Hell's Gates

by Paul Collins

  Some of the citizens of Hobart Town expressed concern at the frequency of floggings handed out to convicts by magistrates. According to the semi-official Hobart Town Gazette of 22 April 1825, ‘On Saturday, and also today, a scene was exhibited in the lumber-yard most dreadful to behold. The Commandant [then Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur, Sorell’s successor] thinks that by a very severe mode of flogging, he will repress all disorders. He has got a very strong man to flog, who occupies about twenty minutes whilst inflicting fifty lashes. But to see the deplorable state of the men! Two I saw who were cut round into the throat, under the armpits, and on the belly and ribs of the right side! . . . Our worthy Pastor [the Reverend Robert Knopwood] declared in the church on Sunday that he could not rest the night before, owing to the dreadful cries of some of the sufferers . . . Nine were tortured on Saturday, four this day, and seven are ordered for tomorrow – for the most trifling crimes, such as being too late for muster, or absent from work.’ One is tempted to be somewhat cynical about the unrest of the ‘worthy pastor’ of the Established Church, given that he himself doubled as a magistrate.

  The Catholic priest William Ullathorne, who had wide experience of the Australian colonies in the 1830s, was opposed to flogging, for he maintained that it led to a person becoming deeply anti-social. He says that ‘the man’s soul is stung and a mortal poison, noxious to the human spirit, is imbibed from the knotted cords, that rankles long in his mental constitution’. Ullathorne, who was also opposed to transportation as a way of punishment and rehabilitation, saw the whole callous process as dehumanising and brutalising for all involved, including the convict, the flogger and the legal officers. He says that this struck him one day in 1834 when he visited the convict hospital in the town of Bathurst to the west of Sydney. He says he saw the triangle for flogging being erected in the hospital square in full view of all the sick men in their beds. ‘On asking why it was put there, I was told that a lot of men were coming from the police court to be flogged, and that it was the most convenient place for the surgeon.’

  By now the convict system was bringing out the worst in Pearce’s personality. Looking back over his record we see an impulsive, angry, aggressive drunk who had learned nothing from experience, including his various arrests and floggings. He was happy to dob in his mates when it suited him. His brief stints on assignment probably indicate that he was an unreliable worker.

  After his discharge from the hospital following the flogging, Pearce worked in the jail gang doing heavy work in chains on public projects. His six-month sentence would have concluded on 30 May 1822, but he had absconded again to the bush before then. He was to tell the jailer Bisdee before his execution: ‘I forged several orders upon which I obtained property. On hearing the fraud was discovered, I was again induced to return to the woods’, no doubt fearful that if he was found guilty he would receive a ‘canary’ – 100 lashes.

  Pearce was presumably after easy money for grog. He attempted to forge a money order on Thomas Williams for the sum of £2 and uttering the same with intent to defraud one Richard William Fryett, a well-off merchant of Hobart Town and a pew holder in Saint David’s church. There was no established currency in early Australia, so all transactions had to be carried out through either barter or private orders and promissory notes. It is hard to work out how Convict No. 102 could have forged a money order, given he could probably only read and write with difficulty at best. But he had seemingly been given a money order by Williams, an ex-convict constable, for £2 for some reaping that he had done for the merchant Fryett, and Pearce must have copied this and presented both to Fryett’s wife, Ann. In her innocence Mrs Fryett must have paid up £4. Perhaps she, too, was illiterate? However, it would not have taken the merchant long to pick a forged note. News obviously travelled fast in the small town, and as soon as Pearce got wind of the fact that Fryett was looking for him, he absconded into the bush.This was sometime in late March 1822.

