The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  This practice makes it hard to distinguish, on the face of recorded charges, between “political” and “social” rebels—if, indeed, such a distinction in time of revolution makes much sense. Many of the prisoners who went to Australia on charges related to property damage or assault were probably, in their own eyes, as much political prisoners as Joseph Holt, the farmer who rose to lead the Wicklow insurgents after some Protestant militia burned his house in May 1798.

  When nine ships appeared from the Pacific with the condemned men and women of the ’98 rebellion on board, they brought the worst load of bitterness the System had yet seen. Of the 1,067 people on board, 775 were at a conservative estimate political exiles.46 They presented a new problem. As a jail for passive English felons, Sydney in 1800 was fairly secure. But how to handle the Irish? In 1798 Hunter had already begged for fewer rebels: “The infant state of this colony will not admit of it being filled up with the very worst of characters.”47 The great fear was another rebellion. “The Minerva arrived about a month ago with the first cargo of rebels,” Elizabeth Paterson, wife of the lieutenant-governor, wrote to her uncle. “They have already begun to concert schemes—I fear they will be a troublesome lot—I cannot say I like the place near so well as I did before.”48

  The ship contained not only Irish rank and file but also some lesser leaders who had been named in the Banishment and Fugitive Acts: Joseph Holt, and a medical doctor from Cork named Bryan O’Connor; two seditious teachers, William Maum and Farrel Cuffe; a Kildare priest, James Harold; and a Protestant clergyman, Henry Fulton. Literate and thinking men like these were bound to be a nuisance, or even a real danger, in British eyes; presently Governor King would inveigh against Maum, who had written “pipes” (seditious pasquinades) against him. “His principles and conduct have changed as little as the others, nor can time and place have any Effect on such depraved characters.… [We] may treat such Incendiaries with Contempt.”49 Yet Governor Hunter had taken pity on them at first. They were softhanded and “bred up in genteel life,” he told Portland:

  We can scarcely divest ourselves of the common feelings of humanity so far as to send a physician, a formerly respectable sheriff of a county, a Roman Catholic priest, or a Protestant clergyman and family to the grubbing hoe or the timber carriage.50

  Yet this restraint did not survive the rumors of Irish conspiracy. In September 1800 they grew loud, and Hunter set up a court of inquiry to look into them. The Irish, informers said, had made iron pikes on secret forges and hidden them around Toongabbie and Parramatta, ready for the rising of the “Croppies” (as Irish peasants, being sharecroppers, were called). There were signs, tokens and passwords. “A ship is in sight.” “What ship?” “A store-ship.” But after a week’s interrogation, the court had nothing but rumors, and certainly no pikes. Nevertheless, it found that “seditious meetings” had been held, “tending to excite a Spirit of Discontent which was fast ripening to a serious Revolt.” Five “ringleaders” were to get 500 lashes each, and the Catholic priest, Father Harold, must watch their torment “as a peculiar Mark of Infamy and Disgrace.” Then, along with “General” Holt and a dozen other suspects, they would all be sent to Norfolk Island, “where the baneful Influence of their Example cannot be experienced.”51

  Hunter might not have carried this out. But as the convicts’ bad luck had it, his term of office finished on September 28 and his successor, Philip Gidley King, endorsed the court’s suggestions. Meanwhile the Reverend Samuel Marsden was making his own inquiries among the Irish at Parramatta.

  Marsden (1764–1838), a grasping Evangelical missionary with heavy shoulders and the face of a petulant ox, had sailed to New South Wales in 1793 as the protégé of William Wilberforce, who recommended him as assistant to the chaplain of the colony. Once there, the protégé showed few of his patron’s instincts to mercy, but focused his considerable energies on getting land, breeding sturdy Suffolk sheep, preaching hellfire sermons and (as magistrate at Parramatta) subjecting convicts to draconic punishment—hence his nickname, “The Flogging Parson.” Marsden soon became the chief Anglican clergyman in New South Wales, and his hatred for the Irish Catholic convicts knew no bounds. It spilled into his sermons, pervaded his table talk and was set down at length in a ranting memo to his church superiors in London which, for bigotry, rivals William Dampier’s thoughts on the Australian blacks:

