The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  It was masters, rather than semi-literate convicts, who left what comments we have on the relationship between master and assigned convict. One vocal employer of convicts, James Mudie, who owned a pretentiously named property, Castle Forbes, was influenced in everything he had to say about his convicts by hostility to Governor Bourke. A number of Mudie’s men had absconded, and one had fired at him during a raid they made for supplies. When they were recaptured, Roger Therry, friend of the Liberator, defended them. A number of them told Therry and the court that they would rather die than be sent back to Mudie, and one showed his counsel the scars of Mudie’s punishments. The bench of magistrates, friends of Mudie’s, would not let this evidence be presented, however. In the end, two prisoners were hanged at Castle Forbes, three—including a boy of sixteen—were executed in Sydney, and the sixth was sent to Norfolk Island for life. With someone like Mudie for master, Hugh could have been similarly destroyed.

  Bourke had ordered an inquiry into Mudie’s behaviour, but removed him too from the list of justices of the peace. Mudie began writing a book, The Felonry of New South Wales, designed to embarrass Bourke before a proposed Select Committee of Inquiry into Transportation, in London. ‘It is notorious,’ wrote Mudie, ‘that, during the administration of seven successive governors of New South Wales, transportation to that colony was so far from being regarded as a severe punishment by the major part of the criminals in England, that numerous avowals have been made by convicts of their having actually committed the crimes for which they were tried, for the express purpose of being sent out to a land of promise.’

  Hugh, argued about by Tories and improvers, kept his counsel in a huge, strange country. Australian-born currency lads might on Australia Day in Sydney toast, ‘The land, boys, we live in!’ It was unlikely that in the huge natural pastures of the Monaro Larkin drank that toast or thought himself more than an exile. But as surely as the immigrant to North America was making and being made by that society, Larkin was—in the great Australian stillness—himself making, and being made.

  4

  THE LIMITS OF LOCATION

  Thy father is a chieftain!

  Why that’s the very thing!

  Within my native country

  I too have been a king …

  But rebels rose against me,

  And dared my power disown—

  You heard, love, of the judges?

  They drove me from my throne …

  The bush is now my empire,

  The knife my sceptre keen;

  Come with me to the desert wild,

  And be my dusky queen.

  Colonial song,

  ‘The Convict and His Loubra’

  If assigned to the main homestead, Hugh and the overseer—and even Mr Bradley on visits from Goulburn—were housed democratically close together, the master in one rough hut, the overseer and man or men in the other. Everyone slept on a sheet of bark with bedclothes of sheepskins and opossum rugs. The door was often a curtain of hessian wool bags. A pannikin filled with clay and mutton fat provided the lighting. Near the wall stood the standard medicine for all ailments, the sole remedy other than alcohol—blue box of Seidlitz powders.

  Larkin’s convict clothing had by now been replaced by the standard bush uniform supplied by masters—leg-strapped trousers, blue Crimean shirts, and a cabbage-tree hat of plaited leaves. A few kangaroos provided material for a warm coat. Hessian-style boots and spurs were worn for rounding up livestock on horseback. Mustering strayed cattle, riding up escarpments through the great verticals of eucalyptus trees, the Ribbonman might have been mistaken for the master.

  The relationship was closer and more democratic still when tyro settlers found remote land and brought into it the few resources they could afford. One of Bradley’s protégés in the Monaro area was a man the same age as Hugh Larkin, William Adams Brodribb. Brodribb’s father had been an English political prisoner, a lawyer who in youth had belonged to a republican cell and who was given seven years for administering illegal oaths. Brodribb senior had finished out his sentence as a ticket-of-leave attorney in Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land. He became both a farmer and a shareholder in the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land.

  The younger Brodribb had come to Tasmania as a child in 1818, with his mother. The boy grew up in respectable Anglo-Scots colonial society, in which it seemed that everyone did his best to forget Mr Brodribb senior’s modest foray into republicanism. William Adams Brodribb arrived purposefully in New South Wales in 1835, when Larkin had been working for Bradley for a year. ‘In those days,’ Brodribb would remember, ‘it was no unusual thing for squatter to claim 200 or 300 square miles; land was no object; there was plenty for new squatters.’ One stockman tending flocks in a hut in Monaro—it could have been Larkin, or any other of Bradley’s fifty other assigned convicts scattered throughout the bush—promised to show Brodribb ‘a good cattle station, unoccupied, not far from his master’s station, provided I should thereafter feel disposed to settle in that squatting district.’ Brodribb’s run lay in a deep corner of the Monaro, in a plain made bare perhaps by the fire-stick hunting methods of the natives who came here in summer, perhaps by other causes. Wooded hills and snow-streaked alps rose above the pastures.

  Larkin was loaned indefinitely by Bradley to young Brodribb. Some years later Brodribb stated in an official document that he had employed and known Larkin since 1834, a slight exaggeration, since Brodribb himself did not arrive in the Monaro until 1835. But in Brodribb’s first year in the Monaro, with a convict shepherd, probably Larkin, and ‘the assistance of a few Aborigines, I washed and sheared my 1,200 ewes.’ Here the wool press was far more primitive even than the one Hugh had seen at Bradley’s. Brodribb confessed, ‘My hut-keeper pressed the wool with a spade, in a rough primitive box made by ourselves on the station.’

  After the settlers’ runs were given some legitimacy, flamboyant officials named commissioners of crown lands rode out in green uniform, hessian boots and braided cap, trailing a few mounted police through the mists or heat hazes, to decide where Bradley’s and Brodribb’s properties and grazing rights began and ended. But boundary lines were still drawn with the same informality—natural springs, an Aboriginal tumulus of stone, tree-blazes, ant heaps, isolated she-oaks, all served as markers. Settlers were to pay £10 for every 20 square miles of country they occupied, and on top of that a halfpenny for each sheep.

  Hugh, now a servant of Australian beef and wool, but distracted by labour, distance and adequate diet from any clear impulse of rebellion, probably had his journeys too. When the wool had been loaded on its wagon in later spring, that is, October–November, a settler like Brodribb started out with a reliable man to bring the load overland to Goulburn. From there they eased it up the Razorback range and down through endless hills to the place called the Black Huts on the Liverpool Road, where Sydney wool buyers posted themselves. In good years, buyers would in fact advance far up the road towards Goulburn on fast ponies. The buyer would cut a slash in an ordinary bale, take out a handful of wool, hoping he had picked a representative sample, and make a bid. These were primitive but significant dealings. On them depended the colonial prosperity with which settlers consoled themselves, to make up for their distance from Britain. What slave cotton was to the American South, convict wool would be to Australia. The mills of Britain had an illimitable hunger for both.

  There were a number of hostelries in the area where the roads from both Sydney and Parramatta met—the Farmer’s Home, the Square and Compass, the Woolpack and Old Jack Ireland’s—at which the squatters and dealers argued and struck a price, while the Larkins of the system went amongst the wagons looking for someone shipped more recently than they, to hear news of that most distressful country. The wool from Monaro, bought at the Black Huts, would be taken on to Sydney by the dealer, be shipped to London and turn up at Garraway’s Coffee-House in Change Alley, Cornhill, where by the light of guttering candles early Australian fibre drew bids based on an unpreceden
ted enthusiasm.

  The returns his master achieved must have raised in Larkin the teasing prospect of becoming a grazier and landholder in his own right. To establish a station, capital was needed, £5,000 for a well-balanced flock, wagon and convict shepherds. But some determined former convicts, starting with small flocks, managed to become the living exemplars for the character Magwitch, the English convict who left his fortune to Pip, in Charles Dickens’s novel of 1861, Great Expectations.

  Larkin heard at some stage of Ned Ryan, a Ribbonman who twenty years before had been involved in ‘assaulting habitation’ in one of the early tithe outrages at Ballagh, Tipperary. He had got his conditional pardon in 1830 and settled land near the present town of Boorowa beyond the Lachlan River. He called his station Galong Castle, and eventually went on to build a castle there and be reunited with his wife and three children, one of whom would serve in the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales. The Etonian, classicist squatter might find that his neighbouring pastoralist was a former sheep thief from Ireland or Scotland, or even a former opponent of the British system. Though rare, the convict who returned home rich, like Orpheus ascending from Hades, would become one of the stock figures of popular literature, and sentimentally implied what many liberal-minded folk believed: that there was no criminal class; that in the right milieu the convict became laird.

  If Hugh daydreamed along these lines, there were factors which might make him think twice. In the winter and early summer of 1837, inadequate snow fell on the alps above the Monaro to fill the rivers. This was Hugh’s first experience of that recurrent but assured Australian phenomenon, drought, the most severe until then experienced by Europeans. There would be five to six such years of blazing suns and poor rainfall. The Murrumbidgee River dried up. Hugh and other convict stockmen had horse races in the dry bed. He would rise up in stifling air to see huge walls of flame moving down the wooded slopes, set off by lightning or an Aboriginal hunting fire. Hugh Larkin’s Australian education was proceeding apace, and heat and fire annealed him further in this inescapable landscape.

  Hugh’s bush limbo had its complications. The day came when, out on his own, he watched in edgy wonderment as the tribespeople, old men and warriors ahead, women and children behind, came down out of the screen of forest on the hills to hold discourse with him and perhaps to trade. Matters in the Monaro had not yet reached the stage where Hugh was armed with one of Brodribb’s carbines. He knew these people speared sheep and, if a shepherd objected too strongly, killed him with spears or a blow to the back of the head with one of the hardwood clubs or stone axes they used to finish off kangaroos. The young native men of Monaro in fact carried a variety of purpose-designed hunting spears and two designs of the stunning and felling boomerang. The women came behind carrying their dilli bags and finely wrought nets of kurrajong fibre for catching insects. Later, when anthropologists visited the area, the Ngarigo were accorded an international scholastic repute for the latter.

  Because these early contacts so frequently befell men like Larkin, there exists too little of a European record of them, but Hugh would have been a remarkable fellow if he had seen communal cause between himself and these opossum-skin-cloaked elders, the watchful younger warriors, the women (lubras or gins, as they were commonly called), and the children who did not know that in this conversation between Ngarigo and English-Irish lay the ruin of their world.

  The Ngarigo had occupied for millennia this side of the Australian Alps between the Murrumbidgee and the Snowy Rivers. They had ritual and marriage relationships with people named the Walgalu and the Ngunawal to the north, towards present-day Canberra, and with the Bidawal to the south. They encountered in summer the Djila Matang from the western side of the Alps, and traded for shells with the coastal Djiringanj to the east. Virtually until the year Hugh arrived in the Monaro, these had been the borders of their feasible world.

  They wintered to the north, but came south to the higher Monaro in spring, to feast on the nutty, protein-rich Bogong moth, Agrotis infusa, ‘animated fat-bags’ settling inches deep on trees and in rock crevices to breed. It was probably in the time of the Bogong that Hugh met them. He brought to the encounter convict and settler myths, likely to cause the European to daydream of some bush liaison with the prescriptive ‘dusky maiden.’ Aboriginal monogamy was based on blood laws, and was therefore as strict as European morality, and in terms of legal sanction stricter. Observers claimed that sometimes a casual sharing of a wife was permitted, as long as it was with a man inside the husband’s kinship group. But the white convict shepherd lay outside the bloodlines and so outside the moral universe of the natives. He was a chimera; and so not a forbidden contact.

  One commentator spoke of ‘black women cohabiting with the knowledge and consent of their sable husbands, in all parts of the interior, with white hut-keepers.’ It was often the armed or lustful convict shepherd, the rejected of Europe, who was guilty of the founding tragedies of the contact between Europeans and natives. But the blame was regularly sheeted to the inferior morals not of Europeans but of the natives. ‘Although the gins cherished some of their children, they certainly kill many, and almost invariably, the male half-breed’s, wrote an observer in 1849.

  There were other versions: the natives found

  their gins, or daughters, are taken from them; and the diseases of the white man, extended without remorse, destroy and daily diminish the race of Aborigines as the squatter advances … I am told it is no uncommon thing for these rascals to sleep all night with a Lubra … and if she poxes him or in any way offends him perhaps shoot her before 12 next day …

  Hugh Larkin may have been utterly innocent of the grossest of these crimes. He had the memory of Esther, but an Esther impossibly remote. He had the taboos of his own religion and culture. But he was removed from the landscape of his customary morality, and hard-used men can themselves be hard users. It was at least likely that Hugh shared liquor, distilled in one of the bush’s plentiful illegal stills, with tribal people. And in protecting his livestock, both because that was the European thing to do, and because it was what his master expected of him under pain of punishment, he would eventually have instigated or witnessed the collision between European and native, the explosion of the relationship into spear-throwing on one side, the firing of carbines on the other. Some shepherds, it was claimed, would potshot natives as if they were pigeons.

  Larkin became aware too of the shifts of policy designed by anxious governors to protect the natives. After Governor Bourke went home in 1837, the new man Sir George Gipps would appoint ‘Protectors of Aborigines,’ usually Anglican clergymen, to patrol remote districts and try to regulate the treatment of the native people within their regions. These men often came to Australia in answer to an advertisement in the Church Times, and saw themselves as living with their wives and children in a manse amongst white-robed natives. Instead they were given a dray and dispatched into the interior. Hugh saw one such man moving bewildered through Bradley’s and Brodribb’s holdings. Like his secular brethren, the protector found the nomadic quality of Aboriginal life an affront, and tried to keep Aboriginal peoples near his hut by supplying them with flour, sugar, tea, tobacco.

  In 1842, even the system of protectors would be abandoned, but the squatters complained that Governor Gipps himself acted as Supreme Protector and generally blamed problems of violence on settlers and their shepherds. Gipps founded the border police to keep order in the remoter bush, and insisted that every native killed should have the same form of inquest as a European. As one commentator complained, Gipps ‘ignored the hundreds of miles that made absurd any comparison between a crime in George Street and a murder in the outer bush.’ He put eleven men on trial for the shooting and burning of twenty-eight natives at Myall Creek, hundreds of miles north-west of Sydney, and seven were hanged. He wanted to punish Major Nunn of the mounted police for killing too many natives while clearing the Namoi country. Squatters told improbable stories of natives warning settl
ers that if they responded to native impudence they would be hauled off to Sydney and hanged. They blamed Gipps and not themselves for the seven or eight years of terror and warfare between 1837 and 1845. The natives would kill whites, one of them complained, ‘for no reason at all save their isolation!’ And Hugh saw himself as possible victim of a sporadic war he had not chosen.

  5

  IRELAND AND THE WHITBY WOMEN

  The women from the Irish counties, on the other hand, were more frequently first offenders, and more likely to come from a background of distress, poverty and destitution from loss of husband or loss of employment.

  Portia Robinson,

  The Women of Botany Bay

  By October 1838, the Irish establishment, sometimes mockingly called ‘the Garrison,’ congratulated themselves that nearly a decade of Emancipation had not brought the horrifying shifts of power, the fall from Protestant enlightenment to Papist barbarism, they had feared. Their enemy Dan O’Connell was in a slough. The Dublin Protestant Guardian crowed:

  He confesses to the people of Ireland, to the Roman Catholic millions, that for thirty years during the whole of which he has hallood them on to treason against the state, and to outrage and pillage of the Protestant Church, yet nothing has been done! yes, nothing! … the tens of millions of your hard-earned cash, the tribute which he extorted from his abused and deluded followers, have been idly spent!

  Hugh Larkin had been working in the bush more than four years when at the City Court of Sessions in Limerick, thirteen Irish labourers and servants, of a section of society that had unwavering faith in the Liberator, were unremarkably sentenced to seven years’ transportation each. One of them was an auburn-haired, small-boned, handsome young woman of twenty-two years named Mary Shields, who had stolen wearing apparel from a Timothy Reardon.