The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  The System in the 1830s had a passion for bureaucratic exactitude about pain. In 1833 Governor Bourke, Darling’s successor, received many complaints from local benches that 50 lashes, the most that one magistrate could impose for a single offense, was not enough, and that the government-issue cats were positively feeble. Accordingly, a circular went forth to all police magistrates in New South Wales, demanding a report on standard cats, samples of which were enclosed for consumer testing.9

  The answers were illuminating but contradictory.10 George Holden, police magistrate at Campbelltown, could give no “categorical answer” about the standard cat except that it was too ill-made to last more than 150 lashes. The nine tails should be stiffer and lighter, but

  it involves a fearful responsibility, which I cannot bring myself to assume, to decide precisely how much torture ought to be systematically inflicted by law on any set of men.… I do not profess to have yet acquired the power of witnessing the infliction of pain with such unmoved nerves.

  Besides, his flogger seemed to lay it on without “that peculiar art in the flourish of the scourge which [is] employed … in Hyde Park Barracks, and so greatly adds to the pain.”

  The Draco of Hyde Park Barracks, Ernest Slade, thought the standard cats quite adequate “when properly wielded” but reminded the colonial secretary that scourgers must not be overworked—they should give no more than 150 lashes a day—and that, due to the nature of their unappreciated task, they ought to have special protection.

  One “J.P.” wrote in from Bathurst to say that the cats came undone at the ends and did not cut the back enough. The Goulburn police magistrate poured scorn on the instruments. The lashes came off the handles after 20 strokes; the thread whipping on the end of each tail came undone, so that “altho’ it bruises, bleeding but seldom is caused, consequently the offender escapes that acute pain and smarting to the extent so desirable should be experienced under the lash.” The cord should be harder, the tails a foot longer, and “it would be preferable were they to terminate in small knots.”

  For Darling and his successors in the 1830s, however, flogging merely represented the episodic peak of punishment within a consistent environment of misery. Every male convict would be put in irons on arrival and sent out to labor on public works for time, “at the expiration of which, I had purposed to assign them to Settlers; and in the event of misconduct, of replacing them in the Road Gangs.” The taste of road-gang life would by then “have rendered their assignment to the Settlers a desirable release from a painful and degraded situation; and in proportion to their dread … they would have behaved to their Masters.”11

  Darling could not put this into practice; there was too much demand for assigned labor. But he did put many more convicts into government work on the gangs, pulling them out of “the very refuse of the whole Convict Population.”12 The roads absorbed this human trash. By 1828, Darling was congratulating himself on having 1,260 second-sentence men in the road gangs of New South Wales, more than in all the penal settlements.13 All this, he proudly informed London, was very cheap: The convict overseers got a “gratuity” of around £16 a year, and with the salaries of free superintendents the complete payroll for the roads in 1827–28 was only £1,621 18s. 9d. No private contractor using assigned labor could possibly charge so little.14

  The convict memoirist Thomas Cook found what road-gang life was like when he was sent to labor against raw bush and sandstone at Honeysuckle Flat on the Great Western Road over the mountains to Bathurst:

  With a sheet of Bark for my bed, the half of a threadbare Blanket for my covering, and a Log for my pillow, the action of the frost was so severe on my limbs that it was with difficulty I could find the use of them, and then only by frequenting the fire at intervals during each night. As I arose, after experiencing all the horrors of a restless and perishing cold Night, the rugged mountains covered with snow, and the frozen Tools for labour stared me in the face before the stars were off the skies; and many a tear did I shed, when contemplating upon my hard fate, and the slight offence for which I had been doomed to participate so largely in the bitters of a wretched life.15

