The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  The second letter was private, short and even nastier. It told Eardley-Wilmot that in view of unspecified rumors circulated by unnamed persons regarding aspects of his unofficial conduct which it was “perhaps unnecessary” that Gladstone should discuss, he must not expect another official post.20

  Thus the “battered old beau” with his flirtatious post-prandial ways was at last broken on the iron wheel of Gladstone’s sanctimony. He tried to defend himself; he protested against the “grossest falsehoods that ever oppressed an English gentleman,” “the most extraordinary conspiracy that ever succeeded in defaming the character of a Public Servant”; he appealed to Gladstone to name his accusers and state their charges; he forwarded petitions in defense of his character, bearing many respectable signatures. It was all to no avail. In February 1847, a few weeks short of his sixty-fourth birthday, Sir John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot slipped beyond the reach of his tormentors in the Colonial Office and died in Hobart, reputedly of a broken heart. At once, the Colonial Times declared that he had been “murdered.” The settlers who had detested and abused him performed a brisk volte-face, awarding him a state funeral with a solemn procession through the crepe-decked town, during which Anglican clergy and Catholic priests fell over one another in their haste to lead the hearse. They then subscribed for a spindly stone monument in the Neo-Gothic style, the largest tomb ever erected to the memory of a governor on Australian soil. By the time it had been installed above the remains of Sir Eardley-Wilmot, the interim governor Charles La Trobe had come to Van Diemen’s Land, made his report and returned with almost palpable relief to his duties across the Strait in Port Phillip. He told Lord Grey what everyone, in and out of the colony, knew by now—that the Probation System was an utter fiasco, that “whatever principle of reformation might be included in the theory,” its only result in practice was to degrade, that it was “vicious … a fatal experiment,” and that the sooner it ended the better for the credit of the nation and of humanity.21 In 1846, Her Majesty’s Government suspended all transportation of convicts to Van Diemen’s Land for two years. By then, the last lieutenant-governor to preside over the System on that island, Sir William Denison, had arrived in Hobart to confront the problems that had defeated Eardley-Wilmot and would in due course baffle him. Among the thorniest of these was the management of Norfolk Island.

  ii

  THE ADMINISTRATIVE CONTROL of Norfolk Island passed from New South Wales to Van Diemen’s Land in 1844, and by then an ill wind had blown through the barracks at Kingston and Longridge. Captain Alexander Maconochie had been recalled from the island in 1843, and replaced by the last military commandant of that ill-omened rock to be appointed from New South Wales: Major Joseph Childs, a fifty-six-year-old marine officer. He was Maconochie’s opposite in every way—a dull, vacillating military hack, distinguished only by his severity.

  For severity was what Lord Stanley wanted—and he wished to see it directed, in particular, against “crimes unattended with violence”: namely, sodomy. From the second-hand reports Gipps wrote before he actually saw Maconochie’s system for himself, Stanley concluded that the new “leniency” of Norfolk Island incubated all crimes, but especially the unmentionable ones. Since going there in February 1843, Gipps had changed his mind—but too late to change Stanley’s. Work them till they drop, skin them alive if they get out of line and make no exceptions—this, in essence, was the formula he transmitted to Gipps as the first stage of his Probation System for men on Norfolk Island. “Nothing but constant vigilance and inflexible rigour in enforcing the appropriate Punishments will be sufficient to restrain the immoralities to which I refer.”22

  The idea that two thousand men, mostly in their twenties and thirties, could be incarcerated on a distant island, deprived of any contact with women, treated so harshly that their only emotional solace could come from one another and then “restrained” from sodomy by incessant flogging is a curiously abstract one; but it seemed real to Whitehall. All their evil proclivities, including the sexual, could be vaporized in the tension between, in Stanley’s words, “an invigorating hope and a salutary dread.”

