The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Unluckily for him, his letter was intercepted by the authorities. It had been folly to write it in the first place, and after due inquiry, Colonel Arthur banished him to level [6], an isolated penal settlement. “Let Him then be removed forthwith to Port Arthur,” he decreed in a note on the offending document. This was done by the end of 1832. Later, good behavior extracted Taylor from Port Arthur and moved him up again to level [5], this time in a chain gang at Launceston. But the desire for freedom still burned in him; in 1836 he vanished from Arthur’s records with the laconic notation “Run,” meaning that he had escaped. Whatever else Arthur’s system had done for him, it had not made Taylor any more docile. There were many Taylors.

  Nevertheless, Arthur had to make his system as perfect and uniform as he could. His task, in conformity with John Bigge’s advice to the British Government, was to run an island of punishment, a place of terror to English criminals. He therefore had to keep assignment in Van Diemen’s Land from becoming the ill-supervised lottery it had become in New South Wales.

  But the free clay of his island varied as much as the criminal. Like New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land had kind and cruel settlers; vigilant and negligent ones; men who would work their assigned servants to the bone, and others who would let them eat at the same kitchen table; above all, men who by temperament and sense of moral obligation would stick to the lieutenant-governor’s rules of convict management, and others who would not, and in between those who, like most people anywhere, would bend the rules if they wanted to and thought they could get away with it. All of them must be brought into line, levelled before the System.

  Without assignment, there could have been no colony in Van Diemen’s Land. Its economy would have died because, as in New South Wales, there was no labor but convict labor. Hence, in Arthur’s view, the mere fact of living as a free settler in a penal colony meant that a man must accept the paramount values of penal discipline. Free settlers were as integral a part of Arthur’s machinery of punishment as policemen or government clerks. Assignment was a bargain a man struck with the government and if he did not play by the government’s rules he lost his convict servants. And the rules were far stricter than they had been under Lachlan Macquarie’s more liberal (and, to Bigge, more muddled) system in New South Wales. They went with a larger and ever-growing police force, and a complete denial of any political say to Emancipists and free settlers alike. Throughout his term of office, which was as long as Macquarie’s New South Wales—twelve years, from 1824 to 1836—George Arthur never lost sight of the fact that to control a state’s labor supply is to control its political life. So Arthur’s “red list” of settlers who could not get assigned convicts was, in plan and in detail, a formidable social weapon.

  Whole groups were automatically put on it. Arthur would show none of the encouragement Macquarie had given to Emancipists in New South Wales. His view tallied exactly with Bigge’s. Ex-convicts, he thought, made bad masters—and of course there was evidence to support it. Either they were too lenient to their men and despised the police, thus jamming Arthur’s “objective” machinery of punishment; or else the psychological need to wield power, after their grinding years of servitude and degradation, turned them into sadists and so aborted their servants’ prospects of reform. Hence, with very few exceptions, no one who had been a convict in Van Diemen’s Land could get convict labor. In this way, Arthur tried to enforce the ideal of Bigge and the Exclusives—that of a permanent ruling class of free descent, with the descendants of convicts as their helots. Refusing labor to Emancipists in Van Diemen’s Land could only deepen the gulf between wealthy (or at the very least, “unstained”) Exclusive families there, and the convict-descended majority. There were only three passably wealthy ex-convicts in all of Van Diemen’s Land at the time Arthur arrived, and he was not anxious to create any more. David Lord, who had inherited an estate worth £50,000 from his convict father James and by 1827 was said to have so multiplied it that he “knows not the extent of his riches,” was not only an inveterate enemy of Arthur but also a complete social anomaly.33

  Some trades found it hard to get convict servants. Arthur despised rum and those who sold it, and would rarely assign a convict to an innkeeper. Believing that the city was wickeder than the country—which it was, given the number of its taverns and the floating population of “loose” women it harbored—Arthur preferred to assign convicts to farmers rather than tradesmen in town.

  Arthur expected masters to make their servants pray and scrupulously observe the Sabbath. They must buy Bibles for their men, if the men could read, but few masters actually did so. Few things irked Arthur more than a master’s failure to instill religious habits in his convicts. Besides, he wanted to leave Van Diemen’s Land covered with a brown mantle of Anglican churches and Wesleyan meetinghouses. He did all he could to bring in clergymen, missionaries and other catechists. The Wesleyans did particularly good work at the foot of the scaffold with condemned criminals, of whom there was no shortage under Arthur. One preacher, the Reverend Carvosso, helped fourteen men to lament and exult their way through the noose into the portals of eternity within a space of thirty hours.34

  Wherever a town coalesced in the “settled districts” of Van Diemen’s Land, Arthur wanted a chapel to be built, usually a plain stone box with lancet windows and a pitched roof in the Gothic manner, without much in the way of crockets and stone foliage, where the Lord could be praised in metrical psalms. There were four churches in Van Diemen’s Land when he arrived in 1824, and eighteen when he left. The church and the police magistrate’s office were the architectural symbols of his regime, and one served the other. Official religion was a means of penal control. The mandatory Sunday muster of convicts had to finish with a service and a clerical harangue. But it was not easy to make sure masters kept their men’s noses to the moral grindstone. Some would work their convicts on the Sabbath, tolerate their propensity to vice and give them rum as an incentive. If he found out about that, Arthur withdrew their assigned men and left them economically crippled.

  He discouraged all intimacy between bond and free. One settler found himself red-listed for letting his convicts eat Christmas dinner with his family. In 1831, when a leading settler, George Meredith, defied the strict letter of police regulations by treating his assigned men to a drink on New Year’s Eve, Arthur ordered his colonial secretary to warn him that another dram of rum down a felon’s throat “will lead to the immediate removal of all his servants.”35

  If a settler had an affair with a convict woman, and Arthur found out about it through his district police magistrate, all his servants would be reassigned. Even if a free man married an ex-convict woman—and most of the women in Van Diemen’s Land had been transported, so there was not much choice for the small settler—he would lose his assigned servants at once. The situation that often arose in New South Wales, where a convict might be assigned to a relative, was rarely allowed here. Sometimes Arthur would let a wife emigrate to Van Diemen’s Land to join her convict husband, provided that the man had his ticket-of-leave or that his master would give her domestic work. But he would not, of course, pay for her passage.

  One exception was reluctantly made for “Ikey” Solomon, the celebrated Jewish pickpocket and fence on whom, legend (perhaps incorrectly) insists, Charles Dickens had based the character of Fagin. His wife Ann, daughter of an Aldgate coachmaster named Moses Julian, had been transported for receiving stolen goods. She landed in Hobart in 1828, with four small children between the ages of three and nine. She was assigned as a servant to a police officer. Meanwhile the intrepid “Ikey,” who was tried and sentenced for theft in 1827 but had escaped from the Black Maria on his way to Newgate (the vehicle, as the authorities discovered all too late, was driven by his father-in-law), had fled to Denmark, to the United States, to Rio and finally to Hobart under an alias to join his wife. He bought land and a house and he started a business, which flourished. Everyone in Hobart knew who he was (the town was small, and
of course full of his former colleagues) but a peculiar technicality saved him: Arthur, who always played by the book, had received no warrant for his arrest from the Colonial Office in London and could not touch him until one arrived. Thus, with the backing of some fellow traders, Isaac Solomon put up a bond of a thousand pounds and Arthur reluctantly allowed his wife to be assigned to him. Their family idyll was rudely disrupted in November 1829 when Arthur at last received the warrant from England. Even then, the ur-Fagin made one last wriggle to dislodge the hook, and with effrontery worthy of his fictional counterpart he petitioned Arthur from his jail cell for an official job:

  TO:

  HIS Excellency Colonel George Arther

  Lt Govener of V D Land &c &c &c

  Sir,

  I beg leave to state the following … I some time back detected A Man with A Forged note on the Bank of the Derwent I had him taken into Custedy; he was Convicted and sent to Mackquarrey Harbour. I allso beg Leave to State that theire Was a Greate Many forged Note in Circulation before I detected this Man; & I have not heard of Any being in Circulation since I detected this Man; I theirefor now offer my Serveses to The Government in detecting all Such Offences or Any thing Else that the Goverment may Appoint me to do to the Hutermost of my Obility.

