The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Arthur was a military man through and through. He had seen service against Napoleon with the 35th Regiment around the Mediterranean, from Calabria to Egypt; in 1815 he took on the post of superintendent and commandant of British Honduras, a slave state with some passing resemblances to the society he would later rule in Van Diemen’s Land. During his eight years there, Arthur showed himself to be a reformer, not by any means a populist but certainly more on the side of the slaves than of their choleric and arrogant owners. Reports of his work in Honduras won him the admiration of William Wilberforce.

  He returned to England in 1822. Honduras had given him a taste for colonial administration. It was his vocation; what other field could give him the same proconsular scope, the same free hand to take a small remote country and re-mold its life in a way acceptable both to King and to God? There was not a trace of hypocrisy in Arthur. He believed it was his duty to make men moral—high and low alike. He was an evangelist who had chosen soldiering as his medium. Soon, through friends in London, he heard that the lieutenant-governorship of Van Diemen’s Land was open.

  When, after much lobbying at the Colonial Office, Arthur was chosen as Sorell’s successor, he insisted on running Van Diemen’s Land as a separate colony and having the effective powers of governor, though he remained lieutenant-governor in title. Shrewdly, he realized even before he got there that Sorrell’s and Davey’s inability to move without permission from Sydney had done endless harm to convict discipline. He persuaded the Colonial Office to frame his commission so that he could draft laws, make land grants to settlers, directly control government money, extend pardons, remit sentences, appoint his own staff and report directly to Downing Street without referring to the governor in Sydney. This was done, and by 1825 the Government went further: It turned Van Diemen’s Land into a separate colony from New South Wales, with its own legislative council—which, in practice, was a rubber stamp for Arthur’s wishes. His Utopia of punishment and reform would be an autocracy.

  iii

  A FEW MONTHS short of his fortieth birthday, when he stepped ashore from the Adrian in Hobart on May 12, 1824, Arthur seemed distant, cold and aloof. His tall frame was stooped; the pallor of his face had not been changed by months at sea. His mouth was thin and compressed, the corners turned down. He rarely smiled in public. In conversation he would fix you with his wide, glaucous, interrogatory gray eyes, and he did not seem to blink as much as other people. He radiated an impression, not of wolfish severity, but of unshakable and vigilant moral calm. If there was ever an Australian governor who had no trouble distinguishing right from wrong, it was George Arthur.

  This was not only due to his military background. Arthur’s serenity came from religion. He did not like to be called a Methodist; that smacked of “enthusiasm” and hence irrationality, and suggested links with the lower orders. But ever since he had a revelation of faith amid the tropical heat of Honduras, he had known that only God was the great emancipator. The Calvinist Evangelicalism he professed was not a private matter. Arthur had been put on earth to impose his values on others; that was the burden and duty of leadership.

  He knew human nature was born and saturated in wickedness and could be redeemed only by prostration before Christ, by participating in the sacrifice of his Crucifixion in a complete surrender of faith. All social amusements that stood in the way of the Savior’s work were vain, and to be shunned. He was, as the vernacular of a later Australia would express it, a God-bothering, blue-nosed wowser. “Would the forerunner of Christ,” he asked his sister in a letter from Honduras, “ever have allowed himself the madness of the quadrilles?” (The image of the Baptist, goatskins a-whirl, treading nimbly across the polished teak at a regimental dance in Honduras has a certain charm, but not to Arthur.) Like most fundamentalists, he was stiffly censorious in matters cultural. He read mainly to reject: The philosopher David Hume was a “wretched infidel,” and the net effect of Alexander Pope’s didactic satires had been to make the young cynical and self-righteous. Social encounters with Arthur and family at Government House were marked by prayer and scriptural readings and were enlivened only by tea, although he permitted himself some port with his colonial secretary. Colonists, in the presence of this martinet and his starchy wife, realized that the days of “Mad Tom” Davey and adulterous Sorell were far behind them. Few people could extract much pleasure from Arthur’s company; but none could doubt that here was the most incisive and vigilantly ordered mind ever to immerse itself in the problems of running a convict colony in the antipodes.

