Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  Historians believe the decision later to build an asylum on the prison grounds came in response to the number of inmates driven to insanity by residence in the Model Prison. At the end of its years of official usefulness, in 1877, Port Arthur housed mostly the mentally ill, paupers, and the indigent, men who had served their time but who had no family and nowhere else to go.

  The question that begs to be addressed at Port Arthur is not about the reasons for the sentence of banishment from England—for the psychopathic child rapist, for the too-assertive Quaker, for the nine-year-old petty thief—but the reasons for so severely punishing these people.

  In eighteenth-century England, banishment was a tool of large-scale social engineering. The “nether region” to which the Crown first sent its banished was the American colonies; more than 50,000 prisoners were transported there before the American Revolution ended this option. Prisoners were then warehoused in derelict ships moored in the Thames. When the English courts ran out of space there, the transportation system was inaugurated, which initially transferred prisoners to the southeast coast of Australia. The First Fleet, carrying 759 prisoners, sailed from Portsmouth for Port Jackson, just north of Botany Bay, in 1787. (By the 1860s, Great Britain was operating thirty-five such penal colonies, from Corradino in Malta to Glendairy in Barbados to Port Arthur in Tasmania.)

  The overarching idea behind promoting the transportation system was that these penal outposts might function as self-sustaining colonies and provide some income to the Crown. While the incorrigible were to be isolated there in actual penitentiary buildings, and while these settlements were expected to accommodate experiments in reformation like the Model Prison, they were also meant to serve a strategic purpose. Prisoners were to be taught trades—blacksmithing, coopering, printing, tailoring, carpentry, and husbandry. They were to sink wells for water, raise their own food, and build a transportation infrastructure on the peninsula. Selected prisoners, both female and male, were to be transported with their families; others were instructed to marry after serving their terms, to have children, and to take up in these regions the duties of the servant and working classes. They were also expected to provide assistance to a separate group of volunteer emigrants, people of “good character” and from the educated classes, who were to be employed as administrators in the penal colonies, developing lumbering and mining operations, constructing shipping facilities, and establishing an export infrastructure. Together, reformed convicts and volunteer emigrants were to extend civilization into the outlands surrounding the penal colony and to cultivate and improve those lands.

  While this stratagem struck many as an ingenious and efficient way to establish civilized life in a “terra nullius” like Australia (land that, legally speaking, belonged to no one), it couldn’t be expected that all prisoners would grasp the wisdom behind the plan. Enlightening them would in all likelihood require a certain amount of discipline, to ensure conformity with the vision. Britain drew on yet another class of citizens, men with a taste for administering the necessary beatings, scourgings, and humiliations, to take on this task.

  The transportation plan was arrogant, immoral, and foolish, and its many injustices sparked nearly constant rebellion in the prison system. One reason some Australians identify today with well-known rebels in the transport prisons, many of whom were in fact criminals, was that these individuals attempted to defy a brutal system of class distinctions. They attacked the presumptions of those who chose to assign every person a state in life, to dictate the shape of each person’s future. Although the settings and circumstances were different, the prisoners’ yearning to be free of these presumptions was fueled by the same feelings of outrage that precipitated both the American and the French Revolutions.

  Among the most remarkable—and for some, heroic—of those in the prison system who refused to be yoked was a “clever, informed, industrious” woman named Mary Bryant. Her defiance and her determination to escape along with her family from the grip of those who sought to make her submit, symbolize, for many modern-day Australians, the will to establish one’s own way in an unjust world.

