The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Meanwhile, under Arthur’s organizing hand, the economy of Van Diemen’s Land was surging. In 1824, when he arrived, Van Diemen’s Land had a white population of about 12,000 and its exports were worth £45,317. In 1836, the year he left, they stood at £540,221, and there were 40,000 bond and free. Most of the settlers were men of capital, for Arthur discouraged free workers, even mechanics, from emigrating to Van Diemen’s Land; a free labor market would have diminished the social control that flowed from his power to allocate convict labor. Wealthy settlers—the “planters” of folksong—ruled the Vandemonian roost and despised mere traders and merchants. By 1830, Van Diemen’s Land had a wool boom, a wheat boom, a boom in real estate and agricultural land and a severe loansharking problem; members of Arthur’s own Legislative Council were rumored to be lending out money at illegal rates of 15 and even 50 percent. Thrifty and ruthlessly astute, the colonel himself knew of every project in advance, made a fortune from land investment and lived like a tea-drinking, psalm-intoning nabob. He stayed within the letter of the law, but the law was easier then, and respectable folk were more apt to avert their eyes from conflicts of interest. Thus when he had the causeway and bridge over the Derwent River for the Hobart-Launceston road built at Bridgewater, Arthur owned most of the land around it; and when he picked the site for a new Hobart wharf, he was accused (though not conclusively) of increasing the value of his property next to it from £800 to £12,000.

  After a few years of dictatorial, God-fearing nepotism there was plenty of reckoning and questioning. It came from settlers, who chafed at the intrusions of his police and were furious when Arthur withdrew their convict servants for infractions of his code; from merchants, who were treated as low money-grubbers by Arthur’s landed gentry; and from all who felt that, as Englishmen in a far colony but Englishmen still, they should have the constitutional rights their “tyrant” denied them. They liked having convict labor but disliked living in a jail. Van Diemen’s Land could not be run simply as a jail forever, but Arthur was determined to do so until the Crown changed his orders. The opposition was weak and tetchy. Its attempts to make itself heard—public meetings in 1831 and 1832 and a constitutional association in 1835—were ignored in Government House. But it had an irksome and at times hysterically abusive voice: the press, which Arthur detested.

  The newspapers of Van Diemen’s Land were rough, choleric and short—a few columns of news and editorials, some letters and official business, tacked onto a mass of advertisements. They tried to win their petty circulation wars with stilted, lurid rhetoric. In short, they were as poor and vindictive as most early nineteenth-century American newspapers. But they were the only forum of popular opinion—as distinct from the printed mandates of the government—in the colony. Everyone read them.

  Such journalism goaded Arthur to folly. In 1827, he tried to quash the liberty of all printing on the island by proposing a Licensing Act, so that any editor’s right to publish could be cancelled at the lieutenant-governor’s pleasure. He coldly offered his all-purpose justification. Van Diemen’s Land was a jail, and in jail opposition should have no voice. Compared to the absolute need for “security and tranquillity,” the free settlers’ unanimous desire for a free press must go unsatisfied. Behind this, of course, lay Arthur’s implacable vanity; he could not stand criticism of any kind, especially not from civilians, and least of all from ex-convicts.

  When he looked at Vandemonian journalists, Arthur saw, not a Fourth Estate struggling for freedom of the press, but a swarm of semi-criminal gadflies sent to harass him personally. There was Robert Murray (1777–1850), ex-soldier, journalist and reputedly the bastard son of an English peer, transported for bigamy in 1815 and by 1825 editor of the Hobart Town Gazette, who wrote sharp attacks—or gross slanders, depending on which side one took—on Arthur’s policies under the name “A Colonist.” (He fell into line after 1832 and became a sycophantic tool of Arthur’s patronage.)