  Cook began in the lesser kind of punishment gang, an “out-of-iron gang.” These did most of the road-building in New South Wales (after 1828 there were, at any time, between 1,200 and 1,500 convicts laboring in them), but they were miserably unproductive. Most of their members had either been rejected by settlers as unfit to be assigned workers or else were working out short sentences (six months or less) for petty colonial offenses. “The mere fact of their being returned on the hands of Government in a community where the demand for labour is very urgent and clamorous,” wrote Richard Bourke, Darling’s successor, meant that such men “must be notoriously idle and worthless.” Their “trusty” convict overseers were corrupt. They would form “select parties” of gangers to go food-stealing by night. Cook reported how some of his fellow gangers frightened two fat bullocks over a cliff at Mount Victoria by rolling boulders down at them and ate steak for days. Prisoners also kept escaping from the out-of-iron gangs; they would run off into the bush, live for a while (but not, as a rule, very long) by scavenging and robbery and then get retaken. The number of these bushrangers made travel, especially over the Blue Mountains, a risky business, since most of them were more like famished muggers than the altruistic Robin Hoods of Australian folksong.16

  Clearly, there was room for improvement, and Darling and Bourke pinned their hopes on the iron gangs. Their members (by 1834, Bourke reported, there were over 800 men serving sentences of 6 months to 3 years in them) were all twice-convicted and they worked and slept in irons. “They have no time for recreation.… [T]heir lot is felt by themselves as one of great privation and unhappiness.” As the road advanced, the iron-gangers dragged their nocturnal prisons with them—huts on wheels, each sleeping eighteen to twenty-four convicts. Sometimes more permanent stockades and fixed huts were provided, from which the gangers had to march out to their sites in irons. The superintendent could make them run to work in double time, pricked on by the soldiers’ bayonets.17 When Thomas Cook was condemned to a year in an iron gang on the Great Western Road he and his fellow gangers suffered in this way

  for some 10 or 15 days when the men (finding themselves so much advanced in debility, and their legs so far injured by the friction of the Irons that they could no longer bear against it) offered a determined resistance … which led to a deal of traffic in human flesh and blood, by the soldiers with their Bayonets, and the Scourgers with their Cats.

  As for the summary punishments,

  The mode of Trial was a mere mockery of justice. I have known instances where the Officer would not even stay one moment to enquire into the merits of the charges, but would sit on his horse and sentence 14 or 15 men standing a distance away (sometimes a whole Gang) to 50 and some 100 lashes each, without an oath, on hearing ten words from the lips of their villainous accusers. This system of seventy was so rigorously pursued that some of the longer-sentenced men were goaded … either to end their days on the Gallows, or better their condition by taking to the Bush.18

  Not all the recidivist convicts could go in the chain gangs. Iron gangs needed too many guards. There was a case for penal settlements whose remoteness would deter escape, whose severity and frightening unfamiliarity would instill “salutary terror.”

  The need for such places had been argued at some length in John Bigge’s report, which took the Exclusivist, pro-rural view and stressed that Sydney was an incubator of crime.19 Bigge claimed that in 1820 there had been one fresh crime for every three convicts in Sydney, as compared to one for every eight in Windsor and far less in the outlying districts. The answer was to get the serving felons out of the towns and into the country—to put the recidivists in distant penal stations, where they could not corrupt the others and where the news of their sufferings would be an example to all. Only thus, Bigge thought, could the government relieve the “constant pressure of new arrivals” and “th
e uneasiness I felt at the constant arrivals of convict ships.” The convicts were silting up in Sydney, unclassified, mingling too easily with the free, and giving the lie to talk about the “terror” of transportation. “The great cause of the diminished effect of transportation has arisen from the increase in the numbers transported,” Bigge argued:

  All the evils of association, the difficulties of superintendence and control, whether arising from the extension and variety of the employments, or from the more laborious duties of the magistrates and superintendents, have arisen chiefly from this source.20

  Besides, the settled districts around Sydney were getting almost too comfortable and Bigge thought it “hopeless” to expect that they would confront convict work gangs with “all the hardships, privations and severities [of their] unsettled state.” Convicts at gang labor should get no room for initiative and work only at such uniform tasks as grubbing out the giant roots of gum trees left in the ground by earlier clearing-parties. There would be plenty of exhausting work along the north coast, to which Bigge urged the government to send them. Under the fiery Tropic of Capricorn, the combination of raw bush and hostile Aborigines would be a powerful deterrent to escape. And once the bush was cleared, the convict gangs would move out and the settlers could go in.21

