The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Death sentences for absconding seem to have been handed out with abandon by the military court at Newcastle, if young Lieutenant Coke was not exaggerating in his letters home:

  The Lieutenants and Ensigns have no duty here, except sitting on the Criminal court and seeing men hung.—The jury here is formed of seven Officers, every day we sit we get 15 shillings allowed us each for our trouble.—The Court in general consists of one Judge, one Counsel against the prisoner, & the Witnesses, seldom indeed does any person come here as a Spectator & the prisoners seldom employ a man to defend them, we sometimes condemn five in a day to be hanged: it is more in appearance like an Inquisition as the Prisoners seldom call Witnesses, & men are condemn’d with little ceremony.30

  What is extraordinary is Coke’s matter-of-factness, his assumption that the convicts had no rights. Why did the prisoners not defend themselves? Because they believed they had no chance with the “deliberations” of this military Star Chamber. Not all the hangings seem to have been carried out; the usual procedure by the late 1820s was to commute the capital sentence or, in some cases, to send the third-time offender straight to Norfolk Island, a punishment in some ways worse than hanging. But such a passage suggests how the System could degenerate once minor officials felt that a governor like Ralph Darling cared little for “convict rights.”

  However, by the 1820s the usefulness of Newcastle as a place of secondary punishment was waning. The place was no longer isolated, because more and more free settlers were anxious to farm the rich plains of the Hunter River Valley. The cedar forests were vanishing and, although the coal mines were still being worked by convicts—including some Chartist political prisoners31—in the 1830s, they could not absorb very much labor. Besides, Bigge reported to his government, the good farmland along the Hunter River made the convicts’ lives too easy. In earlier years, when the settlement only spread a mile or two inland, all crops had to be raised on the poor, sandy coastal soil, so that Nature combined with Authority “to render hard labour an indispensable condition of existence.” Fertile soil contradicted the purpose of the settlement. So after 1823, Newcastle was thrown open to free trade and settlement. Its convicts stayed on—there were more than 1,600 by 1827—but it was no longer simply a jail for the twice-convicted. That role was assumed by a new settlement started in 1821, 270 miles north of Sydney: Port Macquarie.

  Port Macquarie (not to be confused with Macquarie Harbor) was meant for incorrigible life-sentence prisoners convicted of second offenses in New South Wales. Discipline under its first commandant, Francis Allman, was severe; a man could get 100 lashes for trying to smuggle a letter out, or a month in the cell for merely possessing a piece of writing paper. (One sees why convict diaries were nonexistent, and convict memoirs rare.) One veteran of the Port Macquarie iron gang recalled how

  the hills [we] cut through were so steep that a man could not comfortably ascend one of them without irons on his legs, let alone with them—but the hills had to be broken down by men with sore backs, and if one man happened to collide with another who had recently been flogged, it would be—“Oh, G—! Mind my sore back.” Those were hard times; hard worked and half starved.32

  The rubbing of the leg-rings on their flesh, Port Macquarie men used sardonically to say, “put plenty of iron in the blood.”

  Port Macquarie had a high proportion of Specials. Darling had them sent there so that they could not make trouble in Sydney; he did not want literate convicts adding to the rhetoric of Wentworth and the Sydney Monitor. Some of them were harmless creatures, like the Irishman James Bushelle, who, in cahoots with “a broken-down French gambler,” had toured the jewelry shops of London masquerading as a Polish prince, with gum on his fingertips, substituting fake diamonds for real ones. He drew life in New South Wales, and on being reconvicted at Port Macquarie he found a niche as a tutor to some of the free settlers who had begun to trickle in after 1830, “instructing the young ladies both married and single,” as he put it,

  in music, dancing, French and Italian … who met occasionally to enjoy the pleasure of a German Waltz or a Spanish Quadrille in this recent Emanation from the forest; where hitherto the sound of music, or the voice of merriment, had never been heard; where no sounds, but the cooees and howlings of the Black man, the groans of the convicts under the excruciating Lash, or the croaking of the wild Cockatoo, ever pierc’d the Skies or disturb’d the Ambient Air.33

  Thus, the first uncertain pipings of the Muses were heard at Port Macquarie.

