Hell's Gates

by Paul Collins

  By far the most successful escapees from Macquarie Harbour were James Goodwin and Thomas Connelly. When they planned their escape in March 1828, they had a lot in their favour. Both had been in the colony for eight or more years so they were well acclimatised to conditions in Van Diemen’s Land. Goodwin also had the advantage of possessing a superior knowledge of the country, having worked with Thomas Scott of the Survey Department, from which he had stolen and kept a compass. Unlike most convicts, he understood how to use it. He told the authorities later that he only threw it away on the day before he was recaptured. Goodwin, who turned out to be a natural bushman, had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land on the ship Lord Hungerford in 1821 on a thieving charge. Connelly, who was from Dublin, had arrived in 1819. Both had seven-year sentences. Connelly had spent time in the New Norfolk area before he and Goodwin were sent to Macquarie Harbour. They arrived there in early 1827, and eventually found themselves working together with a logging party up the Gordon River.

  During their time at Macquarie Harbour they would have learned from the convict scuttlebutt that possibly as many as seven men had already made it to the settled districts between 1822 and 1827, in addition to Pearce and the Brady gang. At the time of their escape in March 1828, Goodwin and Connelly had spent enough time in the slave labour conditions at Macquarie Harbour to have been toughened up for their stint in the bush. Men working up-river were not brought back to Sarah Island at night, but more or less lived on the job. They had the added advantage that they were given their rations in bulk, and thus could secrete them away in preparation for an escape. While the convicts up-river were supervised by constables, there was also a small contingent of soldiers in a blockhouse at Lime Burners.

  The two men planned their escape well.They picked the best time of the year and made a wise decision in choosing to go by river rather than over the mountains. In his later statement to the police, Goodwin says that he had hollowed a canoe out of a Huon pine log with an axe. He says that while he worked on it periodically over two weeks, it took about a day altogether to carve it out, and that ‘it would have carried four people’. As with the Pearce accounts, there are difficulties in pinning down the exact route of the two escapees. But we can probably make a good guess at it from the comments in his police statement. As with Pearce, the problem is that most features in the landscape had not been named, but Goodwin was an observant man and his account shows that he did not miss much.

  Based on the evidence in the statement, they took one of two possible routes. Either they turned up the Franklin at its junction with the Gordon and then, abandoning their canoe, headed generally eastward across country on a trajectory to the south of that of the Pearce party, eventually emerging at the northern end of the Vale of Rasselas. Or they continued south down the Gordon to its junction with the Denison River, and then followed the Denison heading north-east until they left the canoe and trekked eastward across country to near the southern end of the Vale of Rasselas. The two routes then come together, with the men emerging from the northern end of the Vale of Rasselas and passing Wyld’s Craig, eventually reaching the Ouse River, where they parted company. The escape had taken just over four weeks. They had subsisted on the food they had been able to take, on part of a possum that they scavenged from the Aborigines, and on grass roots, mushrooms and berries, and they were in very poor condition when they reached the edges of the settled districts. They were quickly recaptured, Goodwin in the area to the south of Launceston. The authorities had enough good sense to make the most of his knowledge and skill and, rather than incarcerating him, they made him a guide on a number of exploratory parties. However, he was eventually sentenced to seven years for stealing in 1835 and sent to Norfolk Island specifically ‘by the Lieut. Governor’s orders’. Both he and Connelly then disappear from the historical record.

  Two and a half years later two other men who escaped from Macquarie Harbour made it through to the settled districts. They were the Englishman Edward Broughton and the Irishman Matthew MacAvoy. On 8 October 1830 they emerged from the bush close to Pearce’s old stamping ground at McGuire’s Marsh, near the confluence of the Ouse and the Shannon. Here they walked right into a military party under the command of Captain Wentworth.These soldiers were part of the notorious ‘black line’ designed by Lieutenant-Governor Arthur to try to force the Aborigines eastward toward round-up parties in the more open country north of Hobart Town. The news that the two men had absconded from Macquarie Harbour had not yet even reached the capital, but it was quite obvious that they were escapees, so they were returned to Hobart Town and incarcerated. When the Muster Master, Josiah Spode, who from 1827 onwards was the immediate supervisor of all convicts in Van Diemen’s Land, finally received a report in November about the escape from Macquarie Harbour, he discovered that Broughton and MacAvoy had actually absconded with three others – William Coventry, Patrick Feagan and Richard Hutchinson (the latter went by the nickname of ‘Up-and-down Dick’). When questioned about the others, Broughton and MacAvoy denied any knowledge of the fate of their companions, so it was assumed that they were still at large.