  Lord Bathurst and Macquarie’s successors, Brisbane and Darling, all accepted this plan of northward colonization into the punitive tropics. It was set in full motion by Brisbane and perfected by Darling. Since the fate of prisoners in such places would bulk large in the imagery of the System, they are worth considering in some detail.

  ii

  THE FIRST PENAL out-station on the mainland was Newcastle, founded where the Hunter River flows into the Pacific about seventy miles north of Sydney. This river mouth had been a Cretaceous swamp and, on the flat rocks at the base of the cliffs, the ocean water swilled green and blue around the stumps of petrified trees, whose growth rings could still be read. Of more interest to the early settlers, however, was another relic of that swamp: a seam of coal, three feet thick, that ran near water level through Nobby’s Head, the southern jaw of the river entrance. This seam, first noticed in 1795, gave the place its first name: Coal Harbor.

  In 1801 Governor King sent sixteen refractory convicts to mine coal there, under military guard. They were soon recalled, as it was too difficult to supply this tiny outpost, but in 1804, after the Irish rose at Castle Hill, King dispatched thirty-five of them to labor in the cliff seam. The convict population of Newcastle, as the place was soon named, grew fitfully. By the end of 1804, it was 128; by 1817 it was 553; and in 1821 there were 1,169 people living there, including a handful of free settlers and Emancipist farmers. By then, the economic mainstay of the settlement was no longer coal but timber.

  Vast stands of cedar, the prime joinery timber of colonial Australia, grew in the Hunter River Valley. Men with crosscut saws could rip the great trunks down into tabletops three inches thick, six feet wide and as long as you wanted—the red-gold, ponderous, subtly aromatic slabs that are unobtainable today, but were then as common as pine. Cedar was a government monopoly. Contractors took their ships to Newcastle and bought it convict-sawn, at 3d. per superficial foot. The panelled doors of Macquarie’s Sydney—the moldings, the dadoes and cabinets, even the floors—were made of it.

  Most prisoners at Newcastle worked in the cedar gangs. By 1820, the shore forests were so depleted that the cedar-getters had to go seventy miles upstream to find large trees. These expeditions lasted a month or more and were of course overseen by military guards who supervised the task-work; the quota for a thirty-man gang was about one hundred trunks a month. Once felled and lopped, they would be lashed together into a single big raft; sheltered by a rough hut on its “deck,” the whole gang would float back down to Newcastle in style.22

  Standing orders kept the settlement isolated. If a private vessel put in there without a license, she was scuttled and her crew imprisoned. Licensed boats had to unship their rudders and surrender them to the harbormaster. These measures not only prevented escapes but discouraged cedar-poachers.

  Life at Newcastle was hard, and successive commandants were ordered to keep it so. It was a dirty infant of a town, consisting of parallel rows of convict-built slab huts and a barracks holding some 250 men considered dangerous. There, they slept in cribs a little more than four feet wide, three men to a crib. (The practice of bedding the men by threes and not in pairs was supposed, optimistically, to reduce unmentionable crime.) In summer this shanty town was oppressively hot, the thermometer rising to 105° in the shade, with burning northerlies sometimes pushing it to 115°. One young guard officer, Lieutenant William Coke, a scion of the great family of Holkham Hall, found the climate deadly:

  Often at half past 7 in the Evening we cannot bear our Coats on & are laying down panting for breath, & in a quarter of an Hour afterwards on leaving the Mess we are cold, shivering and wishing for a fire. These sudden changes kill many people. Soldiers and the Inhabitants die very quick here, what with drinking & being exposed to the sudden changes of the weather.23

  Everything in Newcastle seemed either exhausting or boring, but that was what commended it to the authorities. The wildlife lacked charm. “If a snake bites you in this country,” Coke wrote home to England, doubtless meaning to make his sisters’ skin crawl, “instant death follows; one of the most deadly & common Snake’s bite is so bad that the person bit only shivers and falls dead immediately.”24 There were sand-flies, mosquitoes, cholera, dysentery, catarrh and, as an extra irritation, a large perambulating sand dune—unwisely stripped of scrub so that escaping convicts could not hide in it—which kept creeping into the town and had to be shovelled back.

