Thus, by 1834, the last Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land had followed their evangelical Pied Piper into a benign concentration camp, set up on Flinders Island in Bass Strait. There, Robinson planned to Europeanize them. They were given clothes, new names, Bibles and elementary schooling. They were shown how to buy and sell things, so that they might acquire a reverence for property. They were allowed to elect their own police. In the main, however, they simply died—of accidie, deracination and new diseases. In 1835, only 150 Aborigines were left. Little by little, they wasted away and their ghosts drifted out over the water. Robinson left Flinders in 1839 and returned to the Australian mainland. His successors chose to treat Flinders Island as a jail, and its dwindling colony of Aborigines as prisoners. Occasionally a girl would be flogged, but only for moral offenses. In 1843 there were fifty-four Aborigines alive. Three years later, amid blood-curdling prophecies of a new black war from the colonial press, the survivors were returned to the mainland and settled on a property at Oyster Cove on the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, near Hobart. There they guzzled rum, which was thoughtfully provided by their keepers; they posed impassively for photographers in front of their filthy slab huts; and they waited to die. In 1855 the census of natives was three men, two boys and eleven women, one of whom was Trucanini.
The last man died in 1869. His name was William Lanne and he was described as Trucanini’s “husband,” although he was twenty-three years her junior. Realizing that his remains might have some value as a scientific specimen, rival agents of the Royal College of Surgeons in London and the Royal Society in Tasmania fought over his bones. A Dr. William Crowther, representing the Royal College of Surgeons, sneaked into the morgue, beheaded Lanne’s corpse, skinned the head, removed the skull and slipped another skull from a white cadaver into the black skin. This gruesome ruse was soon unmasked, for when a medical officer picked the head up, “the face turned round and at the back of the head the bones were sticking out.” In pique, the officials decided not to let the Royal College of Surgeons get the whole skeleton; so they chopped off the feet and hands from Lanne’s corpse and threw them away. The lopped, dishonored cadaver of the last tribesman was then officially buried, unofficially exhumed the next night and dissected for its skeleton by representatives of the Royal Society. It was, one of them remarked with some understatement, a “dirty job.” Lanne’s skeleton then disappeared; and the head, which Crowther consigned by sea to the Royal College of Surgeons, vanished too. It seems that the ineffable doctor had packaged it in a sealskin, and before long the bundle stank so badly that it was tossed overboard.
Trucanini wept and raged inconsolably when she was told of the fate of Lanne’s body. She had long been frightened of death and of the evil spirit Rowra who would exact the revenge of the dead tribes she had betrayed; but now a further terror joined those. She begged a clergyman to make sure that when she died, she would be wrapped in a bag with a stone at her feet and dropped into the deepest part of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel—“because I know that when I die, the Tasmanian Museum wants my body.” By 1873, the last of her black companions was dead and Trucanini was taken to Hobart, where she lingered on in a wretched aura of colonial celebrity, invented by the whites, as the “Queen of the Aborigines.” One May evening in 1876 she was heard to scream, “Missus, Rowra catch me, Rowra catch me!” A stroke felled her, and she lay in coma for five days. Her last words, as the dark peeled back for a moment from her terrified consciousness, were, “Don’t let them cut me, but bury me behind the mountains.”
The government arranged a funeral procession for the last Tasmanian on May 11, 1876. Huge crowds lined the pavements to watch her small, almost square coffin roll by; they followed it to the cemetery, and saw it lowered into a grave. It was empty. Fearing some unseemly public disturbance, the government had buried her corpse in a vault of the Protestant Chapel in the Hobart Penitentiary the night before. So Trucanini lay not “behind the mountains,” but in jail. In 1878 they dug her up again and sloughed the flesh off her bones, then boiled them and nailed them in an apple crate, which lay in storage for some years. The crate was about to be thrown out when someone from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery read the faded label. The bones were strung together, and the skeleton of Trucanini went into a glass case in the museum, where it remained until feelings of public delicacy and humanitarian sentiment caused it to be removed, in 1947, to the basement. In 1976, the centenary of her death, the authorities—not knowing what else to do with this otherwise ineradicable dweller in their closet—had it cremated, and the ashes were scattered on the waters of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. Just 140 years had passed since the day in 1836 when the virtuous and unbending proconsul, Sir George Arthur, had been ushered weeping onto the Elphinstone at the New Wharf and, to the cheers of several hundred free Vandemonians, had sailed away to England, his baronetcy and the deserved gratitude of the Crown.