  The regime of Arthur was a lot stricter than that of Sorell, so the two escapees were committed for trial in the Supreme Court for absconding. In the rough and unequal justice of the time, the men were sentenced to death by the Supreme Court on 27 June 1831.The Executive Council ratified the sentence that they were to be hung on 2 August 1831. Right up until the last couple of days before their execution they rejected the ministry of the clergymen, Bedford and Conolly, and in the words of the Hobart Town Courier (6 August), ‘they both persisted in the most hardened and audacious conduct obstinately turning a deaf ear to the benevolent exertions of the clergymen to awaken their seared consciences to a sense of the awful precipice to the brink of which their crimes had brought them. Broughton, in particular, who was a Protestant, took every occasion to insult the Reverend Mr. Bedford in his visits to him, and to express his utmost contempt of religious duties’.

  However, two days before their execution one Thomas Jones was executed for robbery with violence and, while he died very penitent, he had also refused the ministry of the clergymen right up until a couple of days before the execution. This seemed to have a sobering influence on Broughton and MacAvoy and ‘roused from their apathy . . . [they both] made . . . confession of the horrid crimes they had committed’.

  Broughton made the most detailed confession, and what a story he had to tell. Like the Pearce party, Broughton and MacAvoy had killed and eaten their fellow escapees. Probably because it was a last-minute confession, written up by Bedford and later published in the Colonial Times (10 August 1831) and the Hobart Town Courier (13 August 1831), there are no geographical details or any descriptions of the actual journey. All that we have are vivid accounts of the men, the murders and cannibalism. Broughton, like Pearce, was probably a psychopath and a hardened criminal, although he does eventually show some sense of guilt and repentance for his crimes. The confession was witnessed by the Keeper of the Jail, John Bisdee.

  As Broughton tells the story and Bedford takes it down, it is clear that the details of what happened are very similar to those of the Pearce party.There were five men making up a regular logging gang, working in timber operations on the mainland of Macquarie Harbour. Besides the 27-year-old Broughton from Dorking in Surrey, who had run away from home and had a long criminal record, and the Irishman, Matthew MacAvoy, the party was made up of three others. ‘Up-and-down Dick’ Hutchinson from Lancashire was a tall man for the early nineteenth century at five foot eight inches. The other two were a sixty-year-old Donegal-born man named William Coventry, and an eighteen-year-old, pock-marked native of Liverpool, Patrick Feagan, described as ‘a boy of the most depraved character’. All were under the sole supervision of Constable Bradshaw. Broughton admitted that the overseer had been kind to him, but confessed that he had participated in attempts on Bradshaw’s life, including planning to let a tree fall on him. Again, as in the case o
f Constable Logan, they hated Bradshaw because of his power to report them, which would usually result in a summary flogging. Like Greenhill, Broughton seems to have taken the lead in the escape plans.

  They overpowered the constable and left him in the forest without food and virtually naked. Broughton gives no details of their route across country, nor do we have any sense of the time-span involved. What the Englishman from Dorking does tell us about are the details of the murders and the cannibalism; it is clear that with death imminent he needed to talk about it. Like the Pearce party before them, the five escapees had reached the point of starvation when a plot was hatched to kill the middle-aged Hutchinson, the biggest man among them. They drew lots while he was asleep as to who would murder him, and the lot fell to Broughton who, without warning,‘killed him with an axe, which we brought with us’. He then confesses to Bedford that ‘He was cut to pieces, and with the exception of the intestines, hands, feet and head, the body was carried with us. We lived some days upon his flesh; we ate it heartily. I do not know how many days it lasted’.