  The Hobart Town Gazette of 18 May 1822 carried the following headline and official proclamation: ‘Seventy Pounds Reward. Police Office Hobart Town 17 May 1822. Whereas Ralph Churton, William Davis, John William Bostok, Patrick Brown, Walter Archibald, John Harvey and Alexander Pearce, whose offences and descriptions are set forth underneath, have absconded from their usual places of residence, and are now at large in the woods. A reward of ten pounds each will be paid on their being lodged in H[is] M[ajesty’s] jail in Hobart Town’. On 4 May a proclamation had been issued with only Davis and Churton’s names, and then on 11 May another was issued with the names John William Bostock and Daniel Church added. The proclamation of 17 May adds the names Patrick Brown,Walter Archibald, John Harvey and Alexander Pearce, so these additional men must have absconded between 11 and 17 May and joined the others to form a gang in the bush. Daniel Church has disappeared from the list of abscondees; perhaps he had already been recaptured or had surrendered. Clearly they escaped at different times and gradually gathered together in the bush, and by late May were operating as a gang. Pearce was said to be charged with ‘divers misdemeanours’. The proclamations contained a description of each of the escapees. Pearce confided to Bisdee that they were at large for three months – an exaggeration, as he was back before the courts again in early July, so he could only have been absent for ten weeks at most.

  We know nothing of the details of this second period in the bush. Probably they supported themselves by raiding outlying farms and roughing it in the bush. The government was saved from having to pay the £10 reward offered for the capture of Pearce; he told Bisdee that he was nabbed by a party of the 48th Regiment, possibly in early July, and taken to Hobart Town. He was likely captured alone because the others were still on the loose after this date.

  On 6 July Pearce was tried for absconding and for the forgery of the money order before a bench of magistrates made up of Knopwood and Humphrey, presided over by the Deputy Judge-Advocate, John Wylde, who was on circuit in Van Diemen’s Land from Sydney. Pearce pleaded guilty to the absconding charge, but not guilty to the forgery. The case went to trial and Williams, called as a witness, testified that he and Pearce had been reaping hay together for Fryett and that he had given Convict No. 102 a money order for £2. But a second witness, Mrs Ann Fryett, claimed that Pearce had presented her with two orders, the second of which had been forged. The bench found him guilty.

  At this stage the legal officers of Hobart Town had had enough of Pearce and he was sentenced to be transported to the penal colony of Macquarie Harbour on the west coast of Van Diemen’s Land for the remainder of his original sentence. Ten days later he boarded the government brig Duke of York for the journey.

  He was very lucky that he was not sentenced to receive 100 lashes as well.

  3

  THROUGH HELL’S GATES

  Throughout his whole time in Van Diemen’s Land His Honor, Lieutenant-Governor William Sorell, had an intractable problem with a small minority of convicts like Pearce who were regularly before the courts. He had no real jail, only the insecure and badly guarded watch-house in Hobart Town. Where could he hold recidivists? Was it possible to reform them? Should they be severely flogged for each offence to make an example of them to others? Was there something that they could do for society, the government, or even themselves in terms of hard labour? How could he usefully employ them and snatch them away from a dissolute life of regularly getting drunk on cheap rum, fighting and consorting with any woman – or man for that matter – convict, free or Aboriginal, who was drunk or hard up or stupid enough to be willing? And how could he prevent them from absconding, roaming the bush, causing conflict with the Aborigines and becoming highwaymen?

  Until the end of 1820 the usual answer had been for the Hobart Town courts to send repeat offenders off to hard labour at the penal settlement at Newcastle, about 177 kilometres (110 miles) north of Sydney Town, which had been set up in 1801 precisely for the most recalcitrant convicts by the New South Wales Governor, Philip Gidley King. But Newcastle was a long w
ay from Hobart Town, and it was very expensive to ship reconvicted men there. For other local offenders, like Pearce, who were regularly before the magistrates of Van Diemen’s Land, it had no exemplary value. Newcastle was so far out of sight that it was completely out of mind.

