The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  By now, according to the meticulous bookkeeping of the Colonial Office, the colony of New South Wales—four small red patches, representing Sydney Cove, Norfolk Island, Parramatta and Toongabbie—had cost the government of George III 67,194 pounds, 15 shillings and four-pence three-farthings, or about 3.35 million pounds in modern money.63

  What had the Crown got in exchange? Not much, in strategic terms; the hope of supplying England’s East Indian fleet with spars and canvas from Norfolk Island had failed miserably. On the other hand, the fact that the Australian coast had been not only claimed but occupied, however feebly, meant that the French would find it harder to press their territorial claims in the South Pacific. Given the broad nature of the balance of power between England and France—whereby France dominated the continent of Europe, while England, global in its reach, ruled the waves—there was at least a hypothetical strategic role for this colony in the primitive terms of eighteenth-century geopolitics.

  As for the convicts, William Pitt’s Tory government claimed to be not displeased by the results. Some critics wanted to know why the felons were not being used on public works in England, as they were in France or Germany; degraded though these creatures may be, their argument went, convict labor had some value, and it was wasted in Australia. Pitt brushed these objections aside in his toplofty way, saying—quite untruthfully—that the main expenses of the colony were a thing of the past, that it was or would shortly become self-supporting and that transportation was by far the cheapest way of getting rid of felons.64

  So the colony would go on; but it went on without Governor Arthur Phillip. On December 10, 1792, accompanied by his two aboriginal friends, or specimens, Bennelong and Yemmerawannie, he boarded the storeship Atlantic and sailed down the harbor for the last time. He longed for England. Twenty-two years later, retired, bored, an admiral of the Blue living on a pension, still in touch (though desultorily now) with the affairs of the colony he had fathered, he died in Bath.

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  As THE LAST decade of the eighteenth century went by, the British Government still thought of Australia and its convict colony in maritime terms. Its settlements were a port and an island; it faced outward to the sea, not inward to the land. It was a base (albeit a feeble one) for trade, refitting and defense, not for internal expansion. The first four governors of New South Wales were all naval officers: Captain Phillip, Captain Hunter, Lieutenant King and Captain William Bligh (of the Bounty).65 The convict colony was, in London’s view, a land-based hulk the size of a continent.

  But after 1792 it became self-supporting, and that was the work of landsmen—the officers of the New South Wales Corps and their friends. For nearly three years between Phillip’s departure in December 1792 and Hunter’s return in September 1795, the colony was in effect run for the New South Wales Corps by its principal officers, Francis Grose and William Paterson. They set the pattern of private management and slave labor that created the wealth of Australia’s first elite.

  Francis Grose (1758?–1814.) had fought against the American rebels in the War of Independence. Badly wounded and invalided home to England, he got back to full service pay by helping to raise and recruit the New South Wales Corps. As its commandant, and as lieutenant-governor of New South Wales, Grose took over when Phillip sailed. He promptly set about putting most civil affairs in military hands. He replaced magistrates with corps officers and appointed a thrusting young Scottish lieutenant, John Macarthur, as regimental paymaster and inspector of public works—posts that gave him leverage by controlling the supply of convict labor.

  Grose did not forget his own rank and file. He cancelled Phillip’s policy of equal rations for all and gave the troops more food than the convicts. He also let it be known that any member of the New South Wales Corps could have twenty-five acres of free land for the asking. But his crucial decision for the future of Australian farming was to offer 100-acre land grants to corps officers—along with ten convicts, free of charge and maintained at government expense, to work each one. The corps officers, Grose reported to London, were “the only description of settlers on whom reliance can be placed.… [T]heir exertions are really astonishing.… I shall encourage their pursuit as much as is in my power.”66

  Under Grose, officers had the economic edge on civilians; they could raise capital by borrowing against their regimental pay, and as a junta they seized a monopoly on most consumer goods arriving in Sydney Harbor. The chief of these was rum, the social anesthetic and real currency of early New South Wales. Colonial Sydney was a drunken society, from top to bottom. Men and women drank with a desperate, addicted, quarrelsome single-mindedness. Every drop of their tipple had to be imported.