  Arthur meant to close all the loopholes in the system of convict punishment and turn the island into an ideal police state where surveillance was constant and total—a Panopticon-without-walls. Moreover, his new system of punishment and incentive would have the inexorable character of a machine, of Bentham’s idea of “a mill for grinding rogues honest.” Arthur came to believe that his system was so perfectly mechanical that it became cybernetic, or self-correcting. The convict’s fate was determined entirely by himself—by his own obedience and tractability, or lack of them. All the officials of the Convict Department had to do was tend the machine and stoke it with paper. As long as it was running, the disposal of the convicts and the severity of their punishment became automatic. That, at least, was the theory; for machines are dispassionate, not vindictive, and Arthur wanted to purge the grit and slop of emotion from his. Weakness led to cruelty; neither befitted a man of God.

  In one respect, Arthur was surprisingly modern. He thought crime was a kind of sickness. Criminals suffered from a “mental delirium,” caused by seeing reality through a “false medium,” a scrim of illusions and distortions. The solution was to train them by drill and rote—he compared his prisoners, more than once, to unbroken horses—backed by the total exclusion of choice from their daily lives. Hard labor and, above all, the boredom of repetition was the only way to get convicts into the passive frame of mind where reformative teaching could pierce and dispel their “delirium.”

  To enforce this “enlightened rigor,” as he called it, Arthur devised an extraordinarily complete system of social control. Van Diemen’s Land was a police state; he made no bones about that. But under Arthur, it also became the closest thing to a totalitarian society (though small and in some ways inefficient] that would ever exist within the British Empire. Arthur wanted to control his island utterly, settlers as well as convicts. His system had the logic of his given premise, which was that Van Diemen’s Land was first and foremost a jail, and that any free people who lived there must put up with the inconveniences of a penal society (the galling apparatus of police, spies, travel passes, trade restrictions, a muzzled press and crackdowns on the right of assembly) if they were to enjoy its benefits—free land grants and cheap assigned labor.

  He divided Van Diemen’s Land into nine police districts, each with a police magistrate in charge of a force of constables and field police. Each police magistrate reported back to the chief police magistrate in Hobart, who in turn reported to Arthur. In his own district, however, the police magistrate was boss, judge, coroner and recording angel. He kept minute registers of births, behavior, proper transactions and deaths of the free and bond in his district. He issued travel passes to convicts. All applications from settlers for assigned servants and all petitions from convicts for “indulgences,” remissions and tickets-of-leave had to go through him. And he controlled the local police force, which ran from the chief district constable down to the rank and file of the field police, who were recruited from among the serving convicts. To get into the field police was considered a fine indulgence, and Arthur knew perfectly well what effect these government turncoats would have on the morale of convicts: “a mistrust and jealousy had already been infused into the prisoner Population which gives a Security to the free inhabitants.”26

  Every convict, Arthur insisted,

  should be regularly and strictly accounted for, as Soldiers are in their respective Regiments.… [T]he whole course of thei
r Conduct—the Services to which they are sent,—and from which they are discharged—the punishments they receive, as well as instances of good conduct they manifest—should be registered from the day of their landing until … their emancipation or death.27

  In 1826 he ordered a transported law-stationer named Edward Cook, under the direction of the muster-master as registrar, to start this gigantic compilation with the 12,305 prisoners who had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land since Collins founded the colony. The result was the “Black Books”—ponderous leather-bound tomes three feet high, containing the name, physical description, sentence, details of transportation and assignment, jail and surgeon’s reports, punishment and conduct record of every convict sent to Van Diemen’s Land. By 1830, Van Diemen’s Land had the most thorough files on its inhabitants, bond and free, of any community in the world—a mastaba of paper raised on the miseries of skewed, truncated lives, falling or rising through the levels of Arthur’s system.