  But the problem was that the murder of Hutchinson made the men pathologically suspicious of each other. Broughton tells Bedford: ‘We each of us feared that on going to sleep we would be dispatched by the others – we were always in a state of dreadful alarm’. But, as it turned out, the next victim was not asleep, but cutting timber for the fire, which indicates that they had some other wood-cutting instrument besides the axe. The ‘depraved’ Patrick Feagan attacked William Coventry. Perhaps the reason was that the older man was slow, like ‘Little Brown’ in the Pearce party, and delayed the group. Whatever the reason, Feagan attacked him with the axe, but Coventry saw him coming and partially dodged the blow, which struck him just above the eye. He cried out for mercy, but Feagan was apparently unable to go on with the deed, so MacAvoy and Broughton had to move in and finish him off. Broughton told Bedford: ‘We lived upon his body for some days; we were not starving when we killed Coventry, we had only consumed the remains of Hutchinson the same day. We were not at all sparing of the food we obtained from the bodies of our companions; we eat it as if we had abundance’. Perhaps, like Pearce, they were starting to enjoy eating human flesh.

  They certainly seem to have been much better equipped than the earlier escapees. They had knives and razors, and snares to catch small animals. Broughton claims that he was on very friendly terms with Feagan; he says, ‘I could trust my life in his hands’. This must have worried MacAvoy and one night he took Broughton aside on the pretext of setting a snare to catch a wallaby. Broughton claims that he was hesitant to go off with MacAvoy because the Irishman was bigger and stronger than himself. But MacAvoy only wanted to persuade the man from Dorking to join forces with him against the Liverpool lad. He claimed that the long and the short of it was that if they got caught they could not trust the young man. ‘Feagan’, he said, ‘was young and foolish, people will frighten him, and he will tell what has been done; now the only thing we can do to prevent it is to kill him’. Broughton argued that Feagan would not ‘rat’ on them, but MacAvoy claimed that if they were recaptured Feagan would give evidence against them to save his own life. He insisted that they should kill Feagan and suggested that if they make it to the settled districts that they ought to both say that the young man drowned crossing the Gordon River ‘at the back of Frenchman’s Cap’. Here he is probably referring to the Franklin. Remember, it is Broughton who is telling the story, and he says he replied that it was well known that the youngster was a good swimmer and claimed that people ‘would also know that I will not go away and leave him’. The matter unresolved, they returned to the camp where Feagan was warming his bare feet in front of the fire.

  Broughton claims that he felt sleepy and that as he dozed off he heard Feagan screaming out. ‘I leaped up on my feet in a dreadful fright, and saw Feagan lying on his back with a terrible cut in his head, and the blood pouring from it; MacAvoy was standing over him with the axe in his hand. I cried to MacAvoy “You murdering rascal, you blood-thirsty wretch, what have you done?” He said, “This will save our lives”. And then he struck him another blow on the head with the axe. Feagan then groaned – and MacAvoy cut his throat with a razor, through the windpipe.’

  It was as simple as that. Broughton calmed down and they stripped the body, cut it up and started arguing over who would have Feagan’s red shirt. Broughton had stolen it from Constable Bradshaw in the first place. It ‘occasioned words and ill-feeling between MacAvoy and myself . . . Feagan’s body we cut up into pieces and roasted it; we roasted all but the hands, feet and head’. He says it was a lot easier to carry roasted and not so easily discovered. They then went on their way and after about four days he says they gave themselves up to the military party at McGuire’s Marsh.

  Apparently MacAvoy had also undergone a before-death conversion and he had given a similar account to the Reverend Mr Conolly. Bedford and Conolly accompanied the two man-eaters to the scaffold on Thursday, 5 August 1831.

  No doubt Conolly relayed all the details of the story that night to his old friend Knopwood over a quiet drink and a pipe.