  There was not much hope on Norfolk Island. From the moment Childs was rowed through the foaming reefs of Kingston from the Maitland in February 1844, the trust Maconochie had struggled to establish between convicts and Authority caved in. There was no longer the sense of a responsive chain of command, or of access to the commandant. Childs’s idea of authority, formed in the harsh mold of the British Marines, destroyed part of that; and the rest was annihilated by his lazy habit of leaving summary punishments to the turnkeys, the overseers and to his resident stipendiary magistrate, Samuel Barrow. Barrow, twenty-eight years old when he arrived from Van Diemen’s Land in August 1845, had been a junior barrister in London. His real talent, however, was less for legal argument than for gross arbitrary sadism. For that, he was the right man in the right place at the right time. If the ornate diction of Lord Stanley’s dispatches provided the theory of Norfolk Island after Maconochie, Childs and Barrow between them supplied the practice, and the treatment of prisoners there became as bad as it had been in the “murdering times” of Morisset. All the men on Norfolk Island were, in Childs’s apoplectic language, “the worst men that the annals of criminal jurisprudence can hold forth to the world as an example of all combined evil.”23

  One did not treat such demons softly, although in fairness to Childs one should note that not all of them were handled with equal severity. One convict who passed through Childs’s regime on Norfolk Island, the former military officer John Mortlock, would describe Childs as “a gallant marine officer” who gained the “entire respect” of the convicts with his “discreet management.” Perhaps all that this judgment shows is that military officers shared the same views on discipline; and Mortlock was never flogged. All the same, he recalled, it was thanks to the “delightful scenery and heavenly climate” of Norfolk Island “that I do not look back upon my residence there with unmixed horror.”24

  “Many of my shipmates were flogged daily,” Mortlock recalled, “in the barrack yard, under my windows, on complaints often made with a wicked purpose by their overseers; though I could shut my eyes, the horrid sound of the ‘cats’ upon the naked flesh (like the crack of a cart-whip) tortured my ears.… Petty ‘dogs in office,’ in order to strike terror, would commonly threaten ‘to see the back-bone.’ ”25 Thomas Rogers, a curate from Dublin who was posted from Van Diemen’s Land to Norfolk Island in September 1845 as its sole religious instructor (such convict-department comforters being stipulated by Stanley’s Probation System), claimed that Childs had 26,024 lashes inflicted in the last sixteen months of his command. On some mornings

  the ground on which the men stood at the triangles was saturated with human gore as if a bucket of blood had been spilled on it, covering a space three feet in diameter and running out in various directions in little streams two or three feet long. I have seen this.26

  But it was in the summary punishments—inflicted by Barrow and his underlings without interference from Major Childs—that the crude ingenuity of the new regime showed itself. The cat was banal; the elite of convicts, the “pebbles” or “iron men,” had their own infrangible code of contempt for it. One prisoner in Childs’s day had a message to the “skinner” tattooed on his back: FLOG WELL AND DO YOUR DUTY.27 “Salutary dread” required something more. In a report made to Eardley-Wilmot in October 1845, Childs had bewailed the limits of punishment set by the Colonial Quarter Sessions Act, as they were “too confined for the class of men we now have to deal with, for whom chains have no restraint, and the lash no terror.”28 He turned a blind eye while Barrow and his men devised methods of summary discipline. The main ones were the “tube-gag,” the “spread-eagle,” the “scavenger’s daughter” and the water-pit.

  The tube-gag was an adaption of that ancient English instrument of torture for women, the “scolds’ bridle.” It looked like a small leather head-harness, except that instead of a bit it ha
d a cylinder of hardwood, four inches long and an inch and a half in diameter, fastened into a broad leather strap that buckled across the face. When this gag was forced into the victim’s mouth and the straps cinched, the man could only breathe through a small hole in the wooden plug, with great difficulty, emitting what the Reverend Rogers described as a “low indistinct whistle” accompanied, if he had resisted the gag and lost a tooth or two, with some red foam. The first prisoner on whom Rogers saw the tube-gag used was blind; for talking in his sleep, he was dragged from his cell, gagged and left for three hours with his arms shackled around a post behind him and tears streaming from his sightless eye-sockets.

  The “spread-eagle” was simpler, though often used in concert with the gag. The prisoner was ironed to three ringbolts, arms fully outstretched, feet together, face to the wall, and left in this tiptoe crucifixion for six to eight hours. Some remained paralyzed for days afterward. A more refined implement for inflicting a similar torture was a raised iron frame six feet by two, on which the victim was strapped with his head and neck projecting unsupported off one end. If he tried to keep his head up, he would suffer anguish from muscular cramps. If he let it flop down, he would suffocate. The “scavenger’s daughter” consisted of binding the convict with his head against his knees and leaving him until he fainted from the pain of cramps. The water-pit was an underground cell with salt water to waist height; men were left there in darkness for days at a stretch, unable to sleep for fear of drowning.

