The Fatal Shore
Page 30
Not one of them seems to have sustained any overt kind of political activity in Australia. In fact the surviving letters from transported protestors of 1830–31—Richard Dillingham and Peter Withers in Van Diemen’s Land—sketch a scene of resignation amid relative plenty. The 1830s were prosperous years on that green, fertile island, and the demand for skilled labor was high. Dillingham had been transported as a rioter, but he seems to have had few political opinions and no connection with organized protest; he found Van Diemen’s Land to be a veritable Land of Cockaigne. In 1836 he was assigned as a market-gardener to David Lambe, a mild decent settler who had held the post of colonial architect early in Sir George Arthur’s regime. He was “very comfortably settled,” he told his parents through a scribe, less than a mile from Hobart:
As to my living I find it better than ever I expected thank God. I want for nothing in that respect. As for tea and sugar I could almost swim in it. I am allowed 2 pound of sugar and ¼ pound of tea per week and plenty of tobacco and good white bread and sometimes beef sometimes mutton sometimes pork. This I have every day. Plenty of fruit puddings in the season of all sorts and I have two suits of Cloths a year and three pairs of shoes in a year.75
Peter Withers, from Wiltshire, adds to the picture: “I have got a very good place,” he told his brother in 1833,
all the Bondage I am under is to Answer my Name Every Sunday before I goes to church, so you must not think that I am made a slave of, for I am not, it is quite the Reverse of it. And I have got a good Master and Mistress, I have got plenty to eat and drink as good as ever a gentleman in this country [has], so all the Punishment I have in this Country is the thoughts of leaving my friends, My wife and My Dear Dear Children, but I lives in hopes of seeing Old England again.76
Assignment, as we will see, was a lottery; Withers and Dillingham drew good masters, whereas Thomas Cook in New South Wales suffered under a bad one. “I want for nothing but my liberty,” Dillingham remarked, “but though I am thus situated it is not the same with all that come as prisoners.” Clearly, however, the System made no effort to persecute English politicals as a group, as it had done to the Irish earlier. Individual masters might give ex-rioters a hard time because they feared unrest on their own farms, but this was uncommon. Generally, the English protestors, skilled family men with a stubborn sense of their own worth, worked out their sentences and lived on as Emancipists in Australia. Significantly fewer of them than of the ordinary criminal population committed second offenses. They had paid long and bitterly for their beliefs. As Peter Withers wrote, “16 years, that is a grate While.” They were not ideologues or professional agitators, but laborers and craftsmen jealous of what they believed to be their ancient rights as Englishmen. Above all, they needed to work, and the stigma of “politics” was hard to shake: Australian squatters and settlers were even more conservative than the English squirearchy whose manners and customs they were learning to ape. “You are one of the Dorchester machine-breakers, but you are caught at last!” were the first words James Brine, one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, heard from his new master on the Hunter River in New South Wales.
Thus most English protestors lived quietly on in Australia, doing the work England had denied them. They had no marked effect on the future politics of their new country. In England, nothing could stop the trade-union movement in the long run. But in the short run, transportation certainly worked as a tactic of repression. It knocked the fight out of its victims. At home, in the villages, it held up a frightening example to workers who had little means of knowing what had really happened to the transported men, since letters back from the Fatal Shore were rare. In Australia, it turned the protester into a political eunuch without making a martyr of him. The wives of transported men, widowed and yet not widowed, taught their sons to avoid the ways of the dissenter; some of them were asked to do so quite specifically by their husbands. In 1835 a former non-commissioned officer, who had taken part in Swing activity and was transported for political insurrection to Van Diemen’s Land (where he forged a deed and was re-transported to Norfolk Island), gave the Quaker missionaries James Backhouse and George Washington Walker a letter to take home to his wife. “You and I have lived for a long time without God in our hearts,” he admonished her. But in bondage he had come to see that his sufferings were meant “to bring me to a sense of my own depravity and wickedness.”