  But with the increasing number of convicts being shipped directly to Hobart Town from the home country, the problem of recalcitrant recidivism was getting worse. Sorell needed somewhere local to establish what were increasingly being called ‘places of secondary punishment’. Here he could establish a harsh regime of very hard labour, often in chains, and he hoped that this would have an impact on the most incorrigible of the local criminal class. At the same time the place had to be so geographically isolated that escape was well-nigh impossible.

  For several years Sorell had been urging Macquarie to get permission from London for him to open a penal establishment in Van Diemen’s Land itself. Given the Sydney Governor’s high regard for Sorell, he strongly supported the proposal, but his entreaties over several years to the home government in Whitehall had fallen on deaf ears and nothing had been done. So after discussion with Commissioner Bigge, who also approved the idea, Sorell wrote a long dispatch to the Under-Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Henry Goulburn, at 16 Downing Street on 12 May 1820, saying that he was now pretty certain that he had identified the place they needed for a local ‘place of secondary punishment’: Macquarie Harbour on the west coast of Van Diemen’s Land.There was good timber there for the convicts to work (Sorell described it as ‘a species of cypress called the Huon Pine’), as well as superficial coal deposits. But the big advantage was that the place was so isolated that ‘none but government vessels would frequent it . . . [and] the great tier of mountains which runs nearly north and south the whole length of the island, their base verging on the western coast, offers a barrier which renders escape by land, always very difficult, and for years probably impracticable’. Sorell was almost right. As we shall see, escape, while extremely arduous, was not impossible.

  The Colonial Office continued to drag its bureaucratic feet, so Sorell and Macquarie decided to go ahead with the proposal off their own bat, although the New South Wales Governor’s dispatch of 18 July 1821 to the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Earl Bathurst, shrewdly couched their decision in terms of seeking His Lordship’s ‘consideration and approbation’. From mid-1821 onwards preparations began in earnest in Hobart Town.

  Both the colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land had originally begun as places of primary punishment to which His Britannic Majesty’s government could transport the United Kingdom’s criminals. Although this is often forgotten today, transportation was generally very successful in reforming those sentenced to it. Most male and female convicts made such a reasonable fist of their lives in the Australian colonies that they did not need to undergo any form of secondary punishment. The system was rough and ready, but it worked reasonably well, probably better than our incarceration of most offenders. If you omit the costs of shipping convicts to Australia, it was certainly a lot cheaper to operate. I believe that today we might learn a lot from the old system, where the underlying notion was that most people sentenced by the courts ought to serve their sentences working in and for the community. Incarceration would then only be used as an absolute last resort and usually only for the most violent and uncontrollable.

  The change from a more open system of working in the community to an emphasis on the incarceration of prisoners occurred around the mid-1830s, due largely to the increasing influence of an unusual coalition of liberals, including the Utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, and conservative Protestant Evangelical prison reformers, who felt that solitary imprisonment in completely separate cells created conditions in which the detainee could reflect on amendment of life in isolation and move gradually toward reformation. In Van Diemen’s Land the classic example of this ideal was the Model Prison built in the 1840s at Port Arthur, along the lines of London’s Pentonville Prison. Port Arthur had been established as a place of secondary punishment after Macquarie Harbour was closed down in 1831.

  But earlier most convicts served out their terms either on assignment working for private individuals, or labouring on projects for the government. Once they negotiated all of the vagaries and inconsistencies of the system, with the men copping the occasional flogging and the women stints in the female factories, they eventually gained their tickets-of-leave, or a conditional or absolute pardon. Meanwhile they might have found someone to live with, eventually married and had children, and gone on to establish themselves as farmers, tradesmen, manual or itinerant workers, or even as professionals and merchants. They certainly ate better in Australia and enjoyed much better health than in the pollution of the English industrial cities or in the Welsh mining valleys. A small proportion of ex-convicts even emerged as successful nouveaux riches, setting a pattern often repeated in contemporary Australia. Many law-abiding Australian families these days can trace their origins back to a convict, and to have a convict ancestor is a point of honour.