  Early in 1793 an American trading vessel, the Hope, arrived with 7,500 gallons of rum in her cargo. The goods and stores she carried were badly needed, and the Hope’s hard-nosed skipper not only demanded grossly inflated prices for them but insisted that not a nail, a sack of flour or a yard of cloth would leave his ship unless the colony bought all his rum first. Rather than suffer this gouging, the New South Wales Corps’ officers decided to pass it on. They formed a ring to buy the Hope’s cargo without competition. John Macarthur, as regimental paymaster, fixed the necessary IOUs against the regiment’s funds in England.

  This impromptu deal was hugely profitable, and the monopoly of the Rum Corps (as the regiment was presently nicknamed) soon pervaded the colony’s economic life. For years to come, most of the cargo that came to Sydney passed through the hands of the corps and its favored satellites, among whom were several ex-convicts. Much of it was invested in land. Emancipated convicts and free settlers had an equal right to farm. At the beginning of 1794, twenty-two grants of land had been made along the rich plains of the Hawkesbury River, northwest of Sydney. Within a few months there were 70 settlers there, and a year later 400; these included 54 ex-convicts with their dependents. But by 1800, only 8 of those 54 still had farms there—and the Hawkesbury flats were the best farming land within reach of Sydney. In all, out of 274 settlers on granted land in New South Wales in 1795—the great majority, 251 of them, being ex-convicts—only 89 were still farming their own land in 1800.67

  There were natural reasons for this: flood, fire, drought—the undying, malignant totems of Australian farming. There were cultural ones, too, since so many of the Emancipist farmers were utter novices, not experienced men like James Ruse. But this early tendency to consolidation—which reversed itself in the Emancipists’ favor after 180068—was certainly helped by the officers’ money and access to credit, and by the rum itself. An officer could pick the best land for his grant; he could get the most skilled convicts, the “mechanics” and former agricultural laborers, to work it; he paid for his tools, seed and stock a mere fraction of what Emancipist farmers, due to the Rum Corps monopoly on imports, paid him; and if an ex-convict farmer started wasting his life with booze, some Rum Corps officer would always appear and buy him out.

  “The changes we have undergone since the departure of Governor Phillip,” wrote John Macarthur as early as 1793,

  are so great and extraordinary that to recite them all might create some suspicion of their truth. From a state of desponding poverty and threatened famine that this settlement should be raised to its present aspect in so short a time is barely credible. As for myself, I have a farm containing nearly 250 acres.… [O]f this year’s produce I have sold £400 worth, and I have now remaining in my granaries upwards of 1,800 bushels of corn.69

  By 1799, New South Wales Corps officers owned 32 percent of the cattle in Australia, 40 percent of the goats, 59 percent of the horses, and 77 percent of the sheep. Grasping, haughty, jealous of their privileges and prerogatives, Macarthur and his friends were on top and meant to stay there; and the official governors who followed Grose and Paterson—Hunter, King, and Bligh—had the utmost difficulty controlling them. They were so powerful, in fact, that on January 26, 1808, the twentieth anniversary of white settlement, they staged a coup d’etat by rebelli
ng against Governor Bligh, deposing him and running New South Wales as a military junta for two years. For this remarkable mutiny, none of the officers was hanged or even seriously punished.

  Their junta mentality fostered two assumptions. The first was that none of them—especially not John Macarthur, who organized the rebellion from a prison cell where Bligh had put him—believed that naval governors were ever on their side. The second was that convicts were there to be used, not reformed. Both caused a rapid hardening of attitudes against convicts, the lumpenproletariat of New South Wales. The New South Wales Corps stiffly resisted any effort to criticize, or even inspect, its treatment of the convicts. The emblematic form of this attitude would show itself on Norfolk Island.