  Arthur made sure that each convict was interrogated on arrival, so that the muster-master had full particulars of them all.* He often went down to the Hobart Penitentiary to meet the prisoners as they arrived, and spoke to them in person. James Backhouse, the Quaker missionary, recounted the homily with which Arthur greeted them:

  He alluded to the degraded state into which they had brought themselves by their crimes; this he justly compared to a state of slavery.… [He told them] that their conduct would be narrowly watched, and if it should be bad, they would be severely punished, put to work in a chain-gang, or sent to a penal settlement, where they would be under very severe discipline; or their career might be terminated on the scaffold. That, on the contrary, if they behaved well, they would in the course of a proper time, be indulged with a ticket-of-leave;… that if they should still persevere in doing well, they would then become eligible for a conditional pardon, which would give them the liberty of the colony: and that a further continuance in good conduct, would open the way for a free pardon, which would liberate [them] to return to their native land.28

  From that moment the prisoner’s life became a strictly regulated and automatic game of snakes and ladders. “The spirit of the convict,” their new ruler would declare in the summation of his penal philosophy, Observations Upon Secondary Punishment (1833),

  is not subdued by unmingled severity. Encouragement forms part of the plan by which he is reclaimed.… There is presented to him the choice of two opposite paths. The one will lead him to the possession of a ticket of leave. The other … will conduct him by a short cut, to the government gang or the penal settlement where he will be subjected to every privation.… Thus it is that every man has afforded him an opportunity of in a great measure retrieving his character and becoming useful in society.29

  Arthur’s system set up seven levels of punishment between its extremes of freedom and the scaffold. In growing order of severity, they were: [1] holding a ticket-of-leave; [2] assignment to a settler; [3] labor on public works; [4] labor on the roads, near civilization, in the settled districts; [5] work in a chain gang; [6] banishment to an isolated penal settlement; and [7] penal settlement labor in chains.

  A prisoner sank by bad conduct, and went up the rungs by good—after a time. But he always had to conform perfectly for a part of his sentence before he had any chance of a ticket-of-leave. A man with a seven-year sentence could apply for his ticket after four years of proven good behavior; a fourteen-year man, after six years; a lifer, after eight. He might also shorten his sentence by exceptional services—by catching an escaped fellow convict, for instance, or capturing troublesome Aborigines or serving as a convict constable in Arthur’s detested field police.

  His progress up the ladders and down the snakes would be decided by full reports on his conduct, gathered from settlers, police magistrates and other witnesses, compiled at the police station in his district and forwarded to Arthur’s colonial secretary. Every offense and sentence, each change of place and labor, would be noted by “a firm and determined, but mild and consistent supervision,” which would also scrutinize the convict’s attitudes to authority and work, his state of conscience and degree of remorse. Thus the prisoner would live without refuge from the eye of authority.

  Arthur’s belief in his system was absolute, and it distressed him to have its workings disturbed by direct orders from England. The Quaker missionary George Washington Walker called at Government House one day in 1834 and found Arthur “extremely chagrined” at an order that had just come on the transport Moffatt from Smith Stanley, the secretary of state for the colonies, enjoining him to take thirty of its four hundred newly arrived prisoners and work them in chains for seven years, instead of giving them the milder punishment of assignment. This draconic and arbitrary sentence, Stanley hoped, would spread the terror of Van Diemen’s Land in England. None of the unfortunate men had done anything to deserve it; they had all been submissive and quiet on the voyage; and Arthur was at a loss to know what to say to them. “They naturally ask why are we treated thus? What have we done?” wrote Walker.