  No wonder, then, that all sense of contract with authority disappeared and that the island lurched toward anarchy. In 1846 the Reverend Thomas Rogers’s predecessor, an Anglican clergyman named Thomas Begley Naylor who had been chaplain on Norfolk Island from 1841 to September 1845, wrote a detailed report on Childs’s regime to Lord Grey. “Revolting things have been done, in silence and without remedy,” things for which “nothing else but the complete isolation of the island can account for.” All was favoritism, spying and evasion, and chaos prevailed beneath Childs’s claim to have restored an order “lost” by Maconochie’s misplaced compassion. Villains were put in soft clerical jobs,* while harmless and indeed innocent prisoners, such as the unfortunate lawyer William Henry Barber, wrongly transported for a fraud on the Bank of England and later to be exonerated by Parliament, were given the filthiest and most degrading tasks. Childs had no system of discipline “conscientiously or intelligently carried out”; all he did was feed and clothe the demons and keep them nominally busy.29

  Far from repressing homosexuality, Naylor reported, the overcrowding and lack of segregation on Norfolk Island encouraged it. “A parade of separation is kept up, but the communication is complete, and at times unrestricted.” The bad apples always contaminated the good, in “a heterogeneous mass of moral pollution painful to contemplate.” First-time offenders and even innocent men “are immediately on their disembarkation thrust among the veriest monsters of crime, from the cold-blooded murderer trebly convicted, to the wretch whose enormity Black-stone characterises as ‘inter Christianos non nominandum,’ without a possibility of escaping.” In the end, Naylor warned Lord Grey, in the tone of eschatological prophecy that would soon become a common trope in discussions of the Probation System, “the curse of Almighty God must sooner or later fall in scorching anger upon a nation which can tolerate the continuance of a state of things so demoniacal and unnatural.”30

  The report horrified Lord Grey. Naylor had hoped to publish it as a pamphlet (and Maconochie, to whom it was delivered, dissuaded him from doing so) but its private impact in Downing Street was immediate. One could not read, he noted, such a litany of “guilt, wretchedness and mismanagement,” on which a clergyman had staked his name, without intense disquiet; Naylor’s revelations were “too probable” to pass over. The new lieutenant-governor, Sir William Denison, was on the point of sailing from Portsmouth for Hobart. At the end of September 1846, Grey’s instructions went to Denison. Her Majesty’s Government must not even take the chance of prolonging evils so fearful in their nature. Denison must evacuate Norfolk Island and bring all its prisoners to Tasman’s Peninsula “with the least possible delay.” But he had second thoughts in November, and warned Denison that “practical difficulties, not to be foreseen at this distance” might defeat the move. They did, and Norfolk Island was not “broken up” for another decade.31

  But meanwhile, before Gladstone’s ax fell on him, Eardley-Wilmot had asked for a report of his own. He knew nothing of Naylor’s damning letter but was worried by the rumors in the hostile colonial press. His own morals were under attack and he could not afford to seem dilatory. In April 1846, Eardley-Wilmot’s comptroller-general of convicts, William Champ, directed an investigator to sail there and, as he delicately put it, report on the “many points … which might naturally fail to attract the attention … of Major Childs.” The investigator was a magistrate in the Van Diemen’s Land convict department, Robert Pringle Stuart, and he arrived at Norfolk Island in May 1846. He completed his investigation in two weeks, and his voluminous report reached Eardley-Wilmot by the end of June.

  Little is known of Stuart’s character, beyond the fact—obvious from his report—that he had an avid eye for detail, considerable skill in sifting and marshalling evidence, and knew the general penal environment well. One historian recently complained that his report “reads like that of a man without humour,”32 but to wring laughs from such material would have taxed the most determined comedian.