  * * *

  —

  MARY BRYANT (NÉE BROAD) was convicted of assaulting an older woman and taking her purse. Initially sentenced to death by hanging, she was subsequently transported to Port Jackson, where she met William Bryant, a fellow convict and her future husband. The living conditions for everyone at Port Jackson—prisoners, guards, immigrant British citizens, and assorted functionaries and administrators—were miserable. (In making his recommendation for the southeast coast of Australia as a site for a transport prison, Sir Joseph Banks, perhaps waxing nostalgic, gave Parliament the impression that the country was well watered and suited to growing crops, which it was not.) The Bryants and their two young children, Emanuel and Charlotte, experienced the worst of conditions there, with rationed food, insufficient water, and the burden of onerous labor. On the night of September 26, 1790, five convicts unaffiliated with the Bryants managed to steal a boat and equip it for travel. They were caught the same night attempting to put to sea and were savagely punished in front of the other prisoners. Their effort resonated, however, with the Bryants and with a few of the Bryants’ friends.

  The authorities suspected the Bryants might be planning some sort of escape, but for unknown reasons, no one kept very close watch on the couple. Will Bryant succeeded in stealing a coastal chart (based on Cook’s 2,000-mile survey from 1770) and was able to acquire a compass. Mary secretly stockpiled food and water and, with her husband, began inviting a few convicts with crewing skills and navigation experience to join them.

  On a moonless evening in March 1791, members of the group stole a cutter belonging to the governor of the colony. It had recently been rigged with a new mast and sails, and fitted with six new oars. The historian C. H. Currey writes, “The cutter breasted the Pacific in the early hours of Tuesday, 29th March 1791,” and then, very quickly, they were gone—the Bryants, their two children, and seven other convicts, some serving life sentences. After a harrowing journey up the east coast, facing storms and shortages of food and water, and after clearing the Great Barrier Reef and doubling Cape York, they sailed 1,200 miles across the little-known Arafura Sea to arrive, sixty-nine days later, in Kupang, a relatively large city and Dutch entrepôt at the west end of Timor. According to Currey, their escape and 3,254-mile journey was “a masterpiece of organization and cooperative effort.”

  The Bryants were inspired to make for Kupang by a group of Englishmen who’d sailed for there from Port Jackson two years previously—and who, they’d heard, had made it: Lieutenant William Bligh and the eighteen crewmen who had remained loyal to him after mutineers forced Bligh to relinquish command of his ship, HMS Bounty, in the Tongan Islands. When Bligh, who had a terrific temper, reached England, he had a ship, HMS Pandora, under the command of Edward Edwards sent out to track down the mutineers. Sixteen of them had disembarked from the Bounty in Tahiti and had made homes there while their leader, Fletcher Christian, had sailed away with eight others. The crew of the Pandora captured fourteen of the sixteen on Tahiti but could not find the other two. On the return voyage to England, the Pandora had its hull torn open by coral spikes as it attempted to cross the Great Barrier Reef. Most of the mutineers, caged and shackled in the ship’s hold, would have perished had it not been for the efforts of the Pandora’s crew, who defied their captain’s order to let the men drown. (Despite the crew’s efforts, four of them did drown.)

  After the ship sank, its officers, the survivors among its crew, and the remaining prisoners made their own remarkable journey across the Arafura Sea in four lifeboats. When Edwards arrived in Kupang and encountered the Bryants, he became suspicious. He informed the authorities that the Bryants and their friends were not the shipwrecked survivors that they claimed to be but escaped convicts. Determined to bring them to justice, along with the Bounty’s mutineers, Edwards hired a
Dutch vessel, the Rembang, and on October 5, 1791, sailed for England with them, the mutineers, and those of his crew who’d survived the sinking of the Pandora. En route to Jakarta (Batavia at the time), the Rembang nearly foundered in a typhoon. Had it not been for the courage and skill of the Australian convicts, Currey contends, the ship would have sunk. The heat, humidity, and pestiferous conditions at Jakarta—malaria, dysentery, typhus—had taken the lives of four of the Bounty mutineers and four of the Port Jackson convicts, including Will Bryant and the Bryants’ son, Emanuel, not yet two years old.