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  THE ATLANTIC, before taking Phillip away in 1792, had stopped at Norfolk Island on its outward voyage with supplies for its desperate colonists. Those crewmen and marines who went ashore were struck by how bad, under the hand of King, the place had become for its prisoners. When they got to Sydney they talked about it, and a marine named John Easty noted in his diary how “that Hand which was recond the most flourishing of any Hand in the World all most”

  now turns out to be A Pore Mersable [miserable] Place and all manners of Cruelties an opresion uesed by the Governor floging and beeting the people to Death that its better for the pore unhappy Creatures to be hanged allmost then to come under the command of such Tyrants and the Govner [King] behaves more like a mad man than a man in trus[t]ed with the Goverment of an Hand … Belonging to Great Britain.70

  King had gone back to England for a brief recuperative spell after the wreck of the Sirius in March 1790, but he returned to Norfolk Island in November 1791, newly married to his cousin, Anna Coombe. He had been promoted to lieutenant-governor of the island and would be its commandant for five years.

  The Norfolk Island prisoners were now guarded by the Botany Bay Rangers. The corps rank and file made no effort to keep their distance from the convicts. They became “very intimate with the convicts, living in their huts, eating, drinking and gambling with them, and perpetually enticing the women to leave the men they were married to.”71 There was friction. Emancipated convicts complained that the soldiers were seducing their wives; and one of these convicts, Dring, the island’s coxswain, beat up a soldier who had repeatedly cuckolded him. King fined the aggrieved husband twenty shillings, which, he hoped, “would convince the soldier that he was not to be insulted with impunity.” It did no such thing; the soldiers felt Dring should have been flogged. During Christmas of 1793, four soldiers were seen heading with a torch for Dring’s farm, intent on burning his corn. When a civilian farmer tried to stop them, one man jabbed the torch full in his face, “which bruised and burnt him very much.”

  Even King could not tolerate this. He had the soldier arrested. That evening, two other soldiers got bludgeons and went after Dring. He was found half dead, covered with blood and cuts. His assailants were court-martialled and one of them, Private Downey, was sentenced to receive 100 lashes and to give Dring a conciliatory present: a gallon of rum. At this, to King’s amazement, Dring and a few other Emancipists begged him to forgive the soldiers: They were terrified of reprisals by the corps. They got their wish, on the condition—as King strictly ordered—that the Emancipists and the soldiers should all sit down and drink the gallon of rum together.

  Here one might expect the rancor to simmer down, but it did not. Bored, bitter and pugnacious, the redcoats (which they were in name only: King was to report that by night you could not tell from a man’s dress whether he was a soldier, a settler or a convict) kept stalking about, picking fights, muttering darkly against King—whom they despised as a naval officer, an outsider to the corps—and plotting mutiny. In January 1794, King learned from a convict informer that the soldiers had taken an oath “not to suffer any of their comrades to be punished for an offence against a convict any more”; they would rise, kill Dring, and put all the prisoners to death.72

  Quelling this, King realized, would be “a very delicate affair”; one did not lightly disarm, on mere suspicion, a whole detachment of soldiers who owed their allegiance to a governor, himself their commanding officer, only two weeks’ sail away on the Australian mainland. Nevertheless, King managed to disarm and arrest the ten suspected mutineers. He hastily formed a civil militia, consisting of forty-four free settlers, all former seamen and marines (no Emancipist, of course, could be trusted with a gun). By a remarkable fluke, a colonial schooner—the first vessel they had seen in nine months—arrived at Norfolk Island two days later, with dispatches from Sydney. The mutineers were shipped to the mainland for trial.