  But among other Specials, “relaxation, petty traffic and abuse” reigned. They seized every privilege they could get; they truckled to authority (“When an overseer spoke to him,” it was said of one Special, “he had the appearance of a goose looking down a bottle”) and made tyrannous overseers themselves. Solidarity might rise between prisoners on the run or men who had been through the assignment system; in the penal stations, rarely. Convict overseers in such places—and on the chain gangs—were notoriously cruel. “The worst wretches that a man could be put to work under were those who had been sent to the country themselves. They were far worse than men who came out free.”34

  As at Newcastle, escape attempts were common. But few succeeded, particularly since the Aborigines proved eager to help catch bolters. As the area opened up to free settlers at the end of the 1820s, security faltered and after 1830 the place became a grotesque mixture of jail and infirmary, “a demi penal settlement.”35 The crippled, the mad and the blind were dumped into it along with the Specials. In the late 1830s, Port Macquarie boasted a gang of one-armed stonebreakers and another of blind men, who in 1835 could be seen “manacled to a chain, and so marched to and fro on the causeway facing the window of the Commandant’s quarters for 2 or 3 successive days for his amusement.” The “blind mob” had a high reputation as thieves, deft enough to ease a man’s rolled-up trousers from under his head as he slept and take the coins from his pocket, or grope melons out of an officer’s garden patch by moonlight. Cross one, and he might put a tiger snake’s head, fangs up, in your boot.

  Most conspicuous of all were the “men on timber,” amputees with wooden legs who were unsuitable for gang labor elsewhere in the colony. They served as delivery men, humping packages inland for free settlers. When not employed, they would lie sunning themselves and gazing at the sea, guzzling rum, of which there was plenty at Port Macquarie, cooked up in illicit convict stills from the sugar cane that flourished there. Real men drank it laced with tobacco juice, a mixture believed to kill the pain of a flogging.

  One of the amputees’ main recreations was fighting. Since they could not stand toe-to-toe like regular pugilists, their friends would perch them face-to-face on the thwarts of a dinghy; each combatant was propped up by a man at his back, “and in this fashion they would fight away in great style” until one of them could no longer sit up. They also played practical jokes. The overseer of the one-armed stone-cutting gang was a Jew with two wooden legs. One day, as he lay dozing drunk in the sun, another Jewish prisoner

  collected a quantity of old maize stalks and other fuel, and set fire to his wooden legs.… They were not burning long, however, before he awoke and found one to be shorter than the other; and it was a sight for sore eyes to see him walking down to the Old Broken Barracks, singing out to everyone that he met—“That Jew-looking bugger down there has burnt my legs nearly off.”36

  Other pranks involved animals. Convicts would wire two tomcats’ tails together and drape them over a doorknob at night. They would slide a live shark into a drunkard’s bed. Almost anything would do to relieve the tedium of Port Macquarie, where Brueghel would not have lacked subjects.

  Discipline in the 1830s was uneven but harsh. Thomas Cook, sent there from the iron gang as a Special in the summer of 1835, found a commandant who (he alleged) thought nothing of flogging old men and cripples, and boasted “that he would make the Deaf to hear, the Dumb to speak, the lame to walk, the blind to see, and the foolish to understand” with his coloni
al cure-all, the lash. Soon after arriving, Cook came down with dysentery, but he did not report to the surgeon “for the name he bore among my fellow prisoners as a Butcher.” For this, he was heavily ironed and ordered by the commandant “in a voice like thunder” to extra labor, under the eye of Roach, the chief flogger. But there was some pity in Roach. Not all such men were the blood-boltered sadists of convict lore:

  At this time the Scourger (whose calling one would have supposed had long since excluded almost every kindred feeling from his breast) was begging of me to keep my Tool in motion, until the Commandant took his ride out, and promising to do my work for me. In about an hour the Commandant left the settlement, and the Scourger, putting down his arms, worked excessively hard so as to save me from the Punishment with which I must otherwise have been visited.37