  Edwards, abandoning the damaged Rembang, put those who remained aboard four other ships and continued his journey across the Indian Ocean for the Cape of Good Hope, at the southern tip of Africa. One of the four, the Horssen, with Mary and her daughter aboard, encountered another typhoon, and another of the convicts was swept into the sea. Arriving in Cape Town on March 18, 1792, Mary, her daughter, Charlotte, not yet six, and the four surviving convicts were transferred to HMS Gorgon. According to Watkin Tench, a historian who sailed with Mary Bryant and the others from Batavia, Mary was greatly, but discreetly, admired by passengers aboard the Gorgon. She was twenty-seven at the time. “I never looked at [her] without pity and astonishment,” wrote Tench. “They had miscarried in a heroic struggle for liberty; after having combated every hardship, and conquered every difficulty.” The six of them were regarded, wrote Tench, as people who had manufactured their own dignity. He thought they should be set free once in England, not forced to stand trial as escaped convicts and sent back to Port Jackson.

  The punishment for escape from a transport prison, Tench knew, was imprisonment for life. Mary Bryant, whose daughter died shortly after the Gorgon left Cape Town, was eventually set free by the court. Numerous people, including the biographer James Boswell, supported her release, citing her courage, the inhumanity of the transportation system, and her personal bearing.

  * * *

  —

  ONE OF THE REASONS Port Arthur stands out so prominently among the images many Australians have of themselves, I believe, and why a rebellious figure like Mary Bryant is appealing to so many is that a significant number of Australians have ambivalent feelings about their country’s origins, lying as they do with the penal colonies and, later, with the violent usurpation of Aboriginal lands. Some Australians would just as soon Port Arthur remained obscure in the national memory, and that any mention of one’s “convict ancestors” be left to Australia’s working class to ponder. Just as many, probably, appreciate knowing the truth about the transportation system and about the lethal violence directed, historically, against Aboriginals. One occasionally hears in Australia comparisons made with Native American genocide in the founding history of the United States. Americans, generally, are loath to acknowledge what invading whites did, and caused to be done, to indigenous people in North America. And are equally as uncomfortable discussing the early decades of their country’s slave-based economy, or the treatment of the thousands of indentured servants England shipped to America to assist in the labor of establishing the new colony.

  It’s harrowing business, trying to sort out the foundations of any nation. Bigotry, genocide, violence, and greed always emerge to play major roles in the narrative, and assigning ethical responsibility for acts that took hundreds or thousands or millions of human lives is always divisive. But without the effort, all nations eventually founder. The decision to stick with civil war, righteousness, denial, and exploitation keeps the door open for tyrants to rule and loyal citizens to become refugees.

  The fact that an outsider can hardly detect any regional accents in Australia makes it easy to assume that the country’s populace (forgetting, for the moment, Aboriginal people) is in some way seamlessly united. Two significant extremes, however, are apparent in the general population. One prefers to cling to what is essentially English; the other wants to discover a purely Australian destiny, the way Revolutionary era Americans wanted to discover a uniquely American destiny. The former would prefer to avoid the disruption that comes with having to examine the treatment of Aboriginals in the past; the other wants the injustices addressed. A similar division is apparent in the American population, where blacks and Native Americans are concerned. (Interestingly, the majority of Aboriginals in the one instance and of Native Americans and blacks in the other with whom I’ve spoken would be pleased if the injustices were simply widely acknowledged, and if the persistent barriers to equality were systemically dismantled.)

  America revolted successfully against its parent country, declaring its opposition to colonial impositions of any sort and enshrining a “melting pot” folklore that, while it claimed to welcome the oppressed, remained suspicious about and resistant to diversity. And America, the most successful of England’s former colonies, went on to become a formidable colonizer itself, imposing its system of political organization and its policies for economic growth on other nations, to the point of authorizing assassinations and supporting juntas and coups that agreed not to interfere with the international operations of American corporations. At the same time, America also ignored institutionalized social injustice around the world, like apartheid, and strong-arm dictators like Suharto and Syngman Rhee, if raising an objection might create significant economic tension or disruption.

