That few women were legally married did not necessarily imply that the conduct of the remainder made New South Wales “a sink of infamy.” It simply meant that the standards of morality and the definitions of marriage familiar to the women concerned did not agree with those imposed on society by Samuel Marsden. Contemporaries accepted his conclusions as to the nature of the women of Botany Bay and modern historians have continued to perpetuate this view.10
Marsden was not alone in his prejudices; and as people are named, so they will be treated. While one may doubt that the British Government set out to create special forms of humiliation and degradation for women in Australia, there is no doubt that the whore-stereotype, accepted by the upper layers of a rigid little colonial society, wielded immense power. Indeed, it would remain, though gradually fading, as part of the design of Australian sexual politics for a century after transportation was abolished. The attitudes behind the stereotype can be seen clearly in the private journal of Ralph Clark (?–1794), marine officer on the Friendship in the First Fleet.
When Lieutenant Clark sailed for Australia in 1787 he left behind his wife Betsy Alicia Trevan, a pretty Devon girl from a landed family, and their chubby firstborn son, Ralph Stuart Clark, aged not quite two. As the First Fleet rolled southward, Clark was tortured by remorse and nostalgia. Was a promotion worth this sundering? Betsy Alicia fills the journal as he pours forth his grief in ink, trying to conjure up the family he might not see again:
Dear good woman I did not know thy worth … Alicia, my friend, my dear wife, and beautiful little engaging son, Oh sweet boy, what would your father give for a kiss of your mother and you, oh I think I hear him cry Papa, Papa, as I am taking my hat to go out, dear sweet sound, music to my poor ears, the only happiness that I have is the kissing of my Betsy’s dear picture and my little boy’s hair that she sent. I would not part with them for a Captain’s commission.11
Clark devises a small ritual with the “dear picture,” a miniature under a hinged glass lid. Each morning, Monday to Saturday, he kisses the glass. On Sundays he raises the tiny oval pane to kiss “my dear Alicia’s picture out of the case,” the image symbolically laid bare, a little closer to flesh. This act is both a denuding and a prayer, as to the effigy of a female saint. Holiness and sexuality are intertwined through the knot of marriage. Sometimes his dreams of Alicia are sexual (“Dreamt last night of seeing my dear beloved Alicia in bed and I pulled her towards me”), but usually they reflect his guilt at leaving her and his fear of losing her. He cannot quite make sense of his dreams, but they seem ominous; he is unhappy
from dreaming that my Alicia took a dead louse from herself and gave it to me, oh unlucky dream, for I have often heard her say that dreaming of lice was a certain sign of sickness.12
Alicia is the fixed star of well-being in Clark’s emotional universe. Her name summons up what he left behind: security, fidelity, licit sexual delight, social continuity, maternal tenderness. The conventional form in which he phrased these feelings belies their intensity. He never meant to publish his journal; he was not a writer but a miserably homesick young marine trying to set down his deepest emotional engagements in a language of sensibility derived from the genteel culture of the day:
Read the remainder of the Tragedy of Douglas this day, oh it is a sweet play.… [W]hat are the emotions in the breast of Lady Randolph when she sees the features and shape of her lost and stained husband Douglas in that of young Norval, little does she know, fond mother, that it is her long lost son … but still I cannot think that she loved as my Betsy, my virtuous Alicia does.13
To say that Ralph Clark idealized his wife would understate his feelings: She monopolized his image of women. If another woman misbehaved, her violence or immorality became a slur on Alicia, suggesting to him on some less-than-conscious level that she too might fall from grace. Hence the vindictive contrast Clark drew between Alicia and the female convicts over whom he was placed in authority. He was being punished for their sins by losing his adored wife. “I could never have thought that there were so many abandoned wenches in England, they are ten thousand times worse than the men Convicts, and I am afraid we will have a great deal more trouble with them,” he wrote while they were still in the English Channel. In July, when four of Friendship’s sailors were found at it with four female convicts in the ’tween-decks, the captain had the men flogged; but, Clark added, “if I had been the Commander I would have flogged the four whores also.”14 The Whore was typically foulmouthed:
Elizabeth Barber one of the Convict women abused the doctor in a most terrible manner and said that he wanted to f——her and called him all the names she could think of.… She began to abuse Capt. Merideth in a much worse manner, and said she was no more a whore than his wife.… In all the course of my days I never heard such expressions come from the mouth of a human being.… She desired Merideth to come and kiss her Cunt for he was nothing but a lousy rascal as were we all. I wish to God she was out of the ship, I would rather have a hundred more men than have a single woman.15