  The number of Catholic Convicts is very great … and these in general composed of the lowest Class of the Irish nation; who are the most wild, ignorant and savage Race that were ever favoured with the light of Civilization; men that have been familiar with … every horrid Crime from their Infancy. Their minds being destitute of every Principle of Religion & Morality render them capable of perpetrating the most nefarious Acts in cool Blood. As they never appear to reflect upon Consequences; but to be … always alive to Rebellion and Mischief, they are very dangerous members of Society. No Confidence whatever can be placed in them.… They are extremely superstitious, artful and treacherous, which renders it impossible for the most watchful & active Government to discover their real Intentions.… [If Catholicism were] tolerated they would assemble together from every Quarter, not so much from a desire of celebrating Mass, as to recite the Miseries and Injustice of their Banishment, the Hardships they suffer, and to enflame one another’s Minds with some wild Scheme of Revenge.52

  Marsden was set on finding the pikes, and his belief in conspiracy was confirmed by such vague observations as this from Hester Stroud, an illiterate prisoner off the Sugar Cane: “From what she saw of the Irishmen being in small parties in the Camp at Toongabby and by their walking about together and talking very earnestly in Irish, deponent verily believes they were intent on something improper.”53 Gaelic, of course, was their native tongue and many spoke nothing else. But Marsden was so certain they were hiding something that he resolved to have some of them “punished very severely” until they talked. Joseph Holt—who, as a voluntary transportee, could not so easily be tortured—was brought up to Toongabbie to watch the lord’s representative in Australia, the Flogging Parson, at work. In his description of Marsden’s interrogations under the blue indifferent Australian sky one sees the heroic determination to resist the tyrant that some of these Irish felt and paid for, as their spines were slowly opened to the air and the blowflies. The first one up was Maurice Fitzgerald, a middle-aged farmer from Cork, transported for life on the Minerva and now sentenced to 300 lashes.

  The place they flogged them their arms pulled around a large tree and their breasts squeezed against the trunk so the men had no power to cringe.… There was two floggers, Richard Rice and John Johnson the Hangman from Sydney. Rice was a left-handed man and Johnson was right-handed, so they stood at each side, and I never saw two threshers in a barn move their strokes more handier than those two man-killers did.

  The moment they began I turned my face round towards the other side and one of the constables came and desir’d me to turn and look on. I put my right hand in my pocket and pulled out my pen-knife, and swore I [would] rip him from the navel to the chin. They all gathered round me and would have ill used me … [but] they were obliged to walk off. I could compare them to a pack of hounds at the death of a hare, all yelping.

  I was to leeward of the floggers.… I was two perches from them. The flesh and skin blew in my face as it shook off the cats. Fitzgerald received his 300 lashes. Doctor Mason—I will never forget him—he used to go feel his pulse, and he smiled, and said: “This man will tire you before he will fail—Go on.” … During the time [Fitzgerald] was getting his punishment he never gave so much as a word—only one, and that was saying, “Don’t strike me on the neck, flog me fair.”

  When he was let loose, two of the constables went and took hold of him by the arms to keep him in the cart. I was standing by. [H]e said to them, “Let me go.” He struck both of them with his elbows in the pit of the stomach and knocked them both down, and then stepped in the cart. I heard Dr. Mason say that man had stren
gth enough to bear 200 more.

  Next was tied up Paddy Galvin, a young boy about 20 years of age. He was ordered to get 300 lashes. He got one hundred on the back, and you could see his backbone between his shoulder blades. Then the Doctor ordered him to get another hundred on his bottom. He got it, and then his haunches were in such a jelly that the Doctor ordered him to be flogged on the calves of his legs. He got one hundred there and as much as a whimper he never gave. They asked him if he would tell where the pikes were hid. He said he did not know, and would not tell. “You may as well hang me now,” he said, “for you never will get any music from me so.” They put him in the cart and sent him to the Hospital.54

  The frustrated Marsden reported to Governor King that “I am sure [Galvin] will die before he reveals anything.”* King ordered a second court of inquiry, which concluded (once again) that although there was no evidence, things looked suspicious; so the “several atrocious offenders” on whom suspicion fell should be flogged again and sent to life exile on Norfolk Island, with “the strictest discipline to reduce them to due obedience, subordination and order.” Thus, the Irish suspects were shipped off to the tender mercies of Major Foveaux.55