You will make our children read, and get off, the above Scripture passages. Never let them read any political works. Keep their minds from being entangled with political men, and their productions. This, you will not need to be told, has been the prelude to all my present misery.77
Probably this fairly represents the usual feelings of transported exprotestors. Budding radicalism withered in the antipodes, unless—as with the Irish—it had close bonds and ancient national grievances to prop and feed it. In convict Australia, repression won in politics, as in the rest of life.
* The inherent difficulty may readily be seen if one thinks of a modern equivalent. How many cocaine-dealers are there in Manhattan? Despite the public preoccupation with drugs, despite immense publicity given to the production, distribution and consumption of cocaine, its physiological and psychological effects, its social imagery, its power as a status symbol and sexual stimulant, despite the relative social visibility of the dealers who sell it and its cachet as a “respectable” drug, nobody really knows. Nor is it known, despite spectacular guesses from police and government, how much money the cocaine trade in New York is worth a year. The number of convictions bears only the sketchiest relation to the number of criminal transactions. Yet here we have a crime which is thought, by many Americans, not to be criminal at all, involving a product they regularly use and dealers they often meet face-to-face. Project this back 150 years, into a different culture, and one sees the impossibility of guessing the size of the English “criminal class” in transportation days.
* Both lived; Galvin received a free pardon from the compassionate Governor Macquarie in 1810, Fitzgerald in 1812.
* These were not the first black convicts to arrive in Australia, in the 1790s a small number of blacks, usually servants or slaves who had been brought to London from the West Indies and then been transported for theft, made their appearance in Sydney. One, a First Fleet convict nicknamed Black Caesar, had become Australia’s first bushranger by “eloping” into the scrub in 1789 with a stolen gun and making one-man raids on tents and vegetable gardens; when this “mere animal,” as David Collins referred to him, was captured, he proved “so indifferent about meeting death, that he declared in confinement that if he should be hanged, he would create a laugh before he was turned off, by playing some trick upon the executioner.”
The other side of Georgian elegance, as seen by William Hogarth. Top: The Idle ’Prentice, doomed to hang, repents in the tumbril as the mob surges around Tyburn Tree (1749).
The proletariat ruined by addiction to spirits, in Gin Lane, 1750–51. (The Bettmann Archive)
A Georgian satirist views the convicts’ departure in the 1790s, as two flash lads bid adieu to their battered doxies and an official grimly points to the “Bay ship” waiting at anchor. Anonymous, Farewell to Black-Eyed Sue and Sweet Poll of Plymouth. (National Library of Australia, Canberra)
Thomas Rowlandson, Convicts Embarking for Botany Bay, c. 1787–88. In the background, an alternative to transportation: a gibbet, with felons hanging in chains. (National Library of Australia, Canberra)
Punishment by public labor on maritime projects: hulk prisoners working on the Thames at Woolwich in 1777. On the left, muscle-powered dredgers cleaning the river bottom; in the foreground, convicts laboring to construct a breakwater. Their prison hulk is anchored in midstream. (National Library of Australia, Canberra)
Captain Arthur Phillip, the Pater Patriae of Australians, Commodore of the First Fleet and Governor of New South Wales, holding the sketch of a fort to be erected in the new colony. Portrait by Francis Wheatley, 1787. (Mitchell Libra
ry and Dixson Collections, Sydney)
An idealized allegory of the infant colony: Hope Encouraging Art and Labour, under the Influence of Peace, a medal made from the clay of Sydney Cove by Josiah Wedgwood. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)
The Sinus, flagship of the First Fleet, rides at anchor in Sydney Cove with her tender, the Supply—and, to the despair of the colonists, is wrecked on the reef at Norfolk Island, a thousand miles away. Watercolors by George Raper (1768?–1797), midshipman on Sinus. (British Museum of Natural History, London)
The embryo of a city, its barracks and houses built by convict labor in the quarter-century since the arrival of Europeans. John Eyre, A North-East View of the Town of Sydney … Taken from the West Side of Bennelong’s Point, 1812. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)