  Nevertheless Cook was sure he would die at Port Macquarie and decided to flee, “under the impression that there existed some hope of my being able to effect a final escape to England.” There was none. He walked out of the settlement, which had no wall but the bush, and went eighty miles south before realizing he was totally lost. Sick with the flux, he survived a week on roots and wild nettles until the Aborigines caught him and gave him to an armed search-party of constables. That did not deter him; in all, Cook tried three times to escape from Port Macquarie, with no success.

  iii

  GOVERNOR BRISBANE decided to plant another penal station on the mainland, so remote that its prisoners would give up all hope of escape. It would be in the Deep North, as Australians call Queensland, where the sun’s heat would bake and baste the sin out of them. In 1823 Brisbane sent an exploring party under his surveyor-general, John Oxley, to look at Moreton Bay, a big coastal inlet noted by Cook fifty years before. It was 450 miles north of Sydney, far enough to discourage any bolter. If it had a river, it might be settled.

  Oxley and his men reached Moreton Bay by sea without incident and carried out a rough survey. They found a river, rich soil, plenty of fresh water, and friendly Aborigines. The shallow bay teemed with fish; they could wade out and catch mullet and snapper with their hands. The mangroves were encrusted with little milky oysters in ruffled shells, and in the ooze between their roots lived regiments of huge, delicious mud crabs. Up the river, as a former convict would remember in years to come, “it looked as though some race of men had been here before us, and planted this veritable Garden of Eden.” The riverbanks were tropical jungle, laced with blue-and-white flowering vines; stately white lilies grew in masses from the tidal mud. Colonies of black Funereal Cockatoos stared from the palm trees, nodding their wiry crests and occasionally flapping clumsily into the air, like croaking umbrellas. Kingfishers flashed through the deep shade.38

  It looked almost too good for convicts, and surely survival would not be a problem: The first human beings Oxley and his men encountered, to their stupefaction, were two naked, scarred and sunburnt white men, who had been wrecked on the coast a year and a half before and were “in healthy state and plump condition,” thanks to the local Aborigines, who had adopted them. In fact, Oxley’s report on Moreton Bay was so encouraging that when it reached London, Lord Bathurst decided that the area should be thrown directly open to free settlers. But his opinions on this took months to reach Sydney, and in the meantime Governor Brisbane had given orders to start a penal settlement there. He wanted it “to receive and maintain a great number of persons.” The convicts’ slave labor was “the best means of paving the way for the introduction of free population, as the example of Port Macquarie abundantly testifies.”39 He put it in charge of Lieutenant Henry Miller of the 40th Regiment. In September 1824, Miller sailed north with fifty settlers, thirty of whom were convict volunteers who hoped to win an early ticket-of-leave. They started on the edge of Moreton Bay, at the present site of Redcliffe.

  Governor Brisbane expected the new settlement to become self-sufficient within two years, by growing maize. However, because of the inefficiency of penal labor, it did not; one cannot build an economy quickly with work designed to punish the builders. Work performed quickly was not punishment enough; the labor had to be “arduous.” Miller had the convicts working twelve hours a day, dawn to dusk. Horses, draft animals and ploughs were all proscribed. As in the “starvation years” in Sydney, every inch of ground had to be inefficiently tilled with hoes, which kept breaking, and there was no animal manure. The convicts became afflicted with scurvy, and conditions were so squalid that they also fell victim to filth diseases like dysentery and trachoma.

