The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  During the afternoon a drunken woman, just come from the factory at Parramatta, began to abuse the woman who lives in the small cabin in front of the gate. After she had sworn a lot, cursed and blasphemed,… [she] turned her back to us, lifted up all her clothes and showed us her bum, saying that she had a “Black Hole” there and slapping her belly like the wretch she was. Nothing more vile than that tribe; animals are more decent than they. I would say much more but it would dirty my little journal to go on. It is incredible to see so many drunken women in this country. The roads are full of women drunkards.52

  Thus it would seem that some prisoners—especially those who, like Lepailleur, believed themselves to be the respectable victims of tyranny and hence a cut above the “real” criminals—had exactly the same contempt for convict women as the free witnesses who discoursed so unanimously on their evils to the Molesworth Committee in 1838. “More irreformable than the male convicts,” opined Bishop Ullathorne, declaring that “when a woman is bad, she is generally very bad.” “I do not believe that one woman in a thousand has the moral energy to resist the temptation [to promiscuity],” Peter Murdoch testified.

  Religious authorities and social workers claimed that convict women, in and out of the Female Factory, responded eagerly to any gesture of compassion or attention. But such assertions were rarely unbiased. The Roman Catholic prelate William Ullathorne (1806–1889), who had been appointed vicar-apostolic for New South Wales in 1834, never missed an opportunity to assert the success (and hence the necessity) of Catholic missionary work among the convicts. He had brought out a large contingent of Catholic clergy to Australia in 1838, including the first nuns ever seen in the colony—five Irish Sisters of Charity. Ullathorne described how these devoted women would go and visit the prisoners of the Female Factory at Parramatta five evenings a week. About a third of the factory women, he said, were Catholics, and most of them were desperate to pour their hearts out to a friendly ear. “It was sometimes difficult to prevent these poor creatures from making complete confession to the nuns. They wanted to unburden their minds, and said they would as soon speak to a nun as to a priest. The reverence with which the Sisters were regarded by all these women was quite remarkable, and the influence they exercised told … throughout the Colony.”53 If one has difficulty swallowing this, it can only be because Ullathorne’s sentimental picture of women convicts begging to be shriven flies in the face of most other evidence about them; there is not much reason to suppose that they were any less tough or any more pathetic than their male equivalents—which is not, of course, to say that they were the degenerate creatures some authorities made them out to be. Clearly, it was in Ullathorne’s interest to increase the Catholic clergy in Australia, and his testimony on the moral iniquities of transportation must be seen in that light.

  Yet some were certainly grateful for a kindly ear. The prison reformer Caroline Anley visited the factory in 1834 and met two “young and extremely pretty” women who, while drunk and in a desperate outburst of temper, had attacked their tyrannous master—a Captain Charles Waldron of the 39th Regiment—and killed him. For once, popular sentiment intervened (and none of the other assigned convicts would give evidence against them), so that their death sentence was commuted to three years. Nevertheless they were regarded inside the factory as incorrigible demonesses, and Caroline Anley was the first prison visitor ever to ask for their side of the story. “If I had always been kindly treated,” one of them told Anley, through the first tears she had shed since her conviction, “I wouldn’t be as I am.”54

  Life in the factory—whether in New South Wales or in Van Diemen’s Land—was a vegetative misery for all who led it. The minds of the women convicts rotted through lack of anything to do, although most of them preferred this stagnant leisure, punctuated by bouts of inefficient taskwork at the hand-loom, to being “treated like dogs and worked like horses” by some abusive master. The steadily growing population of freemen and colonial-born Australians objected to the Female Factories on more pragmatic grounds. By cloistering women in a colony short of females, it slowed down the birthrate. Their main mouthpiece, The Australian, editorialized at length on this in 1825, defending traditional “colonial marriage”—living together out of wedlock—as a great civilizer of the bush, a styptic against “dissoluteness and crime”:

  How many parties are living to this day together by virtue of no other bond? How many … are there who, after conducting themselves in an exemplary manner in that state of “resemblance to marriage,” have been made honest women, and who, but for the forming of this species of obligation, would have been vagrants in the streets? How many by mutual industry have rendered miserable hovels comfortable homes? How many families have sprung up where nothing but a wilderness would have been seen? Had this order of things continued, even in this objectionable shape, many a vagabond, who had been lost to Society, might have been reclaimed; might have become a decent Settler.… But we live in an age, when it is fashionable to assume a demureness of manner, an extraordinary degree of godliness, and lay claim to an uncommon share of holy endowment.55

  Here spoke the voice of rough-and-ready sense; but it was not one that penal officials, imprisoned by their own moral stereotypes of convict evil and female whoredom, were disposed to believe. The barrier of class thinking—of judging the social behavior of working-class convicts in terms of the desiderata of the English and colonial middle classes—was too strong for that; and ecclesiastical witnesses, from Quaker missionaries to Catholics like Ullathorne, were never slow to produce the bogey of convict sexual depravity when they needed to raise funds and muster support for their own evangelical programs in Australia. It was also, as many pages of the Molesworth Committee’s evidence record, an incomparably useful weapon for Abolitionists. To show the vileness of the System they had to emphasize its power to degrade. Hence the additional emphasis, in the English reformers’ decade of the 1830s, on something even less discussable: convict homosexuality.

  iv

  ONE WOULD naturally suppose that, in a remote colony whose proportion of men to women varied between 4 to 1 in the city and 20 to 1 in the bush, homosexuality would have flourished. So it did, especially on the chain gangs and in the outer penal settlements; but it did not leave much official evidence behind.