  None of this assuaged the fears of the free colonists, who remained—as Elizabeth Paterson wrote to a friend in October 1800—in “an uncomfortable state of anxiety … [at] the late importations of United Irishmen.… Our military force is now very little in comparison with the number of Irish now in the Colony, and that little much divided. Much trouble may befall us, before any succours can arrive.… [O]ther ships with the same description of people are now on their voyage to this place.”56

  At Sydney Cove, the ships kept coming. The Anne, in 1801, brought “137 of the most desperate and diabolical characters … together with a Catholic priest of the most notorious, seditious and rebellious principles,” wrote King, “which makes the numbers of … United Irishmen amount to 600, ready and waiting an opportunity to put their diabolical plans in action.”57 Anxiety was running so high that people could not even farm properly; the infant colony was glutted by “violent Republicans” and imperilled by no less than three Irish priests, the most recent of whom, Father Peter O’Neil, had been transported untried after being tortured for information in a Dublin jail, with 275 lashes on his back. (Father O’Neil was later pardoned and returned to Dublin at the end of 1802, much shaken by his experiences in Sydney and Norfolk Island.) King felt it was a breach of security to have priests in the colony. The Irish interpreted this as one more violation of their rights to Mass and the Sacraments. They petitioned King once, twice and again to let Father Dixon, transported on Friendship in early 1800, say Mass for them. King thought Dixon’s conduct had been “exemplary,” and so perhaps he would not inflame his flock with seditious notions. The governor weighed the matter. “An artful priest may lead [Irishmen] to every action that is either good or bad.” But more than 25 percent of the convicts in New South Wales were now Irish, and their religious impulses must have some vent. To the disgust of Samuel Marsden, King permitted Father Dixon to say mass once a month, “under stipulated restrictions”—meaning police surveillance. The first Mass and the first Catholic marriage in Australia were celebrated in Sydney on Sunday, May 15, 1803.58

  Meanwhile the Irish had convinced themselves that the masters of convict ships had been under orders to starve and murder them by neglect on the outward voyage. They had reason to think so. When the Hercules arrived from Cork in 1802 it showed a 37 percent death rate; on Atlas II, 65 of 181 Irish convicts died. King found this “a situation shocking to humanity,” but it was pointless to try and persuade the Irish that it was unintentional.59

  The surprising fact is not that the Irish eventually rose but that they took so long before doing it. It was not until 1804 that rebellion broke out, and it did not last long, for it was badly planned. In his dying confession to Samuel Marsden, one of the rebel leaders, William Johnston, said that the Irish had been talking about a rising all through February 1804 but had fixed no date for it. The idea was to take the relatively ill-guarded and remote settlement of Castle Hill, seize what weapons they could, link up with Irish convicts in Parramatta and then march all together on Sydney. A password was fixed (“St. Peter”). But because of poor communication between the settlements, the attempt was ill-coordinated and, worse, there was an informer: an Irishman named Keogh, who had been thatching a Hawkesbury farmhouse when a fellow convict approached him with word that the rising was planned for the 4th or 5th of March. Keogh took this news to the Parramatta barracks, and before long all the guards in Sydney and Parramatta were counting their ammunition.

  On Sunday, March 4, a Protestant chaplain named Hassall preached to the “desperate characters” at Castle Hill, but only a fraction of the two hundred convicts there came to hear him, “from which circumstance I thought that some alarm would take place.” The Reverend Hassall guessed right, for the Irish rose at Castle Hill at seven that evening. They set fire to a house to announce their revolt and then ran from cottage to cottage, grabbing what arms they could find—mostly scythes and axes, but a few muskets as well. A convict stonemason, Philip Cunningham, hopped up on a stump and harangued his mates—“He sang out, Now my Boys, Liberty or Death”—and away they marched in the dusk to Parramatta, singing their treason songs. On the way some of them burst into the cottage of Duggin, the hated government flogger at Castle Hill, and beat him up. They also found a full keg of rum and, fortified, they split into parties and spent the night looting farms and exhorting other Irish assigned men to join them. Inspired by the rum and the headier intoxication of their liberty, they saw the roof beams of the burning sheds knuckle under, black against gold-vermilion, into the heart of the fire, while trails of sparks wreathed upward into the lavender darkness and the Irish voices joined a capella in the rebel anthem of ’98, “The Croppy Boy”:

  It was early, early in the spring

  The birds did whistle and sweetly sing

  Changing their notes from tree to tree,

  And the song they sang was Old Ireland free.