  Another was Murray’s colleague Andrew Bent, sent out for burglary in 1810, now editor of the Colonial Times: an unrestrained seditionist, Arthur thought. Henry Melville, an eccentric Freemason obsessed with the occult, published the first Australian novel set in Australia (Quintus Servinton, 1830–31, by the transported forger Henry Savery) and, to Arthur’s intense displeasure, wrote an entire book against his administration, History of the Island of Van Diemen’s Land from the Year 1824 to 1825, which had to be smuggled out of the colony and published in England. Then there was William Goodwin, editor of the Cornwall Chronicle, a harsh transport captain turned venomous hack, whose attacks on Arthur and other pillars of the Vandemonian establishment seemed, unlike those of these other editors, to have no basis at all beyond his own opportunism.43

  Some of these men bore unmistakably personal grudges against Arthur. One was Gilbert Robertson, the mulatto son of a Scottish sugar-planter in British Guiana, who had twice failed as a farmer: first in Scotland (where falling wheat prices ruined him), and then on a 400-acre grant in Van Diemen’s Land. He was jailed for debt in 1824 and then worked for Arthur as superintendent of a government farm. In 1829 he struck out on his own again on Woodburn, a fine grazing property in the Richmond district. This time Robertson seemed set. Arthur had made him district constable and the farm prospered; but in 1832 he made the mistake of indulging his convicts too much. For a celebration after the February harvest, he gave them a barrel of wine, invited in another eight assigned servants from farms nearby and left twenty-five convicts carousing while he went to perform his police duties. All the convicts got drunk and one was mortally wounded in a brawl. This time, Arthur acted with surprising leniency. He did not withdraw all Robertson’s assigned men; he merely red-listed him from getting any more. But that was enough for the choleric Scot, who switched to journalism to get his revenge on Arthur and emerged as editor of a daily paper, The True Colonist. Through this sheet, Robertson was able to heap accusations of fraud, peculation, favoritism and tyranny on Arthur for the last two years of his office.

  Arthur’s running battle with the press lasted throughout his administration. The British Government refused to let him have his Licensing Act; so Arthur felt he had no recourse but to sue his critics for libel, bombarding them with litigation to the point where, harassed and short-staffed, they would no longer be able to publish their broadsides against him. Arthur did this with such methodical zeal that Murray, Robertson, Melville and Bent all spent time behind bars. They protested their treatment, in and out of print. There is a particularly indignant letter from Henry Melville to Arthur, protesting the “torture” inflicted on him in the Hobart jail:

  I am writing this in the condemned cell where the notorious man-eater Pierce and some score of other murder[er]s have been confined. In this cell I passed the night (after being locked up by British convicts!) with swarms of bugs, which precluded the possibility of my sleeping.

  I ask for suitable appartments chiefly on account of my wife, who has expressed her determination to remain with me as many hours as possible, and if the authorities have a wish to be revenged on a political opponent at all events the chief ruler ought to have some feelings for an unoffending woman who suffers more from the incarceration of her husband than [he] does.44

  Naturally, they were seen as martyrs. Andrew Bent was defended in court in 1830 as “this Nimrod of printers, this [Benjamin] Franklin of the Southern Hemisphere.” Arthur could put them in jail, but not all his autocratic powers could keep them there forever. What especially irked him was the attitude of his own attorney-general, Joseph Tice Gellibrand (1786–1837), a close friend of Robert Murray. Gellibrand several times refused point-blank to sue for libel on the Crown’s behalf; he even helped write editorials for Murray’s paper. Arthur could not endure this and laid siege to Gellibrand’s reputation in England. As Gellibrand was one of the few genuinely acute and honest lawyers ever to hold public office in early Australia, Arthur could not nail him for incompetence; but he created a cloud of allegations of fiscal dishonesty, and i
n 1826 a dispatch from Lord Goderich removed Gellibrand. His successor as attorney-general was a feeble anorexic named Thomas McCleland, whom Arthur found much easier to control. Gellibrand at once became editor of The Tasmanian in Hobart.45

  And so, through his moral arrogance and his inability to understand or sympathize with civilian tempers, Arthur soon found himself facing a raucous phalanx of opposition papers. Part of their strategy was to contrast the suffering convict with the cold, rhadamanthine lieutenant-governor. To show the “tyrant” at his worst, they harped on the dreaded nadir of Arthur’s system, the secondary penal settlements: first Macquarie Harbor, and then Port Arthur.

  iv

  UNTIL 1832, the only place in Van Diemen’s Land fit for the severest levels of Arthur’s punishment system was Macquarie Harbor, reserved for those who had committed serious crimes after landing in the colony. Its name reeked of fear and woe; all convicts feared it; but Arthur thought it had defects as well, and these came to look worse as both the convict population and the number of secondary convictions grew.

