be enabled to pay for the land such a price as would repay all the advances of government’.

  Such were the dreams of a Scots visionary expressed in a wintry room in Westminster to a committee determined to end transportation to eastern Australia.

  Another witness before the committee, the English Benedictine William Ullathorne, who had heard the confessions of brutalised Norfolk Island prisoners about to be hanged for rebellion, agreed with Lang that transportation had not produced reform amongst convicts. The committee probably had in hand in any case his pamphlet, The Horrors of Transportation briefly unfolded to the People, published that year in Ireland and England. Major Mudie had also written a book, The Felonry of New South Wales, in which he condemned the malice of convicts and the discipline-softening measures introduced by Governor Bourke limiting what local magistrates could do to punish disobedient or insolent assigned servants. Even EA Slade, a former superintendent of the convict barracks and inventor of a special no-nonsense whip for use on the premises, wanted to give evidence along the same lines as Mudie. However, Ben Boyd, a squatter of the regions far south of Sydney, argued, ‘I believe there is no employer of labour in the colony who would not prefer a ticket-of-leave man to a bounty immigrant; for my own part, although I came out here at first with all my English prejudices against the prisoner class, I now from experience prefer them so decidedly, that I have at this moment but few immigrants in my employment.’

  The committee’s final report was an attack on the penal system of New South Wales. It brought an end to convict assignment in 1838, and ultimately an end to transportation.

  CHAPTER 22 *

  THE GIRL FROM THE FEMALE FACTORY

  Like many Australians trying to deal with the past, the author became interested for family reasons in one unexceptional young convict woman who seemed in background, crime and penal experience to represent a multitude of her kind. At the Limerick City Court of Sessions in the autumn of 1837, thirteen Irish labourers and servants were unremarkably sentenced to seven years transportation each. One of these was an auburn-haired, small-boned, handsome young woman of twenty-two years named Mary Shields.

  Other women sentenced at the same court session were Catherine Mongavan, who had stolen £5 13 shillings, a third of the average yearly wages in Ireland; Martha Walker, who had stolen a sheet; and Rosanna Daly, who had shoplifted ribbon. Mary Shields had been found guilty of stealing clothes from a Timothy Reardon. Since her occupation was given as that of servant, she may have been Mr Reardon’s servant. It was recorded also that she was a native of Tipperary, so she and her parents very likely belonged to the mass of landless or evicted peasantry who wandered into cities and took what work they could find.

  This young woman, only five feet one-and-a-quarter inches (155 cm), bore the indications of want. She was already the mother of a small son and infant daughter. She had been married at eighteen in May 1834 to a man named John O’Flynn in St John’s Church, Limerick. Their first child was baptised at St Michael’s Church, Limerick, in October 1835, and was named Michael. A daughter, Bridget, was baptised in December 1837.

  Not all people sentenced to transportation were in fact transported, and for the first phase of her sentence Mary, in Limerick City gaol, was still in contact with her husband and children. In fact, children often accompanied their parents to prison. Mary’s son, Michael, was of an age, about two years old, to want to be with his mother, and since he would be shipped with his mother, must have been at least part of the time in the wards of the gaol with her.

  We know something of Irish criminal offences, and the date of Mary Shields’s crime, in the summer of 1838, has some significance. The potato did not last after early summer, and the new crop was not harvested until September. Shields was at least a city woman, receiving a cash salary. But unlike peasants she had no fattened pig to sell to buy summer oatmeal and as the price of food rose as the season advanced, it was not uncommon for rural and city women to steal goods to convert stolen clothing into cash, or to steal food directly.

  Like
most of the women who were to accompany her to Australia, Mary had no previous conviction. More Irish female convicts—as compared with convicts from the rest of Britain—were married women; more of them were mothers of young families; more came from the country. Apart from Dubliners, few were described as ‘of the Cyprian tribe’, that is, prostitutes. Fewer, too, had been found guilty of crimes of violence such as assault or highway robbery.

  The bill for an Irish Poor Law had passed the British Parliament on 31 July 1838, three months before Shields’s crime. The Limerick workhouse would not be ready to receive its poor until May 1841. Yet the probable truth is that had the workhouse existed as a safety net in her day, Shields would still have committed her crime. To many people, even after the workhouses were in place, a minor crime committed to deal with a needful emergency would prove preferable. Smith O’Brien, the famed Irish member of parliament who would himself one day be a convict in Van Diemen’s Land, had warned in the Commons that the workhouse would prove alien to the Irish. They not only feared the indignity of make-work stone-breaking, or the endless pushing of the spoke of a mill-wheel; they feared, above all, the separation of women from men and children from parents.

  When a number of prisoners including Mary were moved to Dublin to board their transport, she took her son Michael with her. What became of her infant, Bridget, is not known. She would not be the first child left behind with relatives, nor Michael the first child to accompany his mother aboard.