  His findings parallelled Naylor’s. The physical state of the system on Norfolk was miserable—the rations underweight, the grain foul, the meat of the poorest quality, the maize-flour bread (known as “scrubbing-brushes” for the inflammation its abrasive bran produced in the prisoner’s guts) scarcely edible. The service buildings, from the kitchens to the fouled latrines, provoked Stuart’s disgust and the prisoner’s simmering, mutinous resentment. Ophthalmia, gonorrhea and dysentery were endemic. The jail was an unventilated pigsty and the main barrack building at Kingston a bagnio: more than eight hundred men were locked in the barracks every evening after work, the lights went out, and what went on afterward was not the guards’ business. Stuart paid it a surprise visit at eight o’clock one hot night and saw a flurry of “men scrambling into their own beds from others, in a very hurried manner, concealment being evidently their object.” Prostitution was widespread; lads sold themselves for tobacco, new boots, or a lump of bread kneaded together with fat. Rape was not merely common, but inevitable.33

  What especially shocked Stuart (and its effect on the officials who read his report may be gauged from the fact that, when it was eventually printed for the Lords and Commons in 1847, nearly all references to homosexuality were edited out) was that the virtuous forms of sexual life were parodied and inverted on Norfolk Island—not just rape and whoring, but marriage. “The association is not unusually viewed by the convicts as that between the sexes is ordinarily regarded; is equally respected by some of them; and is as much the source of jealousy, rivalry, intrigue and conflict … in others.” Some of the demons were faithful to one another, and “the natural course of Affection is quite distracted.… [They] manifest as much eager earnestness for the society of each other as members of the opposite sex.” In general, it was the English who turned to sodomy; the Irish Catholic prisoners abjured it.34

  Despite the hysterical level of official violence, general discipline was poor. The morning muster was “unseemly, disorderly … in fact the mere nomination of the members of a promiscuous crowd,” with “English and colonial prisoners intermixed, some lounging about with folded arms, others standing with their hands in their pockets, all either in conversation, uninterrupted, or otherwise engaged at their pleasure.” When new men arrived from England, gangs of twenty to thirty Old Hands would pick the locks on their ward, rush in, beat them up and steal their belongings. No one stopped these forays, even when a group of bewildered New Hands just off the transport Mayda, when escorted down to the sea to wash, were plunde
red on the beach “notwithstanding the efforts of the constabulary.” Convicts swore most opprobriously at their guards and got away with it; houses were robbed in broad daylight; one hardened Old Hand (as Naylor had reported) actually knocked down the commandant himself, bruising him severely. Most extraordinary of all, the convicts—or a hard core of them, numbering perhaps one hundred—often went on strike, openly refused to work and submitted “only when terms had been arranged to their satisfaction.” Not one of them was punished or even tried. Their usual complaint was inedible food. On February 25, 1846, they struck over a different issue: The day was Ash Wednesday, a Catholic holiday, and they would not go to work until a military party levelled its muskets and made ready to shoot them. Childs’s civilian officers, however, were not up to enforcing regulations without the help of the military, which could not be invoked every day. “The spirit of disobedience thus strengthened in the refractory,” Stuart gloomily noted, “is, from impunity, reflected by the many, and provokes imitation.” The hard-core men carried knives openly, threatened their overseers with them, and ruthlessly avenged any “peaching” by other prisoners. Anyone who betrayed a fellow prisoner to Authority was denounced as a traitor or “dog,” and his punishment was swift: The men would kill him, or at least mutilate him by biting his nose and ears off, an operation known as “taking the dog’s muzzle.”

  As the guards and overseers had so little control over what went on inside the barrack walls, the prisoners were able to create their own rule. Its center was the enclosed lumber-yard, a building next to the main barracks compound which also held the kitchens. It became a sanctuary where few guards or officers dared to go. The yard was ruled by the “Ring,” a carceral mafia whose control over the lives of prisoners was both inescapable and minutely enforced. Its members did not fear to kill constables when they brought evidence against them; one such informer was found eviscerated in the bush near Longridge, his guts replaced by the entrails of a sheep. Later tales of the System, as composed by Marcus Clarke and Price Warung, surrounded the Ring with the awful glamour of a secret society, a freemasonry of evil, complete with elaborate initiation ceremonies, distinguishing tattoos (stamped on the neophyte’s hide with needles and gunpowder) and a communal chant or oath: