by John Marsden
We were not, however, permitted to stand and gaze about, but instead forced at a quick pace to a group of huts and tents which we were soon made aware was to become our home. Many of our number complained about the rude nature of the accommodation, but to me it was, apart from the comfortable cottage of the Piggotts’, the best home I had ever enjoyed. I was assigned to a hut of bark and timber, with its own fenced kitchen garden. I shared these salubrious conditions with thirteen other boys and young men, the first time the authorities had made any effort to segregate me from older prisoners. Despite the crowded conditions, I thought it vastly superior to the solitude of my existence in St Martin’s and Hell, back in faraway London.
The next morning at seven, without the luxury of any further time to accustom ourselves to our exotic new surroundings, or to recover from the gruelling voyage from England, or to get used to being on dry land once more, we were put to work.
I make no complaint about this. We understood already that the colony was at a critical point in its short life. Since the arrival of the First Fleet, none of the settlers knew whether each ship that arrived would be the last. The drain on the public purse in England for food and other supplies to support the colony was a heavy one indeed, and every person of sense was aware that His Majesty’s Government might at any time throw up its hands and cry ‘Enough!’ Already the entire venture, and every man, woman and child in it, had come close to foundering; in other words, to death by starvation. The spectre of that experience continued to hover over all.
Chapter 33
Despite the foregoing, it was soon clear that many among the convicts would as rather condemn us to the Everlasting as do any work. I do not believe that this was a conscious choice, an act of collective suicide on their part, though it may have been for some. Self-slaughter was far from unknown among the transported convicts in New South Wales and years later I became aware of the stories emanating from the ghastly penal settlement on Norfolk Island, where men drew lots to decide who would murder the other, by which means both were enabled to slip the knot of life; the one who was murdered, and the other, who would then be executed by the authorities for the ‘crime’ he had committed.
At times I worked at Parramatta and Rose Hill, and other times at Constitution Hill, renamed Toongabbie by the Governor in 1792. Owing to my age, I was given a task which was relatively undemanding, that of delivering water to the men performing jobs which were at times literally backbreaking. The buckets I carried were indeed heavy when full, and for many weeks my shoulders were sore and blistered from the weight of the pole I bore across them, but I could not complain when I saw older men yoked to ploughs, or rooting out tree stumps, or engaged in road-making or tree-felling. There was much ill feeling between the convicts who worked hard at these jobs and the men who shirked. The former were aware that their tasks were more taxing because of the indolence of the latter; the latter were disparaging of the former’s compliance with their masters’ wishes. And so the malingerers called the hard workers ‘nightingales’, because they sang too sweetly to the authorities, or, at other times, ‘catch-farts’, a term used in England for a foot boy. It seemed that this vulgar term originated from the practice of a foot boy following exceedingly closely behind his master.
Although I came to some understanding, or so I suppose, of the reasons for many men doing so little, it was nevertheless difficult at times to restrain my anger at them, particularly because most of my friends came from the group who worked fairly willingly. I would say the extreme reluctance of some to perform their assigned duties was a way of demonstrating passively an objection to a system which had ground these men, and women and children too, down from the day they were born, working relentlessly to reduce them to creatures without will, without spirit, without autonomy and, cruellest of all, without hope. I could see that, I had sympathy with their situation, but I also saw two good men crushed to death under a tree because others had not exerted enough effort to keep the strain on the rope which would have saved them. And I resented carrying water long distances under the hot sun to men who had not raised a sweat and who invariably drank carelessly, not caring how much they spilled. Some even tipped the bucket over their heads to cool themselves, thereby wasting the precious liquid which I had laboured to procure for them. Almost without exception I could tell the hard workers from the others by the way they treated me and my buckets.
My interest in this subject was made personal for another reason, which was that the other person designated to carry water was an old lag named Alec Mildren. He undoubtedly belonged to the first group, for he was a professional skulker. As lean as a greyhound, he spent most of his time trying to cadge tobacco. His eyes were lively and alert, but his face was lined and wrinkled. He did not know his age, guessing it to be about sixty. He knew every trick for getting out of work, but when a soldier hove into view no one could have been more industrious. Everyone liked him, including me, but I quickly became aware that I carried six pairs of buckets to every one carried by Alec, and when the men cursed me for being too slow with the water I burned with a sense of injustice at the unfair division of labour.
The cooler the day, the less work there was for both of us, however, and on those days I enjoyed listening to Alec spin his yarns. He had come out on the Second Fleet, after getting a fourteen year sentence for receiving stolen goods. He called himself a slip-gibbet, and he had to explain to me what that was. ‘I’m a man for whom the gallows groans, Barnaby my boy,’ he said. ‘I’m one who could have gone to the gallows half-a-dozen times.’ He had a colourful way of expressing himself, and used a lot of words I didn’t know. He was the one who told me what a ‘nightingale’ was, and how ‘catch-farts’ got their name. He blamed women for all his troubles, and claimed he had three wives in England. ‘But I haven’t taken a wife out here, Barnaby boy,’ he said. ‘I’ve learned my lesson. Not like some of these other lads. If you spit with the wind behind you any day here, you’ll hit at least three men who have a wife in England and another one in New South Wales. The ocean is as good as a widow-maker to these lads. When England slipped over the horizon, their wives slipped out of their ken.’
I was a little shocked at this information, and hardly understood when he went on to say: ‘Docking is all they care about, Barnaby my son; they’d marry laced mutton if it’d get them into a woman’s commodity.’
Many of the convicts who worked hard did so because they hoped to get pardons. Some wanted to return to England, some hoped to take up land around Toongabbie or Rose Hill where, according to Alec, the Government was ‘handing out land like they were making new swathes of it every day’. Alec had no such aspirations. His only interest was his own comfort, and because he did not want to farm land for himself or anyone else, he avoided the attention of the authorities as much as possible. ‘I’m as lazy as the tinker who laid down his load to fart,’ he told me one day, and I could not disagree.
I had no real aspirations myself. I just had a vague idea that one day I would be free and then life would be much better, but I was unable to appreciate what form freedom or ‘a better life’ would take.
Of the four men from the ship whom I knew best, Pierre De Lafontaine, Michael Holt and Chris Norfolk were all assigned to hard labour in the fields or forest, or on the roads. Carmichael, however, with his learning and book knowledge, secured a position as assistant storekeeper and soon made himself indispensable, disbursing everything from grains, salt and sugar, to boots, shovels, sewing twine and nails. His record-keeping, so neat and meticulous, contrasted with the blotted and ill-spelled entries of those who had come before him. In the late afternoon, when I had been discharged from my duties, I would sometimes visit him in the store and thumb through the books in fascination, having never had such an opportunity in my life before. The late Mr Ogwell had never allowed me to look at his records.
The sheer numbers amazed me. The First Fleet had brought 747,000 nails. I was surprised that t
he weight of those alone had not sunk the boats. They brought seven hundred wooden bowls, eight thousand fishhooks, and forty-four tons of tallow. I marvelled at the planning which went into these ventures.
They also carried with them twelve ploughs and two thousand one hundred hoes. There were seven hundred of the wide weeding hoes, seven hundred West Indian hoes, and seven hundred of the narrowest variety, the grubbing hoes, which were supplemented by additional stores from the boats which arrived in the Second and Third Fleets. The men called the hoes ‘long-tailed monkeys’, but they proved to be infinitely superior to ploughs for the conditions prevailing in New South Wales, and indeed, they are still preferred by most to this very day. The rocks and stumps and tree roots were too difficult for the ploughs, and besides, not enough horses were available to pull the latter. The hoes were easy to use, and well suited for cultivating maize, a grain which I found pleasant enough to eat, although it was not popular with many of my fellow convicts. The natives quickly became very fond of it, however.
Carmichael took advantage of my presence in the store and my interest in the records to continue with my reading lessons, and I was happy enough to be thus employed. In his spare time he was often asked to act as a scribe for convicts wishing to write petitions or letters or suchlike, and he always obliged, which helped ensure his good standing with his fellow prisoners. His reputation with them might otherwise have been threatened by his easygoing cooperation with the authorities.
It was a proud day for me when I was asked by a lad of seventeen years, one James Chester, to write a letter home to his mother on his behalf. Seeing me thus engaged, other convicts then sought me out for similar tasks. I was sometimes given food as payment, sometimes tobacco, sometimes just a muttered grunt of thanks. I was thankful for the food, and I passed the tobacco on to Alec.
When the departure of a ship for England was imminent, soldiers, marines, convicts and for all I knew free settlers as well, embarked upon a frenzy of letter writing, so anxious were they to maintain connections with their families, friends and sweethearts back home. Scribes were in great demand at such times. If two ships were leaving at around the same time I would sometimes be asked to make copies of the letters, so that each ship could take one; insurance against the possibility of disaster befalling one of the vessels.
There are many stories told nowadays of the cruelties practised at the Constitution Hill or Toongabbie settlement. People have said that upwards of eight hundred died there in just a few years. I have even heard the figure of one thousand bandied about. It is claimed that convicts were buried whilst they still had breath in their bodies, that men ate grass to survive, that they were yoked to ploughs like beasts of burden and made to pull them across the rocky fields. In particular I have heard the story of the fellow thrown into a mass grave whilst still alive, of how he begged the overseer not to cover him with dirt and the overseer sneered: ‘Damn your eyes! Why should I go to the trouble of pulling you out now when I’ll have to throw you back in before the day is done?’
There is some truth in most of these stories, though I never heard tell of the last one until I was thirty-one years of age. There were many deaths at Toongabbie, partially occasioned by the practice adopted by the authorities of sending gravely ill convicts to the hospital there. Sometimes, when more than one person died in a day, the bodies were buried together, as indeed happened often enough in parts of London. At times there were shortages of food, as there were throughout the colony, and our rations would be cut to levels which made our survival uncertain and forced us to take whatever measures we could to find food in the rivers and forests. Certainly during these times of hardship there were men who experimented with different grasses, including making soups from them, but I never heard of anyone who had much success at this. We did not find much in the way of edible plants, although the lily pilly trees had a sort of pink berry which we liked to eat, despite its sourness.
As for being yoked to ploughs, that did happen, but not as often as the old lags tell it, because ploughs were generally not favoured, for the reasons I have mentioned. And if men were used in this way, what of it? The ground needed to be cultivated, sometimes the plough was the most efficient way to achieve this, and if men were strong enough, why should they not draw a plough behind them?
I do not seek to deny that there was cruelty. Wherever men are put in positions of power and other men are deprived of their rights and liberty, cruelty will manifest itself. There was the sanctioned cruelty of floggings and executions, and there was the concealed cruelty of certain turnkeys and overseers. Conditions were exacerbated by the adoption of Toongabbie as a place of punishment, so that a man or woman transported from Britain to New South Wales for a crime could then be further transported from Sydney Cove to the New Ground at Toongabbie for another crime. Thus the worst of the worst gradually congregated in the area, and some overseers adopted a ‘rule by rod’ approach to manage them.
I wondered as I grew older whether many of the convicts might have been better prepared by the authorities for the situation in which they found themselves in New South Wales. For decades past some of the old lags had hardly spent a day out of strict confinement, surrounded by prison walls and watched over by keepers, forced to adhere to a code which prescribed every detail of their lives. At Sydney Cove, Parramatta and Toongabbie, they found themselves without man-made barriers. There were plenty of natural barriers, those of the forest, the ocean, and the rugged mountains to the west, but these did not present the same aspect. Indeed, to many, they seemed benign compared to the cold stern walls of places like Newgate. In New South Wales men could wander quite freely at times, even into the forest, from whence many made their escape. Although convicts were forbidden to construct boats, they sometimes stole them. Yet over time, these natural barriers proved to be effective prison walls indeed, and few succeeded in penetrating them.
Food rations were issued on a weekly basis, and again, to prisoners not used to managing their own affairs, this system had inherent defects. Just as on the boat, it was not unusual for men to gamble away part or all of their rations, whereupon they had the choice of starving for the rest of the week, or stealing food, or making do with what they could forage. Men sometimes traded food for grog or tobacco. And sometimes they were simply not able to control their impulses. I remember an older man named Alfred who, on at least one occasion, received his week’s issue of grain and used all of it to make his cakes upon a cooking fire but then ate them on the spot, leaving him with nothing for the rest of the week.
Many of the overseers seemed bewildered by behaviour which to us did not seem unreasonable. Their response was to brand all convicts as incorrigible, reckless, irresponsible and beyond rehabilitation or redemption.
I certainly suffered at times at the hands of the overseers, but I also suffered at the hands of my fellow convicts. It was not always easy to determine which group was worse. We boys in our hut, which the others had nicknamed St James’s Palace long before I arrived, got along tolerably well much of the time, but only a fool would put down an apple or a melon and expect it to be there when he returned. The constant thieving did cause much bad blood.
The boys whom I befriended particularly were George Bruce, sometimes known as Joseph Druce, and James Chester, whom I mentioned earlier, the illiterate lad who had solicited my services as a scribe. As well there was a younger boy named Isaac Rose, a cheeky lad, who must have been the youngest convict in New South Wales, having been transported for seven years for the theft of money. It turned out that he had stolen it from the poor box in a church. When we older ones reproached him for such sacrilege he explained ingenuously: ‘Ah, but I was poor, so who was it meant for if not for me?’
He did not know how to stop talking, young Isaac, and I sometimes thought ruefully of Carmichael’s comments on board the Admiral Barrington, about people who were ‘talked out’ and therefore made bad companions. There were times when I wish
ed Isaac was talked out and so give us some peace. Sometimes we sat on him to silence his babbling tongue, but even that had little effect.
George was a water carrier like me, whilst James, who was a strong lad, worked for a brickmaker named Wheeler, who had been tasked with making 40,000 bricks and tiles a month. For this, Wheeler had twenty-two men and two boys to help. It was heavy work: they had to cut the wood, dig the clay and fetch it two hundred yards to the kiln, keep the kiln fires going and load the carts with the bricks when they were done. Wheeler was a hard taskmaster who wanted the best results. He was forever complaining that the clay was not good enough; it was too brittle, compared to the bricks he made in England which fetched at least thirty shillings a thousand.
The four of us, George, James, Isaac and I, eventually managed things so that we squeezed into the smallest room in the hut together. One of the reasons I liked this arrangement was that we four were the only ones who did not interest ourselves in the vices practised by the other boys, who disported themselves with each other in ways that were at times quite shameless. But then, whoever imagined that shame was a characteristic of the transported convict?
Chapter 34
Carrying my buckets into the forest, to bring water to groups of men working there, was fraught with hazards. Among these were the wild creatures. Despite the stories told on the Admiral Barrington, no one seemed sure whether the snakes of New South Wales were venomous. Certain it was that the Indians would not eat them, though they ate almost everything else. These people, who had presumably inhabited the country for some considerable time, reacted to the serpents with the greatest terror and loathing, which indicated to me that there was much to be feared about them.