  Convict diggers, some of whom had been coal miners in England, worked ten to twelve hours a day. The old exposed seam on the face of Nobby’s had been abandoned after 1817, for fear that the undermined sandstone above would crash into the sea. Now the miners went down a shaft, lowered more than 100 feet by a windlass, their leg-irons jingling forlornly in the dark. Conditions in it were dreadful, what with seepage from the sea above, rockfalls and bad air. The miners suffered from “black lung,” asthma and rheumatism. At the end of the day they had no change of clothes, and sometimes no blankets. They had to mine twenty tons of coal a day.25

  The most hated labor, worse than the mine, was lime-burning. Sydney had no mineral lime for mortar. But immense beds of oysters grew a few miles north of Newcastle, and the more refractory convicts were sent to gather and burn them. This meant trudging barefoot all day in mud thick with knife-sharp oyster shells, carrying baskets of quicklime across the tidal flats to the waiting boats. When water splashed into the unslaked lime it burned their unprotected eyes and their scabbed backs. Bigge noted that the lime-burners’ eyes suffered from the smoke “but not to a greater degree than in England,” and thought the convicts blinded themselves to malinger. But the hospital gave little solace to the sick; it was a mere shed, without proper supplies or even soap (which prisoners had to cook up themselves from pot-grease and ashes). In 1816 there were only enough blankets there for one patient in eight.26

  In 1818, to exhort his lime-burners to greater efforts, Lachlan Macquarie visited the oyster beds of Newcastle. He arrived in full gubernatorial fig, with a retinue of fifty people and a four-piece band. The musicians brayed and fiddled, the governor inspected, and what the convicts thought is not recorded. He and his band then went off to lay the foundation stone of a breakwater, to be named Macquarie Pier; convict gangs spent many months dragging rocks underwater to build this hated amenity but it was never finished.

  The main preoccupation among the Newcastle prisoners was escape. To discourage it, the commandants made their officers treat the local Aborigines well, cajoling them with small gifts or tobacco and sugar or, for exceptional services, blankets. In this way, Bigge noted, the Aborigines had become “very active” in recapturing prisoners:

  They accompany the soldiers who are sent in pur
suit, and by the extraordinary strength of sight they possess … they can trace to a great distance, with wonderful accuracy, the impressions of the human foot. Nor are they afraid of meeting the fugitive convicts in the woods, when sent in their pursuit, without the soldiers.… [T]hey wound and disable them, strip them of their clothes, and bring them back as prisoners.… [N]otwithstanding the apprehensions of revenge from the convicts whom they bring back, they continue to live in Newcastle and its neighbourhood, but are observed to prefer the society of the soldiers to that of the convicts.27

  Thus the black police tracker made his first appearance in Australia; and one more grudge was added to the growing hatred of convict white for tribal black.

  The prisoners bolted singly and in parties; some reached the Hawkesbury district, where they hoped to find shelter with assigned shepherds. They arrived gaunt and naked, reamed out by diarrhea, barely able to walk after a three-week diet of bugs, roots and raw snake meat. Once recaptured, some men tried again; one convict at Newcastle in 1810 had five escapes on his record. The punishments for those recaptured were “inflicted with more severity than at other settlements,” Bigge thought. Other punishments included chain-gang labor, and, for women (a few of whom had ended up in Newcastle on second convictions, despite the general policy against sending women to penal stations), humiliating spiked iron collars, riveted around the neck.28

  The symbolism of rank was jealously maintained. Tipping the cap or touching the forelock was imposed as a fetishistic ritual on the prisoners; sometimes, as at Norfolk Island, they were required (on pain of flogging for “disrespect”) to salute not only any passing soldier, but certain objects associated with soldiering—an empty sentry-box, for instance. These orders came from Major James Morisset, who had succeeded Captain Wallis as commandant at Newcastle. A free trader from Sydney named John Bingle was struck by the relentless way that Morisset ran the Newcastle station; he had “never seen arbitrary power carried to such an extent … [I]t seemed very un-English.”29