  This was not only because sodomy was a capital crime. In the eyes of the law, sodomy deserved death; but in the eyes of social custom, especially the customs of English and Irish working people, it was more than ordinarily loathsome—“the crime whose name cannot be uttered,” the phrase that Oscar Wilde would later soften into “the Love that dare not speak its name.” Arthur Phillip, the first governor, was not by the ordinary standards of his time and calling a harsh man; indeed, he generally acted with humane decency. “I doubt if the fear of death ever prevented a man of no principle from committing a bad action,” he noted before the First Fleet sailed. But in his code there were two exceptions: murder and sodomy. “For either of these crimes I would wish to confine the criminal until an opportunity offered of delivering him to the natives of New Zealand, and let them eat him. The dread of this will operate much stronger than the fear of death.” Thus the sodomite, “violent against Nature,” would be erased from society, denied even the small social niche that burial affords. This draconic idea was not carried out, or even mentioned again—there were no spare ships to ferry the “madge culls,” “mollies” and “fluters,” as homosexuals were known in Georgian cant, across the Tasman Sea to enrich the Maori diet.56

  Buggery, it has been said, is to prisons what money is to middle-class society. It was as utterly pervasive in the world of hulks and penal settlement as it is in modern penitentiaries. “The horrible crime of sodomy,” reported the convict George Lee from the Portland, a hulk in Langston Harbor, in 1803, “rages so shamefully throughout that the Surgeon and myself have been more than once threatened with assassination for straining to put a stop to it.… [It] is in no way discountenanced by those in comma
nd.” Jeremy Bentham claimed that prisoners entering the Woolwich hulks were raped as a matter of course: “An initiation of this sort stands in the place of garnish and is exacted with equal rigour.… [A]s the Mayor of Portsmouth, Sir John Carter … very sensibly observes, such things ever must be.”57

  Not until 1796 was anyone in Australia charged with a homosexual offense. This pioneer was Francis Wilkinson, accused (but acquitted] of buggering a sixty-year-old settler named Joseph Pearce. The first forty years of the colony provide scattered mentions of homosexual acts, routinely listed in the magistrates’ bench-books and remarked on, in a general way, by lay and church authorities.58 Nothing in the reports of the Select Committees on convict establishments and transportation for 1798 or 1812 can be construed as a reference to homosexuality. But after 1830, the documents are full of references to it—for that was the decade in which the movement to abolish transportation, dormant since the protestations of Jeremy Bentham, began to gather steam. Abolitionists like Lord John Russell and Sir William Molesworth wanted to show that transportation to Australia depraved most of its victims and reformed none of them. Proponents of transportation—especially the wealthy Australian landowners, who stood to lose their assigned labor if convictry was abolished—did not want convict homosexuality discussed; but its opponents did. Mentioning the unmentionable would complete the picture of Australia sketched by William Ullathorne as a polity of fallen souls whose “otherness” was all the worse because they were white, not black. “The eye of God,” Ullathorne feelingly declared,

  looks down upon a people such as, since the deluge, has not been. Where they marry in haste, without affection; where each one lives to his senses alone. A community without the feelings of community; whose men are very wicked, whose women are very shameless, and whose children are very irreverent.… The naked savage, who wanders through those endless forests, knew of nothing monstrous in crime, except cannibalism, until England schooled him in horrors through her prisoners. The removal of such a plague from the earth concerns the whole human race.59

  When speaking of sodomy, Bishop Ullathorne’s eloquence became sublime and cloudy. He spoke to the Molesworth Committee of “crimes that, dare I describe them, would make your blood to freeze, and your hair to rise erect in horror upon the pale flesh.” But he, like all the Abolitionists, offered more impressions than figures. We do not know (and probably never will) how widespread homosexuality was in penal Australia.

  An example of the difficulty occurs in the minutes of evidence of the 1832 Select Committee on Secondary Punishments. John Stephen, a former judge in New South Wales, related how in the first trial he had attended in Australia four or five Norfolk Island prisoners were sentenced to death. “They thanked the Judge for having ordered them to die: stating, that they lived in such a state of horrid misery, witnessing the most horrid crime known to human nature, committed in numberless cases from morning to night, that they preferred death.” In the course of another trial, Stephen testified, a witness had mentioned “50 or 60 cases [of sodomy] occurring in a day” on Norfolk Island, a sexual epidemic which “made men so perfectly miserable, that many preferred death to living in that penal settlement.” Since the total convict population of Norfolk Island at the time was about 600, this argues an impressive priapic energy on the prisoners’ part, perhaps caused by the sea air. Yet in the same report there is the testimony of the Crown botanist, Allan Cunningham, who spent four months on Norfolk Island in the same year, 1830. Were the convicts in a state “of the most horrible degradation”? “Not that I heard of,” said Cunningham, dismissing the idea of Norfolk Island as a sea-girt Sodom, which he thought had been cooked up by the “radical” press, particularly the “most scurrilous paper” in the colony, the Monitor, ever critical of Governor Darling. The crime of sodomy, he thought, “might have been committed once or twice in the course of ten years, but I do not believe it was common.”60