* This had not always been done before; under Davey and Sorell, thanks to lackadaisical record-keeping in England, whole shiploads of prisoners would come into the Derwent without any records of their crimes and sentences, so that, as Arthur protested in 1827, “we stand in the extraordinary predicament in a Penal Colony of not being able to prove that the offenders transported from England are Convicts.”
* Solomon and his wife quarrelled incessantly and in 1840, when she got her pardon, they broke up. “Ikey” died ten years later. His old gift for making money had deserted him and he did not—as another legend had it—contribute to the founding of the first synagogue in Van Diemen’s Land. His estate was only worth £70.
12
Metastasis
i
IN 1815, the year Napoleon was crushed and England could once more turn her strength to building an empire, the map of white settlement in New South Wales was hardly more than a patch, consisting only of Sydney and Parramatta. The rest was void, the scarcely penetrated green continuum of bush, with a few tracks winding their frail, dusty capillaries toward inland farms.
By 1825 this had changed. There were specks on the coast north of Sydney—Newcastle, Port Macquarie, Moreton Bay—scattered along a thousand miles of coastline and tenuously linked by ships; and Norfolk Island, which had been abandoned on Macquarie’s orders, was resettled.
These little footholds were hamlets of punishment. They had not been created by the hopes of settlers. A growing convict population, and increased severity from the authorities, had forced them into existence. They were, as the phrase went, “the Botany Bay of Botany Bay”—enclaves of banishment in a land of exile. The flood of convicts to Australia had now begun in earnest. From 1820 to 1831 the number of convicts serving sentences there would never be less than 40 percent of the total population. The creation of the penal out-stations was a response to crisis, even though, in practice, less than one prisoner in ten ever served time in one. If Australia was going to scare English criminals, the penal out-stations would have to terrify colonial ones.
By 1825, the English authorities knew—and in fact, had come to accept—that their ways of dealing with crime had failed in the past, were not working now and would be unlikely to succeed in the foreseeable future. The crime rate in England had not dropped; thus one had to conclude that transportation did not deter. The question of “reformation” was not quite as important, since so few people came back from Australia. In 1826, for instance, only about 7 percent of the convicts freed at the end of their sentences chose to return to England, an eloquent comment on what they believed their chances were there.1
Nevertheless the criminal-justice system was by now addicted to transportation and had no real alternatives. In 1821 the government had built an experimental penitentiary at Millbank on the Thames, designed to hold eight hundred people—minor criminals, both men and women, whose offenses would have brought them 7 years’ transportation. It cost half a million pounds and was a failure; its cold cells and defective drains killed the prisoners like flies. Neither public nor government opinion was ready
for wholesale jail reform yet; and, in the meantime, transportation was far cheaper than building new prisons. Besides, the idea of the penitentiary was seen as an American invention; no Tory and few Whigs desired to mimic the ideas of that rebellious ex-colony.
In 1822 the arch-conservative Lord Castlereagh killed himself in a fit of depression and Sir Robert Peel became home secretary. Peel oversaw the removal of some hanging statutes. But what replaced hanging, as punishment, was only more transportation. Peel was a timid reformer and, when it came to thinking about the practical issues of what one did with criminals, his imagination failed. “I admit the inefficiency of transportation to Botany Bay, but the whole subject … is full of difficulties,” he wrote to the Reverend Sydney Smith. “I can hardly devise anything as a secondary punishment in addition to what we have at present.” The hulks were full to bursting with a population of four to five thousand felons. He could not use public chain gangs, for they would “revolt public opinion” and the penitentiary had failed. Only Australia was left to cope with a swelling crime wave. “The real truth is the number of convicts is too overwhelming for the means of proper and effectual punishment.”2
There must still be a place of terror. About the volume of crime, and therefore of transportation, there was little doubt. After 1815, England began to pay the full price for its recent defeat in war, its collapsing labor relations and a succession of failed harvests. Semi-capitalized industry was destroying the old base of town manufacture, the apprentice system; enclosure and famine were sending the rural workers of England and Ireland into paupery. The crime rate leaped, and with it the numbers of transported convicts. From 1810 to 1814, an average of 678 felons a year went to Australia; this mere trickle could easily be absorbed, as unskilled labor, by the assignment system. But from 1815 to 1819, the yearly average trebled, to 2,090; from 1820 to 1824, it went to 2,756. The British Government could not have cut down on transportation even if it had wanted to. It therefore sought ways to make it more severe, more frightening—to remove the impression, as one Lord Chief Justice put it, that it was “a summer excursion.” None of its policymakers had ever been to Australia and all of them saw it through a narrow band of information. John Bigge’s reports, in their thorough detail and unbending class bias, were the authoritative text; and Bigge’s message confirmed the basic intention of the government: that Australia’s eventual fate as a community of free citizens mattered infinitely less than its expedient role as England’s social sewer. The Tories wanted a governor who would think less—much less—about the convicts’ future reclamation than about their present punishment.
Sir Ralph Darling (1775–1858) was their man: a tough, censorious, narrow-minded veteran of the Peninsular War, who arrived in Sydney at the age of fifty in 1825. Morally and intellectually, he was a duller being than George Arthur. He, too, had spent time in a hot climate as the British proconsul of a changing slave state. The prelude to his Australian service had been four years as British military governor of Mauritius, a colony of defeated France. As its virtual dictator, he had done his heavy-handed best to protect the frail rights of the 70,000 blacks on the sugar plantations against their French owners, demanding snap- to obedience and resenting every demurral from his policies. He carried these habits to Australia, where he soon alienated everyone except the Exclusives, who were cheered by his unquestioning obedience to London and his extreme dislike of anything that smacked of democracy, reform or (where convicts were concerned) ordinary mercy. “A cold, stiff, sickly person,” thought Sir James Dowling, a new puisne judge of New South Wales, on meeting Darling for the first time in 1828. “He had none of the frankness and ease of a soldier, and I absolutely froze in his presence.”3
Like Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land, Darling in New South Wales was determined to carry out the suggestions of the Bigge Report to the letter. He would roll back Macquarie’s liberalism, whose vestiges had lingered under Governor Brisbane. Instead of treating the prisoners on their merits, he wanted a rigid, undeviating standard of punishment, “with a view to the prevention of Crime at Home.”
The basis of this standard was the cat-o’-nine tails, whose whistle and dull crack were as much a part of the aural background to Australian life as the kookaburra’s laugh. “Flogging in this country,” one old hand in the 1820s remarked to the newly arrived Alexander Harris, “is such a common thing that nobody thinks anything of it. I have seen young children practising on a tree, as children in England play at horses.”4
Most floggings by then were confined to 25, 50, 75, 100 or, on very rare occasions, 150 lashes. By the standards of earlier days when punishments of 500 lashes were handed out by the likes of Foveaux and Marsden, such inflictions may sound light. But they were not; and in any case, a magistrate could stack up separate floggings for different aspects of the same deed.