  I have the honor to subscribe

  Your Excellencys Most humble Servant,

  Isaac Solomon.36

  But Arthur was not swayed. “I presume,” he frostily noted on the verso, “this is from the Person commonly called ‘Ikey Solomon’—no notice need be taken of his Memorial.” So Isaac Solomon was returned to England amid cries of protest from the Hobart opposition press, who thought it a breach of habeas corpus. There he was tried and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation; by the end of 1831 he was back in Hobart; and in 1835 he got his ticket-of-leave and was reunited with his family. By then, unfortunately, they all loathed one another.*

  It was essential to Arthur’s system that the settlers who had convict labor assigned to them carry out his rules to the last detail. Judging their moral fitness to preside over the punishment of prisoners was perhaps the most ticklish problem that faced the Convict Office. The price of having assigned servants was full participation in Arthur’s system of convict management. It made all free settlers into jailers—“auxiliaries,” in John West’s words, “hired by royal bounties to co-operate with the great machinery of punishment and reformation.”37 The settler was expected to shut up about “rights,” stay at home on his farm and do exactly as he was told. A master could lose his assigned labor if he let his men idle, or used convict rather than free overseers or lent a man to another settler. In particular, it was forbidden to transfer convicts as though they were private property, as sometimes happened in New South Wales. To abuse a servant was to lose him, and assigned convicts had the right to complain to the police magistrate at any time. But it was equally forbidden to indulge them, and any delay in bringing a mulish, rebellious or backsliding convict before the magistrate would get the master (or mistress) in trouble. The only play in these regulations came from the supply of assignable convicts. When the demand for them was high, Arthur could take them away from settlers who infringed the rules, just as he pleased. But convicts had to be put somewhere, and so when there was a glut of assignable felons, more settlers found they were let off with a reprimand and could keep their men.

  The key to Arthur’s scheme of total surveillance was, of course, the quality of the police. “It is extremely desirable,” he declared, “that either through the Police or Principal Superintendent’s Department, the most conclusive information should always be obtained of the character of the applicant [for] assigned labor and all circumstances.”38 To assure this, Arthur had to make certain that his police force was run by men who had no allegiance to either settlers or convicts and were responsible only to him; and that its rank and file had no reason to favor anyone either. He cunningly did both by appointing army men as district magistrates and by putting upward-moving convicts in the field police as a reward for good conduct and a step toward freedom. This was a bureaucratic master stroke. The convict constables were anxious to distinguish themselves, could be kept in line by the merest threat of demotion, knew they had no second chances and doubtless took a certain pleasure in bossing the settlers around. One could expect dog-like obedience—and canine ferocity—from them. The army police magistrates might not know much about civil law; often they looked on the settlers with disdain, and on convicts with contempt. But they were impervious to criticism from civilians and despised the press. Their background had trained them to handle the laborious, detailed paperwork of reports and to carry out every quillet of Arthur’s copious, inflexible orders with military zeal. They believed in the chain of command as implicitly as Arthur did.

  Not everyone resented the methods used by Arthur’s police. They had cleaned out the bushrangers, destroyed the Brady gang and made the roads safe for trade; thousands of people could sleep easier because of them. Nevertheless, they poisoned the social air. Tempers had always been short in Van Diemen’s Land, frictions magnified, manners gross. Bitching and backbiting were the favorite sports of Hobart society—as of Australian society in general. Among the “dirty pack of unprincipled place hunters” whom Arthur’s auditor-general, the waspish George Boyes, saw occupying the upper rungs of Van Diemen’s Land, “lying, slandering, every hatred and malice are their daily ailment and their consumption is incredible.” Now the stew of ill-will was thickened by spying and the fear of denunciation. By 1830, Van Diemen’s Land was fast becoming “a community of slanderers and slaves.”39

  Besides, Arthur was a committed nepotist. He knew what a small pool of administrative talent he had in Van Diemen’s Land, and he needed people he could trust—loyalty being an acceptable substitute for imagination. If he was an autocrat, and he was, he had partly been made so by distance: He faced a year’s delay in obtaining instructions from London, and up to four months’ lag in getting them from Sydney. This gave him even wider discretion than the governor enjoyed in New South Wales, and he used it with a sovereign contempt for “liberal” and “democratic” principles. Never apologize, never explain.