  Good, conservative military men that they were, Macquarie and Sorell were firm supporters of the old system. Macquarie was eventually replaced because he had fallen foul of the wealthy New South Wales ‘bunyip aristocracy’ of free settlers – they are a continuing force in Australian society – precisely because he had encouraged and protected those who had served their terms as convicts, been emancipated and wanted to play a role in the emerging society. In a statement in the Sydney Gazette of 27 January 1821, the emancipists declared themselves to constitute the emerging middle-class of the colony of New South Wales.

  The history of Van Diemen’s Land is somewhat different because there was always a much smaller group of emancipists, and Tasmanian society has always been more stratified and structured along the lines of those who came free and those who came as convicts. But despite all the limitations of life in the colonies, there is no doubt that emancipists were much better off in Australia in terms of wealth, health and opportunity than they would have been if they had remained in the mother country among the burgeoning under-class of the English cities, disposable workers in an increasingly industrialised country.

  But our story is primarily about what happened to the 5 to 7 per cent of felons, like Pearce, who were not reformed by transportation and by their stint in the Antipodes. What were the authorities to do if convicts did not make the most of their opportunities in the new country? The answer then was to retransport them to ‘places of secondary punishment’, where hard labour and severe discipline would at least keep them in their place in the pecking order, as well as give them the opportunity to learn more industrious habits. Convicts on the mainland would have been sent to Norfolk Island (established 1788), Newcastle (established 1801), Port Macquarie (established 1818) and, after 1824, to the steamy humidity of the infamous Moreton Bay settlement (now the city of Brisbane) where, as the balladic lament ‘Moreton Bay’ put it, ‘excessive tyranny . . . each day prevails’ under the flogging Commandant, Captain Patrick Logan, who, to the immense relief and joy of the convicts, was eventually murdered by a group of Aborigines while exploring the Brisbane River.

  At Macquarie Harbour a similar regimen of secondary punishment was to prevail. Sorell’s successor, Colonel George Arthur, a strong Evangelical himself and never a man to mince his words, spelt out bluntly in mid-June 1824 for the second Commandant of the settlement, Lieutenant Samuel Wright, the purpose of penal establishments: ‘Nothing I can imagine is more likely to lead to the moral improvement of the most abandoned characters in this Colony than a rigid course of discipline, strictly and systematically enforced . . . The constant, active, unremitting employment of every individual convict in very hard labour is the grand and main design of [these places of secondary punishment]’.

  Sorell was more concise. He simply described Macquarie Harbour as ‘a place of ultra-banishment and punishment of convicts’. But he also understood London’s preoccup
ation with costs, so he emphasised the valuable products, like good shipbuilding timber and coal, that could be obtained there by convict labour, when he was writing to the Secretary of State and the bureaucrats of the Colonial Office.

  The practical arrangements for the establishment of Macquarie Harbour penal settlement went on throughout the second half of 1821, while Pearce was sliding down the slippery slope of recidivism and accumulating court appearances on stealing, absconding and drunk and disorderly charges. With each new appearance before the bench, the magistrates could see that being sentenced to floggings and stints of working in chains in the jail gang was achieving nothing for Convict No. 102. He was fast becoming prime material for re-transportation to the newly established place of secondary punishment on Van Diemen’s Land.

  After Macquarie Harbour was discovered by Europeans in 1815, it had been visited several times and had been carefully observed and described by Captain James Kelly from the brig Sophia. He had personally given a detailed description to Commissioner Bigge. Lieutenant Phillip Parker King of the Royal Navy spent two weeks there in January 1819. Early in the preparations for the penal settlement it was decided to establish the headquarters station at the southern end of the harbour on Sarah Island (sometimes also called Settlement Island), about 35 kilometres (22 miles) from the entrance at Hell’s Gates, largely because the island seemed fertile enough to grow vegetables. It had been named after the wife of the owner of Captain Kelly’s ship, Mrs Sarah Birch.