The gulf between such “damned bitches of convict women” and distant Betsy, “surely an angel and not a woman,” is absolute, and his hatred of the debased lower orders for taking him away from his wife leads to fantasies and dreams of violence. “If they were to lose anything of mine that I gave them to wash I would cut them in pieces,” he writes of women doing laundry duty on board; and later he dreams that “I was going down to Tregadock to take leave of [the family] before I went to Botany, but was assaulted by a great mob, whom I was obliged to handle rather roughly with my sword.” Three years later, suffering the rigors of Norfolk Island duty after the wreck of the Sirius, he pens a brutally dismissive epitaph on the first person to die a natural death there, a convict woman named Ann Farmer: “She was better than half dead before they sent her from England, by all accounts she was a most wicked woman having been the occasion of more than twenty men and women coming to untimely ends, but she is now gone where she will be rewarded according to her merits.” Soon he was wishing death on other women convicts as well. “I wish the Almighty would be so kind to us as to take a few of them, for we could do much better without them at present.”16
Clark got away eventually and was briefly reunited with his Betsy Alicia in June 1792. After that, his diary ceases before he could see his ideal again. In December 1792, he returned to service in the war against France. Early in 1794 Betsy Alicia died in childbirth, and the child was stillborn. A few months later, Clark’s darling boy, Ralph, then a nine-year-old midshipman, died of yellow fever on board ship in the Caribbean, during a fight with a French ship. Clark was on board, too, and was killed in battle the same day. However, that was not quite the end of Clark’s line, for at the time of his death he had a three-year-old daughter, whom he scarcely knew. She had been born to a convict woman, Mary Branham, on Norfolk Island in July 1791. At Clark’s insistence, she had been christened Alicia. There is no reference to her mother in his journal.
ii
THE WOMEN in the First Fleet were picked haphazardly, ranging from old crones to mere children. There was more system on the next female transport, Lady Juliana, which brought young women of “marriageable” age, “the colony at that time being in great want of women.” A few of them were hardened professional criminals, like Mrs. Barnsley, a shoplifter who boasted that her family had been swindlers and highwaymen for a hundred years; her brother, a highwayman, often visited her on board before the fleet sailed, “as well-dressed and genteel in his appearance as any gentleman.” At the other end of the scale was a meek little creature who bore a curiously strong resemblance to the prime minister, William Pitt, and was thought by all on board to be his bastard daughter.
Some wept and stormed, some tried to escape, and others spent the weeks before sailing hidden in corners, pale with shock and shame, their eyes red with incessant weeping; a young Scottish girl died of a broken heart before the ship left the Thames. Most of them were so demoralized by their “ru
in”—the cycle of poverty, pregnancy and survival by theft or prostitution that formed the plot of a thousand melodramas and ballads simply because it was one of the commonest things that could happen to a girl—that John Nicol, a Scottish steward on the Lady Juliana, thought they were actually glad to be on board. “When I inquired their reason,” he recalled,
they answered, “How much more preferable is our present situation to what it has been since we commenced our vicious habits?… Banishment is a blessing to us. Have we not been banished for a long time, and yet in our native land, the most dreadful of all situations? We dared not go to our relations, whom we had disgraced. Other people would shut their doors in our faces. We were as if a plague were upon us, hated and shunned.”17
Such sentiments, whatever their literary garnish, remind one how the morale of female convicts, never very strong, must have broken down on the way to Australia. London or Botany Bay: both poles of the world were, to many, equally alien and empty of hope. “Harmless unfortunate creatures,” Nicol called them, “the victims of the basest seduction … a troublesome cargo, yet not dangerous or very mischievous, as I may say more noise than danger.”
As soon as the Second Fleet was at sea, the seamen of Lady Juliana began to pair off with their cargo, thus starting the almost invariable pattern of later voyages. Doubtless some of the tars felt like pashas, lording it over a seaborne seraglio. Yet Nicol’s phrase is significant: “Every man on board took a wife from among the convicts, they nothing loath.” Offensive as such pairings were to later middle-class morality they were simply taken for granted among workers in villages, in ports and in London itself. Certainly Nicol did not regard his “wife,” Sarah Whitlam, transported to Australia for seven years for stealing a cloak, as a whore. He remembered her with respect and tenderness as
a girl of a modest reserved turn, as kind and true a creature as ever lived; I courted her for a week and upwards, and would have married her on the spot, had there been a clergyman on board.… I had fixed my fancy on her from the moment I knocked the rivet out of her irons upon the anvil, and as firmly resolved to bring her back to England, when her time was out, my lawful wife.18
He could not get her released, however, and he sailed back to England alone, leaving Sarah Whitlam and their son, born on shipboard, in Sydney.