  7

  A PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT

  I did not set out to write a book about Alexander Pearce. His story is fascinating in its own right and his determination to survive against overwhelming odds is remarkable. And the story includes a feat of cross-country navigation by Robert Greenhill that is extraordinarily impressive. However my original interest was not primarily in the history of Pearce and the other convicts and their stories, but in the natural wilderness in which these events are set.

  In January 1970 I first went to Tasmania, Australia’s southernmost island state, as an assistant priest in a largely working-class, urban Catholic parish in Hobart’s northern suburbs. Public debate over the destruction of Lake Pedder, one of the most exquisite lakes in the world, was then in full swing. In a wry twist, the Lake was named after the Supreme Court judge, Sir John Lewes Pedder (1793–1859), who presided at Pearce’s trial. The lake, with its dark water, beautiful beach and many rare species of animals and plants was first sighted by a party from the Survey Department led by John Helder Wedge and James Erskine Calder on 11 March 1835.

  At first I took little interest in the arguments of either side of this environmental debate – the natural world seemed irrelevant to me. As a young priest my interests were anthropocentric, focused on the people of the parish and ministry. As I idly watched the debates on TV, it seemed that never the twain would meet. The environmentalists claimed that the lake was unique and should be preserved at all costs. The then Labor state government and the local Hydro-Electricity Commission maintained that another power scheme was needed so that Tasmania could be further ‘industrialised’ and ‘employment’ guaranteed. Never mind that almost all the rivers on the island were already dammed, most of them in a couple of places, let alone that Tasmania was remote from the industrialised centres of the world. Lake Pedder was perceived by both major parties as a useful political issue with popular appeal, and the arguments had little to do with logic or common sense. The government’s basic assumption was that the natural world’s primary function was to act as a source of energy for industrialisation, so that employment could be created. In order to achieve this it was decided that an area that had previously been set aside as a national park in 1955, which included Lake Pedder, was to be drowned behind a massive dam.

  The then Premier of Tasmania was an ex-miner and union official named Eric Reece. His argument for the flooding of Lake Pedder is revealing, for it gives insight into the minds of those who believe in development at any cost. Explaining his position in a later book he said:‘God gave us the earth to use and care for. I think that is a reasonable summary of why we are here . . . There is plenty of room out there, in that [wilderness] area, for people to get lost in, to be rescued from and in many instances to die in. People have been lost in there and have never been discovered . . . They [the conservationists] have taken away more t
han twenty per cent of Tasmania’s surface just to be a wilderness and they are now claiming that there should not be any interference with it in any way. This to me is quite wrong’.

  This is a fascinating statement. Reece, whose nickname was ‘Electric Eric’, is revealed as a man of simplistic, almost naive views, who nevertheless was determined to impose his own will on the whole community by damming a river and flooding Lake Pedder in a national park that had already been set aside for permanent preservation because of its unique natural values. Significantly Reece sets up the argument in an explicitly religious context, and was perhaps drawing consciously on the text of the Book of Genesis where humankind was told to ‘be fruitful and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion’ (Genesis 1:28). This widely misunderstood text has been used often over the last century to justify all types of destructive human behaviour toward the natural world and its animals and plants. For ‘Electric Eric’, ‘subduing the wilderness’ by harnessing natural resources through modern technology was important because it fulfilled the human need to use the natural world ‘to create jobs’.

  For the Premier the natural world was ‘out there’, alien, separate from ‘normal’, constructed, human life. It was a foreign, dangerous place where people got lost and died. They even sometimes had the cheek to expect to be rescued from it! In other words, conservationists were a selfish and wrong-headed minority, in contrast to normal people like himself who were concerned about ‘jobs’ and the public good, which Reece identified with the industrialisation that would flow from the electrical power that would be generated. If pressed, he was willing to admit that it was unfortunate that it was the natural world that would have to bear the brunt of this ‘progress’. But as far as he was concerned there was lots more ‘natural world’ out there, so the loss of a bit of it was not so very important, even if it included Lake Pedder. The long and the short of it was that, despite massive public protests in Tasmania and across Australia and the wider world, the federal government refused to intervene, the dam went ahead and Lake Pedder was drowned in 1972. It was an act of enormous vandalism.