  It was early, early in the night,

  The yeoman cavalry gave me a fright,

  The yeoman cavalry was my downfall,

  And taken was I by Lord Cornwall.

  As the commotion gathered in the dark and the news of the rebellion filtered into Parramatta from the outlying farms, a cry ran from house to house: “The Croppies are coming!” The Reverend Marsden, with his wife and Mrs. Elizabeth Macarthur, prudently scrambled into a boat and started floating down the Parramatta River toward Sydney. Drums beat, fowling pieces were loaded with ball and the little garrison kept anxious watch. The glow of burning sheds and shanties was seen in the distance. But meanwhile, a horseman had reached Sydney with news of the Castle Hill rising. Governor King learned about it by midnight, only five hours after it began, and he immediately had a detachment of four officers and fifty-two privates of the New South Wales Corps mustered out of barracks.60

  One is apt to think of the Rum Corps as a rabble of incompetents, but they performed well enough that night. Commanded by Major George Johnston, they set off at 1:30 a.m. and achieved a forced march from Sydney to Parramatta by dawn, with full equipment and musket. The town was intact when they arrived, and after a swig of water and a bite of biscuit Major Johnston split his detachment into two sections, sending one toward Castle Hill and leading the other at double time along the road to Toongabbie. But the Irish were not there either. They had moved on toward the banks of the Hawkesbury River, and Johnston and his men had to chase them for another ten miles.

  The “croppies” made their stand, such as it was, on a knoll which later became known as Vinegar Hill, after the site of a famous rebel battle in Wexford six years before. They had been wandering about and drinking all night, and the first rush of excitement had long since dissipated. Sheepish and confused, they did not know what to do when the “lobster-backs” in their sweat-soaked red tunics fanned out at the bottom of
the hill and Major Johnston (accompanied by his adjutant and, on foot, the Catholic priest Father Dixon, who wanted to negotiate a truce without bloodshed if he could) rode forward to meet them. The Irish leaders Phillip Cunningham and William Johnston stepped out. Major Johnston said he wanted to parley. Cunningham told him to come into the rebel ranks, “which I refused, observing to them that I was within pistol-shot and that it was in their power to kill me, and that their captains must have very little spirit if they would not come forward to speak to me.”61

  At this, Cunningham and Johnston naively supposed the major had come in a spirit of truce. They walked up to his horse, Cunningham protesting that his men would not surrender, “that he would have Death or Liberty.” Major Johnston and his trooper promptly drew their pistols and clapped them to the rebel leaders’ heads, forcing them back into the ranks of the government soldiers. Then Major Johnston gave the order to fire.

  The scene is fairly well rendered by an illustration of the time. Cunningham, hat in one hand and sword in the other, cries, “Death or Liberty, Major!” while Johnston, pointing his horse-pistol, retorts, “You Scoundrel, I’ll liberate you!” “Croppies lie down!” the trooper barks at the rebel Johnston, who replies, “We are all ruined.” In the far distance, Father Dixon exhorts the rebels to “lay down your arms, my deluded Countrymen.” A redcoat in the foreground slashes a rebel across the scalp, crying, “Thou rebel dog,” while the Irishman utters (in comic accent) a woebegone “Oh Jasus.” And in the middle ground, the line of serried redcoats is firing its volley as the motley Irish on the hill spout blood, stagger and fall.

  In this way, fewer than thirty Botany Bay Rangers put 266 insurgents to flight within minutes. Untrained, poorly led and lightly armed with one musket for every ten men, the Irish caved in. “I never saw more zeal and activity than what has been displayed by the officers and men of the detachment for destroying or securing the runaways,” Major Johnston reported with evident relish to King.62