Conflict begins between blacks and whites on the harbor shores, as Iora tribesmen make ready to spear a convict. “Port Jackson Painter,” The Hunted Rushcutter, c. 1790. (British Museum of Natural History, London)
The Noble Savage: At the first moment of contact between Cook’s expedition and the Aborigines of Botany Bay, two warriors oppose the landing. They are commemorated in the poses of antique statuary by the botanical artist on Joseph Bank’s scientific team. T. Chambers after Sydney Parkinson, Two of the Natives of New Holland advancing to Combat, 1773. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)
Further developments of the Aborigine in European eyes. ABOVE: The “Barbarian New-Hollander” as Domestic Savage, rude in family customs, depicted by a Scots convict artist: Thomas Watling, A Groupe on the North Shore of Port Jackson, c. 1794. (British Museum of Natural History, London)
The Comic Savage, after twenty-five more years of white occupation: R. Browne, Long Jack, 1819. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)
The hills of Norfolk Island, seen by a convict artist. Note the many stumps; the virgin forest of Norfolk Island pine was receding by the end of the first settlement. John Eyre, A View of Queensborough on Norfolk Island, c. 1812. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)
The jail complex at Kingston on Norfolk Island, falling into decay by the 1870s, seen from the flank of Telegraph Hill. The remains of the Pentagonal Prison can be seen within the security wall of the compound. (National Library of Australia, Canberra)
Major Foveaux’s jailer remembers discipline on Norfolk Island in the 1800s: The Flogging of Charles Maher, watercolor in Robert Jones’s “Recollections.” “The flogging of Charles Maher almost brought about a mutiny. His back was quite bare of skin and flesh. Poor wretch, he received 250 lashes and on receiving 200 Kimberley refused to count, meaning that the punishment was enough.” (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)
The beginnings of Hobart Town on the Derwent River in Van Diemen’s Land, with the bulk of Mount Wellington rising behind. Pen sketch, perhaps by the surveyor George Prideaux Harris, 1804. (National Library of Australia, Canberra, Rex Nan Kivell Collection)
“They lay anchored in files on the gray heaving water, bow to stem, a rookery of sea-isolated crime.” The hulks—decommissioned naval ships used as prisons—were an essential part of convict management in the early years of transportation. ABOVE: Louis Garnery, Portsmouth Harbour with Prison Hulks, c. 1820.
G. Cooke after S. Prout, Convict Hulk at Deptford, 1826. (National Library of Australia, Canberra, Rex Nan Kivell Collection)
Rebellion and escape. ABOVE: The 1804 Irish rising at Castle Hill near Parramatta, recorded by an anonymous artist. “Death or Liberty, Major,” exclaims the leader of the revolt, and Major Johnson, in command of the “Botany Bay Rangers,” replies, “You scoundrel, I’ll liberate you.” (National Library of Australia, Canberra)
“The Flogging Parson,” the Reverend Samuel Marsden (1764–1838), Evangelical chaplain, missionary, sheep-breeder and implacable scourge of the Irish convicts. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)
The castaways of the brig Cyprus: a woodcut by the convict artist William Gould, printed in 1829, shows Lieutenant Carew lamenting on the hostile shores of Macquarie Harbor, while two loyal convicts, Popjoy and Morgan, helped by Mrs. Carew, build a coracle for their survival. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)
A pencil drawing of the Irish cannibal and absconder Alexander Pearce, made in the Hobart morgue after his hanging, from Thomas Bock’s “Sketches of Australian Bushrangers,” 1823. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)
James Taylor, The Entrance of Port Jackson and Port of Sydney Town, 1821. Note the convict gang quarrying sandstone at left, the relaxed New South Wales Corps officers in the foreground and the tame kangaroo. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)
The Great Perturbator and the Patriot-Chief: John Macarthur, the New South Wales Corps officer who created a pastoral dynasty and was leader of the Exclusives; and Governor Lachlan Macquarie (1762–1824), the veteran soldier who ruled New South Wales from 1810 to 1821, striving to bring Emancipists into the colonial power structure. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)