  Arthur made no bones about the scope of his patronage or his bias toward military men. Given the quality of some of the civil officials the Crown sent, one can hardly blame him. Dudley Fereday (1789–1849), a bankrupt coal magnate’s son whom an English lord’s patronage had made sheriff of Van Diemen’s Land in 1824, turned out to be a relentless usurer, lending money at 35 percent interest. Arthur soon got rid of him, and of his uncompliant attorney-general, Arthur Gellibrand, and of anyone else who seemed either disobliging or short on moral fiber. He went after the customs collector, Rolla O’Farrell, who had arrived penniless in Hobart but amassed a fortune of more than £15,000 by creative venality. This man, Arthur told London, was a debauchee with the morals of a stoat, who lived with one of the prostitutes off the Princess Royal and had been fined for harboring and seducing female convicts. In 1831 England sent Arthur a judge, Alexander “Dandy” Baxter (1798–1836), whose ignorance and paranoiac sadism (while serving as Darling’s attorney-general in New South Wales, he had battered his wife with a poker after she gave birth to twins) were such that Arthur would not have him in his colony. “I found him,” he declared, “in a high state of neurotic excitement and such an habitual sot that it would have been a violation of all public decency to have suffered him to take his seat on the Bench.”40 In 1826 Arthur received John Burnett (1781–1860) as his first colonial secretary—a mewing, forgetful creature, who confessed to Arthur soon after getting to Hobart that “so extremely sensitive is my nervous system that everything which agitates my mind immediately affects my bodily health, and brings on illness.”41 Not without some difficulty, Arthur replaced him with John Montagu (1797–1853), a blunt, thrusting ex-officer of the 40th Regiment, a veteran of Waterloo who—no incidental point—had married Arthur’s niece.

  In the end, Arthur always
got his way with appointments and managed to cripple most of the enemies his purges made. “The Government of the Colony is nominally vested in the Lieutenant Governor and an Executive Council,” wrote Boyes. “I say nominally, because the Executive Council as a body is powerless. The real government is composed of Colonel Arthur [and] his two nephews.” The “nephews” were Montagu and the chief police magistrate, Matthew Forster (1796–1846), a half-blind former captain in the 85th Regiment who had had the excellent sense to marry another of Arthur’s nieces.

  Another Arthur favorite was Roderic O’Connor (1784–1860), a “red-hot Irishman,” the son of a rich landowner, who had sailed to Hobart on his own ship with his two bastard sons in 1824. O’Connor was tough, outspoken, pragmatic and arrogant—a man Arthur could use, despite his atheism and his taste for the grog. He appointed him to the survey and valuation commission, whose task it was to oversee the division of Van Diemen’s Land into counties and parishes, to assess unoccupied Crown land and survey the route for the north-south trunk road, the spine of the colony, which convicts would build between Hobart and Launceston. It was the right job in which to gather some land of his own. In 1824 Arthur gave O’Connor 1,000 acres; by 1828, he had 4,000 and as much convict labor as he wanted—when assigning men to his favorites, the colonel never stinted. In 1836, when Arthur left Van Diemen’s Land, O’Connor was one of the half-dozen richest men in the colony, adamantly opposed to any alteration in the system of slavery that had created his wealth. He was not liked (Lady Franklin, the wife of Arthur’s successor, complained that he was “bound by ties of I know not what nature to the Arthur faction … a man of blasted reputation, of exceedingly immoral conduct and of viperous tongue”), but he was very much feared, and at his death he owned 65,000 acres of Tasmania and leased 10,000 more from the government.42