One may doubt, however, that all sailors showed convict women as much respect as Nicol claimed he showed his Sarah. Lord Auckland, the chairman of the 1812 Select Committee on Transportation, visited a brig loaded with women convicts that lay in the Thames in the summer of 1812 (well after the committee’s work was done) to question its skipper “as to the means of preventing improper intercourse between the sailors and the women.” The captain told him that
every sailor was allowed to have one woman to cohabit with him during the voyage.—Had information of this practice been laid before the Committee … it would have been marked with the strongest reprobation as likely to lead some and confirm others of these unfortunate women in habits of prostitution and disorder.19
Clearly, such “unfortunates” were not being sent to Australia to drain England of some social purulence. Even if they all had been prostitutes, their banishment would have made no difference to English crime; but it would mean a great deal to an infant colony troubled by sexual starvation. The policy was reflected in the the age of transported women—“marriageable age,” as the 1812 Select Committee on Transportation was told:
Q. To what ages are women limited?—We generally confine it, as near as possible, to about 24 and not more than 45.… [T]hey are very young that go out, from London in particular.20
“A lonely woman is a poor thing in a Country where there are so many villains,” wrote one of the officers of the female transport Britannia in 1798.21 When a ship bearing women anchored in Sydney Cove, its upper deck became a slave-market, as randy colonists came swarming over the bulwarks, grinning and ogling and chumming up to the captain with a bottle of rum, while the female convicts—washed for the occasion and dressed in the remnants of their English finery—were mustered before them, trying as hard as they could “to set themselves off to the best advantage.” Military officers got the first pick, then non-commissioned officers, then privates, and lastly such ex-convict settlers as seemed “respectable” enough to obtain the governor’s permission to keep a female servant. (Such permission was a very great favor before Macquarie’s day; and it was stingily given, as an unusual reward, by the governors after Phillip: Grose, Paterson, Hunter, King and Bligh.) According to one former convict, not all the women assigned to officers were made their mistresses (some men, after all, were married and had brought their wives). In fact, “there were several women who were rather taken by the officers as prostitutes than as servants”;22 most of the convict women in the colony cohabited with men and the fitful attempts to curb this did not really apply to officers. Thus, Bligh had forbidden women to be “taken off the store, without being married, unless it was as servant to an officer.” Bligh himself declared, bluntly enough, that “it was impossible to prevent prostitution” (but here he clearly means cohabitation), “and therefore there was no necessity for any regulations respecting it … [S]ettlers wanted female servants, and pitched upon particular women for whom they applied, who perhaps cohabited together; these things could never be prevented.”23
Some witnesses found this spectacle morally barbarous, “rendering the whole Colony little better than an extensive Brothel,”24 but the governors were slow to discourage it because it got the women—whose labor was not much use—“off the store,” so that they did not have to be fed and supported at government expense. It petered out during Macquarie’s administration, after some harsh injunctions from London.25
It was the sense of helplessness, above all, that ground the women prisoners down. Reflecting on the regular shipboard slave market, “a Custom that reflects the highest Disgrace upon the British Government in that Colony,” one observer noted that all the women were not equally “depraved” on arrival; but they were driven down by “Jealousy Vexation & want.” “All have not run to the same Excesses of Iniquity; some occasionally are found better disposed, and perhaps their number would be much increased if they were not, on their first arrival, promiscuously thrown into such difficulties and temptations.”26
Since the liaisons were free of legal ties, a settler could simply throw a convict woman out when he was tired of her. This caused a troublesome floating population of whores and unattached “disorderly women” to accumulate around Sydney Cove, whose westerly arm, “The Rocks,” soon acquired a well-deserved name as the rowdiest and most dangerous thieves’ kitchen in the colony. As early as 1793, these women were offending all who met them, including a Spanish lieutenant who stopped in Sydney on an exploration vessel, the Atrevida: They made “continuous seductive advances” to his crewmen, slipped them Mickey Finns, robbed them blind, and were so “degraded by vice, or rather greed” that the notorious dock-women of Tenerife paled in memory beside them.27 In 1802 Michael Hayes, an Irishman from Wexford who had been transported as a political prisoner for his part in the abortive Irish uprising of 1798, wrote to his sister Mary pleading with her not to come out and join him. He warned her of
the distress that generally accompany [sic] unprotected Females coming to this distant part of the world.… Even were you with me your life would be a solitary one, [unless] you were to asociate with Prostitutes. In this country there is Eleven Hundred women I cannot count Twenty out of that number to be virtuous. The remainder support themselves through the means of Ludeness.… This way of life was sanctioned by the Governors, from the first Landing to this day.28
Hayes also mentioned the punishments, similar to the barbarous treatment of adulteresses in Puritan societies, visited on convict women who could not, due to their weaker constitutions and the relative mercy of the governor, be flogged as severely as men:
They are so accustomed to their lude way of life that the most severe punishments w
ill not restrain them. I have been witness to some flogged at the Tryangle, more led through the Town [with] a rope round their waist held by the common Executioner, and a label on their necks denoting the crime. The mode of punishment mostly adopted now is mostly shaving their heads and Ducking, and afterwards [they are] sent up to Hard Labour with the men.29
The Fatal Shore Page 37