  Pioneering was bad enough, but doing it under such handicaps was absurd. The Eden-like prospect of Moreton Bay disintegrated fast, as such fantasies always did in Australia. The soil at Redcliffe was poor and the first seeds died in the ground; there was not enough building timber, and even the grass for thatch had to be dragged for miles; medicine ran out, and the place was infested with flies, ticks, scorpions and venomous snakes. Lieutenant Miller was driven near to distraction by all this, but he soldiered on:

  Nothing was undertaken that I did not plan, nothing was carried on that I did not inspect, literally, under a burning sun earning my bread in the sweat of my brow; I passed toilsome and miserable days, anxious and restless nights, and underwent privations … greater than any I had been called upon to sustain during years of [army] service.40

  But toward the end of 1824, Governor Brisbane visited the Brisbane River, flatteringly named after him, and decided that the settlement should be moved to its banks. After several months of indecision he ordered Miller to make the move in February 1825. The huts were laboriously dismantled—every iron nail pulled out, straightened and saved—and the commandant’s official residence, a prefabricated cottage brought in kit form from Sydney, was taken down and stowed. In July, they took everything twenty-seven miles up the river to the present site of Brisbane, Queensland’s capital. “The difficulties of this task,” Miller sighed, “with my original few [convicts] wasted and enfeebled by sickness, were so many and so great that none but an eye-witness could in the least form an opinion of them.” Then the governor dismissed him. “I was removed to cover the mistakes of others,” Miller protested, and in fact he had been: Brisbane needed a scapegoat for his own failure to equip the settlement properly.41

  His successor, Captain Peter Bishop of the 40th Regiment, was a fairly humane man by colonial standards. He saw that the convicts would never work well under the severe discipline and the gruelling heat unless they had “a little reward for it,” an ounce or two of tea or sugar. (Such gifts had also cemented good relations with the Aborigines around Brisbane Town, who, as at Newcastle and Port Macquarie, soon learned to catch runaway convicts and bring them in.)42 But he had only two hundred convicts, few of them skilled tradesmen; and although some crops grew, only twelve acres were cultivated, because no one had enough farming experience to be superintendent of agriculture. When Bishop left Brisbane Town in March 1826, it was still only a straggle of cockeyed, leaking slab huts, without a hospital, a granary or even a jail. But the new commandant would change all that. He was Captain Patrick Logan of the 57th Regiment, and his regime would reflect the ironclad severity that the new governor, Ralph Darling, who appointed him, was determined to impose on the prisoners of Australia.

  Between his arrival at Moreton Bay and his violent death there four years later, Logan became a legend among the convicts—so much so that he was the only commandant of an Australian penal station to have a whole ballad dedicated to him, “The Convict’s Lament on the Unfortunate Death of Patrick Logan,” which was called “Moreton Bay,” for short.

  One Sunday morning as I went walking, by the Brisbane’s waters I chanced to stray,

  I heard a prisoner his fate bewailing, as on the sunny river bank he lay:

  “I am a native of Erin’s island, but banished now to the fatal shore,

  They tore me from my aged parents and from the maiden I do adore.

  “I’ve been a prisoner at Port Macquarie, Norfolk Island and Emu P
lains,

  At Castle Hill and cursed Toongabbie, at all those settlements I’ve worked in chains;

  But of all those places of condemnation, in each penal station of New South Wales,

  To Moreton Bay I’ve found no equal: excessive tyranny there each day prevails.

  “For three long years I was beastly treated, heavy irons on my legs I wore,

  My back from flogging it was lacerated, and often painted with crimson gore,

  And many a lad from downright starvation lies mouldering humbly beneath the clay,

  Where Captain Logan he had us mangled on his triangles at Moreton Bay.

  “Like the Egyptians and ancient Hebrews, we were oppressed under Logan’s yoke,

  Till a native black who lay in ambush did give our tyrant his mortal stroke.

  Fellow prisoners, be exhilarated, that all such monsters such a death may find!

  And when from bondage we are liberated, our former sufferings shall fade from mind.”

  Preferably sung a capella in a high nasal drone, this survived in many variants and was perhaps the most popular anti-authoritarian ballad of colonial Australia. Ned Kelly, last and greatest of the folk-hero bushrangers, the son of poor Irish Currency, put it into prose in his “Jerilderie Letter.” Openly addressed to the people of Australia, in 1879