  Once a decade or sixty times a day? Inflated though Stephen’s guess may have been, Cunningham’s was clearly absurd; but both were, in fact, produced by the same reflex. Because the act was unspeakable, it must not be inspected; easier to deny its existence, or else to believe any horror story about it. All that is known about Norfolk Island, however, suggests that Stephen’s guess was not far off the mark, especially by the mid-1840s under Major Childs, when the muddle of laxity and brutality there had reached its absolute nadir.

  Obviously, most lovers were not caught; hence, statistics on sodomy from the penal period are of little use, as they were based only on court indictments. Homosexual acts in penal Australia were done in secret, and prisoners seldom swore out complaints against other prisoners for performing them. Consequently few “sodomists” were arraigned, let alone convicted. Over the period 1829–35, in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, only twenty-four men were tried for “unnatural offences.” Twelve were convicted and sentenced—four capitally, though only one (in 1834) was actually hanged. Five drew hard labor in irons on the chain gang, and three were re-transported to Norfolk Island or Moreton Bay.61

  Why so few convictions? Ernest Augustus Slade, who had been superintendent of the convict barracks at Hyde Park in Sydney from 1833 to 1834 (his resignation was forced by sexual scandal, though over a woman), testified that “among [the lower] class of convicts sodomy is as common as any other crime.” It was an ineradicable part of jail culture. But only about one case in thirty could be proven. Molested youths lodged complaints but then prevaricated in court; and other evidence tended to be vague, since “shirtlifters” were rarely caught in the act of buggery. “If you had it proved,” Slade told the Molesworth Committee in 1838, “that men were found with their breeches down in secluded spots, and they stated that they had gone there to ease themselves, and upon examination it was found that they had not done so, what could have occurred?” But no jury would convict on such grounds. Out in the bush, the dreaded act became more obscure still, as there was nobody to watch the assigned convicts. Bishop Ullathorne believed that sodomy was less frequent among the shepherds, who tended to live alone, than among stockmen, “a much more dissolute set” who practiced “a great deal of that crime” and even taught it to the formerly innocent Aborigines. And if the Man from Snowy River’s convict forebear was not content with the brusque embraces of Jacky-Jacky, there were always sheep. “As a juryman,” one witness told the committee, “I have had opportunities of hearing many trials for unnatural offences, with animals particularly.… I think they are much more common than in any other country inhabited by the English.” “That is, among the convicts?” interjected one committee member. “Yes,” said the witness, dispelling the thought of the colonial gentry practicing abominations on their own merinos.62

  The testimony given to the Molesworth Committee suggests a demimonde not quantified by the statistics of the time. Homosexuality was the norm in the Hyde Park barracks in Sydney, where new arrivals were decanted from the ships, old lags thrown together with young boys. As in all systems of confinement since prisons began, lads became “punks” (passive homosexuals) to get the protection of a dominant man; they went by girls’ names, Kitty, Nancy or Bet. Few of them had any homosexual experience before they got to Australia, according to Ullathorne—and his testimony was more than guesswork, since as a priest he had heard thousands of prison confessions and had to struggle with his conscience as he testified, generalizing so as not to violate the seal of the confessional. As one bewildered youth exclaimed to him, “Such things no one knows in Ireland.”63

  The only account of penal homosexuality in Australia by a convict was set down by the Swing letter-writer from Shropshire, Thomas Cook, in his memoir of the System in the 1830s, The Exile’s Lamentations. His contact with it began when he was sent to labor in the road gangs in the Blue Mountains, cutting the Great Western Road through raw bush and sandstone at Honeysuckle Flat. “It was now,” he wrote, “that my miseries commenced,” although he would not press their “nauseous details” on the reade
r:

  I was yet in the dark of the horrible propensity which the coarse and brutish language of my Gangmates in calamity, coupled with their assignations one towards the other, shortly told me the greater part of them had imbibed. So far advanced were these wretched men in depravity, that they appeared to have entirely lost the feelings of men, and to have imbibed those that would render them execrable to all mankind.64

  For warmth, men bedded two or three together, a custom which “appeared to me altogether objectionable”; and before long, Cook was so broken down by labor and lack of sleep that a medical officer transferred him to another gang working closer to Sydney, at Mount Victoria. But at night, the same fumbling and rooting went on there; the only difference was that there the gangers “were less public in their demonstrations of brutal regard.” Naively, Cook tried to remonstrate with a ganger who took a fancy to him. “Extraordinary as it may appear,” he wrote indignantly,