  Despite its wealth of Huon pine, Macquarie Harbor was expensive. Being so remote from Hobart, it was hard to run. Ships took as long as six weeks to reach it, and no overland route had been found. The sandbar at the mouth of Hell’s Gates was silting up, making entry to the harbor even more perilous than it already was. Arthur’s orders were slow in reaching it, and the commandant’s replies were delayed. Food ran short; scurvy was endemic; the barracks on Sarah Island, with a capacity of about 370 prisoners, was too small. Furthermore, a new speculative venture called the Van Diemen’s Land Company was trying to open up the west coast for stock-grazing, and it looked as though the utter isolation of Macquarie Harbor, its best feature, might be on the wane.

  There was another, far milder, penal settlement on Maria Island, three miles off the east coast of Van Diemen’s Land. Arthur had it set up in 1825 to receive convicts “whose crimes are not of so flagrant a nature to induce the Magistrates to sentence them to Macquarie Harbour.” The convicts lucky enough to be sent to this sweetly idyllic place wove cloth and cobbled shoes, and although flogging and solitary confinement were common punishments, their life escaped the miseries of Macquarie Harbor.46

  But it made no sense and cost too much to keep two isolated secondary-punishment stations, one severe and one not; the levels of Arthur’s system did not call for light punishment in remote places. Arthur decided to shut both of them down and to open a new penal settlement on the ragged tip of the Tasman Peninsula, closer to Hobart. The place was called Port Arthur. It is his monument, and perhaps no British proconsul has a more impressive one.

  Today Port Arthur is easily visited by road; it is sixty miles from Hobart, and every season thousands of tourists in buses and cars stream down the Arthur Highway below Mount Forestier, glimpsing the bright planes of Blackman Bay and Norfolk Bay like burnished pewter struck and feathered by shafts of light, framed by dark headlands. Outcrops of cream and green fibro cottages, neat with garden gnomes and carports, cling to this melancholy coast. The hamlets of this peninsula look feeble and intrusive; their modest grafts of suburbia do not belong in a landscape so drenched in sublimity and misery. One soon forgets them, looking down on the mosaic shore at Pirate’s Bay, cracked into hexagonal tessellations by the cooling of the lava flow; or gazing into the vertiginous depths of the Blowhole where, beneath a slender natural arch of rock, the sea two hundred feet below thunders across the jostled slabs of basalt on the cavern floor, saturating the air with a permanent, clinging mist.

  In convict days, of course, there was no road. The inaccessibility of the Tasman Peninsula was what commended it to the System, and the best way to sense this is to go there, as prisoners did, by sea. One sails down the Derwent estuary from Hobart and turns into Storm Bay, once the calving-ground of thousands of black whales but now empty; from Cape Direction, where Australia’s oldest lighthouse still winks its beam, the long humpy profile of the Tasman Peninsula lies on the southeastern horizon. Its furthest southern point is Cape Raoul, which as one rounds it appears as the western arm of Maingon Bay, the sea-gate that opens the way to Port Arthur—the eastern arm being Cape Pillar. Both capes are of towering basalt pipes, flutes and rods, bound like fasces into the living rock. Their crests are spired and crenellated. Seabirds wheel, thinly crying, across the black walls and the blacker shadows. The breaking swells throw up their veils. When the clouds march in from the Tasman Sea and the rainsqualls lash the prismatic stone, these cliffs can look like the adamantine gates of Hell itself. Geology had conspired with Lieutenant-Governor Arthur to give the prisoners of the crown a moral fright as their ships hauled in.

  But once inside the landlocked bay of Port Arthur, the impression melts. Or so it does for a modern visitor, who sees green lawns, the ivy-covered remains of a Gothic church and the enormous bulk of the penitentiary. In its soft tones of pink brick, far gone in crumbling, it seems an almost maternal ruin. It did not seem so to the convicts, but the shudder it reliably evokes in the modern tourist comes from the contrast between its mild, pastoral present—et in Arcadia ego—and the legends of its past. Australia has many parking lots but few ruins. When Australians see the ruin of an old building, our impulse is either to finish tearing it down or to bring in the architects and restore it as a cultural center, if large, or a restaurant, if small. Port Arthur is the only major example of an Australian historical ruin appreciated and kept for its own sake (although local entrepreneurs have tried, and so far failed, to refurbish it as Convictland). It is our Paestum and our Dachau, rolled into one. Far more than Macquarie Harbor or even Norfolk Island, Port Arthur has always dominated the popular historical imagination in Australia as the emblem of the miseries of transportation, “the Hell on earth.”

  Moreover, its reputation was terrible right from the start. To have served time there was to receive an indelible stain. “There is something so lowering,” remarked Arthur’s successor as lieutenant-governor, Sir John Franklin, “attached to the name of a Port Arthur man.”47 Yet the records clearly show that Port Arthur, though certainly a place of misery for its prisoners, was by no means as bad as either Macquarie Harbor or Norfolk Island.

  Its main difference from other secondary stations lay in the hermetic regularity of its discipline. It was conceived and run as a purgatorial grinding-mill rather than a torture chamber. “The most unceasing labour is to be exacted from the convicts,” Arthur’s Standing Instructions emphasized, “and the most harassing vigilance over them is to be observed.”48 But his regulations for the settlement were equally strict on the behavior of its guards. The commandant’s authority was absolute, and he answered directly to the lieutenant-governor through the colonial secretary in Hobart. He could, and did, inflict punishment without trial, immediately after the offense, so that the convict would “learn his lesson” without delay. But the sequence of offense, detection and punishment must show a machine-like regularity, to which vindictiveness and pity were equally alien. Arthur’s regulations were framed to leave no scope for the exercise of sadistic practices by prison personnel that made a convict’s life at Macquarie Harbor or Norfolk Island so vile. Thomas Lemprière (1796–1852), who served as a commissary officer at Port Arthur (as well as Macquarie Harbor and Maria Island), felt that Arthur’s enemies exaggerated in calling it an “Earthly Hell.” But he did not bridle at phrases like “the abode of misery.” “To this cognomen we do not object,” he remarked with a certain brisk realism, for

  a penal settlement is, and ought to be, an abode of misery to those whose crimes have sequestered them from the society of their fellow-creatures. Were it a place of comfort, the very object for which such establishments are formed, the punishment and reform of malefactors, would become nugatory.49

  “And reform”—this was a crucial phrase. Port Arthur existed to punish its men purposively. It would be the clamp that held the rigid structure of Arthur’s social system together at the bottom.

  Arthur had been think
ing about the place since 1827, when the colonial brig Opossum took refuge there from a storm on the way back from Maria Island to Hobart and came back with news of a deep sheltered inlet, surrounded by colossal stands of timber. Arthur sent her captain back with a surveyor to make a detailed report on the place: its merits as a port, its water supply, and above all its forests, since the demand for timber for buildings and furniture kept rising, and logging was an ideally harsh punishment.

  The report was good, and Arthur decided to put a settlement on the bay that, “from profound respect,” had been given his name. He did not mean to transfer all the convicts from Macquarie Harbor at once. Some of the less evilly inclined ones could be put there as a form of probation, on their way back up the ladder of his system. But the basic population of Port Arthur would be men re-convicted of minor offenses, and others fresh from England.

  The first group, thirty-four new English prisoners with fifteen soldiers to guard them under the command of Dr. John Russell, assistant surgeon of the 63rd Regiment, was landed there in September 1830. More followed; by mid-1831, the convict population was about 150. Dr. Russell would later list “a few well-known characters … mixed with the general class of housebreakers, pickpockets and felons”:

  There was the famous Ikey Solomons; there was Collins, the old sailor, who threw a stone at the King—he died at Port Arthur; there were those men for agrarian disturbances, for setting fire to haystacks, a circumstance that occurred about 1830 or 1831; there was a clergyman from Scotland, and an attorney from Ireland; there were a number of boys sent to learn trades.50

  A heterogeneous crew—which, as always at new penal outposts, had great difficulty surviving at all. Rations were miserably short and scurvy widespread. Medical supplies were so inadequate that at one point the doctor had to operate on a man’s “stricture” with a piece of sharpened whalebone for a scalpel. Convicts went half-naked from want of uniforms. “I had great difficulty in punishing the men,” Russell recalled, “in fact, I was living in the bush myself, and I therefore struck off the irons of every man that came down, and made it a punishment to put them on again.” He could not use solitary confinement at first, for want of cells; but later the “most effectual” punishment proved to be hard labor in irons, with all meals and rest hours in solitary.51