Georgian architecture comes to Sydney: the hospital in Macquarie Street, designed by Governor Macquarie and his wife with the help of a pattern book, and financed by rum. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)
In a watercolor by Augustus Earle, c. 1819, an overseer shows the new Female Factory at Parramatta, designed by Macquarie’s convict architect Francis Greenway, to two of its future inmates. (National Library of Australia, Canberra) OVERLEAF
Lieutenant Ralph Clark of the First Fleet and his “dear picture” of his wife, Betsy Alicia Clark, “surely an angel and not a woman,” his idealized contrast to the “damned bitches of convict women” he had been sent to guard. (Mitchell Library and Dixson Collections, Sydney)
7
Bolters and Bushrangers
i
MOST PRISONERS of the System acquiesced in their fate. They waited out their time, knowing that longer and worse constraint—the triangle, the iron gang, Norfolk Island—would be the price of rebellion. But in any carceral society, there is always a spark of genius for escape. The worse the odds, the more hope escape gives others.
In Australia it was easy to escape. The hard thing was to survive. The odds against surviving were high, but hundreds of convicts made their bets. Some confronted Australia’s external wall, the sea: They stowed away, or hijacked ships, or built their own rafts, or stole a longboat. Others took to the land, even less charted than the sea. At first these runaways were called “banditti” (evoking ragged, romantic figures among dark caverns); more colloquially, “bolters.” In time, the skulking escapee became that primal figure of popular Australian culture, the bushranger—enemy of flogger, trap and magistrate, the poor man’s violent friend, the emblem of freedom in a chained society.
At first, from the 1790s to early 1800s, most of the runaways went inland. After a brief exhilaration they either died or wandered, broken, back to the settlement, “so squalid and lean,” David Collins remarked, “the very crows would have declined their carcasses.” There were reports that fifty skeletons, picked white by dingoes and birds, could be seen on a day’s march to Botany Bay.
The most persistent absconders were the Irish, who in their ignorance had constructed a Paradise myth to alleviate their antipodean Purgatory. They kept sneaking out of the settlement in the belief, as one of them put it to Watkin Tench,
that at a considerable distance to the northward existed a large river, which separated this country from the back part of China; and that when it should be crossed (which was practicable) they would find themselves among a copper-coloured people, who would receive and treat them kindly.1
The fantasy of escape to China was one of the obsessive images of early transportation. Yellow girls and tea, opium and silk, queer-looking blue bridges and willows just like the ones on plates; and surcease from the hoe, the iron, the roasting sunlight and the dumb ache of hunger. For this, not a few of the “deluded I
rish” died of fatigue, thirst or the spears of blacks. Their crow-pecked remains, with a rag of government slops and a rusty basil still around them, would be found in the bush between Parramatta and Pittwater.
The first large group of “Chinese travellers,” as they came to be derisively known, took off from Rose Hill in November 1791—twenty men and one woman, Irish convicts off the Queen. They separated, blundered about in the bush for days, and in their starving bewilderment were easily recaptured (although three of them were so sure they had nearly reached China that they soon ran away again, and died). In time, the China myth was joined by another fancy, reported by Collins with his usual disapproval of the croppies who held it: “In addition to their natural vicious propensities, they conceived an opinion that there was a colony of white people, which had been discovered in this country, situated to the SW of the settlement, from which it was distant between three and four hundred miles.” This other Shangri-la, where no work ever needed to be done, sustained some hope for a time.2
In 1798 the Irish were still running away to China, as many as sixty people at a time. Since none of them had a compass (and few possessed any idea of how to use it even if they had had one), they went out armed with a magical facsimile consisting of a circle crudely sketched on paper or bark with the cardinal points but no needle.