  [But] All the Lt.-Governor is able to say is, “such is the order from home, it is out of my power to help it. However, let me recommend you as your friend to submissively acquiesce: to resist wd only be to render yr situation worse; & I will write home & endeavour to obtain some mitigation of your sentence, until any bad conduct, exhibited in the colony, renders you deserving of this punishment.” Common equity, let alone humanity, prompts this language, which has actually been used towds them by the Governor.30

  Arthur was certainly a martinet, and sometimes a suffocatingly pious one, but in no sense was he a sadist. That taint would be foisted on him later by a hostile colonial press, and fixed in literature long after his death by the Victorian tales of penal Grand Guignol written by Marcus Clarke and Price Warung. His real aim on Van Diemen’s Land was reformatory, not vindictive, like the aims of the Panopticon that Jeremy Bentham had set before the French National Assembly more than thirty years earlier.

  All convicts entered the board at level [2], as assigned labor. Those not assigned to settlers were put on the public works, for which there was a constant demand, for Van Diemen’s Land always needed more jails, barracks, piers, bridges and roads to cope with the growing convict population and the spread of settlement. In 1827, after three years of Arthur’s regime, there were 2,500 men employed at punishment labor (levels [3] through [7]) on public works in Van Diemen’s Land, or 43 percent of the convict population (as against 577 men, or 32 percent in 1820); this reflected the urgent need for new government buildings of every kind.31

  But most of the convicts in that year and all others (2,750 or 46 percent in 1827) were in level [2], the norm, as assigned servants. Assignment was the backbone of Arthur’s system but also—as he was well aware—its weakest point. The idea that any system could smoothly and automatically convert an undifferentiated mass of criminals into the permanent underclass of repentant, tractable cottagers who were the ideal end product of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land, was chimerical. To see the common reality one must turn, for a moment, from the administration to one of its thousands of subjects, whose claim to attention is that, unlike the great majority of his fellow convicts, he wrote an uncommonly frank clandestine letter, which has survived.32

  George Taylor was transported for life to Van Diemen’s Land in 1826 for stealing a pocketbook, and in 1832 he tried to smuggle a letter describing his ups and downs to his “dear Brother” John Thompson, another convict serving time in Macquarie Harbor. On first landing at Hobart, he was sent to work in a government vegetable garden “under the Superintendence of a Cruel and Vindictive tyrant where I remained for a fortnight.” Then he drew assignation to a free settler named Tennant. “Here I was again unfortunate for altho I received a good Caracter from the Cleark of the prisoners barracks as a hard working industrious man Still I had no sooner got to my master than he began to discover [i.e., disclose] the disposition of a Hardhearted Wreach.” After sev
en months Taylor started scheming to get away. He hoped to provoke his master into bringing him before the local police magistrate on a minor charge, so he started a go-slow strike, only doing “that part of my work which I thought proper.” Tennant haled him before the magistrate “two or three times,” but the charge was not bad enough to warrant returning Taylor to government work. So Taylor “persued a diferant line” by feigning sickness and asking, as was his right, to be sent to the doctor—who discovered “that I was sailing under false Collors and gave me a note to take to my Master to that effect.” Taylor opened, read and destroyed the note. He stayed in a fellow convict’s hut for three days and then told his master, on returning, that he had been in the hospital. This flimsy story came apart, of course, the next time Tennant saw the doctor. Tennant took his assigned man to the police magistrate, who sentenced Taylor to the chain gang at Bridgewater. There, convicts in levels [3] through [5] were sweating to create one of Colonel Arthur’s favorite public works—a causeway and bridge over the River Derwent, part of the main trunk road from Hobart to Launceston. The facilities provided there to reform the likes of Taylor included cells that were more like animals’ lairs, seven feet long and less than three feet high; the men crawled into them at night and were padlocked there, behind a stout lattice, unable to stand or sit. Taylor spent two months at Bridgewater but did not seem chastened enough. His next “automatic” descent was to chain-gang labor at the Kangaroo Point jetty in Hobart and on the roads. “You may be sure my Sittuation is not very enviable,” he wrote to his friend, “for it only makes me think more of my Liberty than ever and I am determined to try the first opertunity to gain it by some means or other if possible.”