Every stroke was noted and compiled, and in 1838 Governor Sir George Gipps submitted to Long Glenelg a summary of corporal punishment inflicted on convicts in New South Wales over the years 1830 to 1837:5
Alexander Harris’s Settlers and Convicts, or Recollections of Sixteen Years’ Labour in the Australian Backwoods (1847) offers some vivid reflections on these commonplace events:
Officers, and especially young officers, when made magistrates, get irritated at the hardihood of a class of men whom they have made up their minds to despise; and the cat being a soldier’s natural revenge, they fly to it directly.…
I was sent for to Bathurst Court-house.… I had to go past the triangles, where they had been flogging incessantly for hours. I saw a man walk across the yard with the blood that had run from his lacerated flesh squashing out of his shoes at every step he took. A dog was licking the blood off the triangles, and the ants were carrying away great pieces of human flesh that the lash had scattered about the ground.
The scourger’s foot had worn a deep hole in the ground by the violence with which he whirled himself round on it to strike the quivering and wealed back, out of which stuck the sinews, white, ragged and swollen. The infliction was a hundred lashes, at about half-minute time, so as to extend the punishment through nearly an hour. The day was hot enough to overcome a man merely standing that length of time in the sun.… I know of several poor creatures who have been entirely crippled for life by these merciless floggings.6
Even 25 lashes (known as a tester or a Botany Bay dozen) was a draconic torture, able to skin a man’s back and leave it a tangled web of crisscrossed knotted scars.
The psychological damage inflicted by the lash was worse than the physical, and its traces were equally permanent. “It had the effect of demoralizing them to the very greatest possible extent,” a former surgeon at Macquarie Harbor, John Barnes, would testify to the Molesworth Committee; “I never saw a convict benefited by flagellation.” What the cat-o’-nine-tails instilled was not respect for discipline, but a sullen conviction of one’s own impotence in the face of Authority; this could only be expunged by violence or erased by one’s own death. Next to homosexual rape, flogging was the most humiliating invasion of the body that could befall a prisoner. Nothing in an ordinary man’s experience compared to the rituals of the cat: to be stripped and tied to the triangle, like an owlskin nailed to a barn door; to hear, through battering pain, the quartermaster-sergeant slowly calling out the strokes; this was to be drowned in powerlessness. It left the prisoner consumed with worthlessness and self-hatred, and Barnes spoke of convicts who, on first being flogged, “have become so very much degraded by the punishment, that they sometimes told me that they should never be satisfied until they had been executed for some further offence; they considered it a most unmanly form of punishment.” [Italics added.]7
The scarred back became an emblem of rank. So did silence. Convicts called a man who blubbered and screamed at the triangles a crawler or a sandstone. (Sandstone is a common rock around Sydney; it is soft and crumbles easily.) By contrast, the convict who stood up to it in silence was admired as a pebble or an iron man. He would show
his shapes (strip for punishment) with disdain, and after the domino (last lash) he would spit at the feet of the man who gave him his red shirt. There were always more sandstones than pebbles. Ernest Augustus Slade, superintendent of the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney in 1833–34, believed that convicts always broke down under the lash and furnished the Molesworth Committee with examples of both, culled from his past records. James Clayton, of the Phoenix, was given fifty lashes for being “absent without leave and neglecting his duty …”
The skin was lacerated at the fifth lash and there was a slight effusion of blood; the prisoner subdued his sense of pain by biting his lip. The skin of this man was thick to an uncommon degree, and both his body and mind had been hardened by former punishments, and he is also known to be what is termed “flash” or “game.” … [I]f all his former punishments … had been as vigorously administered as this last, his indomitable spirit would have been subdued.
By contrast, there was poor James Kenworthy of Camden, a pilferer:
The first lash elicited loud cries from this prisoner; at the 18th lash the blood appeared; at the 25th lash the blood was trickling; at the end of the 32nd, flowing down his back.… [H]e would have been sufficiently punished at the 25th lash. He says he was never flogged before.… [H]e was very fat, with a thin skin. The sufferings of this prisoner were evinced by his unnerved state of body when cast loose; he could hardly stand.8
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