  After they reached Sydney Cove, Grose read King’s long report on the incident and was apoplectic with rage. His old wounds, inflicted almost twenty years before by the musket-balls of the American militia, were hurting him badly in the unrelenting summer heat of 1793–94; and now he learned that his naval subordinate had actually armed a civilian militia on Norfolk Island. This was subversion. Grose picked up his pen. “No provocation that a soldier can give,” he wrote to King, “is ever to be admitted as an excuse for the convicts striking a soldier.” No soldier could be tried by a civil judge or magistrate, or even put in the custody of a civilian constable. Most important of all, these constables “are to understand that they are not on any pretence whatever to stop or seize a soldier, although he should be detected in an unlawful act.”73

  This remarkable letter was a charter of immunity for the New South Wales Corps. For Grose, the word convict meant both felons under sentence and Emancipists. Since the number of free emigrants was negligible, “convict” in Grose’s eyes included virtually every civilian in the colony. Thus, the civil establishment could no longer touch the military, but the soldiers could do as they pleased, subject only to the restraint of a court-martial conducted by their own officers. Fortunately, King stood his ground against his intemperate governor. He sent his own explanations to the secretary of state in London; they were accepted, and Grose had to withdraw and apologize.

  But when King himself became governor, succeeding the aged Captain Hunter in 1800, he installed a tiger from the Rum Corps as commandant of Norfolk Island. He was Major Joseph Foveaux (1765–1846), in whose regime the military contempt for convicts would approach the level of mania.74

  There is no record of who Joseph Foveaux’s parents were, but his father is said to have been a French cook in the employ of the Earl of Upper Ossory at Ampthill Park, in Bedfordshire. His mother’s name is not recorded. Someone evidently took the trouble (and spent the money) to give him an education and steer him into a regiment, and his rapid promotion within the New South Wales Corps—from captain in 1791 to major in 1796, a most unusual leap for a young man on minor routine duty in an insignificant outpost—suggests a powerful male patron in the background.

  From his letters, one can glean little of Foveaux’s tastes and interests except a passion for military correctness. But he seems to have had the mentality of many a later camp commandant; Norfolk Island liberated him, enabling his sadism, which had been restrained by the more public sphere of the mainland, to overflow far from courts and judges, thinly disguised as “necessary rigor.”

  Arriving there late in 1800, he found morale had sagged badly in the four years since King had left. The flax manufactory still survived, but it produced nothing exportable. Skilled labor was short, and most buildings were tumbledown. The grindstones were worn out, the saws rusted, and the master carpenter had been suspended for laziness and impertinence. The settlement swarmed with bastard children, some two hundred of them, rather more than a fifth of the total island population, all illiterate and wild. The schoolmaster was in jail for debt and the lone missionary seemed “very unfit for a minister.” Clearly, there was much to do.75

  Foveaux did not go into detail about his own methods. They survive in an account by his head jailer, a transported highwayman named Robert Jones (alias Robert Buckey, alias George Abrahams),
who had got a conditional pardon in or around 1795 from Governor Hunter at King’s instigation but had chosen to stay on Norfolk Island.76

  “Major Foveaux,” Jones remarked, “was one of them hard and determined men who believe in the lash more than the Bible.” Foveaux was determined to leave solid stone buildings behind him: a jail, a barracks, staff houses. A day’s convict work was breaking five cartloads of stone per man. When the picks and hammers broke, for they were of poor quality, their users were severely flogged. The hours were long and the food bad (“the Pork … was so soft that you could put your finger through it, and always rotten”). Prisoners turned out before dawn and, rain or shine, had to put their straw palliasses outside their cells; when it rained, the convicts returning from labor were

  turned into their Cells in their wet state with no means of drying their clothes, such were my orders from the Governor; and did any one of them make a complaint they were immediately sent to the triangles and ordered 25 lashes. Any further complaint was an additional 50.77

  The fate of the refractory convict on Norfolk Island was one of prolonged and hideous torture:

  The flogger was a County of Clare man a very powerful man and [he] took great pleasure in inflicting as much bodily punishment as possible, using such expressions as “Another half pound, mate, off the beggar’s ribs.” His face and clothes usually presented an appearance of a mincemeat chopper, being covered in flesh from the victim’s body. Major Foveaux delighted in such an exhibition and would show his satisfaction by smiling as an encouragement to the flogger. He would sometimes order the victim to be brought before him with these words: Hulloa you damn’d scoundrel how do you like it? and order him to put on his coat and immediately go to his work.78