  Australia, like Canada, has yet to decide how to expend its revolutionary energy. The courage to politically confront what most of the world’s peoples consider wicked—the appropriation of other people’s lands, the exploitation of human beings for profit, the enforcement of policies that perpetuate economic servitude and promote cultural or racial superiority—is Australia’s step to take. It’s arrogant of course to suggest this. I mean the observation only as a respectful salute to the citizens of a sibling country who have said similar things to me, for example, after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s now-famous apology to Aboriginal peoples. When, they asked me, would such a thing happen in the States?

  * * *

  —

  THE DAY I VISITED Port Arthur, Pete parked his car in what was then called the upper car park, a short distance from the lower car park, in which a yellow Volvo 244 sedan stood. A white surfboard was mounted upside down on the left side of a roof rack and the kind of cartoonish stickers one associates with young children adhered to the left rear side window.

  After our tour of the grounds we crossed the cricket pitch again and entered the Broad Arrow Café for lunch. (The image of a broad arrowhead on prison equipment and clothing was a sign of Crown ownership.) I found some materials to read later—Marcus Clarke’s famous 1874 novel, For the Term of His Natural Life, was available—but I couldn’t find a decent map, and after we ate, we departed. Pete wanted to use a restroom at the edge of the lower car park. Physically and emotionally drained, I started to lean back against one of the cars there to wait for him. Almost instantly I sprang erect again, as if recoiling from the vehicle. The feeling that I had actually been pushed away from the car was so strong, so strange a sensation, that I turned around to study the vehicle—the surfboard, the small decals in the window, the Tasmanian license plate, CG 2835—as if one of these details might explain what I’d felt. I was still standing there when Pete walked up. I told him what had happened.

  He gave me a friendly smile, said, “Sure, mate,” and we walked on to his car.

  A few weeks later, back home in Oregon, I was walking up the driveway to my house with the day’s paper when I stopped to read a story about a massacre that had taken place the day before in Australia. A gunman named Martin Bryant had shot and killed thirty-five people at Port Arthur, twelve of them inside the Broad Arrow Café. He’d wounded nineteen more, many critically, and had been arrested by local police when he came running out of a house he’d set fire to near the entrance to the historic site. As I quickly scanned the following paragraphs my eye fell on a sentence stating that during the melee Bryant had “abandoned his yellow Volvo sedan.”<
br />
  I called Pete immediately. He remembered the moment. A few minutes after I hung up I got a call from the Tasmanian state police. I faxed them a copy of the article in my American newspaper, so they could see precisely what information the story had provided me with, and then told the officer who called, a woman, additional details about the car that I recalled. She said the car Pete and I had seen was undoubtedly Bryant’s. She speculated that he might have been there that day to determine the most effective way to kill a lot of people quickly. (The attack was phenomenally lethal. From the moment he fired the first bullet from his AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle inside the small café until he stopped momentarily, seventeen seconds later, Bryant killed twelve people and wounded ten.)

  I later learned, during his trial, that Bryant had considered two other locations before settling on Port Arthur. One was the ferry from Lauceston, Tasmania, to Melbourne, Victoria, across the 225-mile-wide Bass Strait. His plan had been to kill everyone aboard the ferry but the pilot, whom he would kill as they were docking. The other venue Bryant considered was the grounds of the annual Salamanca festival for writers and artists in Hobart, an international event that draws a large weekend crowd and to which I had been invited that year.

  Pete reminded me, when I talked with him about our having seen Bryant’s car there that day, that many Australians had come to believe that the Port Arthur prisoners—especially the ancestors of some of them—hadn’t really been bad people. This was a widespread type of denial, he said, of the real nature of Port Arthur. And he cautioned me that Bryant’s rampage should not be taken as Bryant’s comment on what many Australians refer to as the “hated stain,” the nation’s convict history. He was just killing people.